Ways to Go About Doing It

It's positive year, it's 2008! bad things happen to good people, but now bad can mutate. i lost my cell phone and am losing my hearing, but today my sister saved herself 900 bucks in city taxes and a man bowling pinned another guy to death but it was only on the silverscreen and i got to laugh and drink diet coke afterwards. the times are not so savage!!!

So there's this girl thing i go to.. we talk about girl things and eat cheeses and the other night we took a crack at 'problem solving.' most of us didn't share any dilemmas of particular weight, it was getting late and sometimes you just don't want to go there b/c you need to save energy to jog or brush your teeth the next morning. but things don't have to be heavy to make your life heavy... shed some of the light crap and how much more manageable your situation can become. that's one premise anyway.

gnight

Found Footage: Tour '06 - Entry #4

It's hard to reflect and harder to write it down. Luckily I got this (very) little video clip from our friend Samuel Dixon. Location: backstage at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, just before we hit the stage, when we were still young and slightly innocent. Contains mild nudity and no music. Enjoy.

Click HERE for video.

Microsoft Country: Tour '06 - Entry #3

[highway, seattle]

the rumors about the pacific northwest are totally true. northern northern california into portland into seattle ... what great smelling territory! mends the little broken puppet sides of you and makes you feel appreciative and happy... good pine, good mountains, good fog...

Portland also secretly houses one of the most hospitable families i've ever met (kim's cousins). We stayed with them our second night in P-Town. Besides the bedding, towels, a key to the house, welcome notes, don't worry about making noise notes, we woke up the next morning after her cousin's had already gone to work. We were tired, crusty, hungry and wandered into the kitchen to find it mapped out with post-it notes on all the cupboards like so:





wow.

As for Seattle...

i got to see a friend i hadn't seen in 3 1/2 years. Somehow in that short spell, he'd gotten married, become the father of a handsome two year old and had another baby on the way, He came to the show in seattle where the loud girl shouted for kim and me to go back to la. That and damp clapping left us down on our show, but he said that we girls "delivered the rock." And he reads the Economist and owns lots of cd's. So, okay...

But not before Sia announced she was dedicating every song that night to us . Every single song. Even when she forgot, she'd do a backwards dedication "...oh and that song was for Eagle and Talon, too..." SO nice. Very sia.

And I'd like to go on, but it's time to pack up my drums for the t's bowl gig tonight. Kim got back from Canada just a few hours ago! Eagle and Talon is whole again!

Nothing is Free: Tour '06 - Entry #2

Suffer for your art! Exhibits a & b.

[Publicity machine/poor posture in alice's living room]

[Eagle and Talon Cares EP slowdancing after 4/3 Troubadour show, kim's living room)

Minimum Five Cries: Tour '06 - Entry #1

[E&T and our tour manager chad, n. jersey diner]

Preface:
I used to think I ruined things. Un-midas touch, you know..things you touch turn to tar. Like several years back when I eurailed europe, I really DIDN'T have the best time of my life...went to foreign cities, sometimes liked their statues and things, but sometimes felt like a lonely nomad -- I was worried there was something to the core wrong with me.

Then i met this gal from berlin who was a 'negative optimist' - basically low hopes for most things and then being happy when outcomes weren't completely shitty. Anyway, it got her by. I thought hmmm maybe a way to be i dunno...

Enter Spring Tour 2006...

Present-day Alice was pretty sure we were going to have an incredible amount of fun on the road (first ever national tour with the lovely sia and her adorable band) but I was also thoroughly prepared for me or kim to break down and cry a few times, have some spats, endure a couple of ego-destroying shows, get fired.

FINAL SCORECARD:

Crying: I think k talon shed tears about 2 1/2 times and i cried twice. (causes included: pms, anxiety, jerks, border tension, bad weather)

Fights: no hair-pulling or bitemarks but Kim punched several stomaches and left bruises on one of the tougher-looking guys on tour...Things got a little dicey during the dirty, drive-intensive leg from minnesota to chicago to toronto. But food, a ymca and apologies kept us intact.

Awful Gigs: As some of you know, kim got heckled in seattle. Actually, we both did, but only kim heard it, so essentially she suffered alone. In philly we suffered together though. Nothing serious just our little friend, Signor Technical Problems of Yore dropping in to say hi.

Job Security: We didn't get fired!

Of course, these are the first thought that fizz inside my head as i try to BLOG about this whole tour thing. More details and stories and pictures to come. Welcome to the BELATED TOUR CHRONICLE of the twin talons and their trusty (trusting?) tour manager CHAZZZZ.

hold hands, cross slowly...

love,
alice

Eagle and Talon Let Go

It was our first time doing this sort of thing and inside the trailer parked outside a sculptors workshop/warehouse out in east la, nice amiable people were all about working hard to make us to look more like ourselves. Shellacked in hairspray, flesh-toned powders, expensive rouge and strategically enhanced with lash extensions, orange shadow, green liner, kim and i were realler than we'd ever been before.

We were just getting our final touch-ups when Kurt the photographer came in: "So, i think i know what we're going to do. We found this gigantic barrel out back...Alice, we're going to have you get inside it and Kim will be on the outside not really aware you're there, you know, it'll be like...two prairie dogs. It'll be good."

I was giving myself over to being deeply amused when kim let out a nervous laugh and asked, "are you serious?" He smiled and threw out a reassuring "we'll just try it out okay?"

Okay. (?)

I spent the next hour squatting inside a giant peeling barrel with a totally great outfit on and just my head poking out. Next to my rusty doghouse and totally beyond my line of vision, Kim tried hard to look langorous lying amidst wheatlike shrubs, itchy grass and damp soil. I tried looking at her with evil intent the way i thought an evil prairie dog might do. my feet went numb.

In the end they got rid of the barrel and took another round of pictures with us in fancier borrowed clothes that were intended to help explore the scene's "yinyang oppositional" concept. I got into it (as in slight friction) with the wardrobe stylist, but eventually gave up being bratty and just put on the damn chiffony top they wanted me to wear. We took photos for another 45 minutes. I'm sad to say they ended up choosing one from this batch so you won't get to see eagle and talon's suffering in the grass properly documented.

Anyway, i'm making it out to sound a lot more horrible than it was. Truth is, it was really fun and there are worse things than getting pampered and made up by a talented crew and trying out some girly rituals that you've tended to avoid most of your life. Admittedly, I was a little dumbfounded with the elaborateness of the whole production, but maybe that's what happens when things get professional.

I dunno.

Whatever the case, the whole experience was eye-opening in terms of the malleability of image and how there are just so many ways to represent yourself (in print, in text, in life). And sometimes, and i do only mean sometimes, it doesn't have to be such a terrible thing if you approach it with a sense of adventure or happy halloween everybody! or whatever, rather than seeing it as an assassination of who you are.

that said, you won't see me wearing a leopard-print thong in this lifetime (unless it's keeping my head warm or something).

yours,
alice

p.s. the article comes out this sunday in the latimes/west magazine. be gentle.

The Cowboy and the Gunslinger

I'm off to the 1st annual international tamale festival (up on n. spring st and w. ann) with my kid brother and his newly arrived girlfriend (from Korea via Taiwan). we're going to sicken ourselves with cornmeal. It should be delicious fun.

In honor, a dream (from friday night):

Am sitting in some kind of well-lit coffee bar, the kind you find in the bottom of a hotel lobby in some country in asia. There's no smell of coffee, no chatter or rough drafts, just tables and me. A stranger (caucasian, male, jeans) comes up to me asking for an extra pen (to keep). I'm sitting at a round wooden table with a stapled manuscript, a good pen on the left and a clear plastic one on the right . I look at the cheap one - i was writing with it -- "No."

Later he's sitting at a rectangular table next to the window. Now we're enemies and somehow i happen to know that this guy has four balls and I start taunting him about have those two extra testes and he doesn't like that much. But it's not enough to just see him riled and I start calling him "Quattro!" from across the room. That's when he loses his shit and suddenly jumps out of his chair lunging and is in my face reaching for my throat he's gonna rip out my larynx make it stop saying
"Quattro" but my right arm is already fully extended, my right fist, two inches from his nose "Don't or I'll punch your face I'll do it I will!"


Scene.

-a