To clear up space for L & W’s upcoming Aa video(!), the first 7 episodes of Daddy’s Little Girl Loves Cisco Disco are coming down next Friday, July 7th.

Here’s links and playlists for those early episodes. Shows of note include Episode 2, a survey on the topic of oversexed ? black(?) women(?) and Episode 4, a long & satisfying build from chillax to sophisti-dance.

Enjoy!

Sheesh — enough rock and roll. BACK TO BUSINESS.
Lev’s show Daddy’s Little Girl Loves Cisco Disco airs every Sunday at 11pm on WHFR. Here’s last week’s jammy jam:

PLAYLIST:
Avant - 4 Minutes
Lowfish - Glass House
? - that awesome Italo comp’s at home. I’ll letcha know.
Sutekh - Mouth Party
Human League - Morale…You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling
Erasure - A Little Respect (D.E.B.S. mix)
Chamillionaire & Devin the Dude - Backup Plan
Pitbull - Bojangles
Eminem - Hip Hop
T.I. (w B.G. & Young Jeezy) - I’m Straight
Lil’ Wayne - Georgia Bush

Enjoy!

O, and big thanx to Ben H, for hand delivering the show to WHFR!

Yes there was violence. And not just the boys - Whitney hit a guy. But, as in the CT’s music, the unpleasantness was a necessary step on the path to glory.

I mean, after having 2 drinks thrown at them by hate-Os, another drink poured on them by the dude from Excepter* and saying quite seriously, “You know, it isn’t fun to play music for people,” the Country Teasers were taking requests until almost 3 am. When B. Waller sang “Deaths” the crowd participated in the most earnest eyes-closed-singalong I’ve seen since Dashboard Confessional ‘99.

You can’t do that kind of thing twice in a row, so we’re sitting out tonight. But if you weren’t at Tonic, go to Syrup Room. For super-cereal, this shit is not to be missed.

* ok, just onto their set-list, but ON PURPOSE. He also made fun of them for being poor. WTF? I expect better from WBAR alum.

A few more attempts to get you excited for the Country Teasers before they play NYC/Philly:

* “Spiderman in the Flesh”, track 1 on the new record, is a slow burner of a mission statement.

* “The Prettiest Slave on the Barge” demonstrates that the C.T.s are on some next-level William S. Burroughs shit, satirically speaking. From the live album.

* We named a movie after “O, Nurse!”. Here’s the trailer.

* If Beck had found his sound on stereopathetic soulmanure and not moved on to Midnight Vultures awesomeness and then on again to general shittiness — if he had remembered that noise=folk for several (rough) years, he would have sounded like these two bonus tracks (1, 2) from S.W.R.A.L. Full Moon Empty Sportsbag . Pitchfork 3.1 — wooo!.

* Even when they’re nailing straight-ahead post-punk (I heard they know people who know people in Franz Ferdinand) — the C.T.s can still hurt real deep: “Success”, from S.W.R.A.L..

* Oh, plus they know Welsh (for all we know) and a little Russian too (Lev vouches for that).

The Country Teasers: Patrick Bateman meets Someone, right? Maybe Gil Scott-Heron?

Scientists all look alike.

Starting Thursday and going all weekend, I (Lev) am in a play — Arctic Project X. The theater company is 2 Distinct Motions and the director is internet sherpa Jim Ball. So it’s the same talents that put on the whoah-intense production of Marat/Sade that I was in Summer ‘04 (BTW, that’s prob. why Jim is sensitive about old-timey french politics.) Check out a video of that play’s climax scene … um … excuse the pun.

Arctic Project X is a comedy set in 2027, where global warming has transformed the Frozen North into a viable shipping lane (the famed Northwest Passage come true). An oil company, Afluviex Trans-Global has commissioned a sculpture from an Inuit art collective as a way of improving its image. The play takes place during the video-conferencing meeting between the corporation and the collective. Obviously, hijinx ensue.

The cast includes Jazz Christmas‘ woman of a thousand faces, Christina Norris (she played the viking and the bathing beauty. I guess that’s only two faces…) and Annie Russell, who starred in a movie I made before Lev & Whitney existed, but which I think only Whitney has every seen. Plus Marat/Sade standout talents Rachel Cox & Frank Angones. Plus Conor McNamera, who once played my twin in Comedy of Errors!

Definitely check out the play’s website. It gives a very thorough and entertaining taste of the immersive world 2 Distinct Motions/we have put together.

OK. Here’s the info.

Distinct Motions presents:
ARTIC PROJECT X

Manhattan Theatre Club - The Creative Center
311 West 43rd St.
(Btwn 8th & 9th Aves.)
8th floor.

First Run:
THURS JUNE 15            7:30pm
FRI JUNE 16              7:30pm
AT JUNE 17               1:30, 4:30, 7:30pm
SUN JUNE 18              4:30, 7:30pm

Tickets are $15.  Call 347.284.6236 or
email tickets@2distinctmotions.org
Space is limited!!!
Reservations are strongly recommended.

For those of you who are bargain/thrill seekers, there’s a special opportunity to usher the play (& have a line of dialogue!)

Finally, A NOTE ON THE POLITICAL? ISSUES IN THE PLAY:
If you’re way into topical theater, awesome.
If you’re somewhat squeamish (like me), don’t worry. Arctic Project X doesn’t preach a gospel or “present both sides and let the audience decide”. The play does the harder thing. It inhabits and deals with a world like ours — always changing and only partially knowable. Plus, it’s really funny & there’s lot’s of cool fact(oids) about penguins & birds, etc.

If you haven’t checked it before, L & W faveblog, John A’s Chiasm, has always got lot’s of pertinent climate change news, opinions & links. I might add that this weekend I saw John take a rusty nail to the foot like a real man.

L & W faveband, The Country Teasers, are on a very rare state-side tour to promote their album The Empire Strikes Back. And since they aren’t generally well known/liked, we wanna give you a Heads-up.

I’ve (Lev) never seen The Country Teasers live, but Whitney and her gentleman-lover, Oliver, have. He says, “They’re drunken, belligerent, offensive, and all around charming guys.”

Here are the East Coast dates:

 Wed. June 14 - Philadelphia, PA
 at Khyber
 w/ Times New Viking, Pissed Jeans

 Thurs. June 15 - New York City, NY
 at Tonic
 w/ Excepter,  Pterodactyl

 Fri. June 16 (afternoon)
 WFMU session w/ Brian Turner

 Fri. June 16 (evening) - Brooklyn, NY
 at Syrup Room
 w/ Young People, Magik Markers, Lamb’s Bread, sssspectres

I’m in a play next week (more on that soon!), so the only show I can make is Friday’s cuz I bet it’ll go late. W will be there too & it’s a Todd P show & the other bands are good too.
Whitney and Oliver are also probably hitting Tonic the night before. And I’ve gotten my coat and wallet stolen at a party at Kyhber, so I can vouch for that venue too.

Anywayz, join us!

MP3:
Thank You God For Making Me An Angel tangles/mangles new-wave allusions into a celebration of male privilege. It’s a very catchy intro to what the band’s about.
Love it, but don’t be fooled. These dudes are no 1980s-retro act. Some more MP3s & facts next week to prove it.

So it’s been a minute since the last installment. Part of the reason is that the value of Creative Miswatching by Altering the Movie seems relatively self-evident.

The ways to do it are countless (zoom in on the DVD, turn the TV upside down, eff with the colors, scratch the film …) And the long tradition of artists altering existing movies proves the method’s worth. (This Slow Jamz vid is a particularly good illustration, since it draws an analogy to the vurrryy accepted/important practice of altering music recordings).

What can I add? Only that the even tho the stuff we make isn’t very “funny looking”, creative miswatching through altering movies is key to my and W’s work — especially when it comes to sound. Many of the unusual treaments of the sound/image relationship in our movies (see J.C.!) come from paying attention to the potentials that come from watching other movies with the sound “wrong”.

One clear-cut example is that watching Count Yorga: Vampire on mute while listening to Books On Tape’s album inspired the opening sequence to our BoT music-video. (The results of that experiment in creative miswatching are illustrated above).