My Unemployment: A World Beyond Work

What I did after I quit

chelsmc — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:29:57 +0000

Nothing like my Mom's Honda for getting out of town

I quit my job on Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, I was winding my way over Mount Hood in easy summer sunshine, singing along to Scott Biram and John Mellencamp. I had no clear destination, just an eastward inclination to land somewhere hot and dry and far away from the city. In the trunk I kept a tent, a piece of foam, guitar, and a cooler fully stocked with pasta salad, cheap beer and Irish Whiskey. Vision Quest was on!

Attitude Adjustment

chelsmc — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:06:55 +0000

About a month ago I started yet another restaurant job in a long line of restaurant jobs stretching back 12 years. It annoyed me more than most; disorganization, bitchy management, the feeling of always being watched and judged. My schedule changed every week. After being demoted to lunches for an entire week, I was taken aside and given a talk that went like this:

“Your schedule change is a direct result of your attitude.”

“Um, could you be more specific?”

“Not really. It’s nothing that you say or do, it’s mostly the expression on your face.”

“Oh.” (Insert facial expression here).

After much soul searching, I decided to do what I have often fantasized about doing: not go to work anymore. Effective immediately. I wore a bikini when I picked up my paycheck the next day, and suddenly I noticed how very tired and demoralized everyone in the restaurant looked. Apart from me.

So I find myself, at the age of 30, joining the ranks of the unemployed…and loving every second of it.

Acknowledgments

chelsmc — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:40:35 +0000

It’s the old end of the trip feeling. Our posse has disbanded: Adam flown back up north to Auckland, Hannah’s gone south to see her mum, Max went on a date two days ago and hasn’t shown his face since…

I’m flying back to America tomorrow which seems crazy and sad. There have been so many people that have helped us on this trip, given us beds, food, time, company. I should be sending out thank you cards with giant kisses and checks enclosed, but instead I’ll just do my acknowledgements here and hope I get the chance to repay everybody somewhere down the road. Here goes:

THANK YOU

To Ben and Tim for donating your studio time, home brew, and impeccable taste to our little e.p.
To The Wunderbar and its lovely staff for all the nice bar tabs and shows
To Fleur for the most delicious seafood of my whole life
To the middle aged couple in Dunedin who put us up in their beautiful house and fed us homemade bread.
To the staff at Milford Sound who provided us with free whiskey and cruises.
To John, Niki, and Mel for putting up with us in Lyttleton and letting us crash for more nights than I can count.
To the Broken Heartbreakers (Rachel and John) for making us feel so welcome in the big city.
To Nate, Cam and the rest for letting about 8 people camp out in their basement.
To Muzza and the nice folks at the Red Cliffs cafe for tasty food, heaps of drinks and beds at the end.
To Mikey for sorting our sound out and lending his sweet viola stylings to our little project.
To Kelly and The Captain for showing us the ropes in Taranaki and planning our road trip to Kawhia which was even more beautiful and fish-and-chip-ilicious than I imagined.
To Rosie for lending us shed space, and Emily for the fuzzy blanket, that we will definitely return.
To Rowan at the Wine Cellar for having such a wicked space and putting time into the sound.
To Siggy at Aunt Daisies for those icy buckets of beer.
To James Shanks for airport pickups, workspace, car loans and general helpfulness all the time.
To Hannah Harding for cracking me up on a daily basis
To everybody that came to shows and listened and gave us so much support even though we are total amateurs and drunks. Also everyone that was just fucking rad to hang out with–you know who you are
And most of all to Jess Shanks and Adam McGrath for bringing us to New Zealand and letting us be a part of what you do. Love you guys…

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you

Thank you so

Will Play for Tuna…

chelsmc — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:18:57 +0000

We just spent three days in a bach on the Coromandel Peninsula, drinking copious amounts of beer, swimming in the blue blue sea, eating meals cobbled together from old rice, and of course, playing string band. String band formed months ago when we realized we had four musicians, two banjos, a mandolin, a guitar, and a bass. The rules of stringband are: no more than four chords per song and everybody gets to play. It’s magical…

Yesterday after a long, unproductive, intoxicated stringband session by the beach, the owner of the local cafe/gallery wanders by and makes us an offer we can’t refuse–fresh tuna in exchange for our stringband stylings. Sounds like a good idea, but little do we know that the locals will come out bearing hand drums and out of tune guitars, the cafe won’t have any alcohol, and string band will descend into anarchy.

Sitting Room Interview/ Naked Bass Playing

chelsmc — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:48:13 +0000

http://vimeo.com/3702407

where am i/where am i going?

chelsmc — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:44:28 +0000

Before anything stops, we are back in the cars, loaded with instruments, leaving christchurch with black coffee and bagels, coaxing the little white car over winding hills to make the Wellington ferry. Delaney Davidson of Delaney Davidson and his Ghost Orchestra has come along and narrates the drive from the front seat while Max and I take turns sleeping and spooning his guitar in the back.

delaney's cross face

Aunt Daisies is the most adorable cafe on earth, part beach shack, part venue, part fifties diner. The owner Siggy is one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve met…

on the roof...

And now we’re leaving Wellington, on the home stretch. Traveling is hard work. For the last two months I’ve had a minimum of two other people in the room with me at all times. You spend hours in smelly cars and dark bars. Sometimes you have to fight to reach a cup of coffee in the morning. Hearts area broken, tears are shed and everyone, at some point or another vomits on the side of the road. I love it. But it’s almost over and I want it to somehow make sense in the big scheme of things. I guess it’s the same question as always. Why does anyone do anything? Why do we feel the urge to take to the road, leaving behind everything comfortable and known?

If you know the answer, please let me know. There are four other things happening in the room right now and I find it hard to focus.

Chelsea Motel Makes A Record

chelsmc — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:44:45 +0000

In lieu of paying the studio, Max has arranged to dance naked with his oil can bass on video (to be posted here soon.) No, really this happened. First Ben says, “Max, you wouldn’t be fucking up the mandolin part so bad if you took your shirt off…then things just snowballed from there. I thought for a second that the underwear would stay on for modesty’s sake. But they didn’t. Anything for art…

Staring down the barrel of a gun

chelsmc — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:33:58 +0000

Comments after our show last night:

“Wow, it’s really…different”

“I’ve never seen you make so many disturbing faces.”

“I like your weird instruments.”

“That was haunting”

Mostly it was because the woman who played before us was so sensitive and beautiful-singing and totally adverse to writing any endings to her songs that max and I got really fired up and decided to crush her with with o ur weirdness.

Rock me mama like a…

chelsmc — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:38:40 +0000

Das and Hannah on stage with Old Crow Medicine Show

So, there’s this thing with The Eastern, where Adam likes to close every show by making everyone stand on the floor and acoustically sing “Wagon Wheel.” It’s extremely embarassing but people tend to love it. So how fucking awesome was it when Das and Hannah sang Wagon Wheel with Old Crow Medicine Show to a packed, sweaty, cheering crowd of 700 people? Pretty awesome. But not quite as awesome as the part where Ben the Sound Guy decided that the whole band needed to join Old Crow on stage and started shoving people out, saying “they’re ready for you, they want you to play this song.” Nevermind that they were in the middle of a song and looked totally bewildered as to why there were suddenly six extra people on stage. Nevermind that the Eastern didn’t have any instruments or really even know the song. They just started feverishly dancing, clapping and stomping around, apart from max who was just kind of bobbing and trying to inch towards the back of the stage. It was probably my favorite live show moment of my entire life. Loved it!

The Eastern killing it in Auckland

The other reason that Ben is my new hero is that he got so fucked off that there was no beer provided that he found a secret basement room full of beer that he referred to as El Dorado and proceeded to take as much beer as we could drink. Thanks Ben!

Now we are trying to quickly recover from several days and nights of debauchery and airplanes and go to The Eastern cd release show. I’m really not used to this amount of hard living. I’m feeling quite old and broken and would much prefer to drink a few cups of tea and watch The Golden Girls or something.

Max in all his glory

The clouds have broken…

chelsmc — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:53:01 +0000

I really love playing music. It’s easy to forget when faced with the prospect of a room full of people who will either a) sit quietly and stare at you while you bare your soul or b) talk loudly and ignore you while you bare your soul. I’ve always kind of made up songs and sung them on porches to appreciative drunken audiences (you know who you are) and that was enough for me. Now there are all kinds of new elements and it’s getting really interesting. My callouses are growing callouses. Sometimes I play an oil can bass and sing in a creepy voice with a vaguely English accent. I have learned that playing rhythm guitar is actually really hard. I am learning to sing into a microphone. Last night we adopted a viola player for our gig at the Wunderbar and it completely changed the texture of the songs and filled up a whole different layer of sound. Fucking exciting. Yeah, I really love music…

Now Max and I are flying to Auckland. The Eastern are opening for Old Crow Medicine Show (!!) and Max is their new mandolin player. Should be epic…

lyttleton harbour from the timeball