What band is playing now?

Bands should always paint their name on the front of the base drum so you can tell who they are. Ricky Nelson, Laurence Welk, and the Carrie Nations did it. Otherwise, there is confusion. Junk Thief and I went to the Big Freedom Blowout at El Rio . We listened to The Mystic Sequins, I Was Using That Pencil, Introverted Smile, Shades of Melanie, and Insouisance. I loved the first band, with their two drummers and synth, not to mention patchwork pants. But because they didn't paint their name on the drumset I didn't know who they were and had to text message Landron who standing next to me. Speaking patchwork pants, Pope of Yes will be at the Knockout 3223 Mission at Valencia on July 15. Don't this this melodramatic popular song / classical opera and vocal / electro synth playful one-man-band duo. Photo by Eggs (c) 2008. Later, Junk Thief and oneself went to the Makeout Room to see PoY in a fantastic show on a school night. We got our posters signed and our spirits imbued.

Steamroller Punk

Men's Vogue Online had a great post about artist Chris Burden.
The fact that in 1971 a gallery Santa Ana, California featured a performance artist who had himself shot in the arm with a rifle astounds the mind. It was during the Vietnam war, but how could a groundbreaking (and skin breaking) piece be happening in that bed of right-wing paranoia, Orange County? Burden attended UC Irvine, one of the new UCs at the time that set their sites on experimentation. Tamara Fites is an alumna. Even today, homocore steampunker Tom Jennings works there a technician in the Arts Computation Engineering graduate program. Tom's own creations do not go back quite to the Victorian age, but the early days of real computing. One of his creations is a voice synthesizer using paper telex tape. Various "taped" stories can be loaded into the machine which speaks in an early artificial computer voice (resembling the train annoucments in BART stations). One tells the story of mathematician Alan Turing who broke the Nazi code, but was later arrested by the Brits for being a homosexual. Jennings is obsessed with codes and invented the early bulletin board file exchange protocol, fidonet. Speaking of computer voices, there is always HAL. Bryce is nostalgic now because it's been so long since he's sent a cable or a telex. That was text messaging! No happy faces. One of the keys rang a bell on the other end. Photo by Twylo That key combination is Cntrl+G.

We can rewrite Poe's poem:

Hear the sledges with the ctrl+Gs -

Silver ctrl-Gs!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

The WABAC Machine

As we learned in our last episode, Sherman has grown up and has a thriving interior design business in West Covina. He also does consulting for Sherman Williams whose sentence "There's nothing black and white about green." is worthy of Soseki.

I recently met Shermie at the SFMOMA. I was sitting outside enjoying beef stew that came with tooth-breaking garlic toasts. A young man about 35 came up to me and said "You must be Bryce Digdug." Sherman's voice had finally changed! It was very deep. He still has the big nerdy glasses — very Edith Head. He informed me that Mr. Peabody couldn't attend because of "pressing family business" (perhaps the birth of 10 nieces?) but I suspect Sherman may be estranged from his dogfather.

We both spoke of how we admire Freida Kahlo who has a really big shew at the museum. In the gift store they had Freida mints, rulers, badminton sets, shower curtains, Rubric's cubes, ice cube trays, book ends, bird whistles, chess sets, battery packs, opera capes, fondue sets, journals, playing cards, coloring books, recipe books, car wax, Mylar balloons, cereal, rings, row boats, and car stereos. Sherman commented that the shuttlecock is somehow very Spanish. "It looks like a mantilla." We conducted a long coversation about the mantilla. I said they are a good disguise. Women are supposed to wear one and dress in all black when visiting the pope unless they are Catholic royalty in which case they have the Privilège du blanc. Jackie should have pushed the envelope and assumed the Privilège du blanc. Ironically, white trash like Laura Bush do not have the Privilège du blanc. Can't you just see her in a mantilla? She wore one just last week at the pope's vulgar right-wing garden party.