A big thanks to WERS and you who attened the Semel Theatre, tuned-in/ listened online the morning of May 2. I, myself, had a great time. I travelled out with Mary Jones- see www.maryjonesmanagement.com, and we went to a this fish house near our hotel the eve we came in. The menu featured most selections from around the area of Boston. Out in Los Angeles, there are some great places for seafood, some located on the PCH. I never get a chance, though. I was raised on the Minnesota lakes and fished for walleye. When I was home for the Grand Forks show April 26 I ordered the walleye at Sanders restaurant. Walleye is a very wonderful fish! It is best, in my mind, prepared on a hot pan with a little butter and served with wild rice. You can taste the lake, and the lake tastes like how is smells after the fresh rains on the prairie- like clean atmosphere. Well, the Boston Semel show was a great show. The stage was even decked with fresh flowers thanks to a gal named Maureen. I enjoyed the day and the evening very much! I took the T to Harvard and visited one of the good bookstores there. I think Mary bought Faulkner and Greene? I didn’t find what I was looking for but on the way home we stopped at a bookstore on Boylston called Commonwealth Books and found a good-conditioned Isak Dineson. I am continuing my sudy on Africa.

I climbed on top of the roof and could see downtown all the tall, big buildings of Los Angeles like the one where at Christmas time decorative sheets of green and red lights go around the skyscraper section and with my knife started to hack at the bougainvillea which clung to the shingles and siding. I could smell the earth. It was a hot day and the sprinkler was on and it was wet and cool beneath the tree. I just about lost my balance and I was wearing a pair of sandals. I had remembered one summer in North Dakota digging in the garden with a foot shovel wearing sandals and I cut my toe along the side of the shovel and it wouldn’t stop bleeding my Mom said to drive my own self to the hospital because it was not such a good idea to be shoveling in sandals to begin with and so I drove using only my left foot for both brake and gas.

Downtown Los Angles I have mixed feelings about but I continued to cut the bougainvillea and brushed away the leaves and branches. I found a Frisbee that had probably been there a while and was bleached out. I found a tennis ball too and instinctively threw it to the dog in the neighbor’s yard. I got down on the ladder and was scraped on my forearms and my pants were dirty and I was sweating a bit and so I took my shirt to my face. I haven’t forgotten her name I just don’t really like to say it-you know why make things worse. I should say I’m trying to forget her name but it’s one of those kinds of combinations like you write on your hand right 1, left 2, right 3.

A friend of mine had a GMC truck and we’d take it through the muddy prairie. We’d stop off at Valley Dairy and buy some smokes and a couple sodas and the son of a bitch was so crazy. He was seeing this gal in the next town and she’d come along, bring her sister and they’d be laughing and having so much fun. Dan would drive down in the ditches and over the muddy rows of the fields and around the parking lot of some church.

But I think that’s why Arizona means so much- all the feeling I have for the gal whose name I want to forget, every situation I have been in where I’ve felt like I missed her, or perhaps she was close by, similar looks from strangers, or a familiar perfume brings me to the west. It’s something I have no control over and I want to say that with time it’s been drowned out but in fact it’s grown with sophistication and I can sit for hours staring.

So I go to Tempe, or Jerome, and I feel pretty good. There’s the heat and the sky and the reservation and the old women dragging their old husbands around and there’s canals running thru town and there’s Tombstone and red sand and trident shaped cactus and dirt roads leading forever and there’s green grass and saloons and re-enactments and rodeo and the Grand Canyon and postcards with faces that have deep lines and cowboys and there’s a dormant volcano, the landscape’s shiny black glass and there’s Indian School I like to drive and Baseline too and there’s this great Mexican restaurant out in the middle of nowhere and there’s Tucson and music and citrus trees and painted trunks. It is the place I always go to. It is the place I can’t escape.

March 6, 2008
I have been writing for the next record and writing a book of short & long stories. To do this, I’ve spent every day at a different LA-area library. At first I never wanted to leave the new one in Santa Monica. There they have a little cafe, all new furniture- the cool modern kind, and plenty of space to roam around. I find my searches starting with one idea and leading to the next. I have to remind myself there are no boundaries, only guidelines. Sometimes I say “No, you can’t write about that!” I most often have to fight that side. That’s my struggle. I want to be good, but I am dark. I’m like a dog. I know this dog named T. One half is Shar Pei and the other is Labrador. Any Lab I’ve seen has been quite friendly, generally happy to be alive, and full of life. Shar Pei’s can be somewhat territorial, guarding, still lovable, but you have to be cautious. They take time. My neighbor in Echo Park had a Shar Pei and the little guy wasn’t warm to say the least. T has this good side and this dark side. I can see he wants to be good, but also he goes dark. He cannot help that, that is his struggle.

I am in a hotel across the street from the venue. It has rained this evening and the there’s a celebration, unlike every other Friday, in the streets. It is the first time in a while I have decided to make coffee using the room coffee maker. I can tell you now that it is not that good and that I am drinking anyway. Beside me on the desk are stacks of change, in EU and UK. They are the sound of my travel bag and I have tired from the noise. I plan to buy something in the morning. I am only for a few more dates with Mice Parade- my good friends. They are traveling with their latest release called Mice Parade, and I am traveling with them previewing a new record called Cavalier.

By PAUL SAITOWITZ
Special to The Press-Enterprise

Tom Brosseau, a wiry blond with an acoustic guitar, ghostly voice, and gaggle of songs steeped in allegory and yarns of far-off places, is no longer satisfied to simply pen a good tune — he needs to live it.

The Los Angeles-by-way-of-North Dakota troubadour always had a fascination with music and writing and a penchant for combining the two, but it wasn’t until he began touring regularly two years ago that he discovered what really drives him — the road.

“Touring so much and being away has definitely had an impact on my songwriting … it’s enabled me to see the world and when you travel you tend to write a lot,” he said during a telephone interview. “There’s so much to experience that you can’t help but be affected by it.”

“It’s enabled me to see the world,” singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau said of touring. “When you travel, you tend to write a lot.”
He said that traveling has given him a new framework. While he may not be as prolific a songwriter as he once was, his ideas are more honed and his vision is less clouded.

For him, there’s no need to rely on what he’s read or studied to conjure song material because he’s seen it firsthand.

“Before when I was writing and living full time in Echo Park I kind of established a comfort zone, but when you get out of that it kind of adds another dimension,” he said. “I think I’ve always written about other places, but now I have more of a perspective.”

It’s not like Brosseau has never written songs without an intimate knowledge of a situation. His album “Grand Forks” is about the place where he grew up and went to college and how the North Dakota town dealt with the great flood that besieged it in 1997.

During the height of the flooding, a fire also destroyed 11 buildings in the city’s downtown.

“It was such a tragic thing and so real to me that I knew I’d write a song about it,” he said. “I ended up writing a whole album.”

He performed the set for Grand Forks dignitaries and even got a key to the city, but going back to the place he’d written about presented an experience he was not expecting.

“I don’t know if it is because I’ve been gone for a while, traveled so much or just had a different representation of the town in my mind, but things are not always the same as you remember them,” he said. “I loved playing there and we had such a great response … it just feels like I may remember it now as more of a fictitious place.”

The songwriter is already under way on his next set — which he claims will be more personal and feature a stark, stripped-down arrangement — but no timeline for release has been set.

“In between touring I’m working on things, but the road has become my life so I’m not quite sure when I’ll be done,” he said.

Memorial Day. It is the first day off we have had on the Mice Parade/Tom Brosseau/David Karsten Daniels tour. Last night we were at a club in Washington D.C., the night before we were in Philadelphia…tomorrow we are in Chapel Hill, NC. The road has been safe, and has presented no real danger(s) so far. We have had van difficulties, and are currently having it worked on, but aside from that everything’s tip-top. There has been little difference in gas prices from state-to-state, city-to-city. It’s all pretty much over $3 a gallon. As I mentioned before, I am driving a fairly new Chrysler, and look more like I should be driving to the country club than on tour playing rock and roll venues. I am up in a room with the window open in SS, Maryland. The summer has begun: music is carrying, the smell of the coals and lighter fluid, the dog is pacing the grounds where the folks are playing Badminton, the smell of cigarettes, a dampness in the air, green grass, chearping birds…we are at the tip of the roller-coaster.

Manhattan from Boston, from Canada: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. Last night, and all day, it was mighty hot, near 90. The city was hot and I felt like it was melting. The cars, the traffic, all the yellow cabs were buzzing around, all the people on the street were bumping into each other, the black tar of the street seemed to be soft enough your shoes made imprints, dogs were being walked and their tongues were white with thirst and dragged on the ground, the shops all had their doors open and the a/c lingered out like a saintly ghost and caressed bodies and faces of the folks traveling the sidewalks…this was Manhattan last night.

I am at the club, the Horseshoe. Me and Mice Parade and the David Karsten Daniels band drove last night to…I don’t even know where, but we got there 6am, got up this morning at 11am, and rove to the border of USA and Canada. I am touring with Mice Parade for the next month. I got into Chicago earlier yesterday afternoon. I picked up my rental car- supposed to be a Chevy Malibu. They did not have a Chevy Malibu and tried offering me up a PT Cruiser. I said “please don’t put me in one of those…haven’t you got something a little less flashy” but they did not. They offered me an HHR- sister to the PT, and worse, not me at all. Then I got to thinking what is me in terms of rental cars? Well, needless-to-say, most cars at a place of rental look like they are indeed rental cars. I could write a novel on rental cars. I have had them all: Malibus, Cobalts, Saturns, Pontiacs, even PTs and HHRs. Maybe it’s the fact they all smell like rental cars? The kind of new car scent and cigarette smoke, strong perfume and car cleaner. I was up-graded, to my surprise, to a premium car, the Chrysler 300M. Now I look even more funny than I could have ever wanted. There is no winning!

Somewhere along the lines I regained somewhat from the UK, though I don’t recall really having to rest, or nap. Like I said, it is a strange thing adjusting. You get on a place, fly 11 hours, land in a different country, sleep, adjust to whatever country it is time, start picking back up on the language, on the currency, on the decor and fashion, and then you have to fly back 11 hours to a place the most familiar to you, only warped a bit, weird and strange to you because of time. So here I am, by the ocean. There are workers across the street pulling out an old telephone pole, have been all morning, and I finally think I am on track. No when I think of it, Bristol, UK, seems like years ago.

John Fante- born and raised in Colorado, moved west to LA, lived downtown. I am reading Dreams from Bunker Hill, and I am reading it aloud when I do. I have read Ask the Dust and Road to Los Angeles. They are written, they are the stories from Arturo Bandini. Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Full of Life are the last ones to read in the saga of Arturo Bandini. I laugh sometimes, but feel very close to Arturo, to Fante. Bunker Hill is a great place downtown, around 3rd street. I used to live in Echo Park, on West Kensington, not too far from Bunker Hill. I imagine it was the same place as it ws back in the ’30s. I like Fante. I think he is a great writer. Sometimes I feel like his Bandini books are a bit pulpy, for popular, but I still think they are great.

The flight home lasted a long time, nearly 11 hours. And flying from the UK to the US, it seems, you have the longest day, where the sun never sets. It’s the strangest feeling. I know I am tired, but I cannot sleep. Something about the light coming through the window, and the excitement, too. It’s the longest day. I tell myself I’m going save up, save up and get First Class the next time. When you board and de-board you walk by the lots of space afforded FC: the comforters instead of fleece, the down instead of synthetic, the glass instead of plastic, the meals instead of snacks, the leg room, the arm room, the head room, the magazines and newspapers, the bigger washrooms, the better lighting, the ability to extent, to extend your seat fully, to extend your body out, to sleep, to board first, to de-board first, to get the attention first. I am going to save my money and traveling first class.