Anyway, in the meantime I had taken David Hero out to dinner at Sentosa for Black Cod, and then we had dropped in to UpStage on our way back to Silverwater: which is David's restaurant, and the place we both eat most of the time.

Here is what I wrote about it in the morning:
Last night (Sunday night - not tonight) was great. It was a fabulous clubnight - as cool as the nights when Emanuel was here and we played at UpStage. I got to play truly inspired and beautiful music with total strangers until 2 AM at the UpStage. No smokers. No alcohol in our circle. No PA at all.

The film crew that has been in town the past few weeks is still shooting - the picture is about some drama in a hat factory.

As turned out, a lot the film crew showed up at UpStagelast night, but got there too late - right after most of the band (a "grrrlz with guitars" group from Berkeley, CA called RAMONA the Pest) had loaded their gear and left.

The backup singer is named Ari and she is a GREAT songwriter. Freakwater or even Cowboy Junkies grade hypnotic retro-psychedelic music. She wore 3 blonde braids, a low cut black velvet dress and a black animal-fur hat with ears like a cat (o rmaybe ears like a skunk).  She and her sweetie Dennis(?) who is the bass player in RAMONA, have another band with the same drummer (Pat) called "Hoarhound" and they played the break between Ramona's sets.Pat is a brilliant and inspired trap drum player who listens in a way I have to describe as "savagely" - I sat right next to him while he played - sat almost climbed inside the drum kit,  fascinated by the sounds. No ear protection required. Proved that people don't automatically become total unredeemable idiots or go deaf just because they buy a set of drums, even if John Lester did.

Guitar player had a Princeton Reverb with a Matchless tube pedal for the frontend - a HUGE rich thick sound that was never loud at all.Ari and Dennis(?) stayed after the others left, and we were just sitting around talking about recording tools and tube amps and old 6SC7 and 6SN7 preamps and listening to my CD of the improvised Jazz piano-guitar duets that Emanuel and I recorded there last spring.

And we were almost ready to call it a night and go home when a very beautiful and somewhat agitated young woman (who it turns outis one of the screenwriters and is named Tracy) walked in looking for solace, distraction, a back-crack, and some generally calming entertainment. Ari and I agreed immediately that she really did appear to need us to provideher with comfort and "grounding"  - and Mark was not through shutting it down -so we played some songs for her,  like song-circle, but a little different - we tried singing together on each others songs immediately - each of us singing on songs we had never even heard before.  It was very good and Tracy joined us and we became the backup singers for Ari.  Within half an hour, the majority of the film crew was in the club with us and we were their band, passing guitars around and swapping songs for the next few hours - some of the actors even got into the act and sangwith us or tossed in songs.

Ari really inspired me to get serious.  I think I am finally ready to make my lyrics into songs