We sold a Mac Pro tower recently, and I really love these images I took for eBay, and I can't totally explain why.
Personal travel: East Coast
Oh, East Coast. Home before Seattle was home; the place where everybody knew my name once upon a time. The place where the city's streetcorners and back pockets remind me of both who I am, and how far I've come. As much as I loved visiting this time around, I'm definitely several degrees of once-removed from life on the Atlantic -- I've only visited twice in the last decade, once about two years after I moved to visit family and to shoot at CMJ, and last year, for about thirty-six hours to attend my sister's funeral. So, even with all those well-worn memories, it's a new place now every time I go.
This time around, I planned my trip for early June, and matched my schedule to overlap with my husband's tour itinerary for a few days before sticking around to spend some time with my aunt and uncle in Connecticut. Day one bled in from day zero, arriving on the redeye, a whirlwind of airports and rental cars and getting changed in public bathrooms. I timed out my drive to intercept the van on a random highway, somewhere between Toronto and Brooklyn, and it worked out perfectly, all sunshine and reuniting and big smiles.
We hit the venue and the band went into soundcheck per usual, but after a brief meeting, we found out that the remainder of the tour was being cancelled due to exhaustion and fatigue on Damien's part. It was quite a contrast from the few hours prior, but Barry and I still managed to soak up a bit of Brooklyn once the walls came back into focus. Wandering around was a welcome sensory overload, all the sounds and smells, and magic hour out on a pier; some surprisingly good sushi followed by some unreal artisan (read: five dollars a scoop) ice cream. A few hours later, the band took the stage, and closed both the night and the tour out with an absolutely incredible show. It blew the doors off the venue, and was hands-down the best performance I'd seen them give to date.
We spent the night in a surprisingly rad, affordable hotel near the bridge, and hit Manhattan proper early the following morning for a haircut. Having not been to Brooklyn in all the trips I'd taken to New York over the years, I was blown away at how different it was compared to the city -- which I knew logically, of course, but I'd never experienced the contrast firsthand. The hotels were already booked and prepaid for the next two shows, so after spending the entire day's budget on two hours of parking, we zipped back eastward for brunch and one last hang with the band, and began our decidedly tame adventure north. I'd planned out so many things along the way, but instead we stretched out, and took our time driving, and got lots of big salads at Whole Foods-es along the way, and slept in a bunch. It was downright luxurious for us both, after having been apart for what seemed like forever, and especially for Barry after an eternity in the van, surrounded by people at every turn.
While we managed to sneak in a glorious earthy breakfast at the Haymarket in Northampton, which was one of my favorite spots to visit when I'd drive up for shows at the Iron Horse way back when, our attempts to head over to Cape Cod for dinner one night failed due to *insane* amounts of traffic.
Here's the haircut and the brunch:
Also, I got a bloody nose in this bathroom:
The second half of the trip was spent with family, and what was initially supposed to be a drop-in for Barry turned into four-plus days with me at my aunt and uncle's house. We landed in town pretty wiped out on Saturday, hitting the pool for the better part of the afternoon, while Sunday turned into a caricature of itself: a haze of relaxing, golf tournaments on the television, quality time with the dogs, and putting together sauce and meatballs for family dinner. I documented my uncle's step-by-step instructions while taking notes in my phone about beef-to-pork ratios, the correct type of stale bread to use, seasonings (vs. salts), and the oiled baking method they use now that comes out just as good as frying.
Most of these views, save for perhaps a coffeepot upgrade or some new window coverings, have not changed for at least a decade. The sights, sounds, smells, and even the creaks in the floor when I stepped in certain spots were all so comforting and so warm -- this is a place that's so burned into my brain that I dream about it regularly, full of the ghosts of holiday gatherings past and all the other Sundays with meatballs, and everything in-between.
Most of the days looked the same after Sunday. My aunt and I caught up about the last few years, talking about my sister and the subsequent changes our family has gone through since her death. We cried sometimes, and laughed sometimes, and had lots of espresso, and lots of fizzy water. I lounged around on giant rafts in warm water, and took luxurious naps, and spent afternoons in the sun, and old family friends dropped by, and I got and gave more rib-cracking hugs than I can count. Connecting to it all was perfect in ways I didn't expect, and hard in ways I didn't expect, and lots of feelings in-between that I can't quite articulate all the way at the moment. Maybe in another post.
That's Cookie and Joey, my mom's youngest sister and her husband. There's so much history behind us now that we're all older, as obvious of a thing as that is to say. It's surreal to truly wrap my mind around being forty, which puts them just past the sixty-year mark -- somewhere in my brain, I'm a still a teenager and they're the age that I am now, and we're all still trying to figure it out. Somewhere else, I'm still a kid and my aunt is outside with my mom, drinking Michelob in the driveway while they sun themselves on lawnchairs, spraying the hose at the dogs and smoking cigarettes on a Saturday afternoon.
No matter how old we all get, a piece of me will always live on this back porch, where my grandfather used to sit and watch the thunderstorms, where we sat and watched the rain this trip.
As much as I'm a West Coast-er now through and through, and as much as I've moved on from what life used to look like when I lived back east -- well, I think the only way to put it is the old adage of there really being no place like home. Even with all the hard parts, I still can't wait for the next trip back.
Behind the scenes: PNW spring tour
As it turns out, tour is a lot of loading in, and a lot of loading out, and a lot of looking for healthy food to eat, and a lot of driving, and not a lot of sleeping. In comparison to the rest of the minutes and hours of the days, very little time is spent performing onstage -- which I knew logically, of course? But it's a whole other world experientially. Four-plus days on the road makes an amazing five-week routing overseas look way less exotic, and way more like the work that it is.
I should back up a step. Hi. Barry just got back from Europe, we saw each other for the first time in over a month, had a few painfully short days off together, got married in our front yard, and now he and the band are off on the US leg of the tour. ('The band' being the supporting band for Damien Jurado, The Heavy Light, that I mentioned in that tour rehearsals post back in April.) It's been a bit of a whirlwind!
Between the marriage part and now, we hopped in the car and followed the van for a few days around the northwest, which technically made this past long weekend my first 'tour,' even though it was only for four days. Starting the first night in Spokane -- yes, we spent our wedding night in Moses Lake; no, that doesn't count as our honeymoon, ha! -- I tagged along to the shows in Vancouver, BC; Bellingham, and Portland, before bidding everyone adieu after brunch at The Tin Shed.
So, back to the opening paragraph: lots of loading in, lots of loading out and such. Here are a handful of onstage and off-stage shots that I captured over those four days on the proverbial road, which are mostly from venues, hotels, and the restaurants in-between. I'm pretty happy with them considering this was technically baby's first tour shoot.
As always, images are best viewed on a desktop if you have the option!
Personal travel: Seward, AK
I want to try and describe the experience I've had being in Alaska for the last two and a half days, but I hardly know where to begin.
It's 10pm on Saturday. I'm sitting in the B wing of the Anchorage airport, staring out the window at the still-lit sky. It's barely dusk, and I just saw Denali, even though it was a zillion miles away. I guess I should start with when I started to feel the landscape: yesterday, when Jen took me out to Exit Glacier -- there was a break in the clouds for the first time since I'd landed late Wednesday night, and she wanted me to see it since I'd heard about the peaks and the ice fields from the wildlife tour I'd gone on the day before. Talking in the car, among other things, we realized that I'd been confusing glaciers with icebergs, and then the shapes between the mountains started to make more sense.
So we get to the viewpoint for Exit Glacier, and we get out of the car and stand at the edge of this little parking lot. There's one of those low post-and-beam fences where the asphalt stops, you know, the kind that doesn't really keep anything out or in, it just gives you a visual marker of where you should and shouldn't go. The air was freezing in a way it hadn't been in town, and as I was taking it all in I looked down and saw an illustrated plaque that described the view:
Everything that you can see right now used to be covered in ice.
The graphic showed ice levels thousands of feet above the landscape, that had slowly worn down over the years to a massive glacier between the peaks, that now stood as just a fragment of itself; feeding the waterway snaking through the flat land in front of me. I stood there, starting out at these two 4,000+ foot mountains with a massive, frozen river between them, and suddenly I just felt... different. There was some kind of strange pang in my gut, and I understood more than I had the moment before, and I understood Those People Who Freak Out About Nature, and I could feel that icy air blowing from the top of those peaks right down into the center of my body. It was like I saw Earth and Time, and tectonic plates and history. I want to say that it felt like I'd seen a dinosaur or something? Or at least met someone who knew the guy who had a picture of a dinosaur stashed away in his attic.
I didn't understand what it was at the time, but talking later we figured out that I had found myself in awe. Me, jaded about so much, getting my doors blown off by like, giant ice-covered rocks. And hilariously, perfectly, it was the only few hours of the trip that I didn't have my big camera with me.
***
It's not that Seward proper isn't beautiful -- I'd seen the view, sort of, since Thursday morning, when Jen sent me out on that tour in Resurrection Bay. Overcast and drizzly as it was, it was still pretty breathtaking, and there were otters and bald eagles, sea lions and massive fjords; a glimpse of a grey whale that disappeared when too many boats showed up. We hammered across a choppy part of the gulf where you could see ten thousand miles of open ocean, one of the widest unobstructed expanses you can see from anywhere on the planet. And there were murals on the sides of buildings portraying these big, beautifully lit landscapes right up against Seward and the bay, so I knew there was majesty under the fog someplace? But seeing that view, and standing where the ice had been -- it just made everything shift.
Today we woke up after that York Peppermint Pattie mountaintop moment to bluebird skies and blasting sun, and ALL of the mountains, and ocean as far as you could see, and everything just kept unfolding. It was the San Juans on steroids, Hawaii except covered in snow; huge masses of land and cliffsides sticking straight up out of the water. We drove out this rocky bay where I took a thousand pictures, and we filled our water bottles with a hose that someone rigged into a the side of a mountain a long time ago to feed straight glacier runoff. Spring Water. Later, we ate fresh halibut with a view of the shipyard, and talked and talked and talked. And on the drive back to Anchorage, the sun hit that water and those cliffsides and those mountains in just the right way, and the world just looked so big, bigger than I'd ever seen before; so big that I could hardly fucking stand it. It's like the vast expanse of my heart and my insides and all the love I'd ever known and the universe and Life Itself personified into the landscape somehow. It did this, even, it's making me write about the view the way I'd write about a band. Except it's for real this time.
The thing is, I wasn't expecting any of this. The last few days have been so tender: I've sat listening to a friend who's recovering from both broken arm and broken heart, the whole reason for the trip, barely four days in her new apartment by the time I'd arrived. We processed, she worked; I cleaned. I dug into her kitchen mostly, helping to build her a home, throwing out the trash that the tenant before her had left behind. I went through boxes labeled by the heartbreaker, organized spices and dishes, and put trinkets on the tiny shelves in her medicine cabinet. I listened, I splurged on Thai food, we took long walks and spent a few hours soaking in Seward from the upstairs of the local coffeehouse. I heard so many stories, met so many pets, got a hundred hugs -- all on top of that thing happening with the dinosaurs and Time and the new hole in my gut.
It all collided perfectly in a way that I never could have planned in a million years, and it's a trip that has changed me forever, on every level.
Here's what some of it looked like:
So now what?
Now, the announcements will come over the loudspeaker, and the plane will board, and in a few hours I'll be in, well, less awe: back to SeaTac, back to my car, back to the house, back to the cat and the plants and the records. Hopefully I can sneak in a few hours of sleep before I head south again to pick Barry up from his flight. For now, I'll have to leave here content with the memories and the photos, with the literal and metaphorical tattoo that Seward has left on my sleeve, and with the cues from what I discovered here: tapping into the vein of all the love there is to give, and remembering no matter what we do or don't plan, that the seasons dictate the ebb and flow of where our lives take us -- not the other way around.
Behind the scenes: tour rehearsals at CCT
Two *very* full days of rehearsals at Columbia City Theater for Damien Jurado's upcoming EU / US tour, with supporting band The Heavy Light. I won't be seeing the show proper until the band is back in the states (at The Neptune in Seattle, mid-May), but if these run-throughs are any indication, this performances are going to be incredible -- think evolved-yet-classic Damien-style songwriting sensibility + a gorgeous-ly lush, full-band psych-fringe soundscape. With Barry Uhl, Frank Lenz, Josh Gordon, and Courtney Marie Andrews on deck, I'd go so far as to say that this is my favorite iteration of his live band to date.
Monday, Monday
For some reason, I was really enchanted by how the sunlight was behaving in our weird, messy little house this morning.
