Answer #28 - Rhinoceri love beans

Well, perspective is a thing, huh?  You think she's in love, but she's maybe just tolerating.  This is an easier state to pull off than many of us would like to admit.  Looks like love but it's really just tolerance.

20 more pages in, that's where we are.  In the farthest wilds of Iceland, in cities whose names can't be pronounced by those of us without the ability to find the umlat on the keyboard, Eileen Myles is slightly annoyed.  Still wide-open fascinated, in as much as her scruffy black cool will allow, but irked.  It's been raining.  Alot.  No busses.  Her eloquence is jacking with me, happily.. rough and tumble, stuff of bright light...   

"Most likely we travel to exist in an analogue to our life's dilemmas.  It's like a spaceship.  The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting.  To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world.  Travel is not transcendence.  It's immanence.  It's trying to be here."

No, this blog is not a book review.  I lack both the qualifications and commitment - but for reference, it's The Importance of Being Iceland, and I have a strong desire to spend the rest of the day reading it - followed by the poetry of his Icelandic travels by my friend Duke Lang.  My own writing brain is in serious need of a jolt of sorts- possibly a couple of car batteries and some well-placed clamps.

I'm a traveling musician.  She's captured my own analogue, though I couldn't have conceived of it in these terms. But immanence is what we're all reaching for - those of us on the road, I think.  Trying to be here.  It's never as easy when I'm home, pacing from room to room, scratching my head, thinking 'I should write,' while the phone rings and the cat glowers and the thud thud thud from the studio shivers the joists.

I've picked up 5 shows since Friday.  This is a good thing if immanence is what I'm striving for.  I'll get it in spades, as the shows stretch from Belfast to Wisconsin to Victoria BC.  If you're ever passing through - the year's tour schedule is on Myspace.  It's a long list.  A measure of success?  Hm..

I started this blog keeping points - points of progress in this music business.  Step ups and set backs.  But a friend pointed out that reducing my life to a series of daily points on some grizzly ladder of success was the equivalent of selling my cow to Monsanto.  In return for magical, genetically-altered and non-proliferating beans.

Little did she know that magic beans are what I've always wanted.

Just not from the Monsanto death squads (with the happy Hallmarky Farm Family commercials.  The farm family 'actors' are actually played by zombies, just so you know).

So is it immanence? Or what's the point?

In reality, things are going pretty well.  Some people are interested that hadn't been prior, and I feel a fairly strong compulsion to plow through a handful of brick walls like a rhinoceros - to get to the shiny bean of folk music success.  Um, beans.  Shiny.  Immanence? Transcendence?  snort.