Freedum p Art Y

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(all donations we do end up collecting though will end up going to the ACLU and all book donations will be donated to prisoners)
Music, poetry, fiction, food, booze, discourse, dancing!

Language barriers

There has to be a word in some language somewhere that describes the feeling of hope and fate that accompanies the meeting of certain people– the conviction that you were destined to meet, to be together, but that as in many things, the circumstances just weren’t good on this go around, there was a job calling them elsewhere etc., yet there remains a hope so remote in you that it survives even the pain of moving on and the acceptance into your heart of another– the hope that in the next form you take, be it human or caterpillar, that your soul will have another chance and that in that form, things might really go the way they needed to…

I’m guessing it’s German. Those people have words for everything.

In Tennessee, they can shoot you for stealing a man’s heart

On the back of this business card, a single phrase: “Please, I’m begging you: don’t fall in love with me”

On the back of the business card given in exchange, in a script devoid of all frills: “I won’t if you won’t” and a separate phone number from the one on the other side.

An incomplete description of my weekend in videos

At the Chicken Basket outside of Chicago, if you tell them it’s your birthday, they sing “happy birthday” to you in chicken language

Evan and Chris, front-to-back, playing the guitar and the banjo pressed front-to-back

 

Some fine points:
+ At 8am, the first morning we spent at Buckeye, the friend I was sharing the bed with woke up in terror, swatting at the air. I asked him what was wrong and he said “it’s a fucking mud-dauber, I knew it!” Not knowing what a mud-dauber was, I was a little nervous, but he explained it’s a very large, mild-mannered but nonetheless, wasp that they call a mud-dauber because it uses mud to fortify its hive. I nodded, pulled the quilt further up above my head and went back to sleep. About an hour later, my best friend comes running up the stairs, having not slept at all, and I woke up from the sound of his steps and looked up just as he took a running leap into the space between my friend and I, yelling “mooooom! daaaaaaad!” and we laughed and tickled and wrestled and then went back to sleep like three little babies in a crib. We woke up for good about two hours later to the sound of cello harmonics that the master of the house was demonstrating could sound like gulls.

+  The night of our arrival, we gathered in a circle and took turns singing ballads.

+ The last night we spent there, we stayed inside even though it was a Saturday and we are all in our early to mid 20s. We cooked, colored paper trains for a charity drive, and played a game from my childhood called Barrel O’ Monkeys while discussing protein markers, listening to the master of the house play the cello and the guitar, and sipping perfectly made organic tea.

+ (talking about religion)  Chris: I used to think about that stuff a lot and what I found was that it just depressed me. So now I’m at the point in my life where I am actively trying not to think about it and just live my life and stick to my stupid, pointless pursuits, like music.
Evan: Music isn’t a stupid, pointless pursuit, though. It’s us trying to be God as best we can.

+ Church, for the first time in forever

+ Singing army call-and-responses in the car on the way home

+ If you close your eyes and then open them again, with your mind as clear as it could possibly be, it feels like you’re in Kentucky. If you drive a little further west and clear your mind again, the sky overtakes you, how immense it is, and it feels like you’re in the most beautiful, serene part of Oklahoma.

We play by plains rules

Nobody goes prone to the dirt
Unless you plan to die there

Weird to think the world was that much lonelier twenty two years ago

Thank God I only had to suffer through it 54 weeks before you came along. Admittedly most of it’s a blur.

Happy birthday, baby boy.

For Geoff, 2009

The Jasmine Neosh apology phone network– now toll-free on Sundays!

The point where you realize that Googling the lyrics to Daft Punk’s “Around the World” is the only stroke of genius you ever might have and like all strokes of genius, Sully thought of it first

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/daftpunk/aroundtheworld.html

Poet friends, you would do well to pay attention to musicians

Over the last few days, I’ve really been hitting the mark with my poems. Part of that stems from clarity and part of that clarity stems from inspiration and part of that inspiration stems from remembering what it is I really sound like, when I’m firing at full capacity.

I want my poetry to sound like Tyler Bagwell’s guitar strung through an amplifier powered by a speeding car on a dark road. I want it to sound like moonshine and hellfire in the mouth of a saint. And it will, by god. It will.

 

All of my best poems, I’ve written to the rhythm of the blues.

Spring 2012

Jasmine Neosh and Evan McBrayer Collins, 2012

Having said all of that stuff about not wanting to live a glamorous life, I’m going to be making an independent trip to Colorado soon as well as possibly touring (kinda) in the spring with Can I Get an Amen. We’re gonna spank away your sadness with the Great American Rust Belt.