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...
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
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.
"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.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
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.... =)
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.... =)
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
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....
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 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?
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?
Saturday, March 10, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Thursday, March 8, 2007
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....
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....
Sunday, March 4, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
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
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
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