The YZA

I think most people who don’t play guitar don’t realize how insane RL Burnside’s guitar playing is. He’s a goddamn Guitar Hero (and obviously much much more), and learning to play like him seems to be the Holy Grail of playing for a lot of people out there. I mean, check this out and tell me it’s not badass:

You can’t even see what his strumming hand is doing it’s moving so fast, but you can hear he’s playing a melody, the bass notes, and percussion all with one guitar, looking so damn cool like it’s no sweat off his back, and singing at the same time. There are loads of subpar YouTube videos made by highly technical blues purists (an oxymoron if I have ever heard one) all attempting to teach folks the secrets to RL’s superhuman gifts.

I remember being totally dumbfounded the first time I saw the above video of him playing (and the others from the same series, also on YouTube). I couldn’t tell what he was doing even though I was looking at it with my own eyes. Listening to what he was doing didn’t help much either, since he was basically playing three parts at once and I couldn’t tell them apart. The most confusing thing is how effortless it looks — his hand looks like it’s just strumming up and down, with such shrewd and casual movement, and he’s only using two fingers from each hand. To boot, he’s singing beautifully and without distraction, as if his mouth and his hand were separate machines.

Anyway, I’ve spent the past few months figuring it all out. I thought I had it for a couple months, and played his songs, and realized eventually I was doing it all wrong. I went back to the videos and watched them over and over again and I finally got it. All the instructional videos on YouTube are wrong, and the few pieces of RL Burnside guitar tablature out there are insufficient — they cover the notes, but not the style or strumming technique. I guess if there’s a demand, I could make a video teaching people how to begin to play like him, but at this point I feel like that would be like a magician explaining away his tricks. But, even if you know how to do a magic trick, the skill is in actually doing it, and I promise you that playing like RL Burnside takes lots and lots of practice. If you want a lesson on how to really play like RL, leave a note here.

I’m in Los Angeles, and I won’t sleep. Driving here at night is the ultimate automotive fantasy, better than driving in New York. Winding roads cliffside, big vistas, ocean views and few other cars in the way. I hate reliance on cars, but while we’re driving ourselves into living in an anachronism, I might as well do it right. California is the ultimate car culture, and they do it proper here: four lane highways in the middle of the desert, six lanes in the city, low population density to guarantee civilian street parking, and many, many gas stations. There are so many badass old cars on the road here, too. I never cared much for cars as a kid in the 80s, but it’s probably because new cars have been ugly my whole life, through the present, where most new cars look like a cross between a spaceship and a jellybean. The old cars are on the highways, cruising at 85MPH like all the rest, preserved thanks to lack of rain and snow-melting salt.

Living near Joshua Tree has been really eye-opening. Our town of Yucca Valley is a mix of military families (there is a base nearby where I’m sure they train for all possible desert warfare scenarios), obese lower middle class working folks, sun-damaged desert derelicts and artists, and white trash Meth addicts (they gay Meth heads are on the southern side of the park in Palm Springs). We’re a happy family: I get stares from everyone, big Arab beard and long graying hair. I look like a mountain man, but maybe from the mountains of Afghanistan. That, combined with my Gap sweater and fancy New York shoes, I’m not sure anyone knows what to make of me.

It’s been a treat not having internet at home. If I’m going to waste time, I’m going to do it while doing something productive, like reading or watching the scarce few movies Netflix sends me. Driving down two miles of dirt road from our house to town takes about 10 to 15 minutes, and rattles the BMW coupe I’m driving quite a bit, so the decision to go down for groceries or entertainment is a relatively big one. My communications with friends have suffered a little, but anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a prompt communicator. If I didn’t advertise it so well that I was going away to “The DESERT”, most people who didn’t hear from me for another three months wouldn’t know the difference. Besides calls to my family, I’ve called exactly one friend in New York, and received one phone call from another friend. I did get a fancy new phone though (DROID, by Google, also by Verizon, also by Motorola), and in addition to allowing me to make a receive calls, it’s also a GPS navigator, a photo and video camera, an MP3 player, a web browser, and everything else. So, I can post photos to Facebook and Twitter and feel good that there’s at least one-way communication. Also, Google now formally and officially owns my life, and I am strangely proud.

Not being in New York has been very healthy. Last week, there was a report issued that New York State has, on average, the least happy people in America. I think I will agree with that conclusion: most of my friends back home are pretty down in the dumps, and I’d say I’m no different. It’s a disgusting rat race of desperate comedians and musicians and bankers and advertising execs all being paid way less than they should be, struggling in the hopes that someone notices them. Compound that with the unending stream of “news” from Facebook and Twitter accounts about peoples’ performances, TV shows, successes (and sometimes failures), promotions, etc. and it feels like you’re smothered by insecure, unhappy people promoting themselves mechanically and unendingly. Everyone’s got something to say, but I can’t understand it if you all talk at the same goddamn time.

The quiet is nice in the desert. The winds blow hard some nights, so hard that it keeps me up and frightens me more than a little, but I’ll take that over not being able to hear my own true thoughts among the pollution of the blog-o-sphere and actual physical atmosphere in New York. California certainly has its share of pitiful self-promoters and misguided corporate attempts at creativity, but it’s also got so much more: beautiful, diverse landscapes, lots of space for people to live and make art and noise without splashing piss on each others’ shoes, and a lot of good weather. New York State has the City… and some apple orchards somewhere upstate.

I have been a little obsessed with John Lennon lately. Sure, it’s a little late to discover him for me, but better late than never. First off, it should be obvious to anyone who has listened to his first solo record (John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band) that his best work came after he left the Beatles. Second, I have to admit that I am more than just a little sad about his passing. For a giant like him (and he really was a giant, as a humanistic human, as an activist, and as an artist) to be gunned down by a mentally disturbed nobody saddens me beyond belief — to tears, even. I’ve been listening to John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band for a few years now, thanks to my buddy Robby Grant, but I recently watched the rock n’ roll movie A Hard Day’s Night, starring The Beatles, and I never knew their young personalities before that.

To think that all was good and well in 1963 (when the film was released), the band was so excited for their success, for their future, and so good-spirited about it too, and that all would be so different only seven years later. Anyway, I’m not going to go on giving a history of The Beatles or John Lennon, but I just thought I would make it clear that Xmas with Yoko and Sean in 1980 (only weeks after John was shot down) could very possibly be the saddest Christmas thought imaginable. Sure, there are probably more terrible circumstances than the death of multimillionaire musician and activist, but the world lost a huge positive force the night he died, and I’m sure the reality of that truth was especially brutal and discouraging on Christmas eve. Don’t forget to Imagine all the people, living life in peace, motherfuckers.

I think I’m going to quit playing music for a while.

I’m in California now, living the Joshua Tree park. I have no internet at home, but I’ll send updates via twitter: http://twitter.com/the_yza .

Will post recordings soon. Over and out.

The Telephones, who are one of my favorite local bands in New York, have hit the big time and are playing the Blender Theater next week. Fronted by triple-threat Jesse Adelmen, they play tuneful, rowdy rock songs that you possibly might hear at a bar, but will more likely be hearing at a venue with a marquee. Go see them play:

The Telephones
Monday 21 Sept, 9:30PM
Blender Theater (23rd St. and Lex), NYC

It’s almost 2010! I realized the other day that The Internet cannot be “undone”. There’s no going back to life as it once was before the existence of The Internet, as much as I might fantasize about that. Short attention spans will continue to be rewarded, and memes will spread even faster than they ever have. I spend lots of my waking hours thinking about The Internet, and how I will try to avoid its intoxication. Meanwhile, I’m checking my email and Facebook pretty damn regularly.

To try to combat the fatigue caused by inundation of Internet novelties, I am leaving it behind for a few months. I know, I know: from the regularity of these blog postings, it might appear as if I had already left The Internet behind already, surfacing twice a year to update a web log that’s supposed to inform people about my life. The truth is, I find it obnoxious when people broadcast incessantly (that means you, Dave Hill), so I choose not to pollute The Internet any further with mundane drivel. It’s a hopeless cause, and maybe I’ll come around and start posting all the time, but it won’t be any time soon.

I’m going out to California for a few months. I’ll be living in the desert in a home with little-to-no The Internet access. I’ll be working on purely creative and self-improvement endeavours, including and certainly not limited to: music, writing, reading classics, and learning the Butterfly stroke. I’m turning 30 years old in less than two weeks, and my time is now.

So, get ready to hear even less from me! Or maybe I’ll send Twitter updates from my cell phone every fifteen minutes about how quiet the desert is.

I’m writing this as a warning to anyone who is in a band that is thinking of playing at The Annex in New York. I’m doing my best to propagate the well-deserved reputation that establishment has as one that baldly rips off bands who play at that venue.

My band played there on Monday 29 September 2008. We had booked the show through their booking agent, Xiaoting Luo, a few months in advance. Everything was prepped, and the door deal was as followed (quoted directly from Xiaoting’s email):

Payment:  Depends on the cover.  If the cover is $12, the first 10 paid to see the band goes to the club; the band will get 100% rest of the door based on their draw.  If the cover is $8, the club will take more heads – the first 15 paid.

So, in essence, the club was supposed to take the first $120, and everything else above that was supposed to go entirely to the band. The cover charge the night of our show was $10, so the club was supposed to take the money from the first 12 people who paid to see our band, and all the rest was the band’s.

We put on a strong show, and a lot of people came out (it was my birthday that night too, so lots of my friends came).

At the end of the night, Leon, the guy at the door who was supposed to be counting heads told us we had a count of 30. He then proceeded to tell us that there was an $80 promoter’s fee that we had to pay (though none of the other bands were paying it), and he ended up paying us $120. All of this was total bullshit, and I told the guy that he was wrong, and showed him the email that Xiaoting had sent us (on my Blackberry) with the specific details of what we were to be paid, and just kept saying that he didn’t know that, and that his instructions were to take the $80 promoter’s fee from our money.

Now. I kept my cool, and wrote an email to Xiaoting from my phone right then and there, telling her that Leon was trying to rip us off, and that we were owed money. She wrote back on Oct. 1:

Yes, Leon made a mistake, for 30 paid to see you, you guys should have
the first 12 goes to the house, then you will have $180 instead of
$120.  I’ll check in with the owners about this, and let you know
asap, cool?

In the meantime, I did a count of people who I remembered came to the show, and the list of people that I alone recognized and remembered was 37 people long. So, Leon had not only ripped us off with a bullshit “promoter’s fee”, but he’d also counted the heads wrong and pocketed that money too.

So, Xiaoting and I email back and forth for the next few weeks, each time she has a different excuse why she hasn’t settled this issue yet. Either the owner of the club was on vacation, or she didn’t have a chance to meet with him and get the sheet from the night of the show, etc. Eventually she CC’s the owner of the club, Jason Baron (a guy who has pictures of Barack Obama photoshopped to look like the Devil on his Myspace page), while responding to me, as if to prove that she’s being honest and that she hasn’t had a chance to settle the issue with the owner yet.

After a month of back and forth bullshit, I give her the ultimatum that she either immediately sends me the money and settles it internally on her own time (after all it was their “mistake” and not mine, so why should I have to wait?), or I was going to tell everyone that they’re running a dishonest business. So here I am, warning you all. I even wrote the owner directly, telling him that people in his organization were doing bad business, and he wrote back saying he’d look into it, but I never heard back from him (and neither did I expect to). At this point I don’t expect to ever see the money owed to us, but I am going to make sure everyone who wants to play a show there knows what they are getting into.

For me, the real lesson learned was to trust my band’s drummer. This is from an email he sent a few days before our show:

so it turns out that a buddy of mine from school is the roommate of one of the sound engineers at annex.

A few things we should be aware of. It is important we find out the exact details of the door. My friend told me that they will take a certain amount of of full paying guests, which is understood, but he also said that will take 6 out of the 10 buck of the remaining guests that come. Plus this xiaoting chick is known to promise more then she can deliver, and could show up and take a portion of the show as a booking agent percentage.

I ignored his wise words, thinking it was just some sour grapes someone had spread around. But it was prophetic and all true. So watch out! Fuck The Annex!

Check out this interesting piece of news found here:

Imagine being in the voting booth and the only thing you have to go on is the candidates’ stand on the issues. Imagine voting purely based on a candidate’s record. Imagine not knowing anything about a candidate’s personality. Imagine not even knowing a candidate’s gender or race. Imagine that nothing would get in the way of making an educated, informed decision.

The Upper School Student Council imagined such an election and on October 28, 2008 five candidates addressed the entire Upper School. Under the direction of teacher Taylor Black, they presented issue-oriented platforms, presenting their stance on Iraq, Afghanistan, healthcare, abortion, the bailout, gay marriage, drilling for oil, immigration, death penalty, public education, and Israel.

The students listened and then they voted. It was only after they elected Bari Saltman that they learned they had elected Ralph Nader (Bari received 46% of the votes). Zak Sawyer stood in for McCain and received 4%; Emily Graham, being Obama, got 29% of the votes; Nia James represented the Libertarian Bob Barr and earned 2% of the votes; and Jesse Goldberg was Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney and took 17%.

Now, these are 10th graders in Park Slope voting, so it’s no surprise that the result is in favor of a liberal, but who would have guessed that Nader would have won by a landslide? I am really curious what this experiment would look like on a larger scale among New Yorkers.

The reason I’m curious about how New Yorkers would vote if they were voting on candidates’ stances on issues and not on personalities is because I am a little shocked at how eager my friends here in NY are to ride the Obama train. Obama, in my eyes is a centrist, not a liberal or a progressive, and he has shown himself to be a lapdog of conservatives with money (see his speech at AIPAC headquarters).

Many of my friends who I would consider progressives, or “beardos”, have gotten behind Obama, and support him unquestioningly. I’m disappointed that they don’t ask for more from a candidate. I am keeping my mind open, and hoping that Obama will be an agent for real change, but I am doubtful. The Senate will likely be majority Democrat too, so I don’t want to hear any whining about not being able to get shit done.

It’s a bad situation when my progressive friends, the “beardos”, are rallying for the same dick that is head of Marketing at your company. Obama unites people, but is that really a good thing in this case? It seems like a case of progressive people compromising their views because they are sick of voting for the loser all the time. If people weren’t so afraid, and really voted with their instincts, we’d see someone like Nader elected.

Right after Sept 11, 2001, public buildings in New York experienced heightened security. I remember being able to walk in and out of NYU Medical Center to go to a doctor’s appointment without any sweat before Sept 11. After Sept 11 — lots of sweat. They roped off all but one door to the main building (the building is enormous and takes up several city blocks), and when you entered through the main door, there were “choke points” created by more velvet ropes, forcing every visitor to squeeze through a tight spot that was monitored by an inattentive security guard. It was all an illusion of security — anyone could still walk in and out, but you had to walk right by a security guard to get in. Hope they don’t smell the C4!

Anyway, I noticed that all that is gone now, as of just a couple months ago. Was seven years a long enough time for them to realize the farce of the heightened security craze across the country? This Atlantic article does a nice job illustrating what a joke security is (link). Now I can only hope that New York City cops will realize how overconfidentally obnoxious they look when they parade their cars around the city.