Ah that feels better.

Picture of me ROCKIN OUT ACOUSTICALLY (photo by Todd Wolfson)

I KNOW no one is going to believe it, but I AM PLAYING A REALLY GREAT SHOW coming up here. It is at FLIPNOTICS on APRIL 27th and sharing the bill with me shall be JO CAROL PIERCE AND DAVID HALLEY. After they play every thing they can think of it will be KATHY MCCARTY AND KRIS NELSON playing the songs of DANIEL JOHNSTON in preparation for our trip to MADRID, SPAIN, where we will be playing the songs of Daniel Johnston for the Spanish People.

Photo of Me and Daniel at the show by Todd Wolfson

I wish I had the TIME and the AWAKITUDE to write about it at length, but my show the other night at Antone’s (It wasn’t JUST ME, it was a line-up of a lot of great Austin bands from the 80′s) went SPECTACULARLY well, and has been described as “Sublime” and “Incredible”. Kris Nelson and I did full justice to Glass Eye and also played some songs with Daniel Johnston, my fans were thrilled, and I think many folks were impressed who had not heard me before. IT WAS GREAT!

My next appearance will be next weekend with the Dead Milkmen, they have asked me to come up and do a song with them at their SXSW show. Let me see if I can find the details in my email….the show is Saturday March 19th at the MWTX Party at the Eastside Drive-In at East 6th and San Marcos st. (MWTX means “Mess With Texas”)

I have not personally ever been to this venue, it might be a special one-time venue for this special time of year when every single club is booked with 8 bands a night. Then again, it might be a new venue. There are many other bands on the bill, but I, being old and out of it, have not heard of any of them. But them, I doubt they have heard of me!

So as you can see, my career is advancing apace. I spent the last three days in the studio working on my song in Brian Beattie’s musical IVY AND THE WICKER SUITCASE. So it FEEELS like I am back in the swing of things already, going at a full fever pitch! My cats are all mad at me because I am never home and have started peeing on everything I own. Right in front of me. On purpose.

catnimps

Hi Everybody!

I thought perhaps now that I have decided to play music again, maybe I should post about it on my blog. I decided LAST FRIDAY. I forget now exactly what decided me; I think I stopped by Brian’s house, and he was working on his musical (Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase) (I am in it, I play Ivy’s Mom) and then we talked about a few things, not the least of which was, he told me about this thing called……um…….KICKSTART, where you can get your fans to donate money so that you can make records.

For SOME REASON, hearing about this KICKSTART thing made it seem like maybe I could make records again. I have had, as you have read here, a compulsive though that HARRY SHEARER and MATT GROENING, both of whom respect me as a artist and like my work, would just be my PATRONS and give me some money, (they wouldn’t hardly notice the pathetically small amount of money I would require, since they are such gigantic millionaires), than I would be like MOZART and make a killer awesome record. It would be just as good as any I have ever made, I wouldn’t dick around.

But naturally since they have not offered and I don’t run into them too often, this has not happened. (ALthough they did use my version of ROCKETSHIP in a Futurama movie, and for that I will be eternally grateful!)

But I have fans who would like me to make a record! If I get myself togather, I bet I could do a KICKSTART thing and then have the money to make a record ! Of course I will have to try to RAISE MY PROFILE by PLAYING GIGS. SO I have started playing gigs again.

My FIRST GIG was last Sunday at Jon Dee Graham’s Birthday party, where I played ONE SONG and I really played badly, not because I suck, but because I played Jon Dee’s guitar and that was dumb because all the dots are worn off and I missed my frets. It was a song played way way up on the neck (God Take All), so that was Disastrous.

I am glad you all were not there!  I knew I didn’t suck, but no one else did. They all said “P.U.!!”

My next show is March 9th, this Wednesday, at Antone’s, where I will be playing to celebrate the publishing of a book about the Austin Scene in the 80′s. Daniel Johnston will be there, and the Standing Waves are going to play, and the Skunks too. Daniel and Kris Nelson and I might even play a Daniel song together (It depends on whether he wants to.)

REELY BEEG SHOW!!

I have been practicing and practicing. Also I am going to write some new songs, I have had three ideas. I really think that I will be able to MAKE ANOTHER RECORD !!!

Red Berries

FRIED EGGS ARE IMPORTANT

Reader Sven commented:

“Like any other insignificant person in an audience, I can’t influence the outcome of an artist’s Success vs. Failure death match, but I do wonder what success means beyond satisfying the obvious quartet of human-dignity negatives (not be homeless/not go to bed hungry/not be afraid to walk in my own neighborhood/not have to work for a shithead). Is the overarching goal simply access to more people who really don’t get it? A bigger rack of antlers? More money to finance a more comfortable level of moping?”

FIRST OF ALL: What a G*R*E*A*T Writer you are Sven!! That is just A HELL OF A SENTENCE! I wish I wrote sentences that pithy and exact!

I feel moved to answer, just so that you don’t think I was aiming for a bigger set of antlers: Yeah, that quartet of human dignity negatives, THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS AIMING FOR, and THAT IS WHAT I CALL SUCCESS. I may have gone into this here before, but maybe not, but my “success” goals were as follows:

A 2 bedroom house is South Austin (this is a modest goal for my place and time)

To earn enough money to stay alive (Also, modest. I lived on @$7000 a year most of my  adulthood.)

To live as an artist, making art. Not to have to waste my energy in menial labor, which is what I did. I bussed tables for 20 years, then waited tables for ten more.

I also hoped to earn enough money to be able to have a child. That did not materialize. Of course that would have been EXTRA! But It was part of my unrealized life “plan”, and I always thought of that as part of my SUCCESS!

A CAN OF BEANS

It is funny, the kind of success I have pretty much ALWAYS enjoyed, CRITICAL SUCCESS, I tend to ignore, because, I already had it! But I do appreciate that I had it. I DO! I think, at the TIME, I thought, “Talk (Good reviews) is cheap! Money talks and bullshit walks! PAY ME!!!!!  SOMEBODY PLEASE PAY ME SOME MONEY SO I CAN STOP DOING MENIAL LABOR!!!! AND SEE THE DOCTOR WHEN I NEED TO!!”

Because your name is Sven, I IMAGINE that you live in a civilized country in Scandinavia where artists are allowed to be artists on small government stipends and EVERYONE is allowed to see a doctor when they are sick. It is not like that in Texas. No one is allowed to live as an artist unless they make MONEY (or inherit it) and you can only see a doctor if you have money. So $MONEY$ becomes a big part of the “success” equation, even if you aren’t interested in money for it’s own sake at all. I was never interested in keeping score with money or living a decadent lifestyle.

And of course, all artists want to have enough money to KEEP MAKING ART. Especially with recording artists in the eighties and nineties, when you needed to pay for recording in studios (there weren’t computers at home like now), you needed to have enough money to KEEP MAKING RECORDS.

That is pretty much where every penny of money GLass EYE made playing shows etc went: to keep going. We never ever paid ourselves, EVER. We saved all the money for recording, and financing touring (which was on a shoestring.)

BUT the good news is, I am having success at REDEFINING my SUCCESS!!  SOMEONE sent me a check TODAY for a CD. YAY!! How is this for a success thought:

I AM WELL THOUGHT OF BY THOSE WHO ARE FAMILIAR WITH MY WORK.

Here is an even better one:

I HAVE BEEN CALLED A GENIUS BY CRITICS IN MY FIELD.

A VASE OF FLOWERS

I LOVE BEING AN ARTIST

I am kind of tired, but THANK YOU commentors for commenting!! Commenters? Commetariat?

I have not sent out any presents yet because I had to do my taxes. But guess what I have been doing lately? In the process of doing my TAXES I had to sort of clean out my STUDIO (where my cats had PEED on my DESK and my RECEIPTS!) (YES, you may pity me, it was TERRIBLE!) so now it is about half clean, so I have started painting again.

I am a genius in many ways, one of them is painting masterpieces; I thought since I have completely lost interest in having a job, that a good use of my time would be to practice painting. I figure that if I work at it really hard for a YEAR, then I could probably sell paintings to people. My paintings have always inspired people to break out their wallets, unlike my SONGWRITING (although I have to point out that the only wallets that could have BEEN broken out, other than an 18th century style PATRON, would be a record label’s wallet. Certainly plenty of folks broke out their wallets to pay cover!)

I decided that in order to practice for a year, I would paint on notebook covers and cigar boxes, because they are practically free and if I paint a lousy picture, who cares, I could still use the notebook. (I write in notebooks like Ignacious Reilly).

ANYWAY! Look at this G*R*E*A*T notebook I painted the other day!!

These are the same white Texas poppies that I painted on ADITS

Here is the one I did today that isn’t as good. It looks strangely like magical realism. I will try again with the red poppies (they are in my garden); my G*R*E*A*T*E*S*T masterpiece is a painting called RED POPPIES that I did…uh…in 1990 (?) or so. SO I KNOW I can become awesome at painting them.

You know why this looks so stylized? Because I am L A Z Y

I painted the covers of Dead Dog’s Eyeball and also ANother Day in the Sun:

Here is a fine photo of me changing my clothes by the side of the road, on tour with Glass Eye. I always liked this picture because it is an accurate representation of my total lack of bodily modesty. What IS modesty anyway? Isn't it just Shame? Isn't it just Shame at being Female? What a Crock

I got a new comment today on this blog, which forced me to visit my own blog. Actually, I have THREE blogs, did you know that? OF COURSE NOT, because the reason I have three is to separate the different aspects of my life. I used to have just ONE blog, that integrated all the aspects of my life; but I had to split them up because SOME PEOPLE just don’t want to HEAR ABOUT my PINKO FEMINAZI political views (not you guys!)

My other blog is my “professional” blog that I maintain as a FOOD WRITER. In it I write about FOOD FOOD FOOD and about cadging as much FREE FOOD as possible, which, if you have a history of being a starving artist, as I have, does become second nature. HA HA I must say I think all the other FANCYPANTS, LADYLIKE food writers view me as a low-class beast because, you know, only POOR PEOPLE wax rhapsodic about FREE FOOD.

The name of that blog is Hungersauce, and you can go read it if you want, but it is not as G*R*E*A*T as this blog.

Which is what I was going to write about: HOW GREAT THIS BLOG IS!  I just re-read my two posts (U.T) and (Then What Happened) and even though I have not posted here regularly AT ALL, this is by far the BEST BLOG of MINE. I think I like me and the way I write about my real feelings or perhaps I should call them My Real Feelings™.

So now I will be handing out the prizes for thinking of songs that could be used to torture people with. I was also going to write some more about DEVELOPMENTS. But now all of a sudden I have to go VOTE and its not like I am going to miss out on that, because Pinko Feminazis have got to REPRESENT, amirite?

Brian Beattie

Then I got the Swine Flu. Okay, not IMMEDIATELY, but I felt like hurling having diarrhea volcanic heartburn crap for three whole weeks, just barely getting essential tasks done, and now I forget all the interesting things I was going to write about MY UNBEARABLE TRAUMA. Like for instance I went over to Brian’s house (Brian Beattie) and discussed my Unbearable Trauma with him, and he said something helpful. (DO I REMEMBER what he SAID????  NOOOOOOOOOOO.  (that is a John Belushi “No”.)  I mean, I did at first and dwelt on it for days, and I am sure it helped, I just can’t remember what he said NOW. I am hoping I jotted it DOWN somewhere.)

One thing though: there was this one day where I said to myself: “What? I don’t feel anything about this topic. I am SO OVER IT! GAH!”

But you see, that is how I felt BEFORE I had my cake-delivery meltdown. I am pretty sure that when I DON’T feel ANYTHING about this topic, the UNBEARABLE TRAUMA topic, well I am pretty sure that that is called A STATE OF DENIAL.

DENIAL is a funny thing: I seem to be unusually good at it. It is the first stage of grief, I have read; my Mother died 5 1/2 years ago, and I am pretty sure I am still in DENIAL about it, as I have NOT yet experienced any of the other stages. I was talking to a friend about it, and I said, “Either I am still in DENIAL, or I am a really advanced spiritual genius, because, you know, she just doesn’t SEEM dead.”

Heh.

(I am, at this point, hoping for the Really Advanced Spiritual Genius Option, because I do NOT relish the idea of HAVING to go through all the other stages of Grief. I mean REALLY! Sounds like a total nightmare, especially after all this TIME!)

As you can see, once upon a time I was TOTALLY YOUNG! I think I am 22 in this picture.

But ANYWAY: I know I have not yet worked through my U.T., but I have been slowly progressing. I decided that I should measure my wound cleaning by this metric: AM I WRITING SONGS? That is how I will know that I am recovering. Have I written any?

NO!

BUT…..I have had ideas. Ideas for songs, that I have not yet written. Believe me, that is a Big Improvement!

Here is my first idea: I was thinking about HOW MAD I AM!!!  HOW ANGRY I AM!!  And I was having an Imaginary Conversation in my Head (I always do that. Do You?) SPLAINING just how EPIC my ANGER is, and I said (in my head) “My anger is Not As the Anger of the Others!! My Anger, it never sees the light of day, but it BURNS!!  It Rages like an INFERNO inside me, patiently and slowly (BUT EPIC!)  My ANGER is like the COAL MINE THAT BURNS UNDERGROUND….. THAT ONE IN Pennsylvania…You know….THE one that they expect to keep burning for Hundreds and Hundreds of Years and they keep having to MOVE THE TOWN!!!!”  Eleventy One!!!”

Then I thought, Hey, that is a GOOD IDEA for a SONG!  So I am going to write a song about that burning underground coal mine, and no one will know what I am talking about, except YOU, my 7 FOR REAL Kathy McCarty Fans who read this Blog!  And when you hear the record you will be all like, “Wow it is so obvious that this song is about Kathy’s EPIC RAGE!! And nobody Gets it BUT ME!

But of course first I have to WRITE it.

(A Note: One day long ago on tour somewhere, I think it was on the HUGE tour, A fan came over to me and engaged me in Conversation, and he wanted to talk to me about my lyrics, and he said he really understood them, and I was thinking, “yeah I’m SO SURE,” and then he started talking to me about how “Invention” in about Oppenheimer inventing the Bomb, and like I WAS STUNNED, because HEY he really DID get my lyrics!!  I mean, it isn’t THAT obscure in the lyric of “Invention”, but it was too obscure for, I don’t know, the Other Members of Glass Eye, or any Rock Critic in America, and that one fan was the only person to ever come up to me and start talking about it. Hey, Dude, if you are reading this blog, I Do REMEMBER YOU!)

This is my Cocker Spaniel Skip-Bo when he was, I dunno, A MONTH OLD.

(I actually DID write an annoying song called “Where’s My Pup?” about my dog Skip-Bo, that had a REALLY ANNOYING SQUEEZE-LIKE melody. I couldn’t decide if I liked the melody or not, because it was SOMEWHAT interesting, and then I decided it was just an exercise. I could probably make a whole record of short, annoying songs mostly about my dogs and daily activities. It could be used by the US government to Torture prisoners! Except, No, I wouldn’t let them use my annoying songs to TORTURE people with!! I think TORTURE is so wrong that I wouldn’t even torture DICK CHENEY, and you KNOW I really really WANT TO. Just to teach him a lesson. You know. About how torturing people is WRONG.

Speaking of, you know they DO use certain songs to torture prisoners. How would you like to be a recording artist whose song had earned THAT distinction? I think I would just DIE!!! Can you Imagine? I wonder if they use “Copacabana“. I bet they use “Don’t Worry Be Happy“. Maybe “Music Box Dancer”. Oh oh oh Maybe “The Pina Colada Song!” Or “Margaritaville“? “Popsicle Toes?”)

In comments, if you tell me a song you THINK they should use to Torture Prisoners, and I AGREE with you, I will send you a PRESENT!