i forgot to say- if you read this in the next few hours, race over to distant castle to see UKE OF SPACES CORNERS COUNTY, WORK/DEATH, GEOFF MULLEN & CF (duo), and FLASH FLOOD. i start playing no later than 8:45. this is TONIGHT! sorry i flaked on the announce.

tuesday night means movie night at jon.app’s house, my unfortunately-rare time to hang out with people and watch movies that we like because they are good, and not because they are “so stupid”. last night it was supposed to be a double feature of films by experimental thai director apichatpong weerasethakul, but this was derailed by a irreconcilable skip 10 minutes into the second film. anyway, the one we watched the whole way through was “sud pralad”, aka “tropical malady”, an excellent love / obsession story in two parts that i didn’t piece together because i missed the first half hour. but it was good, and recommended for lovers of slow cinema, and hunters captured by the game. the second half took place entirely in the deep jungle, and the sound was incredible, although it made me very itchy– more than one leech-removal sequence. today i’ve been researching thai naming conventions.

until 1913, people in thailand didn’t use last names. when the process started, it was decided that each last name had to be unique to a family– so if you share a last name, you are definitely related, and if you want to change your name, you have to run through a government database to make sure it isn’t grabbed yet. i think as a result of the idea “last name” being relatively recent, people change their names way more than in the west, and for a variety of reasons (since the asian financial crisis, there have been many cases of people changing their names to change their fortunes, their old and new names scrutized for numerological significance^[1]). also, because each new name has to be unique, surnames are getting longer and longer, often reaching 10 letters. despite being long, thai names are pretty much pronounced as they are written, so if you take the time to look at it, you can say it, however long. A pi chat pong Wee ra seth a kul — not a big deal.

thailand has a large population of ethnic chinese, who kept chinese names for a while, but then started getting thai names in a better attempt to assimilate. it’s my understanding that native and OG thais are more likely to have shorter names, as a sort of status symbol, because you can’t get them anymore (similar to URLs, or how my grandmother kept her car registered long after she was able to drive, just so she could pass the extremely low license plate number to another member of the family).

as a result of this name-frivolousness and complication, everyone also has a short nickname that gets used in all but very formal settings, and like all nicknames, is goofy or nonsensical, or refers to a joke or situation that isn’t really in effect, and like nicknames the world over, is something you can’t choose, and rides through any other name change. as an example of the ubiquity and silliness of nicknames, the king of thailand has the nickname “ong lek”, which roughly translates to “little guy”.

i’m obsessed with names, and name-changing, and in case you can’t tell, right now i’m fantasizing about changing my name to a cool 10 digit thai monstrosity. i’m loathe to change my luck, which is pretty good, but to be scientific about it, maybe i have naturally phenomenal luck that only my current (possibly unlucky) name is blocking somehow. ha! i just learned that i’m serious enough about this that i don’t want to mention my top runner-up name (although i already told shea’la finch). i should probably have someone who speaks thai make sure it doesn’t mean “horse nuts party cloud resized” or somesuch.

oh, and speaking of short URLs and status symbols, kartina has launched a new blog, which totally rules, and has the second shortest URL of any of my friend’s websites: thismoi.com. seven characters! of course leonardr has crummy.com, which is 6 characters, but he launched that in 1997, when single-word URLs were still readily available. anyway, karkar’s site has all the stuff you loved about her last blog– sleep theory, appeals to human dignity, and pictures of the narrator enjoying beverages in public. full disclosure: i saw kartina at the coffee place the other day and imposed on a shot for this latter category. i am excited that kartina is writing again, and i am DELIGHTED that i get to be involved in something i enjoy so much.

picture above is jaybird in thailand. nice shirt b!

jeff was asking yesterday about the dungeoneers, and said he saw them on youtube, but i thought he was talking about some video kevin took with his phone where the sound distorts so weird it sounds like toothbrushes. but today i found an actual good video from the distant castle show a few weeks ago- here it is. good camerawork- lots of zooms.

also kevin put up footage of the bone zone shows in new york last weekend and here they are. in the top video the drum track is waaaaaaay louder than everything else, and a few minutes in some slobby manbaby connects a sweaty paw to dano’s ear with an ugly from-behind coward’s swing. yikes!

last night i went to boston for two non-boston events. the first was the closing of the “shadow out of time” art show at boston university- a big group show organized through the stairwell gallery, featuring a host of providence folks. the second was a big western mass show at the milky way in JP, featuring fat worm, greyskull, pak, tarp, and lazy magnet.

the art show was pretty tite, it was in a huge room that looked like an old auto showroom, with nice shiny floors and ornate ceilings hell high. reglar players were in effect as you can well imagine. no one had their names up on their shit, which was frustrating, so i can’t say whose stuff i liked except for the pretty obvious– carlos had a tent set up with a video inside (the story of ricky rugen); mike taylor had the panels from his dissassembled hallucinominium, plus the “animal science” rotating sequential paintings; muffy and natalja set up an array of dirty mattresses as “stainhenge” (which i plowed into and knocked over like dominos);
erin rosenthal had these cool nesting mannequin heads, eamon brown had his meditation chairs set up; eli had a big cube made of pink paintings; maralie had a few of her instruments on display (but not running on this that last day); mike stoltz had a cool glittery vid. there was more, but like i said, i don’t know whose it was, i don’t have a way to approach talking about it. this isn’t really a review, i’m not about to go piece by piece on the merits of each piece. but i felt it was a solid show of divergent paths from the same well. for the most part, a good grouping.

i helped folks disassemble for a while, and then rode with eli and maralie to the milky way, and just in time to see lazy magnet, who had a full band with GM on drums, dave manbeard and sakiko on keys / electronics, chloe singing back ups, and someone i didn’t reconize playing bass. jeremy had the vinyl pressing of the record finally and gave me one, i haven’t put it on yet but the consensus is that it sounds heaps better than the cd, which already sounded good, and which is crazy, because hearing the songs on cd makes it seem like it would be the most difficult vinyl mastering in history – tons of violent dynamic changes and mood swings, many different recording environments, totally nuts. oh, and i guess it was an arduous process, involving numerous test pressings and years of wait. and incidentally, the sleeve is just cardboard with a sticker on it. jeremy said it was “austere”, but really i think it was “let’s not spend any more money on this record”.

after lazmag, what happened? uh, pak, greyskull, tarp, fat worm. what can i say? this show was all killer, no filler. lots of western mass and providence heads in attendance, plus like 3 people i know from boston. GM got me a free cola from the bar, and it was a really good mixture- real syrupy and peppery even. it was a free show so i even paid for another and was satisfied in my action. rode home with jeff h and ran into gwm, dooley and pak at the natick rest stop, which i think i stop at 75% of the time i’m on that road. oh yeah, special thanks to dooley who picked me up at the honey farms in worcester and drove me to boston, and to jeff, who drove me home. thanks guys! multiple convenience store stops and so yesterday i ate 2 candy bars and 1 burned coffee. i mean, i ate other things, but those were my convenience foods.
some youtubes of the show:

dooley’s set outside, just before greyskull played:

greyskull featuring barnett newman:

hey, real quick request– vote for me / HBML for the “boston art awards“. NOW!!!! the polls close at 6pm tonight!!!!!!!!! i’m the veryy very very first listing, under “installation”. voting is open to all, you just have to email the ballot in. please do this, it would be totally nuts if i won this. and if you want to vote party line, uh, here’s what my ballot looks like (after the cut)
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uh oh, i better write another post before purtle covers the gap as only he can. well, i got out of the hospital, i said that. the days since i’ve been totally convalescing, and am now pretty close to speed, only a mild tickle in the throat. today i even left the house, and hung out at the coffee place with john guida, who rules, and has spent the past few days listening to the white album and reading and rereading madame bovary, in two different translations. guida describes his relationship to french novels as being similar to his relationship with cigarettes– they’re both addictive, and what cigarettes do to his health, the novels do to his morals. we were in a coffee shop splitting a peanut butter jelly sandwich i had brought wrapped in cellophane– who is john guida? he is someone who can talk about cigarettes and french novels and i have a great time.

i said i would talk more about the hospital so here goes. the two amazing things to me about the hospital are:
1. the hospital is totally non-holistic. this should be “duh”, but really, the only time i ever talk about health, i’m talking with people that are excited about it, and approach it from a holistic and diet-based way. the hospital totally didn’t care what i ate, and in fact, brought me food that i knew was bad for me in my condition. it was totally crazy, just pills and waiting.

2. the hospital has seemingly no communication between staff. i had this idea that i would have a file somewhere, and the people i talked to would look at the file as a time-saving measure– this was not the case. every single doctor and nurse i talked to started with “ok, what’s going on here?” which at first i felt was like them trying to see if i had my story straight, then i felt was them getting me to self-assess over and over again, but then i realized they really had no idea. i saw a few doctors over the course of a few days, all of whom asked, “did other doctors come in? what did they say?”. wouldn’t you guys benefit by comparing notes? granted, my condition was totally non-critical, but i was there right? it didn’t inspire confidence, but then, what happened? they gave me some pills, i started to feel better, then i kept feeling better, now i’m better. so no big deal.

overall, being in the hospital wasn’t that scary, everyone was really nice, free care was really easy to get, there was tv and i watched parts of several broadcasts of “blazing saddles” with the n word cut out, which was like, why bother?. i had an indian doctor and an african doctor, both of whose names were fun to learn. the nurses were either transparent or had fun brash personalities. i would do it again if i felt i was getting sicker and sicker and not getting better. OH! also, the thing ML said about the specialist was totally true! i was trying to talk to him about pizza burn and he had No Basis, even dismissing me by saying “i never eat hot foods” the way you might say “i don’t do crack” to someone who offered you crack. can i trust someone who can just look at a hot pizza and wait, without eating it as soon as possible? much less someone who puts the pizza immediately in the fridge? or eats hot dogs right out of the bag? what a creep!

hey everyone, i’m out of the hospital and recuperating at home with another two days of antibiotics. as to what it was/is, medical science was baffled. or rather, medical science is asinine. “some sort of infection” was the best i got. anyway i’ll be laid up at home another few days, then we’ll see how i’m doing. i did get to engage my hospital fantasy of telling a doctor “you took an oath!” but it was pretty low-key. more hospital thoughts once i convalesce a little more. thanks for the visits and well-wishes everyone!

Hey everyone, and those specifically concerned with Jakes health. I drove Jake to the best hospital in worcester last nite, and he gave me the keys to FujiChia. We read the new Clog magazine, and essential X Men and waited awhile. When we finally got seen, the nurse, Robby was concerned, confused and nice enough to laugh at our jokes but was hard pressed to find a vein for the IV. The handsome doctor was stern, and repetitive, but the Einstein haired guy with the accent, just jumped to conclusions, and denied the existence of pizza burn, saying quite frankly, I dont eat hot food. Jake is in the hospital, Umass Memorial where my mom works and after just one bag of saline was visibly better and feeling better. Know news now, but Jake would enjoy visitors, just google it. Sorry I dont have much info but I was delivering milk all day.
Milk Leslie

even thouhg i’ve been drnking alot of water and gatorade, i got super super “can’t stand up or think” dehydrated. now i’m also taking salt (in solution in watered-down gatorade) because counterintuitively, your body needs salt to retain water. or something. i decided to go to the hospital tomorrow if i’m not mostly out of the woods by then. this sucks. anna clipped an article from today’s t&g about an outbreak of salmonella…

i got food poisoning a few days ago, so, apologies to people i’ve fallen off with– my brains kind of dried up. anyway, the poisoning itself was just a 24 hour thing, now i’m just dealing with the task of reintroducing food to my body, which is, perhaps to me alone, a chore, but i do get to drink a ton of gatorade, which i enjoy, and i did a fair amount of sitting around staring at the wall, which i also enjoy. fell asleep last night listening to coast to coast and woke up grinding my teeth. AM radio sounds the weirdest– like a bunch of tin dogs barking in a paper house.

a few days ago the dungeoneers played with fat worm of error in the basement, it was pretty tite. MZ was on a self-professed “bender”, and kept yeling crazy shit while he was playing, then during fat worm we had sooooooo muuuuuuuch fuuuuuuuuun!!!!! fat worm is a great skittering bumping mess always, this time we were skittering and bumping as well. i always feel weird when there are people dancing crazy that aren’t punks, that never figured out the way to dance wild and not actually knock anyone out, that just go right into “moving crazy” with their adult selves. well, there were these guys there dancing real hard and stupid and slamming into people, mike had a great shut-down, which was to vigorously hump them. they didn’t exactly stop, but they did get really weirded out, it was totally cool. also, fat worm played “popcorn”, that 60s moog hit by gershon kingsley, and me and cray-pas sung along and pogoed tomorrowlessly. perfect.

hey everyone that’s been texting me, and then getting upset (a little) when i never text back. i don’t get text messages, i can’t send them. people- you have been texting a wraith. there’s no there there, i cannot be held accountable. anyone wishing to send wishes down a well where i cannot read them, texting them to me is a viable option.