when i move you move

For the tour schedule (Oct 4-18, 2008) & Chicago performances,
please see the myspace page.

I've been playing (guitar, vox) with Dan Siakel (drums) and Nick Morrison (bass, pedals) on select dates this past year, and this trio is sort of the core unit in the making of the next Health&Beauty record The Cottonwood Leaf, Fallen, Likens To a Rat Having Died. That title is not to be taken all serious like we're a buncha weirdos but should have a nice self-effacing ring to it.... like when you feel things but know you won't allow yourself to act on them but still you feel them but you want to downplay the feeling so it will be easier for you not to act on the feeling.

Having significantly altered the general direction of Health&Beauty, which if anyone recalls used to be a quintet with three guitars playing glorious rock songs, we are now a trio playing this kind of punky free improv and some glorious rock songs that have been reworked to be a little punkier and freer. I liked the quintet because it forced us to work out arrangements that kept us from stepping on each other's toes. I like the trio because it forces us to work out arrangements that play out gracefully between three instruments; I like trying to make it sound like a quintet sometimes. It is also a good way for me to get better as an instrumentalist, as I am mostly responsible for all the melodic content of the music. We are focusing both on composition and on improvisation within set boundaries. We work the crowdz.

Nick and Dan and I are about to embark on a tour of the East Coast of the United States of America. Check the dates and tell your friends, please! <3 b

H&B is also the person Brian J Sulpizio and has involved in its workings:

2007->: Dan Siakel, Nick Morrison

2005-6: Steve Manuszak, Sara Johnsen, Cathy Starr, Carlos Villareal

2004-5: Steve Manuszak, Anita Chari, Dan Siakel

2003-4: Steve Manuszak, Jon Douglas, Sara Johnsen, Rodney Lee Jones

There is also a thing called Healthy Booty which is like Health&Beauty but different for one reason or another. There are two dudes who played in that who were not already in Health&Beauty and their names are Brian Trump and Andrew Royal.

I was up late, in my girlfriend's room one night. She was asleep, lying on the mattress, and I was sitting in a chair, drinking whiskey and trying to write something and thinking about going outside to smoke a cigarette in the night. And suddenly the rank stench of rotting shit wafted past my face, and I looked to the fan in the open window. I said, on the off chance she would hear me, "Did you fart?" And she replied, "No." And the smell went away, and then it came back again. And I have to admit that I never really suspected my girlfriend of farting, because it didn't smell like a fart. It smelled like rotting shit; old shit. And earlier that day I had been notified that I was being sued by GE Financial for nonpayment of debt, and that I was being evicted from my home/studio, and that I was about to be sued by two different credit card companies for nonpayment of debt, and that the little red welts that had been covering more and more of the skin on my legs and had been spreading to my stomach were, in fact, flea bites. I began to realize that I was not going to receive a phone call from any of the employers to which I had applied for employment. My space, the one from which I was receiving threats of eviction, had been broken into three times in the past two weeks. The things that had been stolen included my refrigerator, the left-overs contained within my refrigerator, my bicycle, my girlfriend's clarinet, and a rug off the floor. Three weeks earlier, I had badly injured my right knee by bashing it into a dock. That happened only two weeks after I had stepped on a nail with my right foot, which happened one night after I had twisted the same ankle by falling down a flight of concrete stairs in the pitch black of night. The nail-stepping incident had forced me to seek medical attention, because I needed a tetanus shot, though I have no health insurance. It took me seven days to find a clinic that would give me the shot for almost nothing. The knee was still hurting, three weeks later, and it was making popping and cracking sounds when I moved it in just the right ways. The night before, I had been told that the sum total of "world problems," of which there exists a list, will make the earth uninhabitable by the end of 100 years' time. It's not that one in particular will creep up on us, or that the problem is that we aren't dealing with them. The problem is that even though we are dealing with them, we are not doing enough, because no one problem looms ominously enough that we are absolutely forced to handle it. We think we have more time to handle the problems than we actually have, and already the damage that has been done by our refusal to address them is, as I heard, so severe that there is no possibility of the world being a place to live in 100 years. It is over. And I have been trying to pinpoint the source of the stench of rotting shit that wafted through the window, two nights ago. —28jun2006, 10.00am