All Seattle dates cancelled due to an extreme loose stool ping-pong tournament with the dogs of hell's lacerated intestines, in a discreet love hotel in Fukuoka City. a solo performance complete with I.V. Drip and a five-hundred dollar airplane cancellation charge. Thanks, Zawa Restaurant of Fukuoka, now and forever dubbed The Salmonella Cafe. What restaurant in Fukuoka serves sashimi on hot rice? The Salmonella Cafe. After driving down to Portland, a grand ol' welcome party show at The Barn with Oregon Artificial Limb Co., a bombshell blowout with Abusive Delay and Footsolo, Shane and I (Spasmolodic Duo) followed with a reading from atop a very comfortable bed, upon which I had been sleeping off my jetlag throughout most of the show. The performances were stella-cellular, comparable to the delicious warmth of homecooked bread, if the bread were laced with an angelic aftereffectivepneumonicpneullucination pill. Then came Tuesday, a perfectly wonderful set reciting short fictions and sputtering embargoes from Castro's Weatherman (my Cuban novel) wonderful because of the masterful Doug Haning, who was musing piano improvisations at The Tugboat Brewing Company, Portland's one and only living room for people with a palatte for Chernobyl Stout, 13% alcohol. That same night with CexFux at Valentines, just down the street in a sweatier, funkier game of pallandrominoes, a new expanded version of the impro-funkestra with Asa Gervich, JP Jenkins, Mark Kaylor, Jonathan Sielaff, Luc, Shane Schneider and a few others who brewed a palatable liver-cleanser of dense monstermash audio vittles, and as you can see below, god drew an impression of this young man's tender mobilibido as he spat nonsensical chatter-collisiosyms into the mike:
∬ ﾉ( _,,_
(＼＿／) ⌒ /../ ﾐ
（´ 〜｀''） ././ ﾐ
／ ,. ＼_//
ヽ_) '┐
i' ,,-*ｰ､. `i
（＿_| * （＿_）
*
*
*
Next stop on the NW circuit was the Someday Lounge, keeps a video archive of performances, including our This is Not This October 17th performance at the Phase One Words and Music Show, hosted by Garrett Strickland, archiving the nun's habbit I was sporting that evening, complete with a very, very, heavier-than-god silver cross around my neck. Jesus. Footsolo was on amplified bicycle baked to perfection like some slithering metallic goose in chocolate mole. One night later, or was it the night before, I was slated in on the mike with FIASCO, on KBOO radio's Night of the Living Tongue, hosted by the dangerously ravishing Jennifer Robin. Bass clarinets, blenders, egg beaters, keyboards, dulcimers, neon fan, trap-set, saxophones, guitars, electronic transliterations of the formulas for nuclear energy (I'm not kidding), with Tim Alexander, Jerry Soga, Juan, Alejandro Ceballos, Bryan Lightcap and the Reverend Papa Sweat. The final night was tied-up and hung at The Waypost, with Shaun opening the night on solo piano, followed by Plankton Wat on deliciously langorous solo guitar meanderings. The nun made an appearance there as well, with Footsolo screeching and tromping gears of metal eating itself on the electric bicycle, a former member of the Portland Bike Ensemble, Whitney Woolf. Another highlight was catching up with novelist and freestyle-fiction storyteller Mike Daily, whose novel and double-CD set ALARM [2007], an ambitious and psychedellicollaborative shout-out to experimental fictioneers (including Portland's own Kevin Sampsell, who is featured as a character in the novel) scored triple points with heavyweights like Eckhard Gerdes, Steve Katz and Raymond Federman, and he still has copies. IN between the madness, I managed to place copies of my chapbook of flash fictions, Voices From the Fictionary,at the wonderful Reading Frenzyand Powell's City of Books. I was also happy to be able to drop off a few copies of Donkeys, a brilliant gem of a guided tour through scurvy English freakculture by the one and only Nottingham poet and performance artistThe Fug.
And now for a more than surreal stopover in a small university city in the middle of the American prarie, in the middle of the middlewest, with an underrated subculture and plenty of time to reprint a more readable manuscript for Castro's Weatherman: Ethnography of a Bumbling Sex Tourist, before a few weeks in the sur-reality of the Peruvian Amazon....
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