derek bailey, r.i.p.

from the wirelist:

**
Derek Bailey died aged 75 in London in the early hours of December 25. He had motor neuron decease.
**

jingle bell rock

Great piece about the Waitresses "Christmas Wrapping" here. I have to say, I could never get in to Tin Huey, but Chris Butler nailed it with that perfect slice of bratty gal new wave.

Am in Ohio after an effortless and pretty great drive through rt.80 yesterday. I bought all my xmas presents in 3 hours today and managed to get what might be the be all end all awesome mom present of all time (warning: spoiler if you are my mom and it's dec. 24) of renting a flute and setting up flute lessons for her. After about 10 years of hearing her say she'd like to learn, I just wandered into New York Music and threw down with this adorable high-school aged jazz piano kid who reminded me of my high school boyfriend (all the senstive poet/buttrockers in my town take turns working at NY music). This is yet another post-BARR inspiration. "How do you start something? You start it" are the first words on his album, and damn it, if that's not just some punk rock new age mantra I'm willing to bite. I hope my mom gets okay at the flute so she can play with her church choir - this is my secret goal. How weird is it to have goals for your parents?

Yesterday we took a survey of the worst Xmas songs on the radio, and I have to say that Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is my personal least favorite, and I know I'm not alone in this feeling. I think Wanda Jackson is my fav. rock era xmas caroler and you know Bing holds my heart for the satin smooth fireside songs. Since I managed for the first time in my life to pull of my grandmother's patented delicate sandwich cookies both in form in flavor, I have had this weird feeling that I'm actually enjoying Christmas. Maybe if all goes well I'll actually change my mind about that McCartney song, but for now it is the least swinging, least acknowledging of the bitter feel of winter, least sonically or textually related xmas song blunder of all time.

listen lively tonight

so the wxpn live at the kelly writers house gig i did on monday will be airing tonight:

10pm on 88.5fm in Philadelphia or live streaming here. I think it will exist somewhere in archived form also, on the Kelly Writers House website.

Live at the Kelly Writers House 12/12

Last minute promo!: Am reading at the Kelly Writers House in Philly tomorrow with some awesome rock critic ladies. If you're in the hood, please stop by and make absurd faces while I'm trying to sound cool into a microphone in front of a live audience. Yikes.

at the University of Pennsylvania
wh@writing.upenn.edu
3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215.573.WRIT
fax: 215.573.9750

# 8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: LIVE at the Writers House tapes with host Michaela Majoun. Join us for this month's LIVE at the Writers House features the fantastic women music writers Sara Sherr, Daphne Carr, Daphne Brooks, Maura Johnston and Doree Shafrir with musical guest Buried Beds. LIVE at the Writers House airs on 88.5 WXPN - be a part of the live audience!

it's done

178 pages without a conclusion done, only slept two hours last night but somehow in that time it snowed 3 inches done, champagne toast at 10:35am done.

more later.

jersey boys

am about to disappear likely for the next two weeks - masters due on the 6th.

saw 'jersey boys' on broadway, which yes was a total pander to the b&t theater crowd, so much so that jersey in-jokes got more laughs than the characters, but it was a pretty well-told and interesting story - about frankie valli & the four seasons, complete with ugly mob and gambling debts, lost relationships and all of it. they tried to say that fv&4s were the working man's beatles, which i don't think is entirely true, but it is one of those kind of historical readjustments - they sold 100 million records and worked into the late 1970s but have what to me always felt like a really early 1960s sound. Am realizing how wrong I was.

In other news: the 'neighborhood' guy from the play was portraited as a little too jersey to get the subtle meaning of "walk like a man." The producer yelled, 'It a metaphor, Tommy. A metaphor." Which is what I want to yell to people who blame the violence in France on hip hop.

shotgun wedding

Shotgun wedding. Called three and one half weeks in advance. Bought tickets. Whisky.
Church. Wood paneled foyer. Picture of the new pope, too small in the room. Robin’s egg blue. Friend from the Navy flies in on “a shotgun flight” and ushers. One half church Irish one half church Italian. Babies everywhere. Someone is karaoke singing songs, sentimental country ballads I don’t know. Suspect they are by the same artist whose CD was for sale at the check-out at JC Penny’s this afternoon while buying novelty underwear with mom.
Paper walkway pulled by kids like a silkscreen roller, little tear in the bride’s side. Maid of honor, champagne dress. Flip flops. Bride beautiful, taller than I remember her. Simple gorgeous gown – more tasteful than Youngstown. Ceremony. Sisters read the gospel, look so alike. Look like their mother. Catholic church, forget the rules, but the brain tunnels through the ritual unaided.
Groom. My prom date. Just friends. Later my mom makes it sound different. Very awkward. 8th grade, erased his picture from my yearbook. *picture not available. Hilarious tease. Friends for life, but always that distance because I’m a girl.
Mr. and Mrs. walking. Everything framed as “first time,” even in the sermon. Greeting in the foyer, end of ceremony, heightened speech continues. Pawing to not use clichés, making general but sincere wishes. Poetics of escaping the church without a faux pas.
Reception. Friend enters to Williams' “Imperial March.” Tom Waits as their dance. Tables close together, excuse me. Cookie table, regional tradition. Bar staffed by uncles. Joke is they’re all named Vinnie. Like Tony and Tina’s, even the food. Sitting at a table with family of the groom – the husbands are talking about whether children belong to parents, or to god. This is the same room where the cool bands from high school would play gigs because we were too young to go to bars. Brother makes a speech. “At least we finally know he isn’t gay.” Later frames it as younger sibling retribution. Shows speech, written on torn piece of Budweiser box.
Evoke privately held thought with friends who live out of town: The deer hunter. Laughter. “Maybe he’ll strip naked and run down the street.” Drink too much red wine. Convinced this will not make me a mean, odd or stereotypical wedding drunk. The DJ plays “Brick House” before nine p.m. Later the DJ says, ‘this one goes out the guys in the kitchen.’ People dance line dances they learned after I stopped learning line dances. Twenty women to one man on the dance floor. Toddlers to pre-teens half dance half fighting. Some kind of Grease enactment. Never learned the words. Hiding out by the bar with the Vinnie’s, everyone’s smoking cigars. Single friends huddled in corner, conspiring about remaining single. When’s the baby due? Is a phrase I have never said before without irony. Hard to muster enthusiasm – all weekend mom makes excuses for being single, 27, with no kids and in school “she’s a new Yorker” Imagine myself with a monocle in a cartoon on the same page as the blow card, “Babbitt was my mother’s maiden name.”
"A boy named sue" comes on. All the male friends get together in a circle, singing. Stand outside taking a cell phone picture. Feel outside just like high school. No one has a tie around their forehead though.
After last song. Let’s go, please. Clean up tables, throw away extra cake. Take care not to throw away mom’s cake knives. “It’s from my wedding.” Still have the box. Wheel tables to corners, stack the chairs. Gallop off to the parking lot.
Suddenly at “Salty Groggs” Three dollar cover for all but the military guy: put that away. A band is playing. Everyone in it looks like Vince Neil during his solo period. Friend eyes the weird chick from our high school English class. “Is that” almost as dread a comment as “When?” People without children keep showing up, mentioning names of people I have forgotten. Band hammers “Mustang Sally.” Girls in the bathroom all from the wedding, in dresses. I’m wearing all black, but more like an orchestra musician than Roy or Johnny. I try to chat, but I’m not one of them and they know it.
Home. Terrible feeling. Am I too drunk, or just overwhelmed. Can’t sleep all night.

the catalog.

From the Future of Music Coalition newsletter comes the most point blank statement about the change in how we think about music and its commodity status:

In other words, the music industry is moving rapidly away from selling albums to monetizing the value of accessing and interacting with entire catalogs of music. As the music industry changes, we need a copyright system that compensates all the members of the creative team for their work.

the whole language of listening is changing, it seems. accessing instead of buying or owning, curating instead of DJing, the end of scarcity (which is something that I had always had fantasies about, living with a record collector nerd who refused to even let me listen to his records because I didn't put them back properly and quickly enough) meaning a whole different relationship to 'discovery.'

On an entirely different note, the reason that Madonna song "I Love New York" sucks isn't the lyrics or the very haughty concept, it's the timpani rolls, how silly are they? it sounds like some ill-concieved crossover remix.

And in the weird world of celebrity crossovers, here's Mark E. Smith reads the soccer scores

Sweeter than the music of a lovesick mocking bird

Stroll, don't cakewalk, on over to the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project to hear an amazing collection of 5,000 cylinder recordings from the 1890s-1912. Read more about cylinder recording and then put on your smoking jacket and listen to the Early Black Artists and Performers radio show with a fire burning and Nipper at your feet.

Some days I just love the internet.

it was a bear costume, not a bunny costume

hey i'm teaching Bartok tomorrow in class. i can't seem to find any movie stills from the scenes of the twins in the hallway, aka, the adagio section of music for strings. what is the internet coming to?

formed a band

yes, that's right. saw art brut last night after falling mildly in love with them sometime this summer, likely after being stuck in the car with some pitchfork writers on the way up to mutek.
in the crowded, not quite ideal venue confines of Tribeca Grand's basement (which feels often more like a sweaty wedding afterhours sesh when all the 'grownups' go home and the DJ turns out to have better jams then "brown eyed girl-lady in red-wonderful tonight" medley, which makes it sort of better than a REAL nightclub, tho Dave P's Philly home is a little more suited to the grime and glitter nature of these events) Art Brut came out: playing the intro to Welcome to the Jungle, no less.
I ran into their booking agent, who I once shared a bunkbed with at an indie rock retreat in college, who informed me that they were "really excited to go to LA" after I told him "Move to LA" was one of their weaker songs...Ehh.
Anyway, the lead singer Eddie Argos looks like an overdone Shakespearean actor with his rouged cheeks and unibrow - he's uniquely ugly in a way that made me hope he had the stage presence of David Byrne. He doesn't, but his banter "we just got a new guitarist, we're told he's the only attractive one in the band" was endearing enough. Thing is, Art Brut is something like the punk rock version of BARR - inspirational self-concious DIY creation that both exposes and questions its being and attempts to incite the audience to join in, since they've set the bar so low. How do you begin? Begin!, brendan would say. Eddie Argos is more typically British. "I will be coming back to New York City in the unforeseeable future, and when I do I am going to walk around, go into the subway, and find every single one of you and I am going to ask you, 'have you formed a band' and if you say no, I am going to be. I am going to be...very....disappointed."
Argos asked each of the band to take solos as he introduced them, in the last song: each member sucked in a way that suggested maybe they were trying a little too hard to suck. The show is Argos, who sing-speaks through the set as a pomo rock god jester not unlike Jarvis C. before he went capital A art. It is this year's best meta-rock, by far. That Nickelback song about being a rock star? The worst.

soft news

Man, I really HAVE always wondered why drivers mount stuffed animals to truck grilles, I mean, in a kind of urban, anthropological sense. I wish I had written this article.

Reading a really not very good book about Roy Orbison and 'alternative rock masculinity,' which basically argues that his persona was all about a) the glasses, duh, but traces a nice history of other spectacled rockers, and b) his 'man in black' thing, which apparently comes from the dour 1830s to the present tradition of serious men wearing black, whereas men seems to be more colorful in the past. Anyway, wonder who else has written about this kind of stuff - what about the gender persona of folks like calvin, thurston, trent, billy c., stephin, colin, etc etc. Biblio suggestions, please!

nyu on strike: even bono supports

Today NYU grad students began their strike after NYU refused to renegotiate after the expiration of their 2000 contract as part of Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers. After securing the first ever contract for a private university, the NYU grad students lost support as National Labor Relations Board, given a Republican majority by George Bush, in July 2004 reversed an historic 2000 ruling that acknowledged graduate students as "employees" not "students."
If you follow the 2110 link, you'll see a picture of Bono wearing a pro-union button at a recent NYU panel. That guy.

More on the strike and its backhistory here.

cruelty and criticism

Hey, long overdue congrats to Melissa Maerz, who won first place in the 2005 Association of Alternative Newspapers Music Criticism division. Read an interview here with Maerz, where she was asked:

How do you incorporate your opinion of an artist in a review without sounding preachy if you like them or cruel if you don't?

I try to avoid the cruel part by not writing reviews of relatively unknown artists who I don't like -- it seems ridiculous to give people another reason not to hear a band that they've never heard of in the first place. Bigger bands are fair game. But if I'm going to write a negative review of a bigger band, I focus on specifics: which parts of which songs don't work and why. I think cruelty usually comes from sweeping generalizations, and if you eliminate those, you get more critical and less cruel.

Interesting question, an a very sound answer. This is something I think has a wide margin in criticism - what do you OWE anyone - the listener, the reader, the band, in terms of your writing? Are you a reporter when you're a critic? Are you obligated to include facts, to represent fairly? I think of something like Nick Sylvester's piece about Louis XIV, which was clever but a little obv. shot at the sexist little boys from SD, and how I know he got some shit from the band themselves about it. Same with Caramanica and Velvet Revolver (he). It's like 'fuck those bands, the boys were right about them' but then there's times when I feel like critics haven't listened or done their homework, or their pub has it out for the band in general, and it really hurts the band. Case in point: one bad pitchfork review can KILL a young artist. Which maybe is fine from the point of view of the listener, if the listener tends to agree with what that critic writes: they were warned against somethign that would be crap to them. But to everyone? What about the band?

grain and laffy taffy

okay. as someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about it, clap your hands say yeah's Alec Ounsworth does not sound like david byrne, really. or thom yorke. he is these things: whiny. ragged. treble-y. which are often used to describe both of them. but then there's all the other words.

what language is there to talk about the voice that isn't learned from jazz/opera? we talk in metaphors because language fails us. i saw a a Jeremy Blake film with Sodium Fox and sort of about David Berman today, which I have to say was depressingly mid-1990s in a lot of ways, and there was a line about language failing him. Now mind you, Berman, "gen x everyman." waxing slackjawed one-offs about the bland world of amerikka in a series of straightfaced observations laced with little explosions of irony about these really sad subjects, sad as in adbusters when it was just starting. not even stay free. anyway, maybe the language was weak because it had been worn too thin - the visual language of the film, this sort of glitter/grease mc mansion pastische with some pop reference/some video game art/some personal symbolism, dense dense but flat and then berman, whose utterance brought on or set meaning to the collage arising. It was soo much but not enough.

(grain. i want more.)

Minimalism to conceptualism in one sentence:
Less is more, but it's not enough.

Has anyone else thought the lyric in the last verse of Laffy Taffy was "toss it feminist taffy" instead of "Toss it flip it and slap it?" Sigh. Alas, looking up the lyrics online, I find that there's no mention of feminism in the song anywhere.

people hate blogs because they just circulate old news

but here, today i have real news. le tigre broke up. discuss.

drowning pool

The Auteur Issue of Stop Smiling is out. Yes yes, I'm stumping, but it's pretty damn genius, as usual. Check out Andy Beta's awesome Jack Nitzsche feature - I was blown away when I got it.

The new Blood on the Wall sounds like the true wounded crackhead soul of Williamsburg, I mean, read this (from their press kit):

Courtney Shanks (bass, vocals) met Miggy Littleton (drums, vocals) on the way home from shopping for records with her girlfriends. As they got off their stop on the L-train, she noticed a man selling records on the corner. That man was Miggy. Once her friends got done throwing themselves at him, Courtney and Miggy struck up a conversation about music and soon became best friends and band mates.

How much more disgustingly not even made up can that be? Anyway, Miggy's managed to find the space between Kim Gordon and Georgia on their best whispers, taken that to the YMCA on like South 1st, drown herself and come out singing like a vixen. The dude, tho, whoa onto his vocals.

metalheadz

you know, if there's one thing in this world that my blog really *isn't* trying to promote, it's...the inflation of the male phallus (by anything more than one's one body) and so, i have yes, dear readers in the flesh, changed my comments section.

Did i mention that i've started writing for associated press? they just launched a new, mostly-web oriented wire service for all types of reporting - including cultural reporting - and I've written two pieces for them.

The first was on DJ Radar's Scratch Concerto at Carnegie Hall, and the second was Roadrunner Records Metal All-Stars, which was actually something of a dream assignment for me - spend a day with a whole room full of high profile, hard touring dudes who never get to see each other and just let the tape roll.

I was really impressed with how charming and cordial everyone was, and was a little overwhelmed by dudes like Dino from Fear Factory and Dez from Coal Chamber, two really sweet, smart guys who've basically been on tour for ten years straight and who had such an amazing passion for music and musicianship (with like zero degree of cynicism about these things - and able to tell the difference between them and 'the biz,' at which they have been bigger winners than most but still certainly not, as they put it "at Slipknot stature" I mean, imagine that being the bar YOU'LL never surpass. geeezzz).

Banana Republicans USE doll parts

Maybe you've seen these excellent Banana Republican stickers around NYC and out and about. You should email this guy and ask him for some to put up. (Reminds me of the no-alien stickers that seemed to circle endlessly in the zine community of the mid-late 90s, or...obey, but must less obviously design-y)

Saw U.S.E. last night at the Knit and while I will love them til the end of time, I have to say that their newer, mid-tempo songs don't catch me nearly as hard as does "Emerald City" or any of their earlier jams. Noah was still as adorable as ever and the girls I think keep getting better and better. Sigh.

Listening to the new Celebration record, ex-JAKS and Love Life but without Anthony, who is now in Bellmer Dolls (who could def. take the Dresden Dolls in a fight but who would want to beat up those two?). Katrina is less screamy and the organ sounds are now not guitar-organ, just organ, which gives it a more b-movie haunt feeling that the true horrorsound of Love Life. That JAKS reissue, that I reviewed for Seattle Weekly, is really killer. I wish I had seen Katrina back then - what a fury she must have been.

in lieu of thoughts: pictures

...been writing...reading...working...

someone just sent this link for the fun and fashion of split enz

is Dane Cook responsible for the return of the word doucebags? I confess - I have started listening to comedy (am listening to "Wild And Crazy Guy" right now, since the hilarious dude I TA for used it in class to talk about "word pictures") and Dane Cook's thing about the car alarms in NYC made me laugh until no more sound would come out of my embarrassed face.

Stop reading this right now and go read Ann Powers' new blog Eensy Weensy. Seriously.

Here's some pix of the Pavucina Festival I blogged about in August. My mug: 34, 44, 54, 55, 56, 58. 34 and 44 feature Martin from Ememvoodoopoka and the guy in 54-55 on the right is the singer/guitarist for the hardcore band Brood, from Pottsdam. 56 features a dude I met who had been at the CzechTek festival a few weeks prior and was telling me all about the police violence there. sort of.

And finally, yes I'm sure I'm the last person to post this:George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People song and video. The "Gold Digger" connection could have been more clever, but hey...

CMJ 2005 wrap up

So fantastic and low key, my CMJ 2005 mostly because I avoided the drama and hype by going to the path of least resistance. Highlights:

Thursday Dandy Warhols: My hype show, of sorts: Keep an eye for Williamette Week coverage. No opener, packed house at CB's (my last time there? I was a little sad but realized I hadn't been there since I last played there, and that, my friends, was a long time ago!). Most of the set was first two albums, just rumbly and gorgeous oblivion. A capella "We Used To Be Friends" with Courtney wearing a towel on his head was one of the more touching moments.

Mixel Pixel at Piano's: My recent Grooves piece on them might give you some idea, but I really love this band. Goofy, a little scrappy but all there musically and lyrically, with a sort of ridiculously charming live show involving homemade videos by the band, Paper Rad and Retard Riot while the three jangle video-game inspired sad tales of love and tornado-induced loss in front. The bass player also is like a sweet terrycloth spitting image of Sasha F-J, no kidding.

Friday: The Providence Noise show at the Hook: ha ha ha, love Whiney and that he got these weirdos together under the banner of CMJ seriousness. Caught R.L Stein and Friends: a nine-piece noise group sounding like AMM if it were fronted by Animal - shirtless dude with a contact mic collar and rope around his foot, dragging cymbals, flip kicking headstands danger danger destroy the set, "hey we're the opening band an no one is here but other noise people." Life lover and friend Lucky Dragons new material involves a carpet made by friend Muffy that the crowd crouches 'round, touching the metal-weaved strips and each other to change the sound. Luke is my hypercolor future hippie genius friend! Nautical Almanac was a three piece tonight with a dude on weird stand-up circuit box thing plus the usual suspects on violin, bass and shouts - organicly weird clean clear sound. Then Kites, my Provi-noise crush - doing a more subdued big amp inferfaced by tiny stand up bent box controller and mic he swung like those things kids at raves swing, broke the thing then used line noise to sculpt stompbox sound - sounds boring, it was fucking awesome. He's a genius. Avoided DFA and talked tinyness with Luke night and next day. Fantastic and needed.

Friday: Mixel Pixel at Standard Tap: Not as good a show and my first time in the venue - which is a cinderbox monolith of bad sound. Video worked better at Piano's bc of clean surfaces. Was dumb to charge admission for a showcase and let in now badges.

5RC/KRS at Knitting Factory: Caught BARR, old drummer of my tenure in Dopo Yume (as per CB's entry) doing his post-spoken word ackwardly clever in your face art politics b-boy thing. I like this for him so much, and the audience was so in to it and Brendan just radiates weirdly positive energy. Will be in my Masters, watch out.

Caught part of Excepter, who I'd never seen, and was so put off by the vox, as were apparently lots of folks, though the synth boogie beats were fabu.

Dissed at S.O.B's where apparently everyone was jamming Coco Rosie (arghgh) so I couldn't see Supersystem demolish !!! at their own game. Sigh. Home again home again.

Saturday: Galapagos Secret Eye Showcase. Let me tell you this showcase made my festival! Friends Black Forest/Black Sea, from Providence, opened and set the tone with earthy-eyed space jams. Love to Miriam, math goddess and part of my cello rocker posse. The Big Huge is a fastidious two-piece from Baltimore that sounds like Tracy Chapman singing Nick Drake songs on the Appalacian dulcimer and accordion. Some newly made friends said "this music is just what people in Manitoba are craving" okay? An untapped market? I have to say, midnight birthday girl Larkin Grimm sort of stole the show tho - that girl can sing scary well, looking like I imagine Billie Holiday did, that three-quarter profile smile, all round cheeks, just howling howling. Saw friends Long Live Death live for the first time - true post-elvin minimal fairie rock with a touch of Lizard King swagger. And Fursaxa who I think I like better recorded - she always seems so unchangably sad there with her air organ loops, I want to give her a hug.

And with that, I wandered off into the full moon after summer perfect Saturday night back to my house to read and get my mind straight for this morning, when I FINISHED A DETAILED OUTLINE OF MY MASTERS!!! yay to me!

drowned out by the technological cresendo of the city

The upside of coming back Praha drained and stuffed straight back to school is that I now have no idea that waking at 7:30am isn't very punk - makes sense. Get a lot done. Have some tea, chill with the cat, watch the baseball field get finished across the street (where I used to lay and curse it).

Monday is my "day off" and am getting a lot done, like finally listening to this Aural History lecture from MIT by Emily Thompson, jamming the Hardo Budoyo Ensemble and reading bits of Gendron's "Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club," which is becoming helpful in my art school musicians masters madness. 100 pages due the first week of December. Every day I must do something moving forward toward this not so difficult writing goal, but whoa! reading and research. Am going to post a paper I wrote later in the week, asking please please for comments and suggestions.

Also have dozens of CZ CDs, thinking about doing either MP3 blog here or finding podcast space. Hmm. Will consult the experts and let you know.

the progress we're making is significant

freedom of speech rides high and dry among the lies.

quintron news

LETTER FROM QUINTRON:

As I am sure you all must know....me and Miss Pussycat got
out.....most of our instruments were also evacuated, but the entire
electronics lab was destroyed and many Pussycat paintings and puppets
were also lost. Also, the house (SPELLCASTER LODGE) is
questionable.......the front gable blew off and the whole downstairs
(the LODGE) was REALLY the underwater dance club for about 3-4 days.
Unfortunately the only things dancing were dead animals, benzine, E-
coli, fire ants, and human feces........Our entire building structure
being condemned is a real possibility. The good news is that as far
as I know all Rhinestone Records Krewe are ok......Trachiotomy rode
it out along with Strangebone (Jeff Matson), DJ Math Problem (Brian
Marchese), Mikey Serabrini, Danger Dan Fusilier (famous painter of
Mother in Law), Jamie & Raven, and many others. Antoinette K-Doe (of
the MOTHER IN LAW LOUNGE) also stayed and survived but her lounge
saw even deeper water than the Lodge. I know that many of you are
having various benefits and you should send your money to any place
that makes the most sense to you....if you are donating directly to
the Lodge please know that the $ will go to replace equiptment and to
re-build the Spellcaster because we have no insurance of any kind.
It will also go to keep the show on the road for many of the above
mentioned Hurricane heroes. The reason I am writing this is because
I have been asked by benefit organizers to explain somehow what is
happening and where the benefit funds for Rhinestone Records will
go.......so, that is my explaination about money........as far as
what is happening.......i don't know what the fuck is
happening.....this is biblical and it is breaking my heart to see New
Orleans burnt, flooded, neglected, ethnically cleansed, and basically
shoved underwater to drown........but we can breath underwater baby.
Cajun Atlantis has just begun to emerge and the moment those fuckers
let us back in the gates, we are going straight to the gun store and
then to the boat bar for all the free drinks we can drink. Thank you
all for everything........WE LOVE YOU!...............sincerely, Mr.Q
and all of Rhinestone Records

P.S. website will be updated soon and all QUINTRON AND MISS PUSSYCAT
tour dates are NOT being cancelled, although Harry Merry may drop off
as the opener for this coming Fall tour........we must tour with a
New Orleans band now................we will definitely have some
stuff to talk about in the van.


QUINTRON & MISS PUSSYCAT TOUR DATES


wed OCT 26 - BATON ROUGE, LA @ Spanish Moon

thurs OCT 27 - Shreveport, LA @ venue TBA

fri OCT 28 - HOT SPRINGS AR @ Hot Springs Film Festival

sat OCT 29 - MEMPHIS, TN @ HI TONE

sun OCT 30 - BLOOMINGTON, IN

mon OCT 31 - CHICAGO, IL @ EMPTY BOTTLE

wed NOV 2 MINNEAPOLIS, MN @ 7th ST. ENTRY

thurs NOV 3 - MILWAUKEE, WI @ Mad Planet

fri NOV 4 - DETROIT, MICH @ venue TBA

sat NOV 5 - TORONTO @ The Silver Dollar

sun NOV 6 - MONTREAL @ Zoobizzare

mon NOV 7 - MONTREAL @ Zoobizzare

wed NOV 9 - NEW HAVEN CT @ Cafe 9

thurs NOV 10 - BOSTON, MASS @ Middle East Cafe

fri NOV 11 - PROVIDENCE, RI @venue TBA

Sat, NOv 12 - BROOKLYN, NY @ venue tba

Sun NOV 13 - NEW YORK CITY @ Mercury Lounge

tues NOV 15 - Rochester, NY - THE BUG JAR

wed NOV 16 - CLEVELAND @ THE GROG SHOP

thurs NOV 17 - PITTSBURG @ CLUB CAFE

fri NOV 18 - PHILIDELPHIA, PA @ First Unitarian Church

sat NOV 19 - WASHINGTON DC @ THE WAREHOUSE NEXT DOOR

when the levee breaks

friends,

you may know of my lifelong love for new orleans. my father worked at tulane, my aunt went to tulane and she and her husband lived there and worked for texaco for quite some time. In 1998 I too lived there for a summer, one of the best summers of my life and certainly one of the most influential to me in terms of thinking about the impact of music on a community. I have gone to maybe seven Mardi Gras' celebrations and have marked Magazine Street as the place of my retirement, in 2035.

It was at Tipitina's that I went to my first real punk show, in 1995, to see Fugazi. I stood in line for two hours in the rain next to a man in a lovely ballgown with my boyfriend and we thought it was the most magical place on earth. Tipitina's, I have come to realize through writing a story about them, is one of the most community-minded nightclubs in the country, with mentoring programs for teenagers, with co-op practice spaces and 'band office spaces' and in raising money for various charities. I have yet to hear of Tipitina's status.

It was Prytania Street Theater that gave me my start in film, selling tickets and popcorn with with the surliest and most wonderful group of goth kids, rockabilly robot builders and future art stars one could imagine. I have yet to hear of the Theater's status.

The best DIY events happen because Anthony at Turducken makes them happen. He's a math tutor, show promoter and one hell of a swell guy. He's high and dry in Texas.

Royalty of the 9th Ward Quintron and Miss Pussycat make amazing, bizarre music and avant puppetry. They also run a speakeasy called The SpellCaster Lounge, which was an amazing place for shows and hanging out. The 9th Ward is featured in some of the NYTimes photographs of area's hardest hit. Their press agent said that the couple and their instruments are safe, but that all else may be lost.

I am thinking of trying to put together a benefit for folks hit by this, reaching out from NYC to NOLA. More to come.

home again home again. vma 1am whisky bs

it's one a.m. wednesday, i have completely lost my voice but i am home. well, i am in brooklyn. tomorrow begins school and then all moves from there.

VMAs. wtf "My boyfriend tells me about all the cool bands like....AFI..." umm. your boyfriend has bad skin and his band sucks. put that on a t-shirt, duffy. and girl, you could throw darts at the racks in HMV and have better taste than him, so dump him, date yr nearest nerdboy record clerk and make some Suicide dreams come true.

do i like "since u been gone" any more cause girl got wet like some fugly afterhours OSU bar Janis Joplin wannabe? likely.

Gwen. shafted.

umm...STAY WITH THE BOYFRIEND RUFUS. weird. just straight(or not) weird. how did hip hop rule the VMAs but frozenface BJ and thee AmerIdiots win all the awards. "I'm glad rock still has a place on MTV" yes, well...

Shakira. man, did they drop the ball with budget on her number. Yikes. Just saw that video for the first time in Germany and seriously, it looks like some crazy workout ad. A sexy work out ad, but still. Is that shit with the stomach sexy? It freaks me out. She looks possessed. By muuusssiccc.

V praze: crawlspace, castle tour, throwing up in public, or just another weekend on a Czech punk tour.

You may wonder what I've been up to. What have I been up to? Things got a little wild since I started working for Tamizdat, and well, I between school (like going to work, long days, much studying), work (writing album reviews for the site), ex-currics (tours, lectures, etc) and trying to get some other visions of Prague + work on several late and current projects – life has been too much to blog about. Wow, I just realized how much this is like that annoying part of a zine where the editor complains about how late the finished product is.

So I went to this insane festival in Mikulov, Moravia, which featured the big beat group Blue Effect and of course Plastic People of the Universe, Uz Jsme Doma and Marian Varga, who is this really eccentric keyboardist somewhere between Glenn Gould and Keith Emerson who used to be in the group Collegium Musicum. The trip was ½ the fun for me, and less than that for my unfortunate but good-humored friends who couldn't be on the bus with me (pozor: if you travel by bus out of Prague, get a freaking reservation, seriously!) so had to go to Brno and take a cab! to Mikulov (but were offered a lucrative franchise opp. For some dieting formula by their generous cabbie).
Turns out I have been to Mikulov before, five years ago when a friend convinced me that is was 'the real CZ' and I spent a week there drinking wine and reading the bible at the city pool. I was also trying to 'relearn' Latin, which could give you some indication of my stuck brain at the time.
Thank god for the long study to PhD-dom because it'll be a good while before I get Czechs and their music. The festival was open air, super cheap and you could just camp right outside the wall for free. Toilets however cost 5 crowns! There was constantly food cooking and beer flowing, the weirdest mix of music possible from 2pm to 2am (or longer, with friends I was convinced to leave early) from Czech Latin jazz to well, Marian Varga, post-punk, hippie rock, folk, accordion humorists and, like in the disco polo videos I know and love, always children on stage dancing around. And dogs, everywhere.
I was by myself for most of the first night and fell in immediately with some raucous Czechs who were addled enough that our mutual ability to communicate was no barrier. That is to say, I was offered weed by sign language. To toke, universal! Luckily enough for me I declined, so as to chart the insanity of the folks over the course of the evening. I save the juicy details (he!) for my dissertation, but let's just say that later when I said "…and then I realized that the one who was doing the surprisingly nimble interpretive dance to PPotU had a huge swastika tattoo on his forearm," I broke open a good conversation with another Czech punk friend, who told me that this type of 'hate speech' is illegal in CZ. Well, it's a start…
Still on the theme, went to an exhibit called "The Pope Smoked Dope" at the Museum of the City of Prague, which charted the history of big beat (bigbit) in CZ and 'psychedelic visual culture' mostly from hippie central, CA. An intense explosion of artifacts (over 800 in the exhibit) mostly album covers, posters, printed materials, put Czech big beat bands (with names like Flamingoes, The Matadors, The Roosters, Blue Five Dogs, Rebels, Primitives, The Awe telling you that they referenced mid-60s British Invasion although playing and recording later (the exhibit said that the first rock records were produced in 1968 tho I'm going to do more work on that number)). Anyway, am planning to get ahold of the curator and track down a lot of the music if possible. His catalog has some writing about how useless it would be to try to do a sociological study of Czech music from the 60s. Luckily, I still don't know most of those words in Czech so can pretend not to understand.
Also, seeing all those Dead posters and shit shocked me into total admission that there is some serious hippie regression going on in our dear beloved world of 2004 novy weird psych folk groovie death cult jams. Been listening to a lot of irritating posthardcore and you know what, it suits me better! Hating this fake love bullshit is making me more Matos every day? I just want to wear plastic clothes and listen to shiny techno?!? Only six days til c/o Kompakt fest Koln!
So to the subject line: Friday/Sat I was tagged along with Ememvoodoopoka to two shows, a festival in Brtnice and a place in Pisen. The Brtnice show was a two-day festival in the barn behind an architecture museum in Brtnice, a pretty damn small town boasting the relics of a castle and Sv. Julian, as well as a miniature Charles Bridge, complete with statues, over a creek. $2 admission, seven bands and a DJ tent doing some Czechtek-style trance and techno, a tea hut, beer hut, food stand, art exhibit and grounds covered with rope made into spider webs to go with the name: Pavucina. Got there in time to see Lajky, a six-piece sounding somewhere between Arcade Fire and Paris, Texas with hark! a female bass player who had a punchy voice to her male counterpart's hilariously effete indie boy stance. Emem play some dystopian krautrock with boogie moments, and my friend Martin jumps around and pumps his fists like a true leader. Brood, from Pottsdam, got the ubiquitous 15-yr-olds with dreads and short pants (romance) to slam with post-hardcore abandon. Tabletky were a local band whose lead singer looked like, well, Eric Weisbard actually, and who sang like Eddie Vedder. Serious presence. They had a 7-string guitarist and the crowd really loved them.
Or maybe they were really drunk. I am now approaching 10 years of going to shows pretty much continuously and I can say that I have never seen so many people as drunk as all the people seemed on Friday night at Pavucina. There were also 'cookies,' which I watched one person eat so many of that he immediately became ill. Others were just laying on the ground, shouting while dangerously nearby others were just peeing out into the night air. This is where I might tell you that I, having had a nice toast and tea, was looking at the sickeningly lovely moon and Mars, it was pretty bright out. I have never felt so unafraid but so alone as there, standing upright amid this nearly Bosch-ian spectacle. I slept, like most people, in the kulturni dum, in a sleeping bag on the stage. There was no women's room open, and there was a dead daddy longlegs in the men's sink that was so big looking, even in its ruined state, as to inspire great fear. They say you swallow three spiders a year, but this number is suddenly not so important as the size of each one. Ahh.
And Saturday I wrote around with Brood in their van to various small towns in CZ, looking for adventure until someone from Pavucina called saying they forgot their bag of cables, so we made a four hour return and back to Pisen so they could play with Emem at Palubkov, an all-ages club booked by teenagers and likely the meeting place of all the city's alternatypes. I forgot to mention Vicky, Emem's drummer's girlfriend, who did merch for the band and who, at Palubkov, secretly got very drunk. For whatever reason, the crowd was weird and not attentive, but a dedicated group raved for Brood, and we didn't end up leaving to return to Prague until 1am. Five + gear packed in a modest eurocar, I had the good sense to have had several glasses of Frankovka before getting in the car to make me sleepy, but lo! When Vicky decided to start throwing up out the window, I was shocked into awakeness, realizing that we had some intense mrla (fog) and sat shivering as V sat limply, waiting. The only thing worse than waiting to throw up is waiting for someone else to throw up. This is another reason to not have kids, although I'm pretty sure that true love involves not actually being grossed out by the vomit of said loved one. If this is true, I know in my heart that I have loved (and will never buy the cheap absinthe for you again, I'm sorry!) and will surely love again.
This missive will do nothing for my hits. No links, no photos, no pauses, but I think that it will likely be my last in Prague so I'm getting everything out. This week I have my main Czech test, my birthday (that's right it's on Wednesday you slackers, it's too late to send a card) and Friday is likely off to Koln.
WARNING, DEATH: Also, I will be dropping my grandma Carr's ashes in the Vltava on Wednesday and trying to think of some way to honor my great aunt Kay, who passed away on Friday after a month of intense hospital time. I've now lost four loved ones in the last two years and today even dreamed of my grandfather, who died when I was really young, too young to know him. Was at this castle Landstejn with Martin on Saturday and walking up a tower that was 700 years old, thinking what does it mean to be climbing these stairs to look out over this forest and grounds. Got caught in a flash rainstorm so we were the only ones up there, looking out. Am I telling all this to you now so you too see from this place? (I wouldn't be so naïve and selfish to presume) Would I go up if I could never tell anyone about it? I am sad for not knowing what my Aunt Kay might have seen and known that I didn't know to ask.
(please don't wait for me to ask).

rip bob moog

Bob Moog dies at 71.

v praze: required listening from CZ and PL

well, if you're reading this, you might be wondering what i've been up to, but i can't tell you now because i'm busy at work. so you should instead hunt down some tracks by these people:

Deuce from Poland, like crazy wonderful mix of my diamond sky high radical friend Luke Lucky Dragons Fishbeck and the artschool video explosion of Mixel Pixel. Also, he dude is part of what seems to be a rad collective that I would know about if I had time and money to read the Wire.

Kackala from the CZ. Umm, well, five women singing intense a capella covers, I mean, look at the picture fer christsakes - an all girl punk a capella troupe!

Band of Endless Noise also from Poland, who recorded their first album with two of the members of the Magic Carpaithians. Their new album, Riders On the Bikes, has this great sort of Thinking Fellers sounding song called "The Union of Those Driving Slow" and they also play the singing bowl - some psychfolkers took an extremely long walk down bushwick ave and ended up in Warsaw.

And Aktual, also from the CZ, early band of Milan Knizak and the Plastic People of the Universe. "Drop Acid You'll See." Indeed.

z prahy: new suits

The motley crue of mostly advanced Czech students boarded the bus Saturday, 9am, late, which is to say, way late by Czech standards. While most of the buses parked in the lot outside my bedroom balcony window are of the fancy, tinted windows take no prisoners tourism type, this was a good old fashioned excursion bus – something you want to attach speakers to and pile out of to steal a pee like a prankster of olde. The bus belched violently blue-purple haze from its rear whenever it was started up and inside the bus was like smelling a sharpie for too long until we started sailing the narrow winding curves of our random backwoods vylet [trip].

I confess. On Friday, the moje ucitelka asked 'one of the students in another class wants to know if it's okay if she brings her baby on the trip.' And of course no one raised their hands, and so, though my brain begged to defy gravity and stand up for the sanctity of the adult swim rule, I let go. So for the rest of this reading, set your TK drone box to "baby cackle/scream and every woman over 25 who wasn't me obeying their genes and fawning sickly sound." Granted I wouldn't want said woman not to come, but then she let said baby wander/scream/crawl all around the bus because she just assumed it was okay with everyone and that the baby would become 'group property' and people would pay attention to/help it – to an including at our sit down dinner. To je problem.

Whatevs, the trip. Went to the home of Karel Capak, likely mostly known to most for inventing the term 'robot' although until about 20 years ago he was prime comp. lit. material, the first moderni cesky spisovatel [writer] and a fine fine amateur gardener. His house, in Strz, was pretty modest and unlike most American museums, it was more exhibit than, don't know the curatorial term, "just as if he'd stepped out for a minute." There was a nice bowler hat and cane, but more interesting were pictures of him greeting other writers to Prague, like H.G. Wells, correspondences he kept with writers all over the world, and photos of interwar Prague in general. Capek's garden and first floor flooded the spring before he died, washing away the garden he loved - 1938 – it was said that he had severe depression and as someone who spent a life writing sci-fi/speculative dystopian fiction as leader of a cosmopolitan vanguard, it is little wonder what made him so smutny [sad]. He also loved his dog, Dasenka (I think my old Czech teacher used to call me this!) and wrote a children's story about a 'dog and kittie.' Reminds me that I want to buy bell hooks childrens' book.

In Pribram we went to a 19th century silver mine, wore hardhats and entered the mining area by a long double banister-like slide that you rode down on by a giant rectangle of felt. Mind you, there was a retired gentleman on the trip who often summoned the miracle of his pacemaker (he's the arch-conservative Proctor and Gamble guy on the trip who apparently argued that the Japanese interment camps 'weren't that bad). Sooo…this little slide thing was amazingly unsafe and fun, the mine was nuda [boring] but fun-boring (a little too close to Ikea's 'un-boring,' but maybe the same sentiment).

I decided in Breznice that one of my new things to do before I die is either a) wear a suit of armor or b) have a suit of armor made for me and then wear it. If there's ever a reality show about pretending to be a knight, please contact me. Armor is cool and swords and battle axes and all of those things are cool, but even cooler was that this total d&d Czech 16-yr-old boy was giving us the tour, and was like totally all over the weaponry. All the dudes in the group stood in the front, and most women were audibly nuda. Going to places like this reinforces some kind of bizarre traditionalist view of history as a procession of war, conquest, strategic marriage, serviceable oil paintings, relics, intricate monograms placed in unlikely places, and the creation of superlative braggarding at any cost "the first library to use shelves in Central Europe" !!! Well, I'm sure Benjamin would send thanks for the shelves before sliced bread at least (end of the aura of the loaf!). I had an undergrad moment of drawing the belltower from a bench near a lake while taking a break from the herd.

Our hotel was completely just us, but they wanted us to be three to a room. I often get a sense when staying at a hotel that everyone working at the hotel would rather no one was there at all, and this was def. the case v hotelu Kratochvil. [at the hotel 'short stay'!]. I roomed with a nice Jewish girl from Boston who is doing a dissertation on 20th Czech history, as by the end of day one everyone had found the person on the bus most similar to them and settled into that weird chat where one knows nothing of another and finds any topic acceptable for the sake of camaraderie. Anyway, Laura seems to rule.

We went to dinner and sat with the pacemaker man, Lorenzo, and the Midwestern medical R&D guy turned missionary (who explained that his wife wasn't with because she runs a camp where they teach English to disadvantaged Czech youth using the Bible…which, I'm afraid to say, I might have to think as more than 70% unacceptable in my brain) who might be the perfect example of someone you can total disagree but completely get along with – an actual factual good Christian living what seems to be a humble and just life (Isaac too). I ate smazeny syr [fried cheese], which, you'll be unsurprised to know is becoming my favorite Czech dish.

At 10pm they kicked us out of the dining room and into the bar, across a five foot hallway, and immediately the group got engrossed in some card game using another deck of cards with hearts, balls, leaves and TK. They were playing a game called TK which seemed a lot like Uno and had all the non-Czechs confused because of the difference in suits. I will likely buy and bring back some of these cards, wanting to start a Brooklyn version of the PacNW game night institution I know that folks like Brooks long for. Love cards, not just cause in the twinkle of the slot machine and dim lights our table resembled some enchanted Bruegel painting, but because they are fun-boring too, the perfect mental state for great conversation, antics and the beginning of friendships.

z praze: Rebelove, the Czech Grease

I have now been in czech school for one week and living that true definition of sophmoric in that I believe that I might understand some things, or be able to speak because it makes sense in books and in my head, but it comes out all spit, halt and blah when I'm trying to actually communicate. Luckily, I have made a friend - Lorenzo - who is good at just throwing things out there to see if they work, and it makes it easier for me to follow suit. Of course, Lorenzo speaks four other languages, so for instance when I am returning the impulse buy jacket because it has missing buttons and I say: rada vymenit bundu protoze tam chybi knofliky. Musim mit za novou?

Lorenzo says: oh yes, knofliky, it's the same in German.

Then I imagine his brain having these resevoirs of languages from which he skims vocab for a new pond: Czech. Me, I'm out here with a shovel in hand, digging for a dam. I'm about calf deep now.

Today starts my first day of *work* for Tamizdat, this fabulous online distro of independent Central European music. The guys I will be working with are both in bands but no one will tell me their bands' names. The shop and office is on the fourth floor accessed by an interior plaza behind a buzzer-only door advertised only by a sandwich board - how's that for exclusive? And, as mentioned in an earlier post, there are bowls around for various pets that follow their owners to work on occasion.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to a lot of Czech radio - last night was 'oldies' on Olympic radio - by oldies I mean Czech, American and British oldies, from early weird doo wop I've never heard through, well, through the Wings catalog. A lot of the Wings catalog. The Czechs are not afraid of the solo Beatles catalogs at all, and that means I have to not be either, I guess. "Jealous Guy" and beyond.

One other music-related tidbit: we've been listening to Rebelove in class, talking about case endings and what have you. Rebelove is a mid-70s soundtrack turned film about teenagers in love and all that claptrap set to Czech versions of such songs as Petula Clark's "Downtown" nebo "Pata" or Nancy Sinatra's "Sugar Town" nebo "S, S, S" (actually s hacek, shhh shhh shhh) done with much more false exhuberance than the original, even. Will likely send the latter to Ms. Sara Shurr who runs Sugar Town in Philly, and will get a huge kick out of the rendition.

PERSONAL NOTE:

Well, I've only been gone 8 days but I'm feeling a little homesick, can you believe it? Not just for Monster either, but for New York (was remembering that I hadn't seen any outdoor movies at Bryant Park, one of my favorite things) and all those things. I know, every silly publicist I email to say 'no I haven't listened to X because I'm in Prague" emails me back 'I'm so jealous' and I shouldn't write this, but I really miss being aroun people I love. No, it's not that I miss NY, it's that I wish there were some people to share my time with - thus the blog (ya, sentimental interlude). I, for instance, haven't been out at all past 8pm only to use the internet, which for me is downright criminal. I've also only had jedno pivo a neni absinthe. Eveyone in school is very serious I think, and I haven't even emailed my Czech contacts yet. Well, I should do that right now...

This weekend: going to Karel Capek's house and some mining museums and likewise 'real czech' type tourist activities, with the class, so will be gone. More gossip upon return.

z praze: fresh morning rain

Prague, pt II:

I am currently listening to The Cure at some kind of hippie punk bike pot haze hot summer hangout. A man sprayed me with liquid oxygen when I walked in, then laughed in my face for a full minute when I told him it was like 'fresh morning rain.' He has been repeating these words to everyone who comes in, everyone who gets the rain face. He's got a huge red/blonde afro and keeps screaming czech/gibberish insanity into an internet phone connection and laughing hysterically. These people just let me use their internet and don't give a damn. There's a dog on a leather couch next to me.

Czechs love their dogs. Expats, the snarky boring idiot kind who seem to write exclusively for Prague Post, don't like the dogs. I like a good dog, a beagle looking thing following leashless down a cobblestone street and occasionally windowshoping only to find itself lost in the sea of feet. There's nothing more life affirming than seeing a dog recognize its owner from across a square, then it running like some animal kingdom porn at top speed slo mo in epic joy. Gross.

Today was the first day of class. Love the serious older student - four Americans, one Greek, two Germans, one Swede, one Belgian and one Camaroonian. An unlikely batch of humans if you ever saw them. Our teacher made us play two games that would never happen in the States: the first was 'tell me some stereotypes about X people' and she listed Skots, Germans, French. No one would budge on that one, except a German, of course, who confessed. The other was when the teacher asked one student to sit in a chair in the middle of the room while another stood behind pantomiming everyday tasks. She had to guess 'how often' he did these tasks, without knowing what they were. It was like some 50s standup or something.

I'm trying to think of other hilarious things, but really I've been sort of out of sorts knowing that my aunt who is in the hospital is likely passing away this week. I talked to her today on the phone at the hospital and she was in that delirious morphine state where breath becomes more sounding than words. What do you say? I've gotten sadly good at these conversations, having had them many times over the last few years. Never hesitate to say I love you, I have learned though I'm generally bad at those words from my 1/2 wasp upbringing.

That's all for now. Here's something that passes for headline news in the CZ, mind you, not for the day but for the last few days.

Police steps at CzechTek come under renewed fire

A decision by Czech police to break-up a techno music festival in Mlynec, west Bohemia, at the weekend has continued to draw political fire - from both the opposition and some members of the government. On Saturday around 1,000 police in riot gear forcibly broke up the techno party - attended by some 5,000 visitors - at the request of landowners who claimed visitors had damaged their property. Police clashed with dozens of partygoers, using tear gas and water cannons - leading to score of minor injuries on both sides. Around 20 people required medical attention.

Although the Interior Minister Frantisek Bublan defended police steps as "necessary", others, including the country's president, Vaclav Klaus, have criticised the move, with the president saying that the use tear gas and water cannons was "inexcusable". Mr Klaus called the move a "gross blunder" and has already said he will call on the country's prime minister for an explanation.

Others, including opposition MP for the right-of-centre Civic Democrats, Ivan Langer, called Saturday's use of force "unprecedented" - in his view evocative of police brutality in former Czechoslovakia preceding the fall of Communism in 1989.

v praze: end of the technoparty

first post from prague:

got in yesterday, having sat in the last row, last seat of the plane i could see the surly and generationally diverse cleaning crew come up through the back of the plane - all in stretch pants, taking turns kicking the roller vac around the runway while waiting for the mobile staircase to get wheeled into position. welcome to the czech republic.

got a ridiculously expensive cab to my new apartment in karlin, prague 8, just north and a little east of tourist prague and just north of hipster prague, yes hipster prague, because gosh darn it this place is bangin' more than ever - the dollar is worth only 23 korun and boutique hotels abound, but don't let me jump the gun, let me brag.

MY APARTMENT IS AMAZING. amazing. well, i was welcomed by my landlady's friends, who had been there prior to me, and didn't speak a word of English. never one for cliches, i would call this simply ' trial by fire ' and put it at that. They spoke very quickly, and like all adorable over-60 couples, both at once each taking turns to shout over the other. Through a door, a courtyard, another door. the world's smallest elevator (warning: this elevator breaks frequently - yikes!) to the top floor.

one bedroom, elegant, packed to the gills with books in czech, french, english, german and russian - i sublet from a professor. The words 'absolutni vule' total bull, run through my head: a Plastic People of the Universe song, a lace outline of a bull framed in glass over the retrofuture living quarters. Bits from Ikea NJ/Pittsburg abound - collapsed retro chic in the post-soviet international summer student renter paradise. Not one but TWO balconies, full of plants, comfy chairs and yes, yes yes, tchotches! but like, cool kitsch. Something endearing about a picture of the building of the Brooklyn bridge framed on the front porch overlooking the Vltava. This is where my friend Chris would insert the 'sentimental' snark.

Well, okay. Got up, did laundry (I don't even have laundry AT HOME!) and made tea, read the paper and listened to czech news about how an illegal rave caused at 15 km traffic jam and got shut down by the police, then stepped out to find school since I have to be there at 8:45 am and, my brave readers, I don't even know what time I'm on - night day, sleep no sleep, anxiety fright fear expectation, what drugs! - so I need to make sure I know where I am if I'm a zombie.

Speaking of zombie, I went straight to the internet cafe I used five years ago - Bohemia Bagel, which still is playing hilarious breakbeat/jungle international signifier of coffeehouse kool as before, just better computers and more veggie food selections to be had. Good thing, since my rohlik s sunkou (breadroll with ham) left by the adorables this morning was a sad disappointment. They pretended to not understand (nerozumim!) when I said, "jsem vegetarianska!" - I travel halfway around the world to be treated just as my mother would, me.

*i CAN get mail, even have key (I don't even have a key AT HOME!) so send me love if you dare.

felt and fat

greetings from london, pt. 1 of 1:

Long standing curse of my inability to get back to Prague made for all plan-mind going to that leg, leaving London as the three day layover with no map and no agenda whatsoever. Result, lovely of course, if you look the other way from the gallant bobbies in the tube stations, standing four-abreast looking at EVERYTHING with distrust. NYC since I returned: the subway disembodied voice saying 'any possessions left will be destroyed...' and all this, but here, man you leave your bag or even stop looking at your bag a second and other people on the train start asking, 'who's is this?' Trains run so much more smoothly in general in London that the random detours and temporary closings feel like just another day waiting for the J train. Life during wartime indeed.

Well well, I stopped by the MOJO offices to chat with old pal Jenny and found myself explaining what 'crunk' was to the befuddled posse, feeling really, well, it's how I imagine K. must feel every day at the Times, actually, and then I tried to find someone to go see Lady Sovereign tonight with me - no takers. Actually, only the youngest hire knew who she was, if that's any indication to you of the status of grime in the UK media.

Normally I got to shows alone, but wasn't feeling it today and made it a visual art day, stopping at this place The White Cube, which was in Hoxton square, feeling very much what Williamsburg wishes it could ever become - a post-industrial greenland utopia of small shops and artist lofts. the Cube is in the square itself, a big corrogated metal building open to the air and full of paintings by Anselm Kiefer, weird huge canvases caked with waves that kind of lashed against the rusty metal ships attached by wires.

The modern is pretty impressive: a converted electricy generator that literally buzzes from its former use. Art is arranged by subject - loosely, ahistorically, sort of brilliantly - allowing you to think about a subject from a lot of angles. of course, it also sort of digests the art in advance for ya, but there's a lot to see and if you're going to do it once, that might be a good plan of attack. will be interesting to see the works restructured and shifting into different ideas over time. joseph beuys totally dominated my mind today, an homage to the ex no doubt, and i spent a good deal of time wondering about the art star/rock star crossover. Celebrity.

Wandering the streets as tourist with no desire to spend or capture is pretty great - I was determined to spend only 25 pounds and I've done that. Am headed to Prague tomorrow and will be moving in to a one bedroom apt. for the month of August. Email me if you want to send me a letter, or want me to send you one! I'll be collecting Czech music too, so if anyone wants a taste, let me know and I'll start thinking of tracks to put on a CD comp for my Sept. return.

kylie and red wine

jammed an awesome goodbye for Amy Phillips and said self on Tuesday at 12 inch bar - thanks for coming out! I had a retro DJ set all worked out, but things chilled out around quarter of one and I was ouuuut. So out, of course, that I left my cell phone and had to back in a mad dash the next day, after rollicking in the brutal surf of Jones Beach. Was great to be at such a clean beach but I missed the madness of Coney Island.

the blob!

A departure from the regularly scheduled programming, to bring you:

Blob tales from Ohio, pt. 1

Dear readers,

I am home, one a.m., stood up by my high school prom date and instead having watched Sideways with my mom. The clerk at the grocery store said, "like, everyone who returns this movie says that it's totally boring" after I had just said, "mom all my friends parents loved this movie." This is of course after getting shot down about Hotel Rwanda. It mentioned minority conflict, and the minority weren't (obviously) from outer space.

The movie sucked, of course. But I'm in Ohio, so I still consider the woman at the register to be a total birdbrain, which is a term I actually love. Birdbrain. Not very feminist, the term. I can use it because today I spent 2.5 hours floating in my neighbor's pool with my mom telling her why a) disco doesn't suck. and b) contemporary gender theory is really quite helpful when thinking about what it means to be an individual in society. These things are related in my mind, of course. Gay men, dancing, liberation, the end of monogamy, what lies beyond marraige as 'commitment.' trust, respect, truth. Ha! I got a sunburn, but only on the front.

Last night I said "I'm here for the party," to my cousin and her mom, who are in town for what can be called 'a hillbilly wedding' with some reservation. We met up at a roadhouse hidden from the highway by dozens of parked semis. My uncle, who most commonly resembles a prison in-take photo for his severe countanance, was also in attendance, as well as my mom, who refused to take the bacos off the cheese fries although even though they are apparently vegetarian, I still think they're gross. Didn't matter. A huge pack of huge Ohio dudes near us kept like, buddy wrestling and bumping in to our table. I fired one off about 'homosensual lust' and my not-aunt (said potential marriagables at table are long divorced) laughed. Love that, who doesn't believe in progess, you know? And then they started playing "Doin' the Butt," which put everyone in a great mood.

Yesterday I visited my aunt in the hospital. A doctor came in and gave her one of those monologues you only ever see in a movie. She's going to die, you see. But when? He weighed the options, gave statistics, reminded her that she was 'well beyond her years' and almost even said 'slash' when referring to god/nature taking her last breath. You couldn't want for more, really. All the family there. Me recounting what the PaceMaker specialist said about 'the dyes' that could 'put her into kidney failure,' because well "Daphne is the smart one," so she follows what the doctors say. Other people don't follow what the doctors say? Other people, let me tell you, do NOT follow what the doctors say. And from the past three years of losing three aged charmers, most of the time it's the people who need to know the most who hear or understand the least. "Listen loudly" is a song written aptly by a band called Love Life: a band I love, thought Loveless I love more but could do less with such sentiment. Said said, you should listen loudly, not only because you never know when it's them talking to you or when you need to really talk to someone else.

Enough with this 'you' and 'me' bullshit, aren't blobs about technology? "Daphne I have a question for you," my other aunt, mid-80s, asked today at lunch. "Whats an ipod? Is it a computer?" Well, I said. You know what a walkman is like? It's like that, but just it works a lot longer and with more songs. Oh. "I asked your mother what a blog was. They talk about all these things on the t.v. and then I ask your mother about them." Dear me.

My mother, doll that she is, just let me know that she discovered my 'blob' a few weeks ago. I was like, "mom, you can't SAY something like that about my career in music journalism, it totally has a shape. I've worked HARD for that shape." {bad joke, like writing such a long missive on my blob in general, which I'm merely carrying out like a bad writing exercise cause I just watched the laborious and stupid Sideways ferchristsakes and am in that kinda mind}. This would be a boring-er story if it weren't for the fact that my mother printed out the whole freaking blog (that's three years, folks) and put the thing in a three ring binder to like READ IN FULL LIKE A NOVEL. As pitchfork would say WTF?!? Does this mean I go through the blob and delete everything errant, freudian (my dad reads my blog, but he's like 'not into emotions' (hi dad!) so I don't think my drama or escapades would phase him), but my mom, she's all..all. looking for ammo? wanting to show interest? searching to see if i'm secretly gay or on drugs? I can't tell really. Typical Sideways response: Your writing has gotten better on the blob in the last three years. And here I am to blow it all with a long personal narrative about rednecks and death.

THE MUSIC ISSUE

Dudes, tonight I went to this freakin weird Russian folk concert in Warren Ohio with my mom. Five small girls calling themselves 'Golden Gates' sang while a Cleveland-based Russian trio called Moscow Nights backed them up. They wore costumes and played traditional folk music and talked about well-meaning ethnomusicologists going into villages and collecting songs, although they didn't mention the falling sky, one could tell clouds were gathering in that distance.
It was very charming, but most charming was that whenever the girls would hit a chorus, a very heavily synth-ed backing track would come on adding drums, tinkling bells and either a chorus of angelic women or a male harmony part with endless amounts of reverb. It was somehow triggered from the accordion player's mixer and well, it was not unlike the backing tracks in disco polo. Maybe I'm a city slicker ethno asshole, but I don't think many other people noticed they were sorta 'phoning it in,' and in the yet unwritten book I'd love to do about everyone's favorite logical fallacy "If my mom does it, everyone uncool in the world must too" said monolith of the home and hearth said, "now you've ruined the whole concert for me" when I started singing the angel part. She always wanted me to be in the chorus, you know. Anyway, I hope this was so boring that she didn't get to the end cause if so I'm going to have to answer for calling her a monolith. Then again, I just saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: the White Stripes years, so I have monolith on the mind, and if you've made it this far and think I'm going to write more on that subject, well buddy you're just going to have to keep reading.

she certainly can can-can

My Hockey Night q&a is up - long live Paul Sprangers and the Red Wing pop posse. This is the second time I've written something about someone I know, the first time being a story about how my cousin was obsessed with Rick Springfield, which was maybe on some kind of online version of Hit It Or Quit It a few years ago. Writing about the familiar makes me itchy.

Dear blog friends, I was recently sort of darkly thinking about desert island discs (sigh) and came to the sick conclusion that Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space might actually be mine. How grossly trad whoa-is-me first year of college. I'm happy to report to you tonight, however, that when I am feeling sad I now turn more appropriately straight to Robert Wyatt. So basically, now the pity party just has better drum sounds.

Bought in prep for trip: new excepter, mickey newbury, that acid house soul jazz comp, and a chocolate overdose album (ahh, the wrong 'pop' record from rune g. who was telling me about something on that label that was girlie, weird?).

sad news on a day when we're all looking to chicago rock

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=IL%20Crash%20Charges

Police say suicidal woman caused crash that killed three others
Saturday, July 16, 2005 Last updated 7:37 a.m. PT

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SKOKIE, Ill. -- An allegedly suicidal woman accused of causing a
high-speed crash that killed three Chicago rock musicians has been charged
with first-degree murder and aggravated battery, and is being held under
guard at an Evanston hospital.

Bond was denied Friday for Jeannette Sliwinski, 23, of Morton Grove, who
allegedly told investigators that she had been in a fight with her mother
before the crash and wanted to take her own life.

Police said Sliwinski was driving at least 70 mph and had run three red
lights when her car rammed the musicians' car at an intersection in this
northern Chicago suburb early Thursday afternoon.

The victims were identified as Michael Dahlquist, 39, John Glick, 35, and
Douglas Meis, 29, all of Chicago. Officers said the three were on their
lunch break from their day jobs at an audio equipment manufacturer and
were stopped at a red light when their car was struck from behind.

Skokie police said both cars were flipped over by the impact of the crash,
and the musicians' car struck another vehicle, causing two injuries.

Friends and family members said Friday that Dahlquist, who moved to
Chicago from Washington state five years ago, was the drummer for a band
called Silkworm. Glick, a Boston native, was a guitarist and singer with
the Returnables, while Meis played drums with Glick's wife in a band
called The Dials.

Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Colleen Daly said prosecutors might
seek the death penalty against Sliwinski.

lady sovereign's massive debut

In the latest chapter of Knitting Factory ingenue debuts, Lady Sovereign kept the crowd waiting until midnight to come out on stage and rap over skipping CDs with backing vocals last night, blah blah-ing the blog and critic nerd posse (who were out in FULL EFFECT, tho I leave it to someone else to list cause 'i'm a girl and i don't make lists, even about sublebrity spottings) and otherwise crunching her possibility of anything beyond the back Fader cover. "Yo! I'm so sick rioght now, I ate some McDonalds - I'm going to barf, brahahahaha' Okay, she might have actually had some skills had she not been crazy hung over (K reports 'she was at starfoods last night' I mean, don't these yuppie punk bars CHECK ID!).
She seemed uncomfortable on stage - running through all the 'hits' (how weird is the world when someone has never released a record, only import 12"s and the whole front of the room is singing along?) Cha Ching, Random, Blah Blah and parts of "Sad Arse Strippa," a diss song that I had the idiocy/genius to put on my Pazz&Jop 2004, which was done over the beats to Gwen's summer jam - coulda been okay, was - ehh. She also did what was new track to me about how it's too late to turn back on her fame - umm, 'xcuse me, miss? the coach car is one back - i think you're in the wrong seat.'

douglas made me do it too

As per Wolk and Matos, here is some q&a when I should be doing something...else?

What is the oldest article of clothing still in active use in your wardrobe?

T-shirt from Cape Hatteras, NC. I have a photo of myself in it when the thing came down to my knees. Now it is an adorable mostly see through shirt-like rag with a dop of orange paint from when I painted my Ten Eyck apartment. It's okay though because the sun is orange. It's like a scratch on your favorite record - it's part of the shirt now.

If you were to pass along to a child (offspring, godchild, favorite young person you hope to influence for the better) a lifelong passion for one thing, what would it be?

Living in truth, like Vaclav Havel said.

What's the one website or periodical that you read which nobody would expect you to?

Well, I used to have a subscription to Old News, which was this paper that just printed old headline stories from history. I'd get a copy and it would say, "Titanic sunk!" but if you know me well, you would know this sort of thing amuses me.

Does there ever come a point when [insert interviewee's occupation] becomes kind of arbitrary to you?

I had to reread this question, and look at Matos and Douglas' responses to get it. So, re Douglas' response: I mostly interview musicians, and that makes that part of their life sort of an even playing field. Since I believe that the act of creating is beautiful and worthy of thought (the anthro side to my critical product mind), I am endlessly fascinated with motivations, which are the hardest thing to be honest and thoughtful about, I think.

Re: Matos' answer. I went through a big 'wtf rock criticism' phase a few years ago, known as THE DARK YEAR of living in Philadelphia. Grad school, great jobs and being around good people has changed that. I love what I do, mostly, and want to go forth and prosper. And I'm good at it, mostly, which makes it not so arbitrary. I once served Polish Water Ice on the Jersey boardwalk, now that was a random job (but hey, I can make a perfect swirl on top of an ice cream cone, so...)

What is one album/book/movie you have not heard/read/seen but which you really should to be doing what you do, and how do you work around that?

Craig Marks once publically shamed me for not having seen Heathers. Honestly, there are so many things I haven't seen/read/listened to - it makes it hard to sleep in. and Yes, I did go rent Heathers.

What superstitions do you follow or have you made up for yourself?

This was my question. I have so many I've thought about making a handbook to being my friend, with lists of bizarre things to expect. Have to eat the left half of the fortune cookie, read the fortune and swallow, then eat the rest of the cookie. No one has noticed before, that it's a system.

What happened the first time you danced?

Who knows? I'm sure I was too little. I remember two early dancing things. Jazz lessons, step ball change to Janet Jackson. Wouldn't go to the recital because I looked scrawny in tights. Also, seventh grade mixed middle school dance, wearing a purple button down long sleeve shirt and ruffle skirt I bought at FASHION BUG, looking very Amy Grant and wanting to dance with somebody to End of the Road, when my arch enemy got up and lip-synched "Welcome to the Jungle" and the whole gym applauded his performance - being like wtf, he's so punk rock. He died in a car accident in high school, leaving me on a quest for worthy enemies ever since.

What was the first piece of art (book, song, film, painting, building, etc.) that changed your life? What happened? How do you regard that work now?

Soluble Fish. ha ha ha. Language is arbitrary, words have meaning that involves context, but they also have sounds and feelings. Holy shit! I haven't read that stuff in years, but maybe I'll take it to Prague.

If you could choose to understand one thing in much greater depth than the other, what would it be -- your roots or your current surroundings, and why?

Oh, current surroundings. Who cares about 'my roots'? This is an unbalanced question, and I believe history is in the present, so the present no doubt.

How do you like your eggs?

I just started eating eggs when I lived in Providence, so I haven't had all the ways in a toque. I'm being scientific about it, but for now I'll just say a veggie garbage omelet.

criticism and the fop with the monocle

Lots of talk about this article about literary folks jumping into the music criticism game.
Funny, cause yesterday while I was poking around the Grad Center getting all my gear together for Prague, I got into a chat with Aaron about how he wants to write a book about the 'curation of culture,' which got brought up because I was ranting about how much I HATE when people use that word outside of a museum context (see All Tomorrow's Parties, every DJ night in the world now, etc) and he said 'well my book is going to be more about rock criticism,' which of course terrifies me, but I see his point.
There is a professionalism to the craft that has been hard won, while few have (ahh, the desk/staff job - I have three and STILL couldn't live off it) the security to say that they are 'professional critics.' But the branches and outlets, the ways obtaining a career, while ever changing, are pretty standard. Intern, slog, work for crap, work up to better pubs, get offered a job somewhere, get there and then...What? What do you do after you have a desk job? Write books. Become a public intellectual/VH1 pundit? There's a ceiling to it, and it's pretty low as far as the writing world goes.
So if you want to be a REAL writer, you do criticism as a part time thing, a side passion, and when you're famous, you rekindle this skill and hop through the early stages of slogging and go straight to the New Yorker. Brilliant! I applaud thee. What I don't applaud is nostalgia/sentimentality of otherwise ambitious or interesting writers because they think they can just blabber on about how awesome X album was to them in 1981 when they were a senior in high school, as if this were the universal experience. Cha cha, it is - but only if you draw outward instead of in.

Okay, that was an unintended rant. Go play Asteroids on the website of a band I just did a Voice Choice for. He. There's the level of discourse for you.

ALSO - just bought an issue of Heeb for my dear Amy Phillips, who's Best Of-ing the thing but couldn't find it around (me, I have to go to the MASONIC LIBRARY for my best, yikes!). There's a photo spread of gentiles donning yarmulkes for random public ceremonies, and literally every person next to me on the subway in my 3 train Columbia/Williamsburg commute said something about it. Also, a guy tried to pick me up on the platform while I was reading the mag. WTF?

london, subways

montreal olympic thingie, originally uploaded by pinkgerl.

*was going to blog about the city going around in shame today, taking down all the olympic 2012 stickers from the subways*
but, thanks to the neverending wrath of human selfishness and hate, there are better things to talk about, and I'm sure that if I were nihilistic enough to get in the subway today, there would be better things to worry about than this city's olympic loss.

annie get your gun

My interview with David Barker ran on Stop Smiling Online yesterday. It was supposed to run print, but alas..

am a madwoman of writing, interviews and shows.

david byrne at central park: a little lackluster in the opening, amid the pouring rain which never stopped for more than a minute the entire evening. sprinkling of soundtrack, old material, newer work: played 'psycho killer.' not too terribly much of stage antics, more seemed like a somewhat whismical but stately middle aged man leading a small army of dedicated but hired hands.

Annie: yikes. a Andy B. said something like 'color me wary' when I asked if he'd go with me to Hiro Ballroom with me to see my 2004 crush of the year. Went with Caryn and Amy, as per more in the monitor, and was mortified by the amateur nature of the performance, the sound, her singing. It was like the karaoke scene in "My Best Friend's Wedding," only, there wasn't really room for pathos.

TRAVEL ADVISORY: Am flying out of NYC to London on July 26, laid over for two days then on to Prague. Haven't been since 2000 and need suggestions for great shops, sites and other stuff to check while there.

Also, am going to C/O festival in Cologne from August 26-28. Exciting.

accordions and virgins, unite!

Do you love, hate or play the accordion? My friend Maria is conducting a survey about accordions for her MA project. Take 2 minutes and fill it out!

Do you love, hate or are a virgin? My friend Toby just sent me an email about this messed up case of Virgin Enterprises forcing people who use a 'virgin word string' for their companys/urls to give the urls to the company. The fashion designer Virgin Threads is fighting back. Take a second to read up and let other people know if you're into this whole free culture movement, as per Lawrence Lessig or Kembrew.

sublet my apartment for august 2005, ya

Do you or someone you love need an August sublet in Williamsburg? I will surely be in Praha for the month and looking to not pay rent. Help a sister out.

Loving: Mariah Carey, Decomposure, Colleen, Wolf Parade, the second 1/2 of the New Pornographers record, windsor for the derby's newest. Are they the best band who sucks live?

Also, went to see Annie Gosfield at John Zorn's new place The Stone, which is as intensely sparse and raw as the website is puritanical. My friend Nitsuh brought in a Red Bull and I half thought Zorn himself would fly down from the low ceiling and snatch it away saying, "music...not...ENERGY!!!!' Her "Manufacture of Tangled Ivory," for sampler, drums, bass and cello got me rocking prog, so I've been listening to early Genesis and frankly mostly loving it.

Disappointing: New Benzos, Billy C (ya ya I know), Metalux.

Exciting: Played music with six other people last night at Ultra on 30th street - my friend Katie's friends who do this Yo La Tengo/Pavement/Slowdive thing. Only their second practice and things sounded pretty good. I was on cello, and for the first time actually played with people who stopped and turned down their own instruments because they couldn't hear me - Imagine!

xtian rock

Don't normally do this, but am posting directly about my piece in this week's City Pages, on xtian rock. I went through a few rewrites on it and moved from first person essay to trying to take the idea of secular listening to spiritual music in general. Thoughts?

seal the envelope, mail it to myself

I daphne carr being of mostly sound mind and body do hereby declare that I had a pennyfarthing bicycle tattoo long before this video and that I am in fact only psychically related to Billy Corgan by two coincidences of the oeuvre and one adolescent obsession. Okay, and post-adolescence. When does that end?

That said, this video is very bad. It's like all the playful early cinema that made the Méliès homage of "Tonight, Tonight" something beautifully overwrought into a chinsy undergrad final cut pro project. Also, I loved the top hat on Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, but that was umm, over 10 years ago. Everyone knows that vampires now look like Aaliyah. Which is another thing - Billy Corgan keeps getting more white, while his press releases (at least) keep stressing how black his roots are, at least, how house his Chicago was - which is a striking difference from when he used to talk about how Cheap Trick his hometown was while still using blues structures. Go figure. Maybe his wounds will heal and he'll go find a babe to marry in the rainforest.

about not art about industry:

Also, I got the CD today. This is the first time I've ever gotten promo with one of those perferated tops like that of 1) a cereal box or 2) plastic wrap, and which by my tearing off apparently means that I have agreed to their "restricted release" policy, printed on the package, reminding me of Sasha's "Just Say No" to listening parties post on his blog. The packaging actually reads:

By opening or using this CD, the authorized recipient and his/her organization ("you") agree as follows. If you do not agree, notify us at once at 1-866-367-5413 to arrange for return of the unopened CD. [that part was in bold] Until the CD release date, this CD is to be listened to solely by the authorized recipient, and you agree not to reproduce, transmit, distribute or otherwise make the music on this CD available to any third party. Therafter, this CD may not be resold, but my be used in any manner consistent with copyright law. At all times, you must agree to keep this CD safe from unauthorized use....

I would be beyond curious to know if it were actually illegal for me to a) play this CD to my roommate right now or b) play this CD at a DJ gig right now. Also, from a totally annoying 'what does writing mean' standpoint, why is it okay for me to WRITE about the CD before it comes out, but not to even PLAY it for someone else? I mean, isn't reviewing a CD 'making it available' in some ways, to other people? Luckily Kembrew is coming to town (how envious am I of someone whose first name googled pulls up their stuff? Star power!) and he will likely have the answers. Actually, shit, I'll just call the number tomorrow and ask them. Stay tuned adbusters nerds...

Mutek as a newbie

Montreal:

Amazing city with not but two sets of world spectacle residuals - the '76 Olympics and the Expo 67 - for me to visit and photograph in my catalog of distopian modernist architecture. Went to the biosphere and biodome, where little French-Canadian children kept running around shrieking 'le penguin!!!!!' which is actually adorable, as are most things shrieked in what would otherwise be totally out-of-context (how often can you shout 'the penguin' and be referencing something in the room?) that starts with Le.

Mutek:

Ahh, the small festival, seeing the same freaks for days on end, the sense of focused thought. As pointed out in car-full-of-music-journos (which was odd when doing the border crossing 'what do you all do for a living?' ummm...write about music? i thought they'd shut us out for sure (we know what you think about Celine Dion - banished!) it was a split between head and heart, or should i say, the basement experiments and the rest of the house.

Was psyched to see Diane Labrosse not just because she was one of two women on stage for THE WHOLE FESTIVAL but because her low-menace super sharp premordial mix of tones (electronic music suited to the movements of t.rex back when his claims of world dominance were unchallenged) stood out from first two days of rumble-and-click boys for its sense of balance across the whole event, just just lamely building up like it's the damn golden section then retreating.

Loved the first half of Apparat's set, all these huge sheets of warm synths over shuttled beats, just epic and hard but enveloping, too much, too much - it settled down to bugged out darkness and more straightforward beats and just went on. Other people liked the second half better, ehh.

Liked also Mathew Jonson's set at Metropolis, which became the best part of the night since Ricardo Villalobos "missed his flight" (apparently the third time this has happened to Mutek events, curious). Funny but sort of restrained take on his monster-y hooks and wiggy pads - had the whole crowd bouncing before Adam Heart came on with Luciano to do this weird Funk carioca-sounding beat for 10 minutes before dropping some rapped vocals I didn't recognize but will for the rest of my life after having them drilled into my head for the rest of the set. One carpooler actually fell asleep during the set, dear readers. Yikes.

All this said, I am really only beginning to understand the microdistinctions of techno and house in such a way as to hear the movements along a laptop set in terms of genre instead of the dread non-intellect of aural response, i.e. I'm new to inside listening and often felt completely out of the conversation because I couldn't frame my thoughts in genre-terms. Yes, it takes me a little to write this on my blog since admitting ignorance is not something music journalists or bloggers like to do, but it's true. I am new to these genres, and went to Mutek to get excited and figure out where I should go next after loving Ellen Allien, Villalobos, and the new Juan Maclean but not digging the new Michael Mayer and thinking, 'this should clear the air for me.' It did, but not by chat, by listening. Great yet odd for me.

One conversation I had with a dance music aesthete led me to the disturbing thought that people still can't get past the frustration with 'the tyranny of the beat,' the structure by which the body ingests sound and makes sense of it. The beat is not rythmn, but they are intimately related, and rhythm has alternately been chastized or celebrated in nearly every progressive music music movement of the century, but ultimately, physiologically, is it not what connects sound to body?

A few weeks ago at Webster Hall I bumped into three girls in the bathroom. They were coming in from downstairs at the club and ran right into me - I really annoyed at them and kept my eye on them because they were laughing hysterically but not making any sound - laughing sooo hard at running into me? No, they were deaf, and laughing at something else. And out dancing at a huge club. This tells me something about what the beat does to the body that is powerful and important.

And this is where the story begins and ends for now...

"They ripped us off," said Gibby.

Saw the Flaming Lips docu "Fearless Freaks" last night at Pioneer. I remember another docu abt them I saw at CMJ a while back, and thinking it was pretty silly and not very good, and well, Beesley goes way to the other side being as not-silly as possible. The whole middle sequence about Steve's heroin addiction sort of fails at treating the brittle space between success and personal self-worth with any sort of coherence - it just meanders on, bluntly showing Drozd shooting up and endless shots of Wayne saying 'there's nothing I can do." The whole white-trash rags to riches but don't forget who we are is told in this sort of bated breath too, just not subtle at all.

Also, c'mon, right, where would Flaming Lips have been without Beavis & Butthead? It was a lop-rank novelty hit before that show rerunned all through the summer of 1994. No mention in the film, weird.

Other stuff:

Army hip hop on CD Baby. Judge for your self, the pages advertises, "REAL SOLDIERS!!! REAL WAR!!! And for the first time ever... REAL MUSIC!!!" Me, I quite enjoy all the fake civilian peace music.

Matos' Jukebox Jury with USE, ya it's old but I've been like, busy.

If you have any cool DIY/underground materials that you don't want, think about donating them to The Counterculture Archive at George Washington University. They are working with Tamizdat to preserve old Czech music and documents from the communist era. Cool.

MY OTHER NEWS:

Just did an interview with John Maclean for Grooves. He said that his whole album comes from listening to 10cc's "I'm Not In Love." Download and compare: scary!

Am going to MUTEK tomorrow. Are you going? Are you there? Let me know, but I won't be answering my cell for much cause it's freakin' expensive. Text me. Will be with awesome posse Geeta, Amy and Nick. Out of contact until Monday night - vacation!