Category: US Tour in the Shape of Yemen
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Jason Warshof’s Cactus Tractor
We returned to Albuquerque on Friday, quizzed friends about our tour with questions from this blog (Stef won, even though she just sort of skimmed the blog while Bethany studied it in detail all day long), and barely woke up in time to get to our regularly scheduled Saturday morning gig at Tiles of Santa…
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Jar Guy Should Keep Not Wearing Clothes
“Jar guy should keep not wearing clothes.” This was one of Ginger’s musings on this art project (“Five Guys Take Same Photo For Thirty Years”). Also, drastic disappointment that the roach and its photo of a rock star were not in the jar in any but the first photo. What a letdown. We’re at the…
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Candid photos from the lives of artists.
When we visited Glenna in Milwaukee, David got put in prison for imitating a raccoon. They just don’t stand for that kind of thing there! However, everyone seemed to be fine with Orson imitating a hopping beaver (look for footage soon)! When we moved Paul Wilhelm out of his Hyde park apartment in Chicago, we…
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Secret Other Blog–Revealed!
Dear Readers, Turns out I have my own secret blog (not anymore!) so I posted something on it today. I would hate for our loyal Cactus Tractor blog followers to miss out on this exciting event so I’ve posted this blog post so you can see that blog post. Just to be on the safe…
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Wait, are you already famous?
In Galesberg, Illinois. –Sitting in the pleasant breeze of a lazy summer window, Earle Grey tea at hand, cicadas and trains syncopating the background sound scape. There are giant red candles massed out across the wide window sill boards next to me. Leafy shadows romantically caress the computer screen in front of me and a…
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A Hot Mess
We’ve been on the road for almost two weeks. Sleeping on a variety of surfaces, bathing in different parts of Lake Michigan, gleaning our water from coffee and rivers, and eating every other day has some interesting results. It feels like I’m at a perpetual 3rd grade slumber party. Everything that is gross is also…
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My Wet Pile of Horrible Everything
Swimming in Lake Michigan, or “the Ocean,” as I’ve become accustomed to calling it has been wonderful. However the Ocean was also indirectly responsible for a harrowing series of events and a string of sleepless nights: starting with the first moment that my head went under water. I came back from the beach with slightly…
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Tin Can and Stink Badger
We left Springfield Illinois yesterday feeling like rock stars because we played a disproportionately large number of shows for the days we had been in town, we made a lot of friends and were recognized virtually everywhere we went, a few people liked us on facebook, and we had been keeping vampire hours (though not…
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Coastal Meandering
You can see (in figure 1) that St. Louis Missouri is located just off the coast of Yemen in the Gulf of Aden. We drove along ol’ highway N-4, then had to off road it for several miles, eventually turning the blow-up bed into a raft, and fording our instruments (and Orson) through whale shark…
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The Most Important Thing is That You Blog
It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to write. The other day I was packing up the car while Christy/Ginger was blogging, and she felt guilty afterward for not helping (or so she said), but I said, “No, Ginger, the most important thing is that you blog.” I revealed to Christy yesterday that…
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The Best Way to Book Shows is Not to Book Shows.
Booking shows is a lot easier than one would think. When you spend about a month writing fruitless emails to bars and coffee houses all over the country—trying to seem hip, fun and talented, without sounding pompous—you start to get the sneaking suspicion that no one likes you and that it’s actually impossible to get…
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Popsicle Sticks
In complete agreement with the laws of miracle tours, David and I found ourselves surrounded by new friends; smoking cigars and making large ephemeral art projects (respectively). After playing a family-awesome-hipster show with Marty Peercy at his hipster-awesome-family coffee house we were invited to stay with a really awesome hipster family! At some point the…
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Shawnee, OK
We woke at 9:30 and left Vega after packing the car much more perfectly and successfully than we’d done the day before, so now the trunk would close and we created no sparks as we drove. We thought we’d breakfast at a hipster café in Amarillo, so we got off at the Amarillo College exit,…
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Matching Shoes
We got a late start to our tour today because Bashwiner was giving me music lessons. He said he thought it would be a good idea for me to “catch up” to his PhD in music theory before we left, so about four hours later we were ready to go. Our first order of business…
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Bonanza!
We were supposed to be in Palo Duro Canyon tonight for some camping, just south of Amarillo. So that meant leaving by about 11 a.m. Which meant getting an oil change before that, for about 30 bucks. But the oil change turned into a brake replacement, cost 1400 bucks, and took till 5 pm. Then…
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Band Member Bios
Sebastian Hayseed (Claude, Lord Farnsworth). No bio on file. Ginger [no last name] (neé Breadhouse) is the love child of Jennene Swift, who in 1975 married a rock. The song “Brick House” was originally written for her, under the title “Ginger Bread House.” She was proposed to by a famous Brazillian pop star when she was…
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What is (a) Cactus Tractor?
Ginger never understands anything Sebastian (Claude*) says, and vice versa (although Claude [Sebastian] thinks he’s better at it than Ginger is). For instance, she didn’t even know she was being called Ginger for some time. Pincher, binger, danger, finger, linger, stingy, jingle, jumper, Winger—she really doesn’t understand a single thing I say (and vice versa). Hence…
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U.S. Tour (In the Shape of Yemen)
So here’s the story in brief: We played a show with the Yeah Man’s the other night under the name of Bandana Verde. They misread our name and thought we were Banana Verde (like an unripe fruit), and so, to one-up us (before even meeting us!), they thought they might be able to co-opt/appropriate our name…