shows today and tomorrow–
tonight (wednesday) at ralph’s, eric yankus-franco presents:
terribles
nadir
bitch brothers
9pm free
with cake and spaghetti dinner (?)

tomorrow (thursday) at the wheelchair:
cory says:
Fat History Month (Rockin, guitar drums duo, starting there tour off in worcester!)
Florida=Death (Rippin Band and electronic tape music)
Yoko Oh No (sweet band from Boston CRAZY!!)
Computer Violence (need i say more? excellent tape weirdness)

starts @ 9pm
$5 donation.

computer violence is john powers aka “the smoker”.

north ham town was quite ablossom with those tiny white flowers that smell like sexual discharge. the rest of the weekend was nice too. it was the first of two weekends of performances of this play that me and purtle are in, “go to the chateau”, and we were all ready, and everything went splendid. extracurricular activities were slim, as most of our energy went towards the four shows daily, but we’ve been very much enjoying the company of our fellow actors and actresses, as they are fine people and the meta-enjoyment comes from our great enjoyment of desert island scenarios like these in which we befriend people we otherwise would not have met. in this instance it’s particularly heightened, due to the fact that we have staged emotional (but nonetheless emotional) encounters with every person a few times a day. this weekend we hung out a ton with merc, a petite and subtle goof who first arrived in our lives wearing extremely high-waisted pants, and in the play wears a yellow jumpsuit that makes her look more than a bit like a piece in a children’s game, or a contestant on a nickelodeon game show. as noted earlier, the play happens mostly in a moving car for an audience of 2 people, and scenes are set short drives away from each other. merc’s not in our scene but she meets us at the car when the scene is over and together we scramble to the finale for our bows, then back to the house to set up again. since there’s no way for us to see the parts of the play we’re not in, we don’t know exactly what happens in merc’s scene, but it involves a tearful and emotional exit, following which she has to hoof to us on busy streets in as mentioned preposterous attire, all of which is like cult strategy to altered states and mind-attunement to goof-off frequency, making these jaunts to and fro super-enjoyable. me and mike also played basketball, and in keeping with the motif of the past few weeks, gloried in our roles as “scumbags”.

back in worcester now, trying to bust out a ton of silk screen jobs including shirts of my own design for workdeath (whose tape “le corbusier”, available at the link, is pretty much perfect). it’s raining today, which is good for the trees, which in worcester are full of those little green kix that fall and fill up certain sidewalks, plus fine pinks here and there. i walked around a lot on errands today, i got wet.

today me and purtle have the first real performances of the play we’re in, with live strangers. but i’m more psyched about this (email from anne):

Come One, Come All! See the Dragon Sorcerer as he meets his match in our five heros.
Friday and Saturday May 9th and 10th Doors open at 7:00 Curtain at 7:30
First Unitarian Church, 90 Main St. Worcester

The Dragon Sorcerer Play is a culmination of our school years worth of work at the Stone Soup Learning Coop. The students and staff researched knights and ninjas, learned about the literary concept of a quest and all it’s elements, learned about CORI laws and reform, created a story line together, and then a student took the story line and wrote a wonderful play with it. Now we are building sets, making costumes, and rehearsing, so that we can give the performance of our lives. We’d really love for you to join as and share in the amazing work these students have accomplished this year.

Tickets Suggested donation $10 Adults $2 Under 12
Tickets available at the Door

carolynn is in this, and plays an ogre whose power is burping, which is typecasting, but whatever.

also, the overheard bitch album is done and available for download. or pick it up as a double cd greatest hits debut. i think it’s eight minutes total, with celebrity remixes by me and little andrew. overheard bitch is kpars and nrevs, and the songs are all (or mostly) things they overheard people say, regarding bitches, rapped with wanton disregard for rhythm or being near the microphone. the album is called “what are you smiling at, bitch?”, it’s really really weird.

i’ve been getting up early lately and tearing the day, it rules. next step is getting up really early and napping at noon, then if things continue apace, edisoning the now-summer bliss into 4 hour daylets. there’s me, white-out nail polish & lichentstein halter, blasting sideways the knee of the inviolable present.

yesterday i rode past the new hanover theatre to discover an event in progress that i was invited to last week and forgot what day it was on. that event was of course the womag best of 2008 awards, for which HBML got first runner up (aka first loser) “best antique sstore”, which is weird. i told people to vote us “best gift shop” (which i think is accurate) but i think all those votes got thrown away because as was only revealed after the fact, they threw away any ballot with less than 15 topics voted for, and any ballot in which the same thing got listed for everything, which is bogus because i feel like we’re also obviously also the best clothing store, hair salon, cosmetic surgeon, and insurance agency. c’est la vie. anyway the event was weird, i didn’t really know anyone and i was a sure sore thumb in pressed slacksville, but there was some free food i caught: weird tapas and some cannolis (from “wholly cannoli”, which as i’ve noted earlier also serves non cannolli items unfortunately). cash bar with no tap water, so i just got a cup with free ice– “i’ll just wait” i told the barkeep. we didn’t get a plaque or anything, but i’m happy i went– seeing the inside of the theatre was kind of interesting, and i don’t anticipate having another oppurtunity to go in there. it seriously doesn’t look any better than it did when it was a movie theatre and me and eric bennett got caught sneaking into rumble in the bronx for the fourth time.

friday there was an art opening for mike t at HBML, and both the show and the set up ruled. the show is a lot of new prints and drawings, plus a limited edition cereal that mike made special for HBML, with a cool 4-color silkscreened box, and inside, actual breakfast. the set up was kicking it all day with mike t, chip, nathan, and ML. it was a beautiful day, the bench saw a lot of action. lots of awesome folks came out for the show itself, it ruled. afterwards there was a three-stage attack on duck yao, which culminated in all of us at one long thanksgiving-style table, shoveling taoist eats into our stinky mouths. perfection!

saturday me and purtle drove to north ham town for another weekend of play rehearsals, which was once again really really fun. last week we pretty much just hung out with madeline and gossiped, this week we got to explore the town a little more, we went to the skatepark (which is pretty good), hung out with josh TC, played some handball, and on top of that, we hung out with madeline and gossiped (which is fun). the play is going great and me and mike discovered that with all this monkey time (and a sort of carte blanche for hyjinx) we’re developing a practically marxian confidence, with minds less quieted than flowy. sure there will always be those times in the preposterously expensive ice cream shop with magnificent yoga instructor where you find yourself describing the cover art for munchie, in which a leather-jacketed hitler puppet surfs a pizza over loni anderson, and your mind is telling your brain “shutupshutupshutup” and your brain isn’t telling your mouth. but that’s why weeks have next weeks, RITE?!!?

incidentally handball is really fun, we’ve got to get a crowtown session burning. oh, and next weekend the play begins for real, with actual strangers that i spit on a little bit. oh, and i half-secured a ride for this wednesday’s show in turner’s falls, so eat it!

picture above from daily panel, which is still turning.

oh yeah, i’m playing a show in turners falls next wednesday (a week from tomorrow):

Montague Phantom Brain Exchange #3.5
Wednesday, April 23rd, 7:30pm $5.
at the Brickhouse Community Resource Center 24 Third St Turners Falls, MA 01376

Touring filmmaker Bill Daniel presents his documentary “Who Is Bozo Texino?”
music by Jacob Berendes
and also the Vaudevillains

i’m pretty psyched about the movie, which is a documentary in search of the hobo graffitti artist bozo texino, whose cowboy drawing has graced freight cars for 50 years or something. if you want to go to this let me know, i have no idea how i’m getting out there. yes, this iss the same night as the international noise conference on tour, which is in amherst. if you’re going to this, no hard feelings, and can i still get a ride?

also this wednesday (tomorrow) peter brotzmann and han bennink are playing at a tiny church in amherst, and i wicked want to go but again how?

in re: turners falls– josh told me yesterday that turners falls had a curse upon from king phillip’s war up until very recent times, when remaining members of the tribe what cursed it held a lifting ceremony. does anyone (which is to say dan o’neill) have any more information about this? i feel like curses are a dime a dozen, but actual lifted curses are far more rare.

yesterday was a pretty weird day that i won’t get into but it started with eating cereal in the park with annie p (which was totally sweet) and ended with going to see autechre in boston with josh tumblecat, chris cooper, and holmes. me and josh and chris all had pretty much the same experience, which was wondering what the show was going to be like, and then once we were there, saying “oh yeah, this”. what it was was looking towards a darkened stage where presumably music was somehow being controlled, a few people head nodding, a few people hand pumping, but for the most part people just standing there holding beers. really, i’m only familiar with one autechre style, which is “things skittering out of control / atomic dissection often in reverse”, and that’s what i used to try and extrapolate the show during the deciding-to-go-to-the-show process. needless to say, that style was not in effect, and the night was mostly semi-anthemic bangers (which, as mentioned, few actually banged to). we ran into marky metal at the falafel palace afterwards, where josh and chris got turkish coffees and we had the pleasure of watching chris navigate his famous mustache around that tiny tea cup. lots of really horrible conversations that were fun to overhear at the restaurant. all in all, another great night.

oh yeah, and i guess me and purtle’s play is sold out already. sorry i didn’t get the ticket information out earlier, i didn’t know what it was (i didn’t know the information).

about to drive in to the west for another play rehearsal, still reeling from yesterday. first, riding my bike around picking up large checks that people had for me, and putting them immediately in the bank. made some neccessary phone calls and then joanne, CK and soccer camp, came in joanne’s van to grab me and kpars, we split for providence. this is like 3 o’clock.

we visited j9 a little and started to go to the fabric store (the main reason for our trip) but then we realized that it was going to be not open, so instead we went and got coffee at white electric and i played monster bash pinball, my favorite table. then we sat in the car for a really long time trying to figure out where to go eat, which seems like a bummer but was actually really really fun. joanne has a real party wagon, in which the back seats face each other, so it was really just like kicking it in a tiny apartment. at one point a dog with funny ears passed us in a truck and we peeled into action, chasing after the truck and driving erratically and demanding a picture, which we got. just a fun jam out nowhere session, driving around laffin, pointing out other cool dogs and peeing behind things. as day turned into night they went to a party first but i went to the show at as220 (where they showed up later)- monotonic, dark meat, black pus, kites. dark meat was a 15-piece, full horns, banshee vox, barn burner, and they played “universal indians”. i got the record, despite it being $20, which is crazy, and in addition to being named after an ayler song (the aforementioned “universal indians”), it says “ayler” three more times on the packaging. OK! monotonic was next, from israel, a tite three piece in a rock vein with explosive crazy movement- the singer climbing the rafters and sinewing around, the drummer moving his drums further and further into the crowd or being held aloft with his full kit, or the singer running into the bathroom to grab the trash can and then pour it over his (the drummer’s) head. the guitarist was perfectly stoic and pointing. i broke my glasses and then fixed them, it was awesome. kites followed this and what an act to follow! he played straight-up electric guitar in long piercing lines, very feeding back, until a serious “no regard” section where all of a sudden he became the scarecrow from the wizard of oz, bouncing around as if tendons had been cut. it ruled and the whole time there was this great teenager trying to cast witchy love spells on him, fully saturated with complete nonsense. black pus was pretty great, everyone was crowded close leaving lots of space in the back of the room for mellow kickin and exploratory movement– push ups, pinching, miming, struttin’, stuff like that. at a certain point joanne ran to the car and got her double dutch ropes. shit, all of a sudden the only sound was a bunch of wigs getting pushed back. nicole and natasha went ape and definitely tore it. serious session that outlasted the band and out into the street, picking up weird dudes walking past that yell to their friends “i’ll walk home!” and jump in and we all chant “new guy! new guy! new guy!”. i was in absolute heaven. we all drove home delighted.

i’ve been thinking about making this animated gif for about six years. spurred by a discussion with diamond, who didn’t know who charles manson was.

not like i’m trying to make this celebrity mugshot daily or anything.

yesterday it was so beautiful and today it’s even more beautiful still, weatherwise. i’ve been eating a lot- miso soup, spinach sandwiches, broccoli and tempeh with ginger, green tea. yesterday i did that thing i like to do– hang out for a long time on street corners with amazing looking people. in this instance it was two women who looked like spiders from mars, to use a loaded term. i’ve been setting up my new room, which is going great. tomorrow i’m going to get paint, not because i especially dislike the current color (a sort of peach) but because i need to ruin things.

saturday i had lunch with my sister and her family, which now includes a baby, as previously noted. unlike the last time i saw her (her the baby), she can focus her eyes, so she was heavy eyeing just about everything. i was clowning a little, then i realized that a baby doesn’t have encoded the “set of agreed reality” that makes things that are commonly funny commonly funny. they were in town for stephanie’s wedding. congratulations steph! stephanie can be heard here and there on the “interview with a frankenstein audio issue” from some years back, which i should put on online already.

ran to the store two hours late where i found mike benedetti waiting to tell me that tom lewis passed away. tom was a great guy and a friend to mike and the snow ghost, and a teacher to ML, jambuck and d-bird. unfortunately i never got to really span time with him, we just hung out at pizza hut once, and he came to the HBML volunteer meeting. nonetheless he was an inspiration– scott wrote a really good testimonial on the pie and coffee page.

that night, a show at the wheelchair. the show was good, lots of good bands, the best of which was no fucker, an awesome d-beat band from utica with two (!) wah wah pedals (bass wah and the other kind) on the guitar. the craziest “brain drill” sound yet. d-beat is a genre that descended (with minimal change) from the band discharge, who had a distinct visual style, a trademark off-kilter drum beat, and the constant lyrical theme of nuclear armageddon. matt smith was at the show and intimated that they were pretty much third wave d-beat, via disclose. it’s interesting to see the attention to detail, and to see what is now a fairly large scene based off a fairly small sample set. all d-beat bands use one of two discharge fonts, one of which is based on a single instance of magic marker scrawl of the word “discharge” used on one of their logos, which someone later extrapolated an entire alphabet out of. no fucker used the magic marker font, which i’m sure to anyone else looked like just a hastily scrawled note. so it’s interesting, but i have to mention, i’m watching a bunch of kids singing along to outrage about nuclear holocaust, currently in fashion, but tom lewis was 68 years old, and stayed poor, and refused job offers so that he’d have the freedom to go to jail for his outrage about nuclear holocaust. i don’t know everyone’s politics at the show, i’m not saying that people don’t believe in these songs, and i couldn’t tell anyone what is and is not appropriate response to a lifetime of possible obliteration. i just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

the other interesting thing at the show was the there was a fight and purtle got a little manhandled (but not roughed up). exactly what was at the center of thingss, no one can be 100% sure of. but i’m pretty sure it was a case of a few wasted older dudes straight up olderwastedduding it, and trying to prove themselves to themselves (one was celebrating a 35th birthday). anyway they singled out jen millis as keeper of a score that needed settling, so they barked back and forth while the dudes waited for someone to jump to her rescue, and this person, they would fight. well purtle knew some of the guys from years back so he stepped in to say “this is nothing, don’t worry about it”, which had success with the main lout but his buddy said naw, and grabbed purtle by the neck, as if to choke him. i saw this from the door and had two thoughts in quick succession– the first was pretty obvious and immediate: if purtle gets beat up, i get beat up. or to put it another way, i will not allow him to get beat up alone. the second thought was that this first thought was pretty much universal, and sure enough, even the manhandler’s pals jumped up to say “whoa! what are you doing? we love this guy!”. almost immediately it all simmers back down to merely “a tense situation”, as everyone there that didn’t see it happen (seriously, everyone) asks “was someone fucking with mike leslie? because we’ll kill them!”. we both left while things were still tense, but i spent some time talking to a friend of the choker’s, trying to keep him occupied and convince him, uh, that everything was nothing. on this conversation i have a further three points:

• the guys were mostly skins, and as such, clung to the curious victimhood of “people always think we’re neonazis, but really that’s got nothing to do with it”. this statement is mostly true– traditional skinhead culture is old ska and other reggae-variant music, and general football hooliganism. then the look (the dress and sound) was co-opted by fascist groups and as such made an impression in the popular imagination. but any whining doesn’t hold much to me– i mean, even charlie chaplin shaved his mustache after “the great dictator”.

• the guy gave two explanations for the tension: “that girl put a cigarette out on that guy’s face” and “that girl called my friend a jock”. the first is pretty extraordinary, but given the girl in question, i’d have to say, if it happened, it happened for a reason. the second one seems pretty likely, but that the two are offered as reasons for the same action gives both the same weight, which is pretty crazy, especially when you are talking to a weightlifter (technically a jock, although that’s a still a loaded term).
• the guy described himself and his friends as “old school punk rock dudes”, and did so as if to justify their actions, and as if to say “you guys aren’t real or you’d recognize this”. but historically, loutish bald brawlers are not the oldest school in punk rock– the oldest school consists of skinny arty kids of indeterminate orientation and weird shopkeepers that sell bondage gear to teenagers! i realized this on the bike ride home and got pretty psyched.

so i think pretty much nothing happened afterwards, or i would’ve caught wind of it. all in all it’s like dr king said 40 years ago this week, on the eve of his assassination: “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.”. well, that’s how it is for an all-ages punk venue anyway.

ssunday me and ML drove out to easthampton for the first big practice for this play we’re in at the end of the month (”go to the chateau”). it went really good, and we both had a great time, and i feel like we did a lot better than everyone else in the play (actors all) thought we would.

my move is pretty much complete, although i still need to get my records (which is to say LPs) and i still need to set up my new space (which is something i greatly enjoy). moving was a kind of cake this time, as my previous room system involved keeping pretty much everything in milk crates already. MZ helped me out big time with his dad’s truck, and i paid him with udupi. bosssss.

super big up to long-time pen pal and regular pal leonardr, who got a story published yesterday on futurismic. i was a consultant on this story, in re: glitch metal (which isn’t real, in that it isn’t a named genre, but pretty much is, eg orthrelm).

more when more settled.