Insomniac Folklore Tour: Snobbery and the Mall of America

July 28th

What is a band to do when they have a check-out time of 11:00am and a load-in time of 9:00pm? Why, go to the mall of course!

The afternoon of July 28th found us walking through the muggy heat of Minneapolis toward the doors of the Mall of America, the second-largest mall on the continent. We spent the day watching people riding the rollercoasters, poking our heads into stores to look at earrings and nail polish, commenting on modern fashion, and buying various edibles such as frozen yogurt, cheese curds, coffee, fries and bourbon chicken. I have always been a mall rat of sorts: when we were kids, my mom took my three siblings and me to the Galleria on rainy days to ride the escalators for hours. Ever since, I’ve enjoyed window shopping, mall-walking, and, for a brief period in my life, bargain-hunting.

However, it has been a few months since I had been to a mall, and the whole experience, while fun, sat wrong with me. My views on consumerism have considerably darkened since last I walked through a maze of retail. I have gotten less understanding of parents who buy designer jeans for their children, and girls who feel that they need to give their wardrobe an overhaul every season. The American Girl Doll hair salon was almost nauseating, and even the Lego store, as I acknowledged the wonder of their twenty-foot sculptures, struck a bitter note in my gut. 

Perhaps this is a reaction to my upbringing of secondhand toys and hand-me-down clothes— maybe some part of me is jealous that I never got new legos and dolls and frilly name-brand skirts. Or perhaps, in addition, this is my own unusual version of materialism surfacing again. Whereas most people (it seems) are tempted to draw worth from what they have, I am always fighting against finding my worth in what I don’t have. It’s a strange brand of snobbery that shows up in indie, hipster and hippie circles, but rarely anywhere else. “I wonder how much that girl spent on those ridiculous shoes. Good thing I’m above that sort of thing!” This point of view feels noble at the time, but it doesn’t stop to consider the joy that the girl finds in those ridiculous shoes. Perhaps it’s the same kind of joy I find in wearing a skirt that has a nice twirl to it. Dressing ugly is not a virtue, and neither is being cheap.

Tyler rescued this pizza; someone was going to pitch it!

And so the inner struggle against yet another form of pride continues. Money should not be an idol in any way, and that means I have no right to judge whether or not someone else is spending money wisely. If I can keep track of myself and my consumerism or lack thereof, that’s more than enough for me to handle.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Back in the Midwest

Homemade puppets at the Puppetry Arts Institute

July 27th

The past few days have hurried by in a whirl of steady activity. I’ve felt sick so I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking and zoning out. We spent the morning of the 25th at a park, and ended up in Lenexa, Kansas, with a couchsurfing host. The next day, we ran around Kansas City for a while (getting heat exhaustion, eating Subway, and visiting a puppet museum, mostly), then headed up to Ames, Iowa for a show. Along the way we realized our right front tire was flat, and changed to a temporary one. We drove from Des Moines to Ames at 45mph, but still arrived at the Ames Progressive venue on time.

I enjoyed the show a lot: we sounded dynamic, the crowd seemed engaged, and for perhaps the first time, I feel that we got a full sound with just the four of us. Since Ayden left us, I’ve felt that there’s been a huge hole in the music. But that show, we nailed it.

We spent the night at the sound guy’s house without air conditioning, but fortunately the night cooled down and we had fans. I slept like a rock. The next day, this afternoon, we visited the local tire shop to get the tire fixed. Of course it was much more complicated and expensive than we expected. We sat on the tile floor and watched prime-time TV and ridiculed both the shows and the commercials. 

Waiting for the tire to be fixed

At last, the tire was fixed, and off we went, headed north toward Minneapolis. We stopped at a motel surrounded by hoards of seedy-looking men (I haven’t been ogled so much since I was in Spokane) but with a nice interior. We ignored the guy throwing up in front of the lobby and went to our room.

Now here sit I, upon a bed with a tacky, vaguely Victorian design. And there is air conditioning— that is a huge comfort. Tomorrow: Minneapolis!

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: The Vertical Violet

July 24th

I didn’t expect much from a venue in Kansas, even one in the heart of Wichita, a cultural metropolis compared to the miles of flinty plains in every direction. Thus, I was astounded when we reached The Vertical Violet, a large house tucked in a corner of a suburban neighborhood, to find myself overwhelmed with awesomeness. The backyard was decent-sized, packed with people, pavilions misting water onto the lucky recipients, playhouses, and various animals— from chickens to pigs to kittens.

We were scheduled to play as the last band of the Saturday of The Vertical Violet’s Pond Party, a festival featuring live music in the backyard and the living room, as well as copious amounts of food and booze. The place swarmed with people eating, drinking, and making merry. I have rarely seen a more goodnatured garden party.

When we first arrived, we were drenched with sweat and weak with heat exhaustion, so I sleepwalked through our show in the living room and didn’t really appreciate the venue’s magical atmosphere until the next day, after ten hours of sleep. I spent most of the day hanging out by our merch table. Adrienne and Amanda painted faces, including mine. We played a show at 4:00 when another band cancelled, and although everyone in the audience looked utterly befuddled the whole time, they applauded loudly. Otherwise I chatted with people, half-listened to other bands, laughed at the piglet that was running around, and petted innumerable kittens that wandered the grounds. It was good to have a down day after the mad dash across Kansas.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Literature in Kansas

July 23rd

I sat in the backseat of the van, holding my water bottle in one hand and my paperback War of the Worlds in the other. Outside the window, an unmoving sea of grass and farmland whizzed by at 75mph, broken only by the borders of the fields and a series of handmade signs advertising a live five-legged steer and the largest prairie dog in the world. Hot wind tore through the one working window on Tyler’s side, ruffling the pages of my book, which were damp from my sweaty fingers. My back brace felt like it was choking me, but I couldn’t take it off because of the pain along my spine I’d felt that morning. Perspiration trickled down my calves, but my mouth felt dry as sand. Welcome back to the Midwest.

We knew that the 23rd was going to be a miserable nine-hour trek across a vast plain of hot nothingness, so knowing that ahead of time, I managed to enjoy myself. I think this is the perfect opportunity for two interludes to discuss my reading material.

First, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. I read this sci-fi classic when I was 14, and it blew my mind. Although I’m not an evolutionist, it’s interesting to consider, from that perspective, what would happen if humans became suddenly second on the food chain. Wells pointed out, with biting criticism, the massacres that humans had wrought on each other in the name of evolution— it was a lot for a 14-year old to take in, and one of the first high-concept stories I ever read.

Even eight years ago, I could see that the themes were heavy-handed, using caricatures rather than characters to illustrate different points about human nature. A man fleeing from the aliens drops his bag of sovereigns and is trampled when he tries to recover them. A paperboy sells the news for a shilling as he runs along with the mass of screaming people. The protagonist falls in with a curate, a symbol of organized religion. When the curate wails about why God would allow an alien invasion when he had run such a good Sunday school, the protagonist responds: “Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floors, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God has exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.” Although Wells’ disdain for religion is apparent, he also understood a hard truth about God that is important for all of us to remember.

Violence and savagery abound in the story, told through the eyes of the only fully-developed character in the story: the intense, educated and evenhanded protagonist. Wells strikes a perfect balance of mayhem, introspection, random scientific interludes, and heart-stopping terror. Reading the story again gave me more food for thought and reminded me why I love science fiction.

The second bit of literature I read was Tree and Leaf, an essay by J.R.R. Tolkien about the importance of “fairy-stories” (tales that touch upon the world of Faërie, not stories about little fluttery creatures). I could write a huge discourse about it, but I feel that I have to digest it a bit more before I venture to comment on it in detail. Briefly, a few ideas he discussed were the definition of fairy-stories, their purpose, their origins, and why he believes they are more important for grown-ups than they are for children. At this moment I don’t have the resources or the careful thought to give this essay a full review, so I’ll leave you with a quote that struck me.

“Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey: that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive.” 

I encourage all my readers to find a copy of Tree and Leaf and read it for yourselves. It is an ocean of insight into the “real” world, the world of Faërie, and the true nature of escape.

*  *  *

I ended up getting minor heat stroke by the time we’d reached Wichita. But all in all, considering that I spent the day in a non-air-conditioned van driving across Kansas, I think I had a pretty good time.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Fort Collins

July 22nd

We had a free day in Fort Collins today before our show. I used the morning as an opportunity to get work down in the shady park beside the library. In the afternoon, we hiked out to the river that winds through the town and waded in the icy water. We took naps on our friends’ couches and ate burritos for supper at Everyday Joe’s coffeehouse, where we performed. I felt out of it all day, but it was a time of pleasant sensations: a red squirrel keeping me company in the park, salad made of edible weeds, goosebumps on my wet arms in the sunlight, sweat gathering on my face as I played violin. Today was our last day in the west— tomorrow we head to Kansas for the last couple weeks of tour.

Time continues to be distorted. It seems an age ago that we said goodbye to our friends in Olympia. Sleeping on the salt flats must have happened a month ago, and Cornerstone might have even been last year. I’m not used to packing so much intensity into such a short time: my normal form of travel is much more leisurely, spending a minimum of three days in each place. Here we’re on a mad race to the next venue, as tomorrow’s nine-hour drive through Kansas will continue to illustrate.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: The Rockies

June 21st

Last night we stayed in Spanish Fork, Utah with some friends I’d made when I stayed there earlier this year. With laundry washed, body showered and stomach full of bacon and eggs, I said goodbye to my friends this morning, and we were off to cross the Rockies.

The drive from the Salt Lake area to Denver is roughly eight hours if you don’t stop for anything, and as I write we’re on hour seven. What a menagerie of landscapes we’ve witnessed today! Broken earth heaped into mounds, striped with sediment, shaped by the wind, pinnacles jutting from the rutted ground, faintly pink and blue through the heat distortion. Craggy mountainsides, the western peaks of the Rockies, stained with gray water and bleached to the color of sand. The Colorado River, muddy rapids slicing a vein of mountain life beside the highway. And now, massive mountains swathed in evergreen, the trees packed together, interlocking their needles to hold each other together lest they tumble over and fall. All the while, an alpine sky whisks along its carefree clouds, bumping over the tops of mountains. Communing with the mountains from a sweaty van. It’s good to be in Colorado.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Sickness

The past couple days have been a blur. I was an emotional mess the first day, and yesterday I had the flu, so mostly all I remember about the past couple days are crying and wanting to throw up and forgetting everything for a moment when I saw two California quails. We visited Tyler’s “second family” in northeastern Oregon, met some cool people, played a house show in Boise, but I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about it. I’m feeling better today and there’s a chance I’ll be able to stomach some food, so hopefully my next blog will be more coherent.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Idaho Family

June 16th and 17th

On the 16th, we arrived in Spokane sans Ayden, Kourtney and Zach. The Baby Bar did not have us on their schedule, but they said we could play anyway and fed us massive burritos for supper. I took a walk and talked to various members of my family. Downtown Spokane had a vaguely historic feel to it, with well-kept buildings, but these were offset by a sense of sheer seediness in the air. I’m used to turning a couple heads when I walk, but I’m not used to being ogled by ever single guy I pass. The burlesque dancers hanging out on the sidewalk unnerved me a bit as well. As the sun began to set I noticed various people prowling the streets, creepiness hanging on them like well-worn coats, sniffing out booze and… other things.

The show itself wasn’t that bad: the crowd in the bar was on our side, clapping loudly after every song. It was weird to play without drums or an accordion— I felt out in the open, with every note much more important than it had been before. After the show, I followed Amanda outside (minors are allowed to perform, then they are kicked to the curb). We sat in the van and pulled out books. I read a George MacDonald short story and tried to ignore the yelling/screaming/cursing/falling-over/making-out people swarming outside. 

Around midnight, Tyler and Adrienne emerged from the bar, threw the merch in the van, and said, “Let’s get out of here.” Off we went to stay at Tyler’s friends’ house just across the border in Idaho. We left the squalor of downtown Spokane behind.

We arrived around 1:00am at the G’s house, and followed handwritten signs to our rooms downstairs. The next day, I got to meet the family— all eleven of them. Leon and Jennifer, and their nine children, aged to sixteen to not-quite-two: Ephraim, Havela, Asaph, Zion, Zuriel, Simeon, Naphtali, Nehemiah, and Elsie, a conglomeration of curly-headed blondes and black-haired kids, sweet and polite enough to make anyone love children. (I hope they will forgive me if I misspelled some of their names.) Jennifer is one of my new heroes: a woman of beauty, grace, patience, and a wonderful sense of authority and love. She’s transparent and strong, a mother in the truest sense. I want to be like her when I grow up.

I got the chance to explore Idaho with my bandmates, Leon, and all the kids except Elsie, running around Farragut State Park and basking in the cool sunlight of northern Idaho. From the green water of Lake Pend Oreille to the fir-clothed mountains, it gloried in solid western beauty.

Before our house show that night, we feasted on Jennifer’s amazing cooking: hearty chili, seasoned to perfection; veggies and homemade dip; sweet cornbread with local honey; jello; and cookies, peanut butter and chocolate chip, which I could not stop eating. A few people showed up to watch us, and we played an unmiked show, which was a nice change. We spent the rest of the night talking to the kids, and then just the older kids and Leon and Jennifer, after the little ones went to bed. It was a joy to see such refreshingly excited kids, who can bake cookies and mow the lawn and raise honeybees and build things out of legos. When parents expect a lot of their children, it’s amazing to see what they can do.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Parting Ways

July 16th

Last night we had a show in Olympia— our last show with Ayden. We arrived in Washington’s capital city after sitting in traffic for two hours, met our contact Scott, and unloaded into the Reality Church. Over the course of the night we met the three members of Lower Lights Burning (some of the friendliest people I’ve met on tour), gorged ourselves on free pasta and oreos, napped on couches, watched Tyler and Ayden have an epic wrestling battle, played a fun show to an attentive audience, and saw a great set by Lower Lights Burning. We slept at Scott’s house, most of us sprawling on the floor even though there were beds and couches available.

I surfaced around 11:30am and saw my bandmates scattered around the room, half-asleep. Almost time to say goodbye. When would we meet again, and for how long? We don’t know. It suddenly struck me that every time you say goodbye to someone, you have no idea if you’ll see him again on this side.

We all congregated in the living room and talked. I tried to remember every detail of the moment: my body slumped on the carpet, head propped up on my rolled sleeping bag— my left arm lying on a blanket, my right hand loosely tangled in the sleeping bag strap. Adrienne to my left, curled up on Tyler’s shoulder. Zach to my right, sitting in the lotus position. Amanda, Ayden and Kourtney across from me. Small-talk conversation. Legend of Zelda. Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Marionettes. Tyler and Adrienne began wrestling and the rest of us watched in amusement. One last morning together.

Scott and his son made us breakfast— bacon, sausage, and whole-wheat waffles stuffed with fruit! The generosity of people we stay with continues to bless and surprise me.

Then it was time to say goodbye. It felt like a breaking of the Fellowship. I had tried not to dread it too much, to embrace it, to not let it make me sad, but now I didn’t want it all to come to a close. I hugged Kourtney, Ayden and Zach in turn. I called them losers and said they were lame for not coming back to St. Louis with us. Zach lent me a collection of J.R.R. Tolkien short stories. I cried.

We all stood around, not wanting to say goodbye. We extolled the virtues of St. Louis (namely, City Museum and fireflies). We talked about the difference between Missouri and Missoura. We all said how much we didn’t want to say goodbye. But at last we all climbed into our respective vehicles, and waved farewell, and shut the doors, and pulled out of the driveway. Ayden, Kourtney and Zach started back to Portland. The rest of us headed toward Spokane. 

I’m fairly sure we’re all see each other again— we are indeed bandmates. But I realized today how very much I hate saying goodbye to friends.

~Lisa Shafter

Insomniac Folklore Tour: Hello Seattle

July 14th

Our afternoon in Seattle reminded me how much I love this city. Every line of the landscape calls to mind vibrant memories: nineteen, holding hands with my then-boyfriend as we strolled through the Pike Place Market. Twenty, hopping on top of the bronze pig with my sister to pose for a photo. Twenty-one, walking alone along the waterfront and basking in the wonder of the Cascade Mountains.

It was good to share Seattle with six friends. From wandering the Market to watching the sailboats in the sound, it was a breezy afternoon of quiet delight. Seattle seems straightforward, full of yuppies in designer clothes who look down on outsiders because the visitors don’t have as much money. This is a welcome contrast to Portland, full of pseudo-hipsters who look down on outsiders because the visitors have more money. Seattle seems more honest in its snobbery, and I appreciate that. Seattle used to be full of grunge, the flotsam and jetsam of the river, but that city sunk underground and they built a glassy palace of skyscrapers over it. They never looked back. 

The show at Jewel Box Theatre was fun, comfortably full, with an attentive audience who actually bought merch. It was 1:00am before we loaded out, and we went to a friend’s house and crashed on various couches and beds. Sleep had rarely felt so good.

~Lisa Shafter