HA! MB, I just got this fuckin thing - no way am I taking it down into the sewer. I will glady use it to shoot and post plenty of juicy photos this coming weekend, when Thorsten comes to the States and the Rebellion strikes thrice.
At the risk of sounding like one of those people, the iPhone is a marvelous little bastard and I love it. As a chronic early adopter (read: suckafool), I'm willing to ignore all the shit it doesn't do yet... and just enjoy all the shit it does very, very well.
By the way, I hope the good people of Brooklyn and Boston are ready for the Rebellion and The Visitors. If not, you have less than a week to prepare.
I´m going through the weirdest musical phase of my life at the moment: for the last week or so I´ve been listening exclusively to Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Man, that´s scary and I hope this lapse of taste goes as fast as it has come.
But anyhow I did come across what has to be the greatest Eco-Anthem of all time: "All I can do is write about it!" . Well, I did know the song before, just never bothered to listen to those awesome lyrics. I mean, poet Mr. Van Zandt is so dead on finding metaphors for the beauty of the county side that it is hard to go on polluting and destroying nature as we are. Espescially this one line really spoke to me:
"have you ever seen a she-gator protect her young?"
That for once is an experience I can totally relate to. Made me realize nature´s beauty in a heart beat.
We're heading up to Boston on August 5 for a special audiovisual collaboration with Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens at The Middle East. Peter and Sean are the fellows who were hired to install Aqua Teen Hunger Force Lite Brites all over Boston, then scapegoated when some dipshits thought the devices where bombs. The guys are also gifted visual artists, conceptualists and inventors, and they'll be providing visual accompaniment to the Hanslick Rebellion performance. Or maybe we'll be providing musical accompaniment to their light show.
But there's more to the tag-team of The Rebellion and the Boston Two than just lights 'n' music. See, back in the day, Hanslick Rebellion made the Albany scene with a guerilla ad campaign of our own... one that would have gotten us in The Deep Shit if we'd attempted it post-9/11.
The story? Goes a little something like this:
The SUNY Albany campus spent the spring and fall of 1995 locked down in a state of low terror. First there was the incident in LC-5: a student named Ralph Tortoricci took the entire lecture center hostage at gunpoint. Negotiators tried in vain for several hours to make Tortoricci surrender; he was ultimately bum-rushed by a gang of ROTC guys, one of whom got his left ball blown off. Tortoricci was dragged away in handcuffs, shouting "I've got a microchip in my brain!"
Later, a female student was brutally assaulted on Indian Quad. She claimed her attacker was an African-American male; it turned out to have been her father, who was as white as she. The girl had lied in order to keep her dad out of trouble, and the easiest way to do that, apparently, was blame a black guy.
My roommate that spring, Eric Weiss, had a few extra bucks burning a hole in his pocket and he wanted to try something entrepreneurial, so he asked me to help him design a t-shirt for sale. I went with Calvin and Hobbes, every fraternity's favorite characters to slap on a rush shirt with beers in their hands. Except my Hobbes had his hands up, and my Calvin had a plastic suction-cup pistol in his hand and a word balloon over his head that said - you guessed it - "I've got a microchip in my brain!"
The back of the t-shirt would read, in giant letters, "SUNYA STUDENTS!" and in much smaller letters beneath, "BEATEN. LIED TO. SHOT AT." Eric balked at producing the shirt. I can't imagine why.
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Students returned from summer break in late August. The first week of September, the campus awoke to a thorough plastering of flyers that read:
There were also business-size cards scattered everywhere. The front of the cards read:
The back of the cards read do not distribute. Except for one in every ten, which read:
Kids picked up the cards, looked them over, confused - then pocketed 'em. A frenzy of gray-suited school administrators ran around campus, frantically tearing down the flyers. But it was too late. As many cards and flyers had been collected as had been destroyed. The game was on.
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Buoyed by the reaction to our initial campaign, Mechno and I decided to kick it up some. We drove downtown and rented a voicemail box from an office supply store. The box came with a local number, and was pretty solid technology for its time - it was all computerized and multiple callers could leave messages at once.
The next morning, a new flyer was up all over:
The buzz became a roar. Harry Rubenstein, our pal in the Student Association, called in to report that the both the administration and the student government were bonkerizing themselves trying to figure out what the fuck this "rebellion" could be. The thing that scared them the most, Harry said, was that when a number of people tried the phone number at the same time, they all got through, indicating that this was not just some dude's answering machine but rather a sophisticated and well-organized operation.
Leading speculation in the administrative offices: the Rebellion was a Zionist plot to take over a dormitory tower on Rosh Hashana.
We got more than a hundred voicemails that first day. Each caller was treated to our outgoing message: the first 30 seconds of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice". Then they had a chance to leave their thoughts. Most people said a word or two before hanging up. About half agreed to join the Rebellion sight unseen.
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The voicemail number was still getting hit at a good clip a week later. We changed the outgoing message daily, usually by holding the phone up to the TV speaker for 30 seconds. One evening we caught a snippet of dialogue from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was on this night that we received a call from Natalia Armoza of the Albany Student Press, begging us to grant an interview.
SUNYA administrators met with members of the student government. Student Association President "Landslide" Larry Kauffman pledged to find the perpetrators, insisting that the Rebellion was a plot to "overthrow" him. School officials lied, claiming they knew exactly who the Rebellion was and had things under control. In fact, Harry told us, they were shitting eggrolls because when they'd asked local police to trace our number, the cops got nothing.
The following morning, this flyer was everywhere:
The calendar page had been torn from a desk planner in the SUNYA president's office. Over September 22 was written "REBEL."
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A week before the gig, Mike and Mechno were doing their Sunday night talk show on WCDB. I was workin phones, which were lighting up like crazy. The only thing callers wanted to talk about was the Rebellion - the entire two hour show was devoted to speculation. Your humble hosts claimed to know absolutely nothing about this "rebellion". "It's probably just Communists," Mike said.
In the WCDB lobby, next door to the office of the Albany Student Press, hung a September calendar similar to the one on our latest flyer. Except this calendar was all frilly and flowery - it was one of the Mother Earth's Cafe event schedules that Richard Genest dutifully assembled and distributed every month. If anyone had bothered looking on September 22, they would have noticed, in Richard's calligraphy: THE HANSLICK REBELLION.
Nobody did.
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The Albany Student Press, September 15, 1995
Impending Rebellion Stokes Concern by Natalia Armoza
For the last week, hand written posters detailing an impending "rebellion" have been appearing all over the podium. Along with such sayings as "Might does not equal right," and "Resistance does not equal futile," a phone number was included on the bottom of numerous posters.
Several machine messages have been reported at the posted phone number, mostly quotes from movies. Students and faculty alike have begun to question what the posters are suggesting.
Larry Kauffman, Student Association president, said he was "forty percent sure" the posters were being distributed by "some either anarchist or other left-wing radical group." He said the distribution of fliers was "very organized, very sane, very logical."
Kauffman also suggested a connection between the upcoming Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah, also the Jewish day of judgment, and the posters implying that September 22 would be the date of the "rebellion."
Kauffman said, however, he was in the dark about the "rebellion" although he was sure the National Women's Rights Organizing Coalition was not involved. He said, "I'm completely ignorant and quite perplexed."
Other students have proposed several ideas, from the advertising of a religious group to a political candidate. One Junior who refused to give his name said, "Maybe they'll drag out 'Landslide' Larry and behead him and say let them all eat fried chicken."
Mike Keaney, host of the Mike and Paul show on WCDB, the campus radio station, said he has received numerous phone calls about the nature of the "rebellion."
He said, "What can I tell them? I don't know what it is. I have never seen anything like this. It could be political, it could just be a band."
Most students seem to agree with Michelle Pabs, a Freshman. She said, "There's no explanation. I have no idea. It makes you curious."
The ASP called the phone number on the posters, and heard a quote from the movie "Quiz Show" on the answering machine. Later messages included an ominous "Tell your masters that we are on a sacred quest," and a sample from the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice," and the ASP left a message encouraging those distributing the flyers to call.
On Wednesday afternoon, the ASP received a phone call from a male voice. He said the students at SUNYA are "under seige" and that "the rebellion is the voice of the people and the people will not be ignored."
He said, "Those who chose to stand in our way may consider this a warning."
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We decided to try one last gamble with four days to go. There was a Champion outlet in the Westgate strip mall; Mike, Mechno and I pooled the last of our cash for 100 blank white t-shirts. I cut a stencil and we printed "i [heart] the rebellion" on them. Telling people that we knew someone who knew someone who knew the Rebellion, we sold 95 shirts in two days and kept the last five for ourselves.
Howdy slutz.
Thanks to all of you who helped make yesterday's release party a smashing success. The place was hot and the rocking was delicious. The Colonel was so excited he broke Alex's Les Paul! Now THAT'S entertainment.
A special thank you to our buddies in El Alto for celebrating with us. They played a blistering set that ended far too soon.
We'll avoiding the sun in Rebellion central 'till the third of August when we'll rock hard-like at The River Roadhouse. Check the tour dates section for more info. See you there.
Ok, so the moral of this story is: Don’t give hand your camera to anyone detoxing from a heroin addiction and expect to get clear photos. I’m going to leave the photographer unnamed to protect the innocent…
Here are some shots form a house concert I played at a place called Sandwell Manor here in Devon UK.
You might noticed that I appear to be accompanied on stage by two very blurry figures. No, they are not hallucinations.
One is my friend and bass player Ben Grub (left).
The other is a newly acquired violinist and pianist El Davis (right).
We hope to have some better pictures in the future, but these will have to do for now.
I am really enjoying mixing house concerts with club gigs (populated by recovering junkies or not). I’ll try to keep you posted as things move forward here.
CART
