6/27/17

B0DYH1GH PLAYS THIS THURSDAY 6/29 AT KNOCKDOWN CENTER

In 2010 I started B0DYH1GH with Perfect Li’l Daniel. We’re performing for the first time in over a year on Thursday at the Knockdown Center with two of my favorite bands in New York City: BOILED WOOL & SISTER PACT.

“A DEEP BOOMING LAUGH”

Boiled Wool
B0DYH1GH
Sister Pact

Saturday, July 29, 2017
7:00pm Doors/8:00pm Show
21+ // Tickets $8: http://ticketf.ly/2p5u1Cd

A DEEP BOOMING LAUGH is an evening of atmospheric music by Brooklyn-based bands B0DYH1GH, Boiled Wool, and Sister Pact. Largely inspired by Riot Grrrl culture, the three acts revel in the Sad Girl aesthetic, producing pensive, intensifying music that features gorgeous sound reverberations that resonate within the acoustics of the Knockdown Center, providing an opportunity to collectively explore what diligent and thoughtful music can mean in the present.

I’m only a little surprised, but I feel like a lot of people only know B0DYH1GH from our tumblr. Sort of a joke, an art project.
There’s a really good interview with B0DYH1GH in BOMB Magazine, by Ben Rosenberg from 2014.

We also recently put the entire B0DYH1GH discography up on Bandcamp. In advance of our show this week I wanted to talk about these records.


PRETTY BEAUTIFUL


PRETTY BEAUTIFUL was our first mythtape, and is sort of narrative. To my mind, these songs are us sort of finding our way and forging a sound. We’re basically constructing a number of inside jokes and then telling them until they’re not funny anymore. I’m personally really excited by the ways in which sinister and sweet, child and adult look in tandem when overlapped. I think of half of these songs as unlistenable, and the other half as our legendary pop song hits. On these songs maybe more than anywhere, I think PLD really establishes himself as a beautifully perverted lyricist. I don’t know, per se, what he’s singing about, but I feel like they’re resonant of horror and eros,


BUTTERBAWL


We made BUTTERBAWL for an art exhibition put together by East Village Boys. I feel like we inadvertently spent more time on this material than anything before or since. I’m really proud of these songs, and I find that people react really positively to these songs in a different way from our more pop-oriented material. There was something really difficult and freeing in not working with vocals or song structures per se. I remember writing and recording these songs during a particularly hot spring day (Mother’s Day) in PLD’s old apartment, in the living room, and feeling like we were in a trance. These are the most abstract and ambient B0DYH1GH recordings but I think also the most melodic and accessible, somehow. Good music for fucking.


LILDED GILLY


The lost mythtape! The final unreleased album! These are the songs and mixes that we recovered after a great absence. We recorded at least three or four versions of these songs, as well as many others that didn’t make the cut. These are the ones that we decided should be on the record.

LILDED GILLY, the title, is obviously referencing the B0DYH1GH aesthetic of rapture and confusion. To embellish and obscure simultaneously. To read and forget. These are our most pared-down, minimalist songs, and maybe the most radio-friendly. I feel like this is our master work and I can’t believe it took so long for them to come out, but I really want people to hear this.



On Thursday, we’ll be performing ALL NEW MUSIC which will sound like a mix of mostly the last two records.

6/19/17

REST IN CORRECTNESS

This is the thing I read at Walter Cessna's memorial last Monday. I miss him a lot.
What to wear to Walter’s funeral. What song to sing. How to look. What to serve. How to say to those gathered what I know you all know. How to remind. How to pay tribute. How to remember. How to keep in our hearts. How to bring him with us from now on. How to say goodbye. How to be correct in the future, without him.

How to find him. Where to search for him. If I encounter him again, will I recognize him?

How to stay fukt and fix it. What to capture, describe, photograph, dress up, remember, love. Which pieces to save. How to arrange our selves around him.

How to share. How to hold up. How to position ourselves. How to project our true nature. How to be your self. How to see what he saw. How to incorporate. How to love. How to be as fascinated and in love with the world as Walter was.

How to do what he did. How to let him keep doing it. How to live again, like Walter did. How to be as forgiving as Walter was. How to be as wise as Walter was.

If we’re not ready. If it’s too soon. If it’s too hard, too painful, too unbeautiful, too incorrect too sad too much to reckon with.

What sound to make. What to cry out. Where does it make sense.
What order is there? What beauty to locate?

What song do you want to hear, right now? What fond memory springs forth now.
Who did you love? And where are they now?
If I don’t have an answer it’s because I’m stuck and I am heartbroken and I am asking the wrong questions. The right questions are the ones I haven’t asked yet. The questions that lead him back to us. The question whose answer is Walter. Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you get here? How did you know him? Me too.


6/13/17

READING TONIGHT IN BROOKLYN


BROOKLYN TONIGHT 7PM – reading at Book Row / Better Read Than Dead. Featuring BRONTEZ PURNELL, TOMMY PICO, FRANKIE SHARP, DICK VAN DICK and MAX STEELE. Free! 7pm! Cheap beer! – 867 Broadway <3 <3 <3

6/12/17

GHOST RINGS

“I can tell you stuff / that makes you stronger. /
That lets you forget."


One of the reasons I wanted to start writing this blog again was to write about things I really like and one thing that I like a lot is GHOST RINGS by Half Straddle.


Half Straddle's GHOST RINGS Trailer from Half Straddle on Vimeo.

I saw the show last October at New York Live Arts and I bought the record (compiled from live performances during the NYLA run) as soon as it came out. It moved me deeply and so I wanted to write a reaction / review of it. I think it's probably my favorite record of 2017. I’m calling it early. They're going to tour it again soon. The album is released by 53rd State Press on delicious pink vinyl. Imaginary candy.

There's going to be a record release show June 16th at Pete's Candy Store.

I so rarely feel like I like new music. In that Richard Russell profile in the New Yorker he talks about how people are so stuck in their ways that they don’t listen to new music.
Most people, he suggested, eventually lose the impulse to discover new music, “because of what’s going on in their life.” He went on, “I suppose that doesn’t matter—you can listen to old shit. And that’s O.K. as well. People get a lot from that. But they’re missing something. Because, whatever it is they’re into, that thread’s right there, in something being made now.”
GHOST RINGS feels like new music that I can get into and I don’t get into a lot of new music. I mean this in the best possible way, but “Big Woods” sounds like a mid-90s sort of hip-pop pop admixture that I really needed when I was a teenager and I’m glad to have it now. It’s also the best title for a song I have seen in a long time. I always knew Erin was a good rapper but this song blew my expectations away. There’s a lot here.


Ghost Rings Excerpt, "Hellock's Brimble" from Half Straddle on Vimeo.

I first heard this song when Erin performed it as part of one of her solo shows at Joe's Pub. It stuck with me, especially the lines "It so could be real" and "all the Darkness you can bear".

I have such a crush on Half Straddle and it's thrilling and somehow not too surprising that it became a band, you know? I've already written about the time I saw a girl sneaking into a performance of Half Straddle's Ancient Lives.

Erin Markey leading a riot grrrl band is verging on a wet dream for me. It's a fantasy I couldn't ever declare out loud. And it's so obvious and perfect. Here’s how I imagine it came together: Tina wrote the story and the lyrics and Erin and Chris wrote the songs with her words. I’m making this up/guessing. I’ve been a fan of Erin for as long as I’ve known her and I’ve never heard her voice sound as amazing as it has over the last few years. I think because she’s singing more songs that she wrote. She has an amazing instrument and unfortunately a kind of ceaseless focus. She seems like she can always go more places, vocally. And now she makes songs where she gets to. She sounds amazing on this album and it shows off many (but not all) of her best tricks.

I mean everyone sounds amazing. I love Chris Giarmo. We danced in a Ballez performance together and I think we may have played drag bills together but I’ve seen him perform a lot and have always been intimidated by his talent particularly because he’s also very sweet which I find disarming. The songs they made are really wonderful. Tina Satter's thought process is inspiring and fearsome I was really into this interview she did about the project. It's funny to me that she describes this project was exploring virtuosity, because of course I took this to mean musically. And it is, it's insanely ambitious and technical and riveting and probably really hard to make and execute. But for me the sucker punch, the one-TWO effect here is that behind the sonic experience of facility is the emotional virtuosity. The use of great force and finely honed skill to articulate a frailty, a faltering quality. This skill and force and power of the musical chops are used in the service of describing an emotional experience that, to me, feels like a loss.

You can be strong and you can be beautiful and you can sing better and more wildly and louder than every before but you can't make them hear. You can exceed yourself but you can't make yourself into them. You can show them everything, but they still leave.

I feel cracked open by these songs, dressed up by these songs. Like someone comes to collect you before you go to a nightclub and they have good makeup, the perfect mix to listen to. A bottle of rum. I guess my one critical feeling is that I don't love the phrase spirit animals. I do, though, really love the puppet alter ego characters that the ones in this show represent. They feel like gifts. A sort of avatar of responsibility. Like how I imagine it might feel if your parents give you a car when you're a teenager. Or a pet. "It's a lot of responsibility." I'm a vegetarian; I love all animals. All animal voices. All animal desires. All animal romances resonate with me. I know how the beasts want to be together. I recognize that feeling from GHOST RINGS.

The show kind of feels like it's a secret message, but of course it's not. It couldn't be. It's about Tina and her sister. It's about Shawna and Samantha. And the baby. But it feels beautiful because of how conspiratorial it is. I love that they're not mad at each other, they love each other, but they know they can't travel arm in arm. They know they can't go together so they call out to each other from across the distance.

I desperately want that- a sister. An imaginary friend. A band from scratch. A powerful voice. Gorgeous outfits. A story. The thing of imaginary sisters. That the story is about someone you love leaving, wanting different things. Loving someone and being unable to keep them. It’s not just about sisters. I mean it is but it’s also different.

Like a hypothetical band, a side project, and imaginary project. And because of its putative imaginariness it’s so much better than any real thing, any real band or true human relationship. The fantasy is always so much more perfect than the real thing. And the memory, the story of the fantasy, the songs that incorporate the fantasy and the disappointment of corporeal reality, the band that you make about the story is so much better. It can go anywhere. You can write songs and those can be the story, the heavy lifting.

Listen to "I Love That."

... I mean, yes, sisters but I guess also it’s about drag too. In the sense of writing songs using someone else’s words, someone’s voice, someone’s melody. And singing about a whole other person. Speaking for/as. Imagining a shared understanding. That’s sisters and that’s also drag queens (or what I think drag queens is) but it’s not drag sisterhood. The love that exists outside of time/life, the perfect world of the imagination sister wife. When someone you love becomes everyone you love, when you love someone as much as and maybe sometimes more than yourself.

“8 ways to see us / 9 to die. / It’s all connected / it happens when you cry.”

I haven't cried in many years but when I listen to GHOST RINGS I feel as close to crying as I've come in a long time.

I've wanted to cry for so long and these songs feel like release. Or like cumming. Like when you feel yourself falling, turning inside out. Tiny, intimate, nuanced feelings. Things you'd need to invent a secret language to expressed. They're talking about these feelings and they made a band about them and they're belting. They're harmonizing. They're playing in there there. It's as if an attic room is finally opened and it's so much bigger than you thought, bigger than the house it sits atop of.

When was the last time I felt like this? Maybe seeing Khaela Maricich perform for the first time, sandwiched in between Dear Nora and Mirah. This would have been in 2001? 2002? At the 40th St Warehouse in Oakland. Khaela was performing as The Blow, but very recently. She was still selling CDs with her precious band name, Get The Hell Out Of The Way of the Volcano. And I was about to graduate high school as move to New York, though maybe I didn't know this yet. I felt transitional. Her songs felt like they were in a time capsule to me from the future. I saw a way to see the hard, funny, sad, huge, overwhelming and unspeakable feelings. And to sing them, get through them.

It's not like I'm jealous even. The way I am with so many other things. So often when I love something I think (sometimes subconsciously) "Oh I wish that I wrote that". I listen to music at the gym and I fantasize that I'm the one singing, playing the music. Or I'll see a movie or TV show and wish I was the actor. Wish I was the character. It's a quirk of my narcissism. I was literally raised by performers but I'm also a queer person into art and stuff so we have to read ourselves into the world. But with GHOST RINGS I don't feel jealous. I don't project myself into the music or read myself into the text. With GHOST RINGS I find some part of me confirmed. I find myself validated, reassured. The part of me that didn't know he needed to be seen, spoken, sung and made real.

Something about the size, the shape, the pink record also made me think of this Pussycat Trash 7" I rediscovered this weekend.




6/9/17

WHY I STILL SUBSCRIBE TO VOGUE

WHY I STILL SUBSCRIBE TO VOGUE (US)

Last year I was on the verge of letting my subscription lapse, an then they featured Hari Nef and Juliana Huxtable as the bright young things they are and it roped me back in.

This year it was up for renewal again and because I'm sort of around a lot of magazines for work I thought I didn't really need the subscription delivered to my apartment, but that was wrong.

The new issue features a cute piece about women in theater including NYC's own resident genius Young Jean Lee.

But honestly? I'm obsessed with Princess Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and her TNT column. It's like the bizarro high society Literal Princess version of Fag City / the type of zines I love and want to make. The most recent issue's column begins thusly (emphasis mine obviously). As I read it last night during dinner, the blithe, glamorous, nearly sinister and gorgeous sentence here actually made me stop breathing for a second:
"Texas stole my heart, or maybe I just dropped it somewhere whizzing along those arrow-straight roads, wind in my hair, that extraordinary light bathing everything in a golden hue. I took the plunge with Lacey Dorn, a seventh-generation Texan whom I had met at my cousin's art opening in London, and our first stop was her uncle's ranch near El Paso. There were red mountains on the horizon, a few wonky signposts... and nothing else. The emptiness made me gasp.

A proud West Texan, her uncle gave us the grand tour. From his jeep we spotted coyotes, longhorn sheep, and quail before stopping for a delicious mountaintop picnic. Then he let us try out his elegant white-gripped revolver, which, he told us, "won the West." Turns out we have quite the shooting skills, Lacey and I, even though I hadn't held a gun since I was a child."
Looking forward to more.

6/5/17

PRETTY'S LESSONS

Listening to the indie rock radio Sunday afternoon as I did my exercises.
Prayers for
Olivia Newton John
A legend.
Sick again.

Went in the rain to see the Red Aunts, a band I never really got into.* But if I could rewrite my adolescence I'd have made myself a fan. Just because.

Ooo I'm tired of having spilled myself out so much. So publicly! Unpaid. I've been an intern many times. I don't need to be reminded that my exploitation is essential, lucrative.

I'm the fool. I let my cash crops go to seed. I used to that this was clever, and it was. It still is. I think that it remains a clever gesture: to willfully unfuck yourself. To stay out of the fray: to make a better world. To refuse to play the game. To recognize ill-gotten advantages and decline them, in your manner. When you feel like it. To be the cute boy and to be so uncute inside. To make people uncomfortable by getting real.

It's in a way to counteract the misconception that Pretty is stupid. That Pretty is simple, superficial. That Pretty has nothing to teach us. Pretty has a lot to teach is and not all of Pretty's Lessons are good. Not everything Pretty has to say is beautiful. And that shows us that even Pretty is disappointing, fallible, mendacious.
So who else is? Use the spotlight to highlight ones flaws. Because here's why: that's what it does anyway. Even if you're pretty your failure is demanded. Like that Beyoncé song.



Like any clever gesture it's only cute when it's up to you. Once you get to a certain point it's not a choice but a fact Of the world.

Thinking of global warming. Here in New York the cocaine is polluted.
Do we all have to get trained on Narcan.
Are we all gonna have to riot for drinking water.

I used to love opening bands. I don't have so much patience anymore.
I still want to be one though. An opening act. On a tour.
It has been a dream of mine for a long time.

Hardcore for old people.
It becomes drone music or techno.
It's not entropy-- that's
romance. A fantasy. Old-fashion.
It's that we atomize as things progress.

And what is a golden age, really
but a growing surfeit of reflections?

PLD said he saw this famous fashion designer at the fag bar.
A cute talented famous person and he was star struck.
And I would have been too.
I'm always startstruck. A little bit.

One thing is I love seeing punk musicians, or any artist, who is in their 40s.
It's a similar thrill to see newbies: people decide in performance. That's why it matters.

Writing new B0DYH1GH jams last night.
I'm excited for our show on the 29th.

Come closer.
If my smoke isn't bothering you.
I'm filled with love and chemicals. Compounds. I'm swirling. Who else has water rising?

O I've been so low.
But I still
consistently got high.
That the world’s going to end-- is that really news per se?


Some of us stayed punk.
Some of us still have our seven inches.

Some of us hung onto them.



* It's a lie. I didn't really get into them super deep I always knew about them and was sort of a fan, I guess, from afar, for a while. Honestly the cover of Saltbox is a queer root for me.


I know I must have posted this image at least 1,000 times but this is v much how I see myself spiritually/sexually. Or at least used to, one aspect of me. I guess the kids would say Mom. Same.



When Kerry was touring in Two Tears she'd often play at QxBxRx where I go-go danced and we'd hang out. I begged her to reunite the Ref Aunts. She said at the time she wasn't sure (I'm obviously paraphrasing) that she loved those songs or needed to hear them again. “But” I said “we” (the fans?) “NEED to.” Who was I kidding? Two Tears was great.

She made a cool zine about living in Dubai. The Red Aunts are cool and necessary. Messy, bluesy, fun, mean, cool, slick. Strong, tough, weird, funny. Scary, cheesy. Bratty, grimy, shuddering, wild, rich. Loud.

The set ended with Kerry saying: "We never did encores before and we're not gonna start now." And they didn't. They didn't even play "My Impala '65" which was a minitime bummer.

I crashed early and slept in a cloud of nectar from the Ti plant blooming in my room.