I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions to Jeff’s previous post about my artstuffs — a belated thanks to everyone who reblogged or contacted me for more info — so I thought I’d share a few pics from my most recent outing.
(More after the jump.)
Juliet lives like rednecks drive: mashing down the gas with the radio blasting and howling lusty swear words all over the open road. Her stories are full of love and rage, heartbreak and mayhem and sex and drugs and the kind of laughs that rattle the optic nerves. She’s far and away my most exciting new friend from the Moth, thrilling and kind and just a little dangerous — the kind of person who might throw your car keys into the river and then get you to laugh about it.
Having an enlarged heart is a dangerous medical condition: oversized hearts are tender and fragile and wear out easy. But an enlarged heart is also the biggest ball in the storyteller’s cannon. People with giant hearts fall in love with everything in the entire world and get their hearts broken every single time and brother, do they have some stories to tell.
Juliet’s heart is a massive flaming comet, flying all over the place and collecting all kinds of dirt and debris and you just can’t wait to hear where it’s been.
Here she is telling a story at The Moth a few months ago, on the theme of “Respect.”
I’m going to be appearing at a story show at her house in Philadelphia this weekend along with a couple other Moth regulars and a band called the Resin Ballz. It promises to be nothing short of awesome.
You can see a story by The Moth’s Jim O’Grady here:
And two of my stories here:
Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band
Reverend Al Sharpton Hates Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band
Today is national fix-the-country day, and it’s gonna be a long one. No matter what side you’re on, you’re probably sick of the campaigning by now. As a little distraction from all the election-related news you’re sure to be drowning in, I thought I’d post a video of me telling the story of Royal Quiet Deluxe, (chicken band) at The Moth.
By way of comparison, you can read a written version of the story here.
The story links to one of our recordings, made with a primitive drum machine, delay/loop pedal, and my tireless prattling.
The following track, though, is a different sort of sound collage. We recorded it on the front porch of Tim’s parent’s place out in Botetourt County, VA, one hot summer evening. You can hear crickets and locusts in the background, something I think is pretty cool. I am playing the typewriter as percussion here, Tim is playing guitar, and the chickens are pecking and vocalizing. Tim mixed in a recording about Exotic Newcastle Disease in Southern California that was recorded over the telephone many years later, and presto — you have:
Exotic Newcastle Disease, by Royal Quiet Deluxe
There’s one more story in this saga. I’ve told it onstage at a Moth event recently, and I’m waiting to get ahold of the video so I can crunch it and post it here — and I’m working on the text version for those of you that want the full-on boxed-set experience. Suffice it to say that while the Internet has helped me find a whole new audience for this band that I never thought existed, I am 100 percent positive that the Reverend Al Sharpton still thinks the whole concept of Royal Quiet Deluxe is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.
You can see a story by The Moth’s Jim O’Grady here:
And a story by The Moth’s Juliet Wayne here:
Sometimes the Internet is nothing but a glowing wind tunnel filled with gas blasts from the intellectually obese. Even on the best days, the creatively flabby power this thing, gobbling information and repeating it with no regard for quality, just a quick hit of a familiar flavor in massive, constant quantities. Real insight can be a soap bubble lost in that hot, stinking howl.But not today. Today the Internet is a psychedelic sausage-grinder — feed stuff into it and turn the handle, and presto, flowers!
Let me settle down and explain.
A few weeks ago, both BoingBoing and Metafilter/MeFi Music linked to my story about the long-dead Royal Quiet Deluxe — b.k.a. “the chicken band.” This story was one that I’d prepared for The Moth, and never gotten to tell.
Twenty-four hours after posting, an old friend that I hadn’t heard from in ten years contacted me. He had what everyone thought was the only surviving copy of one of our performances on a dusty cassette — he ripped it to mp3 and sent it to me, and I posted it. A few days after that, I was contacted by one of the minds behind , a really, really fascinating podcast/radio show based in Mexico City, as near as I can tell. I don’t speak much Spanish.
I was finally able to get in touch with Tim after years of drift, and man, it was like no time at all had passed. The good news is, he’s got tons of old recordings, remixes, and other soundscapes we made way back then.
The better news is: we’re going to pursue performing in New York. If not at clubs and bars, in the subways. Chickens are easily available through botanicas here. The only catch so far is a place to keep them while we rehearse. If anyone wants to volunteer ideas or their apartment, send me the bat-signal through the Contact form above … I’ll keep you posted.
Today’s edition of The Guardian brings us one of the best headlines that we have ever seen anywhere:
“Giant Dog Turd Wreaks Havoc at Swiss Museum.”
Just take that in for a second.
Okay, good.
Now, the turd in question is a mammoth-sized inflatable sculpture by Paul McCarthy, entitled “Complex Shit”, pictured here:
As noted in the Guardian article, the sculpture got caught in a storm and broke loose of its moorings outside of the Paul Klee Centre in Berne, Switzerland … (insert “loose stool” joke here) … and sailed through the air almost 660 feet, knocking down a power line and breaking a window before ultimately — and this is beautiful — landing outside of a childrens home.
More in the ever-entertaining ‘regular-folks-in-superhero-costumes-performing-mundane-tasks’ idiom, this time from photographer Gregg Segal:
There are more on Gregg’s website, and for other posts documenting our love for this milieu, check out our previous encounters with a down-on-his luck Captain America, and various sci-fi characters in domestic settings.
“Who the hell is D.Billy?,” a number of you have asked over the past month or two. Well, I’ll tell you: D.Billy is the new deputy in this here town. And by “new deputy in town,” I mean that he’s got the keys to the blog and can pretty much do what he wants.
He wouldn’t be here with passwords and access if he wasn’t an awesome new friend, for starters. But beyond that, D.Billy (short for David William) brings energy, excitement and passion to this blog that I’ve really been missing.
I’ve been writing this thing for 4 years, and I’ve gotten pretty burned out.
Or, rather, I thought I had.
I started this thing because I wanted to write stories and essays, which I still do, very much. But it takes a lot of creative energy to do that, and doing it five days a week year in and year out will grind you to whiny little pulp that bitches about traffic and generally mopes and carps. After four years of brain-dumping, I’m ready to strip-mine the pile, seperate the stories from the ore, polish them, get them off the screen and into someone’s hands.
So much of what passes for quality writing online these days is little more than lurid typing, and I’m not into that. I had hoped the blogosphere would be a great literary groundswell, an electronic distillation of art and beauty for the 21st century. Turns out that generation blog just Google-maps the contours of our own navels, and the greatest oversharers get the biggest prize.
Fuck that.
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You may have noticed D.Billy’s name on a number of posts over the past few months. He’s not only a friend of mine, but a pretty awesome artist.
From the artist’s statement on his website:
Using colorful media such as twisting balloons, party streamers, and artist tape, I have begun to add visual representations of sound effects to public spaces as a sort of dimensional graffiti. After embellishing the found scenes and photographing the results, I leave my additions in place to engage passers-by for as long as the materials hold up. For me, this process encourages a reexamination of surroundings and objects that are usually taken for granted, and injects a hint of the fantastical surreality that I have established in my other work.
Or, at the very least, I hope someone thinks these things are kind of funny.
Here’s some of his work:
More after the jump …
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