Attention bookworms and record geeks! Look at this set called Cover Versions. so creative!

Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books.

I saw Shellac play at the Great American Music Hall last Wednesday night. Steve Albini is still an amusing asshole, Todd Trainer is still a freak and Bob Weston still solicits questions from the crowd between songs while Albini tunes the Travis Bean guitar strapped to his waist like it was a tool on a utility belt.

One highlight question to Weston, probably joking, was “How often do you use your Pro Tools rig?” It prompted the response “I don’t own a Pro Tools rig, my friend,” which made the audience giggle. Albini and Weston are two renown recording engineers who are still very much Nazis when it comes to being hardcore analog loyalists. Albini who has only recently caved in to the pressure of having a digital set-up in his Electrical Audio studios refuses to use it himself or even talk about it. Other questions from the crowd were gear related as one guy asked “Where’s the Harmonic Percolator?”, referring to a rare distortion pedal that is now holy grail material for hardcore audio nerds thanks to Albini championing it. This was truly the nerdiest/fanboy rock show ever but highly satisfying and cathartic for someone who had a very stressful day at work (AKA me). Going to this show alone and being one of the very few women there kinda made me feel like a perv.

Anyway, I don’t know why I feel this is worth mentioning, but Albini repeatedly did these pump fake b-ball moves towards the audience during “A Minute” but in a really intense and straight-faced serious manner. I was dying of laughter and really wish I got video. Here’s some other video instead

If it seems at all weird that I like this kind of dark and depraved rock music, here’s an old disclaimer post I made about Shellac in 2007

Flying Pig manufactures these super cute paper animation kits and they are so cool. I wanna get like 20 of them and decorate your house with them (not mine because I’ve got too much crap in it already).

There is a small section of free downloadable kits as well. Fun!

The Sleeveface photo pool on Flickr is an endless stream of record nerd fun. Covers with giant faces on them are so much fun to use this way.

That’s what she said. Got this in the mail today and the packaging rules. Sub Pop released a bunch of 7″ colored vinyl exclusives for Record Store Day recently and I nabbed this because there were 2 songs not on the LP.

I haven’t mentioned this here, but Sub Pop linked to my “Fake Kinkade” post on the Obits artist homepage, which made me smile I have to admit.

//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?). 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.

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, 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.

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) 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.

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.

Herzog/Kinski

Sam Peckinpah

I was getting really excited researching topiary gardens and garden mazes I want to visit in England this spring and decided that Longleat’s maze is not only doable as a daytrip for my proximity but it turns out to be the longest garden maze in the world

Because it is in a nerd’s nature to run with trains of thought and tangents, all these pictures of crazy gardens and castles made me think that if I had the money and resources, I would love to design an edutainment amusement park based on old mystery cliches (or classic Scooby Doo episodes) where predestined secret doors and passageways would be revealed after going into a huge old timey library and pulling certain famous books out of the shelves. A secret doorway would reveal a path to a different adventure base on that book’s story or genre like the Choose Your Own Adventure books i grew up on.

And along these predetermined paths besides the best landscape architecture possible and most realistic faux landmarks, there would be some puzzles and brain teasers to solve to further the plot of the story and advance to the next level/setting. Off the top of my head, I can think of stories like The Most Dangerous Game, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland as inspiration for the different paths/doorways. And maybe for the 21+ group, a tour would be devised where if you fuck up on your forked road choices, you would end up gettin bricked into a wall alive while sipping on a cask of amontillado ala Edgar Allan Poe. That would be game over/end of the tour and eventually spit your loser ass out in the parking lot back to the stationwagon.

OK now point me to the indiscriminate banks that would fund this idea, ha ha ha.

Rest in peace to a true legend and one of the most likable guys in rock history.

First off, please check out this San Francisco blog Beer and Nosh. It’s soooo good. Not only are the photographic essays top notch, but I can’t think of a website ever causing me to daydream about food and beer like this one does. And you KNOW there are a lot of food and drink sites out there. It is from this site I learned about Mission Street Food Thursdays. Every Thursday, volunteers take over a chinese restaurant on Mission and 18th and have a guest chef construct a next level menu inspired by street food. Check out the past menus on the site. Not only delicious sounding but very reasonably priced. I’m excited about hitting these up regularly.

Anyway, Serg and Stef took me to City Beer for the first time and jesus, that place is a beer geek’s paradise! I spent too much money there

and a few bottles of Delirium and Chimay. Still trying to figure out what I want to bring tonight to share with my family. After all this holiday stuff is over, I’m looking forward to trying to homebrew. I’ll document that here of course. Happy Holidays.

Christ, I’m almost 30 and I bought a Barbie. My first barbie, mind you because we could never afford it growing up. Anyway, this one is special because it’s from one of my favorite movies

and it’s 100% real. Hitchcock and The Birds is a pretty odd and amazing choice for a Barbie but so perfect. Melanie Daniels, the San Francisco socialite character in The Birds is kind of an unlikeable beauty who always gets her way. She’s smug, bored and rich and eventually gets comeuppance for a life of complacency in the form of massive bird peckage when she leaves the comforts of her stomping grounds.

My costume is finished!

I’m Bjork when she wore that dead swan dress to the Oscars a few years ago. Now all I need is a baby to carry around with me and I’ll punch anyone who tries to take a picture of me.

I stumbled upon this Toy-A-Day blog when I google image searched Clockwork Orange due to someone claiming they wore top hats and I could have sworn they were bowler hats. Anyway… this blog publishes an downloadable paper toy a day in a high res pdf, much like the readymech ones I posted about here awhile back.