It’s interesting to me what we consider important enough to keep in our backpacks and bags. What are our motivations? How much of it is superstitious–or even talismanic? Where does our subconscious think we’re going? What are we preparing for–and what are we prepared for?

I like inanimate objects that tell stories and what we choose to carry with us can tell us who we are, our sum and measure. (It can also be totally meaningless. Depends on the case.)

For the first part in a new series here at the Asthmatic Kitty Sidebar, this is my travel bag. It’s an old mini Samsonite, one strap, dark blue fake leather, about a foot and a half tall and a foot wide. I have no idea where it came from but I know I didn’t buy it in a store.

If you look close enough you’ll see “ADAM GNADE” written in all-caps Sharpie and, closer still, a drawing of a charm for warding off demons that I found in a book on symbology.

This bag has been all over the country, coast to coast. It’s been on a lot of train trips and a lot of tours and it has crossed a lot of borders.

Here’s what’s inside…

Copy of The New Yorker (latest issue, from subscription)

Composition notebook with “Property of GLENN DANZIG” written on it in all-caps

Pentacle hardback writing notebook

American Scholar Steno Book notebook, green tint, gregg-ruled

Slingshot organizer with “ADAM GNADE” sticker left over from tour merch box

Paperback copy of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Card-stock Dutch Boy paint sample (saved because the color is inexplicably called “Go Away”)

No-name tape walkman with headphones (bought at truckstop in Utah)

Two Will Oldham mix cassettes made for me by Dan Bryant and Connor Kirkwood the night I left Portland

Postcard from my grandparents in La Selva Beach

Unused bar of Dr. Bonner’s Magic Soap (lavender)

Knife with a sailing ship on the handle (bought at Texas roadstop, first US tour)

Unused postcard with Dusty Springfield on the front

Various scraps of paper, notes to self, half piece of paper with unfinished song lyrics–song title, “The Wild Homesick”

Create, Scheme, Remember notebook (made by 1984 Press) used for writing down dialog for stories

Wallet, camouflage, canvas, Velcro with Microcosm Publishing company credit card, three BOA debit cards, Dillion’s Plus Shopper’s Card card, AAA card, expired California driver’s license, keys to storage space in Portland, key to Hard 50 farmhouse, unknown gold key, Chinese money (yi yuan), fortune cookie fortune reading, “Keep your courage up and it will keep you up.”

Battery charger with two AA batteries

Two-prong-to-three-prong plug adapter

Various stolen pens (Ramada Hotel, Hampton Inn, Greyhound/NW Trailways)

Small temperature gauge

Small, round compact mirror (merch from the band The Locust) given away by the band at Locust show/film premier of John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented, Hillcrest Landmark Theater, San Diego

Gloves (gray cotton with skull print)

US passport

2. Waffle House. I rarely feel more American than when I’m at Waffle House getting breakfast at a million o’clock at night. In case you were wondering, when the waitress asks you if you want your hash browns “smothered, covered, or scattered,” the answer is YES. For full immersion go to the one by my place, out on the interstate by the Whisper’s gentleman’s club and the liquor store. Get on the 70, head toward Kansas City, and follow the sounds of ever-lovin’ satisfaction.

3. My friend Megan McIsaac’s photos. You should go check out her photography Tumblr page. She has a new zine out (a split with her friend Renee, pictured below). You can buy it here.

The 1922 Revised Lectionary. Ordered according to the church calendar, yet still comprehensive. “It constitutes one of the many examples of the coherence of the daily office lectionary and the Sunday office lectionary within the comprehensive doctrinal structure of the ecclesiastical year.” (David P. Curry from this essay.)

Veselka. East Village standard.  Great integrity, but not haughty.  Fun.  Their bowl of borscht, with thick butter on challah, is one of the cheapest/best lunches in NYC.

Danny Stiles. He can be caught hit and miss, through static and wind, all over the dial and at odd and movable hours, but always from 8pm-10pm on WNYC 820 AM.  One time he gave me a signed photocopied photograph of himself, as well as a comb with his name on it.

2. Kansas–The new home. Great Plains. The frontier. Good place to write and record songs. Good place to get your head straight. I call the part of Kansas I’m in “the Big Quiet.” It’s like every good country song you’ve ever heard… the wide open spaces, big sky, the no B.S. people, the clear air, clean earth.

3. Stained glass–There’s not enough of it anywhere. Give us more rose windows. Give us more light through stained glass.

1. A jojoba and lavender oil bath with beeswax candles – Baths are the best! Growing up, working class in the UK, we didn’t have a shower, so we had yummy warm splish sploshy baths. Once I moved to North America showering became the new mode of cleaning; they were quicker and faster, pretty much like most things in this culture, but I still love a nice relaxing, steamy bath once in a while. Jojoba, a lovely carrier for essential oils, is a great moisturizer and lavender is a calming fragrance. Beeswax candlelight is super cozy; it also improves indoor air quality, because as it burns it produces negative ions that have air purifying effects, much the same as some houseplants.

2. Pomegranate green tea – This is my go to tea during the winter months. I also enjoy it chilled with ice and honey in the summer. Both pomegranates and green tea contain antioxidants, and have a brilliantly refreshing taste alone and more so when combined.

3. A bottle of Jackson Triggs Delaine Vineyard, Riesling (06) – One of my favorite rieslings from Ontario under $20. This wine is a golden wheat color, has medium body, and sports the flavor of apricots and peach with slight petrol notes. Sounds gross, but tastes delicious!

4. A cup of Casi Cielo coffee and mini almond biscotti – Yeah, it’s a Starschmucks coffee… but it’s not acidic (most of their coffees give me gut rot!) and only comes out for a limited time in the winter months. It tastes like coco and blackberries and it’s smooth and mild. “Casi Cielo” means “Almost Heaven,” ’nuff said.

5. A snuggle with my coon hound/beagle cross – Brooklyn is my 2.5 year old dog. She’s energetic, mischievous, stubborn as all hell (just like her owner!) and is a super-duper suck, a 40lb ginger furred beauty with big, floppy ears  that are as soft as velvet. This dog is awesome. I’ve had her since she was seven weeks old and love her to bits!

1. My Wife: Who says running away to Vegas and getting married doesn’t work?!

2. Winter Olympics: Every four years, I end my patient wait to pour a glass of wine after a long night of studying or working to be blown away by a rebroadcast of the day’s snowboarding, speed skating, or cross country skiing until the wee hours of the morning.

3. When My Friends Become Successful: The past year or two has seen some hard working friends of mine get to the next level. It warms my heart.

4. Going Away to Spain on Holiday: Okay, it never happens, but… I love the thought of it.

5. The Echo Lab: I’ve recorded two albums there with Shiny Around the Edges and it is like being on vacation with the most awesome recording studio at your disposal. Tucked into the rolling horse country of Argyle, Texas, you can grill, shoot BB guns, enjoy a cocktail or two, engage fireworks, and have Matthew J. Barnhart tell you the story of what it’s like to try and transport lobster from Maine to Texas in a van while on tour in the middle of summer.

6. Huevos Rancheros: I could eat this everyday.

7. Recent Jam: Florene’s “Deal With It.” Our former rehearsal space mates released this jam on a new Waaga Records compilation. Like a lost Jean Michel Jarre track from the Oxygene sessions.

8. Intelligence: Canadian television never lets me down. This series inexplicably lasted for only two years. It utilized many of the actors from the Da Vinci’s Inquest series and a handful of X-Files regulars — as is the case with most Vancouver-based shows. My wife and I love this show and still talk about the characters on occasion. Unfortunately, despite strong fan support, it hasn’t been brought back for more seasons.

9. Temporary Art in Temporary Spaces: The urban landscape ebbs and flows in rhythm with capitalist accumulation. Why not allow local artists to have a voice and create temporary cultural spaces for the community?

10. Denton, Texas: It’s the small, Texas town full of music that your mother warned you about.

I am in a band with my wife, Jenny. She is a Ph.D. fellow studying the history of borderlands, bakes a mean apple pie, and was born on the same day as Willie Nelson. As Shiny Around the Edges, we enjoy making music together and occasionally have a chance to collaborate on things non-musical because of the band. The kind folks at Popshifter asked what our “Top 10″ list was for 2009. We hadn’t even thought about this throughout the year, but had a good time putting a list together late one evening over a glass of wine. It should be noted that we would have had our bassist Kerm contribute, but he was on a vision quest exploring his roots in beautifully sparse west Texas. The resulting list is what my wife and I have listened to, watched, and read throughout the year that made an indelible impression. It is either hopelessly out-of-date or incredibly prescient depending on your personal politics. In no particular order:

1. Emma Goldman: Living My Life

A two-volume autobiography penned by one of the leaders of the anarchist movement of the 1900s. Exploring Emma Goldman’s life story is a first-hand look at anarchism, feminism, Marxism, and more in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. This is a great read and helps one understand from where much of modern counter-culture has originated. It is well written and full of wit and insight into the United States and Russia at the dawning of modernism.

2. Frank Sinatra with Antonio Carlos Jobim: Sinatra & Company

A forgotten masterpiece (and out of print in the United States) that is filled with standards like “Bein’ Green” along with bilingual gems such as “Drinking Water (Agua De Beber).” Like all of Sinatra’s albums, the arrangements are superb. Hearing Sinatra and Jobim collaborate is worth the effort to find the vinyl used or order the import CD. I believe it might also now be available digitally.

3. Dust Congress: Regurgitate Sunshine State

Broken down folk with marimba and trumpet from Denton, Texas. They live up the street from us and we never tire of hearing Nick Foreman’s contemplative wail while the notes supporting him waver and stumble in a beautiful procession. The 12″ vinyl is also worthy of coffee table display.

4. Mad Men, Seasons I & II

What started as a deft, retro look at the time when media and commerce began to intersect is now one of the darkest commentaries on the beginning of the end of modernism.

5. Castanets: Texas Rose, The Thaw, & the Beasts

We always enjoy hearing Ray’s new songs and this album is the perfect marriage between Rafter’s production skills and Ray’s songwriting: a sonic voyage greater than the sum of its substantial parts.

6. Leonie Sandercock: Cosmopolis II

This book looks at the questions urban planners will have to answer in a time of hypermobile global population shifts. The speed and diversity of immigration is creating neighborhoods, cities, and countries that are hybrids demanding new approaches to planning.

7. Sonic Youth: Confusion Is Sex

This is on our list every year, with good reason.

8. Russian Ark

Unbelievably (and spectacularly), this film is one entire shot from beginning to end. It takes the viewer through 33 rooms of what is now Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, involved literally a cast of thousands, and details events in Russian history in a non-linear way. The narrators are ghostly presences slipping between observation and interaction with a disquieting ease. The resulting effect is dreamlike.

9. Michel Foucault: History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction

A philosophical staple that crosses academic disciplines, this book offers a new way of thinking about sexuality, knowledge, and power and the ways they are created and transmitted.

10. Black Sabbath: Paranoid

Our elderly VW Golf’s CD player stopped working at the beginning of the year. Inexplicably, this cassette made its way into our car and we have been revisiting it throughout the year. Our recently recorded collection of songs reflects this to some degree.

This is my to-read list…

Imperial, William T. Vollman
With fiction, I write about where I grew up and, because of that, I do a lot of reading within the region. Narrowing the focus even further, Vollman’s Imperial is 1,300 pages on a single county in my hometown. I’d say that makes it essential.

Ulysses, James Joyce
I’m actually on this one already. Halfway through. People talk a lot about Ulysses being dense and referential to the point of unreadability but I think I must’ve just found it at the right time in my life. I get this book. It’s funny, engaging, and it hits you with some truth that’s hard to miss. Over the course of 900,000 pages we follow Leopold Bloom through one day in 1904 Dublin. But it’s more than that. It’s life; a big, struggling, wormy, steaming, scary, laughing, vomiting chunk of it.

Black Spring, Henry Miller
I started Black Spring a few years ago and thought it was crazy, unintelligible B.S. This was before I’d read any Miller and a book like this is not a good gateway. You need to read the lighter stuff first, the Tropics, maybe the Rosy Crucifixion. But now, just a few years later, Miller’s my guy. I’m ready.

The Reivers, William Faulkner
Same as above. This was the first Faulkner I read. Story of three thieves and a car. Not a lot of payoff. Very Southern and dry. Didn’t feel it. Then, this summer, a friend gave me Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, and his style suddenly made sense. Now I’m down for a reread.

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Moby-Dick is no simple man versus whale story. Melville’s greatest is a wordy, complex, labyrinthine piece of experimental prose. To think this was published and read when it was blows my mind. Where were people’s heads at back when this was released? Definitely not where they are now. Maybe we’ve hit a sagging point in culture–or maybe the collective consciousness doesn’t need books like this anymore. Whatever it is, no agent in their right mind would pick this up in 2009. And that’s a shame.

So there’s my list. None of these are easy books but they’re worth your time. Dig in. Hunker down. Here come the dark months…

This winter wasn’t so bad, but it was long and it was gray and it’s nice to see the sun again.

So in that spirit, here’s a list of some great things to do and check out in the Greatest Season.

1. Chesapeake by James Michener. More than 300 years of life along the Chesapeake Bay. Good thing to sit outside with and feel the sun while you go deep into some historical fiction.

2. 40s. Winter for me was all dark, dark red wine. It’s spring so I’m starting it off with a big bruiser like the one in the photo below.

40 on the dead Xmas tree for winter

3. Haircut. Give yourself one. Clear-cut your skull and nurture some new-growth forest. (Same goes for your face. How long have you had that beard? Do you even remember what your face looks like Will you look like your dad when you shave it off? Facial hair will always grow back; it’s good like that. Check in with your real face.)

4. “The Gentlest Gentleman” by My Brightest Diamond. Been listening to this on repeat. The MOKB version.

5. Make Your Place by Raleigh Briggs. DIY home-life book. (“Affordable sustainable nesting skills,” says the front cover.) Build a compost heap, make a planting bed, mix up a tincture, beat the Great Depression #II blues.

6. Ditch the bummer music. Look for these HI-NRG positive vibes punks: White Fang. Their album on Marriage Records is called Pure Evil and it’s a party straight through. Especially the track “Green Beanz.” When I hear Erik sing, “I will sing until the day I die/yes, I will sing until the day I die” I’m, like, “YES YES YES.”

Erik from White Fang celebrates t-shirt weather

7. Potatoes. Hardly anyone I know has a real job these days and we’re all looking for new ways to get through the same ol’ hard times. Potatoes. They’re cheap, filling, nutritious, and you can add a couple bucks worth of fresh vegetables and make a feast for 10. Last night I collected everybody’s spare change and bought a bag of 30 russet potatoes for $1.79. I added a handful of spinach, two cloves of garlic, and two tomatoes and fried up a massive supper for a bunch of really hungry people.

8. Fresh ginger. Clears your head. Heats up your chest. Easy to shoplift from mega chain stores. Go spring-clean your body.

9. Foxfire book series. Collected Appalachian folk-wisdom, ancient DIY tricks, and general cheap-living how-to’s handed down by people who were alive during the Civil War. Read up on haint and snake lore; build your own dulcimer; learn to keep bees; make soap, etc. First five books (1972-’79) are the best.

Foxfire, holy Foxfire

10. Anything by Frederick Douglass. Pure reason and calm-minded eloquence from a time in American history that was anything BUT. Start off the season with a big hot flashlight of genius (1818-1895) that’ll illuminate everything in your path.

Oh, and go outside.

1. John Coltrane and Merzbow, Live at Pompeii (enough said on this)

2. Syd Barrett, Oranges and Animals (wherein Syd is backed by Animal Collective)

3. Frank Zappa plays Erik Satie (shockingly beautiful)

4. The Band, Music from Big Pink Revisited (featuring all the original members–not a simple walk through of those old gems but a re-envisioning)

5. Sufjan Stevens, Such an America as This (songs based on newly rediscovered lyrics and occasional fragments penned by Stephen Foster)

6. Neil Young, Grasslanders (in the mode of Harvest and After the Gold Rush but with some guts like it used to be)

7. Chris Watson, Feathers, Fowl, Fog (near soundless field recordings by Watson of fog, night air, and the movements of individual feathers against each other using recording techniques mysterious and unknown)

8. Lou Reed with XTC, President Kill (I can’t even explain why I want to hear this but I do)

9. The Big Bang and the Core (a field recording of the center of the earth, recorded in super high definition surround–it’s as if you’re right there in the molten core; packaged as a double disc with a field recording of the big bang; o.k. now I’m just being silly)

10. John Lennon, Stoned and Rolled (a previously unknown recording of songs John Lennon wrote with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and then recorded with the Rolling Stones circa 1976)

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

www.christiankiefer.com