most the year, it’s hard looking cool in sunny southern california. i see the kids doing it, wearing their goth or black punky stuff in the blazing sun, and i admire their fashion discipline. me, i don’t have the stamina to look trendy until the clouds arrive, by which time i may be out of practice.

i hiked up mt. josephine yesterday. clad comfortably, un-hiply, and earning only one small blister.

in recent artichoke news, i’ve auditioned a ton of people, with nothing certain yet for the “female co-vocalist” spot or the “lead instrument” spot. maybe slide geetar? maybe cello? hammond organ? we’ll see what exotic varieties of fish come up in my craigslist net. (not “dot net.”) thanks to everyone who has come to play!

my solo show on kxlu’s neuz pollution last saturday was fun. i wailed upon my geetar until it was so far out of tune it came back into tune again. thanks to my hosts maki, chris, and jamie, and to my friends who came to the station!

today i’m reworking my song “air.” i slowed it down, lowered the key, put more wavy geetar in there, and wrote another anxty drone bee bit. i dig it today. will i dig it tomorrow?

while waiting for musicians for the honeybee record, i sort of finished volume 2 of the 26 scientists project — unless i redo a song or 2. if any non-musicians want to give me their opinion about what the strongest and the weakest songs on there are, drop me a line and i’ll send you a “secret” copy. shhhhhh!!!

that is all for now. i have to find a subtle yet amazingly cool black shirt to wear to the imperial teen show tonight at spaceland.

Spam keeps trying to crawl onto this journal. I often remove dozens of spam fungi from this space. But this evening, I would like to promote a very fine example of the genre, since this spam chunk is better and more interesting than my own writing. Le voila:

Most people believe that the gentle umbrella often satiates a football team of another ocean, but they need to remember how seldom the geosynchronous light bulb takes a coffee break. If the cheese wheel sanitizes a spider, then an umbrella daydreams. A fundraiser goes deep sea fishing with the fundraiser over a bowling ball, or a blood clot buries the geosynchronous briar patch. Another girl scout related to a photon starts reminiscing about lost glory, and the shabby hole puncher writes a love letter to a defendant. Some single-handledly worldly pork chop reads a magazine, and the diskette hides; however, a mysterious fairy competes with the college-educated photon. If a freight train caricatures some paycheck about another light bulb, then a freight train defined by the submarine procrastinates. When you see some hypnotic reactor, it means that a grizzly bear living with the cargo bay hibernates. When a hypnotic football team rejoices, a bri ar patch starts reminiscing about lost glory. A fruit cake beyond a bartender competes with the unstable polar bear.

Our Griffith Observatory Gala show on Sunday was weird/fun. They kept us and a host of other musicians in a tiny green room for several hours. But then we escaped, played our set of scientist songs, and ate some intense chocolate things. Spock was there. The moon had a seam, and was smaller than I expected. But it looked very nice behind the chocolate fountain. We didn’t see Buzz Aldrin, malheureusement.

The night before we were diggin’ the hotel cafe. Great sound. Peachy room. Nice to see the fans, and the band’s energy was good if I may say so myself.

Last week Steve Jones played one or two of Artichoke’s Sex Pistols cover songs on his show on indie 103.1. For those who may not know, Steve Jones was the Sex Pistols guitar player. So I must say — holy crap! And thanks, Mr. Jones!

We’re still waiting for our batch of cds. There is much paperwork when you are doing a cover record: fees, forms, paperwork and certified mail — all those bureaucratic things that make rock and roll so enticing. The air is filled with hummingbirds, darting nimbly around my ass, trying to get at my wallet with their sharp little beaks and suck the sweet sweet nectar from my credit cards.

I’ve been working on final mixes of the 12 songs on “Never mind the bollocks here’s the Sex Pistols by Artichoke” off and on all week. If I want to feel annoyed, I listen in my car. The speakers suck in there, and it tells me what tracks to turn down or compress. If I want to feel good about the songs, I listen on ye olde home stereo.

This evening was an example of how obsessive this process of final mixing can be — for me, anyway. I drove off to Spaceland to see Eric Potter playing guitar in Kind Hearts and Coronets, as well as some other swell bands on the bill. But in the car I noticed a half dozen minute changes that needed to happen to 3 of the songs. I drove around the block that Spaceland is on, then up to Burbank for some reason, and then home to make the changes. I’m an unreliable fan!

Did you know that the great wall of China is NOT visible from space? It’s too skinny to see from more than about 60,000 feet up. On a wall-related note, it seems that great conquering empires tend to build border-defending walls just before they shrink back. The Chinese, the Romans, etc. I will leave the obvious contemporary parallel to the gentle reader.

Yep, our old cat “Leaf” died suddenly. He was cool — one yellow eye, and one bigger blue one. They also reflected 2 different colors. The blue reflected red, and the yellow reflected greenish yellow. When we were in the pet hospital hoping Leaf might pull through, we looked at one of those cat breed posters and liked the looks of the Egyptian Mau.

(Parenthetically, Maine Coon cats are really cool too, but in LA it seems cruel to have a giant furry animal, overheating and shedding like mad. Perhaps that was one reason Jimi Hendrix left this city for England? (One level more parenthetically, a painter I once worked with was at the Burbank DMV with Jimi Hendrix. They were both getting their licenses, taking their California written tests. Can you picture that? (Boy, i can’t wait to get out of these parentheses.) Whoops.) One more to go.) Ahh.

So — these Maus are often silver with black leopardish spots. Damn cool. And they are smart and friendly by all accounts. Long story short, we went down to a breeder in the desert about 5 miles from Mexico and bought a silver female kitten. I think we’re calling her “Emu,” which means “cat” in ancient Egyptian. (Perhaps “cat” means “emu” in that tongue, I don’t know. Oh crap, I’m in these again.) Ahh.

And speaking of ahhhh! She just jumped out of our second-story bedroom window! Even as I’m writing about her — Emu went flying out into the night, onto a concrete sidewalk beside the house. We got her back. Limping a little. Possibly unhurt. I think. Shit!

Oh yeah, and we’re making up some new songs too. But I guess they’re nothing compared with kitty drama. (By the way, aren’t emus flightless birds? (Woops.)) Ahh.

I need to get outside this morning while it’s still cool and make some progress on the river rock patio construction.

But first I’d like to spill the beans about Artichoke’s newest concept record, a cover of the complete Sex Pistols 1977 release, “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols.” As everybody knows, it’s a hell of a record, and the angry/absurd lyrics still seem fresh to me. Craig, Ema and I reworked all 12 songs with a mostly accoustic/folky sound. We invented new melodies, time signatures, and so forth — changing “Holidays In the Sun” and “God Save the Queen” into waltzes, hitting a washing machine with a sneaker for percussion on “Pretty Vacant,” and generally having a great time fucking up some brilliant songs. Craig Polding plays guitar, Ema Tuennerman sings and plays ukulele and accordion, Gerry Porter plays thundersheet on “God Save the Queen,” and I sing and play guitar, bass, tambourine, shaker, washing machine, tool box, kazoo and megaphone.

The record’s not quite done. We’re awaiting some vocal inspiration and/or horns for a few sections of “Anarchy In the UK.” And I’m debating whether we should try “EMI” again. We sang the current version backwards, of course.

Well, that’s it for now — except to mention that our “Volume 2″ of “26 Scientists” has not been forgotten. I unearthed an old song about “Zeno” yesterday for drummer Gerry Porter to take a stab at. Zeno was the Greek mathematician and philosopher famous for his paradoxes, in particular his argument against motion. I’ve read that the ancient Greek punks — or “cynics” as they were then called — would refute Zeno by walking forward.

Ha ha ha ha ha. He he he. See ya on the interweb.

This morning my friend and neighborino Doug asked, in response to my invitation to an “Artichoke grunion-meeting” this Friday, if a grunion-themed album might be next for us. Well, one never knows what absurdity will catch my magpie-like fancy. There is an unforgettable pathos about the waves of hapless grunion — standing with their tails driven into the sand like a thousand misplaced tent spikes, fish eyes agoggle and fish mouths agape, the flashlights of tiny children picking out their fish faces from the dark sea.

Artichoke stays pretty busy even without recording a grunion album. Sharon (accordion, toy piano, and vocals) has moved on from Artichoke recently in order to have a few more minutes of free time each week. She’s a chronic overcommitter! And she’ll be missed very much. Andy (bass) has likewise departed amicably. We had a fine year of live shows with Andy, and he may be helping us out in future shows down the road.

I’m in no great grunionlike hurry to jump into the auditioning process for bass players. We’ll get around to that adventure in due time. Our main thing right now is to finish up Volume 2 of the scientists record. A folky “W. V. O. Quine” just came into existence. So now the challenging letters of “x” and “q” are both filled. “X” is of course the indie-hippy “xenophanes” of ancient Greece, who noticed fossil fish on mountaintops and wondered how they they got there.

And I should not forget to mention that the lovely and talented Ema Tuennerman is singing and playing ukulele and accordion with us. Can’t wait ’til y’all get to hear her on Volume 2.

The girl and I are back from Sri Lanka, having climbed the sacred mountain of Sri Pada, aka “the foot of the sacred one” and known to Christians as “Adam’s Peak.” It was pretty cool. We got up at 2 in the morning so our guide could take us to the trailhead. We reached the 7,360 foot summit just before dawn. I rang the sacred temple bell, which each pilgrim is allowed to do their first time up the mountain, and we looked in vain for the sunrise which was lost in clouds. We also looked in vain for the footprint of the Buddha (or Adam, or John Lennon, depending on your belief system) but the stone indentation is underneath a shrine.
Bandwise, we’re recording tracks for “Chien-Shiung Wu” and four other scientists. It can be slow going, since our method involves arranging and writing as part of the recording process, track by track. But that’s the best way to work if you have no budget and are an obsessive freak.
An expert on geese and ducks recently shared with us that those two birds cannot mate and produce hybrid offspring. Sorry to misrepresent the Echo Park waterfowl a few posts ago. So when one goose tells another goose to go fuck a duck, he’s just joking.

You know, Artichoke has been called everything from “the cream of nerd rock” to “brain-snappingly groovy.” But what many fans don’t realize until they meet us is how, well, to put it bluntly — how damn sexy we are. I know, it’s a little gauche to bring it up myself. But I feel that it’s only fair to warn people so the shock is not so great, once they are within the field of our animal magnetism. It’s a powerful force, and we have to use it responsibly. So if you meet us for the first time, just try to stay casual. Try to work through your initial stunned deer-in-the-headlights feeling. Just keep smiling, maybe buy each of us a drink — and one for yourself of course — and I’m sure you’ll be just fine. And no, that warm buzzing tingly feeling never really goes away when you’re with Artichoke. Whew!

It is Thanksgiving Evening, and all through the house
there is food in the kitchen, there is wine to get soused.
There are cats old but healthy, sleeping days and at night.
My computer is working, the band is all right.
We’re promoting to college, we have played many shows;
we’re auditioning singers, that’s just how it goes.
We wake up with songs in our heads and our feet,
like crystallized clouds that get stuck in the trees.
Some songs are quite catchy, and some songs are not;
I’ve written so many that most are forgot.
So happy Thanksgiving to friends and to fans,
to oceans of algae and deserts of sand.