Where is the hotel?

my new punk life

i got to see love or perish the other night. they were amazing. this last month has been a total buzz coffeeshop reunion for me. that was the all ages place i used to promote shows at in cincinnati. this month, and the last couple of days, i've seen the following buzz alumni:
ian svenonious
molly neuman
allison wolfe
sarah utter
carlos from peechees
james canty
calvin johnson

craziness! but last night in philly i saw molly and carlos on the same stage for the first time since the last time i saw the peechees and they were epic, epic punk music. watch their myspace page for some songs soon! here's a couple photos.

i love snipers

gift idea:

saturday night's alright for loving

Hey, LA. Saturday night, kime buzzelli, art opening at New Image Art. you can't miss it. beautiful girls, mysterious slogans, a feast for the eyes. plus becky stark, my latest employer singing solo!

both of these people will be there.

i feel mysterious today

are you psyched yet? 2 days until kime buzzelli's big show at new image!
i might already own one of these! how awesome is that?

last night i went to susan ciancolo's fashion thing. no age helped her make a video with some of their ambient, pretty music. it was at some new place on normal and virgil called choke motorcycle shop. they sell mopeds and old motorcycles and amazing espresso! better than the magic gas. we took the smoke mobile. and saw an amazing sunset.

i did a little experiment on the way to the show i took photos of the beautiful sunset on the 101 through the smoke stained windshield and another sticking the camera up over the roof. there's a marked difference!
here is the one through the windshield:

and the one taken outside the car:

obviously the one from inside is not as brilliant. however, this only creates another theoretical problem. they say that the reason LA has such lovely sunsets is the smog. so, in theory, should not the sunset as viewed through the smoke covered windshield of mike's car be more brilliant as the light is passing through the smog and the smoggy windshield?

hmm

Spring/Summer rapidly disappearing

i got another job yesterday, with another matador band, Lavender Diamond. I am pretty stoked. They are from LA. They don't have much gear. They are nice people. People love their record. They want to be popular. I mean, they want to be bigger. They aren't content being at a certain level. That's good, ambition.
The trade off to all this work is that I can see Spring/Summer, well spring is already gone and now summer is slipping through my fingers. It's cool. It happens every year. I don't want anyone to feel bad about it or think that I do. It's just a fact. I'm used to it. Fourth of July normally means bbq's and fireworks wars with your friends and family. It's different for me (and all my friends that go on tour for a living) now. Here's where I was the last 6 years:
2006: Flying to London (twilight singers)
2005: London (Warlocks)
2004: Belgium (Tortoise)
2003: Norway (Interpol)
2002: somewhere in europe (Moldy Peaches)
2001: NYC (rocovering from a fucked up knee from my swedish van accident with J Mascis)

4th of July 2003 was probably the best, sort of... when i had a chance to appreciate being on a boat (the dressing room) docked behind the stage Interpol were playing on, it was great. We were in Kristiansand, Norway which is about 100 miles south of Oslo. It was 10:30 PM and the sun was nowhere near going down. I also remember trying to convince the drunk keyboard player that he should spend less time hating the band and more enjoying being on a boat in Norway. But he was lamenting that he wasn't on top of the old Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn for some vice magazine party. That wouldn't have been a big deal if it was an occasional occurence, but he whined everyday. And in his defense....the band at the time were not the easiest to be around. But you have to let that kind of stuff go.
I guess my point here is that me and all my touring friends are gearing up to go back to work. The months ahead are usually the biggest of the year and while some of them are on way bigger tours (and i can be jealous sometimes) I am excited to be working for the bands I am. I often find it thrilling to be on tour with a new or smaller band that people are excited about seeing and that no one has seen before. And maybe they haven't been to many of these places. And since I have been to them all more than once (or many times more than that) it's good to be with people that it's brand new to. It helps to make it more exciting for me.
Today I am wondering where I will be on the 4th of July.

I know i won't be getting "chiefed". Chiefed, apparently, is when you are hijacked or your plans are sabotaged by Rene. I lost my chiefed virginity on Saturday. I didn't really care as I don't really have much to do when I am not working. We were supposed to just go to Sherman Oaks mall to see 300 (awesome!). But Rene forced his errand to pick up Lily (she is 15) from her SAT exam or something on us. then we had to drop her off at a bank to get a cab so we could go see the movie. I don't know. I barely knew what was going on other than being in the back seat with a 15 year old girl that was embarrassed by her guardian and his "old" friends was amusing. It was the first time (of hopefully many) to make a teenager feel uncomfortable and annoyed by my presence. Cali said that being chiefed has cost him about 3,000 hours of his life. Here's what being Chiefed looks like, as we wander this deluxe high school campus in search of a tiny yellow sign that said "testing in progress. do not disturb". Again...i didn't really care.

in his defense, rene made up for chiefing us. he bought us our movie tickets.

later that night i actually went out after 10 pm and saw my old friends The Presets. they played at the ex-plex. it was awesome. they are the only electronic band i like, i think. that's actually probably not true...i like daft punk. the thing i like about The Presets is the live drum action. It was radical to see them do a whole headlining set in front of their friends and a sold out club to boot! last year when i worked for them they opened for the boring ladytron the whole time. The kids were stoked, tons of dancing and lots of hands in the air. I skulked in the back and took photos and prided myself on making it out.

this is what you look like when you realize that you just finished playing at 12 AM, you have to DJ until 2 AM and you have a flight to Tampa at 9 AM. And you have 10 more flights after that one. At least they both have frequent flier numbers.

i got a preview of the new Kime Buzzelli paintings yesterday! they are gonna blow your mind on Saturday. I'll show you some tomorrow.

oh yeah! Farmer Dave is the new keyboard player for Interpol! amazing! congratulations!

mike's trunk of secrets

the thing i keep finding funny about today is that i can't stop thinking about these three things that have been on my mind and inspiring me lately.
first....and the funniest, i think, cause i can't really say that the lyrics are all that positive or anything but it's the laughing hyenas. or more specifically i guess, john brannon's scream. it's there in the negative approach songs too, for sure. it's the best.

it makes me want to start a band. i have been painting all day and listening to the crawl ep over and over again, really loud. does anyone have a better yowl happening these days, or ever? i think not. click on the links to check it out. the lyrics are super harsh and down but there's something about when he let's out a "i waaaaaannnnnaa live FOREVER!!" during "Crawl" that makes me want to do things. i mean it makes me want to live forever in an entirely different context from the song. it literally gets my heart racing.
i wish i could MAKE you listen to them while reading this...i always thought i would love to go to a yoga class where we did yoga to hardcore music or early 90's noise rock instead of some of the lame shit i hear occasionally at classes i go to (usually meaning i won't go to those classes again).
and funnily enough when you do a google image search for Negative Approach Cali's photo of a kime buzzelli painting comes up. talk about inspiring!

ok

the second thing that has been on my mind lately is ian svenonious. you know who he is, don't you? he was in the nation of ulysses (!!!) and the make up (!!) and now weird war. on top of all that he has always challenged me intellectually. he has a new(ish) book, the psychic soviet. i still have only read parts. it doesn't only display his genius in writing it shows his humor too. i couldn't even begin to describe it but if you enjoy contemporary music and politics and rock n roll and history and wit and you want to watch someone deftly weave that all together, buy the book. it's only $12.
anyway the other night he was here, in LA at Family. and he read part of his book and made a performance with some slides and some volunteers. and it thrilled me inside.

NOU (photo from Scallen)

did you know that he changed my life?

did you know that if it weren't for ian and his band the make up i might not even be here in LA today? i may not even know 78% of the people i know now. i am sure that we can all say that about something or someone. it's probably not that special. but i feel lucky that ian, himself, returned my phone call when i was 24. i called him and told him that i wanted his band, cupid car club to come play a show in Cincinnati. I was tired of none of the bands i liked coming to town because they couldn't play an all ages space. so a friend and i found a bowling alley on the west, west side of town and the make up came and played what surely must have been one of, if not the first show of theirs outside dc. i remember they all had all white outfits on.

but ian's knees were incredibly dirty and i couldn't imagine why...soon enough i realized that he spent more than half the show falling to them and leaping up. when he pulled himself up by my belt buckle i felt inspired! just like i did the other night after his reading. wait, even before he had started. i felt it when i saw him walking across the street and he came up to me and we hugged. just like we did the day i first met the make up when they rolled into town and came to my house. when i opened the door there was this band i loved and they all walked in and they each hugged me as they passed. like we had known each other for years. and i am happy to say it was the beginning of a friendship. like so many others i still have with people that stayed at my house in those days.

his book! it's pink.

and finally...
it's the universe. fuck. it's crazy. according to this new york times magazine article the universe may be expanding at a faster rate than it ever has before. you'll have to read it for yourself because, although i have been reading many books about physics and the cosmos over the past few years, there is no way i could explain it to you. however, i will say, that when the some of the scientists begin discussing how they are going to give up if the new particle accelerator is incapable of creating dark matter or dark energy, i laugh. and i think it's awesome that things can be so awesome that maybe we have no hope of understanding them. fuck! there might be more than one universe! radical.

aren't you glad you're not at SXSW?

i know i am.

just don't let me fuck up will you

i'm home.

house of love

tonight i will sleep in a house with two buddha's buried in the walls. buried by the dalai lama himself.

oh yeah. he already granted one of my wishes cause there was a pair of size 10 1/2 silver, Dinosaur JR Nike SB Dunks waiting for me when i got here.

oh yeah.

now if you're a rick knucklehead after searing a hole in the ozone layer with your transatlantic first class flight you can now add insult to injury and take a fucking helicopter from JFK to your playground Manhattan.