leftovers

Now I will share with you a very distant and very bizarre memory. It was a time in my life where I lived in fear. I would shudder each time the phone would ring. I would have to run as fast as I could to get to my aunt's house from main street when it was night time. The way it all began was an innocent childhood prank. My friends and my brother and I thought it would be funny to call the operator from our town's pay phone and ask silly questions, many involving a recently deceased woman named Ruby Drake. We would call and ask a question, laugh hysterically and hang up, then call again once we had regained our composure. A short time later, my mother informed me that the KBI (yes, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation) had been sniffing around town, inquiring with local parents, searching for a team of youth who had been committing telephone fraud. Yes, apparently making prank calls from a pay phone was a serious offense, and the KBI was out for blood: my blood. After that...

I hadn't been able to blog about this because it involved a Christmas gift, but I have been completely absorbed with memories of my first band, Singe lately. You see, I decided to produce a short documentary, a la "Behind The Music" to give to my brother Brandon. While working on the project, a couple of amazing things happened. The first was that I called my uncle Ronnie to help me find audio, video, or photos that may be useful for the film. A couple days later, I opened an e-mail from him which contained three Singe recordings, one of which I am sure that neither Brandon or myself had even remembered doing. Two more e-mails followed, equally full of surprises. In all, there were 8 tracks which comprised what we had come to call "the lost Singe album:" Transformation Through Decay . The other thing that happened was that I relived a bunch of memories that I had completely forgotten about for many years. I remember buying the guitar from some guy who live...

I know it's cheesy, tacky, sacreligious and just plain silly but for some reason I do love December, the holiday season, and pretty much for all the wrong reasons. Well, one reason that isn't wrong is the weather here in California. Alternating between "ALMOST" cold, and warm/sunny is just the ideal situation for me. I hate the hot summer weather, but this is just perfect. Secondly, I love shiny, glittery light-up decorations and such, and there is plenty to be found this year. I'm disappointed with myself for not having already gotten a tree and putting up my decorations but I have been rather busy. Which also leads me to what I've been doing that has kept me so busy. Well I am working on music with my band Shitting Glitter, and I have been playing the piano quite a bit more than usual. The other night, I loaded all the demos for the next Shitting Glitter album on to my iPod, hooked that in to my piano, and played along to each song. I was stunned just...

My car hasn't been starting and it's stressing me out. I am able to get it started with a jump, but otherwise it just makes a very pathetic attempt to start and doesn't go any further than that. The lights do still come on, so I don't think it's the battery. Tomorrow, Dylan will jump me in the morning and I'll drive it to the shop. I don't want to dwell on the negative, so I'll talk a little about the holiday weekend. We drove up to Granada Hills on Thursday afternoon to Dylan's sister's house for the first portion of Thanksgiving, which consisted of appetizers and the singing of "happy birthday" to Dylan before we finally had to get back on the road and head to Victorville. We finally got there in the evening and I was so starved by that point, I probably could have eaten the entire turkey by myself. The meal was prepared by a guy named Oscar who looked scary but was very nice. He did an amazing job with the food. Afterwards we...

It is with no small amount of restraint that I attempt to tell this tale without going completely overboard and writing a full-fledged novel. It was, after all, The Thompson Twins who became my first "favorite" band. Although I had dabbled in collecting beginning with Tiffany (I collected all her cassingles and kept them in their own separate carrying case), the Thompson Twins are what started a lifetime of hunting and gathering pop music relics. My earliest, haziest recollection of the Thompson Twins takes place back when my cousin Travis and his family moved out to a very large ranch house and I was helping him unpack, or more likely just obsessively snooping through his belongings. I remember being particularly interested in his "Dynamite" magazine collection. "Dynamite" was one of those full color pop-culture/eductational rags that cool grade schoolers ordered from one of those Weekly Reader type book club pamphlets. Although the magazine was s...

The title of this blog entry is the title of a song. Actually, it was a poem written by my Grandma Irene, and back when I was in high school I put the song to music for her, and recorded it with me singing the vocals over a keyboard preset beat and some really cheesy instrumentation. Last July, just a few days after I had flown to Kansas to visit her and the rest of my family, she suffered a major stroke and is now in a nursing home. She can't really speak or communicate very well other than basic functions like smiling or touching people's hands. My aunt Sharon lives in the same town where my grandma is staying so she visits her often. When my mom and her siblings were cleaning up my grandma's old apartment, Sharon had found the cassette tape that contained "Daydreams of Youth" and played it for her, much to my grandma's delight. Sharon came up with an idea that I could transfer the song onto a compact disc and design an insert for it so it would look l...

I was raised Methodist, and in the town I grew up near, most people my family and I associated with were also Methodist. My grandparents went to the same church I did and we were all very active in it; my grandpa had help build the church and my parents both taught Sunday School, as had my grandma. I think I'm one of the few people in the country, or at least one of the few gay people, who wasn't traumatized by religion. In fact, to be honest, I had a pretty positive experience with my church in general. The worst I can say about it was that it was usually pretty boring and, as a child, it seemed incredibly "uncool" at times. I did go through a couple phases in my childhood where I began to wander down that road of becoming a jesus-freak but luckily it never went too far or lasted very long. I'm always very proud of the fact that even at a very early age I began questioning (and hence, understanding) religion. Once when I was at my grandparents house, I hel...

Only in LA: I just read that yesterday, David Lynch sat himself at the corner of LaBrea and Hollywood Blvd., with a cow on a leash, and a giant banner of Laura Dern that read "For Your Consideration." There was also a banner that read "Without cows, there would be no cheese in the Inland Empire." Inland Empire, of course, is the name of Lynch's new film, starring Laura Dern. I haven't seen the movie yet (as far as I know the only local screening was at the Arclight for $20 a pop) but I do plan on seeing it eventually. I became a fan of Lynch's through the early 90's television series Twin Peaks and have watched every movie he has put out since then. (I will write my "how I fell in love with: twin peaks" blog sometime in the future). I really wish I would have found out about Lynch's impromptu meet-and-greet a day earlier so I could have actually gone and met him. My office is very near to that intersection and I could have use...

Celebrating the new democratic majority of the house (and now the senate!!! woo hoo!) has been a fun and exhilirating experience! In the few short years since I've been actively participating in my country's politics and government this is the first time I've felt like there was good news or hope for the future. When I first became aware of politics, it was because of my anger over the state of the nation under George Bush, who I had previously only thought of as incompetent in an embarrassing yet harmless way. Then I started to pay attention (thanks in large part to my boyfriend Dylan who opened my eyes alot after we started dating) and realized that it wasn't funny, and it wasn't just embarrassing; it was dangerous. When the dire situation in the white house even starts to spread out through the most innocuous sources of pop culture, it's time to say "Houston, we have a problem." After learning the facts, I was still naive enough to believe ther...

Today is November 7, Election Day, and the first thing I did after leaving the house was voting. I proudly wear my "I Voted" sticker and a red and white shirt today (I don't own a full on "stars and stripes" shirt, thank the lord!). Obviously I voted primarily for all the Democratic candidates, and I researched my choices for propositions and what not by consulting the Stonewall Democratic club's website as well as the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce (whose Legislative Action committee I'm supposed to be serving on, but haven't made it to a meeting in some time.) Anyway voting is fun and exciting especially when good news is forecast, so I'm anxious to see the results tonight. I was once a very apolitical person, having gone through the various phases of making up excuses for not voting: "my vote doesn't count," "I don't know anything about politics," "the elections are rigged anyway"... etc. Until I final...

This post goes out by special request of Brandon, so even though this memory is a little fuzzier than others, it's no less important to me. Just forgive me if the chronology is way off. Not that anyone other than myself could really ever know. First, let me say that The Dream Academy is a different type of band than many that I have grown to love over the years, and is also one of the few that I've never had the opportunity to experience live. Whereas most of the bands I like tend to be in a new wave/dance/rock vibe, The Dream Academy is more classical, ethereal and mellow. Of course, Dream Academy takes those elements and applies pop sensibilities to them, as evidenced in their (only) massive hit, "Life In A Northern Town." The way in which I was introduced to this band is still part of one of my fondest childhood memories. Growing up in a relatively poor household on a farm, money was very limited and although I never really felt it was much of a constrain...

Or "When bad things DON'T happen to bad people." Los Angeles is like the worst parents anyone ever had; Hollywood, West Hollywood and North Hollywood are like spoiled latch-key brats constantly vying for whatever attention they can get. Living in Los Angeles, it's impossible not to witness sycophants in action on a daily basis. The definition of Sycophant is: "a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite." Usually, a person is a sycophant because they believe it will serve as a stepping stone to their ultimate goal; stardom, riches, power or love. In most cases, the sycophant identifies a person who has obtained a level of one of the aforementioned desirables which the individual is jealous of and would like to claim for themselves. They believe that by associating with (a.k.a. licking the ass of) such a person, they will somehow by osmosis inherit some of that person's wealth. To break it down, I'll give an example. A person wants to be a ...

I saw Scritti Politti live for the first time last night. In fact, it was their first North American show ever. Back when I was a kid, my family and my mom's sister's family lived very near each other and we would always have separate family vacations in the summer time. We would go to Wyoming or Colorado or South Dakota or somewhere not too far away but at that age still felt like very exotic places. The thing I hated the most about these vacations was being away from my cousins. I was always wishing we could go on vacations together. Anyway, it was 1988 and my cousins were away on their vacation. I took it upon myself to watch MTV and compile a report for my cousin Travis on any new bands coming up while he was gone; as if he was really that concerned. I took my self-imposed task very seriously and, upon his arrival told him about two bands I had seen. The first was Erasure with a video called "Chains of Love." The second was Scritti Politti with a video f...

OK, so I was planning on this "how I fell in love with" series to focus on my favorite bands. But, in the spirit of Halloween, and in light of recent circumstances, I've decided to open up the realm of possibility and tell you about my introduction to a certain notorious family... The Addams Family! (duh duh duh duh *snap* *snap*) Back in high school, when I was still very much obsessed with the television show "Twin Peaks" which had already been cancelled, I used to satiate my hunger for all things Peaks by following the various actors from the rather large ensemble cast, keeping tabs of all their current projects. I was particularly fond of the show's main stars, Kyle Machlachlan and Sherilyn Fenn. I also delighted in tracking some of the more obscure characters and the actors who portrayed them, and one such example was Carel Struycken who played "The Giant" in several season two episodes. I discovered he would be playing "Lurch" ...

I decided to do a blog series titled "How I Fell In Love With:" which will highlight my favorite bands and tell the stories of my introductions to them. Perhaps this will be interesting only to people who also like the same bands, but there is a market for that I believe. Besides, these bands have inspired me to be who I am, to follow my dreams, and to strive for the extraordinary. Without them I would probably be working at a hotel in Kansas. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not my dream. I decided to start with The B-52's because it's an easy story to remember. First I want to state that some of my dates and chronologies in this recounting may be slightly incorrect, but I made the decision to go with my memory rather than fact-checking the web for verification. Anywho, it was the summer of 1989 and MTV (which still played music videos)was featuring a video called "Channel Z" by this wacky band, The B-52's. They had...

Last night I had two dreams (again) that were somewhat interesting or noteable, if only to me (and who else matters, really?) In the first, I saw a RARE Human League video on VH1 Classic that I had never seen or even heard of before. It was a pretty basic video. The song was called "Chrysler" and it was recorded for a compilation cassette that was given away with Chrysler cars back in the 80's. It all made perfect sense to me in the dream because I remember my parents had bought an Oldsmobile once when I was in grade school and it came with such a cassette. In the second, I was shopping for Dylan's birthday present at GB Records in Hays, KS on the closing day (it's actually been closed for a year or so.) It was sad. I wasn't there when they closed, and I was happy without having to have it as a memory. I could have always gone on pretending it was still open. But no, now I have a horrible memory of trying desperately to find CD's for Dylan while th...

I used to use this blog as a secret diary sort of thing, where I could express my innermost (and typically extremely mundane) thoughts without having to deal with the myspace masses infringing on my privacy or self-induced lack thereof. But hey - Screw It! If I'm going to take the time and energy to write all this shit down, someone might as well read it. So, I've made my profile viewable (I guess I didn't really even know it wasn't before) and I think I'm going to actually TELL some people about this blog. Or maybe I'll go read other people's blogs here on blogspot and try and entice them into reading/commenting my blog by doing the same for them. I was going to write something clever here to prove how my future blogs will be more entertaining and fun to read, but it's time for me to go to the gym. Basically I want to be rich and famous, so I'm going to start doing anything I can to sell out to the masses. Going to the gym to get a hot body is ...

This weekend came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. On Friday, I left work a little late and debated in my mind whether to go home and take a nap (as I knew Dylan was) or go to the gym. Although normally it would be hard enough to chose the latter, it was made more unappealing by the fact that I didn't have any clean socks at home, so I hadn't packed any to work out in, and I also didn't have a change of underwear (or so I thought.) However, the prospect of going shopping for new socks and undies, or rather the other items I would pick up at the same time, was appealing enough that I decided to just go for it. I went to the dollar store on Vine and Lexington and got what I thought I needed. In the car, I transferred the socks and underwear to my gym bag, only to discover that I did in fact have clean undies packed, what I lacked were shorts. I was really about ready to throw in the towel this time, but then I decided I could go to Ross and get some shorts. Sec...

It has been another interesting week. Early in the week, my cousin Travis had his first child, with his wife Natalie. They now have a beautiful baby girl named Alice Olivia Angel. Growing up in rural Western Kansas, Travis was like my older brother, but cooler than that because he wasn't really my brother so we never really fought. Also since I didn't live with him, he had a mystique and coolness about him. My mom used to joke about "the gospel according to Travis" because whatever Travis liked, I liked. Natalie, his wife, I met in the 5th grade. Her family moved to Natoma from Mankato, Kansas so she was the new girl at school, a year ahead of me. I had a crush on her on and off from then until the beginning of college (when I finally came out). The crush ended when she and Travis began dating. I was so happy for them that there weren't really any hard feelings at all. I mean I was pretty much "out" by then anyway, if only to myself. I even d...

Tonight is the first show of Shitting Glitter's "Dive Bar Tour" which isn't technically really a tour, since we're not leaving Los Angeles, and we only have one actual date on the tour thus far... semantics. Anyway the "goal" of this "tour" was to play all new songs, in an attempt to step up the pace on the creation of our next and third album, "Food Drinks Music". Of course any time you speed something up against it's very nature, there are going to be growing pains, but I think we're coming out on the other end much better than we went in, and I'm pretty proud and excited to play these new songs. On one hand, it's very scary since the songs aren't really necessarily done, we don't quite have them learned or memorized yet, and it could all fall apart at any given moment. On the other hand, I think the ideas and sounds are there, and it will be very exciting to get the ball rolling on these and share them w...

It's turning into fall here... actually, Autumn began Sept. 23rd, almost 2 weeks ago. But here in LA it's often difficult to feel any change in seasons. However I have gladly noticed leaves on the ground and lower temperatures, both of which I appreciate. Back when I lived in Kansas, I was obsessed with the changing of the seasons, because there the change was usually pretty profound, and I would always find myself reminiscing upon the events that had transpired in the previous years at the same time. Now I'm nearly thirty and I find that I spend all too much time reflecting on the past; the recent past as well as relatively ancient history. If I'm not thinking of the past, I'm speculating about the future. The present tense is just that to me; usually feels like some sort of limbo. If I think of the present, I think of things that are unfinished, things that never get any easier even though you'd think they would, and things that I want to do in the futu...

Last night I had the extreme pleasure of seeing "The Jill and Julia Show" which, while I don't think that's the actual official title, was what they referred to it as during the theme song. It was an amazing combination of music, monologues, and magic as Jill Sobule and Julia Sweeney took the stage together at Largo on Fairfax, just down the street from my apartment. I had never been there before, and in all honesty, I had always purposely avoided it due to their strict "no chattering" policy during performances and the dinner-reservation thing. As a "rock and roller" I'm not used to people eating while I'm performing (or eating while people are peforming), sitting at a table, and keeping my mouth shut during a show. In fact, I find it hard to watch a band and not be able to talk about the performance while it's going on, especially if I don't like the band. But in last night's case, and I'm assuming is usually the case...

No, I'm not sitting here at work daydreaming of Malibu or even Santa Monica. I just got back from lunch and I feel gross, I feel fat, and I'm thinking about going back on the South Beach diet. My boyfriend and I recenly joined a brand new gym, which just opened last Friday. We went on Friday to look around but as I've been busy all week (and hungover yesterday) I haven't actually been to workout yet. I have plans after work tonight, so I think tomorrow might be my first chance. I do know it's time for a change, to start eating more healthy and taking better care of my body. I only have less than a year of being in my "20's" left before I turn the big 3-0 next summer, and if I'm going to be 30 I'm at least going to be in shape.

The title is M E but if you say it out loud it's pronounced like "Emmy" which is what this entry is about; the annual Emmy awards put on by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, for whom my boyfriend has worked for a number of years. What that means for me is that I've attended the Emmy's for 4 years in a row now starting back in 2003. Even though the show is 3 hours long (at least) and I have to get there early, it always goes by very fast and the excitment of the evening is well worth it for me. After the show, we always get to go to the Governor's Ball which is my favorite part. To start from the beginning, we arrived around 3:30pm and I had my tux, which I bought last year for the Emmy's so that I wouldn't have to keep renting one every year, but I wanted to buy a new dress shirt. I stupidly left the pink tuxedo shirt that I wore last year in Dylan's car, then rode the shuttle bus to the shrine and walked over to the shopping cent...

Last night I still wasn't quite ready to help clean our apartment (it looks like a bomb went off ever since we got home from Iceland) but I did want to at least put my band equipment away since it was taking up a lot of room on the floor. I only use my flight case once in awhile so it goes back in the back of the closet. As long as I was putting it back in I decided to go through that side of the closet and see if I could clean anything out. I ended up going through 4 crates of records (vinyl, for you kids). After evaulating them all, I ended up with one full crate of dispensable ones that I decided I would take to Amoeba records. I packed the closet back up, and this morning loaded the crate into my trunk. At Amoeba, the kind man behind the counter told me I could get $83 in credit for the store, or $64 cash. I opted to go with the cash since I am wanting to buy a peripheral for my computer that would work with the Garageband program. I think it costs $150 or so , now I...

The last month has been a very exciting whirlwind of activity for me. Those who know me, know that I get very moody and bored when I'm not kept busy. Not to say I won't be moody and bored while busy but deep down, I'm much happier. It started about a month ago when my friend David arrived at LAX. I picked him up around 10:30 at night. David and I met through the True To Tiffany yahoo group, which sounds very cheesy. But your opinions aside, David and I became good friends and last February he came over from Scotland, along with the group's moderator Julia from England, for a Tiffany show at The Factory. I told him the next time he came back, just to stay with us rather than renting a hotel room, so he took me up on the offer when he decided to come over for San Diego pride, where Tiffany (and Shitting Glitter) would be performing. David stayed with us for 2 weeks, in the middle of the stay we all drove down to San Diego for the Pride festival. I even decided to ...

It's Monday, and on Wednesday I leave for Iceland. This is the first time for a lot of things: my band's first out-of-country show, the first time my brother or our lead singer has been out of the country (I think), and the first time I've been flown overseas for free (yay!). I haven't even started to pack and I'm freaking out a little. For the past two weeks, my boyfriend and I have been hosting a friend from Scotland and the entire time was very hectic, fun and crazy. But now it's back to "normal" if you can consider flying to Iceland to perform at Gay Pride normal. Since I rarely bitch (in print) about other bands, performers, promoters, or people in the music industry, I thought I'd at least let this one slip. Several months ago, at the insistence of someone who is a promoter, but more of a friend, I included "hi resolution" photos on our website for the media to download for use in magazines, flyers, etc... So why is it that l...