You're The Reason For The Width Of My Smile: This Is My The Juan Maclean Post

I would really feel shitty if I didn't tell you, the internet, about something that occurred to me last night at The Juan Maclean show at JB's. It was pretty obvious that the majority of the crowd knew the show was special. But I don't think anyone had seized on why the show was so amazing, or moreover I don't know if anyone who heard what I heard last night could. I little bit of background info about myself, I was weened on jazz, bebop jazz. As good as the refrains were, bebop was all about the solos. Bebop completely seizes your attention because you have no idea what direction the musician is going to take you, what note comes next. Now you have to know the Juan's songs inside and out to catch it, but the live versions are packed with the same spontaneous improvisation of bebop jazz.

First Juan's theremin riffs were spectacular-- so happy he kept it a part of the show. Though they were minor, the riffs on oldies "Tito's Way" and "Give Me Every Little Thing" should have been greatly appreciated by those who attended prior Juan shows. They took it to another level for "You Can't Have It Both Ways" and they took it even higher for "Happy House." For what I can make of it, "Happy House" is a redemption song of sorts, a track that is very personal. Maclean and co. poured their souls into it's live rendition. They played the first eight minutes of the song note for note to perfection, and then launched all of us into space with to my best guess a ten minute jam that builded and builded and builded and builded and builded, you get the idea, and then exploded, and then cooled off and then went back up one more time for the close. Crowd and band were wiped out. Everything was given to the song and the moment. It amazes me that The Juan Maclean attempts this kind of performance so much. I couldn't imagine performing a set like that more than once a week.

Like all DFA live shows, the sound was impeccable. The lights were shitty, but at a small venue like JB's, you knew it was going to be the one downer going in. It's too easy to criticize Nancy's vocals. Listen to what she is saying and you'll understand why she's so phlegmatic. When she belted, she's no Beyonce, but she did well. Hey another idea, and i'll leave you with this: the entire DFA collective gets together with Beyonce and makes a disco record.

Akachan Ga Kawaii Deshou!!

I took 3 kids (Henry and his two Wurasian wonderfriends) out to sushi dinner tonight while their mothers were at Curriculum Night and a "Surprise Fancy Restaurant Dinner, Daddy's got to guesssss" respectively. The kids were all interested in writing me "secret messages" in my diary. None of them can read cursive. Anyways, they young, so... I handed it over.






I got specific instructions on the children's tastes.

Hey Everyone

WE STILL HERE!

We'll have some updates again soon, you know, hopefully by the end of August. You can expect posts about "Crazy" Carl "The Machine" Boccuti's legendary playoff hockey goal scoring spree. I know you must be wondering how many nicknames the guy has. The honest answer is no one knows. We've got the goods on our boy Steven Bloodbath and his crew, Philadelphianz for Strawberry Water Ice! Tagline: "They don't already have that." "Nah man, Fla-Vor-Ice." "Oh." Finally, I am currently [in my head at least] constructing my masterpiece, what surely will be the acme of my blogging career, the annihilation of Chris Wheeler.

Things I've recently been fucking with:

Scuba - A Mutual Antipathy
Deerhunter - Microcastle
Babytalk - Chance 12"
Watussi - Purple Moon 12" [especially b-side "If all we had was love"]
Mark E - Slave 1
Runaway
Force of Nature - Transmute (Still Going Rmx)
Still Going Beats in Space mix
Trus'Me Beats in Space mix
This interview with Juan Maclean

how bout that picture one more time

This Guy Was Behind Me on The Escalator

Heard on SportsCenter

M-E-S-S, Mess Mess Mess. (delivered gravely)

Taking A Big Ol' Bunny Hop Off A Short Bridge

Bunny Hop
Fairmount
3/20/08

Disgruntled with "Hip Philadelphia", I've begun to seek alternatives. When a mixture of old and new friends invited me along for The Bunny Hop, not going to lie, I was gung-ho.

9:00 P.M. I waited around for a friend to come in from out of town, so we were to meet up with the larger group. Walking over to the London, I began to have serious doubts as to what I was getting myself into. Before I go any further, for those of you not in know, the idea is: cough up ten bucks for a good cause (Leukemia), having done a "good thing", you can now act like the asshole you truly are. Ten bucks, complete exoneration. The proof that you're a good person, a set of bunny ears (Easter, baby, get it?), that if you're an ultra-confident party animal (ha) you wear all night long. Oh and then you're entitled to unlimited $3 Stellas. One sweet deal. Ok, so we turned the corner onto 24th street where some dude wearing pink bunny ears was vomiting so hard that I'd swear he vomited his soul. Farther down the block we crossed paths with two 30-something sorority girls, who interrogated us as to our lack of ears, "Where in the fuck are your ears?" "Why the fuck don't you have any ears?" "You wouldn't like it very much if you had Leukemia." What you also need to understand, that I should've pieced together more quickly, is that because of the long weekend, the vast majority of bunnies left work and headed straight to the bars, and were pretty much in the center by this time, 9:00 P.M.

9:15. We spent 10 minutes outside of the London trying to herd some of our party that had wandered off. We found out they were in Rembrandt's and we headed over there. My friend Andy and I still didn't have bunny ears. Thankfully, the only clean shirt that I had was my disco shirt, which let me just tell you the color scheme: cream, sky blue, pink, and silver, metallic silver. Well, that's bullshit, I just wanted to blow everybody away with the shirt. I left the top two buttons undone so as to display my chest hair which I'm becoming increasingly proud of. Anyway, when we got to the table where you donate the 10 dollars, I informed the young lady tending it that I wasn't going to make a donation. She took one look at my disco shirt and decided it best not to hassle me. We made our way upstairs and I instantly was pained by the memory of $5 beers. Btw, do you know that when you buy a case of Lager in New Jersey, the price per bottle comes to 66.6 cents? Wrap your head around that the next time you think you're getting a deal paying three dollars a bottle at The Barbary. You should by now be able to predict the moral of the story: the best place to get drunk and enjoy the company of friends is in someone's house/apartment, not a Fairmount bar.

10:45. After only an hour and half of receiving disapproving looks for my shirt and lack of bunny ears, after observing a couple alternating between making out and fighting, after not being able to talk with all of my friends because the bar was too packed, no place to sit or stand, after having two girls expect me to let them in the bathroom ahead of me after I waited 10 minutes in line because two girls going to the bathroom together is apparently hot, or something, after hearing one dude tell another dude about how he was fucking some girl doggy style when his roommate walks in and he tells his roommate to whip his dick out, that this girl's a freak, and how she starts to suck his (the roommate's) dick and then bang both of them, I had had enough, and called it a night. The Bunny Hop Woo-Hoo! Yeah! I was the guy on the mat.

He Told Me I was his Best Friend Today, also

Henry had a playdate with his friend Jake today.  I sat the two boys down for a rice, roasted chicken and broccoli dinner.  Henry found a wishbone in his chicken and explained what is was to Jake.  Jake won the bigger piece, to his delight.  

"I wish-" 

"No!  Jake, you have to say the wish to yourself or else it won't come true," Henry warned him.

Jake bowed his head and closed his eyes.  He whispered, "I wish Batman was real."

Maybe I Am Gay

Even though I'm like the one to the left


"A month after I'm supposed to care, it's still kind of unbelievable to me how little NYC disco made it into Zach's poll or the other one...

... I really hope Antony Hegarty is enough of a hook here to backdoor increasingly uptight indie rock circles--who I couldn't care less whether they actually liked the record, just that they know it would be a good look if they did...

... but the point is this album is very lush, very (for lack of a better word) expensive-sounding, just so enormous, made to play the Big Room, made for a time when records like "Blind" did in fact play those Big Rooms...

... Right now those Big Rooms are, EMI assumes, only in the EU and UK, which (from what I understand) might be why EMI still hasn't figured out a US release for H&LA. It makes sense as a European dance-pop act, but US pop has hip-hop and dancerock on the mind..." -- Nick on the new Hercules And Love Affair record

By now I think you know what I would have to say about the H&LA record, if not, then it would basically go: "This will be my absolute favorite record of the year." And it will be. So, instead, I'm going to latch on to something posed by Nick and focus it on my own locality. Why does Philadelphia so abhor NYC disco?

For our time New York City is the Center of the World, both financially and culturally. Envy follows such status. Hating on NYC may be a universal sentiment, but believe me, it is particularly strong in a city, which for some unfathomable reason detests being labelled "The Sixth Borough". As if we deserve such lofty praise. By so fervently attempting to establish a unique identity my city has actually ruined any chance of doing just that.

How do you vituperate the axis of the world, Philadelphia? You condemn it as pretentious and smart and expensive and gay. I have already said enough about the gay thing here, and I can't believe more hasn't been made out of it, not that I expected anything, but really, having such a large gay population, we should be ashamed about it. The expensive thing, you can't hack it in New York, the pretentious and smart stuff, you're too stupid and insecure for it, city of mine.

All of the disco acts and tracks that Nick cites in his post are extremely prententious sounding, true, but they overcome it by being very very good. All the arguments I've heard against New York disco in Philadelphia, and this comes from the very top of our hipster food chain, basically condemn it as "dorky and gay", "pussy shit", "faggot music." Well, if that's what you want to call the new Hercules And Love Affair record, Philadelphia, can you please shove your dick up my virgin ass?

The one word that I really want to focus on is "dork". Most hipsters were probably at some time in their lives dorks, most likely in school years. After school, with complete freedom to choose friends and form cliques, hipsters isolate themselves. So insulated, they gain a false confidence, and all too quickly forget the hardships they endured, the fact that they were, almost in a sense innately, dorks. They become like all the jocks and cool kids before them, circumspect and insecure, overly concerned about their appearance. They don't dare to "dork" out on a dance floor. They live on the knife's edge. Philadelphia hipster dance clubs are SO stale at this point-- NYC disco almost entirely absent from everyone's rotation. Consequently, nothing spontaneous or FUNNY ever happens on the floor. The same people talk to each other over and over about how good they look and whether they were able to get tickets to the Cobra Starship show. Most hipsters, at least from what I've experienced personally, currently, in Philadelphia, are actually hypocrites.

Why bring all this up? The survival of NYC disco is at stake. "Blind" hatred is suffocating it. Hercules And Love Affair does not at present have a US release! What place other than Philadelphia, if we could finally smarten up and dissolve our prejudice, could better boost NYC disco? Which brings me to the close. Right now I can think of only three others in the city that truly love the record. Two of us four are Broadzilla DJs. Let's start to set things right, Philly, tonight.