nadie nunca nada

I went to the dressing room to say hi and pass on a copy of Arboretum, my soon to be distributed (McSweeney’s) book of tree diagrams. Juana was sporting a sort of unibrow made out of a brown pipe cleaner. I remember on tour her wearing Birkenstocks, the ultimate in uncool, yet with her it didn’t matter. Tonight she wore an extremely modest velvet no-fashion dress, like something one’s aunt might have worn in the 50s. High neckline and slightly puffy sleeves. She’s slightly peculiar and extremely intelligent. She’s performing solo, but with a sizable keyboard rig that she plays and creates loops and loops on top of loops using a free hand and pedals. There’s a tangle of cables coming out the back — how she can keep it all straight is beyond me. At one point she was having some problem with her monitor and she didn’t stop the song but began singing to the monitor engineer the instructions of what she wanted.