TONIGHT!!!!!

9:00 (show starts PROMPTLY @ 9:30–NO BS y’all!!!)
@ FUSE, chapel hill.  next to nightlight.
desark w/
pygmy Lush
old growth
12Xu
ghastly city sleep

this is our last show of tour w/ghastly & pygmy lush.  it’s been a beautiful thing.  i hope you can come out to support this show.  i’m leaving for some trip somewhere to somehow go do something, so this could be our last show for a while.

also on the bill are our wonderful friends 12xu, all the way from france, & old growth from portland (never seen them, but many people in florida are like “whoa, they are sooo my favorite band!”)

people will be playing short sets tonight, so hopefully this thing will not be super crazy for a tuesday night.  all of these bands are on tour…….for whatever that’s worth…………

updated venue info for tour!

finally.  god i’m lazy.  check out the “tour” page!  email desark [at] gmail [dot] com with any questions i will not be able to answer!

“you know the problem with the human body? not enough middle fingers.” -newsom

i’m thinking i will start a charity for those inclined to donate their cold hard cash to something utterly unrighteous.  for instance, my personal transportation needs.

my car is a dead.  well, technically it still runs, but the important thing to know is that i have to get a new car.  and as much as i want to, i’m not gonna sit here & think up some disgusting tasteless metaphor about what it’s like to watch yr partner in crime get kicked off its last leg.  instead, i’m going to do what any other normal depressed person would do: ignore all my phone calls & eat ice cream.

this whole dead car thing puts a real heavy wrench in my, like, “oooeeeee, i’m on a VISIONQUEST!! i am smart & amazing & i tricked the world into letting me quit my job & now i am my own fuckin boss!  i say yes to every show cuz i ain’t gotta ask nooooooooooobody.  me & my little car, we go everywhere.  i say–hey aimée, you wanna play this thing? and i’m like, hell yes, i would, thank you for asking so politely.  BOOY’ALL!!!” plan.  either way, tour starts tomorrow.  it will be a true pain in the ass to get there, but i’ve got tricks.  & the rest of tour is with the band, so it’s vanward bound from that point on.

anyway, shit will get worked.  i believe in magic.  & mostly i just needed to complain a little bit, on the internet, where it’s like you can complain all you want to & nobody is listening.  what a beautiful thing.

RICHMOND SHOW

i left for what was supposed to be a 4 day end-of-summer trip, but the trip just kept on tripping, and the impending cold just kept on colding, and suddenly it’s been three weeks and it’s winter, and it’s raining all the time now, and still all i got is this borrowed bag stuffed with summer clothes and a couple days worth of underwear, a swimsuit and a toothbrush, cold cans of lentil soup, almond butter, apples and a teapot. and at the fall of the sun each night i’m in a parking lot somewhere, digging through the trenches of my car, getting dumped on by the cold cold rain, pulling out any extra layer i can find to keep warm. but this is the life, my favorite life. it is a life whose survival depends on bonfires and blowing up chestnuts on an open fire, a life that finds sustain in shitty seven dollar acoustic guitars and in friends you’ve found over the years, your storytellers.

been on the outskirts of DC practicing tour songs with pygmy lush into the wee hours of the morning, in an unheated shack attached to a chicken coop; when the song ends you can hear the chickens scratching from the other side of the wall, and the sound is a lonely sound and it makes me feel colder somehow. and…ghosts. it’s like chicken ghosts of chickens passed. it’s some seriously creepy stuff.

i realize that we are on flyers all over the city of richmond, for a show that we actually cannot play, and never really could, but somewhere along the way the lines of communications went down and anyway, this shit happens. i’ve gotta be at a wedding in concord NC that day, and my bandmates have to work, but here’s how i’m gonna fix it. i’m going to the wedding, gonna stay just long enough to steal one of the inevitable disposable cameras and take some undertheshirt pictures, and then i’m gonna haul ass to richmond, to play some songs with pygmy lush. couple of my songs that they fixed for me, one of their songs that i’m trying to not ruin, and a cover song. it’ll be just like any other des ark show, i.e. under-practiced, sufficiently winged (anyone know the correct past tense for “winging it”?), short and intense.

new song! “which of you assholes ate christmas!”

never open christmas on somebody’s advent calendar if it’s only december 3rd, i don’t care how drunk you are. it’s a dick move.

here’s a new one featuring Chris & Johnny from Pygmy Lush, from the farmhouse show in Ashburn VA a few weeks back, on the beautiful outdoor stage Mike built, captured by Janelle’s iphone, which she got that day. or something.

pygmy lush & i will be doing a few songs together each night on tour. double the love, double the tears y’aaaaaall.

THE GAINESVILLE FEST…”what’s the deal y’all???!!???”

i thought our Fest show was on Halloween, so before it got moved to Friday (<–deets coming soon, promise!) we took it upon ourselves to document the painstaking process of finding the perfect costumes.  thanks Blacksburg, yr a fun/cheap date.  anyway, whatever, we’re not playing on Halloween anymore, which is fine, except i sort of wish i hadn’t spent an hour of my precious life trying to figure out how to set up a poll on wordpress so that y’all could vote on yr favorite ones…

in upcoming news: DETAILS ON THE NEW RECORD; hilarious/ridiculous backing vocal situations one degree removed from Dethklok; des ark being danced to by a hot mama in radical queer porn (skate videos are cool, but i might actually *watch* this one); scoring documentaries, maybe-ish; what i had for dinner tonight/my friends in richmond are beautiful.

i don’t have time for all that shit right now, because some crazy richmond women are waking my ass up at the crack of dawn to go running.  but for dinner we had stuffed green peppers & they kind of sucked but will definitely rule tomorrow.

get some bulk black eyed peas & throw them in a pot with 3 or 4x the amt of water.  eventually you’ll want to add chopped purple cabbage, mung beans & bragg’s/soy sauce to taste.  maybe a little bit of black pepper.  cook it till mushy.  in a bowl, mix yr concoction together with cooked brown rice, chopped walnuts, fresh sage/thyme/rosemary/basil from emily’s garden, yr mom’s juicy garden ripe tomato, onion, garlic & cat hair…and stuff them into emily’s beautiful green peppers.  bake @ 350 until kendel arrives & you’ve finished the bottle of wine/an episode of true blood/it looks like they will definitely burn if you forget them in the oven one more time.  meanwhile, cut up a bunch of kale for raw kale salad, but then don’t make it.  put it in a tupperware for tomorrow instead.  make A LOT of dishes.   cut up some apples for a makeshift sugar-free apple strudel, and then be like, uhhhh, fuck this i heard they’ve got vegan mexican chocolate pie at ipanema’s god sugar is the devil.

more about that other stuff some other day.

HARVEST CELEBRATION SUNDAY

from pygmy lush (please email us for more info!):

HARVEST CELEBRATION w/PYGMYLUSH AIMEE (DES ARK) and LIZA KATE
hello friends.

we wanted to invite folks to a nice quiet early evening celebration of the new autumn this sunday sept 27th with our friends and amazing muscians aimee argote and liza kate.

the gathering is at our home out here in ashburn and is completely free. we are starting it a bit earlier and are hoping it to end on the earlier side. starting promptly at 5:30pm. mike just spent the past week building a nice little stage/deck out in the woods for us to enjoy. well have a bonfire and be grilling a whole bunch of vegetables fresh from our garden. the reservoir is also just down at the end of the street for a nice cool swim. if you arrive by atleast 5pm the farmers market veggie and fruit stand will be around the corner and open. well even let the pygmy goats out to graze while we hang. please come with a friendly positive attitude and kindly respect our home and each other. lets enjoy each other company under the new harvest moon and be at peace. drive safe please. hope to see ya here.

lovemikeprophet/pygmylush

HOLY [raw] CRAP BEST SHOW EVER!

if you know me, then you know that “going on tour” is synonymous with “tour of food.” the grand canyon is beautiful, it’s true, but i was just wondering, you know, if they got any raw food restaurants around there…?

anyway, 2 days ago my mom & i decided to have a two-day raw food face stuffing fest, which would include waking up “whenever” & then driving 7 hours to florida to swim in the ocean & eat at the best raw food place i know of. we’re doing this because we’re both crazy, and because she’s raw & hasn’t eaten at a good raw place yet, and because summer is basically over so fuck it, fuck it all!!! last night i called the most well-connected dude in all of st. johns county, and he said, well, you oughta just play a show at the raw restaurant.

and so i am. tonight.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 @ PRESENT MOMENT CAFÉ
9:30pm
w/another guy, whose name i didn’t catch

RAW BURRITO & ICE CREAM BROWNIE SUNDAY HERE I COME!!!!!! i am so stoked to eat you!!!

if you hate me right now…

…because you paid for a blank CD, let me know and we can work it out! or just be mad, and watch as yr anger manifests into some kind of nasty chronic disease later in life.

every kind of love, or at least my kind of love, is an imaginary love to start with

pygmy lush.   i love them & it’s a stupid kind of love, a way-too-in-love-love, a you-can’t-possibly-be-this-cool-in-real-life…..right?-love.  i’m talkin some tina fey, jennifer aniston , vincent donofrio kinda shit.   because you know better, because yr internal realist says “well there was that whole being married to Brad Pitt thing, and Alec Baldwin’s yr boss, plus yr like an 8 foot tall cop. yr so out of my league.”

but whatever. yr a sucker. and then at some point they start dating john mayer and you have to give up on them, or maybe they drive back to sterling, va to go back to work (pygmy lush) and you move on to richmond to keep playing weird punk shows (des ark). and yr love is put on hold. and you wake up the next morning & yr coffee tastes like shit, you wanna shave yr head, yr sick of eating bruised apples you find on the passenger mat of yr car & everything’s working right but everything’s just wrong.

speaking of richmond, i said a lot of mean things to you guys last night.  and i’m really glad that [some of] you can take a joke, because it’s truly a useful personality trait.  i could write a whole essay on why i think it’s important to make a point of getting people to get other people to shut the fuck up, and in my essay i would talk some about how quiet bands i go on tour with totally encourage my mean behavior by constantly reinforcing their appreciation through pats on the back and whispered sentences like “thanks for being the authoritative hushing fascist asshole i could never be…” but when i finished my essay on the politics of being a relentless but purposeful asshole, and i wanted to tell somebody about it, this is how i think it’d go:

“blah blah blah, yeah, that [____] dude is a weird bipolar freak about people talking during his show.”
& i’d be like
“well, actually i wrote this essay about—”
and they’d interrupt me to be like
“oh snap! speaking of which, remember that essay steve albini wrote about how major labels, like, are like, like SCREWING indie bands [that were too dumb to know better]?  wow, man, that shit was so, like, right on. yeah.”
and that’s where i go, in my head, or myabe not i dunno
“christ, people. i loved big black but ENOUGH about steve albini already.”  

anyway, i’m getting kicked out of this coffeeshop now.  but i was just writing to say i’m alive & that there are a lot of geese in richmond.  go listen to pygmy lush!