Alright then, well, bye.

My pal Paul loves leaving – he told me that. His best times, he said, are when he’s driving away from somewhere. I’m the opposite. I hate leaving – even when I’m desperate to leave. When I drive out of town, I suddenly miss the whole place, whether or not I liked it there at all. Bus stations and airports depress the shit out of me. Goodbyes, which I recognize as important and maybe sacred, are to me best avoided and done bandaid style – suddenly and quickly.

So: I’m leaving my job. I am exceptionally glad to be doing so. I’ve wanted to leave this job almost since I started at it, although I did manage to stay four years despite that. I like the people, mostly, but that isn’t enough, is it? This job needed to be left.

I am going to a new job – a job I want, which I am excited about. I feel in control of my fate, near the top of my game, confident and excited.

So why do I feel exactly like this song? (It isn’t often that Crispin Glover can sum up how I feel – when it happens, it should be acknowledged.)

These Boots Were Made For Walking - Crispin Glover

Monkey Power Trio on the Radio

Radio station KFJC is doing a 4-hour special on the Monkey Power Trio tonight – Tuesday, May 20 at 7 PM CA time. You can hear it on the MPT website apparently, through some magical radio/tv linkee thing – and here’s the station’s promo sent out by “Deadhand” Dan Richardson.

Congrats to the band.

A Guest Host Post!

My old pal Paul wrote with a fine idea which I will let him ’splain his own self. Here’s the email:

subject: Please blog this
i'm drunk and i'm youtubing. i need to stop right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD09qQjHXsw

what's new?

-- p

Not much! But you’re the first guest host on the MonkeyX blog!! Here’s your prize!

Vampires, Baby

Been talking and thinking about papparazzi and star-f**kery a lot lately. Then I found this old Elvis trading card I picked up a decade ago in a dollar store.

So I guess it’s an old story.

Here’s a song:

Vampire Blues – Neil Young (from On The Beach)

Enjoy What You Do

The youngest among my siblings is and always has been musically gifted – in one of those bizarre “Wow that chick is gifted” ways. At two years old she sat on my older brother’s piano bench and surprised us all by starting to play a song we’d sung that morning at church; one fingered, melody only, of course, but the weird thing was – and remains – that she did this without hitting any wrong notes. This has been her mode ever since.

She has an intuitive sense of how instruments work – seemingly any instrument. Years later she picked up a guitar at my dad’s place and picked out Fast Car (Tracy Chapman), again without the errors that you’d fairly expect. Later on again, she decided to learn the flute; since she had no one to show her how it went together, she figured it out on her own and learned to play – with the mouthpiece upside down and her fingers at odds with the usual setup – and plays it well. The bass, the drums, anything we’ve introduced to her, she has a natural ability and comfort with that is uncanny and pretty beautiful. She plays music all the time, and it is her favourite thing in the world.

The most recent time she visited me, she had decided she wanted to try recording some singing, which I had never heard her do. Being her odd and funny self, she chose a nutty tune to try – Wham Rap – which you can hear below. The track is made of samples from the original song and multiple tracks of her singing/ rapping/ laughing. The second tune was done on a lark, since we were having fun, and has her singing over the mp3 on multiple tracks; I was surprised and moved by how pretty it all turned out. Check it out.

Wham Rap - Joy & samples from the original

I Burn for You - Joy singing with a track from Sting’s Bring on the Night record

Pink Floyd Tour Comic

Here’s a treat – the comic from Pink Floyd’s 1975 tour. It’s sort of a poor-man’s Song Remains the Same – terrible fantasies of each member (Waters is a soccer star for a couple of pages; someone else is a sailor.)

Rock on. Click the images to enlarge.