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[15 Nov 2009|03:19am] |
basement shows in allston may not change.
parties in allston may not change.
but jesus fucking christ, i'm not sure i've ever seen a dumpster pay off like the new trader joe's. there's so much food that it's actually kind of stressing me out and my fridge and freezer are full and i'm hoping my roommates don't get pissed. that and it's amazing at how many people don't pick up their phone at three am to hear about this kind of bounty.
naan and gouda is surprisingly edible.
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[12 Nov 2009|07:08pm] |
Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)
By Stuart Fox Posted 11.05.2009 at 11:09 am 66 Comments
The Baguette Incident: Re-enacted according to eyewitness accounts. CERN; Bird via Foxypar4/Flickr
The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.
The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
This incident won't delay the reactivation of the facility later this month, but exposes yet another vulnerability of the what might be the most complex machine ever built. With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.
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[20 Oct 2009|08:52pm] |
A particle God doesn’t want us to discover
Could the Large Hadron Collider be sabotaging itself from the future, as some physicists say
Jonathan Leake
Hadron Collider
Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.
Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.
The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.
At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one.
This time, however, their ridicule has been rather muted — because the time travel idea has come from two distinguished physicists who have backed it with rigorous mathematics.
What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.
What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.
This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up. Whether the recent arrest of a leading physicist for alleged links with Al-Qaeda also counts is uncertain.
Nielsen’s idea has been likened to that of a man travelling back through time and killing his own grandfather. “Our theory suggests that any machine trying to make the Higgs shall have bad luck,” he said.
“It is based on mathematics, but you could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them.”
His warnings come at a sensitive time for Cern, which is about to make its second attempt to fire up the LHC. The idea is to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light around the machine’s 17-mile underground circular racetrack and then smash them together.
In theory the machine will create tiny replicas of the primordial “big bang” fireball thought to have marked the creation of the universe. But if Nielsen and Ninomiya are right, this latest build-up will inevitably get nowhere, as will those that come after — until eventually Cern abandons the idea altogether.
This is, of course, far from being the first science scare linked to the LHC. Over the years it has been the target of protests, wild speculation and court injunctions.
Fiction writers have naturally seized on the subject. In Angels and Demons, Dan Brown sets out a diabolical plot in which the Vatican City is threatened with annihilation from a bomb based on antimatter stolen from Cern.
Blasphemy, a novel from Douglas Preston, the bestselling science-fiction author, draws on similar themes, with a story about a mad physicist who wants to use a particle accelerator to communicate with God. The physicist may be American and the machine located in America, rather than Switzerland, but the links are clear.
Even Five, the TV channel, has got in on the act by screening FlashForward, an American series based on Robert Sawyer’s novel of the same name in which the start-up of the LHC causes the Earth’s population to black out for two minutes when they experience visions of their personal futures 21 years hence. This gives them a chance to change that future.
Scientists normally hate to see their ideas perverted and twisted by the ignorant, but in recent years many physicists have learnt to welcome the way the LHC has become a part of popular culture. Cern even encourages film-makers to use the machine as a backdrop for their productions, often without charging them.
Nielsen presents them with a dilemma. Should they treat his suggestions as fact or fiction? Most would like to dismiss him, but his status means they have to offer some kind of science-based rebuttal.
James Gillies, a trained physicist who heads Cern’s communications department, said Nielsen’s idea was an interesting theory “but we know it doesn’t happen in reality”.
He explained that if Nielsen’s predictions were correct then whatever was stopping the LHC would also be stopping high-energy rays hitting the atmosphere. Since scientists can directly detect many such rays, “Nielsen must be wrong”, said Gillies.
He and others also believe that although such ideas have an element of fun, they risk distracting attention from the far more amazing ideas that the LHC will tackle once it gets going.
The Higgs boson, for example, is thought to give all other matter its mass, without which gravity could not work. If the LHC found the Higgs, it would open the door to solving all kinds of other mysteries about the origins and nature of matter. Another line of research aims to detect dark matter, which is thought to comprise about a quarter of the universe’s mass, but made out of a kind of particle that has so far proven impossible to detect.
However, perhaps the weirdest of all Cern’s aspirations for the LHC is to investigate extra dimensions of space. This idea, known as string theory, suggests there are many more dimensions to space than the four we can perceive.
At present these other dimensions are hidden, but smashing protons together in the LHC could produce gravitational anomalies, effectively tiny black holes, that would reveal their existence.
Some physicists suggest that when billions of pounds have been spent on the kit to probe such ideas, there is little need to invent new ones about time travel and self-sabotage.
History shows, however, it is unwise to dismiss too quickly ideas that are initially seen as science fiction. Peter Smith, a science historian and author of Doomsday Men, which looks at the links between science and popular culture, points out that what started as science fiction has often become the inspiration for big discoveries.
“Even the original idea of the ‘atomic bomb’ actually came not from scientists but from H G Wells in his 1914 novel The World Set Free,” he said.
“A scientist named Leo Szilard read it in 1932 and it gave him the inspiration to work out how to start the nuclear chain reaction needed to build a bomb. So the atom bomb has some of its origins in literature, as well as research.”
Some of Cern’s leading researchers also take Nielsen at least a little seriously. Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at Manchester University, said: “His ideas are theoretically valid. What he is doing is playing around at the edge of our knowledge, which is a good thing.
“He is pointing out that we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, so we haven’t yet proved rigorously that sending information into the past isn’t possible.
“However, if time travellers do break into the LHC control room and pull the plug out of the wall, then I’ll refer you to my article supporting Nielsen’s theory that I wrote in 2025.”
This weekend, as the interest in his theories continued to grow, Nielsen was sounding more cautious. “We are seriously proposing the idea, but it is an ambitious theory, that’s all,” he said. “We already know it is not very likely to be true. If the LHC actually succeeds in discovering the Higgs boson, I guess we will have to think again.”
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[27 Aug 2009|05:26pm] |
quote i found online somewhere from the book cold mountain:
"Many a night Stobrod wandered from place to place until he found a fellow working at a stringed instrument with some authority, some genius of the guitar or banjo. Then he'd take out his fiddle and play until dawn, and every time he did, he would learn something new.
He first spent his attention to matters of tuning and fingering and phrasing. Then he began listening to the words of the songs the (slaves) sang, admiring how they chanted out every desire and fear in thier lives as clear and as proud as could be. And he soon had a growing feeling that he was learning things about himself that had never sifted into his thinking before. One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment is that music held for him more than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something to him comforting about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there was a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not be just a tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen. By now he knew nine hundred fiddle tunes, some hundred of them being his own compositions."
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[27 Aug 2009|05:23pm] |
"It seems to me that the more wildly fantastic a tale is, the more likelihood there is for its being grounded in reality one way or another. The average human is so unimaginative that the highest flights of fantasy are beyond his power to create out of nothing"
- Robert E. Howard
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[10 Aug 2009|04:46pm] |
Mike Seeger, Singer and Music Historian, Dies at 75
Published: August 10, 2009
Mike Seeger, a singer and multi-instrumentalist who played an important role in the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Friday at his home in Lexington, Va. He was 75.
The cause was multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, said his wife, Alexia Smith.
Although a quieter voice on the national stage than his politically outspoken, older half-brother, Pete, Mike Seeger was a significant force in spreading the music of preindustrial America during an increasingly consumerist era. In 1958 he helped found the New Lost City Ramblers, whose repertory came from the 1920s and ’30s, and in his career he recorded or produced dozens of albums of what he called the “true vine” of American music, the mix of British and African traditions and topical storytelling that took root in the South.
Mr. Seeger’s dedication had a strong effect on the young Bob Dylan, who wrote fondly of him in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.” Although only eight years his junior, Mr. Dylan called Mr. Seeger a father figure — for helping the under-age Mr. Dylan with his paperwork — and rhapsodized about him as the embodiment of a folk-star persona.
“Mike was unprecedented,” Mr. Dylan wrote, adding: “As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once.”
But Mr. Seeger made his mark less as a star than as a careful, steady student of his beloved Southern music. He was born in New York to a prominent musical family. His father, Charles Seeger, was a well-known ethnomusicologist, and his mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer and folk-song collector. Besides Pete, Mr. Seeger’s sister Peggy also became a noted singer.
The intellectual pursuit of folk music was part of Mike Seeger’s life from an early age. At 5 he made a recording of the old British folk ballad “Barbara Allen,” his wife said in an interview on Sunday.
Mr. Seeger played banjo, guitar, autoharp and other instruments, which he learned from old records and in some cases from the musicians who played on them. A dogged researcher, he sought out musicians who had been lost for decades and introduced them to an eager (and young) new audience. One was Dock Boggs, a banjo player from western Virginia whose records were prized by folklorists. Mr. Seeger brought him to the American Folk Festival in Asheville, N.C., in 1963.
Mr. Seeger’s most recent album was “Early Southern Guitar Sounds” (Smithsonian Folkways), in 2007, and he played autoharp on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Grammy Award-winning album “Raising Sand” (Rounder), also released in 2007. In his career Mr. Seeger was nominated for six Grammys.
In addition to his wife, his half-brother Pete, of Beacon, N.Y., and his sister Peggy, of Boston, Mr. Seeger is survived by three sons, Kim, of Tivoli, N.Y., Chris, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., and Jeremy, of Belmont, Mass.; four stepchildren, Cory Foster of Ithaca, N.Y., Jenny Foster of Rockville, Md., Joel Foster of Silver Spring, Md., and Jesse Foster of Washington; another sister, Barbara Perfect of Henderson, Nev.; another half-brother, John Seeger of Bridgewater, Conn.; and 13 grandchildren and step-grandchildren.
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[26 Feb 2009|06:27pm] |
i really, really hope that movie isn't wretched.
we had a first neighborhood collective meeting in my living room, and someone said my kitchen "looked like prohibition".
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[07 Feb 2009|04:40am] |
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y'know, maybe if i felt a little better adjusted, i'd feel less inclined to steal from parties, but right this second, i'll enjoy my bottle of cheap whiskey, my bodega candle, and my two bananas. maybe i'll feel differently when i sober up. i'm a little inclined to doubt it. also, despise it as i might, shows in allston are, regret it or not, part of my community. i just need to find someplace i feel challenged. or less like a weird alien. and i'm sick to death of hating everything. or someone come play old time with me.
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| from an article on why the arab version of the simpsons flopped. |
[12 Jan 2009|04:01pm] |
"It didn’t have to be that way. “I loved it,” says Hosny of the show. “I take off my chapeau: they are very good artists. And the writers are unbelievable. I loved the character of Homer. There is something very strange about this character. It’s very close to the Egyptian point of view. He’s a very simple and kind person; from some points of view you feel that he’s incredibly stupid, and from some points of view you feel he is wise. Sometimes I felt I was talking about an Egyptian person. Nothing is certain and taken for granted — it’s not ipso facto — and this makes good art.”
what a strange paragraph.
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[10 Jan 2009|04:53am] |
drunken profundities to be considered while sober:
"you know what? i feel like i fit in ok enough a lot of places, but i don't fit in anywhere perfectly well".
ie i think there's more to this than i realize at this moment, not having sobered up yet.
praise from caesar:
"if you applied that back to electric guitar, you'd really shred"
- ben weiser on my carter picking
spiky punk ian in general complementing my style - fedora, long wool coat, black and red scarf, fingerless gloves - sure, good style isn't the be all and end all, but coming from someone so fashion conscious, i'll take praise when i find it.
that and for fucking christ's sake, we've been collectively running a business for a year now and we haven't killed it yet. seriously, wtf? take that as a good thing or a bad thing.
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[26 Dec 2008|02:38pm] |
There's A Riot Goin' On
The Infamous Public Image Ltd. Riot Show
The Ritz- 1981 Ed Caraballo (July 1997)
ED NOTE: this story was weeded out of Ed so don't think of it as an article so much as a guy who was there, telling you the story. IN THE BEGINNING...
This all started when I met the members of Public Image because a friend of mine, Lisa Yapp (who's a producer for CNN now), was doing a cable show around '79. It was a gossip show where she did interviews. It was a syndicated show and she did the club scene. The show was called DIRT and she did her interviews in a garbage can. I was the director of her cable show and I thought I was hot shit even though I was only 18 at the time. One day, she did an interview with Keith Levene. They weren't really promoting anything. They moved to New York in May '81. Keith and John (Lydon) decided that punk and rock were dead so they weren't going to do any more performing and they weren't going to be a band anymore. They were going to be a company- that was the concept of Public Image Limited as they explained it to me. Jeanette (Lee), who wasn't a musician at all, was in the band as kind of a performance artist. They planned to use John's vocal talents and Keith's guitar and editing talents. He was doing sampling back then which was pretty new, like on Flowers of Romance with those celtic, tribal sounds. They rented this loft on West 18th Street, looking to form this company to do soundtracks and make videos. Remember that this was before MTV started out. They wanted to hook up with someone who was invovled with video and computers. Lisa talked me up and Keith said 'I wanna meet this guy.' So we met when she was taping her interview with him. We became good friends and somehow I started hanging out with Keith and Jeanette. Actually, Keith and John were starting to have a lot of fights then. They were starting to get on the out's with each other. It was creative things. They split up about a year after I was on the scene. I was just a star-struck kid then. It was like winning a music contest where you get to hang out with the rock band. They were on Warner Brothers and they always seemed to be getting paid in cash. Keith always seemed to have this big wad of cash with him that he didn't know exactly what to do with. So I became their tour guide to New York and their buddy and their play mate. We would drive around in my beat-up '73 Plymouth Satellite. Keith would wave around his money so flagrantly sometimes that I just grabbed it once and threw it out the window in the Holland Tunnel. He yelled at me so I had to stop and go get it. We were in a little dream-land. I started taking Super-8 movies and I owned a broadcast camera package that was state-of-the-art at the time. I started filming their lives. John is a very intense guy. He liked me and he liked my sense of humor but to him to I was 'Keith's guy.' I always seemed to be going out with Keith and Jeanette so we seemed to him like a little faction. He was a little bit paranoid about us and it wasn't until later that he and I got along. After about a month of hanging out, Keith said to me 'you should be in the band.' I told him that I wasn't a musician, just a video guy. Then I decided 'OK, whatever.' Keith actually made me a full member of the band.
THE SET-UP
So one day, we're up at Warner Brothers at Rockefeller Center. We'd go up there like spoiled brats. Whenever we'd come in, there'd be a whole staff of people and we'd walk in and demands drinks (John never came with us up there). It was really cool for me, being a high school drop-out from the Bronx. So we were there playing pool one day and one of the publicists gets a call from someone who wants to talk to Keith or John. We're deep in this game of pool and Keith said 'What do you want!' It was the Ritz calling, this big popular venue then. It was their first or second anniversary and they had Bow Wow Wow scheduled to perform. At the last minute, they cancelled after they spend all this money promoting the show. They were hoping that PIL would be able to fill in at the last minute. Keith said 'Fuck off! We're not interested!' I was excited though because the Ritz was the first video club in New York- they had this 40-foot wide screen with high intensity video projection. I said 'Wait Keith- they have all this fabulous video equipment there and we could do this really cool performance art thing.' He said 'yeah?' So we went down to check it out.
I'm very proud of this actually. I came up with this concept for the band where they would play live behind this huge screen. You would never actually see the band straight on. What we did was we used this whole row of parcans, high-intensity lights, really low. So these lights would shine the band's silhouette against the video screen. We could alternate that with a live camera that was shooting the band behind the stage and we would project this image on the screen. Jerry Branch, who ran the Ritz, was negiotating with us (he looked like a mafioso). Somebody said 'we're going to pay you $8,000 for the Friday and Saturday show.' I don't know why but I said 'no, that's not enough- we want $12,000.' It was like a surreal game but they said OK. We made our intentions clear to them. Keith told them 'Rock and roll is fucking dead. We're not a band, we're a company. We're here to do performance art. This is going to be a show.' We told them to promote the show that way. They didn't do this though. They immediately went on the air with these radio stations and spent a lot of money promoting it. The Ritz was really exciting because PIL really hadn't done live shows for a while. John still had his core audience carrying over from the Sex Pistols and that was the primary audience for PIL. Both shows immediately sold out. So we had to go to work really quickly. I had this footage and I had to use their editting equipment to put everything together. They gave me full access to all of their equipment. The video screen was on an electric motor that could be raised and lowered. We found a huge white tarp in their basement. Another crazy idea of mine was to make the precenium (the stage) this big white thing and where we'd put this tarp on the stage to drap over into the audience and it would be all white and pure looking. We found this session drummer for the show in the Bowery (Sam Ulamo). He was this really cool, old guy who did blues. He met him in a bar and asked him if he wanted to play the gig. Keith took out his bankroll and slipped him a couple of hundred bucks. So we just told him to be there Friday. It was kind of organic and haphazard, the way that the whole thing came together. So we took his drum kit and all the rest of the instruments on the stage behind the screen. To keep and hold the tarp in place so it didn't fall into the audience, we weighed it down with all of the instruments. The screen was controlled back in the video control booth where I would be. So we quickly used the editting system to put together the Super-8 footage I had. It was pictures of PIL taking helicopters rides and John in a hotel room getting obsessed with cable TV (he pretty much never left the hotel when I knew him). It was odd the way I was learning from Keith. Even though Keith was kind of lacadaisical, to him it was still a performance. That was just his style. Almost like a jazz vibe. Everything was improvisational, just taking and using whatever was there. The concept of the show was that it was like a mask. PIL would have this show playing behind the video and you could never actually get to see them live.
ON WITH THE SHOW
The evening of the show, we hired a limosine, maybe to impress or allude the press. There was a bunch of music press running around getting hyped about this show because this was their first show in a while. A guy from Rolling Stone was chasing Keith around. Even though no one knew me, I felt cool being the secret member of the band. We went around town, picking up supplies for the show. Meanwhile, John was back at the hotel doing his own thing. There was absolutely no rehearsal for the show- it was just going to be John singing, Keith playing guitar, Jeanette playing tambourine and other rhythm things and the drummer.
We get to the Ritz and it was pouring rain. There was a crowd a people lined up. They were getting soggy and Keith got out, looked at them and laughed. They started yelling and calling out to him and he ignored them. He wasn't disrespectful and didn't taunt anyone like John would. We got inside and got things ready but John is nowhere to be seen. There was an opening act that was weird- we just found them in a bar and hired them. The Ritz didn't let the opening band go on or even let the audience in until John arrived. The crowd was standing out there in the rain but Keith didn't seem too concerned about the crowd or John so I just tested the video while Keith did a sound check. John finally showed up so the crowd was let in and the opening act came on. This was a full one hour later than when it was supposed to start. So the audience is wet, soggy and pissed. This opening band had a totally different sound from PIL. It was almost like a folk band. The audience was thinking 'what the hell' and the band eventually got booed off. So now it was PIL's turn to go on. The crowd was really cranky and pissed by then, chanting 'PIL, PIL, PIL!' I was in the control booth with my headphones, nice and snug in there in the back of the club with a beautiful view of the audience and the stage: I felt like I was manning the Starship Enterprise. We felt that it would be appropriate to have a video of Lisa Yipp interviewing Keith and John in the trashcan she used for the show. Lisa gets on the headphones and says 'I'm not going out there- they're rowdy, they're screaming!' I told her 'you're a professional, go out there and do it.' So one of the stage crew drags out the trash can she used for her show with her inside and with the lid on top. The audience looked at it like 'what the hell' and she pops out like Oscar the Grouch and says 'HI, I'M LISA YAPP! I'M HERE TO TALK ABOUT PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!' So now the crowd's really pissed and they start chanting louder. She starts to give an introduction about the band and we play this interview she did with Keith. In the interview, he's saying 'Rock and roll is dead. This is a new age of performance.' The crowd had it by then. They turned on Lisa for everything that happened. They pelted her with beer bottles but Lisa was such a trooper that she kept going with her introduction. She fended off the bottles with the lid of the trash can like a gladiator shield. Then she says 'AND HERE'S PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!' The whole band's behind the screen and Keith starts playing and the drummer's playing this celtic rhythm to start the show. Then Keith starts playing the record 'Flowers of Romance.' He cranked it up and took all the equalization out of it- it sounded so cacaphonous. I started pulsating the parcan lights. It was really eerie and screechy. The crowd just loved it- they fell silent. You just saw the glow and the lights flashing. Keith's guitar was feeding back, playing off the record that was on and John was just silent throughout this whole thing. He just stood next to Keith. You could only see the silhouettes of them and the projections of them on the screen. The crowd is just loving this, thinking 'what a great introduction.' The first song ends and John starts to talk to the audience for the first time. He says 'sil-ly fuck-ing aud-ience, sil-ly fuck-ing aud-i-ence...' He's slowly taunting the audience. Now the crowd's not quiet anymore. They start chanting 'raise the screen, raise the screen, raise the screen!' John's never been one who likes to be told what to do so he's chiding the audience. He says what fuckers they were to pay 12 dollars to see this, just taunting the audience. The more they say 'raise the screen,' he says 'we're not going to raise the fucking screen!' So the band goes into another song that was this kind of improvisational kind of thing. It seemed to be directed by the drummer! John and Keith were just doing their thing. John made those sounds with his voice, almost like a yodelling type of thing. Keith is doing this screechy, primal sounding thing with his guitar, almost like a jazz number. They go through this and it's a ten minute number. The crowd is kind of liking it but you could hear them add their two cents by syncopating the rhythm with 'raise the screen! raise the screen!' At the end of this, John is really being abusive. So the audience starts pelting the screen with beer bottles. Even in the balconies, they were throwing bottles and some of it was hitting the audience down below. The more that they threw bottles, the more that John would chide them. The manager of the Ritz comes to me then as I'm the only member of the band that was accessible- everyone else is behind the screen. Jerry says 'you gotta raise the screen! There's a riot happening right before our eyes!' I felt like Nero watching Rome burn, seeing these bottles all over and I never realized how abusive John was to his audience. So I tell Jerry 'No, I'm not raising it. You should have advertised and said that this wasn't a concert. It's a performance art show. That is what it is, that's what they paid for and that's what we're putting on.' I was guarding the remote control switch, not letting anyone touch it. Jerry kept yelling at me to raise it and I'd yell at him that I wasn't going to do it. Then Jerry turns to the crowd and sees something going on as they let out a collective 'aaah.' The front of the crowd started pulling on the tarp and I start getting scared because the instruments and amplifier were moving forward like they were going to go into the audience. So Jerry says 'Are you crazy? Look at that!' I said 'you're probably right.' So I raised the screen just a little bit, enough to put on the parcans full blast so that we're blinding the audience with light. For a minute, they shrink back from this huge flash of light. It looked like the screen from 'Wizard of Oz' where everyone sees the magical workings of the Wizard, like 'pay no attention to the PIL behind the screen!' The stage hands started scrambling to get the equipment off the tarp as the audience was still pulling at it. The poor drummer was freaking out as his kit was moving. One of the stage hands grabs the mike out of John's hand and starts screaming 'THE SHOW'S OVER! THE SHOW'S OVER!' They bring the house lights on but the audience is still pulling the tarp towards them. It was like 'we want our money's worth no matter how we get it out of you!' The stage hands rushed John and Keith off the stage for safety's reasons. My camera people got out of there. The management of the Ritz took over, saying 'the show's over. That was the show. Thanks for coming.' It was kind of funny because the crowd just slowly said 'oh...OK.' For me, I was in 7th heaven. From the back of the auditorium, it was a beautiful site. It was a sick feeling because part of me said 'wow, I'm responsible for this carnage' and part of me said 'wow, I'm fucking cool!' The manager of the Ritz was freaking out still, wondering how many people were hurt because there were bottles all over the place. As it turns out, there was only one guy hit by the bottle. I made my way backstage to make sure the group was OK. On the way, I meet this producer friend of mine who I invited to the show and who I wanted to impress for a possible job in the future. He called out to me and I thought 'I'll never get a job now.' 'Ed, that was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen in my life!' he told me. I was like 'What? Oh yeah, that was great.' I couldn't believe it. I finally got backstage and there was John, Keith and Jeanette, drinking beers and laughing. Right next to them was this punk kid with his head bleeding profusely. Jeanette got him an ice pack and they gave him a beer and he was hanging out with them. He couldn't have been happier- he was bleeding and he was with his heros. He was the only person that got hurt and not only wasn't he interested in suing us, he was happier than he could be. Actually 50 people asked for their money back and the Ritz actually gave it to them. Basically, it was a big fiasco and the next night of the show was cancelled.
AFTERMATH
The next Monday morning, Warner Brothers scheduled a press conference because there was a lot of press around there and it became a news event. So the four of us showed up and I set up my video camera behind Keith while he was fielding these questions from the reporters. I was filming the reporters as they were filming us. They asked 'how could this happen?' Keith was just being flippant and he basically told them to go screw themselves. A lot of the questions were positive, asking about the concept. Warner Brothers loved the publicity because it got written up in Rolling Stone, New Music Express and all those music magazines.
FALL-OUT
After that show, they later got a loft and we hung out for a little while longer. Then John and Keith were really getting on the out's. Keith was getting more and more paranoid. He just started getting really nasty to me. When I asked him about putting together a tape of that night to sell as a video, he thought I was trying to rob him. 'Ed, we have different contracts,' he'd say. I guess if I was older, I would have overlooked this because I knew why he was cranky. I was just as cocky as he was so I said 'fuck those assholes' and just stopped coming around. He called me and said 'why don't you come around the loft anymore?' but I didn't want to deal with that. About a year after that, John and Keith split up. John hired a whole new band and that turned into Public Image Limited. Then Keith and Jeanette split up. I'd see John out at Danceteria and all those clubs. It was only after that show that John really started to like and appreciate me. He'd see me and say 'Ed, how's that fabulous gear you got?' and I'd say 'Good, how's that bright red hair you got?' We'd laugh and we'd see each other but then we fell out of touch. I went on to do my thing and John went on to do his thing and the rest is history. I felt bad that Keith just dropped off because the whole idea of Public Image and the METAL BOX idea was all him. Everything that was cool about that band was him. Like FIRST EDITION, that's all him and also with all the sampling they did. John made a great contribution because he has a style nobody else has- that tribal chanting/yodelling kind of thing. He's a historical figure just for being himself. It's a shame that they didn't get along. For me, they had something brilliant going. But looking back at that whole event, it's one of THE experiences of my live. Even that night, I thought 'I could die tonight and seeing what I've seen, I could say I've lived a complete life.' I was just really cool! I still think about it. I was almost like a fantasy for me. I got to ride in limos, fly in helicopters, push the paparazzi away. I got to live the fantasy of a rock star for a brief shiny little month.
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| my submission to "what would jack do" on the world inferno website |
[10 Dec 2008|03:36pm] |
thanks to being introduced to your fine musical ensemble around 2000 or 2001 by a young miss katie lewis, me and my best friends at the time all instantly gravitated to teaching ourselves how to breathe fire, particularly after seeing you almost burn down abc no rio. which, while perhaps not to the extent that being devoured by wolves or meeting and managing to horribly insult your one true love would be, was to some extent a life changing experience for all of us. so here is a thank you for showing us the joys of high proof rum and a lighter.
just a few short days ago, "the most irresponsible man in punk", a mr. sturgeon from new york, yelled something unintelligible at me. it probably had to do with lighting the ceiling of the venue on fire with high proof rum. taking this as a challenge, i spat more rum at the ceiling fire. shortly thereafter, the fire alarm went off, the show was over, and we all scattered.
all i have to say is "i learned it from watching you".
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[24 Nov 2008|01:58pm] |
cigar box guitar i built
the box i got for free
the neck is a piece of wood i found in the pizza shop basement, which is 98% hand carved. i got a dremel towards the end of it.
the bridge is a threaded bolt
the nut is a part of the cigar box
i bought the strings and tuners
i usually keep it in open g
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| i was a little amused |
[26 Oct 2008|08:27pm] |
HOW TO CREATE A FOLK SONG
Another excellent contriubtion from Alex Mogieleff and Stephan Grossman's Woodshed Forum
* All folksongs begin with the phrase: ''I asked my love to take a walk'
* The walk should be:
o Down by the riverside
o Past the prison
o Into the valley
o Over the sea and far away.
It should NOT be:
o To the store for a loaf of bread
o To Wallmart
o Along the Champs-Elysee, Park Avenue, or Pennsylvania Avenue
o On rollerblades.
* The conversation along the way should be about:
o Your racehorse
o The perfidious British
o The revelation that you are her/his longlost brother/husband/blacksmith/Lord
o The inevitable baby
o Murder
* Places to be mentioned include:
o Botany Bay
o The Mountains of ...
+ A Land called Honalee
+ Carrickfergus
+ The valley
+ The fair
o All of the above in reverse order, Botany Bay always coming last.
* All folk songs repeat the same words in each verse, but move them around until one person is killed or the ghost appears. If the ghost appears, it repeats the original verses and the process begins all over again. This is known as revenge.
* The chorus of all folk songs is half of the words of the verse moved around some more, and with the addition of some poignant nonsense syllables, all in a minor key. No new information is provided.
* References to work in folk songs should include:
o Hammers (visionary or steam)
o Railroad trains, preferably on the same track hurtling towards each other
o Lots of whales
o Sowing, reaping, harvesting, babies dropped in furrows, etc.
o Job categories allowed in folk songs include:
+ Circus work
+ Lighthouse keeping
+ Mourning
+ Gypsying (especially kidnapping)
+ Blowing up British buildings.
o References to work in folk songs should avoid the following job categories:
+ Insurance
+ Work for any government agency except prisons
+ Re-insurance
* Words that can be sprinkled at random over folk songs:
o gather,
o farewell,
o thee,
o dead,
o twa,
o alas,
o true love,
o bonnie, dagger,
o do Lord.
and so on.... These apply mostly to ballads:
* True loves are always either:
o Missing (gone for seven years)
o Dead (see Necrophilia element)
o In disguise
o Your brother/sister (either known or unknown)
o False (off chasing/married to another)
If it's a happy ending, it's a very rare folksong...
* If your true love is dead, you must:
o Long to kiss his/her dead lips or other portions of the anatomy (The Tradition of Necrophilia)
o Never love again
o Have done her in yourself after spending all night diggin' of her grave
o Have done him in yourself because he done you wrong
* If you are a sailor, and you meet a fair young lady, you will:
o Wind up with no money and no clothes, wearing a dress (the Transvestite Element)
o Get laid after pulling her string
o Acquire a painful and unpleasant social disease
o Get shot after she dresses in men's clothing and finds you've been false
(see Transvestite Element)
* If you are a young lady, and you meet a sailor, you will:
o Turn him down because he's dirty
o Turn him down because you don't recognize him
o Change your mind when you find out he's got money
o Change your mind after experiencing his sexual prowess
o Dress up in man's clothing (the Transvestite Element, yet again)
* And LOTS of metaphors!! Refering to various actions, body parts, etc., should be as circumspect as possible. Birds,flowers,alcoholic beverages,(blud red wine, etc)... may be freely substituted for lips, breasts etc.
And for Male Parts...anything is ok as long as it is longer than it is wide.
* Women who are NOT active heroines in the song may be given away as prizes to men who achieve some goal...such as killing villians, saving ships, etc.
* You are a bona fide folk singer if:
o you have nine different guitar capos, including a semi-automatic flipoff
o our first name is one syllable long, or at most is two syllables that end in a vowel, e.g. Doc, Pete, Woody, Joan, Judy
o you learned the song on a porch, preferably one with a sofa with the insides sprung out
o you refuse to make an anatomical pun about “The Londonderry Air”
o you have ''This X fights Y'' inscribed somewhere on your instrument,
e.g.''this E string fights sexism''.
o you have a dog named after a color.
You are not a bona fide folk singer if:
o you play the Hammond Organ
o your first name is Brittany (unless you are a boy)
o your last name is Rockefeller or Windsor
o you learned the song from your chauffeur or housekeeper, unless her name is Elizabeth Cotton
o you have a sticker on your guitar that reads: “Baby On Board”
o you have a cat (whether it comes back or not) or goldfish (see Entry under whales). You can have a horse as long as you race it in England or France.
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[23 Aug 2008|01:09am] |
this may sound remarkably goofy, but if you are in some way able to be judged by the friends you keep, i feel like you can be judged a little bit by your foes and frenemies as well. and when you lionize joe hill and the original frank little and folks like that, when what passes for labor negotiations is draining conversations with what amounts to the psychic vampire version of an annoying little brother - well, it's just kind of disappointing. maybe it's just reverting back to being an eight year old who loved tolkien and dungeons and dragons, but you want to feel heroic, and a lack of appropriate foes to vanquish doesn't really help that. maybe i'm just being rambly and defining that poorly.
i think it's pretty natural to take a look at where you were a year ago to get a sense of where you are now. and i'm certainly not coming apart at the seems on every single front like i probably was on today's date last year. that being said, i feel like a lot of my closer friends and other folks aren't particularly available, mostly for fairly legit reasons, and while i don't really need to complain to people about petty crap, it would be really nice to feel like i was able to. this isn't really about any one person in particular, it's just that i've felt a little blown off across the board for a while now. and bringing it up feels petty. not acknowledging that it's annoying is probably worse, though. that and i feel like i don't let myself complain about stupid crap to people for the most part because i know i've burdened other people really heavily with that in the past, and while i know i don't have those endless resevoirs of hurt and anger inside me the way i used to, i'm really scared of opening those parts of me up to other people because i know i've hurt some of the last people i'd ever wanted to by doing that in the past. and while there's really no dignity or meaning in endless apologies for the same shit, i still feel like i can't think of any actual way to make amends for that.
on a tangential note, real friendship involves stepping in, helping people with their shit, and not judging. i'm not really going to say more because i'm sure this particular situation is going to wind up gossip central soon enough anyway.
i know most of this shit is really vague, but i just needed to vent because i've been really cranky all day, outside of the part where i drank a bottle of mead and improvised numerous gruesome murder ballads for said psychic vampire.
meh. i'm fucking exhausted and i'm going to sleep.
that and i saw a deer in central square last week.
that and phone tag is annoying. across the board.
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[07 Aug 2008|03:12pm] |
France's Wine Terrorists A commando vineyard owner empties one of 13 wine tanks filled with Chilean wine in Nimes, France. Pascal Parrot / Getty Too much wine, it is known, can cause violent behavior. But few have gone as far as the grape growers of France's Languedoc-Roussillon region, the world's biggest wine-growing area by volume. Hurting from overproduction and cheap imports and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local winegrowers has resorted to "wine terrorism" in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them. Related Articles  There is nothing like a Bordeaux, a Chianti or a Riesling to evoke the taste and scent of Europe in ... THE STORY OF O The hippest new wineglasses, like the O series from Riedel, leave the stems on the ... I am standing in a Napa Valley, Calif. field early on a Friday morning with 24 yuppies who paid $87... The world of wine is complex and global in scope. That makes it a perfect match for the Internet, w... On July 26, police arrested a vineyard farmer from the region for production and possession of illegal explosives. Apprehended in a hospital where he was being treated for injuries suffered when those explosives unexpectedly detonated, 34-year-old Jérôme Soulère confessed to police that he'd been responsible for the July 2006 bombing of a tax-collection office in a neighboring village. He also admitted, police say, to authoring the failed bombing last year of a site the Tour de France was set to pass the following day. Those incidents are just two of many in a series of violent and destructive acts by local grape growers over the past three years that has targeted public and private buildings, supermarkets, tanker trucks hauling cheap imported wine, and businesses accused of gouging growers with ever shrinking prices. Claiming responsibility: a clandestine group known as the CRAV, or Regional Committe of Viticulture Action. CRAV's commando operations began with the 2005 bombing of a state agricultural building. CRAV members, or independent sympathizers, have since repeatedly carried out bombings and other acts of vandalism, including three acts of property destruction in a 10-day span in May. In mid-July, CRAV logos were discovered spray-painted at a Narbonne agriculture collective whose vandalized vats had drained nearly 132,000 gallons of wine to the ground — an estimated loss of around $450,000. Last year, it sent a video to newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy demanding assistance to the region's grape growers or else "blood will flow." Quixotic as it may seem to outsiders, the group — and many Languedoc-Roussillon growers who support its aims while condemning the violence used to achieve them — want the French government to protect them from a rapidly globalizing market. Foreign wine from cheaper producers such as Italy, Spain, Australia, the U.S. and South America — where costs can be one-fifth those in France — has saturated the market and driven down demand for locally grown grapes. That has depressed the price Languedoc-Roussillon growers get for their crops up to 50% in recent years. With revenues plummeting and production costs on the rise, owing in part to escalating gas prices, local farmers are demanding financial aid from Paris. But European Union rules limit how much help the French government can extend; Brussels has repeatedly urged growers to cut costs by letting nearly 500,000 acres of land lie fallow and by swapping plonk production for more expensive, higher-quality wine. That doesn't impress locals. "Many of these vineyard owners are committed to production and investment plans spanning 20 or 30 years," says a member of the regional wine sector, who asked not to be named due to the "vivid tension" the situation has created. "These aren't operations that can change strategy or cut production overnight." Jérôme Soulère's lawyer, Jean-Marie Bourland, doesn't justify his client's avowed acts of destruction but sympathizes with his client's predicament. "We're in a country where, alas, our leaders don't pay attention to well-behaved and listen to those who leave them no choice," says Bourland. "Many of these people are agonizing and dying a slow death," he says. "For some, I suppose, posing a bomb is their attempt to pose a question."
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| hooray somerville! |
[30 Jul 2008|11:17am] |
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Now that Good Time Emporium has closed, the people of Somerville have sought out new venues to hold their melees. One of these test locations, the parking lot of the Market Basket at 400 Somerville Ave., saw more than 100 gathered to watch a massive brawl Saturday morning. Police broke up the proceedings and arrested two. [Somerville Journal]
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