I'll be in New York from July 29-Aug 9.
Playing these shows, come say hi...
--------------------
July 30th Thursday
Next Year's Models at X Initiative
548 West 22nd St
NY, NY 10011
Film and music
Chris Marker's Bestiary
Vito Acconci's Zone
Ken Jacobs' Disorient Express live music by Common Eider, King Eider
John Baldessari's Baldessari Sings Lewitt
Carolee Schneemann's Fuses live music by Bird Show
http://www.x-initiative.org/
http://www.last.fm/event/1130795
--------------
Aug 1 Saturday
Bruar Falls
245 Grand St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Jack Rose
Common Eider, King Eider
Tom Carter
U.S. Girls
$9
http://www.bruarfalls.com/
--------------
Aug 2 Sunday
Death By Audio
49 S. 2nd, Brooklyn, NY 11211
nr. Wythe Ave
Necking
U.S. Girls
Mincemeat or Tenspeed
George Chen w/ Warren Ng
Mi Or And the Pedestals
http://www.myspace.com/deathbyaudioshows
---------------
Friday August 7th @ SILENT BARN
:: UPSTAIRS
:: Child Abuse
:::: Harry Merry
:::::: Ga'an —– mems Coughs
:: DOWNSTAIRS
:: Eats Tapes
:: MNDR
:: dj George Chen ——– from Zum, K.I.T.
:: PROJECTION ART BY: Nate Boyce
915 Wyckoff Ave @ Weirfield | Ridgewood, Qns
M-Myrtle/Wyckoff, L-Halsey| 8pm | all ages
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
gorging the play brain
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these are events that i'm performing at in the next few weeks.
may 22
rooz cafe
298 grand, oakland
blue sabbath black fiji (glasgow)
megaweapon (george chen)
zayante spoils (marcy saude, denver, CO)
all ages
may 23
thee parkside
1600 17th st, sf
chain and the gang (feat ian svenonius)
the hive dwellers (feat calvin johnson)
fresh and onlys
dj megaweapon
all ages $8
may 25
argus lounge
3187 mission st, sf
chen santa maria
zayante spoils
the atchleys
21+
may 29
plea for peace center
630 e. weber, stockton
pataphysics (austin, carrots)
kit
better days
all ages
may 31
berkeley house show (email for info)
bulbs
kit
june 4
hemlock tavern, sf
thrones
common eider, king eider
pins of light
$10 21+
we also have some zines, cdrs, cassettes, and tshirts that we made for tour, the easiest way to check them out is this link to my mailorder site
thanks, hope to see you at some of these shows!
Saturday, May 9, 2009
the scoundrel
Tour was chill, drama free. People ask me how it went, this is all I can really say. It was a good tour cause there are no crazy stories, but I fear we are becoming boring old men. I didn't even get to go hog wild on the Portland food carts that we discovered, open til l3 am servicing the late night bar crowd. I am trying to eat better. Even Seattle, which we'd kind of lost all faith in, turned out better than expected. We were at The Josephine, former home of Charlie Gocher from Sun City Girls and the offices of Sublime Frequencies in a building that used to be a movie theater long ago. Ballard is a strange neighborhood, there's an empty building called "Cookie Conspiracy" (a possible victim of CookieINTELPRO), a bunch of bars (we pass a mixology contest, very boring), and a dead rat in the middle of the sidewalk. I hope that's at least gone by now.
We managed to convince Erika that Dan and us were having some sort of intense tour drama, but we couldn't even come up with good fake reasons for the beef. In reality, we would jam really hard on the Geronimo CD and go to a grocery store and take naps.
At the end of tour we are restless. we come to LA often enough that we are no longer compelled to do tourist-y things, but can combo that in the omelette folds of watching a movie at Mann's Chinese Theater. To watch Wolverine, you have to turn off many of your critical facilities. You have to embrace cliche, which is not the first thing that comes to mind with mutant-themed movies. To say I was disappointed is to admit that I had any prepubescent hopes that this movie would totally rule and Brett Ratner would turn over in his living grave. Instead, unintentional laughter penetrated even the earliest pre-credit scenes. To delve deeper would involve spoilers, which I'll happily give up one on one, but let's just say there's not much to spoil in this series anymore when you're dealing with prequels. Same with the Star Trek prequel - you remove a lot of dramatic tension from these action movies when you already know that the characters survive to end up in Shatner bloat.
We managed to convince Erika that Dan and us were having some sort of intense tour drama, but we couldn't even come up with good fake reasons for the beef. In reality, we would jam really hard on the Geronimo CD and go to a grocery store and take naps.
At the end of tour we are restless. we come to LA often enough that we are no longer compelled to do tourist-y things, but can combo that in the omelette folds of watching a movie at Mann's Chinese Theater. To watch Wolverine, you have to turn off many of your critical facilities. You have to embrace cliche, which is not the first thing that comes to mind with mutant-themed movies. To say I was disappointed is to admit that I had any prepubescent hopes that this movie would totally rule and Brett Ratner would turn over in his living grave. Instead, unintentional laughter penetrated even the earliest pre-credit scenes. To delve deeper would involve spoilers, which I'll happily give up one on one, but let's just say there's not much to spoil in this series anymore when you're dealing with prequels. Same with the Star Trek prequel - you remove a lot of dramatic tension from these action movies when you already know that the characters survive to end up in Shatner bloat.
Monday, April 6, 2009
facts about Weird
One of my long-standing misconceptions about Weird Al has been corrected. There is another famous accordion playing Kankovic from Wisocnsin that I had been told sired Weird Al from his weird loins, and I suspected an Oedipal subtext to Al's parodic tendencies, to supplant and outshine the Father through fat suits. Turns out there's nothing more to it. His dad apparently said "the key to success...doing for a living whatever makes you happy." Other factoids - he was a DJ at KCPR and worked with Wendy Carlos (on a version of Peter and the Wolf).
I was actually trying to explain to someone that UHF was ahead of its time, predating internet culture but being about consolidation of media ownership and guerrilla production. I couldn't really prove my point, so we just watched the video for "White and Nerdy".
I was actually trying to explain to someone that UHF was ahead of its time, predating internet culture but being about consolidation of media ownership and guerrilla production. I couldn't really prove my point, so we just watched the video for "White and Nerdy".
Thursday, February 26, 2009
fictions
i have been on a little movie kick lately, perhaps due to the miserable weather we were having.
BE KIND REWIND. I actually really liked this, it pays tribute to the love of movies and my favorite genre of losers in a dying profession. I was going to compare the failing video store and against-the-odds success to Broadway Danny Rose, which also stars Mia Farrow. It's nice to see Danny Glover back on screen too. While I find I can only take Jack Black in small doses and his character is distractingly insane, he does not manage to ruin this movie for me. I heard that Gondry had intended for Chapelle to play the main role which fell to Mos Def. It's hard to speculate how that could have changed everything, but Mos Def does a fine job in a movie that is really not about how good the actors are. Gondry is the star here, and his enthusiasm and ingenuity really are allowed to go hog wild. As a plot goes, they throw reality out the window pretty much off the bat, so you have to be in it for the spoofs or "Sweded films" that are never parodies, but low budget, seat-of-the-pants tributes. Gondry's sentimentality and wistful naivete is so extreme that I can only compare it as the opposite of his former collaborator Charlie Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. I caught that movie the day after Christmas, and it makes an interesting companion piece to BKR - I feel like THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND was the peak for both of these men, where Kaufman's bitter streak and obsession with structure tempered Gondry's whimsy and each fed into the other's strengths. Kaufman as a director is like his writing, over analytic to the point of claustrophobia. He's interested in artifice, doppelgangers, and raw embarassing personal exposure, tearing his psyche apart and in this case building a miniature city out of it. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is great in everything, and seems like the ideal stand in for Kaufman, more so than Nicholas Cage. It's bleak and brave in its own way, and Kaufman has somehow gotten to the point where he can get away with whatever he wants and polarizing his audience. The characters are all schematic and exist as abstractions, which is hard to critique because it seems to be the point. I hope he is allowed to keep making whatever he is moved to make, but part of me wishes to fuse the best parts of both BE KIND REWIND and SYNECDOCHE into one.
Partly, it's this tension between "entertainment" or "art." I think I must be getting soft and siding with "entertainment", which in my younger days would be viewed as slipping or "losing my edge" to borrow from the song. I find myself more easily manipulated by cliches, more prone to empathy, trying to think of an example - let's go back to BROADWAY DANNY ROSE. There's a mob subplot and some forced romantic tension, but I found myself identifying very closely with Danny Rose, Woody Allen's sad sack idealist booking agent. He totally sacrifices himself for his clients, who are ventriloquists and magicians and jugglers, all novelty acts. It's all shot in black and white and starts off with these comedians that are also of a dying breed, talking about the Catskills and their world disappearing. It's easy to relate to obsolescence and the grinding wheels of commerce crushing your dreams, but Allen pulls off making sad funny, and vice versa.
This can lead to debates about when Allen lost his edge, whether he can recover it, and it feels like the way people talk about Dylan or Springsteen. These creative giants that we live in the shadows of get a free pass sometimes, because even when they fall off their game, they made the game. I wonder if the next generation will have the same veneration for Kaufman or Gondry, or maybe movies are giving way to youtube/Idiocracy world, and these guys are the last of a breed also.
BE KIND REWIND. I actually really liked this, it pays tribute to the love of movies and my favorite genre of losers in a dying profession. I was going to compare the failing video store and against-the-odds success to Broadway Danny Rose, which also stars Mia Farrow. It's nice to see Danny Glover back on screen too. While I find I can only take Jack Black in small doses and his character is distractingly insane, he does not manage to ruin this movie for me. I heard that Gondry had intended for Chapelle to play the main role which fell to Mos Def. It's hard to speculate how that could have changed everything, but Mos Def does a fine job in a movie that is really not about how good the actors are. Gondry is the star here, and his enthusiasm and ingenuity really are allowed to go hog wild. As a plot goes, they throw reality out the window pretty much off the bat, so you have to be in it for the spoofs or "Sweded films" that are never parodies, but low budget, seat-of-the-pants tributes. Gondry's sentimentality and wistful naivete is so extreme that I can only compare it as the opposite of his former collaborator Charlie Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. I caught that movie the day after Christmas, and it makes an interesting companion piece to BKR - I feel like THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND was the peak for both of these men, where Kaufman's bitter streak and obsession with structure tempered Gondry's whimsy and each fed into the other's strengths. Kaufman as a director is like his writing, over analytic to the point of claustrophobia. He's interested in artifice, doppelgangers, and raw embarassing personal exposure, tearing his psyche apart and in this case building a miniature city out of it. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is great in everything, and seems like the ideal stand in for Kaufman, more so than Nicholas Cage. It's bleak and brave in its own way, and Kaufman has somehow gotten to the point where he can get away with whatever he wants and polarizing his audience. The characters are all schematic and exist as abstractions, which is hard to critique because it seems to be the point. I hope he is allowed to keep making whatever he is moved to make, but part of me wishes to fuse the best parts of both BE KIND REWIND and SYNECDOCHE into one.
Partly, it's this tension between "entertainment" or "art." I think I must be getting soft and siding with "entertainment", which in my younger days would be viewed as slipping or "losing my edge" to borrow from the song. I find myself more easily manipulated by cliches, more prone to empathy, trying to think of an example - let's go back to BROADWAY DANNY ROSE. There's a mob subplot and some forced romantic tension, but I found myself identifying very closely with Danny Rose, Woody Allen's sad sack idealist booking agent. He totally sacrifices himself for his clients, who are ventriloquists and magicians and jugglers, all novelty acts. It's all shot in black and white and starts off with these comedians that are also of a dying breed, talking about the Catskills and their world disappearing. It's easy to relate to obsolescence and the grinding wheels of commerce crushing your dreams, but Allen pulls off making sad funny, and vice versa.
This can lead to debates about when Allen lost his edge, whether he can recover it, and it feels like the way people talk about Dylan or Springsteen. These creative giants that we live in the shadows of get a free pass sometimes, because even when they fall off their game, they made the game. I wonder if the next generation will have the same veneration for Kaufman or Gondry, or maybe movies are giving way to youtube/Idiocracy world, and these guys are the last of a breed also.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
couplet
Gran Torino rides the bus
to his place of landing
Look at who his driver is
"It's Gary Shandling!"
This is the last thing i remember from my dream. I feel like Clint Eastwood was reciting this in my dream.
Also in my dream, I saw Sparks at a shitty Mexican restaurant in downtown Oakland and sent out a mas text about it.
My dreams are like shitty twitters.
to his place of landing
Look at who his driver is
"It's Gary Shandling!"
This is the last thing i remember from my dream. I feel like Clint Eastwood was reciting this in my dream.
Also in my dream, I saw Sparks at a shitty Mexican restaurant in downtown Oakland and sent out a mas text about it.
My dreams are like shitty twitters.
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