and energy (happy new year)

Flight to Mars

The Logjam Documentary

In case you missed it tonight:


One more show tomorrow: Flight to Mars! or Mission to Mars! Or Flight to the Mission District 9 of Mars! At the Seattle Center Center House House at 7pm, free all ages! Now with video!

Logjam!

Winter Waterland

Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen

Happy Holidays!

Avatar and The West: A Review

Avatar: An extremely entertaining white guilt redemption fantasy.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could go back in time and stop the slaughter and genocide of the Native Americans? While you’re at it, you could prevent the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, the poisoning of lakes and streams, and say FUCK NO! to the ugly and environmentally unsustainable suburbs and strip malls? Yeah, sure that’d be nice. But we don’t have a time machine. What’s past is past. Shucks, sorry about that Indians! But there’s nothing that can be done about it now. I mean, even if we gave back your land (which we aint), what would you do with it? Most of your ancient ways of life are long forgotten.

But we whites sure envy your ancient ways. We like to start magazines like Shaman’s Drum. We wish we were one of you. (Except without the bad stuff like living on a reservation. Or puffy-nosed alcoholic homelessness. Or being forced to earn your daily bread with white people stuff like casinos and fireworks.) We like to drive our cars to the National Parks and say to our children, “Hey now, don’t just throw that Capri Sun package on the ground. Be like the Indians who used to live here: respect nature!”

Avatar is perfect for us. Because we love seeing war and destruction and kick-ass special effects. And we love imagining that we could become a kick-ass native warrior who could protect the trees and ride a mother-fucking dragon and mate with some hot “exotic” native lady. We’re so dedicated to these causes that we’ll buy the DVD!

So I guess I had mixed feelings about this movie. I mean, I actually really DID like it. I mean, at least insofar as it was fun and exciting to watch and visually beautiful. I didn't even care that they never explained how the floating rocks always had waterfalls coming from them. Now I wanna go back and watch it in 3D. But it made me think: What's left to say about The West?

Today's playlist

Oh! You Pretty Things (David Bowie)
Maybe I'm Amazed (Paul & Linda McCartney)
Army (Ben Folds Five)
Outrageous (Paul Simon)
14th Street (Rufus Wainwright)
Kissing The Lipless (The Shins)
Free Man In Paris (Joni Michell)
In Ear Park (Department of Eagles)
Kicheneface (Jose Bold)
The Green Ray (Gavin Bryars)

A is for Awesome

You know, for kids.

For Your Consideration

The Mountain

Damn what a fantastic show Mr. Jose Bold put on last night. I'm still thinking about it. So beautiful and so funny. Here's hoping he'll at least post a clip or two.

And the new album is amazing too.  go upload it all over your facebook right now:


josebold.com

Tuesday's gone...

...and boy am I glad. Here's the Lynyrd Skynyrd band, people:
[a string section? wow...]

Notes

"When the aliens came down, with their limitless energy machines and their limitless food machines, and told us they would give us all their technology if we would only promise to listen and heed the sad tale of the home world they so nearly destroyed with a juvenile civilization's ignorance at what terrible damage to nature can be wrought from a thoughtless use of technology, well, the environmentalists down here on Earth became a bunch of insufferable know-it-alls."

STATE OF BANDOR

NUMBER ONE:
we take pause in West to think about europeans coming to new land and supping with natives. we eat food. we will not be able move for a day.

NUMBER DEUX:
we get ready to plan 3 free nights of food court merriment for winterfest. each night = different show. we promise not smash your food with hammers that have fake blood in them.

NUMBER TRES:
we enter new year aggressively preparing West for one last pre-OtB presentation in bellingham.


in meantime, johnO and kirk play at northwest film forum on december 5th, same day as new jose bold album is released.

cowboy haiku

hell is others, sure

but riding solo ain't some

grand picnic either.

The True Story of Thanksgiving

In case you missed it:


Kids are so cute!

Hello Trees

As I’ve been thinking about West, I’ve been interested in the landscape, the ecosystem, the non-human part of nature as a character. And of course, many Native American cultures took this idea to be more than metaphor: the trees, the water, the hills are actually alive. So, in that spirit, I’d like to introduce you to three trees:

The Tree That Owns Itself.

In around 1830, Colonel William Jackson, who loved this white oak tree very much, deeded the tree to itself:

I, W. H. Jackson, of the county of Clarke, of the one part, and the oak tree . . . of the county of Clarke, of the other part: Witnesseth, That the said W. H. Jackson for and in consideration of the great affection which he bears said tree, and his great desire to see it protected has conveyed, and by these presents do convey unto the said oak tree entire possession of itself and of all land within eight feet of it on all sides.

So, supposedly, the tree owns itself and the land around it.

(I’m reminded of what Young Chief of the Cayuses tribe said in 1855, upon signing over their lands to the U.S. Government: “I wonder if the Ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said?”)

Now legal experts say that this has practically no legal force at all for several reasons: One, in order to become the legal owner of something given to you, you must have the legal capacity to receive it, and it must be accepted by you. And some would say that the tree does not have the legal capacity to receive property. A related legal notion is that nothing which can be owned can own anything else. For example slaves: Can slaves legally own something? Some would argue that their being owned by something means that the slave’s so-called property is defacto the property of the slave’s owner. But more interestingly: can anything own itself? What would it mean to own yourself? We have a good idea of what it means to own ordinary objects like cars and houses: you have the right to use the objects as you like (so long as you don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights), you can sell the objects, you can destroy the object if you want, you can move it, or change it. But it’s a little stranger to apply these ideas to yourself. You can’t sell yourself or destroy yourself (though suicide has been officially decriminalized in all US states, it is still considered an unwritten “common law” crime).

Anyway, the tree fell down in the 40’s, and a cutting of the tree was planted in its place. They call it Son Of The Tree That Owns Itself. The state of Georgia basically acts like it owns the land, and takes care of it like it’s a park.


The Lost Monarch.

It's 26 feet in diameter (82 feet circumference). It would take about 14 people to hug it. Its about 320 feet high. It’s the largest known Coast Redwood. The tree is estimated to contain 42,500 cubic feet (1,200 m³) of wood. It’s probably pretty old. There’s no pictures of it because it’s hidden. They don’t want us to know where it is. That’s okay. It’s probably better that way. I like knowing that it’s out there though.


Pando.

Okay, now Pando isn’t really a tree. It’s a clonal colony of a single male Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) located in Utah. Basically, it’s a giant root system that sends up stems that are taken to be trees (Aspens). But it’s actually a single organism. Pando weighs 6,615 tons, and is approximately 80,000 years old. It is the oldest, and heaviest living organism on the planet.

Travel log

The East is still very much the East now. Perhaps even more so now that the leaves are off the trees but no snow has yet fallen. The bare trees, still brown and gray, lend a transparency through yards and into homes otherwise masked at other times of the year. People are still lured outside by the crisp, dry weather when they ought to be in, closing their shutters and thankful the witches that most certainly walk the old rail beds and deserted cattle paths and long-abandoned mills don't take a sudden interest in them. This quiet time, this cold stillness before the white shroud descends, this is the time to exercise the most caution. That fallen-down house is not empty. That mirror-lake is only fixing on its prey. As you look past those empty trees, their inhabitants are tracking you. Best now to fix the cracks in the floors and window frames, take down the scarecrow (make sure the crows see you doing this) and dismantle it, just to be thorough. Smile at the Pastor today. For this is not the calm of Springtime. This is not even the joyful resignation of Autumn. This is the between-season that one in the East should not stop too long to observe. The sun will drop from the tiny sky in a moment and there will be no moon. You will not enjoy the darkness tonight.

Better to pick up the pace, pull up your collar and hurry home.

Better still to pack up your own ghosts and head West.

Chinese Immigrants, 1870

Friday the Thirteenth in Phoenix

I'm sitting in a dark theater, building a sound design for a new play called "Junie B. Jones: Jingle Bells, Batman Smells". This is the second time I've designed in a fly house, which means the theater has lines that raise the scenery up and down. Matt is our man on the rail, which means he hauls in the scenic pieces using a counterweight system. Most of our time is spent bringing these pieces in and watching the actors move their desks on and off stage. My job is to try to time out the music with the scene changes, so that everything flows smoothly. I wrote some of the music myself, but the main piece of music I'm using is by my friend Barbara Lamb, a great fiddle player from Nashville. There are lots of bells and whistles, since the show has lots of flashbacks and dream sequences. We just started tech for Act 2 today, which has lots of burping sound effects from an imaginary toy called a "Squeeze-a-burp". That toy is a genius!

Elder Statesmen of nerd-rock

A few highlights from Tuesday's amazing They Might Be Giants show celebrating the 19-years-later platinum status of their major-label debut, Flood:

-Every song on the album. Even the ones they couldn't remember all the lyrics to.
-Cameo by Avatars of They (shabby sock puppets of the Johns mugging for a live-feed camera).
-Lounge-funk update of "The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas" to "The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma" (for science).
-Linnell's effective use of Kaoss Pad and my corresponding feelings of validation.
-A clear demonstration that after 25 years they still entertain each other as much as they entertain us gathered geeks.
-Encore: Fingertips. Fingertips. Fingertips.

It's not often I get to bring my 14 year-old self out for a night of pure delight. Thanks for aging gracefully, TMBG! You still rock, hilariously.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled bloggings of inscrutable imagery.

Bodie

After the nothingness and the spark, it explodes in fractal growth (it grows itself into art / language) until we finally get that moment of cultural apoptosis that brings us inexorably to the crash.

Rubble Vision

Hubble Vision

double vision

tunnel vision

Hello from sunny Arizona! I made it here safely with my accordion. Everyone is very nice and polite. Wish you were here

Ah, The West

According to teh internets,

This huge tree was cut down by an entrepreneur in 1853 who concocted a plan to take the thick bark (just the bark!) on a worldwide exhibition and charge admission. He ran into a problem, though: it was all thought to be a hoax and people didn't believe a tree could be that large. The stump itself soon afterwards did become a tourist attraction here though: dances were held on the stump and the felled tree (still visible in the background) was shaped to form an elevated in-place bowling alley. Later the stump was used as the floor of an enclosed office building, and now it's open to the light again.

What an asshole.

Notes on a future dream

Stars at the beginning, stars at the end. Sun swallows earth. We have always remembered this. Seven sisters escape the bear atop a flat rock tower. Bear sees seven new stars and feels time unspool. Prophecy is blood's memory of past and future cycles. We are all freed by the coiled death our life creates. He comes from the left, always from the left. Sleep is a compass. Death is West. Out is the only way.

Three Things I Learned this Holloween

Crochet = pretty
Music in cavernous lobby = delayed reflection of sound
Musical chairs = violence

"Awesome" plays Holloween Show at The Moore

$20 at the door, 10pm, 21+, rumors of free Heineken and halloween hijinks.

Pictures from the Centrum Retreat

(Sadly, lacking John Ackermann, who couldn't get away from Abraham Lincoln.)

Sign of the Eagle, Man

yesterday, i was walking to work when a guy with purple hair exited a cafe in front of me, took a look at me, and broke into a grin. "eagle," he said, "sign of the eagle, man. right on!"

The Origins of The West

The West ends here, the pacific ocean, the West Coast (the “Left Coast” as they would tell me in South Carolina). We’re at the forward edge, the leading edge of Western-ness. The West moves West, bringing West with it, wiping out the non-West -- the stray bits of East that were here in the West before The West got here. The West sees these stray bits as like wild weeds, needing to be pulled up or tamed, paved over and smoothed out. The wabi-sabi tangles of vine and nest replaced by the ruled-line gleam of steel and plastic.

The West is new and the East is old. The East is tradition and balance. The West is progress and revolution.

So we know where the West goes. The harder question is “Where did it come from?” If West is new and East is old, just how new is the West? Where and when did it originate?

Recently I’ve been reading a book called The Spell of The Sensuous by David Abram, as well as listening to a podcast philosophy course by Hubert Dreyfus. A strange sort of story about the origin of The West begins to emerge.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived in Classical Greece – a good place to start when looking for the origin of The West. Before that was Homeric Greece. And the transition from Homeric Greece to Classical Greece coincides with Greek culture’s being infused with a relatively new thing: the alphabet. It was perhaps 4 or 5 hundred years old, but only in Plato’s time did it start to become common for children (of a certain class and education) to be taught the alphabet, taught to read and write. Socrates was mostly illiterate. For who knows how long before that, knowledge was primarily transmitted orally, as songs and recited poems. People would memorize these things. Even in Plato’s time, much of the population still knew the entire Odyssey (all 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter) by heart. Though it had been written down by Homer a couple of hundred years prior to Plato’s time, the written word until then had been an oddity, a gimmick, something only a certain elite knew about or cared about. It took a while to really take hold. So the Homeric Age of Greece was an oral culture, and people learned to memorize extremely lengthy poems and songs. These songs were manifestations of the embodied values of the Greeks at that time. The songs would slowly change as the culture changed. And for a long time, words were only sounds, sounds that came out of an individual person at a particular time. The introduction of the alphabet (which came from the Semitic aleph-beth) changed things quite a bit. For one, some words could become permanent. The Odyssey would no longer change or grow, it was stuck in the words of Homer. It became like The Bible –a holy work that was blasphemous to suggest editing or updating. Secondly, for the first time, words could be separated from the speaker of the words. (Note: the distinction between words and the ideas they expressed was not something comprehensible to the Greeks at this time, and would not become comprehensible for hundreds of years. That’s why you find so many use-mention mistakes in Aristotle, for example.) Thanks to the alphabet, you could write down something that someone said and instead of talking about what this particular person said, you could forget about the person and just talk about the ideas/words themselves. And at the same time, while certain words (like The Odyssey) became “stuck” by being written down, the alphabet invited one to look at, and possibly change words. Written words enabled a certain kind of abstraction that was impossible before. In the oral tradition, you could talk about Justice only in the context of memorized stories and songs that would give one concrete examples of justice. Justice lived only in specific just actions and just people. But now you can write down the word ‘Justice’ and ask: What is Justice itself? And this was precisely the kind of question that Socrates asked, and the kind of forced introspection and self-examination that got him killed. But Plato took up the cause and wrote down everything that Socrates said. And so the idea of putting abstract ideas squarely in view – only possible thanks to written language and the change in thinking they enabled – brought about a radical change in culture and value. Whereas before, the values of the culture, the way that it sees itself, what the culture thinks a human being really is – before, these things did not exist in the form of explicit beliefs of the culture, they were simply embodied in the actions and stories (and the actions of Odysseus and others in the stories). Now they can be made explicit as written words and then debated. We can examine our concepts, analyze them, decide that they contain implicit assumptions that we no longer agree with, and rebel from them. This is the beginning of philosophy, and the beginning of The West: Progress over Tradition.

Furthermore: Words used to be natural sounds. Words were the bark, the purr, the chirp of man. The pre-alphabetic man is an animal continuous with the other animals. He is part of the living buzzing, chirping, barking world. But when his words begin to have lives of their own apart from their being the sounds of flapping flesh and air, man follows them away from the corporal, away from the physical animal body and into the realm of abstract ideas. His sense of self, his very identity is changed: he is now a thinker, one who trades in concepts and ideas. His body is now seen as a mere container for his true essence. He leaves the animals and the rest of non-human nature behind. Later this way of thinking about what it is to be human is picked up by Descartes ("I think therefore I am") and then brought to the center of Enlightenment thinking by Kant: To be human is to be a thinker who can transcend his animal nature. You may have animal wants, animal desires, but because you are human, you don’t have to act on them. This is why you, but none of the non-human animals, have free will. And this is why the humans are the natural masters of the earth. The essence of Humanity in The West is freedom from and supremacy over one’s animal ingredients. Humanity in The West is the freedom of self-determination. Man is only accidentally corporeal, only accidentally embodied, only accidentally flesh. His true nature is Mind (over matter). He rises above and tames his own physical nature and so entitles himself to tame all of nature and bend it to his will. He is the master of the corporeal world.

Another thread in all of this has to do with the thinning of Gods that started to happen in Classical Greece. Way back in Thales’ time (well before Socrates), it was said that “All is full of gods”. There were many many gods. Indeed, gods were in everything and were everywhere. This brought with it a certain kind of respect for everything in the world around you. The spiritual world was not somewhere far away, it was all around you all the time. Abram marks this as a (perhaps the) crucial difference between indigenous cultures with an oral tradition and our modernity, our West: It is only in The West that there is a distinction between the natural and the super-natural, between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit. In the non-western non-alphabetic cultures Abram studies, all is (still) full of gods. And this does not mean that, say, a tree has a god living inside of it, as an interloper from another world. Rather, the tree itself (with nothing weird added), is already a spiritual, living, being. This is contrasts starkly with the Judeo-Christian God who lives in another world entirely. In the Judeo-Christian way of seeing things, the world that humans live in (while alive) is essentially a world of deterministic biological machines and non-living swarms of particles whose motions are completely determined by the inviolable laws of nature. It is the world of science and rationality, completely separate from the world of spirituality. (“We are spirits in the material world,” says Sting.) The Westerner must grapple with this bifurcation of worlds constantly: In what ways do religion and science conflict with each other? Are miracles scientifically impossible? How does the non-physical soul/mind interact with and control the physical body? These are questions that do not make sense in the pre-Western world, nor in the world of the indigenous people whose oral traditions Abram studies. (The post-theist Westerner solves this neatly by vanishing the spiritual altogether: It is not in this world, and it is not in any other world either.)

the Fort

we'll be at ft. warden making the merry magic in a chamber 40 seconds wide. be sure to wear shoes and dress warmly. don't run out of oxygen.

Last Night's Dream

We're living in a little cabin on the ocean. I take a walk down the beach and I see something partially buried in the sand -- it looks like a really long white t-shirt. Dan Ackroyd comes out (he lives in the cabin next to us) and explains that it is actually a ghost -- a hot young lady ghost that he had a little fling with one summer many years ago. And because he was dating her (and because she was a GHOST), he let her influence the writing of Ghostbusters II. Ah! So THAT'S why that movie was so awful. Dan is telling me: Remember, just because your girlfriend is a ghost and you're writing a movie about ghosts, doesn't necessarily mean she is a good writer. Thanks Dan. I'll keep that in mind.

The Sloppy Dog Saloon

The West

Anyone have an old mandolin I could borrow?

or buy? for CHEAP?

It can have holes in it. or cracks. It can have your "Meat Is Murder" bumper sticker on it. It doesn't have to sound that great. I don't care, as long as it is basically, pretty much, mostly playable.

I just want it 'cause they're useful to have on hand when you're trying to write a song that has a mandolin in it.

anyone? anyone?

The Boy From Lam Kien Salon

I can't remember if I ever posted this. It's old now, but I still kinda like it.

Birthday?

Did someone in this band have a birthday today?

A helpful chart

I put together this chart for people who need help understanding their place in the scheme of things.

The "Awesome" Movie: it's not real, dawg

But the treatment is here...

SCENE ONE: The End
Seven hooded figures roll out a large sheet of paper detailing the end credits. When the paper runs out, they begin to chalk - in real time - more credits on the sidewalk. The chalk breaks. They begin to spell out more credits in blood. They are questioned by cops on segways, who ask where the blood came from. Unable to answer, the seven hooded figures are brought into the police station.

SCENE TWO: Doin' Time
The words "Doin' Time" are written in log font. For 7 minutes.

SCENE THREE: Jailbreak!
In the slammer, the seven hooded figures meet seven inmates wearing out-of-date striped uniforms. Together, they plot an escape route through the walls of their collective cells. An entire musical number begins but is thwarted by seven guards who beat the 14 inmates with bassoons.

SCENE FOUR: Seven Brides for Seven Brofficers
The seven guards return home that night, complaining to their seven wives that work was difficult. The wives, played by men, are angry that their spouses haven't noticed their bitchin' haircuts, and they beat the seven husbands with trombones.

SCENE FIVE: Phantom Orchestra
That night, while the seven husbands and seven wives sleep in separate rooms, the seven trombones become possessed by demons/daemons and begin playing a jaunty jig. They float out into the street and down to the local pub, where a band of seven musicians is playing the exact same jig. Dejected, the possessed trombones wander down an alley and shoot up heroin.

SCENE SIX: A Band
The seven-member band finishes their set and packs up their seven vans with gear. Then they push all seven vans together and lash them across with rope. This proves ineffective on the freeway and a horrible crash ensues. Blood everywhere (they hit a blood truck).

SCENE SEVEN: Denouement
The blood is found by seven hooded figures who have just broken their chalk and are looking for something else to write the end credits with.

FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART

This Really Happened

I think I know what our show's about now

Happy Number 9 Day

Queued up with some other nerds at Easy Street last night 'round midnight to purchase one of only 10,000 remastered Beatles in Mono box sets like a good little consumer. I've only made it through side one of Revolver, but so far I agree with Geoff Emerick.

LewIMAXs and ClIMAXrk

that wasn't a very good movie. i could see roads in the footage they shot of the journey west. pretty sure i saw a QFC sign too.

West

Poor Isaac Ebey (1818-1857). Wikipedia tells us that he was the first permanent white resident of Whidbey Island. Also that he got his head CUT OFF by some pissed off Haida Indians who lived over on Vancouver Island. A couple of years later, after much haggling, the Indians returned what was left of the head (mostly the scalp and some ear parts) to Issac's brother Winfield.

There's a hiking trail that goes by the old Ebey place. It's supposed to be quite pretty.

Weekend Roundup

He eats a cookie and stands on a couch. You never give me your money. When you ask interesting questions, the man in the suit honors your requests. Two become one three times. (They do the high chair dance in 5/4.) A contemporary look at mark making makes a driveway for talented friends to rub eyeballs in a melted vanilla sunday. Four march to buckhorn. One stung twice by hornets chasing them up the mountain, past a plane crash into the remnants of a Masonic password.

Feet

Wish you were here.

Wedding Band

I got married last month, and the photographer just posted some pictures online. Here's us playing at the reception:


And here's Becky being blown away by her own air guitar as Jed & Amy get robotic in the background:

Last Night at Smoke Farm

Kirk & Jen & I went up there yesterday for the LOFI Performance Art Festival. Got a little lost on the way. Once there, walked up a river bed, saw nakedish aerialists in the trees, tree fungus made of tiny books, glowing giant eggs and squidy things, a double hammock in the middle of a field, a piano under a giant tree (I played it in the absolute dark) where knitted flowers floated in transparent spheres, ate cantaloupe off a big rock in a hidden quarry while hanging bottles gently clinked as they swayed, ran through grass taller than me, saw grass french braided into a winding knotting snake along the ground, so much other stuff, I can't remember it all. So good. So so good. Congrats to Jed Dunkerly for curating it.

I took some night shots. I didn't have my remote shutter trigger with me, so sometimes I was trying to hold down the shutter without moving, and it didn't work so well.
(Anyone have any idea what the green things up in the stars are? They came out on 2 different pictures.)

No Comment

The Postcards

More treble. They always want more treble. As if the radio knows what it's playing.

I didn't come here by court order, but the pull felt almost as mandatory. When I got the call, I was working on the '66 Galaxie, covered in brake dust. I probably looked like a miner trying to break into my own house in search of a hot shower, which is probably why the dogs were so confused at my presence. I never answer the phone when I'm in the shop. I never take calls from the group. I never say yes to this sort of thing. This is a mistake, and I know it. So why am I here? I miss something. Or I'm missing something.

You took me right back down to where we started from.

Yeah, more treble.

Song a Day, 8-10-09

Yes, I'm still doing them. Yes, I've missed a few days here and there. Yes, I'm planning on making them up. Yes, you can listen to last night's effort, entitled You And I And This Room.

more from the mini-mart

What Happened?

This blog ate too many cherries and blacked out for like a week. We found it wandering around Target in West Seattle. We stuck an IV in and it seems to be doing better. Sorry, bloggy.

Secret Show Tonight!

Okay, it's not really that secret. I mean, how can anything be secret when you announce it on your blog? Take for example the Secret Service. Pretty much everyone knows about them. Cat's outta the bag, fellas.

And this show tonight. If you're on the "A"-list, you probably just got an e-mail about it. It's going to be at the place where it all began, The Rendezvous, 7/22/09 at 8pm, for only $11.08 Canadian.* (That's $10 American.)

What's this all about? Well, we're working hard on our anti-musical whatchamacallit, The West. So here we'll be showcasing some of the new stuff we're working on, plus playing old songs we like.


*Look, we don't actually take canadian money, so stop trying to get rid of all those bum quarters. We're not taking them, OK? GEEZ.

Wobbly Drummer in Georgetown

Thanks to all who came out to see our strange little performance last night at the Mini Mart.

Arbitrary Art Grant in Dance

I had just enough time before slipping off for a mini-honeymoon to apply for the Vital 5 Arbitrary Art Grant in Dance using this:

I wish they'd hurry up and say who won. I also had enough time to film Nora's entry (which is much better).

Enjoy or "Enjoy." It's up to you.

Our Proud Future/Past

5 year anniversary

I forgot: June 30th was the 5-year anniversary of the first show with all seven of us. It was at the Rendezvous. It sounded like THIS.

Old Show

At The Moore Last Night

Here's Basil warming up at The Moore, at the top of the second balcony. Right before we started a tour went through where someone was explaining that this balcony used to be where you had to sit if you were black or Jewish. There was a door on the alley that led directly up there, so they didn't have to be seen coming in the front door.

My favorite part of the show: "Chapter 4: Americans!", where I (Clark) follow Basil (Lewis), mimicking everything he does, including combing our hair and paddling our way through the seats. I also laughed a lot from my secret corner watching our violinist get all spastic and palsied at the top of Chapter 1 (Wilderness).

Other things of note:
* It was steep up there. You sort of had vertigo at first. But then I got used to it and was doing some dangerous running around.

* Some audience just watched from the lower aisle. Others came right up into the space, trying to mess with us. One guy picked up John's melodica and played it.

* Kirk's going to get me arrested.

* I found a secret bombed out room behind a golden door. There were thousands of old tickets from old shows at the Moore. I grabbed one. Later there was a staff member guarding the door. Kirk would have liked it. It reminded me of the time I was seeing Portishead at the Paramount, (was I on mushrooms? or just really drunk? I can't remember.) and I found this tiny door that led into the rafters at the top of the dome, and I watched the show from up there.

* The walls up at the top were all cracked. It made me think about the people pouring that concrete in 1907. What dead guy poured this piece of concrete that I'm touching right now? What happened to him?

* The acoustics up there were pretty fantastic. The floor tom sounded like a gunshot!


(Got photos from the event? Please post 'em here!)

Analemmanomenon

This Saturday.

(original photo taken of JO, DN, KA, EM: Victoria Lahti. Photoshop bullshit: insomnia)

New Show

Today in random gifts

I'm not sick.

(I think.)

City Horns

Sari & Kevin (from Circus Contraption*) join Evan and Rob in recording some horns for City.




(* only 3 more shows EVER! go see them quick!)

New Show

New Show addendum

New Show

Our new album: an Update

We've been working on this album for a while now. It's got some older songs and some newer songs. And we're ALMOST done recording. 6 songs are completely done recording. Another 4 are really close, and just need a couple of small things recorded here or there. You know, like when you're in the studio and you're listening to what you've just recorded and someone says, "you know what would sound great in the chorus? A giraffe!" And then Pete, our Engineer Extraordinaire, says, "I know of a couple of places we could get one..." There's also 2 (?) songs that we still need to do the vocals on. There's one where some friends from Circus Contraption are coming in to fatten up our horn section. (By the way, CC has only got 8 more shows left, and this is their LAST SHOW EVER. So go see it!)

Then we've got to mix all this stuff. And there's a plan a-brewin' for that. A real good one.

New Show

Kirk learns how to dance

New Show

Thanks all who came to our show on Friday

It's fun to try new weird stuff out. Even if an instrument is slightly out of tune or the video projector dies in the middle of the show.

tonight's show

GALLERY 1412