Austin to Albuquerque

Our next show is scheduled for Wednesday, April 27th, at 8 pm at The Ugly Mug Cafe in Orange County (the O.C., to those in the know, or who watch cable TV). The cafe is at 261 N. Glassel, Orange; the phone number is 714.997-5610. We're performing as featured guests at a regular event (known as Two Idiots Peddling Poetry), which this week also features a special showcase of young spoken word talent. This will be our only show in the Los Angeles area. There's a $2 cover.

The following night, on Thursday, April 28th at 7 pm, we're performing our full multi-media extravaganza (I can't help putting those words together) at a great gallery space in San Jose, where I did a show with the Perpetual Motion Roadshow last year. It's called Anno Domini (or Gallery AD) and it's located at 150 South Montgomery Street, Unit B, in San Jose. The number there is 408-271-5151. This will be our only show in the San Francisco Bay area, so if you're anywhere around there it would be great if you could make it down to San Jose. Admission is free.

Our multimedia extravaganza, in case you're wondering, includes live performance with occasional sound, image, or singing by Genevieve and/or Corey, as well as short films from New Zealand and Canada, such as Grant Lahood's Cannes-award-winning short The Singing Trophy, and some of the latest from Jim Munroe's DVD-zine Novel Amusements.

We left Austin on Saturday evening and drove through Texas as far as Fort Stockton, interrupted only by a brief but bracing encounter with the Sheriff of Wimble County. At that point we couldn't drive any longer; in case you hadn't heard or read it on a t-shirt, Texas is damn big. We had to continue our exodus from the Lone Star State the following day.

I'm writing this from the Flying Star Cafe in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a lively place that offers coffee, burritos, wireless internet, and a surprising amount of music with French lyrics. We arrived in this friendly and comparatively temperate town last night and were guests on Don McIvor's KUNM spoken word radio show. (Thanks, Don!) If you missed it, I have it on CD. We discussed spoken word tours and interdisciplinary performance and Genevieve did an impressively animated version of her piece "I Wanna Be an American", considering that she had spent the previous couple of hours sleeping in the car.

We were worn out a bit from visiting bright, white, windy and otherworldly White Sands National Monument, a place in the Tularosa Basin where you can wander among pure sand dunes that stretch on for miles in every direction. Visitors are not allowed to remove sand or crystals from the park, but I confess that a fair amount of the fine white stuff ended up on the dash and seats and floor of the VW.

In the meantime, neither of us can believe the amount of corn and corn products we have consumed in the last week. We are continuing our search for highway-rest-stop food options that do not feature corn syrup as one of the top three ingredients.