STL & CHI

St. Patrick’s Day in St. Louis. My parents flew in for the celebration. It’s kind of fuzzy but fun was had by all. It rained like crazy while we were there. We bought records down in University City at Vintage Vinyl. It was great to see all the family.

In Chicago it snowed about 7-10 inches after we arrived. We went to the old neighborhoods and I saw a lot of old friends. We went to the Art Institute and saw the Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer exhibits. Cool stuff.

Now we are on our way to Connecticut and New York.

Hipsters Invade Austin!!

I am not one of them. I lack the required amount of ironic T-shirts and tattoos.

I swear, half of Williamsburg was on the plane from NYC down to Austin.

We are here to visit my sister, brother-in-law and their family.

While we were here the South By Southwest music conference has been going on. Naturally we checked out a couple of shows. We have seen and heard a lot of great music this week. This fest is unlike anything I have experienced before. We’ve seen Hopewell, Witch, The Black Angels, Blood On The Wall, The Raveonettes, The Noisettes, Yo la Tengo, The Atlas Sound, Phosphorescent and Shearwater and many many more.

Yesterday was a Texas day. This is a day on which all of the following must happen: shooting of various high-powered firearms, eating barbecue and seeing Willie Nelson perform. It was awesome. My sister Betsy even got to shake his hand.

Tomorrow we fly to St. Louis to see what kind of trouble we can get into.

On the road again…

My buddy Jens and I are leaving tomorrow to do another trip through America. Itinerary looks like this:
Austin–>St. Louis–>Chicago–>NY/CT

We are gonna check out sxsw and what else Austin has to offer. Rumor has it, there might be some BBQ, Willie Nelson and some firearms involved, but you didn’t hear that from me. Well, okay, yes you did. St. Patrick’s Day may involve drinking in a family owned drinking establishment. Chicago is gonna be awesome. It has been 8 years since I’ve been there and I miss it terribly.

If I get near a computer, and if I feel like it, I will report back from the road.


Bonus blog post
I signed up last month for the RPM Challenge. The deal is, you have the month of February to write and record a whole album’s worth of music. As far as the challenge goes, I failed miserably. I recorded 3 songs but only finished one. The song is called:

Urban Pleasure.

The lyrics are not meant to be taken literally, but rather it is a reflection on some of the expereinces I have had living in various urban environments. I used the opportunity to work out a lot of what I felt about these experiences in song form. My friend Henning Thomsen helped out on drums. He also helped me out on the remix of Hot Bitch Arsenal’s groovy masterpiece, Failure.

taggers, bombers, writers

Here is an interesting article in the New York Times about the graffiti scene in Berlin.

Nearly everywhere you go, from the cafe-lined streets of Kreuzberg to the leafy schoolyards in Grunewald, hastily drawn “tags” stream across the sidewalk and crawl up the side of buildings, in an elaborate zigzag of cartoonish graphics, puffy letters, photo-like wheat pastes and bold stencils. Parts of the city look as splattered as a New York City subway car from the 1970s.

Check out the accompanying video.

Soundtrack by Sido.