psychedelic stand‐up show … a visceral experience from the downtown comedy underground. Accomplished thinkers, authors, poets, and artists join Barris and his band to become one seamless, improvised comedy freak show.”

I caught the sold-out show at Union Hall last Saturday. What I could see of it was really, really awesome, when I could see around a pillar. Everything sounded great, though.

Reggie Watts dropped in at the last minute and did a hilarious set, improvising all kinds of hilarious music and completely surreal standup that made perfect sense and told right-on truths as long as you didn’t listen too closely. If you did, you’d realize he was riffing on the kind of played-out onstage cliches you hear from most hip-hop and rock ‘n roll stage banter.

Here’s a pretty sweet clip. In it, Reggie Watts covers Maroon 5′s “Moves Like Jagger,” freestyles and improvises, and raps like the lead singer of a Cookie Monster death metal band:

Reggie Watts – Touching Songs Improv – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

In this clip, Reggie, Greg Barris and the Forgiveness improve a long jam about slack friends, vampires, teen smoking and more:

Reggie Watts & The Forgiveness – Improv Jam – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

Both clips were shot and edited by Alex Gaylon of Karmalize Productions.

Brother, did they ever deliver:

The saxplayer handed me a pretty sweet business card right afterwards, though none of the URLs on it are coming up right now. As near as I can tell, they’re called the Funky Nassau Band, and you can catch them in the subway underneath the Financial District, more or less. They’ve got a ton of stuff on YouTube, too. I especially love this slow jam in a Miami Vice suit.

Now, aside from being a spectacularly talented musician, Joe is also one of my favorite human beings on the planet. In 1998, before we actually knew any-damn-thing about one another, Joe dragged me up onstage with him at the Old Main Inn in Fredonia NY, and asked — nay, told — me to play drums on a song of his that I had heard maybe once before. It somehow worked out not-too-terribly, and I’ve the honor of playing with him off and on for the past thirteen years. Nine times out of ten, one of us has just gotten into the town where the other one lives, and we have ZERO rehearsal time. And just like at the Old Main, it kinda works anyway. If nothing else, I have more fun playing with Joe than doing just about anything else. I would be super stoked to see Problematical Animals on many of your playlists in a couple of months, and trust me, you’ll be glad it’s there too.


As promised at the top of this post, here are some tracks and performance videos of Joe in action, to give you a kind of cross-section of his ouevre. Enjoy, and please help support this guy!

Link: HELP FUND & PREORDER PROBLEMATICAL ANIMALS ON KICKSTARTER.

Two visitors leave the office along with me tonight. They’d had a meeting that went pretty well, apparently, well enough to break the silent force field that most people turn on in large New York elevators.

I’m also wearing shorts and carrying a bike helmet, so maybe they think I’m a bike messenger.

“Well that went well,” the man says, his voice lingering on the “well”, with a pause meant to cue his female partner. “Oh I KNOW,” she says, her hands fluttering, “you were just awesome in there! Especially how you stood up and gestured and threw all those comps to the side and everything — you’re such a ROCK STAR!!”

Whenever someone says “Rock Star” in an office setting, Keith Moon’s spirit buys a pair of pleated khakis at TJ Maxx.

My soul groans a deep and lowing tone, the sound of a majestic redwood that’s about to just give up completely. When I worked as a business banking researcher, my manager would refer to (other) members of our little team as “Excel Rock Stars,” or “research Rock Stars.” She would also leave photocopied prayers for strength and forgiveness on the office copier. Later in our relationship, when she was letting me go, she told me while shaking her head that I “just didn’t have a passion for banking research.”

“I think she’s buttering me up a little, don’t you,” he says, “trying to get some free drinks out of me before the train leaves for Connecticut.” She giggles a little more, and looks at me, saying “no, he was a Rock Star in there, he really had it together! It was incredible!”

“What do you think, man, is she putting it on a little here or what,” he says, totally milking her for more elevator-appropriate adoration.

What I think is:

Nothing says “you will spend the rest of your life in a beige and climate controlled purgatory” like being called “Rock Star” for showing up on time with a succinct PowerPoint presentation.

But I don’t say that. What I say is, “well, you have to be careful when you hear that phrase at work. It usually means something’s coming. I always brace for it whenever I hear that term.”

“Oh, stop,” she says, looking at her partner and laughing still. He’s looking at her, but asking me, “what is it, then?”

“In my experience in office settings, ‘Rock Star’ is the steam wafting off of a pile of corporate bullshit,” I say, before I can stop myself.

But look, people. We’ve got to think about our language a little here, go a little deeper into the subtext. Real Rock Stars show up at least an hour late and blow the hearts and minds of thousands of screaming people. They writhe and sweat, they put their hearts on the line night after night and leave the stage in a hail of cheers and underpants and then shower women way better looking than themselves with champagne at dawn. It’s the reward for years and years of having heart and eating beans, of nurturing the flames in their souls long after it’s time to compromise, shave and get a day job.

Every time someone calls me a ‘Rock Star’ it reminds me how far I am from that. And man, it just burns.

Anyway, they succeeded in making something very funny. It is an over the top parody of the life of a Nerdcore rapper who can’t decide if what lies before him is a slippery slope or a toboggan run. The result is goofy, fun, and not necessarily safe for work.

Our journey begins with Nelson Lugo and Hard Cory trying to get our protagonist home safely…

Years later George Lucas was said to have made this statement “If I had the time and a hammer, I would smash every copy of the Holiday Special.”

Doug Karo and the Late Night Explosion have watched the full two hour show, bless them, and they have then edited the worst 5 minutes together for our enjoyment, bless them again.

Meet Chewbacca’s family, listen to Carrie Fisher Sing lyrics to the Star Wars theme, and don’t forget special guest stars Art Carney, Bea Arthur and The Jefferson Star Ship!

And if you really want to geek out, did you know that there are lyrics to the Buck Rogers Theme song? in 1979 the tv-series pilot had a theatrical release which included this epic intro… and I mean epic. When I was 13 I loved this song so much I bought the sound track album – which I still have. I also wanted all of the silver-space-babe outfits. Especially the bikini. *note to self, make silver space bikini.

BTW: The people at www.livevideo.com won’t let me embed this video so click to link below – enjoy!

Buck Rogers Movie opening

I can’t get enough of the following two acts, so I thought I’d share ‘em with you guys …

I first met Francis a few years ago when we nearly got into a fight at a bar in Williamsburg. I’m not proud of it. I doubt he is, either.

We got over it, fast, when Francis got on the stage and delivered some of the most heartfelt and refreshing jams I think I’ve ever seen live — before or since. Francis is a white dwarf of soul and meaning, performing with maximum density and immense heat and pressure, fusing hilarity and passionate funk. The end result is a diamond the size of Jupiter’s core — multifaceted, mysterious, worth a hell of a lot more than the ten bucks you’d get charged to take a peek.

Francis and the Lights have a new(ish) album out. It reminds me of those hits I heard on the radio in springtime in the ’80s, back when I had my first crush and the warming air made anything seem possible.

It’s embedded below (or after the jump), but I strongly recommend purchasing the album from iTunes. I particularly like “Tap the Phone” and “In a Limousine.”

I saw The Gaslamp Killer totally by accident at South by Southwest this year. My friend Giselle just said “hey come by, there’s this awesome DJ playing,” and I went mostly to hang with Giselle. Her text would have been a lot more accurate if she’d said “hey come by, there’s this scraggly spastic guy playing brain-melting beats that sound like weaponry from a distant planet.” The bass poured out of the speakers like invisible tar oozing over every single hair on my arms, thudding my adam’s apple like a kick drum while the DJ postured and gestured and flicked his arms and hair like the sorcerer’s apprentice practiced on a feather duster first while texting someone with his free hand.

This video pretty much sums up the live experience:

The Gaslamp Killer, Live @ The Drake, Sept 13 2009. Toronto. from mymanhenri on Vimeo.

He’s got this great ear for vintage Middle Eastern pop music, long lost movie soundtracks, deep bass and hard-edged robotic trills: pretty much all my favorite stuff, and I didn’t even know it. This is my favorite track off of his latest EP:

I’d recommend trying out “All Killer” as a lighter, more relaxing hourlong mix — still intense, dense, complicated an funky, but easier for people who aren’t as into the sound of slam-dancing androids. You can find that on iTunes here.

It shows three Masters of the Universe figures that belonged to my brother and I — Jitsu, Tung Lashor (in the Land Shark) and Battle-Damage Skeletor — lined up against the wood panel & linoleum backdrop of the trailer-with-added-rooms that we grew up in, and I f*cking LOVE IT.

I remember the spot where this photo was taken, and I remember that just down the hall under our bunk beds, and under the desk in my father’s “office” there were plastic tubs and wooden boxes of other action figures and vehicles… Transformers, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, Marvel Secret Wars, DC Super Powers, M.A.S.K., M.U.S.C.L.E., Battle Beasts, Centurions, and probably others that I’m forgetting. We also had a giant-sized bin of LEGO blocks, all jumbled in together like an 8-bit plastic gumbo. I can remember the feel of the blocks’ corners and the shooshing, tinkling sound as I rummaged through them looking for just one more clear red dot to cap off the wing of my spaceship.

We still have a few of these things in a closet at my mother’s house. (Or we will until I steal them this summer. Heads up, Mom.) But the bulk of them were given away to our nephews or other kids-of-friends-of-the-family, and from what I hear, many were promptly broken. (*single tear*)

So in pining for my lost clumps of cast plastic and rubber, I decided to fire up the group nostalgia engines. I asked my fellow contributors Jeff, Brad and Cyndi if they had any thoughts along these lines to share, and indeed they did…

CYNDI:
“Where did my Dawn Dolls go? In 1960′s and 1970′s. My friends and I had all the accessories, The Dawn Disco, The Dawn, Beauty Pageant. We would take our Dawn dolls with us for play dates and so my Dawn doll got out and partied. My dawn doll enjoyed the fine art of strip tease – after I saw Gypsy. My accessory? A Dawn Doll purse. It was a plastic purse that had compartments for Dawn (with a sliding window so she could breathe) and room for her clothes. Plus a section in back for your wallet etc. Here is an amazing promo video that was probably used in trade shows that shows it all!:

Where did they go? I’ll never know. I imagine that great doll disco in the sky.”

BRAD:
“I don’t have a lost toy story… but there was a giant box of Peanuts books, those $1:50 (in the late seventies/early eighties) mass market size, pulp books of comic strips.

Every time we would go anywhere, garage sales, grocery store, Wal-Mart, I would beg my Mom to buy me one of these. By the time I was in high school and not reading them anymore, there were about three hundred of these in a cardboard box. By the time I was in my twenties and old enough to be nostalgic for them, that box was gone and nobody knew what happened to it. I still look for it when I go home.”

JEFF:
“I’ve had this Han Solo since 1981/1982. Chewbaccas came and went. I once lost a Chewbacca in the yard and found him a year later, his arms and legs turned green. Now he’s gone.

I was fiddling with this photo while listening to Slint’s ‘Good Morning Captain’, and started imagining Hoth Han here as the ‘captain’ in the song, sending a message via a dying camera to a lost Chewbacca.”

What about you, readers? Drop your nostalgia in the comments.

And then I came across this guy playing cover songs on a ukulele:

He was on the natural stage there on the Uptown side of the F train, playing sweet, melancholy songs greatly aided by all the natural reverb down there.The singer/ukulelist goes by the name “Laustcawz.”He’s got a website here, and this is his theme song.

I got him to do a song just for me so I could share it with all of you:

It’s a version of B.J. Thomas’ “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” which was apparently #1 on the Billboard charts in 1975. You’ll hear some echo there — some of it’s the train station, but it’s also a woman who couldn’t help herself but to join in. She looked to be about 26, a punk rock black woman with several pink dreadlocks and a smattering of facial piercings instinctively chiming in on a sad, sweet country/easy listening pop hit from back before she was born.

When I watch this now, at my desk the day after, I can feel this enormous swelling in my throat and chest, like my lungs and heart are suddenly way too big. My eyes bulge a little, and there is a wetness in the corners that’s not tears, exactly. It’s more like a nectar.

It’s the nectar that’s a byproduct from a chemical reaction inside the soul — when you find yourself, all of a sudden, so much more alive and in love with the world than you ever thought you could be.

I have no idea what the street value is of a honey made from that nectar. Boy, that must be something.

You never hear anyone singing Coldplay or Dave Matthews, is all I’m saying. I prefer it that way.

And don’t get me wrong here — sure, sometimes the phenomenon is a little annoying. But other times it is completely the most awesome thing that can happen to your whole week, a beautiful, off-kilter accident.

Like this guy that sat across from me on the J Train last weekend singing Chris Brown’s “Winner.” Check this thing out, it’s beautiful. I love how he doesn’t let his performance stop him from pouring himself a little sip of something from his thermos, then gets his soul stole by the music before the cup hits his lips … and caps it all off with a shameless crotch scratch. Also of note is how quickly the guy next to him stops giggling and starts ignoring the whole thing.

Don’t let me spoil it for you, though – check this out for yourself. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that the world is alive and beautiful and full of strange surprises …