My homedog.

My homedog.

esquel

This is esquel

David Byrne and Brian Eno

A new album from David Byrne and Brian Eno is in the works:

As Drowned in Sound noted today, David Byrne announced this week that his long-rumored return to the studio with Brian Eno is nearly complete:

Quote:

The dream art-rock team of David Byrne and Brian Eno will return with new, strange fruit soon, the former Talking Heads man told NME.com recently.

Speaking at an event in New York, Byrne revealed that the duo had rekindled the relationship they formed in the late 70s/early 80s which resulted in three Talking Heads records and 1981’s classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

“I’m finishing up a record with Brian Eno, a musician that I worked with 30 years ago,” Byrne said following an appearance with Paul Simon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the 9th of April. “We did a record together of songs, and that’ll come out.”

The NY Daily News adds:

Quote:

Byrne told us he’s collaborating with their mutual friend Brian Eno “for the first time in 20 years. Brian had written a lot of music, but needed some words, which I know how to do. What’s it sound like? Electronic gospel. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sources say the album will likely be released via Nonesuch, by the end of the year.

In the meantime, David Byrne’s booking agent at William Morris Agency, Mark Geiger, has been soliciting offers from a number of different promoters around the United States for Byrne/Eno live shows, promising the set list will consist of at least 40% Eno-era Talking Heads material. Most of the tour is already booked.

This means that I’ll get to see Brian Eno live in person.  Not to mention seeing David Byrne and listening to Talking Heads songs.

New hookah

After 3 years of my second hookah, it finally broke last night.  This is the new one.  I missed out on an incredibly beautiful black on by about 15 mins.  Oh well.

Wolves with no fur

I’m not quite sure why so many people have a hard time accepting the fact that there’s a difference between what gender/race/culture/planet someone identifies with, and which of those their physical features would indicate they’re supposed to identify with. Society has defined certain characteristics of “human” we’ve also defined certain characteristics of a biological male and woman. I can see that distinction being important in the context of science, but not socially.

Andrew Sullivan posts a video of a discussion on Fox where the commentators are discussing the “pregnant man” and how convoluted he must be to consider himself anything other than a woman, since only women get pregnant. “If a man wants to get a gut, he does it the old fashioned way: beer and nachos.”

Society says: you’re a republican, you’re supposed to do x. You’re a democrat, you’re supposed to think y. You’re biologically considered “male” and therefore must identify with z. You’re white, so don’t wear that. You’re black, so don’t speak like that. Never lose your identity.

Maybe being part of a social group is comforting for some, but I don’t think it’s completely unfair to say that our identity is completely and totally up to us. Our instincts, our urges, our beliefs, thoughts, intentions, background all make up our identity. They exist together with each other to create one complete and unique identity. We can change what we’re given, even biologically to match what we identify with, but it’s not a necessity.

Similarly, there are wolves that look like humans. It’s because biologically, they are humans. They’re the ones who were abandoned in the wild and identified with the only living thing they could attempt to identify with. They’re part of the pack. They walk on all fours. They howl. They don’t wear clothes. They’re not very sensitive to cold temperatures. But they still have all the biological characteristics of a “human,” and all of these elements co-exist successfully.

It’s a simple fact that we are really complex beings.

Glory

A long time ago, my friend Nick (and our friend Utkarsh) joined me in a band called Midnight Echos. If you need a visual reference, take a gander at this:

Nick gave me a receding hairline with his Photoshop skills, and then life gave me a real one with its aging skills. Anyway. Fast forward a few years, and Nick has become one of the best artists I know: confident without being cocky, and humiliated without being self deprecating. He wrote a show at 19 that grew and grew and became one of the most talked about shows in our local theater community. Four best friends from high school return from a year away at college, and go to pull a prank on their old stomping ground.

There’s no set change and no intermission, but over the course of 90 minutes, the guys transform from a gang of identical white kids from suburbia to four incredibly diverse and faceted young adults. As this transformation unfolds, the characters play a game of trying to figure out how to merge nostalgia with reality. It reminds me of a quote from the last episode of Six Feet Under: “You can’t take a picture of this - it’s already gone.”

Now, it seems Broadway is in on it. Click for a screenshot of the NYtimes.com front page today. The full NYtimes story after the jump.

And the story, from nytimes.com:

Next Stop,Broadway, Show biz youngsters

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Published: April 3, 2008

ABOARD AMTRAK’S VERMONTER, just outside Washington — It was 8:15 a.m., which is half-past dark in the theater world, but James Gardiner and Nick Blaemire were already up and on their way. Though Mr. Gardiner had performed in a production of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” the night before, and they had both gone out with the cast afterward, neither seemed the least bit tired. Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Blaemire, you see, are quite young.

 

From left, Andrew C. Call, Jesse J.P. Johnson, Adam Halpin and Steven Booth in “Glory Days,” a hit earlier this year in Arlington, Va. The four will also star in the Broadway production.

Oh, they are old enough to have written “Glory Days,” a Broadway musical that is beginning performances at the Circle in the Square Theater this month; that is why Mr. Gardiner is moving to New York. But at 23 (O.K., Mr. Gardiner turns 24 on Thursday) they are young enough for you to entertain troubling thoughts about misspent youth when you consider what they’ve already accomplished.

“Glory Days,” which they began writing seven years ago, was a critical and popular hit earlier this year at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va. Peter Marks of The Washington Post called it “a beaming source of musical energy.” With that review and others like it, Ricky Stevens and John O’Boyle, two relatively green producers who have credits with “Radio Golf” and “Is He Dead?,” decided the show could fly on Broadway. The $2.5 million musical begins performances on April 22 and opens on May 6.

In a season unusually rife with underdog musicals — including “Xanadu”; “Passing Strange,” written by a rock musician with almost no familiarity with Broadway; and “In the Heights,” created by and starring a 28-year-old — “Glory Days” may be the nethermost dog of all.

The show is about four friends who reunite, somewhat awkwardly, a year after high school graduation. It is semiautobiographical; the characters are based on Mr. Blaemire (pronounced BLAY-my-er), who wrote the music and lyrics, and three of his high school friends. These guys are not slackers either, apparently. One is an understudy in the Broadway production of “Chicago.” Another is an understudy in “Xanadu.” The third, perhaps most intriguingly, is working on a film called “Zombie Strippers” starring the porn star Jenna Jameson (although the film is not that kind of film).

Mr. Blaemire is in the ensemble of “Cry-Baby,” now in previews at the Marquis on Broadway. And Mr. Gardiner left the Signature’s production of “Spider Woman” halfway through its run to work on “Glory Days.”

Mr. Blaemire and Mr. Gardiner both of whom grew up in Maryland, met when they were 16 and members of a musical theater company called Young Americans of Washington, which put on shows and revues after school. By this you could infer that these guys were not exactly captain-of-the-football-team popular in high school. That is the nature of being in the theater crowd, its shortcoming but also its allure.

“It was a huge thing growing up being able to have a perspective on the social hierarchy of high school mainly because you’re not a part of it,” said Mr. Blaemire, who is by far the more talkative and excitable of the two, and who had a chai latte and a Pepsi before 9 a.m.

The quieter Mr. Gardiner, who said he was a loner in high school (a different one from Mr. Blaemire’s) agreed. “The key in high school is to fit into a clique, and I never did,” he said. “Now I’m sort of proud of that.”

Both grew up loving the theater. Mr. Gardiner and his twin brother (who is the assistant director of “Glory Days”) worked as child actors; Mr. Blaemire’s parents took him to Broadway shows starting at a young age.

But Mr. Blaemire also wrote songs, about girls he was going out with, girls he wanted to go out with and girls he was breaking up with. He also, during the summer after graduation, wrote a short musical treatment about a bitter argument that had broken out among his close friends, one of those things that may not seem like a big deal to outsiders but was borderline traumatic for longtime friends about to leave one another for college.

He sent it to Mr. Gardiner and, though Mr. Blaemire went to the University of Michigan and Mr. Gardiner went to the University of Maryland, they began working on it. Teachers liked it but encouraged them to work on something else. They kept at it nevertheless.

 

 

One summer Mr. Blaemire and Mr. Gardiner took a two-week musical-theater course at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The program was administered by Eric Schaeffer, the artistic director of the Signature Theater and the go-to director for musicals in Washington. They showed him the script for the show. He offered encouragement.

“I was doing it really just to be nice,” Mr. Schaeffer said in an interview. Mr. Blaemire and Mr. Gardiner read that as an agreement to help develop the show.

“That’s what we heard in our young and naïve brains,” Mr. Gardiner said with a laugh.

So over the next several years Mr. Blaemire and Mr. Gardiner, who ended up writing the book, would work on “Glory Days,” with Mr. Schaeffer offering copious notes. Mr. Blaemire often took Michigan classmates on weekend road trips to northern Virginia to perform the latest version of the show at Mr. Schaeffer’s home. After college Mr. Gardiner became a regular in musicals at Signature, while Mr. Blaemire moved to New York, toured with the Off Broadway show “Altar Boyz” and then went to La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego for the out-of-town tryout of “Cry-Baby.” Through all of this they worked on rewrites through phone calls and e-mail. At one point, after a couple of readings, Mr. Schaeffer decided the show was in good enough shape that he would direct it at Signature.

So here they were, sitting in the snack car, talking about the state of “Saturday Night Live,” hilarious YouTube videos and McDonald’s cuisine — in short, all the things that your average early-20-somethings talk about, except that these two were on their way to New York to work on their very own Broadway show.

And those friends of Mr. Blaemire’s who will appear, in some form, as characters in “Glory Days”? They seem to be cool with it, Mr. Blaemire said.

“We all went out to dinner and were sitting at Sardi’s on our actors’ break, and they were just like, you know, ‘Who would have thought that our story was going to be onstage in this city?’ ” Mr. Blaemire said. “My mom said to me, ‘I hope you didn’t peak too early.’ ”

Not to mention he’s going to be on Broadway as an actor in the show Crybaby. At 23 he’s managed to conquer two life long dreams, and has inspired me to chase after mine even harder. Good show, man.

on a female folk musician kick

Just got these two from Amazon’s mp3 store:

Patty Larkin - Watch the Sky

Carrie Newcomer - Geography of Light

This is exactly what I need right now.

reasons

Reasons why this week/weekend was/is awesome:

  • Mike and Sarah moving back to DC
  • Andy home for Spring Break on Friday
  • New humongous TV
  • Billy breaks my boredom streak and breaks in my TV with me
  • Lunch with the whole fam over the weekend
  • Sleeping in
  • Hookah with Zach during a
  • Full Lunar Eclipse
  • $1 Movie in Arlington
  • Wall hangers for small stringed instruments
  • Full security clearance

New homes

I got hit twice with illness - one was a terrible cold that I’m still coughing up, the other was a stomach bug that shrank my stomach so that I can’t even eat a Chipotle burrito all the way through.    Sad.

The weather has been getting better, and that’s a plus, but sad to know that it will all come crashing down again pretty soon.

Super Tuesday tommorrow.  Trying not to get too hopeful.

I find myself bored lately - might have to do with the fact that I’m a little stagnant at work due to waiting for my security clearance, and also not having written/recorded anything lately, even though I’ve got a lot of ideas.  Might come up with an Ruby on Rails app to manage the project hours - I wonder how well it would be received.

Our house is almost done, probably a few more days of work and then we’ll have a shiny new kitchen and two bathrooms.  Oh yeah, and the deck.  Speaking of which, summer is right around the corner.  Was thinking about what David Allen said - mark your calendar a month from now, and something life changing will happen in that month.  The two times I’ve tried it, something life changing did happen.  Nothing earth shattering, but enough to make me believe in this theory.

I really hate everything that Starbucks sells.  Why do I keep buying them?

the worst part of being sick?

Music doesn’t sound right.  Can’t put my finger exactly on what it is, but it’s there, like one weird ingredient in an otherwise outstanding soufle.