Welcome to Part 2 of my interview with Davy Rothbart from Found Magazine. In the first part, Davy talks about the cover of his new book, being on the road, and what happens at a normal Found show. Today, Davy talks about how he gets into performance mode, passion, Rise Against, and his new book, Requiem for a Paper Bag. The Boston area Found show is Saturday, May 9 in Union Square, Somerville at Precinct.

You were talking about how you get a little bit rambunctious and try to read the notes with the energy with which they were written. Some actors and athletes and musicians try to figure out a way to get into a zone when they're performing and I'm wondering do you have a 'Davy Rothbart Found Magazine Mode' or can you just go from sitting shotgun to jumping up on stage and doing your thing?

Well...I gotta give props to the wonderdrug, alcohol. It's not like it's a different person or anything. I mean, on the road all those years with musicians, I'm sure you saw that transformation and how different people pulled it off. I like to think I could be that energetic without it, but I think that, you know, you probably slept like three hours the night before and you probably slept on the side of the road and then you drove seven hours, so you need something almost just to bring you to life. I don't know, I love alcohol and fortunately I've always had a pretty good relationship with it. I can drink it every night for two months on the road and come off the road and not need to hit the bottle. But I love Maker's Mark whiskey, I like a couple beers to sip along side of it. My friend Andrew, he's come on the road with us a couple times. [Laughing] We were doing these shows with Frank Warren from PostSecret, another community art project along the lines of Found. And Frank was like, 'Let me see what all your pre-show rituals are,' before the first show we did together. Andy was like, 'Alright, Davy' and I kind of stood there like, imagine a robot that was turned off, you know, limp limp, and my head was bent down. He took the Maker's Mark bottle and poured it down a hatch in my back. And as he plugged it in, like you would fill a lawnmower with gasoline, I kind of came to life. [Garbled energized robot talking about Found Magazine].

Anyway, to me, besides alcohol, it's also the content of the notes. To me, their pretty breathtaking. And profound and hilarious. I do find if I can just inhabit the emotion of the note. I might have read the same note the day before, but if I just actually think about what the person is saying and what they were probably feeling when they wrote that note and I just read it with that emotion then I find that's bringing it to life in a really energetic way that's real to people because it's true. So I think you don't really need alcohol, ultimately. Even just reading the Found stuff that gets mailed in everyday when you read these notes, you find yourself tearing up or laughing out loud. Getting to connect and touch somebody so closely, another human, and sort of be inside their mind and their heart. I think ultimately when I'm reading them during and an event it's the same kind of thing. I try to be really present with that item, that note, and the person that wrote it.

So basically what I'm getting from this is that as long as you have one note and a full-length mirror into which you can scream naked you'll be all set?

Yeah, exactly, that's pretty much the way I rock it. [Laughter]
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Davy Rothbart and the Magazine crew have a new book called Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World coming out on May 5. To celebrate that, Davy and his brother Peter have set out on a tour of the nation (The Boston area stop will be Saturday, May 9 in Union Square, Somerville at Precinct).

To celebrate THAT, I had a conversation with Davy, about, among other things, touring, getting into character, getting old, and, well, Isiah Thomas. The interview ran a little long so I split it up into 3 parts. Here's Part 2, and Part 3 is coming tomorrow.


Jumping right into it...

I saw the cover, it's a little bit different than your other ones, huh?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. This guy Michael Wartella. He's an artist in Brooklyn. I'd seen some of his stuff in the Village Voice, some of his street scenes. It seemed awesome if we could get him. I didn't know if he'd be able to pull it off as brilliantly as he ended up doing. But I thought it would be awesome to have a street scene having the authors in the book finding whatever it is they talk about in their story.

Did you have an idea for the cover before you found the artist?

No. I think I just saw his work and I wanted to do something different than some of the other covers. I don't know. It just occurred to me that we could have the authors of the book out on the street finding shit. I'm looking at it now. It's so fucking good. I'm really happy with it. I hope the inside's good, too. I like the pieces, I think it's a solid book. You know, when we're out on tour, we end up sleeping in the van a lot of nights. There's two beds. One is the backseat folding down and the other is the stacks of boxes and magazines. You literally end up sleeping on the books, that's your bed. So it helps if you like the book and like the cover.

Sweet dreams, right?

Exactly.

I was a tour manager for six years, so we ended up sleeping on the floor of the van a lot of times.

Yeah, it's not bad, right?

I mean, a couch is better.

Hold on, my brother's calling in. Let me just tell him I'll call him right back.

Sure.

Did you guys tour mostly in the US? Did you have a good time?

Yeah, I haven't done it in a couple years and now I feel like I'm at a place where I hated it when I was doing it, but I wish I could do it again.

God... I know that feeling all too well, that push and pull. Because it is so grueling and difficult and it can be frustrating and just exhausting. And yet the grass is greener. Being home and comfortable is so appealing. And then there's the call of the road again. I often am like 'Alright this is the last big tour for a long time.' This has been the longest lay off. We haven't done a US tour in a year and a half, two years. But then it's hard not to get that itch again, right?

Definitely. I guess my suggestion to you would be don't ever quit.

Really? That's cool to hear that. I think there's something else which is to not do it quite as often.

The bigger you get, the more comfortably you can do it, right? So maybe in a couple years you guys will be in a tour bus and you'll forget all about this conversation.

Haha. Yeah, maybe, the ceiling for literary tours is... well, that's not true. David Sedaris is an aquaintance of mine and he lives pretty well on the road.

Is this the biggest tour you've done?

Actually, this might be the second biggest or third biggest. In 2004 when the first Found book came out, we realized there were finds from every state so we thought it was only fair to take the show on the road. That tour was 136 cities over 8 months in all 50 states, so that thing was a beast. It was a lot of fun. I just love the unpredictability, you know? Of every night not really knowing what's going to happen, where you'll end up sleeping that night. As you said, sofas are better than the floor of the van. But maybe you'll end up, some dude has a grandmother who has a mansion 20 miles outside, oh, Albuquerque.

We stayed there.

Or maybe you end up sleeping on hammocks in Florida in the jungle. Yeah, I do love it. That was the biggest tour, this is the second biggest tour. Other than the 50 state tour. This is 56 cities, it keeps growing, we keep adding little cities here and there. So I think it's 56 cities in 62 days.

Right, so this is cake compared to the first one.

Well... yeah. I'd say, that one went on and on, but it was pretty magical to go to all 50 states. There was 3 states I hadn't been to before that tour, Hawaii, Alaska, and North Dakota. So it was awesome to visit those places. It was a good trip. This is only the hits.

Big cities, huh?

The thing that I kind of love, even on this tour, we've sprinkled a few cities... I always like going to cities we've never been to before. And some of them are cities I've never visited or even driven through, like Knoxville, TN, I'm excited about that one. What else do we have? Little Rock, Arkansas. Wichita, Kansas. I like visiting some of those places. I love some of the shows that only have 20 people in some small ass town, but on the other hand it's nice to know most nights we'll have pretty good shows this trip because it's only the hits.


What's a normal Found show like. Or is there a normal?

In terms of what happens at a Found show? It's basically about an hour long, sort of rowdy reading and music show. I get up there with a big stack of my favorite notes and letter that people have found and sent into us over the years - or maybe it's an hour and a quarter - so I have these found notes and I read them out loud, but I end up getting a little bit carried away. I read them with the energy and emotion they were written with. I get a little rambunctious. My brother Peter has written songs based on some of the found notes. And his songs are really pretty and some of them are fucking hilarious. He's got this one song, in my mind, it's the highlight of the show. At least it's my favorite moment of the show when he plays this song. Someone one had found this cassette tape in a town called Ypsilanti, Michigan. It's these kids, they had written these homemade booty rap anthems. So Peter wrote a cover of one of these songs. I mean the songs are pretty horrible, but Peter wrote a cover of one of the songs called, "The Booty Don't Stop." And it's fucking brilliant. It's amazing.

I'm looking forward to that one.

It's a beautiful thing.

(The Found Tour hits Boston on May 9th at Precinct in Union Square. Requiem for a Paper Bag comes out on May 5. Come back tomorrow for the 2nd part of this 3 part interview.)

Exciting news as Open Bicycle celebrates it's Grand Opening tomorrow with deals, demonstrations, and parties. Open Bicycle is about an inch outside of Union Square, and even better, about 300 feet from my house, on Washington and Hawkins. They join Metro Pedal Power (even closer to me) and The Dutch Bicycle Company as the newest members of what bike aficionados should (but probably don't) call Bike Mile. You know, like Auto Mile?

The Bicycle Exchange, Broadway Bicycle School, ATA Cycle, Park Sales, Ace Wheelworks, and Paramount Bicycle, Cambridge Bicycle Shop, and the 3 shops above, are all jammed into a little Cambridge/Somerville corridor making it possible to visit all of them in one swoop if you're so inclined.

Also, check out this 4K word Boston Globe article about whether Boston is ready to become a first class city for biking. We are.

I don't know how to reconcile this Boston Globe article naming Somerville the 'Top Spot to Live' for hipsters with this Somerville real estate description saying, for the past 15 years the “hip” and the “unhip” have flocked to its squares". I think of the quotes around hip and unhip as air quotes, which is fun.

If I'm reading this EOT report correctly, there will be a bike path from Bedford right into downtown Boston. Is that something you might be interested in?

(Via Universal Hub and STEP)

A chance encounter hipped me to the fact that it was four years ago yesterday that Hargo built The Somerville Gates. At which point, the internet went crazy and 4 million people looked at The Somerville Gates' website in a week. The site had to be taken down to cool the viral internet's greedy bandwidth needs, but the entire installation is now happily back online where it should be. More coverage from The Boston Globe, Big RED & Shiny, msnbc.com, The New York Times, and of course Boing Boing.

The Massachusetts legislature is debating a bill to declare an official sandwich. The bill, (H-2932), submitted by Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein (for the second time, actually) is "An Act designating the fluffernutter as the official sandwich of the commonwealth." (Full disclosure: As a resident of Union Square, Somerville, where Fluff was invented, and a lifelong Fluff fan, I wholeheartedly support this bill.)

This got me curious about whether there are other Official State Sandwiches out there. Via FoodTimeline.org, I found that 2 states have sandwiches known as "traditional foods" (Iowa's Loose Meat Sandwich and Nebraska's Runza Sandwich), but this is obviously not the same thing. Even a state in Mexico has an official sandwich (Vera Cruz's Pambazo). Someone suggested, as a joke, that the Oreo become the Official State Sandwich COOKIE of Utah (which doesn't count because it's a cookie and a joke), and in response to the bill being submitted in MA, a Florida radio duo began lobbying Florida to declare a official state sandwich.

Meanwhile, bloggers in Indiana and New Hampshire have previously begun movements agitating for a state sandwich of their own. Delaware's might be the Bobby, but there wasn't anything definitive on the nets, so send me a message if you're in the know and I'll add a link. As far as I can tell, though, the only "Official State Sandwich" out there is Carle’s Bratwurst, the Official State Sandwich of Ohio (recognized as such in a 2006 omnibus bill recognizing 64 other people, places and things as official symbols of Ohio).

Finally, I would be remiss if I neglected to link to the official Marshmallow Fluff Homepage, complete with history, recipes, and fun. Obviously the Fluff Festival as well.

(This post was inspired by my friends at Grand, an awesome shop in Union Square that is celebrating their one year anniversary this weekend. (No Fluff was promised to me for this plug.))

Remember last week when I was telling you about how much the people of Somerville loves Tom Champion. And how they love him so much there's a fan group on Facebook? Cosmo Catalano has remixed the latest snow emergency call into some bumping Tom Champion fanmusic. Just listen to it.

Somerville is a city that LOVES its snow emergencies. We've had a snow emergency for every snow storm this year, during which, you can only park on the odd side of the street. The City LOVES them. Sometimes, they call a snow emergency the morning of the day before a storm. We love our snow emergencies so much, there's even a Facebook Group in appreciation of Tom Champion, the guy who records the snow emergency phone messages. This past week, we even had a cold emergency. There weren't any parking restrictions, but Tom Champion didn't want us going outside unnecessarily.

Except for a couple hours this afternoon, it's been snowing ALL day, and yet no snow emergency. You'll get'em next time, eh, Champs?

4th annual Winter Craft Market outside on the square (where the Farmers Market is) and inside Precinct - lots of jewelery, cards, etc.