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• 29Mar

  Solo show at Rockwood

  Come out next week, April 5th for a solo show at Rockwood Music Hall.  Eva Lemkin on the harmonies!

• 30Aug

  September Show at Bowery Electric

  No that wasn’t a typo. If you saw a show on 9/21 at Bowery Electric, you weren’t seeing things. We had to move this show up a week to 9/14. Now playing with Ellis Ashbrook for the Gypsy West album release residency. Good night ahead…

• 19Aug

  Get a Grip

  Some video from a recent show at Bowery Electric of a new song called Get a Grip.

  Get a Grip [Monuments] from Gabriel Berezin on Vimeo.

• 3May

  Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

  Here is one of the forty possible afterlives conjured  up by wacky genius neuroscientist David Eagleman.  This book is amazing, but I particularly liked QUANTUM:

  Here in the afterlife, everything exists in all possible states at once, even states that are mutually exclusive. This comes as a shock after your Earthly life, where making one choice causes the other choices to disappear. When you become a lover to one, you cannot become a lover to others; when you choose one door, others are lost to you.

  In the afterlife you can enjoy all possibilities at once, living multiple lives in parallel. You find yourself simultaneously eating and not eating. You are bowling and not bowling at the same time. You are horseback riding and nowhere near a horse.

  A velvety blue angel gently descends to see how you are coming along with this afterlife.

  “This is all too confusing for a poor human brain,” you confess to the angel.

  The angel rubs his chin. “Maybe we can ease you into this with something simpler, like a day job,” he offers.

  You are immediately dropped into a work life of simultaneous contradictions. You are concurrently practicing several careers at once, all the careers you had considered when you were younger. You simultaneously count down your rocket ship launch and defend a criminal client in front of a jury. In the same moments, you scrub your hands for a gall bladder surgery and navigate an eighteen-wheeler down a New Mexico interstate. Gone are the constraints of location and time.

  “This,” you tell the angel, “is too much work.”

  “Perhaps we could warm you up with a simpler situation,” he considers. “How would you like to be in a closed room, one-on-one with your lover?”

  And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else.

  “Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I’m used to.”

• 5Apr

  As the spirit wanes the form appears

• 17Mar

  This Weekend!

  Got a couple great shows coming up this weekend with My Pet Dragon and The National Rifle.  Tomorrow night in Philly at The Fire and then back home at The Cakeshop Saturday night.  We play at 11pm both nights.  We must see you!

• 10Mar

  Simon Armitage

  Was late to the game on this guy. Read The Shout. Here’s more… (Thanks Camilla)

• 3Mar

  FUCK

  Why are we depriving ourselves of this phonetically pleasing, all-purpose word?  This use of “effing”, I’ll never understand it.  Like using an ipad, it’s somehow grossly emasculating.  After generations of censorship, isn’t it time to allow fuck into the common vernacular?  I’m not saying I’d want my two kid nephews dropping it all the time, though it would be funny (then again, maybe that’s easier to say for a non-parent). I remember experimenting with the word as a teenager, feeling like a badass, using it in appropriate context.  Around that time of familiarizing myself with it, I was forced to attend a big neighborhood family gathering a few houses up the road.  Sitting around a large buffet-style dinner table, my little four year old neighbor Josh, thirsty, asked his mother pointedly, “can you pass the fucking milk?”  My immediate reaction, before the sound of the silverware hitting the plates, the muffled snickers, and that aghast noise people make when they’re caught off guard, was “fuck yes, that’s a great way to ask for milk.”  He was of course overly reprimanded and sent to his room, sans milk.  He wanted to say fuck not because it’s forbidden, but because it’s a great fucking word.
  

  
  And now this Cee-lo song.  I’m making the obvious assumption that his management was savvy enough to record the alternate “Forget you” version in the early stages of tracking the song.  But wasn’t the whole point to write a chorus with Fuck You in it?  Why would I ever want to hear the awkward cadence of “forget you” in that chorus?  It’s an insult to everyone involved.  And really, what damage is it doing?  For you baby boomers, did you really think “fuck” would remain such a taboo word in 2011?  So long after The Doors and Lenny Bruce got in trouble for saying “higher” and “blowjob”?  Why are people so afraid of words?
  

  
  Let this be my informal rallying cry to knock “effing” back out of the vernacular where it belongs.  Vive la fuck!

• 3Mar

  Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City of Bladensburg

  Loving this John Fahey song today.  Psychedelic Indian bluegrass that shifts into a 20 second blues dirge at the end.

• 1Mar

  Interview with blaqbook

  Had a fun interview recently with Aaron from Blaqbook. No idea how he condensed all the rambling we did into this crisp article. Thanks Aaron!