surrounded...
this holiday lil bit has been a signifigant one for me, and i'm still kinda processing fully why. i've had very contrasting emotions throughout, and i just need to make sure i come away from it all with the right frame of mind. i won't go into huge detail, but the short of it is that hand in hand i have felt wonderful connection and unsettling disconnect.
on the one hand is the act of returning to a city that keeps changing so much or in the very least keeps feeling so far gone from the place that i know and cherish in my memories of it. i attended the annual end-o-year party scene at the place of a guy who has been hosting it every year for any and every person even loosely affiliated with the people in my class and it has kind of become something of a legendary event. i found myself really looking forward to going, to kind of catch up and have some meaningful and insightful conversation with some other people out in the world finding their own singular meanings of livelihood and existance. what i instead found was a couple roomfuls of people who looked much older than me yet acted even older than that, dressed like the parents of catholic high kids in holiday sweaters and talking in calculated vague ways about nothing, with no scandal, no hormones, no existential burning, no debauchery, no true interest in finding out anything about each other except the 2 minute summation of where, who, and how followed by the polite salutation and out for the conversation, unless already initiated by me. i'm talking to people who used to sit with me for hours on end really talking about our fears and dreams in this world and who experienced with me the insanity of what it was like to be in an awkward skin all belittled by the same prep school system of dressup cat and mouse, insubordination, and shelteredness from the female kind, and now all i get from these souls is "oh, you're there? cool. i live in blahdy blahdy and work at blahdy. you look good. good to see you."
i experienced a little of the same at the big family christmas where relatives i don't really see very often try to size you up, sum you up, and ship you out in groups, and i finally settled in to a good hug and moments of communion with the ones who really return the same interest and conversational investment in me. i also played a gig that was the cd release party downtown and made this big preparatory act of getting people to record the thing since i'm garnering live footage, but ended up mostly very distracted by the noise and unsure of how to really address the wholeness of the room in an act that usually comes so easy to me.
if i were a pessimistic person i would actually give these thoughts more than momentary attention and a little colouration of my psyche. however, i'm not.
here are the things i'm actually coming away with. firstly, i am amazed and humbled by the fact that three very beautiful people from the miles and miles away that is my current home, decided to go through all the flight mumbo jumbo madness to come and experience some holiday time with me and my fams, willingly, and excitedly. i had the thought over and over in my head as i was standing around with a roomful of people whose unifying ingredient was me, who would otherwise not know each other, that the whole moment, the whole scene had a connectedness of which i was the core, and i felt beautifully, wrenchingly grateful for such. i had tables and standing roomness and tightly packed friends all at my gig, who may not have been able to hear what i do in the purest light, but still felt my music important enough to come out and support and stay and listen to with big grins and approval. and i had a whole big mosaic of activity experiencing the new post-katrina b.r. and n.o. landscape including sightseeing, shopping, meals, the rural life museum, lsu, french market, benedetto latenite housedom, christmas concert magnificence, etc. that i got to experience with amazing company.
i have mostly been away from my phone and not ball and chained to it. that is only because i have wanted to be truly present for the company i was in. and also i am in ancient atarified windows 95 paired with lethargic abacascomputerland here. so if it seems as though i am out of touch of late, i am hoping that you will simply know it is not a dis or a sign of anything except circumstance.
now i will be here down south for a couple weeks mostly just attemptiong my creativity and taking in the not so cold temperment of baton rouge winter. i hope to catch up with some folks and see some faces not so common to my eyes these days. i also hope that everyone is feeling well, grateful, and well-kept. it seems maybe the time to.
huddlin' in a winter wonderland
out of all the crappy one-line reviews and messages from people on GarageBand.com that demonstrate nothing more than the half-wit mentality of people and just how very little they are actually listening to something, i every now and then receive something that makes the whole venture totally worth it. here is a piece of a letter to me on there:
"
I'm not overly concerned about you getting discouraged with music; it's apparent to me from listening to you that you probably couldn't stop if you tried. You just have to keep pleasing yourself, in my opinion. If I do something that I think is good, or achieved what I wanted to with a song, than I'm a happy camper. If others connect with it, it's a lovely thing. If you let yourself get too wrapped up in what the public wants or is fed, though, you can drive yourself to distraction. Was it Oscar Wilde who said "If it's popular it's wrong"?(Morrissey probably wishes he'd said it!)"
Celebrations and Wanderings was chosen as 'track of the day' on there for Monday, and 'Moving, Shaking' was chosen as track of the day for Tuesday. Both will get tons of listens from this i suppose. I'll post a link when the time comes.
we are kind of having to stay put for the time being bc of the weather. i'll hafta see when the best time to get out on the road and get on down will be. very shortly.
the web
yo yo yo so from this point forward for the next little while my internet access will be somewhat limited, because i am venturing out from my house and first heading up to philly to see mieka pauley play and then i'll start rollin away later in the week for the big venture south.
and all my e stuff usually gets sucked into outlook express so if there are new e's i can of course reply to those. i'm just saying i may not have your addy to write you a fresh new one. g.
it is kind of getting stagnant and smelly and doggone and, well cold here so i am so very excited to be movin across this land some.
more lata..
d
joining a fanclub with my friends
so apparently i have a new fansite, and there are a bunch of posts i've never even seen about how much people love them some daniel lee..
http://mi2daniel.proboards70.com
flakes like mashed potatoes...
yes.
tonight i walked around in the strange silence that had solidified in the afterhours neighborhood o mine, and acknowledged the first _real_ snow of the winter up here. there have been a few nights up here lately that have felt like that unknown north dakotaesque cold that is just as alien to me as the alien eatery jon and i graced on both ways of the journey out to seattle, but for some reason it takes the snow to really make me feel like a southern boy getting used to a new place. beautiful, and i promise to not take it for granted.
www.danielleemusic.com/gallery_image_view.cfm?id=141www.danielleemusic.com/gallery_image_view.cfm?id=143i'd been shaking from the caffeine, and so i decided to compliment my mochafied stomach with a can of chef boyardee. i used to think that chef boyardee looked like my dad except with white hair, but as they each get older, they look less and less alike i think. or maybe i'm getting older. nah.
i've been up for waaay too long cornered off and surrendered to the task of reviewing enough songs at garageband.com to get credits to put my own songs up for review and its democratic process. i, however, feel as robotic at the programming into which i'm peering. i think the fact that some shmuck who normally wouldn't listen to my music anyway who simply wants the fastest way through the task of the least possible requirement in order to get his own music reviewed and into motion... makes this enslaving process more a representative republic. for which i'm entirely grateful of course.
jon has moved out and into his own lil place, and i think the silence he left behind him almost has a personality of its own. he lives right next to a whole foods and a trader joe's tho. the bastard. i miss him. perhaps that is why i have more computer questions to bother him with over bits of AIM than ever now.
i've played some pretty decent shows of late, each with more than i could've ever expected. most recently i was up in a part of maryland whose windy backroaded mapquest beguilement could give folly to even the most iron-nosed, but finally i got there. i ended up on a highschool stage fit for ameteur productions of 'our town' and 'oklahoma', but there was a well planned musical extravaganza with many different styles of strongwilled youth pouring out creativity and risking their legacies and reps in the name of music. by the time i got up there the place was crawling with energy, hormones, awkwardness, and adolescence and it was the kind of setting that makes me crawl in my skin because i want to open up a can of reality and quake mostly my own soul and whomever would really step there with me in flight, the big PA system belting out echoed and mighty. I think there was a connect by the time I was through, and I spent a good amount of time talking afterwards and making up for the time i'd spent enclosed in my iPod world prior.
www.danielleemusic.com/gallery_image_view.cfm?id=134www.danielleemusic.com/gallery_image_view.cfm?id=135i am now entering into a brief period of woodshed where i am burying myself in my work and insisting upon the space and the actualization of the creating process i seek. it is the perfect time to do this up until the big trip south, when it is quiet, cold and decembrist, ha. i can't wait to see my crazy changed stompin grounds, and it'll behold quite a few of my beloved people too. won't be long until that jazzed up charlie brown christmas melody is exemplified in the people around me.