grab-blog: tonight in boston, the new haus blog, st. vincent, swordswallowing & married life.

September 30, 2011

good morning world.

it’s a gorgeous fucking day in boston, massachusetts, where i’m currently holed up for a day of email and coffee.
i decided it’s a good to to blog a nice long random blog filled with random ephemera, since i have a lot of it kicking around my desktop.

……….

i’m ok, for all of you who’re asking. better every day, pretty much, since getting back from europe. it’s been a strange two weeks of bid decision-making.
where to be decisions, next-record-making decisions, team-putting-together decisions, mostly all the things that go into making a rock star much more boring than people assume.
i do love this time of year. yesterday it was dark and warn and rainy in boston and i found myself grinning like an idiot walking down boylston street, going la la la la la in my head, high on life, wishing simultaneously that i wasn’t so fucking weather-senstiive.

so being in boston is good.

it’s like visiting my old life, in lots of weird ways, even though i’ve never really left. i’m never home long enough to do the sorts of things i’ve been doing.

neil is here. he’s working on a secret theater project. or is it secret? i can’t keep track. let’s pretend it’s secret for the moment, it’s more fun. having him here in town, with us both working, is so much more enjoyable than when we try to squish in nothing-time together after we haven’t seen each other for a while. we’re both so much happier when we’re working….we’ve just had to figure out how to take our allergy to vacation into account while planning our weird-ass relationship. he spends some nights with me in the cloud club and some nights close the the theater, staying over at ron’s, and we, like, DATE. it’s pretty hot. he writes me a poem. i pick him up from rehearsal. he squeezes the zit on my forehead. i fix his wayward hair. he rubs my leftover sprained ankle. last night he told me stories about his great grandfather. i tell him about my fears of letting go. we’re like….married. who knew? but it’s wonderful. i love him. i do.

und…..speaking of the cloud club, michael pope has been putting together a fucking beautiful blog, chronicling his last few months of working together with lee to birth a cloud club website.
i’ve lived here for 11 years no (and counting, good lord) and the house has NEVER had a website. this blog is the closest thing we’ve got, and there’s some stunning pictures of our digs.
our house is….special. strange. very visually confusing. it needs this….

go see: http://cloudclub-bloglogue.tumblr.com/

and in more boston news…TONIGHT (friday) i’m going to do something at club oberon that i haven’t done in ages….i’m going to put my old-school performance-art hat on and resurrect an old piece i wrote. mali sastri, from the band jaggery, is running a variety night at club oberon called ORG : ASYLUM and she asked if i would do something theater-y. she usually runs these parties out of the house but she’s been getting FANCAY.

so instead of pulling out my fucking ukulele and doing something “cray-cray” for the asylum-themed night, i dug up the skeleton of a ten-munute piece i wrote, directed, and put on about 12 years ago (at an old beloved loft space here in boston called pan 9) and gathered some volunteers. the piece is highly disturbing! how happy i am! come if you can, there’s still a hnadful of tickets, and the rest of the entertainment on the bill looks fantastic (almost all of my boston pals and housemates will be there, it’s a totally old-school local throwdown).

tickets HERE: http://www.cluboberon.com/events/org-asylum

…………….

the new st. vincent record is out and it’s sounding bad-ass so far.
i’ve been walking down annie-clark-memory lane, someone i saw last night was telling me how one of his favorite AFP youtube videos was the one of me, reggie watts, sxip shirey and jason webley (and some other freaks) covering her song “marry me, john”. so here it is, for fun….

and there’s also this….the sick & twisted peter greenaway homage that michael pope filmed for the AFP + St. Vincent cover of “what’s the use of wondering” by rogers and hammerstein that wound up, oddly, on “who killed amanda palmer” as the only cover song.
the top video is fun, the bottom one, slightly more nauseating.

choose your own adventure.

you can get the new st. vincent record HERE: http://www.ilovestvincent.com

UND on the topic of st. vincent, i was recently sent THIS video by kimbra…which is like a st.-vincent-meets-dresden-dolls-in-the-body-of-a-21-yr-old-new-zealander.
kind of love it. i posted this to twitter and while many had heard of her, many hadn’t. feast yo-selves:

her song with gotye, also amazing:

……………..

oh oh oh:

if you’re from san francisco, neil & i JUST ADDED a second san francisco show at a different venue, because the first one sold out so quickly.
it’s at the brava theatre on november 2nd and tickets go on sale TODAY at 10AM PST. kickstarter backers get first dibs on ‘em (we sent them a special pre-sale password) and then we’ll put it out for everyone else if there are still some tickets left. the place is small, so we shall see…good luck. more info at my tour page.

if you missed our kickstarter, we’re RECORDING the show and pre-selling the disc. you have about TWO DAYS left to order it you wanna, there’s over 3,000 project backers so far….holy fuck: http://bit.ly/AFPandNG

……………………

and here’s some photos from last night…….
i went to the ignobels, as is traditional when i’m in town.
“what’re those?” you ask…
so says the wiki:
“The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’. Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.”

it’s a HILARIOUS and INCREDIBLY DORKY evening and ALWAYS awesome…

i popped on stage just in time to do a group sing-a-long of tom lehrer’s element song….

….and then pulled a 2.5 foot sword out of a man’s throat.

my favorite by far, was the peace prize.

it went to the mayor of vilnius, lithuania, who demonstrated that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over w/ an armored tank: