Select shahts from Bahston

tall buildings
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SK and me on the set of Two Dimensional Dudes on the Moon—a new sci-fi action thriller set for a summer ’09 release in select theaters.






Bahston’s answer to the squirrel. These things can be found on every street corner, swarming every park, even scurrying around in the subways. New York’s got rats. Antarctica has ice. Bahston’s got terriers.

Because I failed my one real goal of the trip—taking a picture of a Bahston terrier—I’ve been reduced to copping one off a Google Image search.



Anti-war protesters are freaking awesome. There were like 5 of them on the Cahmmon Saturday afternoon.



The elusive bowl of clam chowdah. We wahked to da end a da earth (e.g. Tavern on the Watah) to enjoy a delicious bowl of chowdah. And holy mackerel was it good.



There is more to do in the Bahston subway system than there is in many small countries. Passenger-operated chimes, movies playing on the subway walls as you ride through, terriers to pet and feed stuff to….I could go on literally for hours.

Bahston’s Ahsome

Ever since I was a tiny little kid, my first instinct upon arriving in a new place has always been to blog. Hence this post.

Train up to Bahston rocked. Got a sando—on the company. Ended up in an aisle seat and asked this sweet old lady next to me if she minded trading with me, because I “like looking out windows and it’s my first time riding this thing.” She was cool with that so I basically sat there staring out the window listening to great music and dozing for 3 hours and to be perfectly honest with you I can’t think of a better way to spend your Sunday afternoon. Got to Bahston and made my way to the subway, and after a couple of stops this girl gets on and I scoot over a little to make room and she sits down and looks at me and is like “thanks.” And I’m like “want to have sex?” JK!! After about 5 mins I’m like “so why do they call it ‘the T’?” She said she thought it was for “train.” So that pretty much settles that. She was doing relief work in Mississippi for a year and just got back to Bahston last week. And then came my stop and I said goodbye to her forever.

Rolled up into the hotel feeling like kind of a badass, just because it’s fun to pretend sometimes. Checked in, etc. Room is aDoRaBlE!!!!!




Threw all my shit down and ran out the door and into the subway to take a stroll on the Bahston Cahmmon before dark.


shiny building


anarchy’s cool. (until people start killing each other)

[graffiti reads "decapitate the state"]


statue erected in celebration of ether



sweet sign

Flowers and beans

Hi. I wasn't going to blog tonight. I was going to be asleep by midnight. Then, I started listening to Outlandos d'Amour and got blown away. Then, I wikipedia'd the Police and although on some level I was aware that they are like, functioning as a unit again (considering ticketmaster sends me a "Don't miss the Police" email roughly 7 times a day, and considering I saw them play on the Grammys), I never knew the full details. See, what had happened was....they basically broke up in 1986, and as of the Grammys (like, 40 days ago) they are back together for the first time in 21 years and about to kick off a tour.

But here's the important thing. The article happened to mention that they are playing Live Earth.

(Excuse me?)

Live Earth.

(What was that?)

Live freaking Earth, dude! Apparently it's Live Aid for climate change. So I pretty much just figured out what I'm doing on July 7th this year....

I have to say it's pretty effing astounding that environmentalism and human rights have become..... cool. I mean, fuck. Two years ago I was routinely getting punched in the face for even having subconscious thoughts that other human beings matter and that we need to not shit in our own nest if we want to make it past the year 2050.

I know. I KNOW!! The whole thing is exceedingly boring and you want to know why in hell the title is "Flowers and beans." Fine, fucker. It's because I was going to write the blog about one of my German roommates, who is evidently the coolest and most hysterically funny person I have ever seen. Basically the whole thing was going to revolve around the fact that in an attempt to explain how lame and not hot the Paris Hilton sex tape is, he said, "If you want to tell your kids about flowers and beans, just show them this tape!" I had no fucking clue what that meant at first, and then another German roommate was like, "Flowers and bees, tool ratchet, not beans." And that's when I fell out.

When I could breathe again I was like No, Dudes. The birds and the bees. Silly!

And then a lot of other funny stuff happened, and then I went and locked myself in my room because it was too funny and I couldn't take it...

Quote unquote

From a recent issue of Columbia's free weekly, the Free Times--the closer to an article about Columbia's music scene:

"There are a lot of people that say, 'Columbia sucks'. Columbia doesn't suck--you suck. If you can't have a good time in Columbia, you probably can't have a good time anywhere."

I almost pissed myself when I read that'n...

Also, from Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, out of the Aug 2006 Spin:

"...I don't want to be the kind of person who does not get messed up by other people's suffering."

Amen to that, sister.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand my life is complete

check out the *top* link on the right...

(OK, the top one AFTER the Google ad...)

Forgot how to blog

(SIKE)

So I'm sitting on the plane looking out the window at brownish snow all over the ground, taking in the industrial wasteland surrounding me, and thinking about all the bradford pears in full bloom back home. I'm talking like brilliant white flowers all over these big trees, against the clearest bluest sky ever....and that one day I was driving down the highway and saw in the distance a mass of dark purple clouds right up against the neon green of new leaves on the trees--something I used to see every day during summers, the afternoon thunderstorm you can set your fucking watch by. And thinking, I remember standing there looking at those bradford pears against the blue sky and thinking how fucking gorgeous that was, and how shitty it would be to not have that all around me again....

Some country bumpkin in the seat behind me is looking out too, and she goes, "It's all dirty up here, at home everything's all pretty..... New York's tainted." Hilarious! and profound all at once. Kudos to the country bumpkin.

Ah well....I'll get used to it, which is maybe the sad part. I was feeling a familiar feeling, the same I do every time I come back to New York from home....to use MFB's phrase, "it's a real reset button." Every time I come back here from home it's as foreign and mysterious and exciting and promising as it was the first day I set foot in the city....

So I guess I'm cool with that. Plus, I miss people and stuff.... =)

Just watched part of Mission Impossible 2

and thought, hell, this is as good a time as any to set an all-time personal record for blog posts in a single day.

At one point there are back-to-back scenes where someone is talking to someone else and getting them to reveal some highly incriminating secret, and then they walk out of the room and you get this close up face shot, a momentary pause where the person looks really serious and determined, and then they start peeling off the mask and voice modulator and you're like "Oh, fuck! It's Ethan!" And when you have 2 of those back to back, it's borderline hilarious.



Dude, peep this. What if you got a camera and made a youtube video where like every 4 seconds someone "unmasks" themselves? It would be hilarious!! You could have it involve King George, Tricky Dick, Rummy, Hilary Clinton, Barry Obama, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, OJ Simpson, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Homer Simpson, E.T., Britney Spears, a muppet baby, Alf, Winnie from the Wonder Years, Barbara Walters, David Spade, Paris Hilton, Hugo Chavez, and the lead singer of Twisted Sister, and people would be tearing off masks right and left. And at some point of course you'd have to have a scene where someone tears off a mask to reveal that they were just wearing a mask of themselves....

Tonight I’m going to have nightmares about

the inevitable development of the human version of U0126. Did anyone see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Just wait until King George and Tricky Dick II get ahold of this technique….

The Tonight I’m Going to Have Nightmares series derives from a recent post about smart dust and will serve as a reminder from a foaming-at-the-mouth liberal mind that nothing is OK, we’re all doomed, and everything is going to shit.

Why is it that the mainstream media almost always refuses to even sally forth a single sentence about possible negative consequences of technology, when they are happy to offer wildly optimistic (and often unrealistic) hopes for the benefits? Maybe because technology is impossible to stop, so we may as well go on and accept the new world being forced onto us?

(ken, you’ve got to stop drinking and blogging….)

The Splasher

Got a turkey and swiss at a deli on Stanton Saturday night before the Horrors show. As I was walking south down Chrystie towards Delancey, I happened upon some of the handiwork of a dude known as The Splasher . This is a guy who goes around splashing bright paint all over street art and then pasting these little manifestos next to the splashed art (each manifesto has a warning at the bottom that the glue used to paste them contains shards of glass—yikes). The whole situation has gotten a lot of press, including articles in New York magazine, the Gothamist, Curbed, the New York Times, and others I’m sure (“Defacing the defacement or vandalizing creativity?" askes the Times). There’s a bunch of photos of the splashings , but I can’t find a list of their locations….

The one on Chrystie is red paint obscuring a comic-style drawing of a couple. The man is carrying a U.S. Treasury briefcase and the woman is cradling in her arms what appears to be a bomb. The manifesto posted next to it is titled “Art: the Excrement of Action” and essentially condemns art as a second-rate representation (or should I say “bastardization”) of primary actions/experiences.

Just to throw my two cents in, art is just a way to communicate. Yeah, I know that’s arguable, since I’m sure there are people who create art for art’s sake alone, or for themselves—not to show to anyone. But at any rate a lot of art is simply an attempt to communicate something. It doesn’t do a whole lot of good for one person to have an experience or feeling and not try to share it with other people—especially if that experience bestows information that is useful in some way. So who gives a damn if you’re debasing the purity of an experience, because you’re getting something good in exchange—you are spreading an idea. I mean, nothing I could write in this post could come anywhere close to evoking what it felt like to see the splashing. So I bastardized the experience, so what? I still had it and remember it. But by writing about it, now other people might have a similar type of thing….

I’m fully aware that I myself have even made the opposite argument many a time, specifically to SK recently about not writing something down because I don’t want to sterilize or censor an experience just to make it presentable to other people. So maybe we all have certain things we want to keep pure…but for Christ’s sake, you gotta put some of your shit out there for others to consider, too.

The other interesting thing about it is it’s one more iteration of the “graffiti question”: how do you resolve the fact that graffiti, while it is undeniably art, is also an act of property destruction, which is not cool considering property laws are pretty crucial for a democracy to work. Graffiti could even be considered a form of splashing, since putting graffiti on some great work of architecture, like a church or a sculpture or something, is basically the same as what the Splasher is doing. So how do you resolve that? Is graffiti good or bad? And is splashing good or bad, given that it is basically a vandalization of graffiti? And, is splashing art?

First show in my new hood

Wrote the following on the Jones Street Boys show at Pianos on 3/2. It may eventually be published in Plateau, in a reworked form....so, here's the orig:

Having been turned away from the show I wanted to see at the Cake Shop with a smug "We're sold out," I said screw it and just went next door to Pianos. I saw the second half of the Surefire Way's set, which I won't say anything further about, and then watched a nice dissonance-inflected pop set from Philadelphia's Bebek. Having felt like I had just seen Blondie on mescaline, and having kind of liked it, I went out to the bar and had a beer and a smoke.

I made my way back into the place as the Jones Street Boys were setting up, saw an upright bass and a mandolin and thought "Oh, fuck. I'm about to see Alison Krauss and Union Station. Awesome." What I saw was in fact not Alison Krauss and Union Station, but something quite different....

The Jones St Boys are five dudes based in Brooklyn: Walt Wells on upright, Sam Rockwell on drums, Jonathan Benedict on keyboards, Danny Erker on mandolin, guitar, and lead vocals, and Jon Hull on harmonica, accordion, and lead vocals. Generally you'd place them under the category of "alt-country," although they probably have a little too much energy and originality to be contained within such a tired-ass genre of music. At times, they channel a bit too much O.A.R. and not enough Willie Nelson and Neil Young for my taste--but their sheer honest enthusiasm and versatility always saves them. If nothing else, you will walk away from their show with a healthy dose of the Warm Fuzzies from seeing five country dudes just plain play their hearts out. I mean, by like song 2 they were all drenched in sweat from the strain of putting every ounce of fucking strength they could muster into the thing. And it never hurts to have multiple lead singers (Erker and Hull switched off, and Benedict even sang one towards the end) and like half a dozen different instruments to work with. Everyone sang harmony, cracked jokes and swigged buds between songs.

Essentially, you have here your basic country music setup of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, and your basic country subject matter centered on chicks, beers, smokes, leavin' town, love, heartache, family, and death, and then you have various black sheep thrown into the mix: poppy keyboards straight out of Neil Young's "See The Sky About To Rain," Hull's accordion and harmonicas (all 207 of them holstered in an army green belt a la John Popper), and Erker's electric mandolin (I'd heard of these, from that Dylan song---er, wait, that was an electric violin--but had never actually seen or listened to one and didn't know they really existed). Strangely enough, electrifying the thing had the effect of making it sound like the clean, bright electric guitars of the Cure, which was an interesting thing to add to a predominantly country sound. The mandolin and the keyboards together could lift songs up to a kind of out-of-place poppy bliss at times, which unfortunately you can't really get from poor Mrs. Krauss.

About midway through the set, Erker asked the audience if they were "ready to see the biggest mouth in the room explode." Hull starts singing the song pretty normally, and he then gets to the chorus. What happens there could definitely be called an "explosion," but "eruption" or "supernova" could also pass as an accurate description. Like, who the fuck let Joe Cocker into the building? Clearly Hull gets high with a little help from his friends. This song was also the first time I have seen someone headbang while playing harmonica. Those things must be, like, all used up after a full set of that kind of wailing. At times you could be forgiven for thinking a pigeon had managed to dive bomb into Hull's throat and his writhings were actually attempts at exorcising said demon. Or, said differently, Hull's, uh...good at harmonica.

It's hard to decide whether the energetic pinnacle of the show was the Joe Cocker Moment or the finale: the last song ended and Hull told the sound dude he could cut the mics, "but don't start the music yet--we got one more." The Jones Street Boys gathered together in a line, Hull in the middle with his harp and Erker quietly strumming his unplugged acoustic as the crowd gradually settled down and then stopped rustling around all together, and there was a remarkable quiet in the little room--a marked contrast to the chaos just outside the door and in the streets, which was heard occasionally as someone came in or left the room. Hull started singing solo, accompanied by the lone, spare guitar chords, and the other guys joined in, singing slowly and with painful regret, "Goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew; goodbye to the flowers, goodbye to you. We're off to the subway, we mustn't be late. Going to work, in tall buildings." I don't know whether anybody else in the room was from a small-town, Anytown USA, but I do know that if they were, they must have been fairly heartbroken too.

So. "Alt-country." Alt-fucking country, for Christ's sake. I have often related the opinion that country music is a static art form--no one ever really innovates, they just continue to make more versions of the same stuff that people have been making for like a hundred years or something. Same subject matter, same basic sound. Not that that's bad necessarily, but it certainly isn't fresh and exciting. The Jones Street Boys have not disproven this theory--but perhaps they have stretched the boundaries of their genre enough to achieve a reasonable level of originality, without wandering far enough off the beaten path to find themselves totally lost.

Tonight I'm going to have nightmares

about smart dust.

IWD 2007

Ladies and gents, you've just stumbled onto the OMG, is that the name of your blog exclusive coverage of the International Women's Day 2007 celebration at 117 Hester. Everyone's basically going ballistic, doing all sorts of stuff to show our appreciation of the greatest gender on Earth: Jon watched the new episode of Lost. Alex and Ben lost their finals soccer match. Some dude from London came to see a room that's available. And I created a commemorative tee, sacrificing probably thousands of perfectly good brain cells to the noxious fumes of three industrial strength sharpies.



I really, really wanted to add a list to the back of the tee entitled "Prodigiously Abbreviated List Of Women Who Are Awesome" and put like Patti Smith, my mom, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winnie from the Wonder Years, and others, but I started getting too high from the fumes and had to clear the hell out of there....

Technology killed the cat

Saw it scribbled on the wall of the boys' bathroom in Sin-e, 3rd urinal, right above a picture of a girl's ass. So that's the piece of wisdom I came away from the whole thing with--that, plus the End of The World, the Subjects, and Luke Temple (commonly known to super-fans asThe Tone Locs--they didn't play "Funky Cold Medina" last night, but it was still a good set) rock my BVDs off.

Now, the funniest thing that happened (outside of watching Footloose and dancing to the dance scenes) was when SK's phone rang while she was *snoring* (LOL) and I was semi-conscious, and I hand her the phone and she answers and is like "Ken's asleep and I'm just laying up here in the bed...." Silly SK.

For further information on this magical night, please consult ergie and dorkface.

My dad is awesome and hilarious (so is my mom, but she doesn't know what email is, so it would be harder to capture her awesomeness in words):

Glad to hear you scheduled the box pickup. We will definetly pray for the best outcome.
Get settled, get some rest and then give us a call. Let me know if you need any more start-up funds.

Guess if a lesson is to be learned from this, it's plan ahead! Your first move to and your second move in NYC can now be characterized as nervous desperation. Good experience, though. And I'm sure you'll get better so it will not be as difficult next time. As my good friend Murray Smith always says.....fail to plan....plan to fail.

Love you.

Dad

And another thing,

in case you were wondering, i am just trying to build up my blog archive so that people are fooled into thinking i'm a veteran blogger that is not to be fucked with. and yes, i do realize that you're going to read this post before you read the previous two, so it's not going to make sense at first. and i'm fine with that.

Why the hell

would these people put 11:03 when it's really 2:03? that doesn't help my credibility. am i going to have to manually change the clock to my time zone every time?

oh well, it's better than geocities, which i think uses army time.

For some reason, I'm still awake

I just wanted to announce to the world that it is again 2 am and I am again still awake. I'm not sure what that's all about. On the plus side, it will be great fun to see just how cracked out I look tomorrow morning. I'm envisioning bloodshot eyes, frequent lapses into space-staring states, speech that is more slurred than normal (if that's possible), and increased appetite (I have a very vague recollection of reading a bunch of papers on the effects of sleep deprivation on mice that found that they eat a lot, although it doesn't end up doing them any good--a recollection so vague in fact that it's probably dead wrong). It's going to be difficult to continue to convince people that I am not stoned.

Movin' on down (to the LES)

When my alarm clock went off this morning, I was not prepared to deal with the situation. I was sprawled out on my futon, cozy as fuck but extremely dehydrated and nursing a pounding headache. Saturday night was dancetastic. It was the only organized event I held in my west village place, and seeing as how the whole shit was an unequivocal success, I batted a thousand at that apt, good times-wise, and feel pretty damn good about it.

I should've gotten up immediately but instead I hit snooze for 30 mins. I got to the Uhaul place late, picked up my van, called up my favorite Belgian (MFB), drove home and fried a couple of eggs. I knew that in order to survive this ordeal I needed to eat stuff. What I did not know was exactly how critical that instinct would turn out to be....

MFB got there, and amidst a lot of giggling (I was still drunk from sat. night), we loaded up the van. I had to move it around a few times because I parked way far away at first, and then I parked in front of a driveway and someone immediately tried to drive out of it. While I was moving it I had the radio on and that retarded song came on, the one that goes, "This is why I'm hot, this is why you not, I'm hot because I'm hot, you not because you not....." or something like that. It's hilarious, and I commenced to singing it over and over and giggling some more as we loaded.

We drove down to the LES and all I wanted to do was drive all day. Driving's fun enough, but then you throw in the whole van thing and it's like God, I feel the innocent joy of a twelve year old playing a video game where you drive monster trucks around. We got there and I parallel parked that bitch beautifully, on the first try, which was a small personal victory for me. Then we realized we were in a no parking zone. It was cool though, because miraculously a spot had opened up not too far away, and I backed the van almost a full block and then backed into the space, beautifully, which by my calculation would be small personal victory number 2 of the day. We started carrying shit in to the new place and I realized really for the first time that I am now living in the heart of Chinatown. I'm not sure why this never hit me before, but suddenly the fact that me and MFB were the only non-Asians in sight and every store had it's largest sign lettering in Chinese totally hit home. Hey, fine by me. Everything's cheap as fuck (I got a lemon-lime kool aid-like drink in a corner store for a quarter; MFB got a liter-sized diet coke for a buck) and I'm like 2 blocks away from the Bowery Ballroom, where I'm pretty sure I'll be spending about 89% of my lonely Friday nights.

We had to carry all my shit up 7 flights of stairs. I completely underestimated the horrors of this fact, and I think MFB did too. I mean, once you got to the fifth floor, you had already been pushing yourself to the breaking point and could go no further. You prayed to the good, sweet Lord that when you looked up you'd see that you were there, safe on floor 7 where you needed to be. But every fucking time, you looked up and you were actually on floor 5, and in your fit of delirium from physical strain, you'd hear scary voices cackling at your weakness and see little elf-looking demons jumping up and down all around you and pointing their fingers and shrieking with laughter.

We got all the shit up there, though. And God, did that feel good! MFB's a superhero, no doubt. When we came back out to get in the van, I saw some dude shoot a big puff of confetti into the air and was like, wow, Chinatown's awesome. Earlier me and MFB had seen some kids throwing poppers on the ground and I had been like, wow, Chinatown's awesome. As we approached the van we noticed crazy loud music and colorful dragons going down the street. I'm like, dude, there's a parade. This neighborhood is the shit! MFB was like, oh yeah, it's the Chinese New Year. Crazy ass shit....

We started to drive off, got like 2 blocks and hit a police barricade. MFB went and asked the cop what was up, and come to find out we were in this tiny, 4-square-block area that was being cut off from the rest of the universe by the parade. We were literally trapped in there, and the cop's estimated time of escape for us was about an hour. Really, it was all highly comical. MFB was like "Welcome to the neighborhood, dude!" He was supposed to meet someone in Washington Square in a little bit, so he was forced to abandon the whole scene, which he could do, being on foot and stuff. Me, I was stuck--which was totally fine, because all I wanted to do was go get some Chinese and watch the parade. I got out of the van, asked the cop if I could just leave it there and wander off, he said no (granted, I was basically in the middle of an intersection....but who gives a damn, because no one could go anywhere), and I wandered off anyway. The hood was totally alive, people everywhere and all kinds of shit going on, and you could hear the parade even if you managed to get out of site of it. I came up on a small group of people gathered around a few dudes, one of whom was banging on a drum and one of whom had on one of those awesome Chinese dragon costume things and was dancing around and stuff. It was extremely cool. Weirdly enough, the people gathered around were looking on with just as much fascination and curiosity as I was, as if they had never seen anything like this before and were delighted and intrigued by it. I supposed that most of them (all kids) were much more American than Chinese, culturally, and I thought if that was true, it must be weird for them to behold something that was at once foreign and part of their traditional culture. Maybe they felt the same way I do when I see farmers doing what they do....I mean, coming from a (traditionally) deeply agricultural, uh, culture, you feel like you should know about that stuff. But you don't, because no one farms anymore.

Eventually, the cops started letting cars through intermittently, and I got out of there and started speeding up to 23rd, where I was going to drop a dresser off at Goodwill and then head west to return the van. This was a true adventure, akin to driving a jeep through the jungle at high speeds while being shot at. I was kind of having the time of my life, and seriously considered saying fuck it all and just turning that bitch around, taking the lincoln tunnel and driving to LA. I didn't, but I did crank the radio up loud as hell and enjoy it while it lasted.
I dropped off the van and headed towards the subway to go home, and then I saw this bar called "Trailer Park." I verified that it had food, went inside, and ordered a burger and some tater tots. Tater tots! This is the first place I've been in New York that serves the little suckers. I looked around at all the trailerparkiness in there, and I have to admit they had done a pretty sweet job of it. Lots of really nice touches....but ultimately not the least bit authentic, just a novelty act--everything available for purchase was expensive as hell, and not that trashy at all. But hey, it was fun to look at all that cool stuff, and listen to the music. I'll definitely be back.

I got on the subway and rode home. I was thinking of the parade again....all those happy people, singing, playing drums, dancing around in those cool paper dragon things, etc. Being an egocentric prick, I couldn't help imagining that the whole community was throwing me my own personal Hi Kenny, Welcome To The Neighborhood party. Which I was fine with. I walked down the street, past all the joyous little Asian kids, into the new year, and I was thinking these thoughts, colored confetti floating down all around me.