Hotels

Paying for a room to sleep in!  It’s always felt so extravagant to me.  Even a $40 Motel 6 room.  All to yourself.  It’s not the wrapped soap or made beds.  It’s that it’s a temporary home, at your absolute convenience, anywhere, off any highway, at any hour.  Ring the bell, swipe your card, get your key and voila, instant intimacy, instant home, anytime, anywhere.  And it is strangely intimate, as in homey, for me.  I don’t need much to be at home: walls, a power outlet, running water.  Bed, shower and ashtray are nice but can be improvised.  My house has little a hotel room doesn’t, and nothing I couldn’t happily do without.

 

I love the modern portable American life: that with a car, a credit card, a laptop and a phone, you can live anywhere.  I love the fact that you can live happily and indefinitely out of a shoulder bag.  If they ever built a full-size keyboard into my phone, I wouldn’t need the bag.  A second pair of pants is for people who play golf.  If it can’t fit in a bag, you don’t need it.  If it can’t fit in the trunk of a car, you definitely don’t need it.

 

Home is where the job is. 

 

I wanted to be a writer when I was ten because I thought that, if you could make it as a writer — sending stuff off and getting paid for it — you could live anywhere. 

Texas country, in both senses

I'm from Texas, where country music was invented. Cowboy poetry and cowboy music, John Lomax's Smithsonian collection. Texas swing, Bob Wills, Don Walser, The Texas Playboys. Buddy Holly -- who, with Chuck Berry, invented rock. And of course the recent crowning glories of Texas country/rock: Willie and the Vaughn brothers. As a Texan, the only "Nashville sound" artists I'm allowed to formally acknowledge are Patsy Cline and The Man In Black (who were from VA and AR respectively).

I'll listen to Nanci Griffith and the Cowboy Junkies and John Prine til the neighbors are begging for Fatboy Slim and The Crystal Method. But don’t tell my mother.

 

Now, if we're talking R&B, like John Lee Hooker or BB King, that's another matter altogether.

Of course, nobody kicks it like Public Enemy.

Except for Tito Puente.

Or Yma Sumac.

The western topography makes me much happier than anything east of the Mississippi. I like deserts, canyons, scrub. Violent, recent mountains -- not the eroded things that pass for mountains out here. And the trees on the east coast! I hate 'em. All these fucking TREES! You can't SEE anything. Where's the fucking horizon?  Dead overhead!  Suffocating.

Fucking trees. A tree should have a good mile of clear space around it. Except for redwoods. They can do whatever they want. And trees with spanish moss. Oh, and mangroves. Oh, and cypresses. And mulberries. Oh, and dogwoods and redbuds. Need lots of those, packed dense in riots of mid-Atlantic spring color. And Blue Ridge fall foliage, need that carpet of fire. Other than that, too many trees here. OK, pecans are delicious and oaks are majestic.

ELMS SUCK