from Ouspensky again: “…art which does not reveal mysteries, which does not lead to the sphere of the Unknown, does not yield new knowledge, is a parody of art, and still more often it is not even a parody, but simply a commerce or an industry.” and dude wrote that in like 1915 or so… wonder what he’d think of the current state of affairs ol’ P. D. Ouspensky is pretty dense stuff, it takes me quite a while to get through one of his books but i’d heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to try and stretch their brain a bit, i find that studying his writing has the effect of making me think less about the dumbass side effects of what goes on in the world and more about the basic human condition, about why the human race seems to only be able to ‘rise downward’ as it were… theres a great film playing on cable tv these days entitled i think “grass” or such, is the history of marijuana ‘reform’ and legislation in the US… beyond the questions of drug use what i got out of it is just the general way terror media tactics have always been used here to influence popular opinion, it never fails to amaze… apparently there was a period following the civil war where morphine, heroin, cocaine and various related heavy ass stuff was readily available to the american public in the form of “remedies” for this and that… interestingly, a great deal of this use was the province of the middle rather than lower classes since they were the strata of society who could afford doctors… just when the problems and dangers of addiction were about to come into focus suddenly along comes the ‘horrors of the killer weed’ etc etc completely diluting and adding a layer of insane bullshit to the whole subject… i’ve always thought that the post WW2 generation had none but the fuzziest information available to them about drug use, the results being that me and a lot of others who came up in the sixties were a lot less cautious than perhaps they should have… and of course this relates to the way so much is dealt with here, young people who have to cut through layers of lies and misinformation arent going to bother to question etc etc thanx again for the baby related encouragement and advice it really is much appreciated… the american deal seems to be almost done so we should have an actual release date for the next record pretty soon, (while working on the thing for so fucking long i of course wondered if it was any good but having been away from hearing it and being confronted with the finished thing i think its really fantastic, one of the best ones etc etc) great electrical storm here last night, first one this season… i got a great letter, i quote: “but, cHRIST, aren’t you a little old to be cranking out kids?? I’ll never understand you Hollywood types…” …i love it,… yeah, like i was just saying to ben and j-lo the other day “well the baby isnt born yet but at least its got a good agent…” all 4 now love chris

thanx everyone for the comments, you all are really great… today its sunny here and reading all of your baby stories and congratulatory remarks have made me feel all is right with the world for the moment… last night was one of the first that included the choir of frogs and cricket things all carrying on out in the woods around the house… the baby has a name but ill wait till it shows up… thus far the biggest drawback (aside from barbs dismay over the loss of girlish figure) will be us not being at burning man this year which would have been four in a row.. somehow having the baby either delivered or present at age three weeks in the desert doesnt seem like a good idea… one thing i think about a lot is if i should just ax the fucking tv to bits before the kid ever gets to see it in all its horror… im really sure america would be a much better place without television…its just beyond the beyond whats taken for granted here… what the hell is going to happen to the goddamn human race at the rate things are going, am i totally crazy or is just everything getting more mediocre by the second?… its really hard to get a kind of free personal insight into what is really happening in the world, i just keep getting pulled back into the idea that things were ‘better’ more sophisticated when i was growing up, that there was more influence among the young people beyond just buying power, it felt like things were less factionalized and broken up into the myriad of special interest groups that are out now, it feels like theres been a deliberate and successful attempt to take any power away from young people…it feels like america is turning back to the stoneage sensibilities of the nineteenfiftys…everyone knows its ‘dangerous’ to criticize the establishment, to be unpatriotic… the nauseating conservative ‘family’ walt disney values that everyone worked so hard to shake off are back in full swing… spirituality is a lost cause and the miserable radio is at an all time low. i cant believe the crap that i hear, the goddamn ‘classic’ rock stations playing the same twenty songs over and over again ahhhhh!!! rant rant !!!!! everybody do something before its too late!!!! anyway as soon as the baby comes im gonna take it to germany and hang it over a balcony ha ha only kidding dont worry actually im in a good mood love chris

happy easter and pagan associations everyone… was just reading how Ouspensky says that the Christ passion, the events of the crucifixion etc. were like unto a kind of living version of the ancient Greek and Egyptian “Mystery” plays wherein the god died and was re-born, the difference being that of course with Jesus and friends the event was ‘played out’ in reality, and not on a stage with actors, im just getting up to the part where he addresses who he thinks the “director” was… ***************** TAH DAH!!! ***************** as some of you are by now aware Barbara and myself are having an actual baby in july (mostly her)… this has been going on for a while now and is kind of in the home stretch… i think its time to announce etc as the arrival will curtail some of my band activities during the summer and early fall, word is coming of our getting to australia and japan and i dont think im going to be able to get to australia this time much as i love it there, i just couldnt be away from Barb and baby for this period for more than a few days, the japanese dates are just 2or3 in early aug. and i think ill be able to do those if it only means being away for five days or so… thats just the way everything has come down and im trying not to be conflicted, [[as i might have mentioned our dear friend and mentor VALI MYERS died recently in Melbourne Australia and though i was lucky enough to have spoken to her a few times while she was in the hospital (“well love, I’m fine except for dying…” actual quote) i hadnt seen her too much for the last number of years and though im looking forward to getting a little closer to who she was with and where she wound up its gonna have to wait for now… VALI was one of the most extraordinary people alive in the 20th century and the fact that she wasnt more well known is part of her whole mystique, a long story id just suggest that anyone interested look around on google or whatever, theres a lot of stuff http://geekgirl.com.au/geekgirl/009dogs/vali.html is a quick look, seems to be a lot of things available about her]] so the baby situation has of course quickly educated us to the insanity that surrounds baby production in the united states… this is the usual kind of madness that one encounters when dealing with the american medical establishment, familiar territory, so we have one in four births done as what is cheerfully referred to as a c-section which kind of downplays the major surgery aspect, it seems that women are encouraged to take epidural anesthetics which produce all kinds of complications; prolonging labor, reducing fetal heartrates etc etc… that like many other aspects of life in america, childbirth is treated like some kind of crisis situation that needs to be ‘taken over’ by someone other than the one having the experience… i was gonna write actually about related topics, about how i feel things are different now from when i grew up and if they really are or if its just my own perception… but ill save that we dont need anything for the baby ( oh yeah Barb had ultrascans and we werent disinclined to find out the babys gender but it just wouldnt let us see… i did get to see lips and yawning which was amazing, and a little face pressed up against “the glass” as it looked, the scan looks through the skin of the babys head as well as the stomach wall so one sees layers of eyes and skull, it looks like a cheerful little alien) i mean anyone that can afford it can make large cash donations of course, but if you cant afford more than 10 or twenty thousand then i must insist that you stick to just sending good wishes for the baby to come through ok… beyond that…. oh another story is about these two crazy fucking dogs that we got… i hadnt mentioned it earlier cause i was waiting to ‘announce’ about the baby which the dog story relates to somewhat; barb of course always drawn to animals, we were walking in the west village around the time of the last NY area shows and she lured me into a pet store to “just look” at dogs… the window of course filled with crawling squirming cute puppies… she asked the people if they had any older dogs and the girl said ‘yes we have these that are too big for the window’ and proceeded to bring up a little white manic dog, an american eskimo, which proceeded to run frantically around the store… so maybe we should actually get it cause flapjack would like to have a playmate, the cats dont play with him etc… but wait… it seems this little dog has spent its entire life with another little white dog, so here comes another larger little white dog much less crazy…so theyre discounted cause they are bigger than little and cute like the ones in the window, and we wonder how the hell anyone would have ever seen them without asking and how weird it is that after a certain time they get ‘kicked downstairs’ into the cages in the basement etc etc, and we couldnt seperate them cause they are a total team and kind of single personality between the two of them… now these guys totally missed getting any kind of complete training during their important formative puppy (pupa) months and as a result are fairly wacked… also theyd been stuck in a cage most of the time… we were staying at the chelsea hotel at the time (see DEE DEE RAMONE “Chelsea Horror Hotel”) and so the dogs came back there with us and the VERY NEXT DAY we found out that Barbara was having a baby (was pregnant)… one day she was in a little room with them and she heard a tinkling sound coming from under the bed and it was the littler dog playing with a used crack pipe… so the dogs are named Sydny and Nubis… all winter long we suffered through the horrors of dented doggy training and constantly fluctuated as to give them away/kill them etc but they have finally settled down to a respectable kind of life style and now we have three dogs and six cats and almost a baby… (actually the dog door saved us, the biggest problem was that sydny and nubis would start barking furiously at six in the morning every day and would have to be let out manually,) ok thats the dog story ill try to be writing more regularly love to all chris

greetings all after my hiatus ive finally gotten back on line (more or less) in our new place here, i just went thru the last hundred or so messages from you all… the record will most certainly be out for the summer. its finally wrapped and “in the can” as they say and i for one really like it, Steve Thompson who produced Korn and a shitload of other current stuff came in to do a few more songs and mix and master and we’re indebted to him for doing a great job… Jimmy is around, hasnt ‘left the band’ most likely will be on the next bunch of shows, but its up to him to discuss his own stuff so im gonna leave it at that for now as usual thanx for all the nice comments, thanx to all the people who write regularly, Rob, Luciana, Claudia, etc etc my computer is completely fucked right now so im gonna keep this brief ive got a lot going on personally but as far as this all is concerned, again i really do like the new record and we may be out with some shows before it comes out as to current events i was watching the war the other day and noticed that underneath the press conference with a bunch of military dudes (resembling a camouflage fashion show) were basketball scores… at the time it just seemed like “well ok, yeah” but later i realised how totally fucking insane the whole thing is, why im not emotionally reacting to any of this, because like everyone else ive been completely desensitized by everything coming at me on the same level, news is entertainment is reality tv is all a bunch of bullshit… more later chris

internet place in brooklyn is straight out of Wm. Gibson, complete with dirty floors flickering neon and host of odd characters… returned from U.K. yesterday rush hour… as things progress i realize how hard it is to differentiate one show from another, was thinking that if something fell on my head during the set i might then be able to make a distinction, as it is though, the actual music parts of the separate events are all blurred together… what i remember is the cute girls, sometimes boys in the crowd, the streets of whatever city we’re in, sometimes what the backstage area looks like etc etc, that stuff… cause people ask me what i thought of such and such a concert and on the whole the answer is that i dont really know, some are better than others as a result of various intangibles the last show in London at wembley was good for me… (by the way i still dont have an internet account up and running which is why im in this place with my yahoo account…id had this hotmail account for years but of course as {with all good sleazy corporate entities} i tried to log on recently and discovered that since i hadnt used it in 30 days they expected me to pay for what was formerly a free service… yahoo seems to still be free) it was of course great to be back in the U.K. and briefly in Ireland, Scotland…i’d gotten a lot of e-mails from you all questioning the wisdom of us going out with INXS everyone being too polite to just say it was a fucked idea but i got the drift…i dont really know anything about those guys except that the singer managed to do himself in weirdly and naturally you were all right about it being an odd bill at best… they seemed like nice enough guys… the tour involved long blocks of down time, often after arriving at the venue for a sound check we’d have six hours of mind numbing blank space to fill… for whatever selfdestructive lack of foresight i didnt bring anything to do except for a ‘game boy “advance” ‘ on which i battled snails and tomatoes before advancing on to forks and evil cupcakes, this all in a game called “bomber man max” or some such, initially i had no aptitude for this whatsoever but after discovering that my approach had been all wrong (that i didnt have to blow up all the snails after all) i became appropriately obsessed… also there was a copy of grand theft auto 3 on the bus which was good for various moments of violent expression (ive gotten a copy of the new one ‘vice city’ which is more an extension of GTA3 than a new game, its got ‘atomic’ and i think ‘call me’ init as well as Debbies voice as a taxi dispatcher…seems they made so much fucking money with GTA3 that they could afford a whole bunch of big names as voices including Ray Liotta as the lead voice etc etc…{speaking of celebrities i was really plucked to meet Juliette Lewis when we were in L.A. the last time, its funny how one can get a sense of how people are from seeing them act, she’s one of the few people ive met who i could honestly say i was a fan of without being merely polite, had seen a lot of her work etc etc, she was so sweet and good natured and down to earth i was really knocked out, i havent had an encounter like that in ages. sooo many of ones heroes turn out to be disappointing when one finally meets them} so yeah a lot of time spent on the bus crashing virtual cars and murdering innocent bystanders) the U.K. is going the route of the USA in as much as the western economy is creating more fancy ass little cafes and galleries everywhere one looks…the last time we were over about 5 tears ago some of the now thriving areas were still uninhabited… Manchester was a real surprise and pleasure, we got a quick glimpse of the pumping youth culture as we walked around one afternoon, i wish i could spend more time there sometime, it reminds me of here in Williamsburg Brooklyn a great deal… im gonna wrap for now ive got a lot more stuff in my head that id like to put down here and hopefully ill have an account up in a week or so (all i can get where i am now is a satellite hookup or a dial-up ugh.) do keep writing i havent checked my mail from the site here for a while and expect to have to spend a day reading… oh yeah the one last thing for now is that i think it was Louis B. who gave me the “switchblade kitty” cd, anyway i really loved it especially the version of ‘my heart will go on’ , a huge improvement over celine thing, and we wound up playing the whole thing before we went on at some of the UK gigs and the sound guy Dave told me that quite a few people had approached him asking what it was… so switchblade kitty there is hope keep up the good work…. as for everyone else thanks all of you who said hello over there and i should be back here pretty soon love CHRIS

the period since returning to nyc has been quite hectic mostly due to my relocating out of new york city proper… simply, i’m moving from a large dark dirty expensive space in the city to an even larger clean light cheaper space in the country…with trees recently i reread “Neuromancer” and was surprised to note how much stuff from Matrix was lifted from it: “His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves…He looked at the backs of his hands saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin”…reminiscent of the green streams of readout in the movie, beyond that the book features a Rasta spacestation called “Zion cluster” and numerous other items that wind up referenced in Matrix… required reading… if anyone was confused by american foreign policy objectives i hope you’ve all got it figured out by now, really simple: take over the world… not to forget that theres a presidential election coming up again in ’04 and being in the middle of a war should assure bush another term, changing horses “in mid stream” and all that… im halfway through Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book “Lullaby” (guy who wrote ‘Fight Club’ , ‘Invisible Monsters’, others) he makes some very cutting observations about the new american decadence, i can also recommend that… i got a few e-mails to the effect of “gee putting out another greatest hits cd sure smacks of wanting to make money” yes! thats absolutely correct! (deeper though, lets not forget that blondie is no longer on emi and they’re gonna put these things out anyway and tempted though i might be to tell them to just keep my share i think i might somehow regret that decision)… i just heard the atomic kitty version of tide is high which is weird that that kind of britney spears programmed sound has evolved into an actual genre, i hope John Holt has made some bucks off of it… not much else is afoot now, packing stuff includes uncovering various forgotten items both great and horrific, old photos and memorabilia; a couple of old pictures of james dean that id forgotten about, posters, autographs, but the fucking miserable moths ate my Tibetan rug even though it had been wrapped in plastic to prevent their access (the moths only eat good stuff, have no appetite for polyester or other synthetics) i’ll be glad to leave them in the city… i dont know when i’ll get on again probably not too far forward, got to get the cable modem up and running in the trees oh, i remembered one thing; what if someone had a program or site where anyone could submit a 3 dimensional rendering of their environment, inside their house, around their neighborhood etc etc etc the goal being to have a computer map of the entire world that would be like a game envirronment, would eventually enable one to travel around the entire planet from their home computer, people could constantly be adding details like a rusty tin can on a sidewalk, a picture on a wall, then the whole world would be filled in in HTML or whatever and you could walk from san francisco to atlanta on the computer all the while going into buildings and rooms and around corners and down alleys etc etc… this led me to think about the time coming when people will be able to brain link with the computer and what if thousands, millions of people could all do it simultaneously making for a huge mechanical hive mind… maybe it would be better than television though somebody would no doubt try to put commercials out there stay out of trouble chris

got back to nyc in one piece more or less currently playing catchup with this and that… burning man was fun, really fantastic. the actual fire was the best of the three ive seen, really massive, the post office got to cancel mail for real this year, we met a lot of people… i got about a hundred messages when i went on line, read fifty in each of two sessions (AGAIN!: the hunter is not my favorite blondie album, i dont have a favorite blondie album and im still not sure if i ever said otherwise, i dont think that debbie knows about whatever is named ‘diamond bridge’ in new jersey, and im certain the song title is not a reference) this is short… 9-11 looms like a huge commercial for cultural contradiction, yesterday bon jovi played in times square for the start of football season… i think everything is catching up with me ahhhhhhh im glad everyone seems to have liked the shows what else? i dont know ill think of something for next time as usual thanks for all the nice things youve written chris

“We were dancing and loud. We snuck our way down to the secondfloor section. One girl joined us, she came by herself and she knew all the words. Then later we were joined by a dancing frog, and sexy cow girl.” “I sat down in the beginning (with the crowd) for a couple songs, but then couldn’t stand it, it was wrong… you can’t sit at a rock concert, so once I committed to screwing the people behind me” “…i came up with the acronym, ” Pioneers under negative komments” (PUNK).” “…a good antidote to all the 9/11 media crap we’ll have to tolerate. Everyone must feel for the victim’s families and communities but the thought of watching Bush and Blair bullshitting about their anti-terrorist achievements while doing the suitably sympathetic and dignified thing – yeeucch.” “Thank GOD the market crashed.” ” F anyone who says/implicates you’ve sold out – what are you supposed to do, live in other people’s attics/couches and steal bread from friends’ cabinets (i got a 47 year old one-of-those in my attic right now! Nice, sweet guy, but…)?” “AOL sucks. i keep losing my coonection ” “SHAYLA LIVES !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” “Please tell me that you guys are at least getting paid for the Mazda commericals featuring “One way or another”?” “…I could use my binoculars to focus on your hands and try to steal some licks. Guess what…I have no idea what you are doing” “…for our 8 year anniversary he booked us a suite at the Silver Legacy in Reno for the night of the show. He made me promise I wouldn’t roam the corridors and elevators in search of the band, though. Damn. ” thought i’d include a few choice comments from the e-mails i get… unless some major event or other drives me to the computer i think this is the last of the tour messages for now… i think there are two shows left… i really had a good time at pretty much every gig, all in all this tour has been very enlightening, i’ve gotten even more involved with the website and i feel more hopeful about the future of the band in general, that we may actually be able to keep on doing live shows for longer than id anticipated going into this… i’ve met a lot of great people, last nite we played in Kelseyville CA at some kind of resort deal, this was an odd choice for a venue, bordering on a dinner theater, (at least they cleared the tables before the show) problem with these situations is that people show up because they just attend anything thats at the place, not because they want to see whoever is playing, i guess this is good for making converts but we’d like to think people are there to see us… (this doesnt mean we aren’t aware of all the fans who come to the shows in out of the way locations, i always can get a vibe from the people in the audience who are there for blondie even if they’re not yelling and carrying on, just more cosmic energy stuff)… anyway last night right at a table in the front was a young girl who was so moved by the whole thing that she was literally in tears for the entire set, i in turn was caught up in her enthusiasm and handed her my finger picks as we got off stage, by sheer coincidence i walked right into her and her father as i was heading for the bus… turns out ‘Lacy’ was there for her 18th birthday present, (her birthday was sept 11 no less) and was a huge fan… i brought her on the bus for a bit, she got to talk to DH and watch me play grand theft auto some more (punch line of the grand theft saga is that the fucking copy of the game im using which was borrowed from Jinsoo [the knife] our keyboard tech, has a glitch of some kind so that everytime i’d get all the three ‘caporegimes’ [see the godfather] to the meeting at the dons house, while fleeing from the triads in a ‘stretch’ limosine that was really miserable to handle, every time i’d succesfully complete the damn ‘mission’ the stupid game would crash, what this means in english is that one cant finish that particular copy of the game no matter what [yes i tried cleaning off the disk, no, it IS actually the disk itself thats screwed up, weird] i still am not sure if ill ever buy it, im scared of not doing anything else if i have it around)…Lacy was so sweet and knocked out at being around Debbie, we were all pleased we could do something for her that meant so much… i am really psyched that we are getting so many young fans here in the US, this too makes me feel hopeful that maybe at least some of the kids here will be able to get past the GAP style media brainwashing thats attempting to produce a generation of safe clones who will act out their ‘animal house’ spring break safe legal wildness and then settle into dull middle class life with no questions asked (people dont get that the ‘aquarian age’ technically is, according to the doctrines of western astrology, a very orderly period, ask your friends who are into it… have you seen ‘starship troopers’? where everyone is part of the global government system and all live a mode of communal fascism? i thought that portrayal of the future was really fantastic, and im often afraid that thats exactly where things are headed, only difference is that i dont think the enemy is gonna be outer space bugs its gonna be us, other humans, one would think that world leaders would appreciate the inherent schizophrenic nature of the time now, that the “enemy” cant be destroyed without also committing suicide… i just spent about 45 futile minutes trying to find a quote from writer Theodore Dreiser… to paraphrase its basically that man isnt high enough to be totally human and not low enough to be totally animal,(of course i give animals more credit but you get the idea) somewhere in a limbo sort of non committed transitional state… right this minute in the hotel room here the two talking heads on tv are debating the “target iraq” headline with the sound turned off…well thats fucking inevitable, good as done… one of the people quoted above asked a question about my playing style and guitar influences, the finger pick thing goes back to my liking Earl Scruggs and playing five string banjo early on, also the first electric band i ever saw was “The Blues Project” who most of you probably havent heard of except maybe for keyboardist Al Cooper who went on to play with the pretty awful Blood Sweat and Tears and who is redeemed for playing on Dylans “Highway 61 Revisited” and i think other of Dylans records from the period…the guitarist of the blues project, the late Danny Kalb was the first person i saw using fingerpicks on an electric guitar, the second was the guitarist of a very obscure band called “the Spike Drivers” who i saw open for the Velvets… a really major influence on my playing besides of course Hendrix is John Fahey who is a kind of unclassifiable blues/folk guitarist master who has a lot of solo recordings available that go back to the early sixties, finally the guy who wrote me mentions Jorma Kaukonen who i dont often think of but who was an influence in that i always loved the Airplanes psychedelic approach to guitar, how guitars functioned in their mixes etc in other news something about some fish that is climbing out of the water and eating everything in sight back east and even weirder to me is some dude arrested with a garage full of short range missles in ROSWELL NM of all places… i could probably think of more stuff but i’ve got to sort through all the junk i’ve accumulated on the road today and figure out what to send back to new york and what to take to burning man… so have a good rest of summer i’ll get back on in sept some time thanks again for y’all support and keep those cards and letters coming in folks… also again: SEND PICTURES love chris

tour is winding down with a few more shows i think some of you occasionally misconstrue what i mean, either that or im just not clear which is also a distinct possibility…for example my point about commercials in the cinema was that though i’d first seen them in the UK, showing them is now common practice in the US, thanks to all the game freaks who sent me tips about grand theft auto, i’ve gotten all the nuances and tricks figured out so you needent send any more info… (one thing i didnt see on any of the game cheat sites was the very surrealistic thing one can do with the tanks which is to try and fill up the whole city with them, i found that i could keep producing more and more tanks which would just pile up on top of each other making a huge pile of crunching burning tank flesh, one time the game crashed as a result) i really dont have many thoughts on us playing with INXS, i hope its not too bad a bill, again i never was really familiar with their music and we werent involved with putting the bill together (at this juncture {point} id like to suggest that anyone with complaints about stuff like this address them to Laure Dunham <laured@10thst.com> and let her as a management rep know what you think… i’m always getting messages that i dont know how to respond to) one guy out there wanted to know (sigh!) if i thought Johnny Ramone would play a 6500 hundred dollar guitar… well of course not but ol’ JR is a very specific case in point who proudly told me that he never plays guitar unless he’s on stage or recording… also dude presumes i paid for the guitar im using… i have bought and own plenty of expensive equipment and junk however and if someone wants to accuse me of being greedy and or capatalistic i’d much prefer they come directly to the point rather than resort to implication… this stuff is painfully ironic and makes me want to bitch and whine about how much money we’ve generated for others that we never shared in, certainly a big conflict for yours truly as i’ve never been in this for money, at the same time feeling anger for being so financially screwed over the years… you can believe this or not, i think the majority of you know that im honest with you all, i think it would be really horrendously bad karma to bullshit about oneself en masse like this… debbie and i talk about sometime writing a more detailed account of the band history from our point of view (dont write asking when it’s coming out!! go back and read the precedeing sentence again before you do) my old buddy from brooklyn Mike “the psych” who lives out here in maniac mode just showed me a clipping from a local paper which once fucking again refers to the “next Blondie album ‘Drive'” again this is not, and never was the name of the next record… the media is like playing that game ‘telephone’ where one person whispers in the next ones ear etc etc and like five, six, whatever number of people later a completely warped version of what the first one said comes out of their mouth someone else asked what i think about bands doing covers of other peoples material… personally i always liked hearing an artist with a specific sound/style redefine a piece of music by another, sometimes it works, sometimes not, for me a great example is hendrix doing the beatles ‘sgt.peppers lonely hearts club…’ which i never liked and doing bob dylans ‘all along the watchtower’ which is for me is an absolute masterpiece of pop music… a piece of advice i’ve always given bands starting out is to do a lot of cover songs, i think it enables you to get into the head and hands of another musician as it were, also as far as doing a demo for the rest of the world people are able to connect with a familiar song, sometimes especially for record co. people its hard to hear a new band and a piece of familiar music is sometimes a good bridge san francisco is a great place i was here in the summers of ’67 and ’68 and i oftimes wonder why i dont live here… new york has just been wrecked by ghouliannies regime and i wonder if and how much it will ever be able to swing back… ten years ago i couldn’t tolerate los angeles, now that new york has become so plasticised even LA feels refreshing, as ive said before people cant have a future without a past and the elimination of so much history in new york is terrible to me, landmarking has nothing to do with reality, is only about money and i’ve seen just fantastic old buildings torn down and replaced with grotesque ‘modern’ structures that look more like futuristic prisons than anything else…san fran is still possesed of a lot of atmosphere, alleys and run down old structures are beautiful in their noble decay, maybe its like old age, cities shouldn’t be the victims of ‘ageism’ by now im a little bit worn out and im quite looking forward to heading into the desert for burning man, im going with barbs and some others a week early leaving from sacramento the day after the tour ends, im easily found out there at the post office and i’d be amused by anyone who said theyd seen the site here (im meeting more people at the shows who say they’ve seen it) i’ll probably get a chance for another post before the end after that i’ll get back on in sept-oct love chris

it took me like three hours to get through the 60 or so e-mails i got from you all mainly cause i was checking out all the stuff about grand theft auto that people referred me to, im really a novice at the thing and i didnt quite get how dense it is, jeez, ive just been playing a borrowed version on the bus i dont think i can afford to suffer the addictive aspects of owning it… so thanx for the tips ive got enough info now to get completly enmeshed in the damn thing in LA before the Anaheim shows we saw a bunch of acquaintances and friends, i hadnt seen Cherie Currie for like twenty years and she is a major babe still, old comrades Lydia Lunch, Paul Zone, Michael Schmidt, Chris Young, this was at an ‘informal’ dinner Mr. Schmidt tossed for us and Siouxsie who i’ve only met on occasion but who looked quite terrific, Howie Pyro and Mr. Zone were acting as DJ’s.. much else is status quo, ive been meeting more of you out here, still thanx for the messages, do keep them coming… ive got to deal with things, this is short, ill get in another more detailed report in a day or so, (id intended this to be but i havent even gotten out of the hotel yet, presumably ill get a better sense once again of the horror of las vegas and have some thoughts on it) happy birthday whoever has one regards, love chris