WHITE PIGEONS

White Pigeons (2004, Fifth Planet Press), being my first novel, is an explosion that took a lost freak-out to Bolivia to finally ignite. My hundredth band broke up after my millionth album; I was proving excellent at finding love but miserable at keeping it; was in the thick of my “omg-how-am-I-really-gonna-pull-this-off” late 20s panic having no idea the 30’s would soon bring relief; the wide open world touring offers started losing its mystique once the temporality of a different city every night began giving me more superficial broad strokes than essential minutia the sedentary normal professions are privileged to reap; and most importantly, my lyrics kept multiplying, extending well beyond the lengths of reasonable songs wherein repeating a chorus even felt like wastes of breathes that could’ve otherwise been used more economically for fresh ideas. No, no more nothing of this kind of life for me, I lunged towards the break with a one way ticket to Peru and returned from Bolivia two months later with (an incredible longing for NYC and) the blueprints for a type of love story I wished to purge thereby graduating myself to a better state; a state free of the turbulent flux that comes with raw youth; free from all the tyrannies of nostalgia and hope for a more accepting present tense instead; free from the violent sadisms of truth for well-worn ancient wisdoms I could ease into. White Pigeons is my uncomfortably temporal love story I offer up as fodder for our communal pyre (in a good way). This may be the last story of the 20th Century as well. The Towers were still standing and New York City was more Banlieue than Versailles.

The first pressing of White Pigeons included a twelve-song cd and its accompanying lyrics which serve as Chapter Seven, the (quasi-present) interlude between the past and future love story, as performed by the protagonist’s fictitious band in the book, “The Breaks”, as played by my actual group, Vague Angels . I have toured both the States and Europe several times in support of this book -- sometimes with a band, sometimes with only an acoustic guitar, and sometimes with neither. Since then the cd has been released separately by the German company Expect Candy and the individual songs have appeared everywhere from limited edition colored Swedish vinyl releases to Spanish television commercials to Jonathan Demme’s Manchurian Candidate featuring Denzel Washington.