I’m leaving for Europe in the middle of the night for 3 weeks and even though I will be online intermittently, I doubt I will have time to update the site. I’ll be visiting Paris, London and Barcelona, the first 2 places I’ve never been before. Here are some pics I took with my Holga in Barcelona the last time I was there 8 years ago. I promise I will come back with better photos this tour.
This deserves a separate post because the Devo panel and show at the Austin Music Hall will go down as one of my most fond and epicly entertaining memories, not just of South By Southwest, but as someone who has had a lifelong obsession with music and the stories behind it. I’ve admired Mark Mothersbaugh for a long time and think of him as a visionary, not to mention one of the most endearing and interesting oddballs in pop culture history.
When I was in high school, there was one issue of Mean Magazine that had a feature on him and it came with an insert of about 100 miniature stickers of his comical visual art. I had no idea at the time that he was actually a pretty gifted visual artist. Check out his amusing website of his works. My appreciation for him continued to grow through the years. For instance recently, I read that he is legally blind without his glasses. The story is that when he went to the optometrist as a 7 year old and received his first pair of glasses, he saw for the very first time “smoke from chimneys and birds.” After truly seeing and “experiencing” the world for the first time, he was inspired to illustrate. That same night he had dreamed of being a famous artist. That anecdote is so profoundly touching to me and adds another fascinating dimension to his already inherently interesting personality (How the f*** did this music come out of Akron, Ohio?). Strangely enough, Jerry Casale and Mothersbaugh met at Kent State around the time the government was shooting students and snuck around making music and films together when the campus shut down and curfews were in order.
Aside from the arty stuff, he’s a really damn good composer and did the theme for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and a gang of scores for movies, including the Wes Anderson movies like Rushmore, Royal Tennenbaums, etc etc. Anyway, blah blah blah so there’s a little background information on why I adore this spazzy renaissance man so much.
So I wanted to hear him talk as part of the Devo panel for SXSW. Surprisingly, he was soft spoken — almost shy– while Jerry did most of the promo talking (and trash talking). I’ve seen photos of Mothersbaugh present day during Devo shows as a 58 year old man in full hazmat get up and energy dome hat and couldn’t help but shake my head. Before going to this show at the Austin Music Hall I didn’t know what to expect. I was excited but I also was a little worried that I might feel embarrassed for these old dudes not being able to pull off this foolishness that they were known for as young ones. Not to mention they were playing at midnight (way too late for old guys to be rocking out) and after Tricky too, how weird is that? I knew this show would be surreal, but I was hoping it would be the kind of surreal that was intended.
After Tricky nearly puts me to sleep, gyrating and trying to rock-out to unfortunately mid-tempo repetitious tracks with a pseudo-Martina on vocals, It’s finally time for Devo to come out at midnight. The set begins with a huge screen in the backdrop scrolling absurd and amusing visuals of Devo’s long history and the audience is getting hyped. They come out in the worksuits to a new song called Don’t Shoot with a hilarious animated video highlighting the song’s theme (the outro of the song is “Don’t tase me, bro!” over and over). It’s at that point I realize the entire concert is going to have these amazing visuals synced with the live music and I knew it was going to be highly entertaining and nothing like I’ve ever seen before. So brilliant! Mothersbaugh’s vocals were perfect all night, and they all performed and did routines with the energy and theatrics of men in their 20s… for one and a half hours. For the encore Mothersbaugh came out as Booji Boy, sang Beautiful World in falsetto, and played this custom circuit bent synth instrument that was molded onto a tennis racket and had a toy duck head sticking out at the end of the neck. At the very end, he pulls down his pants and all these super balls come spilling out. He grabs hand fulls and bounces them into the audience. Remember those rubber balls you got for a quarter in the grocery store machine? In no time, these super balls are bouncing all over within the audience and the music hall. The audience was going CRAZY.
When the show was over I was filled with a kind of satisfaction i can only describe as childlike joy. Devo’s amusing antics were contagious and convincing and still makes me smile when I think about it. What makes me even more happy is that now that they have a full time drummer (Josh Freese) they will tour instead of playing these intermittent shows in places I will never be. The new songs they debuted were great, and I’ll show a video of one they played down below. There are a lot of current bands obviously inspired by that sound, but they lack the absurdity/ fun in subversive commentary and satire. Now with the poor state of things and infrastructures crumbling left and right, Devo’s idea of “De-Evolution” is more relevant than ever and I am grateful they are still doing their thing. Mothersbaugh and Co’s live show is the equivalent of attending an eternal pizza party when the rest of the world is on the brink of apocalypse and you have no choice but to feel joy and laugh in the face of tragedy. The day he stops being awesome is a day I hope I never see. He gives me hope and optimism in growing old.
two videos from the show. sorry, these clips aren’t high fidelity – loud drums and bass are impossible to capture with a point and shoot camera.
Long story short, my friend Lauren the Saint hooked me up with a music badge for SXSW and I was in Austin, TX from Wed to Sunday for music bliss. I saw Freeway, Bun B, Janelle Monae, Diplo, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Black Lips, Jadakiss, Devo, and a whole bunch of bands I don’t know the name of and my friends Djing. I left the Fader Fort before Kanye because the portapotty situation was dire when all these people came for him. Overall though, It was a great experience.
Here’s a slide show because as usual, I hate scrolling and have too many pictures. Click right arrow on your keyboard to advance to the next picture.
Echo and the Bunnymen doing one of my favorite songs
We had a gathering of food and drink at my friend Elias’s house to welcome Corey to San Francisco. Serg got a pork shoulder from that La Gallinita butcher shop in the Mission (the one with the pigs cooking pigs artwork painted outside) He smoked it for 7+ hours for pulled pork sliders and it was delicious. I was put in charge of decorations so I printed cutouts of those joyous cannibal pigs and stuck up where ever there was blank space on walls. Sorry to my vegetarian readers for the offensive imagery, but cannibal pigs artwork on butcher shops is just too absurd and amusing to me. I also hit up the mission dollar stores and got random flags of mexico, puerto rico and argentina as well as party balloons/streamers. Good times, you can read Serg’s recap on Grocery Eats
After an afternoon full of drinking, food and rock band dorkery the evening reached new levels of retardation as it usually does when Elias hosts a food & drink party at his house. I don’t know whose idea it was, I think maybe Lydia, but it was decided that The Many Facets of Roger album cover needed to be recreated and I was put in charge of photo and art direction. Too bad we forgot to take the sheet down for the back cover.
My friend Alexis Mackenzie was asked to do a shirt for the Select Series from Threadless and it’s great just like she is.
Also, thanks to everyone who voted for my silly t-shirt so far and much thanks to Allan from Mission Mission and Plug1 from What I’m Seeing for spreading the word. It’s been scored 477 times so far with 3 days left to vote. fingers crossed!
Just picked up two film nerd limited run shirts Maria Forde drew for my local video store for $12 each. She rules and I’ve talked about how much she rules here before.
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