fudge

as you might have guessed (but probably not)

2009-09-27T17:58:00.001-07:00

fudge and i have broken up. i'm done living a lie, thinking i can be passionate about anything other than music. my pretty pal aileen and i admin cha-cha-tchotchkes, which operates a bit like an audio-visual soundscape playground. enjoy or loathe at your leisure.

Blog Snog Snack Session

2009-06-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Check out my new favorite blog:

A Million Keys

Ceci Moss and I were in a Comparative Literature class last spring and I think I make her uncomfortable because I want her job and her blog. She also hosts a radio show for East Village Radio and you can listen to it here:

Radio Heart

AND she also does some solo sound work you can check out here:

Mi or and The Pedestals

Daniel Rossen Ruins My Life Again.

2009-06-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

He covers Judee Sill's Waterfall and it's devastating.

Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel

2009-06-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

You're too late! You've missed the Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel MoMA Exhibition . If was full of fragile paragons and ironed-out linguistic crinkle-cuts like this:

León Ferrari. Planet. 1979. Stainless steel, 51" (129.5 cm) diam. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fractional and promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Mirriam Levenson through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund. © 2009 Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires

For the untrained eye, this collection could have easily been mistaken for insignificant ephemera - consisting of drawings, paintings, and sculptures of significantly delicate materials - sometimes thin Japanese paper for Schendel and human hair for Ferrari - which emphasize the frangibility and immediate confusion of real life experiences.

Free Isn't Free

2009-06-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

David Byrne in Prospect Park for free!? Pretty exciting right? Wrong. Epic wrong! It was such a zoo, full of Babyland (aka Park Slope) old-timers hating on Sass Central (Billyburg-Bushwick-GP) but mostly hating that they're old-timing, and forgetting that young people with a snap for fashion are entitled to their own form of social sass, whether it involves fierce LA-face or silence, or catwalk posture. P.S. David still knows how to get funky.

The Goran Bregovic show was less stressful. We actually got to see the show this time and the crowd was full of amazing, friendly (equally sassy and kinda crazy, like an old man that was dressed like a neighborhood flasher) faces but what was most exciting was the amount of men that had voices like mountains and heights to match. The only word that left their mouth that I could understand was "vodka" and the man-mountain right in front of me had a profile like this:

and I thought, "shouldn't you be on some Ancient Greek pottery somewhere?" There were gangs of gentlemen with amazing profiles congregating like they were conducting some serious "family business" and that. I knew they looked dangerous, but I couldn't stop looking at them!! I'm pretty lucky I got out alive, right?

So I am broke

2009-06-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

and I am up to my ears in student loans, and I probably will be for the rest of my life. Somewhere within the deep scholarship sea, someone somewhere said that if I post this picture, I may win a money prize? It is a poorly executed document I concocted in Lido, Italy whilst on an educational excursion to Europe with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Department. I hated it.

I had a little itch

2009-06-07T09:20:00.001-07:00

and then I had a little scratch. And now my face looks like this:

Darn grass, darn sunshine, darn sweat, darn pimples, darn pimple cream!

Maybe I'm

2009-05-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

boy crazy because my formative years were furnished by literary-feces like:

when I should have been reading the obviously superior:

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

2009-05-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

Grizzly Bear as animatronics! Picture this side-show replacing all those machines in your Chuck-E-Cheeses/Bullwinkles/[Nightmare Machine/Animatronic Display of Choice]. This is wonderful, and terrifying, and wonderful, AGAIN.

Thank you Patrick Daughters for not imposing some obvious narrative on this beloved pop treat. I remembered the other day that I'm going to gawk at the GrizB two nights in a row next week, TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW! I think I might die a little.

I Love You But I've Chosen Noise

2009-05-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

My favorite noise-bot Lex visited this week and it was the most fun I'd had in a long, long while. We went to No Fun Fest, a three-day ear-obliterating conference for the musically sadomasochistic. I've always been interested in music, but quickly found the structuring principles oppressive and counter-productive -- mostly because I've always been more interested in larger metaphysical questions about what it means to hear, the transcendental qualities of obsessive-compulsive repetition, and the beauty of our doomed impulses to mimic nature/attempt to pursue the naturalistic in technology/soul of machinery, thus my love affair with noise.

Noise is a hard sell, but it helps if you have the boyish charms of Dominick Fernow (noise alias: Prurient), the man behind Hospital Productions, both a label and a record boutique in the East Village. I wouldn't have had the courage to go in there if Lex hadn't paid me a visit, but I'm afraid that Fernow has ignited the fire in my inner-Tiger Beat, and it would be wise to keep my distance before an even more unhealthy obsession develops into complete hysteria (some of my co-workers would probably argue that this has happened already). It might also be wise to keep my distance because I'm pretty sure that Fernow's girlfriend could knock-me into next Sunday with those fetish boots she was rocking all weekend.

See what I mean? He's all dark and tortured, but meticulously groomed. Fernow will obviously be the end of me. Let's start a bet to see how long I can manage to stay out of his shop before going completely mad.

Attractiveness is So Unattractive

2009-05-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

The attractiveness that consumes the screens this season in the visual nuclear weapon that is Star Trek is horribly painful. Check out this mess:

If I were a fem-bot, my mechanical guts would have splat all over the computer screen centuries-ago. Zachary Quinto as Mr. Spock is so incredibly attractive, that it is actually ruining my life. It's like high school all over again. Thanks, ZQ.

Hi!

2009-03-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

I just really like this picture. Eddie D. slaps us with his best mad-dawg show-down face, and Chris Taylor is obviously thinking about me. LIKE, DUH.

Twitter Pitter Patter

2009-03-08T09:54:00.001-07:00

photo by Jordan Lawrence

I think it's har-har that Eddie D. has a Twitter that he's hopelessly devoted to, but what I didn't expect is Robin Pecknold's (Fleet Foxes/Tweet Boxes, White Antelope) batter-up in the game. What's even funnier is catching Eddie D. and Robbie P. chatting via Twitter like internet pen pals. It's precious:

Eddie D. Tweets

Robbie P. Tweets Too

An Oldie But a Goodie

2009-03-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

It's nearly two-years old, but behold: yet another reason why Grizzly Bear is my favorite band:

Grizzly Bear on Eating Lots of Meat

Robbie P., You're My Hero

2009-03-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

Robin Pecknold is my hero because his Twitter is full of treasures. Check this out:

Clara Rockmore makes the super-alienating sound of a theramin sound like a human voice. I think I just died.

Ah-HA!

2009-03-17T16:39:00.001-07:00

I knew the Freak-a-Leak Version of Veckatimest sounded fishy. Check out the latest version of "Cheerleader" to hit the inter-waves, here:

EUREKA!

Volumes of difference!

Word on the street is that the boys were in LA recently for a video shoot. Yesssssssss.

An Oldie But a Goodie II

2009-03-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

This is nothing new, but Fever Ray gives me steam-heat. Everything is so gorgeously dark. I might like Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo stuff more than The Knife...eep!

Cupcake-on with 'yo bad-self

2009-03-15T14:09:00.001-07:00

Good evening lovelies. The Cupcake Adventure Club has recently inhabited an abandoned bakery on the corner of Cake Wrecks and unintelligible excitement.

Hang out, eat too many cupcakes, and then throw them up here:

Time to get ILL

What You're Not Supposed to Hear

2009-03-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

At one point, Ed Droste suggested that le bear di grizzly used Veckatimest as an opportunity to flesh out ideas that had been floating about for some time, some perhaps pre Yellow House. Pressure is immense to progress, to always deliver, unleash "the new," a force of creative energy which has never been imagined before -- this is of course, impossible, and I think we can all agree that the pressure to appear original contributes to an insecurity that haunts many artists, on the hour, every hour. My first impression of the leak was "whoa, this sounds way closer to Horn of Plenty than anything else" but it's not that I was merely reacting to the low, compressed quality. Literally, the leak sounds like something you're not supposed to be hearing, a fly on the wall type of experience.

What makes Grizzly Bear a unique act is their heightened self-consciousness. Song writing appears especially cautious. Criticisms about their lack of strength melodically are missing the point. Droste and Rossen are often amplifying simple, tiny gestures, achieving to avoid over-done, obvious notions of romantic love, loss, and the landfill of ideas that pollute much music today. The result are these secret-self revelations that burst with color, expansive space and texture. Yellow House made Grizzly Bear much of a music-box band. Especially with a song like Marla, the work encompasses this closet-of-curiosities quality, like an attic antique covered in cobwebs and years of dust. Thus, Yellow House often amplifies what you're not supposed to hear on a pop record: creaks of stairs, doors, and shadows--even if this is not literal, it strongly evokes this ghostly ambiguity.

Veckatimest irons out these ambiguities for the most part, like a dusting of the dust, preparation for display of the antique that's been left unearthed for years. This is very much a pop record, one with less thoughtful meandering, more vocal risks, but most definitely an ironing-out of idiosyncrasies (again, that maybe the quality of the leak)--but on the other hand, has very carnival-esque / cabaret-sounding colors, a record that fluctuates between small and vast spaces through use of vocal drones and a girl's choir.

I can't wait for this on vinyl. I don't even have a record player.

The Only Reason to Watch Watchmen

2009-03-09T18:19:00.000-07:00

Ummm, why are all of our villains sexually ambiguous? I'm sure someone has written on this... Matthew Goode's version of the purple-draped, Egyptian pharaoh-obsessed, Adrian Veidt is deliciously Bowie, but let's admit it, the rest of the film is certainly NOT sexually ambiguous. We have nearly-naked and comfortably-passive women at the beck 'n call of beefcake boys and not only fluorescent, but sparkly blue, all-powerful male anatomy out and about without warning. Thank goodness for Patrick Wilson's Nite Owl, who has all his smarts in the wrong place but no one cares because he's packaged just how we like 'em: big and dumb.

Ooops, that's two, three, four... reasons, huh?

2009-03-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

If Yellow House is about abandonment, then Veckatimest is about fear of abandonment.

The amount of roller-coaster rides that Veckatimest gets on mine iTunes is too much, but I'm working on that.

P.S. I love the internet. Check out this pic of Eddie D. in a winner costume.

Adventures in Synonym Finder

2009-03-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

One of my adorable bosses sang praises for J.I. Rodale's The Synonym Finder and here's why. Beloved S.F. offers an abundance of commonly articulated words, but then will savagely unleash gems such as:

FLAPDOODLE

bona-fide meaning:

flapdoodle, n. Informal. nonsense, bosh, rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, stuff and nonsense, rot, fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks.

but sounds like:
vaginal flatulence.

Cupcake Adventure Club

2009-03-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

photo (AND BAKING!) by Hannah J. Simpson

My pal Sarandopolous and I have decided that there are not enough cupcake blogs. We're gonna start one soon. It will be called Cupcake Adventure Club. Watch this space for updates.

LEAK!

2009-03-03T19:01:00.000-08:00

Eddie D. spoke about the ordained leak of their much awaited Veckatimest but dude, that be like a flash! Thanks to my favorite internet-ninja, J, who led me to the treasure, most of the downloading options have been disabled but you're welcome to stream most of the album here:

Ear Teasers

Personally, I'm really attached to the live recordings already, so these tracks kinda sound extraterrestrial. Ed claims these leaks are rough and I'm inclined to believe him. Darn you, Grizzly Bear! There's no way I'm being productive tonight, I'm all stuck on the stream... And what's this about two shows at Town Hall at the end of May? But why won't they let me buy all the tickets NOOOOWWWW?

P.S. Have you read reviews of BAM show? BARF. It was like the display of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond at The Great Exhibition in 1851. Ok it's gorgeous, but, really, that's it? Them boys draft some diamonds, but they should have used Nico Muhly's skillz a bit more. I itched for more interpretation rather than album regurgitation.

2009-03-02T18:09:00.000-08:00

For real coverage of the GB Bros/Final Fantasy symphonic spectacle
surf to:

My Kinda Partaay

...because I'm crap at real coverage, probably because I'm not a real person.

I AM A ROBOT!

Wouldn't that make you better at real coverage?

SHHHHH!