music&politics

great review at Art Relish

2009-03-18T09:21:00.001-05:00

Our current show got a great write-up at Art Relish - article is here.

chicks with guns - OG style

2009-01-30T09:25:00.000-05:00

Love a girl with a bolt-action.

This is the Real Question

2009-01-28T07:44:00.002-05:00

Yes or No?

Blago is a fabulous douche; Rush is a fat crap. Haggard still teh gay?

2009-01-27T08:00:00.005-05:00

I have a wonderful recurring dream wherein Rod Blagojevich is fired from a canon into the belly of Rush Limbaugh. The children cheer as hair and blubber rain down from the heavens. Ted Haggard is there, furiously signaling his delight.

By the by - just what are Rush and his listeners so worked up about? That they don't get to wipe their asses on the rest of us for another four years? That their TVs aren't quite big enough? That they can't afford to chase Viagra with Oxycontin now that the banks are failed because of their own delusions of exceptionalism?

Now that spleen = vented, I can go on with my day.

"We Are Jazz. Jazz is America."

2009-01-23T20:23:00.000-05:00

Y'all are badass.

MLK, Obama, and Marc Anthony Thompson

2009-01-19T17:09:00.002-05:00

Dig this amazing performance from one Mr. Marc Anthony Thompson, AKA Chocolate Genius. Marc Ribot discovers new modes of thought on guitar.

And yeah - Happy MLK Day, and I know where I'll be tomorrow. All day. In my mind, anyway. God Bless Barack Hussein Obama.

They burn witches, don't they?

2009-01-08T09:44:00.002-05:00

From CNN:

"Early Tuesday morning, a group of people dragged the woman, believed to be in her late teens to early 20s, to a dumping ground outside the city of Mount Hagen. They stripped her naked, bound her hands and legs, stuffed a cloth in her mouth, tied her to a log and set her on fire..." [story]

The woman was suspected of witchcraft. Is it 2009? Did I miss something?

All the wisdom you will ever need

2009-01-05T21:29:00.002-05:00

Why? Why not?

2009-01-05T14:47:00.004-05:00

Today my daughter was using my printer, and she picked up my copy of Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band from a pile of CDs on the desk. Now, she's a huge Beatles fan, being that age (13) when it seems one discovers the Beatles (she likes the later stuff). "What's this sound like," she asked all innocent-like.

My answer: "It sounds like Plastic Ono Band." Listening to is now, I can't believe how hard Ringo and Klaus hold down the bottom, and freakishly awesome her vocals are. Nobody does it like this anymore. "Touch Me" is one of the tightest grooves of all time.

Happy New Year aii'body

2009-01-01T11:31:00.001-05:00

and get ready for the SuperVolcano that's going to pop like a thermonuclear cork and make all our current problems seem like mere blemishes before the dance. Yellowstone's about to blow, kids.

Artist Phil Ralston

2008-12-30T10:14:00.003-05:00

Phil's style is truly unique - not abstract, but not representational, and evocative of architectural renderings, aerial photography, and cartography all at once.

pool skatin' renaissance

2008-12-29T13:36:00.002-05:00

It's straight out of William Gibson - LA's foreclosed houses are becoming a network of bootleg skate parks. Skaters are using real estate websites to find vacant homes with pools, draining them, and then doing work. Story at the NYT.

I <3 the Apocalypse

2008-12-27T09:21:00.002-05:00

First of all, Happy Post-Christmas to all of you to whom that applies. It's my favorite holiday - the lull between Xmas and NYE. The pressure's off, you're not expected to go anywhere, nobody really expects anything to get done (those site updates can surely wait a few days).

So, leave it to our friends in the Middle East and Asia Minor to harsh my late December mellow. Isreal, a day after resuming aid shipments to Gaza, started bombing the hell out of everything. And India and Pakistan are getting all troop-movement-y, and no doubt spinning up missiles and scrambling planes and all that other War Games dialogue.

Y'all, I'm trying to chill, maybe play a little Incredibles on PS2. (What? It works.) I don't need to worry about, in the words of my man Linus, "being bombed from outer space." It's just like when I was high school, when I should have been binge drinking and trying to mount whatever crossed into my field of operations. Instead, being the current events nerd that I was (am), I was obsessed with Isreali air incursions into Iraq, and assorted Soviet behaviors, and so on. No play-play for the neurotic 17-year-old in the corner ranting about brinksmanship and machismo and how close he lives to a major first-strike target.

Didn't help that I had just read Alas, Babylon.

I did - will you?

2008-12-25T09:07:00.001-05:00

It's the season of giving, and of new beginnings, and all such like. And yet, I had a really hard time doing this.

This Christmas, say it with Wookies

2008-12-25T09:01:00.000-05:00

THIS is how you do electronic music

2008-12-17T20:29:00.003-05:00

NIN: Echoplex - Live at Rehearsals, July 2008 from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

You know, some things I've outgrown, and some things that I used to worship now seem downright dorky, but somehow NIN keeps bringing it. Simple but engaging melodies, tight beats, razor-sharp guitars and more sweet, sweet kit than you can wave your AMEX at.

Back in the 90s I was in a band that aspired to this; we used actual PCs running DOS onstage early on (the laptop came later), with big piles of Emulator II keyboards, and crunchy guitars, and big clunky headphones for the drummer. This video shows the 2008 style, with Lemur controllers and in-ears and the whole shebangabang. Big ups to CDM for this.

Wonder no more!

2008-12-17T11:35:00.003-05:00

Have you been losing sleep, wondering what will happen next? What with the economic pockyclips, the emergence of the fabled blakpresident, and the end of American cars (yes, we used to build cars). Well, rest easy - a commentator over at boingboing has laid it out all nice like, so you can plan accordingly. Time to get out that Y2K kit, folks. For reals, this time:

india and pakistan will go to war ( due to the false flag operation in mumbai), thereby causing the bush admin to declare martial law, keeping obama from being sworn in as president. the u.s. will join india in the fight, china will join with pakistan. this war will turn nuclear. internal opposition to bushes martial law will create a radical, u.s. insurrection which will cause many of our citizens to be arrested and placed indefinitely into fema camps. documents will slip out proving that the u.s. govt was responsible for the attacks of 9-11, just as they were responsible for the 'gulf of tonkin incident', and the 'sinking of the Maine'. as our money and system of govt. starts to become worthless and begins to eat itself from the inside, the N.A.U. will be created by the partnering up of the mexican, canadian and u.s. govts. thereby making the u.s. constitution null and void. around 2010 a new star will appear in the southern sky. it will appear brighter and brighter with each passing year. at first we will be told that it is nothing to worry about. around 2012 this new "star' will be revealed as the planet nibiru making its annual 3060 year return to the inner solar system, it's massive gravity causing tsunami, earthquakes and massive volcanic eruptions which will literally change the face of the earth. the ones that survive will have to find a whole new path to planetary repopulation. enjoy!

All thanks and praises be to Wonkette for bringing this to my attention.

This is dog is more metal than you

2008-12-13T18:39:00.002-05:00

Death Metal Puppy - watch more funny videos

Lookit - the moon's all big and stuff

2008-12-12T16:11:00.002-05:00

The Beeb says the moon will be closer than normal tonight, and therefore giant, filling the sky and roiling the oceans. Except for not really.

Science v. Religion in the Bush Years

2008-12-09T09:53:00.002-05:00

So Bush thinks maybe the Bible isn't 100% literally true, and his EPA guy thinks that evolution and religion are maybe compatible. That's what Darwin thought, too. Fire-breathing comments at ThinkProgress aside, sounds like a reasonable view to me. The Catholic church has held this view for years, arguing that natural selection is the best explanation we have for the actual mechanism for the emergence and development of life. Why does so many people's faith hinge on a six-day creation schedule?

Oh, right - because if that part's not true, then what of the rest of it?

And now, a little typographical poetry

2008-12-04T08:56:00.002-05:00

NYT has a nice little article on typography in the subway system, and I found this little gem in the comments:

Three cheers for the typeface Helvetical!
A triumph for fine fonts esthetical,
Aksidenz Grotesk?
A mishmash! Dun’t esk!
Hodgepodgy, haplessly heretical!

— Larry Eisenberg

Flat tax, breakfast, Tupac Day

2008-12-03T22:21:00.000-05:00

Nothing sounds quite like an 8-0-8

2008-12-03T07:59:00.002-05:00

Back in in the day, one of my first exposures to drum machines was the diminutive TR-606, a kind of stunted baby brother to the iconic 808. Later, me and my then production partner got our hands on a TR-909, a somewhat enhanced version of the 808. All the machines had the wonderful quality of sounding nothing like actual drums. You weren't trying to imitate or replace, you were doing something different with a new kind of tool. I still use sampled 808 sounds to this day, along with everyone else in electronic music. The CBC has the story.

Blasphemers!

2008-12-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

The Roots make Dave say "Oh My GOD!"

2008-11-22T18:54:00.001-05:00

It might get better than this, but not by much.