The latest videotape that I went through was raw footage from the Perpetual Motion Roadshow that I went on. I have fond memories of that whole tour. It was with Jessie Lynn McMains (then known as Jessica Disobedience) and More Or Les. Even though we did not know one another before the tour, we had a great time together. The Perpetual Motion Roadshow was an idea by Jim Munroe to form a tour circuit for indie authors so that everyone didn't have to start from the beginning every time an indie author wanted to do a book tour. This goaround of the tour attracted some attention from BookTV, a Canadian television network devoted to literary matters, and they had us take a video camera to document the tour for their feature on us. The video is a hoot! We met some strange folks on the journey and had a lot of fun doing so. We also taped some of our performances, and that is what I am sharing here. This performance is from the Ottawa tour stop. I tried to do a different show every night figuring my tourmates would get bored seeing me do the same thing every night. At this stop, I read a bit from The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus and then put on my Mexican wrestling mask to channel a dead professional wrestler to give advice to the audience. At the end, you can hear Jess.
My buddy Mark Justice has a new novel out, and it is very different from his first, which was a cozy mystery. This one is a hard-boiled Western! I very much enjoyed reading it and gave him a blurb, which he used on the back cover. If you like Garth Ennis's work and Deadwood, then this is your kind of story! I love the tagline: "They sent him to Hell. Hell sent him back." According to Mark, this is the start of a series of pulp Westerns starring Gauge Black. I look forward to reading the rest! Oh, and he's not done writing cozy mysteries either! He is a writer with quite a range!
This is another video courtesy of Jimi Imij. This one comes from a 15 August 2000 show at The Mantis Gallery in Kent, Ohio USA. My buddy Bob had booked a few bands from Milwaukee to play town, so I played an opening set. At the time, I was finishing my dissertation and didn't have time to play in a band, so I did some solo gigs. I wrote this song after reading a Phil Ochs biography. At one point, Ochs got a bit wacky and created an alter ego called John Train who was more of a drunken trainwreck. I like the song, but the subject matter makes me sad. It would have been grand if Ochs had been able to hang in there longer. It would have been interesting to see how he would have responded musically to punk and new wave. My favorite part is the acappella bit at the end, especially the audience joining in with some handclap percussion. I don't play the song much anymore; it's not in the currently 40 or so songs that make up the set. I doubt it will ever find its way back in, but one never knows.
