A Spike Lee Joint

Captain's Log, star-date 4/28/2011. The last two days have been more of the same for us . . . long days rife with tales of mystery, death, and deceit.

Aunt Cathy woke us up bright and early (or after noon) and took us out for a sweet little breakfast at a new restaurant by the Charles River. The food was good, the company was great, and the service was . . . interesting.

From there Aunt Cathy took us to the farm where she owns a share in their CSA.




Charlie and his wife were wonderful and after showing Zac his first ever chicken and catching a couple wild goats they forced Mike to drink a beer. He hated it.

We then drove back to NYC yet again because we love it so much. Air Bud met us at his front door, but first he answered the age old question . . . "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?". He found her on Graham St. in Brooklyn, bought a huge pizza pie from her, and brought it to us to enjoy in his apartment. Bryant misunderstood what it meant to be a "GUMshoe" and tried to sit in some instead. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture of that.


Air Bud told us about his encounter with a girl named Molly. She seemed a little tough to stomach at the first, but nice enough by the end of the night. The story ended with Air Bud teaching Bryant how to do the hand-jive with BOTH hands at the same time. I watched.

We played a real buster show at Spike Hill, but our wonderful friends (Kat and the bandcycle crew) stuck with us through the end of our free 1 a.m. show on a Tuesday night. Zac decided to stay home and sleep instead of playing.

He made the right decision.

Spike Lee from Spike Hill got us all so wasted that we didn't notice the gas leak in Air Bud's place and Mike, Zac, and I died.

. . . we got better.

The next morning we woke up to find this clue:


We determined that it meant that we must seek out and watch Low with Milagres at the Bowery Ballroom. So we set out on our quest.

We checked Low's castle in Central Park . . .

this miniature city . . .

and Bryant's Droid. But alas Low, Milagres, and the Bowery Ballroom were nowhere to be found.

We met up with a dear old friend Jessica and it was immediately like old times . . . her and Zac trying to recreate Devo photo shoots in Times Square:


Eventually we found what we were looking for and the rest of night was pure bliss . . .

Milagres playing to a sold out Bowery Ballroom crowd that was into it.

And Low, blowing the roof off of my live show experience. We all loved the show. Low's set was just about perfect . . . a quiet, moody, seamless set, including nearly all of "the jams". They created a vibe and the whole place was feeling it.


Unfortunately Low's dark side turned Bryno into a zombie, who in turn turned Air Bud into a zombie, and they ate Mike and I.

Zac, the sole surviver, had a nice end to the night which consisted of enjoying some sandwiches and beers with his new best bud Steven at Kyle's wonderful Wiliamsburgh apartment.


This is Tim signing off. Good night and good luck.

feeling the way

as i sort of mentioned in the Easter post, we've been staying with tim's most gracious and accommodating aunt and uncle this weekend. good conversation, good food, good sleep....the only way we really had to repay them was to have steven play his favorite pop and show tunes on their piano. here he is doing a medley of "come sail away" and "bohemian rhapsody"



kyle really insisted on showing all of us this video. it was horrifying. fraser had to look away.


bryant and fraser WERE playing with this ball, but then that mean old dog took it away and ruined all the fun. eric and i documented the entire thing. we're taking the owners to "people's court" for not keeping such a fearsome beast on a leash


here's zac, once again, doing his best impersonation of steven. he's playing "candle in the wind"






here's chris losing at a game of "words with friends"


here's zac trying to teach steven his concentration/black magick van loading technique. the problem is, unlike zac, steven's heart is pure, so he's unable to harness the evil darkness. let your light shine, steven. . . for the world to see!

Hoppy Easter!

here's a live video of Milagres we shot on Easter Sunday, 2011.

playing a show on Easter Sunday is a tricky (and very stupid) business. BUT, we'll get to that in a minute.


no joke...this is zac seeing the ocean for the very first time. he got bored real fast and kept complaining that he "thought it would be bigger". what a brat.


two half-italians and a hillbilly walk up to a lighthouse. the first half-italian says "umm..........................." and then there's about 2 minutes of silence. the second half-italian looks into the water and says "hey, look dis! i think i just saw a brown turlet trout!". then the hillbilly looks around and goes, "........uh, is there like a pool we could take a dip in?".




after we took this shot, some runner lady with a mouth full of granola waddled by and goes "i've never seen anybody take THAT picture before...". it's cool to know that even when we leave home and reach a foreign land like the east coast, people still appreciate our cutting-edge style.


tim and cousin sam


bryno in the middle of half a hand-jive.


there is a very, very good chance that this is a picture of the best meal i ever ate. prepared by tim's aunt and uncle and shared with us on the afternoon of Easter. there was salad. there was asparagus. there were 2 loaves of homemade bread. there were potatoes and gravy. there was ham. there was lamb. there was ricotta pie. there was cookie pie. there were seconds....


we ate so much that tim immediately died.


bryant was gonna rat us out for not turning over tim's body to the proper authorities, so we bound him up and tortured him, gitmo style.


then, since it was Easter, tim came back to life and we forgave bryant. then the 4 of us went inside to watch our buddies practice for the next night's rock show.


HoPpY EaStEr!!

Great Friday, cool Saturday

we woke up (relatively) early the next day so we could do two things....have brunch with Kat, and buy tickets to see Low (with Milagres) on the 27th. I'm not sure if Low realizes that they get to play with the band that just did FIVE shows with husband&wife, but i'm sure they'll be excited when they find out. this was Kat's reaction when Tim said that same sentence to her....


we left NYC and headed for Winooski, VT. First things first....we met up with our Milagres buddies and went for some vietnamese food. it wasn't spicy enough for kyle. he likes them real spicy. he put sriracha and jalepenos in his soup to make it tougher.

after that we played a show, and when Milagres went on it looked like this:


i don't have any photographic evidence of this, but after the show we stayed with the sweetest girl in the world named Katie. She was super kind to us, gave us the scoop on what's good in VT, and made us feel very comfortable. Katie, if you're out there, we love you. please contact us and we'll be friends for life.

on with the show....

after we left Katie's place it freaking snowed and snowed and snowed all day and it was like a blizzard, but it was in April and it made no sense and we hated it, but what could we do because it was just dumb stupid weather. it was pretty though. see?



halfway through the trip to Maine, our van broke down. like i said, it was a blizzard, so conditions got a little hairy with no heat and no transportation. we drew straws and Zac and Bryant had no choice but to kill and butcher and eat me and Tim so they could survive. Donner-Party-style. here they are after their hearty feast. turns out, the van wasn't dead after all, so these two guys continued the tour without us.


i was just kidding about all that cannibalism business...what actually happened is that after the van broke down we were walking to the nearest gas station when we all fell down a rabbit hole and ended up in this magical saloon. i don't know what it was, but whatever cowboys lived in this alternate universe had won a lot of trophies. we weren't looking for trouble, and we certainly couldn't compete with these muchachos, so we had some shots of sarsaparilla, passed out immediately, and woke up back in our van, never to speak of it again. until i just wrote this blog.


we eventually made it to portland, where bryant read the paper while Milagres did a soundcheck. one of the great things about being the opening band is that you don't have to do anything but show up and play. sure, you're set's going to sound bad, BUT while the headliners are busy fussing over their monitor mixes and EQs and ryders, you can sit in the greenroom and eat bananas like this:

it's real fun to much a banana. you can tell, because i'm laughing.


for real though, Milagres rule. their record is coming out this fall on the Kill Rock Stars label and i'm super excited to hear it. until then, i'm going to hear these songs played over and over for the next five nights. you are jealous.

oh, i also got this picture of Chris for my collection of "photos of people who are sleeping or dead". there'll be a nice round-up of these photos at the end of the tour, but here's a taste for now. it'll kind of be like "Hot or Not", but you'll have to decide whether the people are alseep, or dead. get it?

But I can't f$&#ing close mine s#*%

New York City. We've got a serious love/hate thing going on with this city. Over the years, it's been home to some of our highest highs and our lowest lows. This time though, the stars aligned. We played the Rock Shop in Brooklyn, not only to a room full of people, but a room full our rowdy friends. It was the kind of welcoming show we're only used to experiencing in Bloomington, or Muncie, but here we were living it up in the big city having the thrill of a lifetime. Thanks to all of our friends that came out and joined in the fun. We appreciate that.

 
This is our good old pal Airbud. He provided us with a most comfortable crashpad during our visit. He's one of the kindest, funniest, friendliest jokers you'll ever meet. You can tell he's cool in this photo by the way he's lounging. Airbud strolls, that's it and that's all. Here he is telling us some story about sex-trade-mad-cow-disease or something like that. I wasn't paying attention. We were way too busy scarfing his leftover Passover foodover allover nightover.






Our first order of business in NYC was to stop by the Kennel to record a session with Jim Santo, Billy the engineer who's last name I never got, and Jack Rabid - editor of The Big Takeover. Those dudes were totally sweet and the recording session was fun and went smoothly. We'll have more on this (and you'll be able to hear it) in about a month or so.


We probably haven't gotten a chance to mention it yet, but we totally sold-out of the Proud Flesh LPs that we brought with us about halfway through this tour, which was definitely unexpected. For as talented and incredible as we are, we're very humble, so the selling out came as a nice surprise. Here's a photo of the package of MORE records, sent to us by the lovely and beautiful Jared P Cheek of Flannelgraph Records. Hopefully, if we can sell the rest of these, we can afford to get Jared some drawing lessons and he'll stop drawing Bullwinkle on everything. Until then we'll be spending our time at the moose, goose, and got-loose.


Kat Lee is one of our oldest and dearest New York friends. This is her (and husband Corey's) band ohnomoon, and they are great. They should be dropping some recordings on us soon, so prepare yourself accordingly.


Right before we played, Tim dropped his cell phone behind/under the stage. Here's Kat laughing at him during his first (of several) attempt at crawling under there to retrieve it. It was gross down there, and probably full of spiders (like mayberry's old bandstand), but he eventually got his phone back and even scored a few new cables while he was down there.


In 2009 Glass Ghost released one of my favorite records, Idol Omen, on one of my favorite record labels, Western Vinyl. Here's me seeing them live for the first time and loving every single note of it. For those of you in the know, its kind of like if Ben Lumsdaine and Dave Segedy were fused together and joined Kill & Eat but had Aaron Neville singing. Not to mention, they were incredibly friendly and charming. I hope we get to cross paths again soon.


And finally, here's our old buddy Taylor getting into a shouting match with Bryant. Neither of them were upset, and they weren't saying anything, just shouting. For like a half hour. It was super annoying, so we ditched Taylor and murdered Bryant. Here's a picture of his corpse.