Amon Tobin shakes his butt!

Oh wow oh wow I saw Amon Tobin at the Grammercy Theater last nite with Jonny and Heather!!!



This was such a great show, and everything was perfect, even down to the minute details, such as not having to wait on line to use the restroom at all, and nobody had peed all over the toilet seat either! Good times! Amon was amazing; it was my first time seeing him live, and I had no clue how adorable he is performing. DUDE, he SHAKES HIS BUTT to the beat! Opening for him was P-Love, who was kind of a n00b, but he did really well, and chatted up the crowd throughout his whole set. It was kinda like how, in college, there was this kinda nerdy audio guy who lived down the hall, and sometimes you would stop by his room and he would spazz out trying to impress you. It felt more like that than an actual DJ set. It was cool.
Amon Tobin played a set with 7.1 surround sound, which was mind-blowing. Like, every so often, you'd hear this small shout, and you'd think it was coming from the crowd, but then it would grow and morph, and take flight and flutter around you. I don't know how he was doing that, but maybe it had to do with this mysterious glowing blue box he had on stage that seemed to have no other purpose in his show other than to fuck things up.



After the show, Jonny, Heather, and I went to this bar at the Chelsea Hotel, where I saw an interesting looking switchboard from the golden days of telephone operation. Only at the Chelsea.



Jonny and I, true to form, got into a drunken fight about the merits of creating software that applies a detailed taxonomy to the myriad sound samples in your library, so you can call them up on-a-whim while improvising. I doubt it was interesting to anyone but us, and maybe to on-lookers totally miffed at these two idiots screaming about file-naming protocol.




My fotos of last nights event aren't really that great, but you can check them out on my flickr if you'd like. So instead, I'll leave you with a picture of this random-ass parade float I found on 116th street and Lenox avenue.



I think it has something to do with maintaining family values in the Community. Wait-- is that an ELECTRIC CHAIR? Hottt.

Bizzy come een like a mascot at that boasie place!

Last night, Vicki and I went to Gelsinger's friend's art show cum poetry reading. It wasn't that bad, but Vicki and I were acting rude, kinda on purpose. (Sorry!)



Gels' friend Ian has his art shown at the Johnathan Shorr gallery; his art is really intricate, as if he was painstakingly recreating graph paper out of wood and gold foil. I liked it a lot.



Gels did some poetry about memories of the Carribbean. (I think?)



In a very sing-songy voice, he shared his Carribbean memories of salt folded into the sea like scent folded into a woman's body, NaCl, memories, the Carribean. I don't know, I just don't know.



I love Gels a lot, he's a great friend and he's super smart and talented, but last night, sitting there, I felt, well, ejaculated on; it was a self-centered, ostentatious, boasie kind of poetry jam, and I wasn' feeling it.

Vicki is crying, because to laugh would have been rude.






Then Damian (who's an amazing guy) read some of his "disposable" poetry from this awesome book he pressed himself. (Damian does his own pressings, and I really love his poetry-as-objects stuff. I'm a fan.)



His poems were quite good, and funny in his Damian-sort-of-way. However, I know that if I rose to Damian's challenge of mashing down his purported "disposable" poetry, his little object books, he would totally cry. So I didn't appreciate his pyaka. He was straight fronting. I didn't call his bluff, but I was tempted, and one more glass of wine and I might have really embarassed myself.

Robert Kochik, whom I've heard read before, and greatly admire, was there; it was good to see him, but after having sat through Gelsinger's song poetry with a (semi-) straight face, I couldn't pay attention to Kochik's reading. I guess this is an appology to Gels, if he's reading. I just couldn't sit through that stuff last night. I was like a total pinky; it was that bad.

Thursday is Bjork Day!

Vicki Blogged About Bjork So I'm Gonna Too

I love Bjork. Don't get me wrong, I do. But, for some reason, she always appears in my dreams whenever I'm having "issues", and she tortures the hell out of me.

When I was engaged to a very bad French man, and we were doing a long-distance thing, I had this dream that he was cheating on me with Bjork.

I woke up at 4 in the AM, I was all disoriented; I forgot I was sleeping in another person's house, and I had to use the bathroom. It took me about 5 minutes to stumble my way into the bathroom. And when I turned on the light, a magazine was lying open on the sink: open to an article about Bjork, and her neotenus jelly-face all looking at me, triumphant and laughing! I HATE Bjork. (I love Bjork.)

Anyways, Vicki seems to take a different view about the whole being-cockqueened-by -Bjork argument. Here's the dialectic:



Okay that's all for now!

China Update No. 1

Now, in an attempt to boost my readership, I have enlisted the help of my friend Adam Lanphier to bring you all the latest updates from our friends-to-the-north: China. Adam is a freelance journalist for the biggest expat rag in Beijing, called "That's Beijing", or "That's BJ" for short. I had a look at That's BJ's local event listings for interesting "assignments" for Adam to document, all in the name of greater cultural understanding.

Here's a little info about Adam: He's tall and lovely to look at. He's a virgo. No fatties need apply.

I selected, as his first assignment, something billed as the "Fourth Minimal Dance Party" at a bar called Big Ben or something, I don't remember. Anyway, here is the photo of the place; it is, for some reason, called the "Sweet Smelling Village".



Adam actually hasn't told me what it was like, other than that it was not as minimal as he thought it would be, and that the DJ was cute. Now Adam is fighting with a real estate agent, which I suspect is another story waiting to unfold.

This isn't really a "cultural update" of any particular interest. We're still working out the kinks. Update #2 will be better.

Andrew Brandou scared the hell out of me!

I need a vacation very badly. I think I'd like to take a "stay-cation" and sit in my house and just blog. I've got so much to blog about, but very little time.

This is old news, but the creepiest thing I've seen in a long time is this series of paintings by Andrew Brandou about the People's Temple murder/suicides in Jonestown.



(This one is my favorite.)

Turns out, Brandou's entire body of work consists almost exclusively of works inspired by creep, violent, cultish phenomena, including works inspired by the Manson murders. I really want to buy this:



It's a toy he's having manufactured of a recurring motif in his works, the sniper bunny. He's just so adorably creepy. Also, please understand, dear reader, that the aesthetic from those old Golden Books from the 50s, 60s, and 70s used to populate my nightmares as a child.

"if i said the words 'desiring machine', would you be alarmed?"

no :)

us v. them, over and over again.

Hello non-existant reader! Hello future generation!

Last night, I went to the Warper Party all by myself because Vicki stood me up. (Bizzy why!!!!?? Bizzy, come ON!!!!)

I knew I shouldn't have gone, given my only experience with the Warper crew has included some nasty Furries shittily covering that "back with another of those block-knocking beats" song, fist-shaking rage over Microsoft-Malfunction, and some ridiculous Yahoo v. Google argument that AKA still won't let me live down. That being said, I don't know why I went. But I went. Here are some fotos.



I took this picture of the video being reflected in the mirror behind the bar. This was the only pleasant thing about this evening, however, because what you can't here, reader, is the disonnant screech of some asshole blowing a trumpet into a microphone hooked up to some Max/MSP patch that causes consistantly growing feedback. This is where I started to grow deaf.

Then, this guy came out. I know, you're all like, WOW! And I was, too. At first.



Look at that guitar! It seems like this dude took the strings n shit off of his electric guitar, and glued it to a shitty tablet PC! Then he took the wires n gears and whatnot, and plugged them all into some patchbay that is plugged into the tablet PC! This is a pretty hot idea! Look, here's a close-up:



So, you have to give props to the man, okay. This is pretty cool. However, let's just say, the music he was playing sounds exactly like the college-dorm-shroom-trippy Windows Media Player "acid" visualizations swirling around on that damn tablet PC.

To reiterate: cool idea. Given. But come on, why does that shit have to sound like the soundtrack to some mid-90s soft-porn on Showtime? I took audio, but it was pretty shittily recorded, so I won't post it here.

So anyways, after that aural onslaught, I booked it out of there and hit the King.



I ate a STACKER.



More pics on my Flickr page, if you're interested. It's in a set called "The wackest shit I've ever been a party to". They're all taken from my camera fone, so they're super pixelated. However, I'm starting to really love the way the fotos come out looking like I ran them through some old Print Shop pointillation filter first...