it's a very dada way of looking at food service

i’m sitting at home in my boston digs, about to embark on the Meat of my Time Off Adventures….paring my email inbox down, cleaning up this goddam apartment, trying to shave unnecessary verses off the new songs that are going to hopefully be birthed into the world before 2014.

i’ve had some excellent random-ass adventures in the past week…

i met Tim Minchin (an australian songwriter who is sometimes funny) as he was passing through Boston on a tour and he’s one of my new Favorite People. tim and neil had mutual friends and tim knew me from australia…so neil emailed us together. life is beautiful like that. in the course of a mere three hours we managed to hit two locales in harvard square: we met at L.A. burdick and headed to the Cafe Pamplona, where i got to show off the Amanda Palmer drink on the menu and we determined that the BEST kind of drink to get named after you is the kind that had a free-floating identity; that is, it is defined by what you last ordered when you came into the cafe.

so someday you may walk into Cafe Pamplona, order an Amanda Palmer drink, and be brought a greek salad.

tim is very fucking funny, i suggest going down a youtube hole with his clips sometime (highly recommend: “prejudice” and “white wine in the sun”). we bonded over the fact that we don’t fit into any genre, we both write funny songs, and sad songs, and songs we like, and that’s what we do and people have to deal. his songs are brilliant. he’s brilliant. go check him out: timminchin.com | @timminchin | facebook
here he is performing “prejudice” on conan, shortly after leaving boston:


here’s me and tim in the garden behind my house:

tim left his glasses in my car when i dropped him at the airport and sent a frantic text
and so, after doing a brief photo shoot with his glasses in the car –

– i turned around and drove to find him and we got to have a great discussion about how happy i was that he left his glasses in my car because then i got to do something that proved i liked him and wanted him to be my friend. then i also got to drive around east boston, lost, after getting distracted on my way home. eastie, represent. i realized i probably did not have a single fan living in east boston. east boston is a foreign place.

after this, i went to a bizarre fundraiser in NYC for the david lynch foundation. he was raising money to teach soldiers with sever PTSD to meditate. michael pope and i sat in a room with hundreds of people and watched soldiers tell stories. i gave david lynch a copy of “who killed amanda palmer”. bucket list, check, onwards. and it was a wonderful feeling to meditate with that many people.

und….i played alina’s book release show (get her book HERE, go go go) and right before leaving ran into john cameron mitchell, who was there for the late show, so i was forced to stay to see pam ann, who blew me (BLEEWWWWWWWWWWW MEEEEEEEE EWWWWWWWWW) away. australians winning once again: pam ann is a completely unhinged anachronistic airline hostess with a filthy fucking mouth and sense of comic timing that had everybody in joe’s pub more or less peeing in their pants from minute one. go check her out if you can….it’s fucking funny shit.

i was given a free musically-activated vibrator…the OhMiBod. my friend carter brought his friend brian (who founded OhMiBod) and i was gifted this wonder of modern technology. my publicist, sarah avrin, snapped this lovely picture of my and my new toy:

i caught up with john the next day and we traded musics. i played him my new demos, rough phone recordings that hopefully nobody will ever hear but my trusty friends who can listen with no-judgment filter. i am excited about these songs like i’ve never been excited about songs before….mostly because i haven’t ever made songs like this.

alina’s book-excitement also coaxed me to greenpoint, brooklyn, where me, her and wesley stace (aka john wesley harding) played in a basement of WORD bookstore, which is a rad independent joint run my very hot-looking brooklyn chicks.

meanwhile, my life is boring in a way. i’ve deliberately taken myself off tour to catch up on the boring shit and the boring shit must simply be done.
the organizing is never interesting to me.

i like the doing.

casey and meghan and i had a painting party the other night. i painted a thank-you-for-waiting-gift for someone who never got their merchandise a few months ago, and casey worked on a painting of noah (which you can’t see here). meghan was painting at home. she was on skype with casey (you can see her in the bottom left corner). so, she wasn’t actually in the room but she was at the painting party. she and casey do that. they just stay on skype for hours all night while they paint together. i think that is amazing, somehow. in fact, i felt like i was less at the painting party than meghan because she and casey have such an ONGOING painting party on skype. life is getting stranger and more beautiful by the second:

i’ve been feeling overpoweringly grateful lately. i miss neil, but we’ve gotten familiar enough with our long-distance-marriage to make it somehow workable, for the time being. my friends around me in boston have become a stronger, tighter-knitted bunch as we try to weave ourselves together in a safety net of love for our friend who is ailing. i don’t talk about that, really, in my blog, because it seems too personal, but i don’t mind saying that it’s hard, and that it’s changed me, and that my priorities seem to come into ever-greater focus as i watch the movements and choices of those around and the effect that they have on the whole.

cormac and i were driving to somewhere in his car yesterday. he was playing me eminem songs i hadn’t heard.
sometimes i can’t stand that cormac makes me listen to things i’m not in the mood for.

i remember when he made me listen, for half an hour, to the recording of andrew dice clay bombing in some third-rate comedy club. the diceman was not doing well. he spends most of the show berating the audience and defending his right to be an asshole. it’s not comedy, that recording, it’s humanity. and incredibly sad..

so we were listening to a specific collection of eminem’s diss tracks, where he’s focused solely on bitching at and tearing down other people. i mean, eminem doesn’t just bitch. he takes vitriol to an art form. he’s a great poet. but DAMN man, girlfriend is ANGRY. i don’t even really know who everlast and fred durst are, but it is now very, very clear to me that eminem does not like them. and calls them fucking faggots. and wants to kill them. it hurt my heart, listening to it. i’ve been seeing too much of it in the real world lately to be able to hear it without getting a little depressed.

i sit in hospital waiting rooms and airport gates and i look at the whole hilarious parade, watching people scream at top volume into cell phones, watching people kiss and weep…and think: yep, here we are again. all you can do is laugh at the parade, have compassion for the hateful, have a cup of coffee, play some rock shows, do the dishes, have a skype painting party, keep your phone on in case something awful’s going to happen, take your vitamins, have a hit of a cigarette offered to you by the boys on the stoop.

on the drive back, we changed from eminem to frank sinatra.

we listened to frank all the way home and we screamed together at the tops of our lungs as we drove through the night rain.

and this

this is why i love my life

AFP