today (amongst other activities) i brought change to the supermarket change machine. FYI, a double gulp cup full of miscellaneous change (but less quarters, which naturally get picked out) is roughly $105. i kept fantasizing about someone asking me for change, and me pulling out a handfull and throwing it in the air to rain down on both of us, laughing. then it didn’t happen. after the change-in, i was left with all these foreign coins, T tokens, and plastic game pieces, the fantasy slightly changed.

message from the balmy south for immediate release! mike taylor writes:

Dear traveling bands and art rebels, et al. In the early 80s, Black Flag drove to Miami, Their style of Hello Kitty t shirts and cutoff jeans forced the Miami Beach punxes of the era to doff their leather jackets and mohawks in favor of fuggit apparel that the rest of the youth culture only caught onto like 5 months ago. Fast forward to 2006, When Animal Collective and GangGang Dance played at the Vagabond in midtown, because bands only come to Miami when galleries pay their way in December for Art Basel; Animal Collective is now alternative Miami’s favorite band.

It’s like Daydream Nation, but Animal Collective.

And that could’ve been your band.

Do you understand?

Come here. It is 6 hours south of Gainesville, which you should be playing anyway. Yes, I know it’s along, dull drive. You still play Nebraska, though. The time is now, 2009. They even made a joke about it on 30 Rock last night: “Why does anyone go to Miami? Ass. And the bourgeoning art scene”.

I quit booking shows when I lived where everyone wanted to go. Now, I will book your show. I will make sure you eat well. I’ll take you to the beach in February. You’ll get to scope out your apt. for when Cuban travel is an Obama possibility. I can’t promise the ass thing, but if you know how to work it…

I know it’s not 1996 and you don’t have to bust your ass anymore and Myspace guarantees whatever you think they guarantee. But seriously, fix your sense of adventure. This is one of the last major US cities that freak culture avoids, yet it has more pirate radio than ANY US CITY and better coffee than ANYWHERE. Right now, noise kids are descending on MIami for the annual Int’l Noise Conference and they’re gonna have a blast. Then, all will be quiet until December. If you tour here, you will have a memorable experience.

Take me up on this. I’m not sure how long my time is for here. Email me at scenerific@yahoo.com ( in the spirit of true-to-life trust and adventure) if you want a show NOT IN DECEMBER. I will not deal with Art Basel shows! I DO NOT HAVE A MYSPACE ADDRESS.

Thank you and get psyched,
Mike Taylor

also, mike pointed me to this mindbending turn on the silver jews fan forum. here’s the jist, should this link degrade: SJ frontman/onlyman david berman is quitting music to focus on writing in the hopes that he can make a larger cultural dent as a writer, in order to offset the miserable bulge caused by his own father, DC lobbyist richard berman. holy shit! from the forum: “My life has been riddled with Ibsenism. In a way I am the son of a demon come to make good the damage. Previously I thought, through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world. But there is the matter of Justice. “. HOLY SHIT!

hey, sorry to be tech here, but i have quick questions that maybe someone can solve in re: this website. in asking these questions i am looking for answers, but also, letting myself feel like i can get away from the computer and stop thinking about this for a second. i will accept both useful answers and the other kind. topics include: wordpress, twitter, widgets, and KB advanced RSS. RSS dogs will have to go to the page to see what i’m talking about.

ok, so the page runs on wordpress, which is software i’m pretty happy about. i use the plugin KB advanced RSS to bring select content from my other sites to this page (noticeably the current daily panel, and the most recent picture on pretty alright). this is working fine. but i also use this the plugin to import my twitter, right at the very top, and although i have continued to tweet (the verb they push, for obvious reasons, over “to twit”), it only shows the last post from last year (“jet boy jet girl jet x”). since the other stuff works fine, i’m inclined to believe it’s just twitter, but the rss feed for my twitter account works fine, and shows the recent stuff. i know the program isn’t reading the feed as “down” because if i click “hide this if feed is down?” it stays up, and if i click “reverse order of posts” it shows the very first tweet. i’m using wordpress version 2.7, and the most recent version of the plugin, which is version 2.1.3, which claims compatability up to wordpress 2.8 . any ideas?

UPDATE: it seems fixed somehow but i didn’t do anything. best idea was from nick that involved just using a plugin that was specifically for twitter. i guess my “don’t buy new, fix the old” sensibility doesn’t make sense when both the new thing and the old thing are both free and immaterial.

lux interior passed away this morning. an early influence, lux and his partner ivy developed for me into a real inspiration. on stage, ivy was a battery charged by equal parts of the four muses: taciturn, rubicund, moribund, and industrial. similarly, lux was the perfect component: shirtless, ecstatic, of slippery gender, full of corny jokes and base innuendos, barely contained. it’s easy to think of lux on tour, singing “surfin’ bird” for a half hour and leaving a moppable condensation. at the same time, it’s easy to think of him at home cooking eggs and listening to fats domino, saying “hon, toast or english muffin?”. it’s easy to think of him taking classes on shamanic wisdom and hitchhiking barefoot; it’s easy to think of him getting hassled by cops for changing his name to Vim Voola. it’s easy to think of his parents in akron ohio; it’s easy to think of him getting up early on the day they put out new records at the salvation army. loose, fun, easy and always delivering, it’s easy to think of what must be his epitaph:

HERE LIES THE BLOODY GEARS OF A BOPPIN’ MACHINE

god bless

monday i took the bus to boston to take the bus to providence to get a ride to boston to go to the “boston art awards”. here is my catty synopsis:

first things first, i rigged the entire thing. or, half the thing anyway. i think i was the only person with the gumption to send out to my list “vote for me in this thing”. additionally, i think i was the only person to say “also vote for all my friends, here is a ballot to copy and paste”. additionally, i think i was the only person with “a list”. these things combined serendipitously with certain ballot issues: each category had like 30 people in it, splitting the vote drastically and leaving room for a landslide victory consisting of (let’s say) 11 votes, and many people were nominated for several things, so even if, say, 30 people voted for someone, they may have voted in 3 different categories, and again, a concerted (i don’t know) 11 votes in a single category would win the day for someone else. i’m not trying to be self-deprecating– this is the truth or close to it. but in the interest of rendering unto caeser that which etc., let’s look at it as a combination of gumption and good grace, and to be quick, winning by gumption and good grace, or let’s say “finesse”, well, that’s not bad. in any event, a nice item for the (increasingly preposterous) resume, and anyway anyway, everything (i’m learning) happens by hook or by crook, or to be sure, a decision. thanks for voting everyone!

as for the ceremony, it went the way of almost everything i’ve seen in boston– TOO COOL. no one would fess up to the fact that what they were doing was fun and exciting or goofy or invigorating or whatever, it was like high school. what’s the deal? are the stakes too high? i never see anyone dancing at punk shows in boston, it’s like the same shit, everyone with their arms folded and treating everything like someone they don’t know on the subway. they might talk about it later to people they know, but damned if they’ll interact in any way, or even fess up to the idea that there’s something mildly interesting going on. i should’ve seen it coming, but i thought there’d be more pomp. i dressed up, i did my hair, i was on a date, i thought at least that it would be so bad it’d be fun, but it wasn’t. we were just invisible at a bar out of our price range with people too dialed into a projection of adulthood. there was no preamble, no acceptance speeches, and the award was just a xerox on parchment-color paper– not even cardstock! all in all: too casual. luckily my award was first and i got to leave and take a long walk in extremely pleasant company on certainly a nice night for it, total “we deserve the best and let’s at least seek it out and to some degree, in seeking, find.”. ultimately, i have no complaints.

oh, also i met greg cook, the blogger that put the awards together- he walked right up and said hi and put me at ease, and had the decency to wear a handsome and well-fitting suit. greg is (i’ve been told by several sources) the best art writer in the area, the one that asks the questions that are the most with it. no disrespect greg about the prickly time i briefly had which is ultimately my expectations, aka my problems, and probably everyone else had a splendid time and who am i anyway? the only other awards ceremony i ever went to was the corlies, which was so gratifying and at the same time silly and personal that i almost cried, plus there was lasagna, gabby wastoids, actual statuettes, people throwing shit, dan st jacques, and i got a standing O for quoting inspirational biggie lyrics. a tough act to follow!

the show friday was awesome– not a ripper, but a total soaker. i played first in the new laptoppy style, but i managed to sing one too– i just programmed three buttons to be regular notes i could sing to. i was happy about it, even though i had spent all day and the day before playing and kind of hypnotized myself almost into a fugue state. like every performance i do, i don’t really remember what happened– when scott told me later what he liked about it, i thought he was talking about something else entirely. tape “soon”.

second up was the GM/CF/JP jam, JP being a guy i just met that night (who introduced himself as “JP”, and not just to fit in with the schema). it was good and in two parts. i tend to think of a noise performance as being a single unbreakable unit– piecing it in two or more distinct chunks, each with their own arcs, was a cool trick to signify intent, away from “let’s turn everything on and groove on it”, and towards “this is the piece”. christopher had a (comparatively) huge synth he had been working on for some time, making those sssSSSHHUP ssssssSSSHHUP ssSHUPssSHUPssSHUPssSHUPssSHUP sounds i like. GM had a nice keyboard played in a “tape the keys down” style (with no tape), JP had some sort of homebrew apparatus, an effects array and occasionally, way far away crust vocals. really good, and spacey, and controlled, a hang-glider. i think this was their first show, after practicing in geoff’s bedroom for hours everyday for a week. pretty tite. that was in the living room and soon after in the basement, WORK/DEATH played a truly uplifting set. i enjoy talking to people who aren’t noise fans about noise– today i told pat shins that it was like death metal without the drums or guitars, just the ambiance, but i didn’t say that in addition to howling wind and thick sonic duvets, there was also, after a while, beautiful keyboards in emotional/revelatory chord progressions, like having a bold, totally shapeless idea in the forest as the sun beams on you and the wind blows warm but not unsettling.

finally uke of spaces corners in the living room, dan b and amy m os, guitar and keyboard and echo effects, perfect. in the weirdly glowing announcement email, in which i also said and not unfairly that this show was all people at the heads of their respective fields and at the tops of their games getting topper, i said that uke XYZ was “folk music removed of the influence of the embarrassing 60s folk revival”. meaning, it was harry smith anthology shit, personal in style and content. email back and forth with people extolling the merits of 60s folk, chiefly music-as-news, and fair enough. uke had this insight on the harry smith anthology, as a way to explain it’s proud unknowing weirdness: that it was the last recording before the influence of TV. well, we’re getting outside the influence of TV again, but in a high-access rather than low access way. right? that’s exciting! i tried to convince dan to change the name to “yukon spaces”, but he didn’t bite and was only half into it because yukon golds are his favorite kind of potato. also i should mention that both dan and amy were getting over food poisoning during the show and into the next day! rough!

oh, i put up a short clip of work/death on youtube:

well, you can see the keyboard anyway.