'Happy Holidays' (said in high-pitched american accent)

Yesterday was thanksgiving here in the states; a holiday celebrated by religious and non religious alike and a day off for us. Sounds good, but a miscommunication with my ex-girlfriend meant that we happy four found ourselves in the city on 'turkey day' with no place to go and eat the bloody thing. We hit the streets in the car of our producer's wife's, keen to find a slap up meal and some good ol' northwest American fun.... But the place was sad, the streets lined with the homeless and the forgotten (a picture I'll never forget), and no life seemed to live anywhere around.

Luckily, after a long search we found a few scarce openings; a restaurant, a bar and a 7/11, and that’s all we really needed. I feasted myself on the most disgustingly large meal (pork, chicken and lamb all on one plate), had a couple of beers and then ate cookies and played poker back in the place we were staying near 15th avenue. The place was Anne's (the sister of our producer) and was perfect. She was away in China looking for sponsorship for her manga musical and so we had a free run of it as well, just to top things off.

The day before that was also a privilege that I'm keen not to forget. Artis the Spoonman came in to the studio to play spoons on 'Cold Bread' and 'Honk Kong Cemetery'. He's famous not only in Seattle (where be busks regularly) but also worldwide (most notably for his playing on the Soundgarden song 'Spoonman'). He's also perhaps the greatest spoon player in the US at the moment, and is completely and utterly eccentric. Nowadays his playing is rarely on records, not least because he was so hurt that the success of the Soundgarden record didn't bring him incremental return, but thankfully he agreed to do this session with us.

His playing was amazing, never stock or similar and always with a content smile on his face and closed eyes. His instruments were multifarious and odd; spoons of metal and wood, along with forks and other odds and ends. And his performance, fuck, it was just consistently entertaining, wrapping his fingers, hiting his legs and mouth with the spoons and many more moves besides, whenever anyone was watching.

At 60, with old skin, bald head, orange shorts and a toothy smile, Spoonman is completely mad but he's not detached. His manager told us that on the ride over, as with all trips they've made before, Artis told him stories from start to finish, sometimes with tears in his eyes and sometimes shouting with the force of fear and trembling hurtling though his vocal chords.

While we were hanging out in the control room he told us an amazing story too. When he was six his teachers asked him what he wanted to be, and he said a musician. They pushed him further and asked what sort, and he was stuck. He didn’t know what that meant, what it meant to have sorts of music, to have people tell you what was this and what was that, and he was left without words. Very slowly, with his teachers looking down on him, a term apparated into the front of his mind to describe the feeling he had, the feeling that music shouldn’t be the way they wanted it to be, and he said 'Jazz'. His teachers laughed at him..... Looking up at us as if we were they, he shouted, “you can want to be a mercenary or you can want to be a missionary, it don’t matter, if you’re six then there ain’t no offence in none of that stuff…” And he's right you know, he's really right.

Before signing off for today I want to finally say that I’ve decided on the subjects of my Christmas essays for this year. In no particular order they'll be on; 1) ‘the spiritual home‘, 2) ‘mastery and the clogging of freedom‘, 3) ‘honesty vs. truth‘, and 4) ‘on not having seen many films‘.

Till soon.