July 18, 2008
TOUR IS OVER — IF YOU WANT IT
I have finally wrapped up my east and west coast tours and all my local events in San Francisco for the book — just in time to go on tour with my band, BLACK RAINBOW. Yes, its a pretty hectic year. Reading tour turned out to be one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. It was great to be on tour with Cindy Crabb of Doris out east and a real nice change of pace in my life: we only had to do ONE THING every single day for almost two weeks! So great! We just listened to The Ramones the whole time! Besides Cindy, I also got to read with some cool folks on tour. In Portland, I got to do a show at Reading Frenzy with the amazing Moe Bowstern of XTra Tuff zine and in Brattleboro, VT, Dahlia of Open 24 Hours zine read with us, too. Tour highlights:
1. The post reading punk show at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn w/ TULSA, STUPID PARTY, ONION FLAVORED RINGS, and SHELL SHAG. The rock was desperately needed by Cindy and I by this point and the show delivered. John Paul, TULSA’s drummer, had broken his bass drum foot on tour but was playing with his LEFT FOOT instead and it still was amazing. SHELL SHAG did a beautiful, sweet and sad acappella cover of Lemonheads’ “My Drug Buddy” and changed all the references to the Mission in SF. Perfect.
2. Cindy’s “Father’s Day Poem” in Brooklyn: simply shouting “Fuck you Dad!’
3. Olympia Public Library show. The Oly public library is staffed by rad punk ladies! Its some kind of utopia where the librarians not only read your book and promote the show, but they write reviews of the book for the daily newspaper and get the library to pay you! No shit. There was a great crowd of young and old folks, including an oldtimer who asked me, “What I want to know is, what time of day do you think all this stuff UP?”
4. Lake swimming with 40 punks in Seattle after the Elliot Bay Books show, and then driving down to Portland afterward to make it to Punk Donut Night at the new Voodoo Donuts
5. Getting to check out great collective spaces like Red Emmas (Baltimore), Food For Thought Books and (Amherst), Tinder Box (Brattleboro) and, of course, Blue Stockings (NYC) Thanks everyone!
Some new midwest and maybe Canada dates to follow, but tour is, thankfully, done!