Serious Business

Lauren, Ryan, Jane, Pascal, Lara and her mother and sister and I went to check out David Byrne's installation down there by the Staten Island Ferry. Seems Byrne went and attached an organ to a building and now it's making music of a sort.

Lauren sat and played it for a while; kind of sounded like a building. Never having heard a building played like this, I was pretty impressed by the whole thing.

Hey, you can hear Lauren play her Whirley Wednesday night at the Mercury Lounge when Balthrop, Alabama shares a bill with Caithlin DeMarrais and Serious Business recording artists (and dear friends) Rocketship Park and Benji Cossa.

We've been getting some nice attention lately over at EndUp Records and the village of Balthrop, Alabama located in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. For example, check out this amazing review of Balthrop's debut album, Your Big Plans And Our Little Town written by Kevin Nutt. Or look here to see what the venerable Village Voice has to say about us and our little town. The Voice seems to think we live in something called Bococa, but that just adds confusion to a town in Alabama that is located and founded in Brooklyn.

Keep things simple, people. Let's not get all caught up in the New York Real Estate narrative . . .

See y'all tomorrow at The Mercury Lounge . . .

We Are Family

The Pierces at Joe's Pub Saturday night.

With Strings

The Emerson String Quartet at Joe's Pub,Wednesday night.

Turning Your Orbit Around

Last week was a big concert-going week for me. I saw Radiohead out in Jersey a week ago last Saturday, just me and 30,000 other folks. They all seemed real nice (except for that one guy) and they knew the words to most every song. I got to hang out a bit backstage because John got me an all-access pass, but the only famous person I saw was Tim Robbins, but I see him at the grocery store all the time, so it didn't seem that special.

Then, later in the week I saw Wilco over at McCarren pool in Williamsburg. I got to stand up real close and hang out with some guy who hosts a show on ESPN. He told some funny stories that made me laugh. After pretty much every song Wilco played, he'd shout, "that's another good one!" and I think it made them feel good because everyone else was just cheering loudly in words that were hard to understand. Afterward, Sara and I wandered over with some friends to the rooftop deck of a guy who had been hanging out on the bus with the band before the show. He said they were real nice, but star-struck because Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon had been on the bus too.

The lesson I take away from all of this--I mean, other than that Radiohead and Wilco are making more interesting music in more interesting ways and finding more interesting avenues of distribution for it than anyone else--is that, in our Iphone calendars, Tim Robbins and I have much in common.

"No Rain, No Rain, No Rain . . . "

Sara and 199 other guitarists got rained on Friday evening, thus preventing them from playing Rhys Chatham's Crimson Grail for 200 Guitars.

It was still a pretty great time--the rain delayed the start and put off the final cancellation-decision, which meant that the other music was played from the stage to an audience of people clinging to, hiding behind and peering around their umbrellas. It was a large audience despite the rain. And it didn't thin much during the rain.

New Yorkers will put up with a lot in the search for new experiences. They're also a pretty understanding bunch when the game gets called on account of the risks inherent in plugging-in two hundred power chords in a downpour.

It seems that everyone's trying to come up with a make-up date solution, but in the meantime, you can get a glimpse of what might have been over here at Brooklyn Vegan . . .

Covered

Julia Greenberg, singing songs from the Dory Previn songbook, last night at Joe's.

Her MySpace page notes that Julia is working on her second solo album.

It also notes that she will be doing so for the rest of her life.

Road Movie

I put together a little video from our summer tour. Give it a look and listen and tell me what you think. I was going for Scorcese meets the Cohen Brothers but it might maybe have come out a little like Ferris Bueller meets Miss Piggy . . . Also, look out for my next film, an adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past set to drum beats sampled from Phil Collins's third and fourth solo albums.

I sure am ahead of my time (and up past my curfew) . . .

By the way, the photographs in the video are by Bernie DeChant and myself. If you have trouble figuring out which is which, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "does this photograph look like it was taken by a keen eye steeped in cinematic technique or a guy who usually draws stuff?"

The answers will not surprise you.

Listening Parties

Here's that Jill Sobule drawing from last week.

And here's Chip Kidd, making both his Pub debut and, well, just debut as a Rock God. Apparently, being the most-desired book-jacket designer in the known universe is not enough of an outlet for his imagination and so he has taken to song, which explains the title of his band: "Artbreak." His band plays a sort of new wave pop and I expect they'll make a strong showing for best art-direction of a debut CD when it finally makes its way to a store near you. Man, they've even got a video.

Squeezebox

Last week, Jill Sobule played Joe's Pub.

This week I'm back up in Canada and I don't have the drawing of Jill scanned and with me, but I do have this one of her keyboard player done during the number he switched over to accordion.

Leftover Bits

It's been such a busy couple of weeks and a lot of the drawings I've been doing have specific destinations that preclude them from going up here on the blog. But here are a few that slipped between the cracks . . .

Midsummer Night's Swing.


Spike Lee, overseeing the filming of Passing Strange.

Last week, I spent a couple of days at the Dietch Galleries down in Soho, working on some drawings for a magazine in Los Angeles--I'll have more details about that later, but I thought I'd give a sneak preview of one of the drawings here.