Upcoming NYC Show
For those of you in and around NYC, we’ve got a show coming up (6/7) at Le Poisson Rouge as part of the venue’s 15th anniversary celebration.
We’re performing “in the round”, meaning we’ll be playing in the center of the room, facing one another, while the audience surrounds us on all sides. The band for this one will be me on guitar and piano, Michael Lerner on drums, Logan Coale on upright bass, and David Moore on Farfisa organ. The Celtic harpist Maeve Gilchrist will be opening. It’s going to be a pretty unique show.
Here’s me, practicing an oldie:
And here’s a short piece I wrote recently regarding the weird weather of this spring in the Northeast:
Drought
This morning saw a little icon of a cloud with raindrops beneath it, captioned “50%”. This means I will experience today in distracted suspense, keeping a close watch out the window, stepping onto the porch every few minutes to determine whether it “feels” different out there. And it sort of does.
The clouds have a bit of a jog going and the air is swaying. It feels like something might happen. The forecast says something might happen too— 30% at 1pm, 40% at 2pm, 50% at 3pm, and hovering around those solidly ambivalent percentages into the early evening.
It’s been an unusually dry April and May, an affront to the aphorism about these months that says “if this, then that”. But flowers seem to be coming up without any help from the presupposed showers, turning said-aphorism on its head. Seems plenty of varieties do just fine baking in the sun.
I fully subscribed to that springtime recipe at a young age and have carried it into adulthood as an immutable fact, so now I’m getting impatient and worried. First: for trees, already confused by a mild winter, who missed out on the deep hibernation required to refresh on-schedule. Next: for bears, extra hungry after last summer’s drought, who might wake up early and go looking for food in stream beds that haven’t filled up yet. And ultimately: for all the other hot-weather processes that will stop short when Regular Spring eventually returns with cold rain and a final frost.
Truthfully, I’m not mad about leaving heavy sweatshirts on the floor and walking the dog without suiting up, and I’ll gladly throw my coffee in the fridge. But I don’t feel like I’ve earned summer yet. It’s a little like having a major plot point spoiled well-ahead of time— without the planned progression and careful development, the payoff feels artificial and unsatisfying. The meaning isn’t in the reveal itself, but the intricate unfolding that made it inevitable.
By 4pm nothing has materialized, and I’m starting to lose hope. I imagine flower petals falling to the ground and shriveling, tadpoles overcrowding a shrinking puddle, unemployed bees flying around aimlessly until they exhaustedly drop into the tan grass.
Or worse, a neighbor ignoring the burn ban, torching trash in his backyard, leaving it to smolder and inadvertently starting a ferocious wildfire that decimates every forest within a hundred miles, birthing new blazes with exponential intensity, carrying flames around the continent, hot coals hopping ships across the ocean to toast the rest of the wild planet, filling the sky with a choking smoke-cover, making outside uninhabitable, forcing everyone into climate-controlled mall-cities—
And then, for a moment, I think I feel water land on my nose. Several uncertain, breathless seconds pass… and then another, bigger splash on the back of my hand. And I begin to hear an encircling tapping as the wooden deck slats are pointilistically painted a deeper, darker shade of themselves. The trees’ early leaves bounce upon impact, as each drop is passed from the crown on down.
A familiar aroma is suddenly everywhere, as dusty concrete becomes freshly paved and cracked clay remembers it was once soil. The temperature plummets within minutes, confirming that this small domain of earth and air, after holding its breath just to see how long it could, has finally exhaled, and so can I.
Thank you for reading this far. I’m aiming to do more of this sort of thing in the future. But like most endeavors, writing takes quite a bit of time.
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