Here are my pics from favorite cities London and Barcelona. Hit the right arrow on the keyboard to advance to the next pic if you hate mouse clicking

Here are my pics from Paris/ Normandy/Loire Valley finally. I’ll post London & Barcelona later. Hit the right arrow on the keyboard to advance to the next pic if you hate mouse clicking

Here’s the teaser vid I made for me and marco’s anything goes DJ monthly. Since people aren’t going out as much these days do to recession & regression, I thought reversing this old timey footage of Market St in the 1900s around the infamous earthquake would be appropriate. Let’s start mining for gold again!

//photo by grebo guru

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?). 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. 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.

crowd at Austin Music Hall anticipating old dudes in hazmat suits

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 like a child, and played this synth instrument that looked like 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.

Mothersbaugh as Booji Boy //photo by grebo guru

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 formerly of NIN and A Perfect Circle) 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 more than ever with the state of the world 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.

Camera purge! Kristy’s b-day at the Fairmont Hotel, Cal Academy of Sciences, Serg’s Warehouse Party and misc crud. Not pictured is all the awesome comedy I saw this month because of SF Sketchfest. Do you know how much i love this city? Yeah…you do.

Here are some photos from my Christmas in the Sonoma cuts. And more evidence my nephew Julian and I are kindred spirits.

The 5th Annual Tamale Day was epic this year. Lots of tamales, beer, the de la Hoya/Pacquiao fight on PPV, Rock Band funnery, and quality time with good folks. After most had left, somebody an idea to deep fry a tamale and the night had officially reached Level: JackAss. I watched as dudes proceeded to deep fry random things they could think of such as cookie dough, rum balls and a serrano chile pepper. Str8 comedy. Many thanks to Serg and EJ for putting this together as usual.

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Sorry that I’ve been apathetic about updates here. This past Saturday, there was a big soapbox derby at Dolores Park. It was a surreal dorkfest of epic proportions. 75,000 people came out to my neighborhood for this – that’s almost two ballparks worth of people. I’m lucky we got there early enough to secure a nice place on the grass to sit and watch the big screen. I’m amazed something like this was pulled off successfully. So much fun, comedy and action in one place, not to mention a beautiful day out. I really am in love with this city.

There were over 30 crafts that participated and each team did a little skit to music prior to pushing their craft down the top of the hill on Dolores Street. Gerardo Sandoval was the first one to go down Dolores as sort of a sacrificial lamb. It’s not too often you see a City Hall supervisor wearing a speed racer helmet going down in tiny box with wheels. I love that politicians in my city can embrace their inner dork. There was Bond’s 756th homerun ball with orange smoke trailing it, a rubiks cube (that solved itself in real time while on its run!), a giant boom box, hammerhead shark, giant squid, deathstar, a donut, Gene Simmons’s tongue, taco truck, and many more I can’t remember. Sheila E was one of the judges and she either gave everyone a 1 or a 10. She’s crazy.

las vegas, bingo, more county fairin, eating drinking, beach housing (right arrow to advance)

this is almost too embarassing to share but it also makes me laugh like a maniac in my head. i was on my friend’s roof the other nite to enjoy some fresh air which unintentionally turned into us “playing Rear Window”. we noticed that there was a quiet party in one of the windows directly across and in a half drawn shaded window next door, 2 sets of extremely large bare calves in athletic ankle socks were pacing around the floor closely, possibly about to get down. lights out, no action. we kept talking about how these were the biggest calves we’d ever seen and tried to figure out which ones belonged to a man or a woman, or whether they were same-sex calves. i proceed to take pictures of a few buildings because the lighting is ethereal at that hour in cameraland.

anyway, the next day i take a look at the pictures and in one of them, something seems a little off.

i’m getting a weird vibe looking at it. i zoom in closer, and oh my god! i think there is a guy in there.

and oh my god, he’s staring right at me. looking all retired porno actor in a robe with nothing underneath? could it be? this dude is MY personal Raymond Burr. and it was around 1:30am so it seemed a majority of the neighbors were asleep. seemed.

haha! just when you think you’re alone, there is a naked dude in a robe quietly staring at you.

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the ramones, cheap champagne and digital pictures of my friends and fam is what is standing between me and super sulker mode this neglected bingo night. folks who criticize the ramones for being idiots (who only talked about hamburgers and male prostitution) end up underestimating their power to make anyone, even Debbie Downer, super pumped for retarded behavior. I love The Clash but they couldn’t make me escape quite like the Ramones. Ay Romeo! I don’t wanna go down to the basement