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.

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Musically, our culture has achieved singularity. Every song ever recorded is dripping off the tip of the Internet’s long tail and into the ears of anyone with headphones and an iTunes account. Bands like the Black Lips and Interpol do solid service to sounds past, and Girl Talk mashes old songs together to make something new. While New York’s Francis and the Lights has one foot rooted solidly in Prince’s synth-heavy ’80s output, the other foot is rhythmically shimmying its way straight into the future.

I’ve mentioned them here before, several times, with good reason. They’re one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen, in New York or anywhere else.

This video for “The Top,” from the new mini-album “A Modern Promise” just made me scream. It’s shot on 35mm, pops in a giant new Quicktime window. Compared to Youtube videos, this is Batman in IMAX, except funky. Click the dancing Francis after the jump to see for yourself:
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In the Northernmost part of Greenpoint, just about as far up as you can go in Brooklyn without falling in Newtown Creek and drifting across the sludge-channel to Queens, there is an ever-changing graffiti mural on the corner of Clay and McGuinness, on the walls of the Power Brake Service shop. We’ve seen employees on site while artists are laying it down, and even saw an NYPD cruiser stop by for a short chat with a tagger before rolling along without so much as a finger-wagging, so we reckon the building owner either approves of the paint job, or at least isn’t bothered by it.

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“Hey, are you gay?” the man asked, grinning wide enough to give his gums a sunburn. I’m not, but it was a fair enough question — I was walking through the East Village in a white linen jacket on the Friday before the Pride parade.

“Uh, no, not yet,” I responded. He wore an large navy blazer over a spectacularly filthy t-shirt. Scabs adorned the corners of his smile. He held an overstuffed shopping bag in his arms, cradling it like an infant.

“Want to give it a chance?” he asked, stepping closer.

“What, now? With you?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, I’ve got all these condoms here,” he said, and tipped the shopping bag towards me. It was bulging, brimming, boiling over with condoms in every color of the rainbow. “We could …”

I cut him off. “Look, dude, we’re not gonna go off and use all those condoms together. Even if I was curious, I just don’t have that kind of time. As it stands, it’s been 32 years and I think I’m all set as a straight guy.”

“Hey, okay!” he said, real chipper, and rolled on down the street to find someone else to share his enormous latex bounty.

This photo was taken in my kitchen — my roommate started celebrating Pride a little early this weekend, and left a display for me. I wish I could have gone to the parade with him, but this little diorama sums it up nicely.

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The Coney Island Mermaid Parade is the sweet and freaky collision of drag, burlesque, special effects and little girls’ birthday parties. It’s a cavalcade of glitter, grease-paint and family-friendly toplessness, a celebration of summer and fun and art sweeter and trippier than Spongebob Squarepants singing for a Flaming Lips session at a gay pride parade.

The loudspeaker in the parade staging area said it best:

If you are the parent of a small child, you should know that there may be exposed body parts that could damage your children. If anyone walks by with those body parts exposed, please make sure to cover your children’s eyes.

Words can’t say what the pictures can — here’s a collection of photos David and I took at the 2008 Mermaid Parade this Saturday:

More after the jump:

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A couple weeks ago, we ran a big fat blog post about a bunch of people sparring in Union Square. They were practicing mixed martial arts (MMA), and letting pretty much anyone get in the ring who wanted to fight.

In writing the post, I tried to focus on the vibe in the air, how cool it was to witness the thing happening — as well as describe some of the utterly ridiculous videos David shot. The post got a ton of traffic (for us), and a corresponding ton of utterly retarded comments that totally missed the point.

David’s videos were pretty choice — and we intentionally focused on the ridiculous side of the thing to attract more attention. The blogosphere’s principal exports are bullshit and outrage, and its chief currency is attention. I’m not a journalist, I’m a storyteller, and I don’t mind altering the telling of an event to make it work better as a story. The thing about stories is, when you tell one story, you’re not telling another one.

All that aside, here’s some really spectacular photos of the Union Square Spartans by Anya Roz that really capture the dignified ballet of the thing, all the grace, training and prowess — and of course, tons and tons of rock-hard man-candy:

More photos and some video after the jump …

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It was a real armpit jungle on the subway this morning, people jammed up in there scalp-to-nostrils like a bunch of soft and complicated Tetris blocks. Everyone flexed their brains real real hard to create a personal force-field, either by staring at a piece of reading material or cranking the iPod and doing the sort of vague-dance-lip-synch that says “hey fuck you, world, I’m so not a part of this that I am astrally projecting myself into a nightclub and at that nightclub on the astral plane I just don’t care about NOTHIN’.”

Then somebody’s weapons-grade anal vapors wafted through the car like a grey-green angel of death. Most people completely ignored it, though the dancing lip syncher did seem to stop opening her mouth quite so wide. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, just sit there and suck it up in the most literal sense.

One guy just stood there ignoring the fragrance and just eating his breakfast like everything was cool. He methodically worked his way through a baguette, pressing a flattened palm against the tail end and shoving it into his steadily chewing mouth like a log into a wood chipper.

On a good day, eating on the subway is a narrow cut above eating in the bathroom. And we all know that any food that is taken into the bathroom is automatically garbage. There’s molecules flying around in there, man, and they settle on everything. This was far from a good day to eat on the subway. This was bringing food into a funky molecule hurricane.

The human mind naturally tries to draw patterns, to find relationships and pull a thin skin of order over a chaotic world. I was certain that this baguette-chipper was the train farter, immune to his own poison. Then he got off the train and whoever it was crop-dusted the car again.

The train finally stopped and disgorged a couple people, let some fresh air in. For a moment, the deadly anal death-angel aroma traded places with its musical equivalent: the lilting sounds of an Amazonian pan-flute band. For just a second there it was all farts and flute music and faces too close — then some folks got off, the A/C kicked in, and the train doors clipped off the music before we pulled away.

It could’ve been worse, though.

My sister was in a pretty horrible auto accident this week. She was driving on 64 in Norfolk during rush hour and some guy plowed into her from behind. Twice. We still have no idea how that happened. The car is pretty much totalled. The rear of it crumpled all up and busted her back windshield in, and her body’s pretty rattled.

The guy who did it got out of his truck and said “Wow. Hell of a way to start a Monday, huh?”

It was Tuesday.

It’s going to be a long and painful process for Jess, getting money from the insurance company, renting a car, either fixing or replacing her car. But it’s just money and time. She can still talk and walk, and she can still express her love with cuss words and laughter, and for that I’m really, really grateful.

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I am writing to you from a command position approximately 1 mile above the Manhattan skyline. I am hovering upside down in the cool open sky, wearing only a tremendous pair of headphones pumping Rare Earth’s “I just Want to Celebrate” at a volume that will not only crack hardened Al-Qaeda operatives but convince them to climb aboard the P-Funk Mothership.

Occasionally, featherlike wisps of cloud will slip over me, caressing my body like cold, wet ferrets. When this happens, a perfectly tailored white linen suit with waterproof properties magically appears on me, protecting me from any dampness or discomfort.

This is what it’s like to have a minor manic episode — hovering high and naked and feeling music down to the DNA. Sort of. Music is mission critical to a proper manic mood. It’s got to be loud as it can get, preferably with a solid, somewhat corny groove. Lately I’ve been rocking the aforementioned Rare Earth song, but Lee Michaels’ “Do You Know What I Mean,” Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” or any number of other cracker-funk jams will do. Soulwax’s entire “Nite Versions” album is choice mania music.

Imagine being a floppy hand puppet left in the corner of an abandoned office and feeling Rare Earth enter your body like a hand in a surgical glove, invisibly lifting you into the sky — then realizing that the guys in Rare Earth are the six-fingered hand of God who’s letting you dangle upside down in space and cruising you around the skyline for a while. The view is spectacular and the soul is invincible … temporarily.

Then comes the crash. I’m working on that part. I’ve enlisted a trained professional to teach some dismount techniques, and for right now, she’s doing a bang-up job. She seems to think that the high highs aren’t healthy either, but how can anything that feels that good be all bad?

Coming off the hand of God today wasn’t quite the triple-axel, point-and-stick landing I’d hoped for, but I’m back down to normal and I don’t feel like a dusty puppet in the corner again.

It’s all about the little victories, people.

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I saw this sign in Union Square last night:

I love bacon, don’t get me wrong — but I wonder sometimes if it’s like zombies and robots and monkeys online — awesome, sure, but also just this stuff the Internet fetishizes just to be fetishizing something. I mean, as cool as I think robots are in the abstract, I’m not actually that thrilled about having a world crawling with them. I just like looking at them and writing about them. Is bacon the internet’s meat robots?

According to Eliza, hell no:

Bacon is the number one meat that vegetarians miss, and the one that eventually breaks most of them.

She’s right. I never could be a vegetarian in the first place — couldn’t give up bacon.

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Hey there, visitors — there’s more (and much better) photos of this here — check ‘em out.

I got another cryptic text from a friend last Friday afternoon: “Fight Club in Union Square. GET HERE.”

For those who don’t live in New York, Union Square has historically been a giant meeting place for political protesters, social activists, and merchants of all sizes. In the days following September 11th, it was a meeting place for rescuers and mourners alike. Now it’s home to a multiplex, Ann Taylor Loft, a Whole Foods, and a Diesel store.

So really, it makes perfect sense that in the inner chamber of Manhattan’s consumer culture, right there in Union Square, there would be a massive, public fight club.

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