El Ay. That's Spanish for "The Ay".

Fuckin’ A, I really did fall off the habit with this blog. I meant to write an entry for each day reminiscing about the events of the same day three years prior. But now it’s nearly July three years later and we finished the tour. So now it’s just…a formless recollection. A standard memoir. How pedantic.

Well, where better to write about in a generic “here’s how I learned what I learned” than Los Angeles?
(Answer, as it always is, is New York…but stay tuned. I should cover New York around mid-September at the rate I’m going).

August 5t

From Santa Barbara we coasted down the slope into Hollywood. Or, more accurately, Silver Lake. I was going to be staying with my friend Megan, who comes up a number of times in CLOWNFISH because she’s been my friend since I was fourteen. We went to high school and then college together and she was around/subject to many of the events at the formative years of my life. I hoisted my whiny, self-important pining on her our first Senior Year and caught her fucking one of the department techs in my bed our second senior year. (Quick aside: Megan has had sex with three different people in three different my beds and none of them were me. ALSO, on this occasion, she ALSO lived in the BIKO house. Her room was literally next door to mine, so I don’t know what her trip is about fucking in my bed but I’d just like to say I’m clearly not the one with the issue here). She’s a real stalwart lady. I would recommend her to be anyone’s emergency contact. She would probably show up, annoyed with me and not knowing who you are, but she would show up.

Megan showed us around Silvelake and we marveled at how freaking cute everyone is. Apparently a key part of moving to Los Angeles is investigating and identifying your personal vibe and then manifesting it in the form of your aesthetic. This doesn’t mean “looking hot”. I feel like most people’s perception of LA is that everyone has to be hot. That was not what I observed. Rather, everyone was curated very particularly. I saw a trio of witchy girls in flowy white linen and black combat boots, Serious Actors in pants so just a little too short they would make a Victorian gentleman blush, trans masc kids in critter prints, everyone was wearing sunglasses. The key is keying into your vibe and then advertising it. You are your brand, right? Capitalism will kill us before we kill it: make sure you’re fuckable!

Silver Lake was cool. I think that’s its point. Megan pointed out The Thirsty Crow to me, the bar Father John Misty sings about in his song “Nothing Good Ever Happens at The Thirsty Crow”. I met a dude who was in a band with the barback who fed us free shots. So you move, Misty.

The show was at a little black box called The Tree House, located near a grocery store (and more importantly, a taco truck). This was one of those fun LA moments where you find out who your real friends are. “Hi, I’m doing my solo show at a Black Box. No industry will be there. Wanna come?” Many of my friends claimed to be “out of town”, which I assume meant “in The Valley”

I don’t have any interest in going any further into what culture is or isn’t in LA. I remember I sold some merch and figured out that if I do the show without a mic in my hand it ruins a dick joke and I worked long and hard on stuffing this show with as many dick jokes as possible — so that was a valuable lesson.

April 7th

On the way out of LA (I played “Leaving LA” by Father John Misty. This was a few years before Tim Minchin released “Leaving LA”, you see. And I had never heard Tobias Jesso Jr’s “Leaving LA”. (I still haven’t, actually. I just typed the title into Spotify to see what would come up. Seems more people have left Las Vegas, which, honestly? Good for them. My dad lived there for a while in the early 2000s. I hated it.)

Then we drove down the 10 (across the 10?) to Joshua Tree National Park. We played the U2 album and found a place to camp way the fuck out past Jumbo Rocks, where everybody recommended we camp, because Jumbo Rocks was hella full. (Another Quick Aside — I am very into the rest of the country adopting “hella”. When I was in college it a VERY NorCal sliver of slang and the ability to use it without encountering non-plussedness from my conversational partner makes the whole chat more hyphy).

Joshua Tree in April is not too hot yet, which is phenomenal. If you haven’t been, it’s a bit like being on a 70s sci-fi novelist’s vision of Mars. Desolate but for this one kind of flora you’ve never seen anywhere else. Odd rock formations. I did some more yoga. Camen took a slo-mo video of us but when he did I moved in slo motion which made it extra slo and extra fun, or as he put it “unusable”.

This was also a big play-test day for our cameras! The whole point of bringing Camen and Jori along was to film this thing but the day we were supposed to leave the cameras (which has been shipped from China) were stuck in customs in Oakland. And for whatever reason, IN Oakland we couldn’t just pick them up. Instead they had to be cleared, shipped to Grass Valley, and overnighted to Megan’s in LA (which hopefully they would actually get to before we left. They did.)

Camen spent the whole day in Josh Tree building mounts and testing the devices. From what I observed he was a very happy camper.