chinese broccoli

day one: dc to pittsburgh

it’s not quite the dirty south, but what better way to start the spring than to inaugurate it with a magik markers tour, and an introductory meal of chili half-smokes at ben’s chili bowl, the official restaurant of the magik markers. hi guys! it is so nice to see you all again!

after ben’s we pile into cabin john’s van and make like bandits for the city of pittsburgh, a place i’ve neglected for too long. i am a big fan of pittsburgh (…it’s the milwaukee of the east!) and its hilly bricky industrial charms. as we wind our way through clara barton country i realize this tour must pass through breezewood, so naturally i am terribly excited about this and do my best to educate the band on breezewood’s finer points (“and and and there are only hotels there and no grocery stores and they don’t have a mayor and and….”) we get to breezewood and admire its vistas of interchange, multiple gaseteriums and ample choices for affordable lodging. the sky is always slate grey when i pass through this place, which just makes the shiny red fast food signs glow more brightly.

pittsburgh

our destination tonight is pittsburgh’s garfield arts center, a dirty place on a dirty stretch of penn avenue, patronized by a community of those with both good will and the ability to turn a blind eye to things like a cascading wall of festering mold. the show’s organizer is manny theiner, who has been running pittsburgh’s music scene for about a billion years now. he is even more iconoclastic than i remember. opening act has a gong which falls on the gongist partway through, but i guess that’s why they call it an arts center. markers are great despite the strange energy, though they’re not allowed to haul out their cover of “ramblin’ gamblin’ man” because of (visibly posted) house rules against playing cover songs, just in case manny is busted by ASCAP spies.

apparently last time the magik markers were in pittsburgh they stayed the night at a house that was such a party the memories are hazy (“i remember a pizzeria….and a balcony?”) but this time we stay at the house of the aforementioned opening act, in a gong-filled highland park home overlooking east pittsburgh which also includes a dog named chi. our generous hosts pressure cook us some rice and vegetables and we fall asleep at a respectable hour, only to be woken up to host mike’s insatiable urge for deanna troi. “it’s weird,” he says, “I woke up needing to have my fix!” and then puts on a dvd of star trek: insurrection which we all sit down and watch in a bit of a daze, partially because it is television and partially because it makes such a strange counterpoint to everything else in the house: the spiritual statuettes, the incense that i never see but that won’t stop following me around the house, the dolphin iconography, the gong collection. we’re sure they’ll be ashamed of us if they know we really want enormous deli sandwiches topped with french fries on them for lunch, so we slip appreciatively and discreetly away before picard reverse ages any further and starts selecting his wardrobe from the abercrombie & fitch catalog.

in the strip district of pittsburgh we coffee up at 21st street coffee and tea, and are waylaid on our way to our gluttonous lunch by a fresh donut place: a real pittsburgh guy here with a buzzcut and a bluetooth headset is fresh frying donuts under rainbow signs that say “peace love donuts”. none of it goes together but i’m starting to get that that’s the theme in pittsburgh. speaking of things not going together, but going together perfectly, we get absurdly huge capocollo, cheese, slaw and french fry sandwiches to go and hit the road in shame at our own future gluttony. we are already off at quite a food pace.

columbus

i don’t even know where to start talking about columbus; it’s been a hundred thousand years since i’ve been in this place i know so well and which has changed so much. though i don’t really want to start a sentence with “back in the 90s”, back in the 90s i used to drive here all the time: an easy 2.5-3 hours down us-23 from ann arbor to see yo la tengo at stache’s after class, catch the coctails on their way through the midwest, see guided by voices, anyone from near or far that was touring through the area because you knew it would be a great show in that town, and if i rolled up, as i often did, without a plan, it would take literally minutes for someone to graciously offer a place to stay that night, even if i hardly knew the person.

eventually these trips to stache’s to see out of town acts became trips to see local bands and annual long weekends lost to the anyway festival, yearly communions with my other friends from new york, boston, canada and wherever who all recognized in columbus the magical scene that only a sort-of-artsy, sort-of-charming, sort-of-sad place stuck in the middle of ohio could generate. the music community here was full of egos larger than its cracking sidewalks could bear, and as they strained against their own self-imposed limits, the most incredible music came out. during my time as a resident of ohio’s neighbor to the north, i developed a keenly un-michiganian obsession with ohio, and produced an entire zine dedicated to its proud exploits and exports. it is without a doubt that the seed for that obsession was set on my first trip to columbus, an irreproducable roadtrip with the mountain goats and friends that started with a moviola matinee show and ended at a summer fair and a private karl hendricks show in bela’s living room. i hated comfest, but i loved ted and bela, our shy (!) guides that day, and this bizarre hip college city with a million cozy front porches and two million dogs.

though i have felt distant from those times in recent years, anyway fest long since over and so many of the acts vanished, broken up, moved on to adulthood, or dead, i’ve been feeling quite close to it in the last six months through bela’s blog about jerry wick and jenny mae leffel, a deeply real and important blog that has documented a lot of the essence of what columbus was about for anyone that lived there or just enjoyed its contact high. it’s a pretty amazing thing to read if you know any of the characters, but i’m thinking it’s probably amazing on its own if you’re, you know, a human being in the first place, if only because the writing is so completely put out right out there you can’t help but be humbled, and in many ways it is a story very much about growing up and not growing up combined into one, something i and probably all of us are thinking about every second of the day.

anyway, seeing bela (now long sober, now with children, still married to the beautiful woman who somehow picked him out of that mess and kept him through it all) after reading all these things was kind of heavy, though in a good way, and when i met his four-year-old daughter the first thing she does is point at the gaunt button i’d recently reattached to my jacket and say “i like your pin”. i don’t think she actually read it or anything, but whoa.

magik markers have an instore at used kids this day, and it’s kind of surreal to park next to the wendy’s and wander down to (almost) the same place and look at dollar tapes in 2010. ron and paul and dannemiller are waiting for me, and then shirley, and we reune in that past-meets-present way where your friends are still totally drinking budweiser in the middle of the day but now they can’t go out late because they have to put their kids to bed. the markers play three songs only, in an attempt (which fails) not to spoil the town for the show later tonight, and we head from there to the grotty bourbon street cafe where the show will sound HEAVY DUTY earsplittingly punk but basically no one besides bela, who will be our kind host tonight, will attend. a tv over the bar is showing footage of jet ski explosions, and a mentally challenged guy that is a fixture here asks the band if they’ll back him up for the theme to batman. they do.