sanctimony and starfish

Starfish and coffee
Sign of the times
annoying people
chopped wood
meowing cats.

poems penny each

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music-
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire...
-Robinson Jeffers

ship of fools (hunter/garcia) by me

industrial stuff in Portland

open mic

I'm playing at on open mic tonight at Fireworks in Corvallis.  Feel free to come down or tune into the webcast   starting at 9pm.  I won't be the only one playing, but I will probably be the only "Chris."  Maybe I can sell another cd.  I'm thinking of buying a whole bunch of equipment so that I can start playing cafes, because my voice definitely needs amplification.  My guitar is loud anyway, but my voice is kind of weak.  I think I would need a mixing board in addition to an  amplifier, because all I have right now is an acoustic with a pickup built in, and a microphone and stand for the microphone, and that is it.  I think I have the self-confidence to get up and sing and play for two hours, and I have enough songs, so I might as well get started.  However, there aren't a lot of venues in Corvallis, and I haven't got anything going as of yet.

I played the Interzone last year and it was a disaster.  I thought I had some good songs, but something about the atmosphere was just completely stultifying.  Plus there was like two people there.  At the most.

I used "I" about two zillion times in this post.  Does that mean I am self-centered?  Maybe.  But this is just about playing music.  It doesn't mean that I have zero concern for anybody else, which I undoubtedly do.  

It's art for art's sake, and I find that if I can concentrate on making the song sound the way I think it should sound then it works out, because I have a opinion that a song is good, and that if I play it right, it will sound good, which brings me to the fact that I'm playing exclusively songs that are written by somebody else, most likely Hunter/Garcia, Cat Stevens, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, or somebody similar.  Some of them are old folk songs that predate all these people.  Tonight I play on playing Bertha (Grateful Dead), Here Comes the Flood (Peter Gabriel), Rubin and Cherise (Hunter/Garcia), Dry Your Eyes (Neil Diamond), Stella Blue, and maybe some more.