Location/Show 1: the independent international interstitial festival at i^3 hyperspace with lord of the yum yum, geoffrey pugen, negativland, heather marie vernon and more
Location/Show 2:unconventional action at the lowercase collective with we'rewolves, kt the band, purpetual dusk at curtsy caverns, porches and more
Cost: donation
Things I missed to be there: Parsley Flakes and Baby Teeth at the Empty Bottle; Bakelight 78 at the Bravarian Glau Haus; Miss Gab, Beatkids, and Har Mar Superstar at Debonair Social Club; Critical Mass Art Show Closing Party at The Heart of Gold; Back and Forth Nu Disco Party with Nick Chacona and DJ SR-71 at Lava; Livewire, Mr. Automatic, and The Sleevz at Reggie's
I was at two shows tonight where the lights went out.
In the first, they were turned off for The Simplification of an Island Imploding, a sound sculpture by Fashion Flesh that had no visual components. The piece was not without its merit. It isn't every Friday night that you can escape everything, the rush of cars and trains, flashing lights and pop music (or at least your particular subculture's approximation of it), and get to experience something with your fellow revelers, and I'm sure that no one appreciated that more than the drunken art institute students who took complimentary pillows to the floor, laid down, and soaked it in. Personally though, I was bored. It was a pretty standard background noise sound collage; nothing really engrossed me, no tension was built up or relieved, it pretty much kept its pacing and volume constant until it ended and then the lights went on. I appreciated the curators suggestion that we move around and explore the space but I wasn't in the mood, and from almost anywhere in the room, I think the piece would have benefitted from full surround sound, instead of just two speakers in the front of the room.
The second time the lights went out, I was sitting on a radiator on the second floor of the Lowercase Collective House. I'm not sure if it was Porches or Purpetual Dusk at Curtsy Caverns who did it, but it was a folk-punk act consisting of a guy with a guitar. I'm not sure if it was (a) out of modesty, or (b) in deference to the music he was about to play, or even (c) a calculated mimicry of either option, but it got my attention before he started out his pained and impassioned singing and in spite of his pained and impassioned voice. Keeping me there wasn't an easy task. Acoustic guitars almost always drive me from a room, and he was the third such act of the night.
On the surface, the two shows couldn't have been much more different. The I Cubed fest was an epic multimedia festival with weirdo talent from all over the country, held at an immaculate loft in a part of downtown where it's nearly impossible to park without a valet, and the first thing you see when you enter the space is an elevator that's been tricked out to look like Spring as envisioned in an Easter basket. The Lowercase Collective, on the other hand, is a house on the edge of Logan Square and Hermosa, where gentrification comes less in the form of punk hipsters and more in the form of forward thinking families settling, and you can't really find your way inside without hitting a bad patch of ice and busting your shit.
Both shows went for a three-tiered approach to their nights. The titular three I's of the I cubed fest stand for Independent, International, and Interstitial and the Lowercase Collective's show, labeled an unconventional action, consisted of a vegan dinner, a presentation on plans for organizing against one of the upcoming conventions (I missed that part and have no recollection on whether it was the Democratic or Republican Convention) and ending in a concert (two concerts really, with electric bands in the basement and acoustic acts upstairs).
A little more about the acts...
In a usual Lord of the Yum Yum set, Paul Velat uses a mix of beatboxing, throat singing, sampling and looping to perform a mix of iconic classical and pop music standards (think The 1812 Overture, Flight of the Bumblebee, Welcome to the Jungle, and Summer in the City) and mash them together in his own image, in a way that is often as impressive as it is hilarious, and unusually danceable. It's hard to believe that it doesn't get old, but he is consistently the high point of whatever show he's playing.
The last time I saw him was one of the best. He was playing a show with the underrated psychedelic punk outfit Loto Ball Show, opening for the purposefully (I think) cringeworthy, Dr. Demento'd out bad-is-funny-and-funny-is-good-so-ergo-bad-must-be-good act Little Fyodor at the Mutiny. I don't really know how to explain how his act, which is pretty weird to begin with, blew everyone away by being weirder than usual, but that night he really outdid himself.
Tonight he did it again, and maybe for the first time reached the potential of what all of those previous shows hinted at, when he premiered his opera Sock. The show is about a dude who wakes up to find one of his socks missing, and travels to the underworld to find it, encountering a cavalcade of odd characters, including singing trolls and naked mole rats on his journey to find the keeper of lost things. The opera used a mix of of puppets, masks and crowd participation to get the job done, and proves once again, that any children's show can be adapted for a discerning arts crowd with the addition of beer and words like "fuck" and "shit".
Upstairs at Lowercase, KT the Band started off the folk sets. Her lilting voice was reminiscet of a guitar playing Joanna Newsom, a midwestern Joanna Newsom who, instead of writing songs about unicorns and magic and shit, sings about beautiful girls who work in sandwich shops in Sheboygan. It would have had us all nodding in our seats even if she wasn't beautiful, but the mix of her and her music were so charming and delicate and delicately powerful and lovely that you could almost hear the hearts breaking all over the room. Somebody needs to get this girl into a real recording studio, because the tracks on her myspace page don't do themselves justice at all.
At this point, it's hard to even think about a situation where something would offend me. On any given episode of any number of shows on Comedy Central and Adult Swim, the "hocking" same topics, have been rifled through so many times, I don't even notice half of the ironic racism and brutality breezing by. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. Shows like Wondershowzen and the Sarah Silverman show seem like they try (or tried in the case of Wondershowzen) waaaayyyy too hard to get the laughs that shows like South Park, The Chapelle Show, Shin Chan, and Robot Chicken seemed to do effortlessly, but the ratio of hits to misses is still in their favor (which is more than I can say for cheap, bullshit shows like Drawn Together).
In the twenty seconds or so that make up the meat of Daniel Kibblesmith's video Fix It With Eyes he uses Aushwitz, Abu Ghraib, a dead animal and a dead baby in a series of things that could be made better with big googly eyes. The video was done cheap, and it looked like it was done that way on purpose. Daniel seemed to be wearing his influences right out in the open in an Aqua Teen Hunger Force shirt and a well-placed Tim-and-Eric-y "Great job!"
It reminded me a lot of old Wondershowzen, which kind of got to me, until I did a quick search through his videos to see that he can do something different if he wants to and has worked comedy from a number of different angles and any number of syles. Fix it With Eayes might not be Kibblesmith's best work, but it's a slick video and still good for a laugh after a few viewings.
It probably sucks to be the We'rewolves while Canada's We Are Wolves are running around making it big and stealing your thunder, but these kids didn't seem to mind. They were a great dancepunk act with dance songs about dancing and punk songs about punks and ended with a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival that just drove kids crazy, even after the singer, realized along with the rest of us that he had no idea what the lyrics were after the first chorus. Also, they all look like they're twelve and may very need rides to the train or the suburbs if they want to see their comrades in style Screamin Cyn Cyn and the Pons.
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