Donkey Dispatch #2
The weather sucks lately, huh
Happy Pride. I’m at home by myself on a Saturday, finally, and I can’t think of anything to do with myself other than chores. So naturally, here I am sitting at my desk with no plan whatsoever. Thankfully in place of a plan I have some news; I’ve spent the last week trying to contrive some kind of cutesy frame I could use to make reading this more appealing, but in the end I can’t think of any worse crime than to impersonate myself, so here we go.
The Donkey Show at Five Iron is going weekly starting June 15th, 2024. This is really the one piece of information I need you to leave this webpage with. Mike tells me that starting in June there’s going to be a pool table and drink prices are going way the fuck down. And as far as the entertainment goes, your girl Mira has the run of the place from 8pm to close. I will make absolutely certain to update this newsletter at least once a month to announce the coming month’s schedule.
Speaking of which, it’s June the 1st, so let’s run down what is in store for the Donkey Show this month:
June 15th - DONKEY SHINE! (Mira’s monthly residency. More on this below) w/ guests Please Use Other Door
June 22nd - Marc Ellason Band, Krispin, no1city, Rio the Bear
June 29th - Nedy Johnson, Elliott Austin, Ryan Thousand, secondplacetheory (OR), hosted by Xylo
I took the first two weekends in June off to 1) give me more time to find bands and 2) not have to be absent for my first two shows because of gigs I already had planned.
I won’t lie, this level of responsibility is uncomfortable. But here’s why it’s worth it to me (with apologies to readers who already know all this):
All of the door money goes to the bands. Neither I nor the bar take a cut. (Disclosure: there will be at least one tip jar, for the evening’s host, which will usually be me.)
The shows are all ages. This does entail a certain level of responsibility on the part of artists and attendees. But the Donkey Show is for everyone
I can book whomever the hell I want. The other two bullet points above put me in a unique position to put on shows that will potentially have a range of effects on their audiences. I am not interested in representing what the community likes so much as what the community is doing. I want to represent the process of the community recognizing itself more than the current state of their product. All to say, I won’t be matching artists based on overlapping criteria like “genre” or position in the pecking order; no one “headlines” the Donkey Show. You won’t be guaranteed to enjoy every moment of it. You’re going to love it, trust me.
For (somewhat) more frequent updates on the Donkey Show, be sure to follow the Instagram account.
(Author’s note: Eric Dolphy, maybe not the best choice of music for trying to organize and communicate lots of information. We press on.)
Oh yeah, what the hell is Donkey Shine!?
I am not denying myself the privilege of my position: one Saturday a month will be reserved for what I’m calling my “residency,” a show called Donkey Shine!
The plan for this show is to focus in on one band who is at some kind of a juncture in their career - released something recently, about to go on tour, just started playing live, etc. - and to feature them in a format more akin to a late night talk or variety show than a traditional rock show. As the host, my model for this sort of thing is Jools Holland; the performances he hosted on his show Later were absolutely the peak of ambition for me as a musician.
The point is, I (along with whomever among the constellation of iffin is available) will play, and the band will play, but there will also be a sort of freeform interview component as well. What I want to accomplish is a means of building a personal relationship between the band and the audience in a way that circumvents social media, that even circumvents the whole framework of “stage banter,” and to generally make a case for why we’re all actually doing this. And then maybe at the end I can sit in on a tune with them, because I just think it would be really fun to do that.
The first guests for what we could call the “pilot” performance of this concept will be Please Use Other Door. They are recent veterans of the Donkey Show, and I won’t pretend that I don’t know them well personally too. They did just release an album that is pretty kickass. Seeing as they are also among the first to offer their help as general volunteers for the Donkey Show, it’s likely that you’ll be seeing a lot of them anyway, and I promise you won’t regret becoming familiar with them. That’s June 15th at Five Iron in Capitol Hill. And then every Saturday afterwards, forever. Let’s fuckin’ do it.
I’m tired now, so here’s the other stuff Mira’s got going on in June:
Tonight, June 1st, I’ll be playing at the new Kraken with Rat Paws, along with Option B and Ol’ Doris, who are celebrating the release of a new tape. I still haven’t been inside this place yet, so I’m very excited for this one.
Next Saturday, June 8th, iffin is playing their first show in Everett at Black Lab Gallery, along with Laser Beam and Rather Ordinary Dudes supporting Portland, OR’s Jade Peter on tour. I’ve wanted to play at this place forever. Shit, this is gonna be a good month for me.
Saturday, June 29th iffin will be in Portland at the Sarah Douglass Home for Something Something Something I Can Never Remember, along with some other bands that I haven’t heard about yet. This one is going to be awesome; I love their neighbors.
See you at the Kraken, kids!
Miss Mira