Final Lineup for tonight's benefit at the Dark Room

We've finalized the performers for tonight's show, and it's looking great. See below for videos from a couple of the participants...

Just added, Lemmy & Figgy! Check it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_g9jS_O6MQ

And the Ukulady, straight outta LA...

12/29 Special Dark Room show: Mikl-em, UkuLady, and more

Thessaly is up from LA for a visit. We're going to put on a special show on Friday featuring her as UkuLady and her new band Special Occasion Music.

Also on the bill, I'll be reading a great piece of writing that I haven't unearthed in years. It's worth it, I swear! :) Red Door on the left bring the sketch comedy--it's Alexia and John, my co-stars from Young Frankenstein. And Jim F, the man who makes so much of the
Dark Room go-go-go, will have his banjo on his knee.

All goes down Friday, December 29th at the Dark Room in San Francisco's Mission District. Show starts at 8pm.

Applied directly when directly applied

A friend pointed out the Head On entry in wikipedia. And it's funny.

Santa like it's 1996 on Tuesday

1996 Portland Santacon 10th Anniversary Party

Tuesday, December 19th



Cafe du Nord

2170 Market Street

San Francisco



doors: 8pm

video starts: 9pm



Santa Open Mike and general merriment after screening til closing.



Free admission. Santa attire encouraged.

It was the Cacophonist of times, the first Santa Rampage planned for outside the City by the Bay. And vision of riots danced in The Man's heads. Cuz Saint Nicholaus x 10 x 10 x 2 soon would be there.

And shit.

Yup, 200 Santas invaded Portland (some were indigineous, actually)
10 years ago. And a bunch of this city's usual suspects were of
course leading the charge. The list reads like a Ho's Ho of SF
Cacophony. Melmouth, Geekboy, Cortez, Holmes, Burke, John, and
of course that damn Beale guy. With his video camera!

It was before my time. Just before my time. I was here but I
hadn't quite drunk the water yet. :) I went the next year to LA.
You can see a very quick cameo of Danielle, early on--she didn't go
to Portland though, it's in pre-launch festivities.

I believe that this video, assembled by Scott Beale, Stu Mangrum,
and Scott's voiceover guy friend, is the best encapsulation of the
mysterious, beautiful, intoxicating and creative mischief that
we breed out here in Norton's city. Practitioners of forgotten
social arts and biters of feeding hands, the post-something, semi-
comatose cultural criticism of the Drunken Masters, all hail
Santa(s) in Perversitus Bacchanalium Uber Alles. And shit.

Whenever friends came to visit and wanted to know what I'd been
doing, I would play them this video. It was much easier to explain
that way. It's like this. Every weekend. *Sigh*.

10 years ago? No way. You're lying. Not every weekend is like
this anymore. It's probably still going on, and I'm just not
sticking my foot in it as often. But on Tuesday, we'll get a nice
fat taste of Vintage 96 Cacophony. Wear something you can get messy.
Like say a holiday outfit from Oriental Trading Company (remember, one size fits none.

That link again, in case you missed it....

My Other Blog-- there, I said it!

I have another blog that I've been playing with. Don't take it personally. It's from the Sixapart folks who make Movable Type. I guess it's their MySpace play or whatever. Whatever. It's cool cuz it easily enables adding multimedia to blog posts. And I need that to be easy. See the heavy textual thrust of this here page.

Yes, at some point in the future I'll make this bit of .com real estate prettier, better, more contemporarily tech-enabled. But for now I'll utilize the pre-fab goodness of the Vox platform. And link to it from here to keep some flow going. Oh managing my many blog personnas. I deserve a vacatation, huh?

11 Year Old Squid!

Why is this Squid laughing? My good friend Scott Beale is celebrating the 11th year of his company / passion laughingsquid.com. There's a big party this Saturday at Mighty at the foot of Potrero Hill (where it meets... Outer SOMA??). I get to be Master of Ceremonies (yay!), and there's a great lineup including the one and only Mr Lucky.

There's a list, a calendar, a series of events, a blog, videos, photos... he actually has a great post on the blog about what laughing squid is. It's as impressive as always.

Scott has always been dedicated to fanning the mutant gorgeous flames of underground culture. Like me, he came from a distant planet--his is called Ohio, mine is known as Virginia. From a distance we used to observe this thing called "culture" (which grows incredibly well, thrives in fact, here in San Francisco). We'd also get pieces of culture transported to us through a complicated mechanism called "The Postal System". Anyway, once you get to taste the real thing, once you are in the greenhouse as it were... it's intoxicating, you appreciate being here. You want to cultivate it. You want to document it and to help it propogate.

Anyway, that's my reaction. That was Scott's reaction. He made a documentary. He started a company. He shot video of everything cool & weird he found that was going on. He started an email list and a telephone bulletin board, both of which told people what was UP promoting the promoters, enabling the participants. Oh, and far from least important, he made friends.

I think in the big picture, what it's all about is creating opportunities for interesting events to be populated by interested people. For creativity and hard work to be appreciated. And for dreams to be realized, dammit. There's more to say on this theme. I'll have to save it for another proper and truly Blog-type post. When it's not so late and I don't have a flight to catch in the early AM.

Anyway, to note that Scott didn't do these things all by himself. Danielle, my girlfriend & partner in art and crime for getting close to a decade, was one of Scott's first collaborators in event production and related activities. Others like Pippi & Phil with "The Number", and all the artists and Cacophonists who were the subject of the emails of what was going on. But Scott has always had a knack for organization, design, detail, and --wait for it-- follow-through(!!!) which many have lacked. He can run a fucking business for one thing. That's craziest thing. Look I gotta crash now. More at a later time.

Hope you can make it Saturday night!

Califone tonight at Bottom of the Hill

Califone is probaly Danielle and my favorite band in the world (which is really saying something, as anyone whose seen my music collection knows). They are playing tonight at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.

I have two standard descriptions for Califone's music:

1. Tom Waits' "Gun Street Girl" goes to art school
   
2. You find a pair of seemingly ancient cowboy boots in an anonymous thrift store. There's something compelling about them. You start to wear them obsessively. You keep figuring out new functions, bits of magic, they can do. Disappearing your enemies. Giving you control of wasps and locusts (but not honeybees). Now you always have silver coin in your pocket. Eventually, you realize they are the made from the robot snake in Blade Runner. They have a benign curse upon them. And they go with absolutely nothing, but still somehow "work".
   

You can put these guys on a bill or in a mix w/ the likes of Son Volt and Calexico, very easily. But in concert they also get into noisy, effects-laden jams that no one can wrap a box or a label around. Their renderings of halluciated (sic) blues, roots, and more precisely the roots of blues electrified. Fry the country killer in the chair and turn him into a super hero. Yup. And the lyrics are fine fine.

Want to hear free Califone mp3s from their site?

I suggest "Electric Fence" (early) in particular and "Wingbone" (recent), to represent the range and dynamics of the band.

you can also hunt up several videos on YouTube. Including a few from a week ago, at their first show of this tour

More links:

• Califone homepage
  
• Wikipedia page on Califone
  
• Thrill Jockey's page
  
• All tour dates
  

Young Frankenstein the Play:
October at the Dark Room

image by Scott Beale (Laughing Squid)

Young Frankenstein is on at the Dark Room. And I am playing the monster. I am! I can prove it! (Thanks, Scott!!). Check out Scott Beale of Laughing Squid's great photos on Flickr. As long as you don't mind finding out ahead of time what all the costumes (and makeup) look like!

The show opens this Friday, 10/6, and plays all of October on Fri-Sat at 8pm, and on Sundays at 3pm. I really highly recommend catching the earlier weeks when tickets will be easier to get--the last couple weekends always sell out.

It's fantastic and includes a lot of great talents involved with last October's great show at the Dark Room (which Scott also documented).

Come check it out!! Tickets are available at the door or in advance from Ticketweb.

update your damn blog!!!


okay, okay already....


okay, well, not all ready, I guess. sooner or later.

Star Wars tops 2005 goof-up list - Cinematical

All-things-movie blog Cinematical pointed to this fun list of the films from 2005 with the most "goofs" (continuity mistakes, "plot holes", etc). SWETRS One-hundred and Thirty Nine mistakes in total, according to the folks at Movie Mistakes. It's a running list including contributions by visitors to the site, so the tally changes, and more recent or less popular films are going to be lower (for now) cuz they've had less scrutiny. King Kong, which I saw last night, has forty-six. But you gotta figure that's gonna grow. [FYI, IMDB has a much shorter list Rev o' Sith, but I guess they aren't as dedicated as the Movie Mistakes folks to that task.] Also, the number sometimes decreases, because the site allows corrections of supposed mistakes. The Corrections page for Sith may be more fun to read than the mistakes page.

Movie Mistakes is a fun site to know about, for now Pirates of the Caribbean has the most mistakes of all time. You've gotta figure that people spending enough time critiquing Gigli. But then that's what Bad Movie Night is for.

Yo. No. Really. It's me. I do post occasionally.

esp. when Scott name-checks me. ;)

I'm watching Long Riders right now. RIGHT NOW!! A great film, just the cowboy flick you always want to watch. Hero outlaws. Daring robberies. An amazing gun battle. A tough guy knife fight. A tragic ending. It's one of my all-time favorites. I recommend it for a double feature with Outlaw Josey Wales--which is also set in Missouri. And as many folks know, that's very high praise coming from me.

Shot in 1980, it's The story of the Jesse James gang, starring 4 sets of real brothers: Keaches, Carradines, Quaids and Guests. Keith Carradine not long ago played Wild Bill Hickock in the current HBO western series Deadwood. That also recently flew through our NetFlix queue.

It really holds up, after all these years, I'm very pleased to say. Which is good. I can't say that about all the movies I remember fondly and have recently re-watched. That's right, that's right, we really are bad.