HONK! 2009 took place this past weekend in Somerville outside of Boston, MA. But a big thanks is due to my friend Alita for giving me the heads up on the event that I honestly did not know about – but she read my body language and excitement for recently seeing Mucca Pazza and clued me in. I glanced at the list of bands travelling to Boston to play and it read like an international smorgasbord of brass & drum skins. And I wanted to get my step on!
I got in touch with one of my Boston chums, “mulcad01″, and described the event’s affairs and location. He too wanted to enjoy the festivities, and declared that everything – everything! – was “about 2 blocks away” from where he lived. Somerville and Davis Square, here I come!
from NYC to Boston. I took the Bolt Bus, which comes highly recommended. They have 110V AC power outlets and a pretty good WiFi connection, and their crowd are generally advantageous of these amenities. So there are lots of laptops and movie-watchers. Yes, this means you’re more-or-less isolated from the person next to you, but it’s also a means of discussion & conversation if you’re so inclined, and I am!
It took nearly an hour and a half just to get out of Manhattan! So I arrived to Boston late, but it worked out perfectly that my matey mulcad01 got off work as I was arriving. mulcad01 and I went to a bar and watched the unfortunate conclusion to game 2 of Boston’s ALDS – no better than my Cardinals. And in true Boston style the bar was jam packed with revelers and fans. And in true Boston style they spent as much time yelling at the television as they did drinking – that is, LOTS!
mulcad01 was afraid I’d peek under the covers, so he wore his jeans to bed. Otherwise he said he always sleeps completely naked and chained to his bed (some alarm system “releases” him every morning).
After some driving around and looking at quaint streets and public art, we went to a NERF WAR GAMES event. No shit. See for yourself:
Everybody was really dorky and lovely and the donuts were only a quarter if you were participating in the war, but we wanted to HONK!-stomp!
(Please keep in mind we didn’t have a choice in attending the NERF event. Seriously! It’s not like… a geek like me would ever, I mean ever, be interested in anything like that!)
We proceeded back to Somerville where mulcad01 lived about 2 blocks from everything. And sure enough within minutes from his doorstep you could hear and then see the processions of bands converging on the town and then occupying their respective “stages”: squares, parking lots, plazas, bank steps. Whatever and wherever that could hold a couple hundred people was, for one day, converted into a great outdoor music spectacle! And the weather couldn’t have been better: warm in the sun, cool in the shade; you wanted a sweater otherwise but were fine to take it off and stay warm as long as you danced danced danced!
All the bands were, simply, amazing! Each band had two slots and played in two different places, so the opportunity was there to see every band and site. I did not. Mainly because I wanted to see two bands in particular, and a couple other bands if time allowed. The two bands in particular were Hungry March Band (who have graced these pages before) and the What Cheer? Brigade whom I first saw open the Swoon show at Deitch in Long Island City last year and they blew my mind then, and this time around they completely disemboweled me! mulcad01 and I danced so hard we woke up the next morning stiff and sore!
Oh yeah, here are those bands I was talking about:
What Cheer? Brigade from Providence, RI
Hungry March Band from Brooklyn, NY
Rude Mechanical Orchestra
I didn’t get nearly enough photos of What Cheer? Brigade. That’s because I was dancing so hard! Their second set was after sundown and the pavement nearly cracked from the collective stomping of the crowd! Especially that one song… you know it when you hear it. With that silent break-beat that transitions from horns to drums, breaks again and everybody starts whaling! Oh man I’ve had that stuck in my head for days!
Just do a Flickr search for HONK! 2009, you’ll find plenty more images already flooding online.
After the final sets the evening quickly died down. Everyone was pretty exhausted from approximately 10 hours of dancing and walking the streets, and believe it or not people needed rest… for the street parade the next day! Yay!
But before we get there I went on a nightly walking tour as I often do in new cities/towns, and mulcad01 showed me this round building that I would totally love to call my own. It’s been uninhabited for some years, and is only recently being “developed”. How properties like this ever fell by the wayside is beyond me. If it were mine, I’d paint it in such a way to make it appear like a giant cake! Yummy home!
And now, for the street parade:
What Cheer?, this time marching.
I didn’t get to see them the day before, but I guess this is Orkestar Zirkonium. . . oh yeah, THEY ROCK! Their songs were perfect for marching, as mulcad01 and I kept pace with them for many blocks!
We departed the parade however and took a walking tour and headed to Boston’s ICA where there’s currently some wonderful work by Damián Ortega installed. We took about the longest possible circuitous foot-path route there, and along the way saw a stairway full of slinky, a GIANT ship on the horizon, and mulcad01 pointed out what would be the best possible sniper positions (spillover from his service in the Watching Too Many Movies forces).
look at the size of that boat. seriously. it’s taller and longer than those buildings!
the identity of mulcad01 will forever remain a mystery.
We had some dinner, headed home and I packed my bags for departure. The festival was moving to Providence the next day for PRONK but unfortunately I had already booked my return ticket and didn’t have a place lined up. So I jumped the first available WiFi-enabled bus back to NYC and there I was at 2am.
And well, you know you’re home when:
and just to remind you, SOCKS!:
Bottom line is, if you have the opportunity, GO to HONK! You won’t regret it. What a joyous celebration of dancing in the streets and freedom of movement in an otherwise striated space. Express yourself through dancing!
Jay-Z’s forthcoming Blueprint 3 album (due respectively I’m sure on the 11th of September), and more specifically his album cover and track listing have been getting a fair amount of attention lately. To meme the analysis even further, his track listing even received it’s own “news” article, and searching “track listing” in google returns a thumbnail of Jay-Z first and foremost (above).
How meta!
While his track listing design is okay, it’s not very original or interesting really, I’ve seen muchbetterdesigns of information handling than this. But I’d really like to focus your attention on his album cover:
At first, one goes, “Wow!” One should. It’s an interesting image.
An ensemble of sound instruments and equipment, we see everything from boards and mixers to old-world and new-world phonograph players, as well as enough speakers and amplification to crack the foundation in my building’s basement, all topped off with an accordion, how quaint. Everything is painted white except for the keyboard keys, the drum cushions, the record on the crank-style phonograph, the electric-style phonograph arm, and those rubber feet on the speaker head. The 3 bars in the middle are like roman numerals turned sideways, and are oriented like a “stack” – this is the final album of his trilogy after all, so it’s only appropriate that one think of each album as building upon the previous release, with this thankfully being the final Blueprint.
The composition is intriguing, all the objects arranged into a towering mish-mash. And the three bars are a unique way of expressing the third installment. However neither are original or even creative, and in my opinion they’re outright stolen!
Okay okay maybe all the instruments pictured were the instruments necessary to produce the album, but I seriously doubt that Jay-Z is that conceptual in the execution of his album covers. And maybe he thought himself novel in the adaptation of three bars to signify his almost-architectural record-naming scheme. But as I’m about to point out both practices are quite deeply rooted in contemporary art.
For starters there are the three bars: transparent & equal (although not equidistant). Overlayed, they show the world behind while masking it (I just noticed the violin! That’s what I mean by mask!). And they quite clearly resemble the work of Donald Judd, a minimalist artist who while he worked with wood, steel and concrete is usually known for his transparent, at times reflective, Plexiglas boxes that were arranged in stacks and mounted on walls:
Their stack creates a type of tower, and their verticality makes you wish yourself taller, shooting into the sky! As noted, the one difference between Judd’s work and Jay-Z’s cover design is that Judd’s work is equidistant, that is the distance between the boxes is exactly equal to the height of the boxes themselves, creating a type of democracy between the objects and the wall or background they reside upon.
A few more examples to show you Judd’s rigour of line and his creation of boxes, spanning several decades:
Then there’s the white towering ensemble, or assemblage rather. It’s a direct reference (and poor execution I might add) to a truly pioneering artist: Louise Nevelson, a female born in Russia in 1899 whose family emigrated to the US in 1905. Someone whom to this day is still undervalued and under-acknowledged (see how short her wikipedia article is, especially compared with Judd’s). She eventually moved to NYC in 1920 where she would live until her death in 1988, and during her time made assemblages, or physical collages, from discarded objects that she found on the streets of this magnificent city. Truly: trash art! And while her work was made from trash, and was simple in its execution (everything – EVERYTHING – painted white or black), her work contained an inherent complexity and depth that few of her time could rival or generally even muster the courage to put out there:
And this is why I look at contemporary art. It’s so far ahead of the curve. And this is why I’m so uninformed by pop culture. I mean, I’m sure Jay-Z’s album will be good. He has some mega producers backing him up, and has all the right (some would say too many) “featuring” artists by his side. But the real testament will be in 20, 30 years, if Jay-Z’s album cover will still hold as much ooompf, ooopla or ahhhhh as it does today. Probably not. Whereas already the work of Judd and Nevelson, 20, 30, even 40 years after its making in some instances, is still as strong as ever and will in another 20 years still be as vital, necessary and important to understanding culture.
I’ll spare you your life: watch to get an idea of how good he is, then for the WTF-moments fast-forward to 1:16 and 2:50 or just watch it all the way through (the music is shite but he’s actually really good). Point of interest: this guy racks his bass guitars the way I rack my socks!
People who know me know I love to listen to Pandora, the Music Genome Project (aka internet radio). Their ‘Quick Mix’ feature added a few months back has been a real blessing. Their algorithm will switch from Jimi Hendrix to System of a Down to Talib Kweli to Led Zeppelin all in the same session, all based on my previously created radio stations. It’s brilliant. I don’t have masses of time anymore to prepare playlists, fill up my HDD with mp3s ripped from my own CDs (cough cough), or even listen to entire albums by one band anymore; I much prefer random and continuous listening, changing beats and rhythms, all combined with my input.
Clearly a large percentage of what they play is pop or rather well-known musical pieces (the bands I just listed prove this). This is all due to licensing, legal forms, and the fact that larger labels will simply always carry more influence. However every now and then there’s a little gem thrown in, someone I don’t recognize, and it’s refreshing. They have a “bookmark” function for saving songs that intrigue you in exactly this way, but there’s no way to share the list. It’s manual and tiresome, but I’m going to keep a continually growing list here of some of the tracks that really caught my attention in the hope of tracking down these artists later.
If you got an artist to recommend, leave it in the comments!
Band – Song Title:
Beats Antique – The Lantern
Ima Robot – STD Dance
J.J. Cale – Travelin’ Light
The Rootsman – Ta Travudia
Plastician – Cha Vocal
Yoshimoto – Du What U Du
Devin the Dude – What a Job
Metallica – Turn the Page (of course I already know Metallica, I just forgot how gooooood this song is!)
Those who follow the Life and Times of Nick Normal know I’ll be returning to NYC within the month. In my mind it’s “business as usual” upon my return. By that I mean I know better what I want from the city and what to expect – having lived there for nearly 5 years already, and I don’t consider myself not living there now, simply away on sabbatical. There aren’t many things to surprise me there anymore; it’s more about coming to terms with living in a city of constant activity, and thriving on that energy and escalating it whenever possible. However every now and then there are phenomenons you simply never knew about which are consistent in their delivery and message. My love for Queens notwithstanding, I’ll admit usually these phenoms reside in Brooklyn.
Meet ninjasonik! Go figure as soon as I return to NYC they go on tour, so I’ll have to wait til May at the earliest to see them, but these guys have it figured out:
I got a MySpace, I got a gmail, I got that Facebook, but I don’t do Friendster.
so Shalin lives in a dollhouse, Angie lives in a dog shack, and Martina doesn’t actually live here and was the catalyst behind convincing me and Angie to take a boat trip to Mexico. All of which has nothing to do with the house pictured above, but at the same time that’s where they all live, but not really. New Orleans is weird. Yup, and these are my friends.
Getting to the house was difficult, which was expected. The driver of a city cab didn’t use the meter and charged me $12 for a journey that would have been difficult considering the weight of my backpack but wouldn’t have been untraverseable any other day on foot (I’ve since realized). He didn’t know how to locate the cross street given the address and suggested that having to drive to find the address might be too far for the fare. Welcome to New Orleans!
Once settled, the first order of business was food, so we set out for a walk in search of po-boys! While walking, it became clear that New Orleans architecture is obfuscated by the abundance of growth and green here. The city neighborhood’s landscapes are dominated by trees, plants, flowers, foliage and probably account for 30% of the density of the town:
As for dinner, I think I just about managed to capture everyone with their faces stuffed:
So service here is so slow and almost awkward, but is a journey in and of itself, you just have to roll with it. Then you’ll have a great time! Our waiter must have made at least four maybe five trips to the kitchen to actually figure out what they had in terms of deserts, but eventually landed us with exactly what we wanted:
Devoured, Gone. We Are Hungry.
As I arrived in the city in the mid-afternoon, by the time we finished with dinner the sun was set. Even having been here a week now I’m divided between seeing the city during the day and seeing it at night. It’s beautiful both ways:
The moon here is flipping bright. Bright, and low. And routinely about as big as I’ve ever seen it. Definitely as bright as I’ve ever seen it. So much light gets reflected here, which was more pronounced once we got out on the boat (will save that for the next post).
As for my first night in New Orleans I experienced something magical that I highly recommend to all if you want a flavor of New Orleans that you simply cannot find anywhere else. I journeyed – under Martina’s guide – to the Venue, a club up river where DJ Jubilee (a high school special educator during the day) and Katey Red (a transvestite rapper and teacher also) spin a distinct brand of music that is unlike anything else I’ve heard. Part hip-hop, part electronica, part bass, Bounce as it’s called has it’s own beat rhythm and vernacular that rivals Grime in the UK in its propensity to energy, but is contained to the shores of this fair city.
Music and club shots begin around minute 4. That mirrored wall… will live with me forever!
