yesterday me and mcshane went to the mall drunk to see “kick ass”. while there we messed around in the apple store checking out the new ipad. we played a fingerboarding simulator, then left.

big up to agent provocateur kar kar, whose blog is getting reupped all over, first on jezebel, now on bust.com, and featuring a story by me about my grandmother! original here.

in addition to being a good agent, kar kar is the sort of good friend that buys a sugary item, eats half then says “do me a favor” and pushes it on you. we’re almost at the point in this arrangement where i can pretend this “favor” is a chore for me, like sigh, ok…

hmm, i hope i’m not blowing up my spot here.

yesterday’s show was awesome, if underpopulated. people don’t like going places they’ve never been, and 5pm is an uncool time for a show to start. but that also means that all the people who were there were good at having fun! i played mix tapes through a bunch of effects, and monkeyed around on the mic, and dropped bombs, lasers, and reggae airhorns on the bands when merited. there was soda and streamers and balloons and 10 pizzas and the show was free– no sympathy for people who stayed home. big kids was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

my understanding is that part of the reason the show was so early was so bonezone guitarist D.O. could go to bed early to get up the next day early to go to patriot’s day battle reenactments. what i love about bonezone, and whatever, about all my friends, is that not caring has gone so far as to include not caring about acting like you don’t care about things you like. i blame society.

also, ML has a new nickname that looks like it will eclipse the short-lived “magazine mike”: “toohkins”. it’s because one time he used two napkins.

oh, and pat scully wants me pass on this info about the show tomorrow in boston, featuring his band the rowdy ones, plus product of waste, and COMPUTER VIOLENCE (one of my all time favorite midi punk bands). it’s at 20 rugg rd alston, 9pm. the show is a benefit for paisley park, aka worcide, aka price chopper, which is worcester’s own “vigilante transition” skatepark on squatted land. the show costs $10 or a 90 pound bag of portland cement. also:

We will be raffling of tons of crazy items such as, a television, Mirror, Tasty Skateboards, Hand-Cut skate deck, the oportunity to give Ed and Myself Horrible haircuts that we have to have for a week and cannot wear a hat, even to work, fyc shirts, worcide gear, and more… Tickets are only $2.

every now and then i have a moment when i realize that i’m clearly living in my own old conception of what the future would be. this happens a lot with ICP, which is sort of a gibsonian idea- gangs of teenagers seeking minority status who dress as actual clowns. it happened again just now- i’m at the coffee shop not checking my daily internet feeds, because a lot of them habitually feature bouncing ass anigifs. not that dancing has ever been anything more or less than dancing (…), but it’s definitely the future when it’s a task to sit still for a moment’s peace and not see a gyrating human ass, cartoon beheading, or epilepsy inducement.

incidentally, ICP has a new video out that i really like. it’s a possibly vain attempt to bring their followers to witness and appreciate the beauty of life. this follows a previous and massive attempt to bring their followers to christ’s love, which did not work as well as planned. true story! track is called “miracles”. “there’s magic all up in this bitch”.

well, flood update- looks like i won’t be back in action at the studio for a month– the other buildings at atlantic mills are all set, but my building gets power through the flea market, which got majorly fucked, and all that electrical work needs to be redone in order to get to us. bummerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… living out of a bag for a while…

luckily i am rich in friends, and people are falling over themselves to help me and my roommates out. i have a place to stay, and it’s even nice. and i can go back to the studio during the day to get anything i need… it’s just annoying to be thrown from your zone. up until now i’ve been just waiting for the next day, when maybe i could go back and get to work. today my goal is to set up some reasonable facsimile of a good work environment, try and get back on whatever the ball is now.

thanks mickey z!!!!!!!!!

tite event this sundaaaaay, the 18th, in worcester-

• TERRIBLES

• BONE ZONE
• BIG KIDS (featuring abby bbbbbbbbanks)
• +1

4 – 9 PM

with pizza

formal attire a must

HOSTED/DJ’d BY yours truly jacob berendes

this is a benefit for young punks in mongolia
http://www.lotuschild.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1

it’s at the WCUW radio station (big empty front room) on main st.
again this is from 4 to 9pm. get to the show on time and make plans for an afterparty.

last night there was a pizza party for the people of the flooded-out mills, to celebrate the power being finally back on. it was bittersweet for me though, on account of i am still (electrical) powerless. so that’s the bitter, and the sweet was that there was a lot of really delicious homemade pizza, enough that everyone could have too much, and enough that there was not (as is frequent) a too-high ratio of creative ingredients to dough, by volume. you know when there’s a consensus homemade pizza and there’s too many cooks and nothing gets cooked right and you’re basically eating a food not bombs soup on a soggy whole wheat plate? it wasn’t like that. strict good ideas, or with bad ideas sparsely intermixed, but anyway no solid dumbs like broccoli and boiled eggs and entire shrimp cocktails with essential aminos and nutritional yeast. strictly white bite, b!

so anyway i’m still at nick’s drinking kombucha on ice and watching richard pryor movies, a no complaints (from me) zone. listening still to last fm all the time, and there’s some funny emergent behavior now that i’m days deep into listening. basically it’s this streaming music service tied to a recommendation engine, but the default is that if you listen to more than half of a song it gets added to the list of things you like, which list is used to refine the recommendation engine. so i’m never or rarely listening to the same thing twice, and i’m slowly expanding the breadth of music i’m listening to, on a very casual drunkard’s path that will eventually connect everything. right now i’m being blasted a lot of keiji haino, sidney sharrock, and lesser rephlex artists. how long on this path until i’m listening to dolly parton? how long until i’m listening to myself?

uh oh, how long until i’m listening to Lyte Funkie Ones’ “summer girls“? negative one minute, b. oh, “there are 2 bands called LFO”. for a second i thought warp records had a real weird spell.

the mike t art show opened saturday and obv i wasn’t there but i wasn’t there because i had plans to go to the mocca comic book fest, but then i didn’t do that because the flood upset my rhythm too hard and i couldn’t swing out the books i planned, and besides i noticed that money was suddenly low again, frown face. buuut mike’s pictures of the empty space look tite and hopefully there’s some miami party paparazzi shots of opening night too somewhere. if not we have photoshopping to do. and mickey z said she got me a new york present which i don’t want to chatter about because i’m too psyched about it!

meanwhile back home for no money i went to the zine fest at nurba narts where there was smartfood, orange dry, tostitos, salsa, and chips ahoy, straight up and down- smartfood! in addition to on point snack items, i picked up some new comics and shit by my psychic twin katrina. don’t know if i mentioned ya kid k yet, but we have the same birthday (trinity day), and exactly twelve years apart, so both of our zodiacs (newspaper and restaurant) line up, we’re practically indistinguishable except that one of us has cooler hair and the other is a 30 year old scumbo. i know it’s hard to keep track, but katrina is not to be confused with kartina, who is of course my agent, from whom i am quite easily distinguished, in a complementary and certain fashion.

my and nicky have been playing plenty mario kart 64, from some freeish emulator, projected on the wall. in a cool move for a video businessperson, N doesn’t have a TV as such, just a digital projector he bought slightly used. did you ever be hanging out in yours or a loved one’s living room and notice that all the seating is horseshoed around the TV and even though its off and you’re having a lively conversation your eye still falls on it regularly? it’s weird, rite? in nick’s house that doesn’t happen, but a large wall is conspicuously blank, which is also weird, and the couch just points at it. anyway at least when you’re staring out into space it’s actually just blank space and besides the couch has to point somewhere.

nick and i hardly ever play video games, and didn’t a whole lot as kids, so when we do it it’s the kind of novelty that you might as well dive into– not casual. and because it’s always new, there’s a lot we do wrong. for instance we press the buttons too hard, because our reptile brains think that if we press the button harder our go karts wills go faster. not true. ditto steering with our bodies. this does not affect our video go karts. the other thing we do is get so immersed in it that we forget to blink, and as soon as the race is over our eyes are fucked up. admittedly we’re getting a little better at this, and can now blink and even talk about things (although only things relative to the gme at hand). the really weird thing is how fast we adapt to new things. in the game there’s a way to turn a corner where you jump into it, and there’s a controlled skid, and if, in the skid, you do this one special move, your skid smoke changes color, and when you come out of the skid you get a power boost. clearly there is no real-world version of this. ok, “tokyo drifting” is real, but you don’t go faster at the end of it. i mean, energy cannot be created or destroyed! we’ve been trying to master this skill in-game for the past day or so, and when i went to bed last night i would close my eyes and FEEL with my BODY, this feeling of a controlled skid that ends in a rapid acceleration. the way you might still feel like you’re floating in the ocean when you’re going to bed after a day spent floating in the ocean. totally weird.

still on forced vacation, aka placenapped, at nick’s house, while they replace any electricity work that may have got wet. this is crucial because the “water” from the river has high weird sediment content, of the sort that catches on fire, then you breathe the smoke, then you can’t feel your face. i’m trying to stay focused using the sarah connor strategy of exercise-when-distracted, which is especially tite because revs got a rowing machine for x(treme)mas this year! i’m not yet crazy jacked (meaning, jacked the way you get surreptitiously in a mental hospital to prepare for escape, and saving your son’s life), but neither am i the flimsy alternate reality waitress me being blown to ashes in front of the crazy jacked this reality me. NO FATE.

the other day i woke up slow, and got slow into the day, with a headache, and bummmmmmmmmmmmmed ouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut. luckily i’m prepared for shit like this, and i have a checklist that includes exercise, green vegetables, water, coffee, talking to friends, getting fresh air. UNLUCKILY it didn’t work and i had to face up to the idea that maybe something was awry in my life emotionally. but then MEZZOLUCKILY about a half hour, an hour, after this realiz, and me bummin and stirrin, fuckin nicky revs tells me, like oh yea, you know that coffee’s straight decaf rite? just like that! and we go to the coffee zone, and everything pole reverses. so i finally have an addiction to something. and as i always suspected, it’s nice to wake up and immediately have a mission. also, you think you know someone, for what, 20 years (really) and then they drop something on you like “i only have decaf coffee”. it’s not like guy has ulcers or anything… guy…

yesterday i realized that part of my antsiness was not listening to music, and so i got really into last.fm, which is like a “wisdom of crowds” music recommendation engine. the really crazy part about it is the method of circumventing the legality of being an online radio station. my understanding is that you can’t have a play-on-demand web music service without paying someone some money. but you can have a randomized list, and you can have that list generated on the fly. so for example, if i want to hear derek bailey, i’m SOL, but if i’m content with hearing things SIMILAR to derek bailey, with the odd derek bailey cut thrown in every now and again, then we’re in business. which means it’s a backgroundable learning situation- i know i like derek bailey- play me the records of his contemporaries and children. cool. alternately, if i’m set on hearing something specific, i can guess about something that might hold it in it’s periphery. right? so if i want to hear boredoms (for example), i can put in “noise ramones” or some other side project, and there we go. some artists are perfectly suited to this, like kool keith, who has a million side projects and pseudonyms. some you have to be pretty delicate about. also i can put in a list of things that i know i like / want to hear, and have it shuffle these around, or even better, have it work on things like these things. in this way it’s like a music version of that plato’s cave scenario i always think about, where you only have the mort drucker parody of the movie, and never the movie itself. there’s also a “neighborhood” option, which gives you possibly unrelated music from people who listen to the same music you listen to, but i’ve found that to be more than a hair towards valuelessness, as in this we’re more likely to deal with those people who value quantity and not especially discernment. triangulate your preferences, america!

another thing i’ve been doing on the site is editing the biographies of artists i know, including yours truly. ok, point of pride- someone else (a fan) created the profile for me, and a few people added pictures. it was already there, without me asking for it or even hinting around (as i have fruitlessly with wikipedia). the only reason i even touched it was because the bio was cribbed from (get ready) the OTHER jacob berendes!!!!!!!! it’s a curious read, which i will crib in it’s entirety for your whatever. picture me as:

…an artistic geek and web developer who is continually merging technology and design. With a passion to constantly enlighten, entertain, and seek adventure he relates to his audience while presenting them with the bleeding edge of what’s possible. Join him as he breaks barriers, pushes limits, and leaps into the unknown and busts out the otherside. Witness endless creativity from his midwest work ethic and never give up attitude. He is on a journey through the real world, the digital, and everything between. Let’s explore.

you can picture my delight, especially my self-satisfaction, and my rugged jawline bouncing on a medium table if not floor at this bizarrely worded promo boilerplate, but can you even grip how harsh my brow crinked at “midwest work ethic”? that’s when i realized that some jig was up.

i also edited some other pages that i’m not going to link to, but i left alone the lazy magnet page, which is, duh, perfect. also the page for matt fox shows the music of matt “audible digestion” fox, but a picture of totally a different matt fox, and then a video of a third (!) matt fox playing ukulele with bongo accompaniment by A DIFFERENT andy kyte!!!!!!! FTU dude!

still not allowed back in the studio, as it’s still evacuated, because the power’s not on. i was told there’s a slim chance of going back tomorrow. in the meantime refugees from the great (?) olneyville flood are everywhere, dirty, sleep-deprived and aimless, in 3- 4- and 5-day shirts. it’s not so bad for me- i’m still at nick’s, trying to piece some writing together on my tiny computer. it’s comfy and in many ways the computer is my room, so getting kicked out of where my physical shit is is almost not too too bad.