How to get your band noticed, time machines, my book, and other important news

my face is angry

I was on a panel today at Berklee College of Music talking about how to get your band noticed by music press. I think that makes me a professor, so I'd appreciate it if you address me as Dr. from here on out. It was fun and good, and I got to shoot the shit with my colleagues and mumble zingers in front of a crowd, which is always nice, but I completely forgot to bring up my number one piece of advice for Berklee kids on how to get famous: start a cutesy quirk-pop duo with your fiance and do white-people covers of r&b songs. Boom, sorted. 

Breaking news: Japan is weird, awesome

SPACE POOP

You know what's fun? Looking at pictures of other people's vacations. My man Jimmi Heiserman has been in Tokyo for work? Fun? Not really sure. He's been posting tons of pictures to Facebook of all the cool stuff he's doing and I think we can all agree that he and his globetrotting lifestyle can go eff themselves. Jimmi, by the way, is the guy who designed Quadradius, the online flash game that I wrote about a few years ago, and that I was hopelessly addicted to for a long time.

He was nice enough to share some of his pictures from his current trip to Japan and his last one with you good people below. I think they're pretty cool, because they confirm my suspicions about that weird, awesome country: that it's weird, and awesome. Text and photos by Jimmi. ALL CAPS "JOKES" BY ME.

The most Swedish thing ever | New Lo-Fi-Fink

Everything is the most thing ever today, like this new video for "Kissing Taste" by Sweden's electro/neo-disco/chill-wave/indie-dance/laptopfart Lo-Fi-Fink (via Stereogum). Some other Swedish things I've heard of: Me. Skinny dudes with their shirts off in the snow. Pretty blond girls in a dude's shirt and she looks at the camera for a minute, like, maybe she's looking over here. Is she looking over here? Nah, probably just a skinny Swedish dude playing drums on the porch like usual. Frozen swamps, probably. That one vampire movie that was pretty good. Porn star Puma Swede. My grandmother's cooking. Vampire Eric. Other things. 

The most Boston thing ever | PTSOTL fine art appreciation

I made this with my lung-hands

I like to think of my conceptualized installations as approximate inventories of fragmentary consciousness (via meaninglessness), ie, found objects, photographs other people took, paintings I don't understand, photographs I would have taken if I was there at the time, and consumerist refuse. They are improvisational in as much as the constructed vis a vis the deconstructed, the ready-made and the never-should-have-been-made align, come together, regress, push and pull, in and out, just like that, not so hard though, sorry I'm just kind of tired I guess, can we try again later. My parameters are schematizations, investing in the viewer a sense of movement through texturized, space, historicizing within that space a disgusting townie who smokes too much on his dirty back porch, for example. Alientation and aesthetics, minimalism and maximalism together at once.  It's a sort of poetry of seduction of the unreal, a commentary on consumerism, but also a pile of shit. 

Are your skinny jeans killing you? Yes they are

May I present to you, Luke's balls.

Bad news, hipsters, you're all going to fucking die. Well, obviously, yeah, we all are, probably miserable and lonely, but you're dying right now as we speak, unless you're reading this naked, which is weird, but I can sort of vibe to that. 

It's a condition that super serious medical science is calling "sudden onset ball squishing syndrome" unless I misread this piece in The Wall Street Journal Tight Ties, Killer Heels: Clothes Make the Fashion Victims.

The even more most American thing I've ever seen

know how u feel man

OK, never mind, maybe an army bro gunning out pushups to Nirvana at the State Fair isn't the most American thing I've ever seen, as our man Patrick Kay helpfully pointed out in the comments to that last thread. Instead we've got this slice of Americana folk art, or f-art for short.  I have watched this 6 times in a row and counting. It's pretty old, but there's a reason the classics stick around.

Why did Kurt Cobain really kill himself? (Happy Birthday re-post)

This is the most American thing I have ever seen.

Happy birthday to Kurt Cobain! To celebrate let's take a look back at why he killed himself.

For almost two decades now music fans have been trying to figure out exactly why Kurt Cobain killed himself. Was the pressure of Nirvana's success too much to handle? Was it his crippling stomach pain or subsequent heroin addiction that did him in? We thought we'd never know.

DJs aren't real musicians right? Live dubstep band / Skrillex link bait post

This isn't real music via

Remember last week when the session drummer from Jack Black and Juliette Lewis' TV bands went on the Grammys and said all that racist shit against DJs right before performing with Deadmaus5? Awkward. A couple days ago he put out a pretty funny, lengthy, and charming apology, in which he said, in part  “I don't know how to do what Skrillex does (though I fucking love it) but I do know that the reason he is so loved is because he sounds like Skrillex, and that's badass. We have a different process and a different set of tools, but the 'craft' is equally as important, I'm sure. I mean.....if it were that easy, anyone could do it, right? (See what I did there?)"

Pinterest is illegal, Gordon Ramsey goes to prison and other news

Pinterst IRL via La Carmina

Pinterest is for girls, you guys. Haha, good one. Girls can't use the internet, can they? They're all, let me talk about my day at work first for five hours, then they step into a mop bucket and get their foot stuck and fall out the window and you have to go help them parallel park. Or maybe I'm wrong, at least according to this woman-splaining piece on Clever Girls Collective about how pervasive the sexism in writing about Pinterest by the male-dominated tech writing world has been. 

Boston's most violent, racist bar [?] closed by city

Not sure how anyone could've seen this one coming, aside from all the other melees that have broken out there over the years, but one of Dorchester's most notorious bars, Ups N Downs, has gotten knifey again. You'll all surely remember my last trip to the bar from my book, Boston's Best Dive Bars, Drinking and Diving in Beantown, which you've all bought already by now, right? (And which just went on sale at all the Urban Outfitters in the area this week in case you haven't). 

I've posted the entry on Ups N Downs from the book below if you want a taste. First one is free.