my friend shannon's last livejournal entry includes this:

mood: *yawn*
music: (you're just a) Gucci model by Cheese on Bread

i don't know whether to be happy she's listening to our album or pretend-offended that she's yawning :)
i guess it is a pretty boring song!

xoxo
dan

cheese on bread has just completed a relentlessly successful rehearsal weekend. now i just need 2 weeks to recover. so much singing! we're debuting 2 new songs at the fire on thursday, and if they go well, we'll try them out again at our CD RE-RELEASE PARTY on july 10th! one song is a beach boys hommage with lots of harpsichord and atmospheric electric guitar. it's the most arranged song we've ever done, and it's the first song we've ever started with the full band. so many intelligent points of view, so few bars of music! the other song started out as just another bouncy cheese on bread tune, but now it's a full-on spin doctors knock-off. thank god!

i don't even remember the last time we played a new song live.

hope you can come experience the rock.
xoxo
d

Dibs mentioned that I should update this blog.
He's probably right.
Today's entry will be in bullet form (a devious method I learned from master slacker Cesar Alvarez.

-My photo is in all sorts of local gay magazines. I'm officially a G-list gay celebrity. Pretty soon I'll be rubbing elbows with the pilot cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy!

-I've been sending out Cheese On Bread presskits, which is fun. I love this band so much. Woah, have I mentioned that our CDs have arrived?? They're beautiful. Especially the bar code. I love our bar code. I'm thinking of getting it tattooed on my forehead. I'm also thinking about shaving my head, but I don't think anyone would enjoy that.

-We're making preparations for our show with Schwervon! next week! I can't wait to show off Philly to Nan and Matt, and vice versa. They rock harder than...rocks.

-After my last semi-disastrous set at Apocalypse Lounge, I'm starting to reevaluate my performances. Over the past few months, I've gotten more and more comfortable telling funny stories in front of my audiences. That's dangerous because, as I mentioned once or twice in my previous post, I am not a comedian. I'm just a normal performance artist with the occasional burst of humor. I need to stop setting up the expectation for punchlines when I don't intend to punch any lines or line any punches or anything of the sort. Which is all just to say that my new piece, Boi with an I, is going to have AS FEW JOKES AS POSSIBLE. I'm excited to do a non-musical performance where my success cannot be gauged on a moment-to-moment basis by laughter from the audience. Laughter is seductive, but it's not the reason why I perform. I'm not an entertainer. I'm really not. I'm an just an academic with a really messed-up lecture style. And now I'll just have to trust that the audience is paying attention. I like the sound of that. "Trust." I don't have enough of that, especially when it comes to performance, and especially when it comes to myself.

-I'm really looking forward to Regina Spektor's show next Tuesday.

-This weekend we're having Cheese On Bread boot camp in Philly. There's a chance we might put together some new songs! That hasn't happened in ages.

-Writing Cheese On Bread songs is a very long process. For instance, the chorus to "How Long Have You Been Haitian" was written in May 2002. The verses were written (I believe) in June 2003. Right now, I'm working on a song tentatively called "Emo Boyfriend," based on a chorus I wrote in January 2003. The last time we worked on songs together, Sara and I agreed that we shouldn't rush ourselves. We just need to trust our instincts and let the songs grow organically. I guess it's kinda funny that such methodical analysis is coming from the band that brought you lyrics like "I drew a pretty picture, I mixed a mushy mixture." But oh well.

-Last Tuesday, Toby and Casey gave one of the best shows I've ever seen. I was half-crying like the whole time. They make me feel like a person.

-Kinda fixated on Bill Clinton lately.

-I'm going to start running around my block every day. It feels really good. We should start playing some kind of weekly game in the park. Something where we get to run around.

-Stunned, as usual, by beheadings, et al. Pretty numb. Confused. I need to find some other people who care about this stuff pronto. Maybe you?

Love
Dan

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did you know they put BEEF FAT in twinkies?

well i found that out last night, in the rockstar green room at the knitting factory. what a strange and beautiful show! by the time we went onstage, most of the penn alumns had gone home to their tribeca lofts to rest up for a big day of trading stocks and irresponsibly controlling american mass media. the lights on the mainstage are such that you can easily see everyone in the audience, which is a rarity to be sure! we got free comps for toby, dashan, yoko, casey, katherine, and tami. come to think of it, the majority of our audience was on the guest list. rock. good ole' danielle took time off from researching celebrities at worldwide pants to come hang out. and kate, a director from my acting days at penn, appeared in a really pretty skirt.

anyway, it was a blast to finally play with a full band! daoud sounded great, and everyone's parts really started to fit together smoothly. i particularly love what matt's been doing on the electric guitar lately. it tickles! my favorite part of the night was "it never felt so right," which we haven't done in MONTHS. it's funny...when we wrote these songs, we'd say things like, "wouldn't it be cool if we had drums, so we could go *badda bang!* or something?" and now we do. dreams come true are so hard to process. cuz you're so used to just dreaming them.

kevin helped keep me from dreaming on stage by knocking into me a lot, and making eye contact. i really reigned me into the reality of the performance.

dibs broke 2 strings during "biological romance," and we both ended up just flouncing around the stage, screaming into my microphone. as that song and the set ended, i was sprawled out over the center monitor, and i could feel all the sound vibrating in my crotch. i love real stages.

anyway, i just wanted to give a show update! so much is about to happen in the next few weeks. lounge act rehearsal with kris tomorrow, boog city & ps122 both on saturday night, a day of duo rehearsal with sara on sunday, sin-e on monday, and the lounge act performance on wednesday. and then i'll breathe. until the box of 1000 cds arrives at my door.

oy!
xoxo
d

So this past weekend was Cheese On Bread Boot Camp in Philly. It's the first time since the Boys started playing with us (I now refer to Side of Fries as "the Boys") that we got to hang out and talk about arrangements without a show looming over our heads and watches. It was fantastic. Daoud of Art Sorority 4 Girls came down to drum with us! He's the perfect drummer for these songs. His style is really intelligent and thoughtful and modest and economical. And he wears glasses, just like the rest of us. I hope he stays in the crew for a good long time!

We'll unveil the 6-member C.o.B. tomorrow night at the Knitting Factory. I'm crazy excited.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan is dead. It's odd...I've always conceptualized Reagan as just that: a concept. To me, Reagan was always this metaphor for everything I hate about American politics: spectacle, gloss, deception, detachment... He was an actor. He was a good actor. And he used his talents for evil. He let thousands of people die of AIDS. He set the stage for the deaths of MILLIONS more by not checking the epidemic when it was still (arguably) controllable. He bankrolled OSAMA BIN LADEN (which no one seems to be talking much about). If the two biggest threats to humanity are AIDS and terrorism, then we have Ronald Reagan to thank.

So odd, too, to see photos of the clearly-shaken Nancy Reagan. It's remarkably powerful to watch her break with the Republican line to support stem-cell research. She wanted to save her husband. In the years since his Alzheimers was diagnosed, her politics has been guided by her love. Something about this new image of the activist Nancy Reagan seems almost sexualized. On some bizarre levels, she conjures older images of AIDS activists -- prompted by love and sexuality to challenge an uncaring Right-Wing government to do something about a horrible disease. Creepy how things turn out, eh?

Elsewhere, the leaders of the G8 Summit plan to discuss starvation. Over lunch.

Oy.
xoxo
dan

Jeez! Today I played GAY DAY at Stuyvesant High School! Yoko and Ann (of Dream Bitches fame) helped create Gay Day back in 1998, so they came along with me. I've never walked around down there before, at the low, low, low end of Manhattan. It was beautiful. The high school itself was really stunning -- especially since I keep hearing that NYC public schools are so terrible. I know Stuy was a special smart kids school, but I had no idea it was so well-funded!

Anyway, the kids were so nice! It reminded me of Drama Club back at Richard Montgomery (well...in its better moments). I was expecting something pretty small, but there were actually a LOT of kids there. They were all really happy and attentive and reactive during my set. They laughed a lot, which felt good. I was really NERVOUS before I played, which hasn't happened in a while. I was just so humbled by the youth and joy of these kids who are only really a few years younger than me. But there was something sacred about them. I was afraid to tamper with that.

I was a sophomore in high school in 1997, when Ellen came out. I feel like that was the big watershed year in terms of gay visibility. After that, it was so much easier to talk about sexuality. It's funny to see kids who grew up almost entirely on the other side of that turning point. It makes me feel old. In a good way.

Regardless, the Cheese On Bread mailing list is now filled with email addresses of awesome radical kids. I'm excited to get to know them. When Gina Young played, they were all singing along. Some of them knew every single word to every single song. That's dedication -- Gina has lotsa words! Gina's songs are so good. She captures scenes and feelings from high school with such maturity. That's so rare! A while ago, Cesar was saying how the best grunge songwriters of the 90s must have actually been pretty dumb, to have had such adolescent rage. But there's a difference between adolescent rage and rage expressed in an adolescent fashion. Gina captures the former. And she does it so well. It makes me want to write some songs about fighting The Man.

Anyway, when the event was over, Yoko and I went over to Sidewalk to see Ivan Sandomire and Double Deuce. I've never seen Ivan with his band before. Rawk, man. I wish I could have heard his voice better. Everything about his performance is fantastic, but it's his voice that really does it. It's positively RABBINICAL.

Toby was really happy when I saw him. He was wearing a white bow tie, and he asked me to sing on "Window." Now, even before I ever hung out with those guys, Cecily and I would constantly listen to their album while doing menial tasks all around the house. Those songs are already classics. So this was like the equivalent of Bjork asking me to sing on Hyperballad. Crystal was on stage too, so it was like the Mamas and the Papas. It felt super good. I wanna sing with the three of them again really soon.

Tomorrow, Dibs and Daoud and Dashan and I travel to beauteous Philadelphia for Cheese On Bread bootcamp. We're gonna play around with drums and see what happens. We have so many rock-club shows coming up. It'd be sick to have fuller rhythm section. Sara and I are gearing up for a major publicity blitz. We have absolutely no idea what we're doing, and it's great.

Oi Oi Oi!
xoxo
love
dan

that last entry had nothing to do with cheese on bread. i love the c.o.b. helpers who surround me and sara with love and competence. it's a beautiful thing.
xoxo
love
dan

i think i'm too quick to ask for help.