it’s a hungarian group called muszikas.
hungarian?
yeah.
you know a lot about it?
a little. it’s farmer’s music. I like it because i’m a farmer.

My friend Yvonne has moved to Park Slope with her boyfriend Karl.

Check out some prints done by Karl.

I’m on the Frames bus, on the way to Philly from New York. The wireless internet is down, but fortunately our WIRED internet is working just great, although occasionally it gets stuck on a bit of roadkill and a kind of skunky smell comes through my laptop’s speakers.

It’s been a busy few days. Sunday night in Boston, and again earlier tonight in New York at Town Hall, Doveman opened for the Frames. And last night I did an acoustic show with the Frames, then did a piece with the guys from the National at the Filmmakers Cooperative Benefit at Angel Orensanz, then went to Pianos to hear the Robot Ate Me, and ended up sitting in for a few songs on organ.

There was some added insanity tonight because Doveman drummer and my personal Jedi master Dougie Bowne got sick and decided at 7 (an hour before we went on stage) that he couldn’t get out of bed, and so reserve troops needed to be called in. And what fucking great reserves. Bryan Devendorf, from the National, gamely hopped in a cab in Brooklyn, arrived fifteen minutes before showtime, and completely saved our asses.

If you haven’t done it already, go to YouTube and do a search for “Vagina Power.”

The million dollar question: What does Ma have on her lap?

Everyone needs to post more to this blog.  All I see these days are my own posts. I want news of YOU GUYS. As you have been delinquent, here’s my account of what everyone’s up to these days.

Marian. At the hardware store on Greenwich where Marian works, three irate customers asked for pipe cleaners. Marian tried not to think about what made them become irate AND need pipe cleaners.

Sam. Sam has been working hard at the grain silo, but in between he still manages to play fiddling gigs. After his show on Friday, everyone asked him how the grain silo work was going, and with the first sentence he spoke, he gave it all away — everyone realized he’d been lying from the start. He’d never even SEEN a grain silo, except on Google Images.

Gabe. Gabe has been contemplating a possible world in which possibility does not exist.

Thomas. While travelling cross-country with the Frames, Thomas has realized that not only does their tour-bus have wireless internet, it also has WIRED internet, with a gigantic ball of internet cable wire which unfurls or furls rapidly as the bus travels farther from or closer to their giant router, based in Ireland (which is where the Frames are from).

Kathryn. Kathryn made a green soup. And all her future unborn kids retched in anticipatory disgust.

Ted. Ted grew taller. Someone spotted his newfound height, and his cool sneakers, and concluded he was “IT”-boy, Wallace Shawn.

Dawn. Dawn recently did her first official gossip column for Artforum. Don’t call it a “gossip column,” call it a “social diary.” Now she’s gone into hiding, fearful of retaliation.

Guest Blogger: Omar. Omar, in business school, is like a new vineyard. Even though they make no money for years and years, each year, they mature and get closer and closer to making zillions of dollars, and therefore, their value increases with a slow steady slope.

Sheila. Oh boy. I don’t even want to talk about Sheila.

I visited some friends in New Jersey including the wonderful Steph and Geoff.
Stephanie coordinated an amazing meal:

Carrot soup with coriander seed and cream
Freshly roasted red-pepper risotto
Parmesan on asparagus
Chicken, grilled on the outdoor grill, with thai curry seasoning

Then, they taught me Texas Hold’Em, and some Texas Hold’Em was played.

welcome back. some of the grain got wet in the rainstorm flooding and was harder to move. my hands are getting all cracked and farmerly

here is a picture of my boss and his wife

one of the nice things about all this is that it really takes me back to my youth. i made a drawing of it:

I am writing to share with you the invention of some really exciting
new software. Very soon a program will exist into which one can input
two images one wishes to compare. (e.g Jon Stewart and Fiery No.3,
Michael Douglass and Fiery No.1, Fiery No.3 and Fiery No.1 or even Jon
and Michael.)

Now, this is not the crude photoshop melding of ‘what
will our children look like’ rather, the program runs a battery of
statistical tests and outputs a series of measures of how alike or
different the two images are. These comparisons are based on human
facial recognition skills and thus output information in order of
importance for the ways in which we actually develop to recognize
faces we know. In other words it gives greater weight to similarities
found in features of higher importance, where importance is defined by
the amount the human brain uses that feature to detect familiarity.
With this program and the popular statistical analysis program SPSS we
can find answers to questions like “do Brad and Angelina actually look
more similar than most couples?” the answer is in fact yes: they
“look” based on our methods of facial recognition 36% more similar
than random chance would predict. Jon Stewart and fiery No.3 (even
though Fiery No.3 is in fact a Muppet it meets the minimum
requirements for features recognizable as a ‘face’ by the human
brain.) These two are actually 17% more similar than chance would
predict. And if we turn on a feature that allows a more even
comparison between different races (basically lessening the weight
given to perceived difference in skin color) they are 19% more similar
than we would predict to randomly selected faces to be.

The Frames tour bus has just passed uneventfully over the border into Canada (don’t you smell it? don’t you smell it? some of you people just about smelled it). Earlier tonight we played at the Showbox in Seattle, probably the best show of the tour so far.

Glen and I have been watching Deadwood (”pickling his dick in the cunt-rind of another”). We’re midway through Season 2. I love it so.

Bus touring turns out to be great. I’ve been sleeping fine (I actually sleep better when the bus is moving than when it’s parked), and it’s a really lovely schedule to be able to walk off stage into a bus, go to sleep whenever you wish, and wake up the next day in the town you’re playing that night.

Last night at dinner the guys in the band were telling me that eating cheese before sleep gives you strange dreams — apparently a well known superstition? It’s not one I’d heard before. This article from the British Cheese Board gets more specific: Cheddar makes you dream about celebrities.

The Shortbus web site, which is run by our friend Sean, has been nominated for a Webby award. Vote for Sean!.

Read all about it.