yesterday while winding down to sleep i listened to this john cage interview and was surprised and a little weirded out by the fact that he is not, as i had presumed, endowed with a boisterous american chortle of a voice, which i had suspected, based entirely on one of the two pictures i have of him, laughing w/ full beard. instead he has a voice rather similar to vincent price. true.
today while silk screening i listened to this interview with pauline oliveros and was delighted to find out that she sounds a lot like jen ker-atch-ee.
lee and jack and jen w/ nice eyes have an art opening at white electric tonight (now) in providence. sadly i can’t make it but i’ll be in town tomorrow for the bookmobile, so i’ll get to stop in and see the pieces then. of course mike t’s opening is coming up in june and last week was andrew and cara and adam and lauren’s opening. every time i hear somebody talk about their opening or anyone else’s i giggle, and if that’s infantile than i guess i’m just one big infantile.
friday’s noise show at the spacement was amazingly good, so here, the rundown:
ratobasher with bob jordan: bob played ukelele, bells, mbira, and other noisemakers, channelled through several solid state effects pedals controlled by nathan ratobasher, who also played minidisc loops. real good team. it was a quietish tabletop set and interested parties crowded around to watch bob make funny faces at appropriate times.
prurient. imposing wall of amps, in front of which a shirtless man with two mics stood harnassing massive power, yelling occasionally (eventually), but mostly doing feedback. mics smash on concrete floor and make sparks. i saw him play at that halloween show right before lightening bolt, but he only played for like, two minutes. this time he played for at least twenty and it was captivating. i bought the record (a split with kites), which at the moment i lack the technology to play.
emil beaulieau. second time i’ve seen him play, and do pretty much the same set- put on one of his records and dance around, triggering a distortion pedal, with a mic in a tin can and an extra turntable arm held in hand. dancing around he bumped into someone, then got out a long string with plastic bottles on the end and whipped it around smashing people about the leg and arms to clear some room. one of the happiest guys in noise.
can’t. beautiful set playing homemade synth, the synth has no keyboard or other control mechanism, only knobs and switches and patch bays, funnelling white noise makers and wave generators through a variety of mechanisms. my understanding is that the first half of the set was basically “tuning” the machine, getting it in such a state as to continually make interesting noise. once this state was reached, the machine was shut off. second half was jessica (the woman who is can’t) singing into and not into a mic, breathy and (effectively) wordless. really awesome.
industrial sonic echo. TVs with static and test patterns, aluminum foil, animal bones. industrial sonic echo stopped trying twenty years ago but continues to play every week. nick can go off about how their ubiquitous prescence and dismal performances mislead the public into believing the living arts are not for them and the avant garde is the definition of not relevant, but he can do so on his own time. for now, you can extrapolate. i found it interesting that they expanded their bowie covers repertoire to include not just the opening screed to diamond dogs but also the supermen and ziggy stardust. christopher’s favorite: “the tv went out and the guy hit and said ‘I JUST KILLED DEATH! WITH DEATH! AND GOT DEATH! DEATH!’.”.
negative time. josh made beats and people danced
crank sturgeon. tabletop solid state pedals, wrestling, partial nudity, foaming at the mouth. i wasn’t so into it– as a fiasco, i felt it could’ve gone further.
skin crime. lots of people were really psyched, as i guess skin crime doesn’t do a lot of shows. many were enthusiastic, i was just bored.
vartan. i did not pay attention. visuals by adam chao were just sections of “forbidden planet” cut up in uninteresting ways. if the music sounded anything like forbidden planet i would’ve been so psyched but it didn’t and i wasn’t.
greg greg. he really recast himself as a smooth lover. sang love songs. passed out lyric sheets and did greg greg kareoke. a tender and funny close to the night.
of course performances alone do not make a show- the crowd at the show was really great, too. slickpig was there and we rode bikes home afterwards. christopher kites was there and we talked for a while and bonded over being born 6 days apart. i told him i was going to try and make a bowie cover out of reordered pieces of kites songs. jessica rylan (can’t) gave me a cd with no cd in the case, and we talked for a little bit about contemporary classical electronic record collecting. maybe if i send her a mix tape she’ll send me a recording of the sort of bleepy bloopy stuff of hers that i like (mp3s on her webpage lead me to believe the cd i would’ve gotten was all harsh distorto stuff anyway). the best were the noise nerds that were there. i sometimes think of noise (and harsh noise especially) as being a sort of therapy for people, and i forget that oftentimes it is therapy that really works.
talk last night of how in many situations, warts are psychosomatic. a schoolteacher with whom i am acquainted reports buying warts off kids so afflicted for a quarter each. a week later the warts disapear. i ask do the warts appear on him, he says no. i remember how as a kid i had warts on my knee in a very specific constellation. i am attempting to regrow them by drawing them on every day and thinking positively.
tomorrow somewhere in new york state there’s a call for extras to “look grunge” in the background of a new gus van sant 1990s period piece, and get paid. me and kelpars were talking about going, as she’s got green hair and doc marten’s and has been wearing my plaid golfer shorts the past two days. and maybe i’m a fool, but we’re not. listen, i’ve got friends, and they’re important to me– andrew and adam and cara and lauren have this photography show at the bijou at 6, greg greg is playing at the wag at 8. i said i’d be there, i’m going to be there. i hope you will be too.
i went to the postal center to send a colorful package to quincunx and the fed ex guy outside said “that’s one crazy yellow sock you got on, brother!”. i told him it “keeps my foot warm.”, and he said “there ya go!”. it was pretty positive.
last night i discovered the extent of archive.org. sure, i’d used the wayback machine before, but some weeks ago peter hipped me to the movies (lots of great ephemeral films like are you popular and the famous duck and cover, plus tons of other weird stuff including the three stooges and night of the living dead). last night i discovered the extent of their audio section. no easy links, but root around and you’ll find lots of live concert recordings (including morgan coe’s band bread and roses, plus the minutemen, fIREHOSE, and mike watt solo) and shit, a mess of good stuff. old country blues 78s, 20th century classical, lectures and interviews and radio programs, john cage, edgard varese, really really good. i’m going through the lists of longer programs, trying to make a list of stuff i want to listen to. i’ll post it on a separate page and we can all listen along and report back maybe.
i showed jenine the bouncing water balloon thing (see last post) and naturally, she was excited. i mean, that’s her natural state. anyway she was telling me that she used to make glass stuff that looked like a water drop of water having recently dropped into a glass of water. i asked her if she could make me a glass klein bottle and in explaing it to her we found (what else?) acme klein bottles at klein bottle.com! of course the company knows its audience (goofy math nerds) so the page is chock-a-block with silly turns of phrase and a general joy. “The finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions.”. NB: they also sell hats.
ok, i’m almost done raving about this, but the author of the page talks a lot about going to colloquias. why don’t we have colloquias?
leonardr- today i jamped the open source - open sores joke which you claim sole discovery of. in other weird idea-jamping news, far more sensational and a the same mild level of tenuousness, holmes and nick and i (you know, downhill battle middle upper and upper upper echelon (draw your lines where you may)) were talking the other day about that new david bowie mash-up competition. i thought it was interesting because it was a major major label artist rewarding his fans for breaking the copyright of other artists. then nick pointed out that the contest explicitly states that you can only mash-up a song off his new album “reality” with something off his own back catalog. boring. the important thing here, as holmes pointed out, is that “this is not the summer of the mash-up. september 2001 was the summer of the mash-up.”. he then went on to imply that the contest became an idea to publicity agents only after the massive grey tuesday press, which they were in part responsible for. “someone is winning an audi as a direct result of downhill battle.”.
i’m really into this right now (you’ll need quicktime 5). this party busters movie is pretty good too.
just like there’s that other jacob berendes in wisconsin, there’s this other jacob’s software that used to live on a tripod-hosted page. the time. is right. for toddlers.
i think my little datebook shimmied it’s way out of my pocket last night on the ride home from aryder’s house. in the words of dan langlois, “f”. hey, if anyone wants to go to the intransitive fest, email or call me. because i want to go, but not alone. driving from worcester is a plus.
tonight mel and kara and marge madigan came over and i made cheezy louisey with collard greens. this will be day two of an experimental new summer sleep schedule: to bed at seven am, up again at one. right now i’ve got to go do research for the second volume of fujichia follies. maybe i can have a full production by late july. the cultural touchstone this time isn’t the little rascals, it’s elvis movies. this time i hope to have more of a narrative, more actual parts, a handfull of practices, more dance numbers, and the same kind of midi backing to all the songs. perhaps i’ve said too much.
