Posted by Marc (24.58.142.203) on August 26, 2002 at 04:38:30:
Apparently I'm the only one of Jim's friends who knew he had a middle name, let alone what it was. There are time's that I've questioned this knowledge... but I'm pretty sure it was Roger.
Jim had the most honest and wonderful laugh of anyone I've ever known. Good smile too. You always knew he meant it. Like really meant it. If you could get him to laugh you knew you had accomplished a great work. Maybe that led to the folly of trying to find ways for him to laugh. It was kind of like having the Buddha with some Christian strings attached in your passenger seat.
I spent more time around Jim these last 4 years than with anyone else apart from my son. I'm not sure if that meant we were particularly close, maybe we were just the sorts who liked to have someone else around even if you weren't doing anything in particular. I was always a big fan of that sort of activity. Like hanging around in a cafe for too long catching up on to do lists and old mail with someone else doing their own thing as well. Always better to do this with them, even if you didn't interact all that much. Maybe you know what I'm talking about.
We used to take absurd road trips on a regular basis. Check out bands and bars that we'd never been to before... strange new towns and roads. More often than is plausible we'd get to the venue and find that the band we were told would be there was not, and worse no one knew what we were talking about. Sometimes we'd just get lost... but never successfully enough. There's only so many roads in New York and eventually you hit a river or another state or something else familiar.
Jim and Jason and me used to talk about being old. How we'd still get together every now and then and make weird music. Doing what we did in the Brown Cuts Neighbors for so long we had a different sense of time for creative work than what may be normal. It'd been so long that patterns had started to emerge. Rhythms across time of how we worked. We had just started to hang out and play again recently after a long break... many of Jim's songs, some twisted blues jams, some noise collage, whatever... it was fun to be together again and doing that with no pressure for a show or recording. No big expectations...