Aug 2007
Have bike will travel
08/30/07 Filed in: Rambling
Having fully embraced this nomadic lifestyle, Johnny & I decided that it was time for some bikes. Yesterday we purchased a pair of Dahon folding bikes & they are an amazing design. This morning we spent two hours riding along the Hudson River, on the West Side Waterfront Greenway path and then pedaled home for lunch. Yesterday we rode around Central Park, where we spotted Brad Pitt riding in a horse and buggy, surrounded by paparazzi. I cannot wait to explore cities all over the world on these folding bikes. We also ordered the Airporter suitcase, which allows us to check the bikes as luggage when we fly and store them in the bus bay while on tour.
Upcoming European tour
08/29/07 Filed in: Rambling
We are currently on
a BREAK
Aug 27- Sept 4 - New York City
Sept 6- Sept 16 - Portland, Oregon
Where we will attend:
Time Based Arts Festival at PICA & The Affair at the Jupiter Art Fair
Wed Sept 26 - Ice Hall - Helsinki, Finland
Fri Sept 28- Hovet - Stockholm, Sweden
Sat Sept 29 - Spectrum - Oslo, Norway
Mon Oct 1- Capitol- Hanover, Germany
Tue Oct 2- Torwar Hall- Warsaw, Poland
Thurs Oct 4 - Lotto Arena - Antwerp, Belgium
Fri Oct 5th - Zenith - Paris, France
Sun Oct 7 - Philipshalle - Dusseldorf, Germany
Mon Oct 8 - Jahrhunderthalle Hoechst - Franfurt, Germany
Tue Oct 9 - Ahoy - Rotterdam, Netherlands
Thu Oct 11- Carling Glasgow Academy- Glasow, UK
Fri Oct 12- Carling Apollo- Manchester, UK
Sat Oct 13- Wembley Arena- London, UK
BREAK - Munich
Sun Oct 21 - Tonhalle - Munich, Germany
Mon Oct 22 - Stadthalle - Eriagen, Germany
Tue Oct 23 - Messe B - Stuttgart, Germany
Thurs Oct 25- Land Rover Arena- Bologna, Italy
Fri Oct 26- Palaottomatica- Roma, Italy
Sat Oct 27- Palasport- Andria, Italy
Mon Oct 29- DatchForum- Milano, Italy
Tue Oct 30- Palasport- Padova, Italy
Wed Oct 31- Eulachhalle- Winterthur, SWI
Fri Nov 9- Newport Centre- Wales, UK
Sat Nov 10- Civic Hall- Wolverhampton, UK
Sun Nov 11- King George's Hall- Blackburn, UK
Aug 27- Sept 4 - New York City
Sept 6- Sept 16 - Portland, Oregon
Where we will attend:
Time Based Arts Festival at PICA & The Affair at the Jupiter Art Fair
Wed Sept 26 - Ice Hall - Helsinki, Finland
Fri Sept 28- Hovet - Stockholm, Sweden
Sat Sept 29 - Spectrum - Oslo, Norway
Mon Oct 1- Capitol- Hanover, Germany
Tue Oct 2- Torwar Hall- Warsaw, Poland
Thurs Oct 4 - Lotto Arena - Antwerp, Belgium
Fri Oct 5th - Zenith - Paris, France
Sun Oct 7 - Philipshalle - Dusseldorf, Germany
Mon Oct 8 - Jahrhunderthalle Hoechst - Franfurt, Germany
Tue Oct 9 - Ahoy - Rotterdam, Netherlands
Thu Oct 11- Carling Glasgow Academy- Glasow, UK
Fri Oct 12- Carling Apollo- Manchester, UK
Sat Oct 13- Wembley Arena- London, UK
BREAK - Munich
Sun Oct 21 - Tonhalle - Munich, Germany
Mon Oct 22 - Stadthalle - Eriagen, Germany
Tue Oct 23 - Messe B - Stuttgart, Germany
Thurs Oct 25- Land Rover Arena- Bologna, Italy
Fri Oct 26- Palaottomatica- Roma, Italy
Sat Oct 27- Palasport- Andria, Italy
Mon Oct 29- DatchForum- Milano, Italy
Tue Oct 30- Palasport- Padova, Italy
Wed Oct 31- Eulachhalle- Winterthur, SWI
Fri Nov 9- Newport Centre- Wales, UK
Sat Nov 10- Civic Hall- Wolverhampton, UK
Sun Nov 11- King George's Hall- Blackburn, UK
Love from Jersey
08/24/07
THIS PLACE IS HUGE !!
Video Killed the Radio Star
08/24/07 Filed in: Art
As we approach New York City and the end of this US tour leg, I am thinking alot about music videos. Maybe it is because I am a first generation MTV kid, reared by Martha Quinn on the "I want my MTV" slogan? Last year when we toured with Thomas Dolby, it was amazing to see the crowd react to his Blinded me with Science video-still fresh after so many years. Dolby is a first generation MTV rock star. But times have changed and MTV's recent shift to "reality shows" holds little interest for me.
Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry are today's masters of music videos. Also Warp Films, a digital film studio in the UK that is connected to Warp Records and Cunningham is working on some interesting projects. Closer to home, Portland-based filmmaker Matt McCormick has recently made good videos for some West Coast bands.
Perhaps the most interesting development in the genre is how YouTube allows us to mine this evolution in AudioVisual history. The first video to be played on MTV was Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. Here are a few others:
talking heads - Once in a Lifetime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYbUCvz1LYE
talking heads - Burning Down the House
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oVuLJS_Eok&mode=related&search=
aphex twin - come to daddy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Az_7U0-cK0
Time Lapse Load In
08/20/07
In Detroit we took this time lapse series to document the Load In process. This particular day was not as dramatic as a Load In that takes place in a big hockey arena, where there is only a big platform in the center of the room when we arrive. But this old theater was a beautiful reminder of Detroit's boom-times . The quicktime movie is a bit like an electronic flipbook. We are planning to take another series this week, which will go from the moment we arrive on-site until the end of the show- almost 12 hours later. As of today, we have 7 days left on the US leg of the tour!
Super towers of the future
08/18/07 Filed in: Rambling
Today we are playing at an outdoor amphitheater in Toronto, which stands in the shadow of the The CN Tower, "Canada's wonder of the world". This tower was built in 1976 and is still the world's tallest free-standing structure on land, although a proposed tower in Dubai is set to surpass it in 2009. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Toronto was a booming 'City of the Future' (much like Dubai today) and the tower was a potent symbol of the strength of Canadian industry. The CV Tower has even been named one of the Seven Wonders of the World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
There are several other significant towers in the world, but Berlin & Seattle have my two favorites. Berlin's TV Tower/ Fernsehturm was built between 1965 and 1969 by the former German Democratic Republic, as a monument to the power of Socialism in Germany. On my 30th birthday, Jdk & I went up there to celebrate while looking down upon the dynamic Alexanderplatz and surrounding Berlin. The Space Needle in Seattle, Washington was built in 1962 for the World's Fair and stands as a reminder of the sci-fi Future City, a vision that looks so retro today.
Canadian Carnyland
08/16/07 Filed in: Rambling
Crossed the US border to play our first state fairground show in the rain
Rock Gods
08/14/07 Filed in: Rambling
When we arrived in Baltimore this morning, I was surprised that it did not look like a set from a John Water’s film. The waterfront area where we are tonight looks more like Boston or Annapolis with mega-shops, restaurants, and sailboats. You know, nice but a little dull. So I found a bookstore and picked up Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery, which claims “Metallica is the “thinking man’s” metal band and the headbanger’s CNN”. Not sure if this Professor of Popular Culture will deliver on bringing me into the fold of Metallica’s music via theory, but I figured that if I was ever going to read this book, being on the road with a metal band was the right time to do it.
We leave the US tonight for Quebec City – Viva La Quebec!
Photo by Bill Worsham, my bus mate from the lighting team
Txt Me L8r is coming to an end
08/14/07 Filed in: Art
This crowdsourced exhibition is coming to its grand finale on August 24 at the Houston Center for Photography. If you cannot attend the opening/ closing party, you can look at the photos throughout the month on the flickr site
Hello Cleveland
08/11/07 Filed in: Rambling
The weather here is amazing with a light breeze and sunshine. It feels like a real beach day. We are playing tonight at an outdoor arena along the river and throughout the day Great Lake tankers and tour boats have been passing by the venue. They make me long to live aboard a houseboat- trading in the dirt and grime of the highway for the open seas.
Video World
08/10/07 Filed in: Rambling
This photo of us was taken by Andrea Grover, while she was hanging out backstage in Houston.
We arrived in Chicago this morning & since it is a union theater, we had to wait on their guys to set up our gear. This makes for a slow moving morning, but it is much easier on the body. Our video show has been getting better and better each night and we are now using the live cameras throughout the entire show. On occasion we do still miss a cue, but for the most part, I think we are really starting to rock!
Today I learned that artist, Bill Viola designed the video for a Nine Inch Nails tour in early 2000. I hear they produced a DVD of that tour, which I will have to look for. Rolling rolling rolling - we leave for Cleveland tonight and have the day off in Detroit on Sunday!
Minneapolis
08/09/07
Today was our first true 'day off' since July 17. Minneapolis seems to be recovering from last week's i-35 tragedy and we had a wonderful day exploring some of the cities finer points. Sadly we did not make it to the Walker Art Center, where last summer we had a personal tour from the curator Yasmil. But Jdk and I did re-visit the 1950s time-warp Nye's Polonaise Room with Piano Bar and Polka Lounge. The golden glittering naugihide booths are the wonderful compliment to the beehived hostess and stuffed cabbage perogi plates.
Eastbound and down, loaded up and truckin
08/05/07 Filed in: Rambling
We had a great show in Austin and are now heading
across Oklahoma on route to Kansas City.
Photo: txtmel8r Assignment #2 was "What does the weather look like?"
Photo: txtmel8r Assignment #2 was "What does the weather look like?"
The Delicacy of Rock and Roll
08/01/07 Filed in: Rambling
This morning I woke up and was unsure of what day of
the week it was and of what state I was in. I guess
the mentality of Rock and Roll tour has fully set in.
As we roll back into Texas, I feel welcomed home by
that familiar smell of summer rain.
I keep coming back to the scanned copy of Dave Hickey's essay The Delicacy of Rock and Roll from Air Guitar, that I saved to my desktop before leaving Houston. My favorite 2 paragraphs come at the end of the essay:
"Rock-and- Roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us- as damaged and anti-social as we are- might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock- like "free" jazz- sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock- and-Roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising."
I keep coming back to the scanned copy of Dave Hickey's essay The Delicacy of Rock and Roll from Air Guitar, that I saved to my desktop before leaving Houston. My favorite 2 paragraphs come at the end of the essay:
"Rock-and- Roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us- as damaged and anti-social as we are- might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock- like "free" jazz- sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock- and-Roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising."
Johnny DeKam in the news
08/01/07 Filed in: Art
Here are two articles that have recently appeared
on-line:
from Live Design: DIY Video for Thomas Dolby
from Creating Digital Motion: Thomas Dolby Interviewed on CD Music; Johnny DeKam, Visualist
from Live Design: DIY Video for Thomas Dolby
from Creating Digital Motion: Thomas Dolby Interviewed on CD Music; Johnny DeKam, Visualist