Friday in a food coma

I just returned from a a delightful pulled pork social and going away party for Richard from Absolutely Kosher (I'm sure the irony is not lost on them). At one point Cory Brown is lecturing the youngin's about ye good old SF days of PEE, VSS, A Minor Forest, Track Star, et al. Dawns on me that this is all over ten years ago and no one else in the room cares to process such nostalgia. I am chastened by the indifference of youth.
The two links that I wanted to point out today are perhaps unrelated, but in my carb-induced daze, I am sort of blown away by this pre-Edison sound recording that is being presented down at Stanford for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections conference. Makes me wonder if the cryogenics people were not at least half not-wrong in their thinking.
The other bizarre news of the day is the Mexican emo riots. Or are they technically "anti-emo riots"? Sort of like the way Zoot Suit riot got turned from an incident of white soldiers beating up Chicano kids to a terrible, terrible song by the Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

more Austin

I get up pretty early on Friday to meet up with Scary Mansion at Chris Rolls' hotel. I passed on trying to get into this apparently sold out Children's Museum show the night before. I like the Austin bus system, it's pretty regular and cheap. Paul Costuros is asleep in the hotel room when we get there. Leah and her twin sister Vanessa arrive, we were hoping to shoot on the roof by the pool, but there's a power issue, and it's probably noisy, so we opt for filming in the room. The videos turned out great I think, they are here:
We eat a so-so rather bland pita sandwich at the Pita Pit. My food options are pretty wide open compared to my vegan and veg friends, but I still find the selections pretty bland and I vow not to overdo pizza. Paul goes to buy some swim trunks and I get a picture taken wearing a dorky hat and wraparound sunglasses i found at work.
On friday afternoon, we play at Okay Mountain, a gallery near/behind an inflatable moonwalk rental place, which also sold pinatas and had air conditioning. Our band was playing on an Asthmatic Kitty bill with Gary Higgins and Weird Weeds. I ran into Katie Byron and her friend walking down Cesar Chavez and dragged them there with me. It's a pretty cool gallery, and it's a hot day in a backyard with only porta potties. The abundance of porta potties is a sad reality when you bring in a ton of drunk people in to your town and the plumbing capacity is overrun.
The Okay Mountain show runs late and we have to play before Weird Weeds and bounce before they play. I also talk smack about the free gross vitamin water that is there, and I guess the vitamin water people are there. Whoops. We have to drive across town to get to the Opera House for the Smell show. We worry that we are running late, but of course there is still plenty of time because there is a band playing that is friends with the owners who got added. We watch the band Magic Johnson. I go to the cafe across the street and start talking to this random girl. She is editing video, and I ask her what it's for. "Did you watch the Super Bowl?" she asks me. No, I didn't. She says "I don't normally watch it, but I won this contest and they showed my video during the Super Bowl." She entered a Doritos music video contest and now she has a record deal with Interscope. I invite her to come see my band across the street but I can tell this is not going to happen. For the record, I eat a lot of Doritos.
Opera House is right around the corner from End Of An Ear record store and next to a shop called "New Brohemia" that is a men's used clothing shop. I ask them how long they've been around with that name, because I thought I copyrighted the name "Brohemia" in 2000. I honestly never did anything with the name, but I am pretty sure I called dibs on that shit. The guy there said they've been around "a few years," but there we go.
Anyhow, we play indoors in this tiny room and it is pretty fun. Seeing the whole LA crew is nice, it felt like a real show on a real tour. We wait till the end of the show, which is Anavan, and then drive off across town to find the 501 Theater show that Veronica set up.
(photo from The Skyline Network)
For those unfamiliar with Finally Punk, they were/are four young (still young) girls from Austin whom we met in 2006 when they came through the Bay just as we were leaving Club Short. There is an assumption that we were evicted from Club Short. It is not so cut-and-dried, but in any case, people decided to trash our house as if it were being demolished. I am sure it will one day be demolished, but up to this point, it has not been. What can I say about Finally Punk playing our house - the railing on the side of the house came completely off. In any case, Veronica is also in the Carrots and she had supposedly quit Finally Punk, but she played this show with them. When we arrive, Death Sentence: Panda is packing up and Naked On the Vague is playing. There is something distinctive about a certain genre of Australian vocal styles, one cannot put it down to just accents. There is an approach to singing which is see in bands like Sea Scouts, Lakes, and even Naked On the Vague, whose Lucy Phelan is the only woman I can throw this descriptor at. Nevertheless, they are darkly noisy and gloomy in a way that pleases me. I spend part or most of the next band waiting out front trying to locate friends I have told to come here, and I also go back and forth to Ms. Bea's where we've been told that we can play the UTR/ToddP show as long as we get there by 10:45 and promise to be done by 11. I see Michelle Valdez aka Bunnyphonic who moved from Oakland to San Antonio a few years back. We toured together a long time ago, and she seems to be doing well in Texas. Liz Harris shows up also. Finally Punk have the largest crowd as hometown advantage and the rarity of their performance surely comes into play. They have a lot more songs than I remember, and they have the crowd in the palm of their collective hand.
We play a very aggravated 5 or six songs right after them. The ticking clock of another show three blocks away probably adds to the adrenaline rush. Hate to be the dicks who run away right after playing, but that is the way of SXSW. We haul ass over to Ms. Bea's and borrow the equipment of the band before us whose name escapes me, but they are from Georgia I think. We end at 11 on the dot.
After DS:P, Michelle and Russell and I go to a diner whose name I forget. The line is not so bad. Michelle tells me about a residency she did in Barcelona. Both her and Russell agree that music is dead. Art is where it is at apparently. I'm kind of moping to both of them about feeling burnt out on music and they think I should move to Texas. It's not really sinking in at the time, but the longer I linger in Austin, the more livable it seems.

SXSW summarized

I started off writing about this on the Little Otsu Studio blog, but now that I have my own thing, it seems more appropriate to continue the saga here.
(I just was about to say "I started blogging about this" when I realized the appropriate term should still be "I started writing about this." It would be like saying "I started zining about this." Still trying to wrap my head around this format.)
Anyhow, this is the analogy I like to use for SXSW. Do you remember (if you grew up around one) going to Chuck E Cheese as a kid? It was always super exciting in theory and the place seemed massive, but your carb overload and attention overstimulus starts to wear off after a while. There is that sort of forced sensation of fun that becomes codified, so at some point you start to wonder if it is really all that it's hyped up to be. Add into this the creepy voyeur/flaneur dynamic of excessive documentation. Also, you and your friends are just there to have fun, but some of your friends go in expecting that a guy in a giant rat suit is watching all the kids playing to cherry-pick their particular fun-having methodology out of the crowd and anoint them with Chuck E magic. How do you think they find all those clapping arms to mount on the wall?
This may sound excessively cynical, but I still associate Chuck E Cheese with fun. I like overstimulation in small doses. And if you don't play the game of caring whether or not the rat is watching your every move, you will have more fun. And would I really say "no" if Nolan Bushnell was under that rat mask and wanted to help my "career"? Probably not. The man started Atari!
My Thursday afternoon was spent at Ms. Bea's Todd P show, and then I pretty much spent the rest of my evening glued to one spot, the Habana Annex for the Upset the Rhythm show. Chris and Claire are awesome, they booked our UK tour and their band Hands on Heads played a ton of shows with us, and they put out our album. Playing their showcase was the ostensible reason for the entire trip. (Oh yes, my band for interest of disclosure, which probably doesn't apply if you are reading My Blog, is called KIT)
This is a pretty killer lineup. Gowns on first, followed by Soiled Mattress and the Springs. Bizarre yet straight-forward smoove jazz played by a strange trio of New Yorkers. Avi is on the comp I put out under his solo guise of Dim Diamond, but here he is pounding the drums. Saxaphonist Matthew Thurber also does these insane comics on Picturebox and on his own. I buy the issue of 1-800-Mice that I don't have already, which has three sushi chefs hunting down Peace Punk.

I think we play at that point. Some technical snafus, I think my pedal gets unplugged or the battery dies during the first or second song. I think we recover. There is apparently an overdubbed video on Superdeluxe. I am the one with the SG. Thanks "El Douche A" for the mild amusement.
High Places play right after us. I feel like I see them more than I see some bands that live in the Bay Area. Not that I'm complaining. Rob and Mary rule. I take the most photos of the trip here before I realize something is fucked with my memory card, so there are pretty much no other pictures for the rest of this trip.

Oh, did I neglect to mention that the Habana Calle Annex is outdoors with a giant tent? And that our stage is a giant mobile truck that was used on the Warp Tour? During the Hawnay Troof set, which actually was the first act of the night, VC invited people on stage and they bounced around, pretty literally, as the thing was probably not designed to hold that many people at once.
John Maus played after High Places. His records are great. I was expecting a band maybe, but much like Ariel Pink, he sings along to pre-recorded tracks. "Sings" may not be the right word. He freaks out a lot, runs around the audience, gesticulates wildly, is off the fucking hinge. I would not have guessed this level of aggro-ness based on his music. He looks and acts like a cross between Malkamus and Bob Linder from Total Shutdown. Truly bizarre.
Death Sentence: Panda are next. I see the kids from New Bloods at the show, and a few peeps from Terrorbird, and Tom Loftus, and a few SF peeps roll in for DSP including Tony Bedard and Chris Rolls. No Age rolls in from like their 4th show of the day. After the show I start walking with Russell back to his house, but he just moved to Austin like one week prior, so we get sort of stuck in a weird area. The first and hopefully only time in my life, we come across one of these rickshaw bike guys and he says he'll take us back to Cesar Chavez for $5. At this point I haven't slept in a while and my feet hurt, so we buck up. This guy is dragging at least 300 pounds of competent human flesh up a small grade hill. I feel intensely guilty and we are going about the speed of a brisk walk. We give him ten when we get near the Congress bridge. And then it's a long walk down Congress to Russell's, where I sleep on a hardwood floor with some sheets by his dryer. I am so tired that It does not matter.

Have to break this up into smaller chunks, this is too much to read at once I imagine. Friday is described in the next post.

inaugural posting

In an ongoing series of exhibitionist tendencies, welcome to my blog. Yes, I already have a flickr account, a last.fm, a myspace, a facebook, and jesus, shelfari? When is the last time I read something that did not have pictures? It's been a while.

Right now, the most interesting thing going on is my friend Juan is going to South America for a while so I have inherited his cat named Juno. He's not pregnant. He does have mutant extra thumbs.