Kevin Costner Eats Sushi

It’s Thursday night at RuSan’s and Denny is all excited about something… “It’s him! I can’t believe it’s really him! Kevin Costner is here!” I’m thinking, “Sure Denny. Sure.”.

Today is the official first day of the weekend in Restaurant-Land and that means I have to work an hour later and there’s too many servers on schedule…. Because it’s still Thursday…people have to work tomorrow….mostly they don’t want to be eating sushi at midnight. An hour ago I was wondering who I could call to get out of work tonight. But here I am so hopefully we WILL be busy and I’ll make some money tonight.

Well, shoot me! It is Kevin Costner. Unmistakably, the man sitting in the corner of RuSan’s really is Kevin Costner. I’m trying to remember the movie’s he’s been in. All I can think of is “Dances With Wolves”. My brain starts spitting out Indian names for RuSan’s patrons… Grabs With Chopsticks, Sits With Sake, Makes Noise With Chewing. Robin Hood, Water World, The Post Man, Tin Cup; all these movies don’t pop into my head for some reason.

We are pretty busy tonight and it’s a little bit awesome that no-one seems to notice that Kevin Costner is here. They say that music celebrities appreciate Nashville because they don’t get hassled here. Well I guess it’s true.

Santo is asking me if I will ask Kevin if he will take a picture with him before he leaves. Santo is a sushi chef and he’s awesome but I don’t want to be the guy who approaches the famous movie star and attracts attention to him. Pretty soon we’ll have a restaurant full of people clamoring to get a picture with Kevin Costner and all he wanted to do was eat some sushi and go play some music with his band. Yes….if you weren’t aware Kevin Costner is the front man in a band called Kevin Costner and Modern West. Listen to him sing here (http://www.myspace.com/kevincostnerandmodernwest).

Kevin is getting up from his table and getting ready to go. So I approach as nonchalantly as possible. I realize as I approach that Kevin Costner is taller than he appears in movies. He’s wearing boots which add a bit but I think he must be at least 6’3’’. So I look up and say, “Excuse me, our sushi chef wanted me to ask if he can have a picture with you before you go?”. “Where is he?” Kevin replies. I say “He’s the short Asian at the front… Also I wanted to give you these” I hand him my EP, “believe” (with card cleverly slipped into the sleeve) and my album, “Beautiful Frustration”. I follow that up with this amazing statement, “You can listen to it in your car…I hope you like it.” He stares at the CDs for a few seconds and says, “That’s cool. Thanks Tim.”

I’m not making money from music yet. I’m pretty sure that Kevin Costner is. Even if he isn’t, it probably doesn’t matter for him. I hope to one day make a living at this but for now I can say what probably few independent musicians can say; I gave my music to Kevin Costner. Judging from the tour schedule on their myspace page Kevin is a busy man but I hope he finds time to listen to it.

Steaming Pee and The Evolution Of Man

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Above is a representation of the apartment where I live in Nashville, TN. The red and blue spots represent the ambient temperature; red being warm and blue being cold. Room 2 is where I spend most of my time. You will note the little table in the corner with the computer and chair and microphone stand (yes, that’s and microphone stand with microphone drawn there). Room 2 is toasty warm. Room 1 is more or less closet space and a passage way from Room 2 to the kitchen and/or Bathroom/Loo. You will note that the Bathroom is the coldest room in the house.

I wrote the following piece a few days ago but I felt I needed to preface it with the floor-plan of my house:

There is steam rising from my pee-stream, which is breaking the icy surface of the water in my toilet. Behind me the floor dips ever so slightly towards the wall. My faucets have all been left dripping since the weather dropped into the ‘teens (Farenheit) a couple of weeks ago. The constant dripping has led to a drip from the bottom of my shower. I can’t figure out where the water is coming from exactly but the end result is that there’s now a sheet of ice on the floor that I have to step over to go to the bathroom. At least it’s frozen and therefore more or less contained. My plan for my day off tomorrow is to chip the ice off the floor and try to stop the drip.

According to scientists mankind is evolving. We, collectively, are getting better at surviving. We are the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain. Living as I do right now I don’t feel very evolved at all. I feel like I’ve taken a step backwards. But I suppose any change is evolution so maybe I am evolving.

I wrote a song a few years ago when I was trying to write punk songs and it currently has had three incarnations. I’ve never been happy with the recordings. The first two are a little more rock n’ roll but I used a terrible drum loop when I recorded them out of necessity. The most recent recording is an acoustic version and in a way I like this one the best because the song is fairly introspective despite its punk-song origins.


I thought it would be interesting to put all three of these up to demonstrate the only kind of evolution I believe in. My voice has changed, the guitar parts have changed, some of the melodic elements of the song have changed and the structure even changed a little but in the end it’s still the same song. An amoeba is an amoeba. A monkey is a monkey. A man is a man.


p.s. after listening to the original again I decided it would be best if you didn’t have to hear it. So there’s only two versions here.