leftovers

Just a warning: this blog may ramble and contain many asides! My brother has begged the rest of his blogging family members to get on the horse as far as our blogs are concerned and get something written before the holidays! Since this month has already been completely jam-packed and fun filled, it's going to be difficult to sum it all up in an orderly fashion. First, as you all know, I went home for Thanksgiving last month. I got to spend the holiday with most of my family (mom, dad, and Adrienne) as well as my cousin Amy, my aunt Sharon and uncle Tim, my cousin Andrea, her husband Dallas, and their three kids; and my uncle Ronnie and Aunt Lisa, their daughter Caitlyn and her boyfriend Colin. Hopefully I didn't miss anyone there! It was a fantastic day. We drove back to Kansas City that night because my plane was leaving the next day. On the way to the airport, we stopped at a casino called Argosy, where we indulged in an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet - as if we needed more fo...

Today, my sister and I took my mom and dad (even though technically my dad drove, so he took us) to Weston, MO to go shopping and then out to dinner at a restaurant/winery. It was a joint birthday present from my sister and I, since my dad's birthday is this month and my mom's is next month. Weston is about 25 miles north of Kansas City; my parents live in Olathe which is about the same distance (I believe) south of KC. Weston was apparently a place back in the olden days where farmers raised tobacco and people would get off the riverboats and onto a stagecoach to head out west. (I hope I got that bit of history right). Today, Weston is a BEAUTIFUL little town, that looks like something out of a picture book. Let me back up. First, dad drove us through some similar little town called Parkville I think, and I had a weird deja vu moment when I saw this beautiful college campus up on a hill. I told my family I had dreamed this place before, but because I've been saying t...

It's funny how bands can mean everything to you at one point in your life, then slowly fade out of your mind for years. When I was in the 8th grade, The B-52's were like the second coming of Christ, as far as I was concerned. Although completely mistaken into thinking they were a "new" band when I first saw the video for "Channel Z" on MTV during the summer of 1990, I quickly discovered the band's long history and began collecting all their albums. I had the cassingle of "Love Shack" about 2 months before anyone else in my school had even heard of the B's. One of my proudest moments in all of junior high was when I "premiered" the video for Roam at a Christmas Party my parents let me have at our house for the entire 7th and 8th grade classes. Several weeks later, Roam would become inescapable. So, it's probably no surprise that last Friday night when I got to see the B-52's live for the second time in my life at the LA...

In October 2003, my boyfriend and I flew to Iceland. It was something I had been wanting to do since junior high when I first become obsessed with the remote country, most likely due to my fascination with its most famous export at the time, Alt-Rock band The Sugarcubes . Travelling to Iceland had normally seemed prohibitively expensive, but after signing up for Icelandair's e-mail list, I discovered a great package deal for Iceland Airwaves, a huge rock music festival that takes place each year in Reykjavik. Most of my blog readers have had to hear me tell this story over and over again, so I won't proceed any further with details of the trip, other than to say that it was then that I first became aware of Silvia Night. From the cover of the in-flight magazine to huge billboards all over town, Silvia was everywhere, with her red, black and white striped hair, drag-queen makeup and outrageous garb. But what was she? It was hard to determine why she was so famous or what she h...

My band just got back from a whirlwind "tour" which we appropriately enough titled the "Talkin' Shit" tour, to promote our new EP Sidesaddle Sweet Talk . We left Los Angeles right after work on Friday evening, swerving through the canyons that lead from West Hollywood into the San Fernando Valley, then proceeding north over what they call the grapevine (which I have never understood why), and finally rolling into Bakersfield at about a quarter 'til 9pm. I had never actually been to Bakersfield before, but we knew some girls there who have a band called Three Chord Whore and we've played with them in LA a few times. I got along really well with Shantell, the drummer, and each time I've seen her we talk about us going up to see them in Bakersfield . I was hoping to book a show with them up there, but this whole trip was planned very last minute so I wasn't sure it would work out. We arrived at their house still not sure whether or not we would...

Recently, my cousin Amy came to Los Angeles for a wedding, and I got a chance to visit with her quite a bit as she and another friend of hers stayed at my apartment for a couple nights. It was a lot of fun, because I love having family come see me in California, plus I had never gotten much of a chance to get to know my cousin Amy because she was older then me and already had gone off to college when I was a kid. But when I did get to see her at family events such as Thanksgiving at my grandparents house, I always looked up to her and thought that she was really cool. I remember she was always nice to me and my siblings and always treated us like grown ups instead of the little kids we were, which I always appreciated. In visiting with Amy, I found out so much more about my family and our shared grandparents than I had known before, and it was very interesting to me. Talking about my grandparents and their farm, which had belonged in my family for years and still does to this day, brou...

I had a weird dream the other night about the house that my brother and I lived in for our last few years in Kansas. It was at 111 E 4th and is no longer there. It has the distinction of being the only home I've lived in that no longer exists. Odd, isn't it? They tore the house down soon after my brother and I left for Los Angeles, after my parents moved in for a spell during a weird limbo period between selling their own home in Hays and moving east to Kansas City. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was the first house I ever shopped for and "bought" myself. Actually, my dad bought it, but it was I who came up with the idea and even backed it up with some mathematics. I figured out that it would be way more financially wiser for my parent to purchase a home for Brandon and I to live in during college, rather than us paying rent to someone else, because later my parents could sell the house for more than they paid for it (the housing market in Hays generally a...

Just a quick blog because I've been seeing the billboard for this new movie "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" all over town. Now, I won't purport to know anything about this film other than the obvious: Adam Sandler and that fat guy from King of Queens have to pretend to be gay with each other for some rediculous and most likely contrived plot device. I have no interest in seeing this film and I'm personally not offended by it (or what I know of it - which is admittedly little) but it does bring up a point - why is it that homosexuality is so often a comedic tool in modern entertainment? Watch ANY blockbuster comedy movie, network sitcom, or even many amatuer stand up routines and you will see that gay jokes are in abundance - overwhelmingly so. Sure, even as a gay man I can see the humor in some of these jokes, but why does it seem like gay jokes are still the end-all-be-all of American Humor? We claim to be such a diverse nation, and while homosexuality is ...

For my recent 30th birthday, I received a gift for which I had pined for quite a long time - "Downside Up", the B-Sides and Rarities box set from Siouxsie and The Banshees. Apparently, I had mentioned this to my bandmates Amy and Brandon, and they had somehow remembered this and went out and purchased it for me, much to my surprise! As a result, I am now presenting my tribute to this great band, one who tried to reach out to me several time before finally taking hold. This is the story of how I fell in love with Siouxsie and her banshees. When I was first starting out in the world of musical obsession and pop record collecting, I would get all these different mail-order catalogs, magazines, flyers, etc, because I lived in the middle of Kansas, and the internet wasn't around yet. I had to mail order everything. And, being a farm kid with a budget of $30 a month, I wasn't able to order much of anything, so the big thrill was just looking through those pages and deci...

"Out in the Sandpile" is a game, of sorts, that my siblings and I used to "play" often when we were growing up on the farm near Paradise, Kansas. Originally, it started because my brother and I had these toy cattle trailers, which we would play with in a sandbox that my dad had built. Us country bumpkins called it a sandpile, even though it was a real sandbox. One day we turned the toy trailers upside down and decided we had build a town. Our young imaginations soared and soon, we were scavenging all over the farm and going through our toyboxes, looking for things we could add to the burgeoning city. My first character was named Kitty Kiffany, after my cat named Kiffany, and I decided he was a "pioneer" and the founder of the town. I'm not sure if the town had a name at this point. As time went on, the town spilled out of the sandpile and eventually took over what used to be an ice skating rink that my dad had built for us to use in the winterti...

One of my earliest memories about music is riding in my parent's big blue Chevy van as a very young child, and listening to my parents 8-track tapes. Those long-ago times are very vague and foggyin my mind, having almost been completely forgotten until a few years ago when I did some deep soul searching and tapped into them. I do recall a few of the artists represented in my folks' small collection of those infamous black cartridges. Blondie was a favorite of mine (and still is, to this day). Creedence Clearwater Revival - don't remember any of the songs off the top of my head, nor do I remember Anne Murray; although I did remember the artwork and recently bought that album on vinyl and didn't recognize any of the songs. I particularly remember "Betty Davis Eyes" by Kim Carnes but I'm not completely sure whether this was on a soundtrack or something, or if my parents actually had a Kim Carnes 8-track album. Last is my most remembered artifact of the 8-trac...

I haven't been blogging lately, so what have I been doing, you may ask? Well, this past week was a whirlwind but a lot of the work I've been doing is fun work, so it's all good. First, my band is finishing the final touches on our new EP, "Sidesaddle Sweet Talk" which will be released at LA Pride (June 10th). There are some cool remixes, a new version of "Mustache Rides" (which would be the third studio recording of it) and two new songs that I'm really proud of and excited about. Both of these new songs were sort of just throw-aways to me, things I had done on the Korg a very long time ago that I didn't suspect would ever see the light of day. Luckily for me, I have two very talented bandmates who took these tracks, and wrote amazing lyrics and musical parts for and took them to a new level. One of the tracks, "Delay", was further enchanced by our producer, Hoagie, who elevated that song to completely new territory for us - and I c...

Yesterday was my parent’s 34 th wedding anniversary. They were married on April 19, 1973 and they actually eloped, which I always thought was such an exciting and romantic notion. I fondly remember back in high school when my brother, sister and I joined my folks on an anniversary trip back to Grand Island , Nebraska , where they had honeymooned. In true Devin fashion, about all I really remember from this trip was the mall! And of course my new shirt, which was a thick-striped polo with really bright jewel-tone colors. (I bought the shirt in Hays at KG Mens, but wore it on the trip.) So it’s fitting that last night I whipped up a new musical composition, a song titled “Symbols of Love.” It’s quite a hoot. I based it on a poem of the same title that was written by my grandma about a stuffed toy belonging to my (at the time) baby cousin Brian. It was published in a magazine called REM in 1974 accompanied by a photo of a sleeping boy, clutching a teddy bear. The po...

For as long as I can remember, I've always had an overwhelming sense of Pride and Protectiveness of my hometown, Paradise Kansas . Even as a very young child, I was extremely interested in the history of the town, and I was always saddened by the dwindling population. I dreamed of time-traveling back to the hey-day of the town, imagining what it would have been like back in the early 1900's when pioneers optimistically built their homes, stores and businesses there hoping that the town would blossom into a city. I tried to picture what it was like when my dad was a teenager there, and Paradise had its own high school and the students would drag Main Street on weekend nights or my uncle Ronnie's band would play downtown. By the time I came around, Paradise was little more than "a wide spot in the road," as my mom used to say. There was never much to do there, but I still always found plenty to fascinate me within the modest town limits. Perhaps the most fun acti...

OK I am ready to continue my Twin Peaks blog series. First things first, I need to clear up some errors from my previous blog. After reading it, my mom back in Kansas called me and "let me know" that her and my dad did not, as I said, lose interest in the show after the third episode (which featured the dream sequence). In fact, mom assertains that her and dad did continue to watch every episode in the first season and many in the second season. This is true. I replied that while they did perhaps watch they weren't as interested in it as I was. Obviously that can't be argued, but I guess I should have given my folks more credit. They did follow it more closely than anyone else parents I knew at the time. Now that that's cleared up, let's move on. I've thought about it often over the past 15 year or so, trying to figure out what it was about Twin Peaks that transfixed me so. First of all, I had never been a big "TV" person before Peaks. I...