Live show banter, misplaced West coast rain, Jenga

This morning I was listening to a live show of Jeff Tweedy at someplace called The Forum, recorded in June 2000. I don’t know where that is, the Forum. The show comes to me thirdhand through some Oregon friends of mine. The show is, however, fantastic. Jeff plays songs that I haven’t heard anywhere else, a series of Woody Guthrie-ish ballads that I sense work better in a solo context than if Jeff’d been with a band.

Plus, there’s a good amount of banter on the album. Jeff can’t remember the words to a couple of songs, and in laughing about it with the audience reaffirms his status as one of the more real, that is, humble, rock & roll heroes in my personal pantheon. His stories are funny and disarming: “Did I ever tell you guys the story about the Germans? That is, about the whole German people? [Laughter.] I’d be in the back room tuning up, and they’d come into the room and say things like: ‘WE ARE FINISHED WAITING FOR YOU NOW!’ ” Normally onstage banter rings such hollow notes that I grit my teeth waiting for the talent to go on being talented and stop with the buddy-buddy intimacies or the Yeah!-Bono’s-right! political grandstanding. Done right, however, and given the right environment and the right crowd, such banter can really make the show cohere, and makes me want to anonymous buy the fellow onstage a dark beer of considerable quality.

It’s been raining for the last five days. It won’t stop. I can’t go on runs if it’s raining before I’m about to go running. If it begins to rain once I’m out there, fine. I’ll keep running the route and get all elated and Gene Kelly in “Singing In the Rain”; I’ll spring along and sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops, etc. But if it’s *already* raining, *hard*, forget it.

I’m making headway on "Good Ground". About 1,000 words a day for the last few days. Is its plot in play, is there much happening in immediate scene, is it in medias res? No, no, no. But its characters are emerging. And I’m accumulating a certain amount of momentum in terms of the writing style: I always feel that my better work comes from a loosening and a quickening of language, a sort of barreling Faulkner-ish sentence (I’m *really* not trying to compare myself to Faulkner here) which is my most reliable compositional means. Most of these sentences, while grammatically correct in a technical sense, will lose a reader faster than Mr. Magoo loses everything, and I’ll have to alter them each at some point. But from a compositional point of view, they are the building blocks I’m most able to use in constructing this tower of who knows exactly what shape or dimension. Which reminds me of a Jenga tower 50 feet high I saw yesterday on the Internets. It’s a scaled replica of the Sears Tower (only with half the number of floors—otherwise it’s to scale). I’d provide the link but I’m going to be late to work if I don’t like move.