Californiageddon

Zum Soundcloud group

2012-01-19T16:05:00.000-08:00

I asked people to join this group and post their sounds as well.

Giant Robot 68.1 - More music reviews and follow-ups

2012-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

Giant Robot 68.1 - More music reviews and follow-ups

complete KFJC interview

2012-01-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

If you have 3 hours to listen to me blabber and play records (with Max Level and Simon Fabela) click away! Thanks KFJC Mayhem!

last.fm tagcloud

2012-01-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

Make your own dynamic tag cloud

long year.

2011-12-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

Just got the domain name TangHuaChen.com, my cousin paid for a memorial site and it just directs to that, but somehow that seems like our modern way of paying tribute.
This photo is from the one time he came to my house in East Oakland. I wasn't there that long. I hope he was happy with it.

wakka wakka

2011-11-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

I was feeling a little cynical about the new Muppets movie when I heard about it a year or so ago. I just saw it however and while there is WAY too much of the human story in it, I could also see how much Jason Segel used the Walter character as a pure kind of fan and put in how he himself related to the Muppets. It is a movie that leans heavily on nostalgia, sentiment, and not a little schmaltz, but it totally got to me. And it's actually funny for the most part. What great comedy doesn't KIND OF suck for the last 5 minutes when it has to get down to the business of resolving plot points?
I also saw it with someone who was 27 and never watched the show and her comments were along the lines of "it's super cute, but I didn't get a lot of it, I didn't enjoy it as much as you did." Which I wonder if that's how most of the actual children taken to this felt, while their parents were bawling to "Rainbow Connection."
I could break down part of my love for the franchise as the last remaining part of my childhood that is somewhat intact after the Star Wars series was completely gutted of all meaning in the past decade. I had no expectations for a Smurf movie, and they were somewhat met. The Smurfs movie had jokes, and they were more meta than I thought, but they were in the end, jokes about how shitty of a movie they were making. And the Smurfs had no inner life.
The part where I'll cry, and I rarely cry at movies, was when Kermit is wandering through his house singing and looking at the portraits of all his friends. I don't think any of the old films or anything else Muppet-related invested that much into a backstory for him. He has never been my favorite Muppet in the same way that how the fuck can Mickey Mouse ever be your favorite character? He's the boring center and the straight man. His sincerity is the most consistent thing about him.
The movie on the whole seems to be pitching itself as an antidote to reality television and being jaded, by going so over the top with its diegetic jokes. It's a pop cultural love letter that could just coast on accumulated goodwill, but it becomes a greater statement about humility and celebrity and vulnerability in surprising ways. It's just too bad Segel and the other writers felt the need to shoehorn so much of their subplot in.
I haven't been following Segel too much, but if there's a throughline to his persona, I could see it from his character on Freaks and Geeks insisting he was going to sing a song he wrote for Lindsay, not realizing it was terrible. Seth Rogen ends up saving his dignity somewhat by smashing the guitar, but Segel's thing, as it were, is overcommitment. In this case, he poured all of that into the writing of the movie. I love Amy Adams in most things, The Fighter particularly. She does a better job at being a Muppet-y human than he does. These are minor caveats though. If you go into a kids' movie expecting fine human acting, it will be a hard road.

Standup

2011-11-22T12:39:00.001-08:00

New podcast up

2011-11-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

Zum Podcast Episode 10
ANIKA - Officer Officer (Stones Throw)
ANTIFAMILY - I Of The Law (Difficult Fun)
GA'AN - Arms Can Speak - Black Equus (Captcha)
BORIS - Hope - Attention Please (Sargent House)
WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM - Subterranean Initiation -Celestial Lineage (Southern Lord)
VAN DYKE PARKS - Wall Street (Bananastan)
ARTHUR DOYLE - Stormy Monday - No More Crazy Women (Carbon)
BESTIAL MOUTHS - Hypnagogig Jerk
SISTER FUCKER - Glass Gauntlet - California CDR
TOTAL SHUTDOWN - Ka Ka Ka (Load)
DEL CLOSE AND JOHN BRENT- Basic Hip - How To Speak Hip (Mercury 1959)
SCARCITY OF TANKS - Canister Fault - Sensational Grade (Total Life Society)
RACCOONS - Lad Salad
GULLS - Mdou Moctar "Taholtine" remix - Music For Saharan Cellphones (Boomarm Nation)

KIT in France

2011-10-25T00:49:00.000-07:00

KIT is coming to France for the first time.
Also back in Brighton for the first time since 2007!
all known dates listed below.

KIT FRANCO/ANGLO FALL TOUR
Facebook event page

mon oct 31 Nantes @ Festival Soy w/ Iceage
tue nov 1 Tours @ Le Temps Machine
wed nov 2 Caen TBA
thu nov 3 Metz @ Festival Musiques Volantes
fri nov 4 Brighton
sat nov 5 London @ Dalston Victoria w/ Captain Ahab, Bitches

sun nov 6 Los Angeles @ The Smell / PPM Festival

Stereo Total "Rain" remix

Comedy on the Bus - Friday Oct 21

2011-10-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

The Larry bus will be moving from various BART stops in the East Bay from 8-10 PM on Friday Oct 21st

Facebook event link
also check
http://twitter.com/busshow
and http://twitter.com/georgethechen for updates

performers include
Ivan Hernandez
Roman Leo
Alex White
Jessica Sele
Andrew Holmgren
Alee Karim
MC George Chen

8-8:30 Ashby BART
8:45-9 MacArthur BART (will pass the VOID signing at 1234 Go Records)
9:15-9:30 19th St BART
9:45-10 (will pass the High Places show at Liminal http://liminal-space.org/events/land-sea-presents)
10 back to Ashby BART

#OccupyLarry

Number 1 In Heaven

2011-10-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

I went to go check out the Bay Area Now 6 show at Yerba Buena Center the last weekend it was up. Consequently they shut down the entire upstairs so we couldn't see anything that was being de-installed. (Shouldn't that be "unstalled"?) I hadn't been to one of these in years, but I was not super enthused or blown away by anything there. The Ben Venom quilt was impressive in scope definitely. That and the Tammy Rae Carland photos I naturally gravitated to, maybe it's a bit lowbrow of me to be into metal and stand up comedy. Weston Teruya's sculptures were cool, they inevitably reminded me of Ben Peterson's paintings.
When John and Stephanie told me their friend was doing a slideshow lecture on Voyager, I was trying to think of excuses not to go. I ended up tagging along (and resisting the siren song of Beard Papa's creampuffs) and was super pleased and surprised by the evening.
What's most interesting is that it crosses over from being performance into film. They call it live film. It's almost a new genre, except it's like the early days of silent cinema.

The work herein seems like a variation on Utopia In Four Movements, or at least two out of three chunks come directly from that. What's nice is every iteration is, by the nature of being a live thing, a variation. Sam Green and Dave Cerf change the order and content of the show each time around, no live band this time. Cerf mixes the audio cues live and Green does most of the narration. The first piece was on Voyager's gold record that is meant to document humanity for any potential intelligent life that ultimately comes across it. They goof on that impulse with funny juxtapositions of the images that were selected and even a snippet of Jeff Bridges in the buff as Starman. There's a little tinge of "what has society become," where we no longer look up to science and exploration, where Carl Sagan has been replaced by the Kardashians, but they're not into pointing fingers. A lot of the pieces work by not shoving an answer down your throat, but hanging in the ambiguity, which is as close to moralizing as we can take.
The second piece was on the world's largest shopping mall in Dongguan, where I just went in August. They didn't show it to us, probably because it's a bit of an embarrassment with 90% of the space vacant. The camera follows a suited Teletubby dancing around the empty mall, which opened in 2005. Having just been in the absurd heat and humidity of Dongguan, I felt for this girl even as I laughed at the situation. In some ways, it's no different than the workers in the Donald Duck suits in Disneyland. Like everything in the piece, comic cynicism is balanced out by some sentimental hopefulness. They closed with a piece on time capsules as a phenomenon that seems to have died off as we document ourselves into infinity with our media oversharing, even as Brian Eno spearheads the Long Now Foundation. They ended with a toast (handing out alcohol to the crowd is a neat trick for interactivity) to Occupy Wall Street, a glimmer of utopianism amidst endless bummers.
I didn't realize until much later (even after we'd gone out to dinner with their whole crew) that Green had made the Weather Underground film. I think I may even have been at KPFA when he was doing an interview about that film.

This whole presentation reminded me to ask my Aunt, who works at NASA, if she knew anything about the Gold Record. Turns out she knew a lot of people who were mentioned in the book Contact, which I'd never read. I vaguely remembered the movie with Jodie Foster, which was based on Sagan's novel, but my aunt claims to have known the character Foster was based on.
Our family friend Emma, my aunt's good friend who worked at NASA and SETI also, was obsessed with Carl Sagan. He came through NASA in the '90s and gave a talk. At the reception, Emma grabbed the half-eaten Twinkie he'd left at a table and treated it as great a souvenir as someone might treat a moonrock. Who knows how long Carl Sagan's Twinkie lasted, but he inspired her to become a scientist when she was a little girl in England.
My dad was very into astronomy and space travel. We had posters around the house of the Horsehead Nebula. I grew up staring at this poster of our solar system done to scale, marking the distances between planets and relative sizes. It was always disheartening in a way, in the midst of doing my homework, to stare up and see just how tiny and insignificant we are in the cosmos. People like Carl Sagan and my dad may have found it exciting to know they were part of something vast, but it just reminded me that life was short and bleak and ultimately insignificant. As an adult, I wish I'd been able to take that longer view in, but I still find myself struggling to find the meaning in things. Especially now with the instantaneous overshare of Twitter and even this blog, it's easy to be overcome by the rush to be somewhere or check things off your bucket list rather than reflect on the nature of reality and face mortality in the broadest terms, at the level of a species that will barely leave a mark on one tiny marble. A blog post is nothing like etching in gold, I'm often reminded and occasionally relieved by. But it's not far from a time capsule.

Here's the content of the gold record

P.S. RIP Steve Jobs and Bert Jansch

Old Boxleitner track

2011-10-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of thing I'm enjoying with soundcloud, posting things that kind of belong nowhere in the scheme of any commercial logic but nice to share archivally.
This was a band that I was in with several people, but most consistently it was me and Gabe Mindel and Ceci Moss and Ian Connelly. "Consistency" is maybe not the word that most people would apply to this band. It was exciting though, we were all freshfaced and bushytailed enough to try and jam all our concepts about music and art and performance into one platform. I could go on about what that period in my life was like, and I do have an old column I wrote for Skyscraper at the time of this recording, the first time any of these bands really went on tour.
This was off a cassingle organized by Owen Ashworth. We were not super tight at the time, but had this idea to go on tour with Jim Yoshii Pile Up and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone to the northwest in the dead of winter. It's only relevant in a way because of what came out of that whole experience. we definitely turned Sikwaya off of playing live music nearly for life, I think he quit JYPU shortly thereafter. Some of us got so into touring that it became pretty much our lifestyle for the next decade.
The recording I recall making in this living room I was renting in the Mission, using TV static, a digital delay pedal and messing with the 4 track speed.

Show Oct 10th

2011-09-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

This one is interesting, some friends from Amsterdam and from east coast noise power couple Ren and Val. We wanted to keep it mellow on a Monday, so we're just DJing. Lief Hall is going to do visuals and Gaze headlines.

Facebook event
Last.fm event
Oct 10th at East Nile, all ages.
Map
Gaze
Unicorn Hard On
Container
Laser Poodle
Momelien
DJs Chen Santa Maria
Lief Hall live animation/projection (Vancouver BC, ex-Mutators, Myths)

snot my fault

2011-09-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

I am in the house I grew up in the longest. One of multiple houses, but this is where a lot of my oldest memories are rooted. I am sleeping in a room that I remember being my room when I was 4 or 5. The same purple weave wall is there.
I used to have an issue, some of us still have it. It's taboo to talk about, but I'm gonna break the silence.
I used to be a chronic nosepicker. I was a booger eater. I enjoyed the salty flavor. My mom said I used to enjoy crying a lot, so maybe that's where that came from, enjoying the slickness of mucous in the back of my throat. There was a patch of this purple wall that was covered in boogers when I was a kid. It's not the kind of wall that cleans easily.
In retrospect, it was a sort of controlling, comforting behavior in a chaotic upbringing. I read about people who are cutters, and some of their logic made sense to me as a nosepicker. It got to the point where as a kid I would have chronic nosebleeds. My parents would try to get me to stop, say that my nostrils were going to become huge. I guess the only other thing about this is I never developed a phobia about blood. Some people say they faint at the sight of it. I always took it as an inevitable thing, just lying below the surface of our frail exteriors, and it didn't taste awful. Maybe I was on my way to becoming a vampire?
When I was about 11 or 12 my mom took me a to a doctor and I wasn't sure what he was actually supposed to be doing, but he stuck these sticks in my nose and they burned like hell. I guess she had authorized him to cauterize the blood vessels in my nose so I wouldn't have the constant nosebleeds. Way to swat a fly with a sledgehammer, medicine.
I also have a theory that genetically Chinese people were used to an extremely humid environment, and the dry California weather was not something I'd adapted to. I don't have many racial theories, but this one made sense. Why else was I the lone kid who would break out in these spates of self-induce nosebleeds? Having just gone to China, I think my mucous filters were overactive in blocking out the pollution and I was crustifying at a noticeable rate. So there goes that theory.
I'd like to say I learned to stop. I think I've just replaced that tic with other tics. But I'm not ashamed of my habit anymore. Maybe it was Andrew WK that broke that barrier of silence for all of us, his bloody visage that implied cocaine abuse. I am a reformed nosepicker, but I take it one day at a time.

Chen Santa Maria - live Mama Buzz set

2011-09-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

I feel like we've been playing Mama Buzz forever. Probably have. Since 2004 or so? Was weird to revisit it with this minmal set on Aug 21. Also on the bill were Orbless, Garrincha and the Stolen Elk, and Polyps from Portland.
Thanks to Adam Gochnauer, ever the documentarian.

Sun Ra's Job Creation Plan

2011-09-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

BAM/PFA L@TE recap

2011-09-15T02:07:00.000-07:00

Here's some documentation from the series of shows I put together in August for the Berkeley Art Museum.

Aug 5, 2011 - David Horvitz and company

Mia Nolting Skype portraits

Joshua Kit Clayton conversing with an unsuspecting populace courtesy of BAM/PFA flickr

Sara Wintz and Jackqueline Frost "Use Your Paper Voice" courtesy of BAM/PFA flickr

C. Spencer Yeh

more photos from BAM/PFA flickr here.

Aug 12, 2011 - Gerritt Wittmer & Paul Knowles.

Gerritt Wittmer & Paul Knowles @ Berkeley Art Museum 8/12/2011 from Gerritt Wittmer on Vimeo.

More photos at the BAM/PFA flickr set.

Sir Richard Bishop

Aug 19, 2011 - Evangelista.

signed posters printed and designed by Brendan at Yes Press

cat people

2011-09-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

i have gone through several catsitting scenarios since my beloved Possum passed on. I have been hesitant to commit to another situation that long term and generally committal. When Jamie could no longer handle Doris/aka 14th Amendment, I took her under my wing, assuming that she'd be at least on familiar territory. She took a shit on my favorite sweater on top of my comforter and futon. I later discovered she'd sprayed urine on a bunch of cds. She is the first cat that resented me so much that she ran away, when she could get her fat pillow-like body out the escape hatch in East Oakland. During the Gowns tour I was watching the white stinker who would claw my arms whenever I came home. To be fair to him, he thought he'd been kidnapped, and he kind of was - I had to corner him by an outdoor dryer to get him into a cardboard box. It turned out Ezra never told his dad I was coming to get the cat, so he even reported him missing and thought he'd turned up dead in the kitty morgue. Turned out he'd identified an entirely different cat.
Then I had Juno for a few months and he made the transition with me to my new apartment. He went back with Juan when I left on tour.
And how could I forget Clarence, the Maine Coon. He was a lover and a meower.
In any case, other than the occasional houseguest (Saul, the upstairs kittens) I have been cat free for a while.
My friend Sophia is in the midst of moving and asked if Corndawg could be put up at my place. I'm gone most of the week, but when I come back we snuggle. He's dying for attention, and he has sharp claws, so I appreciate the effort but his bony nubs making biscuits on my arms hurts like the dickens. I think last night I may have punched him in the face in my sleep.
I was gone for a few days and when I came home it looked like someone had ransacked my kitchen. A box on the very top shelf had been knocked down and cupboards opened, as if Corndawg were looking for a frosty mug to pour a beer into. Or maybe he needed a collander for some pasta he was making.
I had completely forgotten that Jamie had given me a bag of cat stuff long ago. I'd already donated the cardboard scratch device away to the upstairs kittens, and didn't see much immediate need for the rest. Corndawg had managed to get this door open where I'd stashed some old cat stuff, and strewn across the kitchen floor was an expired bag of catnip. I pictured him writhing around in his stolen treasure, huffing the stale remnants like Al Pacino doing heaps of coke off a table in Scarface.
Perhaps more disturbing was this glove/comb combo that was bequeathed to me by Jamie. It was used extensively on 14th Amendment because of her appalling skin condition and alopecia. Walking into what looked like a crime scene with only the evidence (stale catnip bag, glove covered in another's fur), I wondered what raced through Corndawg's mind at the moment of discovery, like Geraldo Rivera unearthing Al Capone's vault.
A smarter cat might ask, what happened to all these other cats whose fur I can smell on this comb/glove? What was the catnip for? Have I ended up in the lair of a cat serial killer? Why else would he need to entice strange cats over with catnip, collect their hair for his nefarious purposes, and dispose of the body where a creature such as I may never smell the remains?
But no. Corndawg is trusting. He jumps on me and makes biscuits and does not conspire to bash me over the head with a typewriter once he's convinced me of his Stockholm Syndrome. Or does he? It's just a waiting game.

Decayed

2011-09-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, I had come back with my tail between my legs from spending most of the year in Manhattan. I decided to come back, nearly broke, directionless, knowing only that I wanted to write professionally and deciding that I could do that anywhere. I moved all my stuff back in January. For a few months of spring I lived in a squalid flat with a philosopher who slept on a piece of wood and left a Pigpen-like wake of baked beans mess chaos, a girl who kept getting into complex situations with boys that she had to keep hidden from her girlfriend, my bandmate who was sleeping in an open hallway, and probably some other visitors that I lost track of. I ran out of money again, I tried temping, I tried rebooting my band to pretty much no interest from anyone, I wondered if returning to the Bay was the right thing to do. Coming back felt like giving up, and partly a too-late attempt to win over this girl I was in love with in Oakland. After about two or three months, my bandmate decided to move to Portland, the apartment disbanded, I'd run out of money and ended up moving back to my Dad's house in San Jose. I could only find temp jobs or substitute teaching at a preschool in Berkeley. I ended up working at the movie theater with a bunch of friends. My parents were not living in the house, they were in Hong Kong, so I thought I'd be doing them a favor watching the place and paying no rent. I didn't even have a car, I had to use theirs to go work minimum wage an hour away. I couldn't envision settling my life in the South Bay, all my friends were in SF.
I finally got a full time job for three months, I was sick of feeling so isolated and wanted to move back up to the East Bay. I ended up looking with the girl I lived with before and another friend I had met through their oddball crew. Sight unseen, I agreed to move in to this house with them once I had the job ensured. The day the lease was signed was 9/11/2001.
I woke up very groggy that morning at my Dad's house. There was a voicemail from my sister to turn the TV on saying "we're under attack." It was very difficult to comprehend, who was doing the attacking? I watched the footage. I instantly got online and tried to email friends in Manhattan. My geography was always shaky, but I also had no idea what the scope of the panic was like, if my friend in Chinatown was in a crash radius. The subway. The only time I'd been near the WTC was in the subway.
The first thing people were saying on the message groups I was on was that we should go donate blood
One of the online photos of bystanders hugging and crying up in midtown had someone I knew from the Bay Area. Another message board mentioned friends of friends who'd been on the first plane, including a newborn baby.
My first posting was a concern that what happened with the Japanese in the internment camps was about to happen here again.
Stories were floating around on the internet of narrow escapes, of people with turbans being attacked as people were fleeing.
I had to go over to my Mom's house, she was moving out and I was supposed to help her pack. I called her and said there's all this stuff on the news, I don't know if I can come over and help you right now. She said that I should still come over because life will go on and she still needed help with moving. It was very surreal helping her pack and dealing with movers while still in shock, wondering if I should talk to the movers about it, needing to talk to someone about it but my mother was pre-occupied with preserving her stuff.
I ended up driving back to my dad's house, thinking the world had changed forever, and wondering if this thug dude riding his bike by the gas station was aware of it. Nothing felt normal for a while after that, but to be honest nothing had felt normal that whole year, or since.

May and Nichols more like

2011-09-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

job wobble

2011-08-26T00:34:00.000-07:00

after 4 months, I have a new job.
Today I ended up naming a box device after a song by a band I am in without realizing it.
And looking up cryptozoology names.
Spending part of my time near where I grew up. Have I grown up yet?

KIT "Out Of Ruins" video

2011-08-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

New video for the song "Out Of Ruins" off the KIT album Invocation.
Directed by Steven Andrew Garcia

SFMOMA Artcast August 2011

2011-08-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

SFMOMA | Explore Modern Art | Multimedia | SFMOMA Artcasts | SFMOMA Artcast August 2011

I get to compare Total Shutdown to Matisse. Not really, but it kinda seems that way.

Word As A Weapon

2011-08-17T00:32:00.001-07:00

Sea Scouts - Word as a Weapon by Noise, Etc.

going

2011-08-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

on my way to China. I haven't been since 2002. Waiting at SFO.
Just completed a good evening at the Berkeley Art Museum. Great performance from C Spencer Yeh. DJing creepy sounds from Mimaroglu to Charles Dodge by Matt Thompson. Lots of other new friends performed. Then got a ride to Ashby BART. Now we wait.

New Zum Podcast (Episode #9)

2011-08-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

Please enjoy

Zum Podcast

Episode 9

---------------

ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB - Works in Progress April 2008 - Bread #1

LITURGY - Sun of Light - Aesthetica (Thrill Jockey)

VHOLTZ - unreleased 12" track

RENE HELL - Bending (Voice) - The Hilton (Type)

MEREDITH MONK - Masks - Mercy (ECM Records)

GLASS GRAVES - KIT "Rain" Remix - Revocation

HIGH CASTLE - We Were Lovers - Spirit of the West (Zum)

SLEETMUTE NIGHTMUTE - In Adulthood - Night of the Long Knives (Fast Weapons)

DIVORCE - Early Christianity (Optimo)

ZS - Acres of Skin - New Slaves (Social Registry)

COUGHS - Bunny Slope - Live recording from The Smell, July 1, 2005

GROUP DOUEH - Wazan Samat - Guitar Music From the Western Sahara (Sublime Frequencies)

7YRC

2011-06-07T02:33:00.001-07:00

song i helped write

The Lowdown in my old yard

2011-05-28T02:19:00.001-07:00

The Lowdown on Burn My Eye! episode #6 from V. Porter on Vimeo.

4/20 Show

2011-04-16T15:49:00.000-07:00

new lineup and new venue for this wednesday. Also here's an interview I did for the website Argot and Ochre

Wednesday, April 20 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia
San Francisco, CA

A mix of talk show, comedy, and music performance.
Hosted by George Chen
publisher V. Vale (http://researchpubs.com/)
comedian Chris Thayer (http://www.facebook.com/christhayercomedy)
cartoonist Jason Shiga (http://www.shigabooks.com/)
performance by Tastyville (http://tastyvillepresents.com/)
music by Spaceburn (Steve Santa Maria and Brian Tester)

$5 all ages
8 pm to 11 pm (music done by 10:30 pm)

Little Paper Planes has my shirt!

2011-04-06T08:36:00.000-07:00

Little Paper Planes is carrying this shirt i made a while ago, selling it for $20!

Variety Show

2011-03-16T01:34:00.000-07:00

It went really well, some of the participants did not want their videos made public so we're respectfully holding off on those. We packed the Saturn Cafe backroom, gave away some fudge and records and DVDs, had a few laughs, made a few friends. There will definitely be another one happening, but perhaps in a new location.
Thanks to EMA as well, nice to have a home town show for them before they tear up SXSW.

Variety Show

2011-03-01T12:22:00.000-08:00

I've decided to combine all my interests (podcasting, comedy, music, talking to strangers, being a "host") into its logical culmination - a live Variety Show.
Friday, March 11 · 8:00pm - 11:30pm
Saturn Cafe
2175 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA

A mix of talk show, trivia game show, and music performance. with EMA (ex-Gowns, Amps for Christ)
Joshua Ploeg (travelling chef, punk singer)
Alee Karim
Christy Chan
Dianne Martinez
Sarah Lockhart (slideshow presentation)
hosted by George Chen
We will be playing the Leonard Maltin Game (as heard on the Doug Benson podcast http://douglovesmovies.com/) for audience prizes.
$5, 8 pm.

pre-gabber

2011-02-18T16:49:00.001-08:00

MOZ

2011-01-10T21:43:00.000-08:00

TH Chen 1944-2010

2010-12-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

drawing for his memorial program

T.H. Chen 1944-2010

My father went into the ER last friday after being sick for a few days with what he assumed was simple Tonsilitis. By the time he was admitted to the ER, his blood pressure had gone up and his throat was closing. When they anesthetized him to put a tube down his throat to keep him breathing, his blood pressure dropped and his heart stopped. They had to resuscitate him twice, the first time with CPR, the second time with those paddles. I learned all of this early the next morning as my cousin and aunt drove me down to San Jose to see him. So by the time I arrived, he hadn't been conscious for probably ten hours. The next few days were a scramble of trying to figure out how to maintain his body, not sure to tell people if he was in a coma or what. My feeling, and the doctors bore this out, was that he lost all the oxygen to his brain when his heart gave out, and the machines were only keeping his body alive.

He had signed up to be an organ donor, so that actually allowed everyone an extra day to come see his body and say goodbye before he was taken off. Last we heard, his liver was transplanted successfully.

The funeral is on Monday.

It's strange to think that at the time he went into brain death, around 1 AM on Friday night, I was playing a show in Oakland. I was playing drums and I was starting to get that feeling that can happen in improv where you tell yourself "this is bullshit" but you are too committed to being there to just give up. Not that it was inherently bullshit, but I was just letting all my self doubt color it, and if I'd known what was going on, I would have of course rather have been in the ER with him. I felt shitty because the last time I talked to my dad was on my birthday. He called me to wish me happy birthday at like 7 in the morning, so I was a little short with him as I was just waking up.

First draft of my eulogy for my dad I am supposed to give on Monday. I'm sure there will be revisions.

We all think of our parents as larger than life, as a force of nature. In my case it may have been true.

My father was a firm believer in mind over matter, a philosophy that worked up until very recently.

I remember him not as a business man, but in the past week floods of little memories and vignettes have been bubbling up. The most time we spent together might have been sitting in hourlong traffic from our Bengal Court house to my school in Saratoga. In the '80s, I thought that was how traffic worked. On these drives he would try to drill me on multiplication tables, talk to me about current events, or try to impart his philosophy on self-discipline and personal responsibility. I don't know if I absorbed it all, I definitely had trouble with the multiplication tables, but if you want to quiz me, we can take questions on that later. He would try to explain perpetual motion to me and the law of Thermodynamics, the only section of which I could remember was "There's No Free Lunch." All of this was over the head of a kid who goofed off in Chinese school and retreated into my own fantasy world of super hero cartoons and drawing.

I remember that he had a few jokes he loved to tell. One of them had a punchline about Henry Kissinger jumping out of an airplane with a backpack, so it was a bit over my head at the time. Another favorite might not work in mixed company but I remember it in the context of working at IBM and there being some racial tension with one coworker, who came up to him and said "Chen, you're a shit disturber." His simple response was "Why, am I disturbing you?" I wish I had the werewithal to have that swift of a response, and for an immigrant non-native English speaker to assert himself and turn the situation around always stood out to me as a sign of his strength.

He had a love of science outside of his doctoral field. Astronomy posters were strewn around the house, and I had a "Darwin for Beginners" book thrust on me at an early age. He had a few model airplanes, and his love of aviation probably was tied to his father's role in the Airforce.

While in some ways I think of my Dad as a force of nature and logic, he made compromises for us, his kids, that I'm sure were difficult. Not just switching jobs to support his family and kids going to private school. When my sister and I really wanted a puppy, he got us one even though he had a fear of dogs from being bitten as a child. As I've been looking through old photos this week, I realize how hard it must have been to say "No" to us, because we were really cute kids.

When we were in 4th or 5th grade, my sister and I made it our project to try and get him to quit smoking. It was before the patch, before the gum, we thought just using logic and little gimmicks like a cigarette encased in glass that said "break glass in emergency" would do it. He humored us a little, but in the end I think he just learned to hide the habit better. Although I never smoked, I used to like going into our garage and seeing the layer of haze under the flicker of the florescent tube, an adult ritual of my dad's that remained hidden but left trace elements. A few years ago, I went to pick him up at the airport from China on one of his brief layovers. He seemed stressed out and needed to stop at a gas station and he bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked openly in front of me for the first time in decades. Although we didn't speak about it, I felt like that was a moment where he acknowledged that we were both adults, and there was no need to apologize for our behaviors or life choices, that things were just what they were.

I don't know a lot about batteries, but in the past few years, my Dad's advice was to never leave a battery at full charge or completely empty. Keeping it somewhat in the middle and centered was ideal, and that seemed to encapsulate his philosophy. But I can't think of anyone who lived life at full-charge as much as he did. I can't help but think that the energy he generated for his family, his co-workers, and friends all these years is enough to fill this room.

Video round up

2010-12-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

Great to see another installment from this DVD series of out there animation, traditional and computer aided.

CARTUNE XPREZ 2010 dvd from cartune xprez on Vimeo.

The Portland crew that also doubles as live performance "band" Hooliganship has put together its third Cartune Exprez compilation since the inaugural 2006 edition which turned me on to artists like Takeshi Murata.
2010's version from their press release: "It's been 2 years in the making and got filled up with more animations than ever: work by Jacob Ciocci, Amy Lockhart, Marc Bell, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Clare Rojas, James Duesing, David Daniels, Billy Grant, Sebastian Buerkner, Barry Doupe, Seth Scriver, Christine Gensheimer, Brandon Blommaert, Rimas Sakalauskas, Hooliganship, Taras Hrabowsky, Yoshi Sodeoka, Philippe Blanchard, and Luke Painter."

Speaking of Andrew Jeffrey Wright, he's been making some bizarro youtube clips with music by fellow Philadelphian Mincemeat Or Tenspeed. This one is for Print Liberation:

and this one pays tribute to another film.

I'm guessing it's just performance art? "JUST?" Yes.

I'm also reminded of a cool film series last month I caught at Southern Exposure. I particularly liked Kota Ezawa's mash-up of The Beatles and Dead Kennedys. Of course that's not on Youtube, but here's an interview with him.

that's so ravin'

2010-12-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

play all at once

back by request

2010-12-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

Funny KIT video directed by Vice (notice he is not in the shot till the last few seconds) shot on a very hot day in LA with a bunch of new friends.

Someone asked me recently what happened to this blog. I had put up something that seemed very personal and not necessarily "embarrassing" a year ago, but that i thought at the time could effect my "professional life". a year later it doesn't seem like that big a deal and I took a chunk out of that post, and I also realize not much can make me appear more or less professional at this point. So I'm back. But trying not to have this be a public diary. I also have taken most of the tiny chunks of what I like to talk about on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/georgethechen

boooored

2009-11-03T04:11:00.000-08:00

insomnia returns. i am not sure why exactly, i just remember tonight, i was in san francisco and nothing appealed to me - there was no food i wanted to eat and nowhere i wanted to go. i think that my recent attempt to eat better has curtailed the somewhat pleasurable food binges that used to fill this void.
this is a familiar sort of boredom to me, but with an added sense of disdain that i do not like. about a decade ago i was feeling very paranoid about being in the same place for so long, feeling like telegraph was this familiar trap, that i was reliving a cliche of my own life and unable to escape it. i ended up escaping for a while and then it felt familiar in a way that was comforting. the pendulum has swung to another side, not discomfort, but feeling extremely jaded.
i think about the term "punk rock saved my life" which you don't hear too much anymore. maybe because punk rock ruined my life. that's not even correct, that implies that it's a done deal, that the ruination has occurred. it's more accurate to say that punk rock is ruining my life, or is the vehicle by which i gauge its downfall.
i have a lot of problems with people in positions of authority. it is ironic when those people espouse some sort of anarchist or punk tendencies, it muddies up the dynamic. i had worked in a workplace that i found borderline abusive and infantilizing and it rubbed me very wrong, but i had very few employment options at the time. i now am finding myself having to work again with [REDACTED], i want to say "tormentor", but work is a voluntary engagement, i don't want to liken it to actual torture. it often does seem like a barely tolerable way to spend your time though.
i can't tell if i'm inherently lazy anymore. i just knew after being in this situation that i didn't want to have a boss, and i managed not to have one for a pretty long time - about 5 years. i didn't work for myself the whole time, i did many odd jobs and had many minor bosses, but nothing seemed quite as punitive when it was so meager and part time. i finally gave up hustling so hard and settled into this sort of steady groove. it's not ideal, but it has been flexible and allowed me certain freedoms and gradual upgrades in my standard of living.
[REDACTED]

2009-09-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

some sounds...

2009-09-11T01:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't done much solo music the past few years, but was more motivated to do so recently just by virtue of being asked to play more. I used to perform under the solo moniker of Megaweapon, which actually started its life as something of a pop/indie band and just morphed into my noise experiments with 4 track, but lately i feel less reason to hide what i'm doing behind a psuedonym. it also helps that no one seemed to care whether or not i was playing under a pseudonym or under my real name. I am kind of reserving Megaweapon as my DJ name, and i may post some mixtapes i've made, but for now i kind of want people to check out my current sonic interests. lots of guitar.
both these recordings (a month apart, weird) were sent to me by travis johns. the first is from a luggage store gallery set i did that was very minimally attended. i kind of viewed this as a rehearsal for the solo sets i had planned for the east coast but i'm glad that it got documented - i tried to video it myself but my camera batteries died before it got too far.

july 16, 2009. it doesn't kick in till about the 1 minute mark.

i ended up doing a duo with warren ng in brooklyn at death by audio that i wish we'd recorded, and then i did a solo set in philly that went okay.

the second set here i did at golden trapper keeper lodge in august, fresh from having done the rhys chatham crimson grail piece. this is only relevant to the music here insofar as i kept the same open tuning that was used in crimson grail, partly cause i was too lazy to change strings. ASSS and Chrome Wings from Portland played this show too.

aug 16, 2009

Both these links are set to expire soon.

neglecterino

2009-07-15T20:12:00.001-07:00

now that i have a twitter and you can track the minutiae of my life easier than is really desirable, i forget to update this blogposting, it withers without my nourishing fingers.
between going to record in washington for a week, going to la to play the upset the rhythm show and driving back up after sleeping a few fitful hours in the back of a rental car, i am regaining parts of my human brain after operating on lizard brain levels. signed up to play with evangelista for one show, doing epic practices. trying to become a semi-legit musician that can read sheet music after about twenty years since i had looked at a suzuki method book. working at my job, all the wing-nuttery that involves. i find myself floating in globs of isolation between obligations and duties taht i have chosen, feeling tugs to drop out but this is what i've elected to do with my life, so i'm not sure what dropping out will bring me to. it feels like a transitional phase right now, the slop of summer, the nostalgia whiff mixed with possible personal growth development. i have not gotten a chance to watch up. that is the one simple pleasure i was promising myself, and now there's no more parkway, i'm not sure if there's a cheap seat theater to still go to for this. dumb escapes are needed.

New York shows

2009-07-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

FREE!

--------------
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
George Chen w/ Warren Ng
Mi Or And the Pedestals

http://www.myspace.com/deathbyaudioshows

--------------
Monday Aug 3
Copy Gallery
319 N 11th St
Philadelphia

Social Junk
Mincemeat or Tenspeed
George Chen
Hunter Stabler
hosted by Ben Peterson

---------------
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

nerding

2009-06-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

geochen's Profile -
Get This Widget

gorging the play brain

2009-05-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

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!

the scoundrel

2009-05-09T00:24:00.000-07:00

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.

facts about Weird

2009-04-06T17:25:00.000-07:00

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".

fictions

2009-02-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

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.

couplet

2009-02-18T07:39:00.000-08:00

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.

writing again

2009-02-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

Been laying kind of low in the writing zone the past few years. I remember in the early days of the aughts, i made it my mission to get paid to do this thing that I'd been obsessing over since 7th/8th grade, writing about music. Maybe it started with getting a copy of Lester Bangs "Psychotic Reactions and Carbeurator Dung", which, when you are already a puberty-stricken self-imposed outcast, can only contribute to forcing a psychological generation gap moat from your peer group. Now that I AM an old man, I wonder why I was rushing it.
So part of what has me thinking about this is not just the "new freelance society" (thanks vancouver) or as Tina Brown puts it "Giganomics" of our new financial decline (I was an early adopter of financial decline, the bleeding edge as it were), but also a period of being overloaded on music. It is/was my day job, my vocation and avocation, and crux of my social life, so to add in the burden of TALKING about it...you can see where this is going. The last semi-regular outlet I did was Paper Thin Walls. I just got an email last week that said that the archives are pretty much gone. It was fun to write for Weingarten and it was a really good group reviewing about three tracks a day with mp3s, but they were owned by Getty Images who decided it was time to shut the baby down, so the chances of a defunct site fixing its archives is pretty much nil. So you will be spared my praising of Mammal and ripping on World Inferno Friendship Society, but I really wish I'd backed all those things up.
So I will start by saving the writings that go on here and at this new thing, Thee Outernet. Chloe is the captain but she does not really steer. It's off to an interesting start with the crew.
Other writings I've spewed forth include this review of the Surrender record (the Guardian got the wrong cover image somehow, which you won't see in the online review), an interview with Penelope Houston of the Avengers, some of which might get used for a podcast, and an interview/conversation with Sharon Cheslow that will also probably end up being a podcast.
Now that I think about it, podcasting might have re-sparked my interest in music and the impetus for sharing it. The point being I think that this blog is going to steer clear of music writing now that I have multiple outlets for it on the outside, so expect more TV and movie reviews and pictures of cute animals.

mary hicks on letterman

2009-01-31T07:45:00.000-08:00

Last night David Letterman brought out Bill Hicks' mother and played the clip that he pulled off the air 15 years ago. It was a move that was compounded by Hicks death a few months later. Hicks has grown in legend as a comedian and that moment has been something of a defining point, which I always assumed had been about his material being too controversial for network television.
For whatever reasons of guilt or realizing that history would be against him, but more seeming out of a genuine desire to correct an error in judgment, Letterman's decision to air the material and formally apologize to Hicks' monther is one of the few things besides the inauguration that makes me want to keep my TV around and get the digital converter box. I have always preferred Letterman's sardonic curmudgeon-ness to Leno's populism, but he is clearly exhibiting more depth as a human being in moments like this.
The material that aired, while it is dated, and I still find some of the homophobic comments cringe-worthy from his stand up CDs, was humming truest when skewering religion. I wonder how Hicks would feel today seeing Marky Mark outlive the careers of all the other pop stars he had it in for (Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer did not need any helping hands in their downfall, though who knew Billy Ray Cyrus would spawn a cash cow). I was also just impressed with Mary Hicks, who seemed like she would not have been really confortable with a lot of Bill's material but defended it nonetheless. They alluded to how hard being cut out of the show had been on him, and Letterman's apology seemed genuine and contrite. Though it's hard to say how things would have gone differently back in 1993 if this had aired, by today's standards it's not that controversial and giving him that much airtime today can only cement Hicks' legacy and redeem Letterman's role in it.
Personally it felt vindicating for a cult hero of mine and something about the whole event resonated with me, perhaps because I have enough trouble explaining what my life is like to my mother and imagining that it will one day be acceptable. Maybe it was seeing the vulnerability in the apology or to feel that history has a chance to correct itself. It seems like a minor vindication or victory, but these days we'll take what we can get.

live blogging the inauguration=inbloguration

2009-01-20T08:41:00.001-08:00

i just left my tv on last night, had some trouble sleeping till 3 or so, so i awoke around 7:30 am PST with the coverage on.
just watched the nbc ceremonies, with the familiar tom brokaw drawl introducing all the vps and ex presidents. talking about how jimmy carter is being chillingly received by other presidents for calling the israel situation apartheid. bushes original and clintons jam traffic a little. bush the elder looks really feeble with his walking cane. they say barack "h" when announcing him, i guess that is to be expected. flags wave. i was wondering what it is like to just be one person watching from over by the washington monument, maybe there are big monitors. you can hear tons of chanting. i was in ny in 2001 when people were going to protest bush's inauguration, i didn't go, but it was tempting. it's weird to think how opposite this is. okay, now it's dianne feinstein presiding over this. it is interesting to see all these people who are rivals at diferent points on a stage together. itseems ifyou havea life in politics, you just learn to hide that enmity, or once you're out of the game, you must not care as much anymore. okay, here is reverend rick warren providing the invocation, i had read a little about this choice...
lots of people heads down, closing their eyes. he is the first to say "african american president". he looks up when he says "wisdom to lead us". i wonder if al franken is there somewhere. the entire crowsd is very respectful and silent. does the "our father" prayer, which i used to know when i went to all boys catholic school. wow, here is aretha franklin, wearing the shiniest silver hat. i guess this is where they wanted odetta to perform. there is a band playing somewhere, can't see where, maybe it's pre recorded, that makes the most sense, there would be lots of sound issues if it was a live band. but there's a background chorus and she's doing a call and response with them. they gave her a wireless mic even though she's not moving around that much. my mom is calling me now to see if i'm watching, which she also did during the olympics opening ceremony.
everyone is rocking good winter wear trenchcoats. biden is geting sworn in.
now it's john williams composition with itzhak perlman and yo yo ma. i guess i have not watched one of these live before, i had no idea there was so much music involved. it's all sad and then the clarinet (or is it oboe) sounds a bit hopeful and major key and everything picks up tempo wise. and then it goes into a familiar refrain and all of a sudden it's like "murder she wrote" and "dueling banjos" and jaunty. i can't see who is playing piano. looks like yo yo has an ear piece on, notsure what for. oh yeah, i can see the pianist. i guess this counted as noon even though he hasn't taken the oath. now it's time for the oath. michelle is holding the book, the lincoln bible?
you can hear the sirens, or taht is just what is happening in the streets of oakland. that was quick. okay, they're firing a cannon, which seems to be sending a mixed message. feinstein presents him. now it's speech time and nbc is cutting to viewings all across the country. he's got the prompter for this of course.
so we are being called on to sacrifice and be ready to make hard choices. i do wonder if we're weak and unable to survive the way my family did or the way those that lived through the depression did. cut to a girl who managed to find the most ravey hat - a peace sign foam hand in red whit e and blue. where is your patriotic novelty hat store? i speculate that the facebook phenomenon may be reducing our gross national project. he's talking "unpleasant decisions" and remaking america. acting on the economy, infrastructure. alternative energy, thank you! i wish there would bea cut to the red hat ladies somewhere, but i think the red hats are just to warm your head. apparently cynicism no longer applies - what will i do without it? are we in a post-ironic age again? the last 8 years were good for irony and satire. thank you for standing up for the constitution. "america is a friend of each nation". (it's 9:11 am right now!) "we will not apologize for our way of life." patchwork heritage, talking about religion and including atheists, thanks! "lines of tribe shall soon dissolve" thanks melting pot. to the muslim world - "mutual interest, mutal respect". addressing the middle east. we can't keep consuming the world's resources without regard for its effect, something to that effect. i am not used to feeling this - vulnerability or pride or something close to belief in someone talking. there are high hopes for this talk since he's raised the bar. he mentions jim crow. okay, i'm not gonna cry but i got worried there for a second. 18 minutes and ten seconds. i realize that i'm so used to being angry about bush that my reaction is partly that of an abused puppy getting out of the pound and being brought into a loving home, cringing at a raised voice.
poet elizabeth alexander? is she the poet laureate? that poetry cadence that rises and falls in between a question and declaration. "many have died for this day". rustling paper means you're done.
"Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr., will deliver benedictions." This guy was hilarious. "brown can stick around, yellow can be mellow". Oh, I'm super mellow. Now it's the navy sea chanters chorus, or navy seal chanters? you don't expect navy seals to be super musical. well this went off wihtout a hitch thankfully. now brokaw is talking again.

Movie time

2009-01-16T01:01:00.000-08:00

Let's talk about movies.
I hate to be the dude who harps about how for a quarter back in the day you could see a film and get a phosphate and a popcorn. But really, it's like $10 to see a movie? At the AMC, where the security cops carry guns? I used to work at a movie theater in Albany. The pay was nothing, but I worked with friends and really, I just needed something to help regulate my at the time very nebulous life. So I have seen my fair share of movies. They did not disappear when VHS technology emerged; I don't know if we can draw an analogy between the decline of the recording industry, but the DVD market is going the way of the CD format soon enough.
What was my point - oh yeah, I love Doug Benson's I Love Movies podcast, it usually has really good guests and they talk about movies roughly the way my friends would, if we were high all the time and had an audience. In that spirit, I had to comment on recent cinematic fare.
Christmas day hanging out with my mom, we had run out of things to talk about that did not involve me radically changing my life, so the only thing left to do was waste a day, like 90% of the rest of America apparently, in a chain mall movie theater. The only thing that seemed tolerable that was just opening that she was into was Benjamin Button. I tried to convince her to see Milk, but she said it seemed depressing and not a movie with special effects worthy of a big screen. Curious Case of Benjamin Button, if you saw only the ads, had a very Forrest Gump vibe to its promotion. What do I mean by that? The juxtaposition of a wide eyed innocent in the racialized South with its nuggets of folksy wisdom plus a life-long one-true-love, yadda yadda... This did give me pause but it was really the best compromise I could think of for parent-friendly films on the weekend that Marley and Me was the number one movie in the country. I may get into some SPOILER ALERT territory the further we go into this, but what I found kind of baffling is that this was the film reuniting Se7en (yes, you have to spell it that way, it's in IMDB) director David Fincher with Brad Pitt. Well, they worked together in Fight Club also, but the notion of this dude who put America's Sweetheart Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box taking a stab at a philosophical feel-good movie was too rich to pass up. He also had a big gap between doing Panic Room and Zodiac, all of which is pretty detailed in its violence and thriller-ness.
So the grotesquerie starts off right after a long rambling framing device of aged, wizened Cate Blanchett on her death bed and a total music video about a blind dude who makes a clock that runs backward. Julia Ormond is in this story and it's always alluded to in some way that she's kind of a fuck up and the symbol for that is she smokes. I hadn't seen her in anything since Smilla's Sense of Snow, which was kind of surprisingly bad ass, but was eleven years ago, so maybe she was feeling that aspect of her character. Anyways, the gross part I was waiting for was how they were gonna handle this character that is born old. This is answered with a baby that is super pruney. Well played Fincher, well played. Some of us might have liked to see the mother torn apart by an Alien-type birth of a too-huge 5 foot oldster, but you kept that shit subtle. Mother does die in childbirth, and the guy who played Dr Jekyll in that terrible piece of poo League of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes the man baby he fathered and leaves it on the steps of a house that for some reason, he either already knew about and assumed that the stereotypical barren negress would have her maternal instincts kick in and continue to enact this stereotype through the rest of the film. Not having read Fitzgerald's story that this is based on, there are lots of weird choices in this film that seem like attempts to ground it in a magical reality that don't really pay off for me. Like, why does this all have to do anything with Hurricane Katrina? Like that is the surprise twist at the end, that it's all a metaphor for a very specific incident? It's weirder to me that someone finally put Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton in the same movie, and he gets together with both of them. Talk about having a type. Also he says that Tilda Swinton's character is "very plain", but she's basically a few inches of cheekbone shy of being Cate Blanchett sans whatever redhead dye job they put on her. So there's lots of stuff in this movie that doesn't totally work, or seems like it was a good idea, plus it's a long ass movie. Yet it does not feel quite as manipulative as Forrest Gump. There are obvious manipulative moments but the creepiness and misery of it all remains foregrounded. Though it starts off with the type of man child foolishness that Robin Williams has done repeatedly, the character turning into an alzheimer-riddled little boy cuts down on the sentimentality that we think is coming. Up until all the other framing story elements muddy the whole thing up again. It also depends on a high tolerance for Brad Pitt. I've never really found him that compelling in movies. Having the greenscreen CGI of his head on a tiny body is also something I found distracting. If you go into a movie theater on Christmas though, you want to be manipulated, you want sentimentality or whatever feeling got sucked out of spending time with your actual family and have a 3 hour facsimile thereof, so kudos to you David Fincher for trying to say everything that can be said about the human experience in three hours of digi-sepia tones and CGI hummingbirds.
We had a break and went into two different theaters. This is known in layman's terms as "double dipping". My mom had already seen Slumdog Millionaire so she went to see Valkyrie. Slumdog Millionaire had been hyped up to me by most of my friends, and I have to say it pretty much met my expectations. It's well structured and hits on a lot of violence and romance and cultural stuff I knew nothing about prior. When I think of movies with violence and children the rawest example is probably City of God, so nothing shocked me quite as much in this film as that one, but there are comparable moments. I guess it hadn't opened in India yet and just won a bunch of awards, so it'll be interesting to see how an Indian audience reacts to it. I will say that at several points I wanted the guy to give up on this girl, she did not seem worth it really, all the torture that he goes through to get her. Like most movies, that's where it ends, he gets her and he has money now so they will theoretically be happy. Mo money mo problems.
The movie I saw in theater recently that was the best was Let the Right One In. Recommended for the non-squeamish, which I am assuming most of you are. There is the whole coming-of-age Euro drama genre that is invoked with this movie, a la My Life as a Dog, plus a whole bunch of gory vampire stuff. I don't want to spoil too much about this, but comment back to me if you have seen this movie, but I found myself really bummed by the ending, not that it wasn't awesome to see the inevitable bloodbath, but because we kind of know what this kid's fate is gonna be. If you know what I'm talking about, tell me if you agree. It's seeming like this is how Eli operates, planned or unplanned, until there is nothing left of the person. Maybe I am reading too much into that, but that is how some relationships go.
In the tradition of movie review send off taglines, I need a closing line. "Hey, do you have any popcorn you're throwing out?"

insomnia

2009-01-06T03:50:00.000-08:00

i took the day off as i have a sore throat thing going. tried to sleep most of the day but got sucked into planning a tour and trying to get label things together. in the midst of that, my ms office appears to have lapsed license wise. i need a copy of that and quickbooks. spent a lot of time assessing the point of doing a record label in 2009. don't have a solid answer yet. take some comfort in seeing that no one really knows what the correct course is, so i am probably doing as well as i can considering the obscurity of what i do.
went to some shows this weekend, both at the hemlock. the show on friday was high castle and mayyors and the intelligence. there was also a band called christmas island but i missed them. i am putting out a record for high castle, so i have some vested interest in attending, and i guess that adds some answer to the previous paragraph. if only i could put out a record for mayyors too, but they need to do things their own way, and that is in super limited runs with very little information on any of their records. mark said their plan is to put out ten 7"s before they are old men. the intelligence does not do much for me, but i notice they have the drummer from eat skull.
i considered spending every night this weekend at the hemlock, but that just seemed too sad so i skipped out on the Rio En Medio, Avocet show, although I like those bands a lot. But I did return for round two on Sunday night for a show that I booked for Gay Beast, Mute Socialite, and Strip Mall Seizures. It got a write up in Flavorpill as a No Wave show, which is kind of an easy ballpark to land the entire bill in, but that term always opens up a can of worms with purists. Also, the No Wave influence does not really resonate in my mind with any of these particular bands in the sense that they do not have a really dark negative attitude. there are herky jerky parts and saxophones but all three acts project too many good time vibes for that simplistic round up. strip mall seizures have two bassists now and on the last song one of them moves to the scrap metal percussion. while it is not all sunshine and lollipops, as judy is singing about money being hidden on cayman islands and imminent financial collapse and the mortgage crisis. gay beast - i do not know what dan's lyrics are about for the most part, but the band impressed me the last time i saw them about two years ago. more mathy and "angular" guitar and drum workouts, they are the new blood for the skin graft label, and it's a logical fit. dan's silkscreens are totally epic and colorful. it would be easy in some senses to place gay beast in a lineage of aids wolf or paper rad aesthetically, but not to be dismissive, just as a reference point for fans of those entities. mute socialite have gone from an instrumental four piece to a fifth with the addition of liz allbee on trumpet and vocals. she sits out on one or two songs where moe gets up and plays guitar and there's this repeated chanting going on. i am on the fence in regards to the vocals in this band, especially on the "funk" song, but when liz is on the mic it's turned into total punk rock, even with a drink in hand. they just went into full on dog faced hermans land with the addition of trumpet, which is never a bad thing. i drove home and all i had to eat in the fridge was a mango which was my dinner at 1 am, which is probably why i'm sick now.

"zing"

2008-10-27T19:30:00.001-07:00

big baby

2008-10-23T03:05:00.000-07:00

Running on a treadmill or in place.
I am having serious doubts about my competency at basic living skills.
My car battery died while I was driving it on the freeway. How do I know? the speedometer cut out but the engine was still running. The battery light actually came on, but I am used to many lights being on, so I ignored it until the radio started to go out. the night before i was asked by Phillip if i wanted to join the "Pen Fifteen" club. I thought he said "Ten Fifteen", like 1015 Folsom. So he wrote "Pen 15" on my hand. Why I did not resist or wash my hand more thoroughly, these are questions even I ask, as my car breaks down on the way to the airport and my dad ends up coming to pick me up and we are on our way to a huge family function, and my cousin asks "what's on your hand?" I hope that did not get in any of the photos.
I wonder when I became or will become George Costanza.
Performing lately has become sort of a dreaded chore. I can occasionally get into it, but something about putting myself in front of an audience right now feels extremely self indulgent and also overwhelming. i used to say i didn't have stage fright ever. i wouldn't even characterize it as that, it's just an extreme malaise.
I jokingly mentioned getting stoned to see USAISAMONSTER and now it is becoming a running gag with crossover potential into real life. i have never smoked anything, so if i were to do it it would have to be in a food form, or Kristen recommended a vaporizer. I have just been coming to the realization that my sober ability to cope with reality does not seem to be functioning so well and that perhaps this is why people resort to alcohol and drugs. I am hoping to reach an epiphany of some other kind before I go there. I have not really discussed my sobriety with people unless they ask, partly because it's kind of boring and also it's not something i necessarily identify with in a "straight edge" manner. Yet, it is a defining decision that has affected my life. I spent a lot of today explaining why I did not really see much appeal in drugs, while I try not to judge other people who do them. I feel like in many important cultural ways i might as well be a stoner: I am lazy, I listen to reggae, I eat junk food and have insomnia. I went to see Pineapple Express at the 4:20 screening on opening day.
This same enabling friend suggests I get a tattoo. I don't have tattoos for roughly the same reason - i am cheap and don't like pain. I don't mind bleeding, I used to get nosebleeds a lot. but those don't really hurt. you just get this weird salty snot taste in your mouth and there is this sticky viscous loogie feeling that is foul. but no, i have no good ideas for my theoretical tattoo. i used to say i wanted nipples on my back, but really, that would be horrific on a real person. i sometimes like other people's tattoos. I kind of feel like I have emotional scars, that should be enough. they are hella tribal.

bits and pieces

2008-09-20T06:05:00.001-07:00

impressions

2008-09-04T09:24:00.001-07:00

columbus (from Nirazilla's flickr)

motellin' names

2008-08-25T01:37:00.000-07:00

first, some animals...

discussing terrible and good band names in the van. these are bad ones in someone's opinion, not necessarily mine (note- this is not about the quality of music):
rage against the machine
this song is a mess but so am i
capitalist casualties
foot village
radiohead
acid mothers temple
abe vigoda
indestructable beat of palo alto
the dead science
bjork
kid606
architecture in helsinki
vivian girls
yacht
fuckwolf

:good band names:
sonic youth
the doors
joy division
the fugees
x
ooioo
fast forward
the cars the doors
crass
beat happening
the smiths
bob dylan
the damned

:split opinion:
morrissey
skrewdriver
no age
xiu xiu
high places
hawnay troof
art bears

:good potential band names:
hippie and the punks
dom delouise
grux's real name
craven

just left charlotte, nc. atlanta was muggy and rainy but actually turned out fine. we eat lots of bbq, see giant spiders and scorpion spider hybrids and the car starts to smell weird. i have photos of evangelista playing frisbee, they will be posted later on my flickr.

touring in the south

2008-08-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

we left monday night and drove three days out to austin. snacks were consumed. brianna's pumpkin cookies were a hit.
it's all a blur of hotel rooms really, and dank humidity.
music played in the car:
rockateens
charlemagne palestine - strumming music
fleetwood mac - best of
anthology of american folk music
paul f tompkins - impersonal
menace ruine - cult of ruins
vitamin piss demo
deathspell omega
todd barry - from heaven
khanate
grizzly bear
king crimson
foot village
grouper - dragging a dead deer up a hill
unwound - new plastic ideas, leaves turn inside you
david cross - shut up you fucking baby
thee silver mount reveries - pretty little lightning paw

austin - okay, some drama.
houston - good!
birmingham - i think we were okay, but the venue was great! yay bottletree.
tentative plans to visit a swimming hole but i thnk that we are in the midst of a storm headed this way. atlanta tonight

can't argue with the sky

2008-08-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

My grandfather just passed away and i decided i wanted to play this song, from Fred Thomas "Sink Like a Symphony"
This is all I can think of to say right now.

"I held my breath, but I breathed in the smoke regardless
of my room as it burned.
It filled my lungs and I was done,
and I slept.

I saw the line between sleeping and death.
As I stepped over it, a small voice said, "don't be afraid,"
and a choice was made.
and I dream of an auditorium surrounding me.
A thousand eyes, a thousand hands held up the sky.
And I believe I heard their voices in my mind say,
"don't be sad; it's just your time go.
Make a ladder of your spine,
let every rung be stepped and climbed.
Make hummingbirds from your insides,
and let your face turn into vines,
and let your teeth and bones rewind.
But realize, now, realize
that you were only walking light,
and let it go back down
and shine on everybody that you loved when you were alive."

And so Elit,
would you wait for me,
even if I was removed from our time and died?
Well don't cry, 'cause it's only the last part of life,
and i'm still by your side.
And it will happen to you like it happened to me,
and the rest of the people we know.
Like the summers all end and trees lose their leaves,
and the water turns back into snow.
Every grandmother, grandfather, particle--
we're all here for a while then we go,
living for love and love alone.

And you will be with those angels in disguises,
cleverly holding their hands over your eyes
to make from your nightmares the nighttime.
And you will believe a thousand days before you die, maybe 999--
you'll feel the numbers' slow decline,
but, everybody, it's alright 'cause you can't argue with the sky.
You can't argue with fire."

busy month

2008-08-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

I feel like I've been hiding out a lot, but it would be nice to see you all - I'll be travelling for about a month, details below. Please make it to some of these other events, I am pretty proud of them all (I've neglected promoting a lot of these because of the Club Sandwich 2 Year anniversary show, which went really well (review here). We even won a Guardian "Best of the Bay" award!), and am in a rush to get a bunch of projects done before tour. Please come out!

Aug 4th Monday
Playing tonight with KIT and BARR/Brendan, Fox Pause (the Sarah Han jambode), and Nighborhood Stars (Diekman) at Mama Buzz!
6-9 pm. all ages

Aug 9th Saturday
Craziness of crazies - CHEN SANTA MARIA is almost done with our album (yay) and we are playing in Napa Wine country this saturday the 9th!
di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature
5200 Carneros Highway 121 Napa, California 94559 • 707.226.5991
from 6 to 8pm for the opening! come out and experience this.

Aug 10th Sunday
READ IT AND WEEP:
performing as a "spoken word"/"comedy" format (only the second time I've done this) opening for heavy hitters such as Sam McPheeters, Tara Tavi, Erika Anderson, Yasi Perera, Lanie "THE RIPPER" Fletcher, and Sarah Cathers. Should be a total goof, but fun times
http://21grand.org

Aug 14th
SISSY SPACEK BIG BAND/LARGE ENSEMBLE is playing at 21 Grand on Thursday August 14th,
>> George Chen - Guitar
>> Vice Cooler - Drums
>> Paul Costuros - Woodwinds
>> Chris Dixon - Drums
>> Tony Dryer - Double Bass
>> Jacob Heule - Drums
>> Matt Ingalls - Clarinet
>> Loachfillet - Percussion
>> Kanoko Nishi - Koto
>> Corydon Ronnau - Guitar
>> Amanda Warner - Bass
>> Kim West - Woodwinds
>> John Wiese - Electronics
>> Gerritt Wittmer - Electronics
http://21grand.org
http://clubsandwichbayarea.com

Really stoked to be going on tour with my 7 Year Rabbit Cycle bandmate Rob Fisk as COMMON EIDER KING EIDER, opening for other 7yrc-ers Jamie and Ches in Xiu Xiu! The first half will be with the ever-amazing Evangelista with Carla and Tara and friends. The second half is with Prurient, totally running the spectrum! All dates below, come out and say hi if you can! We may also need places to rash, so get in touch about that...

Aug
20 - Austin, TX @ Mohawk - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
21 - Houston, TX @ Orange Show Center for Visionary Art - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
22 - Birmingham, AL @ Bottle Tree Cafe - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
23 - Atlanta, GA @ Drunken Unicorn - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
24 - Charlotte, NC @ Milestone - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
25 - Baltimore, MD @ Sonar - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
26 - Providence, RI @ Living Room - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
27 - Boston, MA @ Paradise - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Common Eider, King Eider
28 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom - w/ Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, Prurient, Common Eider, King Eider
29 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Garfield Artworks - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient
30 - Columbus, OH @ Milo - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient

September 2008
1 - Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient
2 - Pontiac, MI @ Crofoot Ballroom - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient
3 - Chicago, IL @ Bottom Lounge - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient
4 - Dekalb, IL @ House Cafe - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient
5 - Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon - w/ Xiu Xiu, Common Eider, King Eider, Prurient

Catcall

2008-07-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

My bandmate Vicent Coolier (just made legal) hipped me to this track.
A few years ago (guess it was 2006) Kiosk from Sydney came out to the US and did a bit of touring. I still have one 7" of theirs that I think is quite good (the CD didn't do as much for me). They played the crazy final show/party at Club Short with Finally Punk, xbxrx, and Paradise Island and I was busy with trying to clean the last bit of random stuff out of the basement and wondering why the hell we were having a show when we were supposed to be out the next day - it was also being referred to many as an "eviction party" and the rumor was that the hosue was being demolished anyway, so no one seemed apologetic for snapping the metal railing off the side stairs. I could do an entire series of Club Short posts, but i will refrain for now.
Point being - Kiosk played one of the first Bus shows (in front of Mama Buzz), the last house show at my place, and were rumored to sign to Kill Rock Stars before going back to Australia and breaking up. I've seen Jack a few times since, but i did not know what the rest of the band was up to till just now.
The vocal stylings on this song are very removed from the hoarse riot grrl styled screams that Kiosk traded in, but both the video and song are pleasant surprises. Catcallis the project, the nausea inducing video (perhaps a camera inside a plastic hamster ball?) is directed by Warran Wright of the enigmatic Moop Jaw. I can't vouch for the rest of her material, but this song is really catchy, and confirms my unacknowledged recent softening towards mainstream female fronted pop (Santogold and I've come around to Feist). Enjoy.

Demolish Serious Culture

2008-07-22T15:44:00.001-07:00

thanks.

movement

2008-07-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

*it has been an interesting summer.
*i left 19th ave in a mess, it was a mutual mess, but i prefer clean breaks. these breaks kept throwing abusive tendrils my way, and seemed to spiral and drag me down into their black hole toxicity, but i am in a beter place now, that is all there is to say about that.

*i was told "you don't have enough room in your life for other people." maybe that is true. at least in terms of the amount of physical stuff i have, the carbon and papyrus and plastic footprint of my existence thus far, i accept the accusation. now i will be all ephemeral serverspace, i will have enough memory to disseminate, i will multitask.
*finally feeling settled into this place. the first few days, it felt unreal until i could get wireless. wireless became more essential than showering or cooking, at least in the state i was in. now that is sorted, i have some plants, i have the kitty cat, i even got some art for the walls that i bothered trying to find a frame for. i lack tools, but improvisation is the best tool.

*i made myself puke the other day. i came home from a show and was so hungry i ate these hardboiled eggs that i had in the fridge and a whole pasta dinner after midnight. some time around 5 am i was up and feeling wretched. i knew i was going ot be doing nothing that whole day but hanging out in the bathroom. the next day, i moved my pa speakers that i'd leant to the girls rock camp and ate some pho, the only thing i'd eaten in more than 24 hours. i noticed that i had a broken blood vessel on my eyeball. i don't think that's ever happened before, but it probably happened with either the puking or the lifting. it hasn't changed colors yet but the doctor says it will. can't wait.

*every few weeks i go visit my grandfather. he's been in and out of hte hospital, but he's like 93, so it's kind of to be expected. i feel guilty that i don't do more to help him. i have my flurry of activity, and when i am free some times i just want to relax and read or sleep, and i know other people don't have that luxury. my cousin and aunt have taken on the major care of him, i think it's sort of acknowledged that i don't have that many resources to spare, other than driving them to and from the doctors. there's some what of a language barrier between us, which is more on my part than his, but he's always been a reticent, strong silent type. it's weird to think that i resemble him the most out of anyone in my family, possibly my dad, but it's been pointed out by others, and i see it more. it is really hard to fathom the loss of independence that comes at that age, and dealing with the inevitability of your own mortality, and it's hard not to get morose or sentimental about it. the place i have felt most effective has been when i'm able to talk to the doctors. my aunt's english is passable, but there is a lot of technical information she may be missing, and i recently went with her to the pharmacy to get medications - she had to bring a chinese to english medical dictionary to break down what all the drugs were doing. i worry about how often he's lapsing into hospital visits. one thing that keeps me encouraged - he was always into ping pong, and even though he's on a walker and can only stand up for about 5 minutes without it, he can still hit the fuck out of a ping pong ball. his skills have declined a bit since christmas, when he was doing some crazy backhand returns and reaching for the ball. this time he missed a few direct down the center shots (which i'm not even that good at) but i am still amazed at the accuracy and reflexes he has considering what he's been throug the past few months. he's not reaching as far as before, but he can assuredly beat my mobile ass. i wonder how much practice, how much muscle memory and instinct stays with you, and what if anything i will be good at if i ever make it to that age. it actually inspires me to be good at something, anything, to the level that i could even do it one tenth as well as he can at 93.

donate money to my medical bill

2008-06-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the hooligans of pepper juice, I have a $1200 ambulance bill. My insurance is covering part of it, but I am now responsible for $740 of this bill resulting from a "caustic chemical assault". We may not know each other, but if you feel like helping me out, even though there are way worse problems in the world to deal with, I sure would appreciate it. Thanks, GC

red hot chili peppers are bad in your eyes as well

2008-05-05T08:26:00.000-07:00

i was about to move some stuff from my old place to my new place on friday. it was garbage day and i was bringing in one of my trash cans from off the street when two guys were walking up the hill towards me. one of them asked me for 50 cents. i said "sorry" and kept going about my business. as i came back down stairs to get my other recycling can, they were still standing in front of my house. one guy said something to the other and i could tell something was about to go down. the next thing i knew, my glasses were covered in some orange-red shit. i just took them off and looked at the guy. it was some homemade shit he'd put in a plastic squirt gun. i am not sure what response they were expecting, but i just said "what the fuck is this?" and he stuck his hand in his pocket pointing it at me saying "you want some more?" i should point out that these guys were both a lot taller than me and no one else was on the street to witness this at all. i was more pissed off and just shocked that anyone would bother to do this, over 50 cents no less, or just boredom. i knew it was just a plastic squirt gun, but if someone in east oakland is trying to fuck with you and sticking something out of their shirt, it's probably a good idea to leave it alone. i just started walking towards the house so as not to drag out this confrontation and they just started laughing and walking back up the street. i tried to throw something at them but it just landed on the sidewalk. at this point, no one else was home and i tried to wash the shit off my face. bad move. although you are supposed to wash your eyes out, the fact that most of this stuff hit my glasses probably prevented me from falling to my knees right away and possibly getting rolled for my wallet that had $2 in it (ironically the same amount of money i had in my wallet when i was mugged before). but throwing water on my face just spread it all around. i was feeling an insane burn and mucous running all over. i wished i could just look up on the internet what to do to treat pepper spray, but then got more anxious about hte fact that this was some home brew ghetto mace that could have mixed anything else into that squirt gun. i ended up calling 911, barely able to see what the right buttons on my phone were. in a short burst, 3 cop cars and an ambulance rolled up. the ambulance just helped me blow my nose and then put me on the gurney thing and ran water over my eyes for a few minutes. they told me they wanted to take me to the hospital. i tried to think of a way not to go, having heard horror stories of insane bills for ambulance trips, plus i was only 2 blocks away from highland anyway. my paranoia about the spray got the best of me, and they made me think that i should get everything checked out just to make sure i did not have my eye cut or anything. so i'm sitting on the thing with my clothes completely soaked and get admitted. hopefully my insurance covers all this, but i'm not feeling optimistic about it. i'm sitting in the hospital for nearly 2 hours. one of the cops comes along and asks if i want to press charges. i think about this, and who knows if these assholes were over 18 or under, and i think about this conversation i had last week with em about "the prison industrial complex" and just the fucked up dynamics of gentrification and how everywhere i've lived in oakland the past 7 years has had insane crime and violence happening, and how i have been told not to trust cops my whole life. when it comes down to it though, i figure these guys could be doing this to anyone else and maybe they wouldn't report it and yes, i think i could pick him out of a line up, but no, i don't know for sure. they want to irrigate my eyes again, but once i'm able to see and i'm drying out all the contents of my wallet, i just ask them to make sure i'm not going blind from whatever got sprayed on me. he does a ph test on my eyeball and it looks fine and they discharge me. i walk the two blocks back to my house somewhat disoriented and clothes still soaked through. thank god i'm getting the fuck out of east oakland.

tubing

2008-04-20T02:32:00.000-07:00

Muxtape

2008-04-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

yeah, i made one as well.
http://geochen.muxtape.com/

jpg roundup

2008-04-13T00:57:00.000-07:00

Rio En Medio. Saw her at a weird traintracks show in Berkeley last Saturday

along with Avocet from Feathers and Idea Fire Company, recently relocated to SF.

Scott Arford churning guts at Misanthropic Agenda with Obstacle Corpse, Wiese, and DJ Gerritt.

"Flesh Flows" by Adam Beckett 1973

Rebecca Whipple paintings at Johansson Projects

For Pudding

2008-04-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

I had a dream about a nuclear attack. Not to make the name of the blog more meaningful, I guess it's just anxiety. The thing about it was having like half an hour or so of awareness that bombs were coming, and trying to tell people, but the people I was with seemed to embrace it. I told this girl that I was not ready for this, but she said we should just go outside and watch it, that it was better to be outside than hidden away in a cave.
Needless to say, I did not feel very good when I did wake up. It took a lot of effort to drag myself out of bed and when I got to work I parked behind a Ford Explorer whose license plate read "IVPUDYN". The license plate holder thing around it read "Never Satisfied". Both of these things confused me. For one thing, why would it be good to advertise that you are never satisfied? Sexually, or with the need for speed, or are you a perfectionist? "Insatiable" maybe, but "Never Satisfied" seems to be about, you know, life. Or possibly never satisfied with the amount of PUDYNG in your life. Do you think "IV PUDYN" means "For Pudding"? Or an intravenous way to inject pudding? Or worse, intravenous "pudyn."
The best thing that has happened today is Sikwaya finding this on eBay.
I would love to grow more arms just to play this. Maybe after the nuclear apocalypse, I will.

Friday in a food coma

2008-03-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-26T23:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

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.