We're huge believers in Youtube as well as music. Youtube is an amazing medium for examining humanity, as is music. Youtube provides a sound document of our planet's people, whether it be music or a frat guy eating ipecac and ralphing. It's all there. All of it. Amazing.
The video, the song, the dance, Roberto, Ann… aahhh. I can't imagine a better world than the one they've created right here. I want to go to there! What I've read is that every instrument on this album is acoustic, from treated piano to filtered harpsichord. That just blows my fucking mind. I used to believe that Ann Steel was too out of this world to be real, that she must be some wild italian fabrication, but now I know better. I wonder what she's doing right now….
Franco's looking pretty John Torturro in this clip. I love all the weird bored italian kids in the TV audience. Franco seems to win them over by the end after they break out the long plastic bubble worm though. Seriously Franco, what happened? This jam rules.
Jean Painlevé was a apparently the “chief ant handler” on the set of Un Chien Andalou. His underwater pieces are some of the most beautiful surrealist films that exist. He was doing it long before Cousteau but you rarely hear his name. In this touching piece titled The Love Life of the Octopus, he, with the help of a menacing and playful score from Pierre Henry, explores octopi and their freaky deaky love life. Octopi don't get enough respect if you ask me, they're some smart motherfuckers. They taste good fried up in little balls too.
If Robert Ashley were shrunk down like in Inner Space, moved into my ear, and just talked and talked, never shutting up, I don't think I would mind. The warm, southern vernacular gently caressing my brain stem would probably extend my life by twenty years. While in many ways I prefer the album recording of The Park, the playfulness of this performance and the ways this video capture it are amazing in their own regard; the hand gliding across the piano keys, the hand on the telephone, endless slow pans of people waiting, waiting, waiting….
This video is interspersed with tons of great footage of Ken Kesey being a freak on stage and on the bus and all sorts of random shit. I just love it. My dad listened to the dead when I was growing up but I wrote it off pretty intensely, however in the last ten years I've learned to love'em more and more, and in the past year finally delved into the live business. When Jed, my brother and drummer in Etap, got 300 bootlegs at a record show I couldn't help but cherry pick through em and thus it began…
These dudes are truly our Indonesian brethren. I'm pretty sure we're channelling the same weed demon.
