Dudes, hi! I’m back at my home in New Orleans, just in time for some bullshit. Gray and I are staying here in the city through whatever degree of weather comes. We’ll be reporting for some newsagencies, Canadian ones. Canada needs to know! We’ve got a bunch of good nonperishable foods, wine, water, Gatorade (yeah! ever since we both had dengue fever in Rio this past spring, we’re addicted to the Gatorade!) and, you know, a lot of other crap that I guess is necessary although we probably won’t use it. Wish everyone on the Gulf Coast luck!

GZA’s new album, “Pro Tools,” is out, and it’s amazing.  Buy it. 

R. Kelly’s new album, “Twelve Play: Fourth Quarter,” is not out yet, and it’s amazing.  Download it illegally on bittorrent. It is so beautiful.  It has a song called “Playas get lonely too,” which is a nice song about solitude, and a song called “Relief,” which is a truly insane song, because it is so beautiful, and it has the lyric “What a relief to know that / the war is over” in the chorus.  Coming out in 2008, what could he possibly think that means?

We 802 tourers are in DC where many good people have taken great care of us including David Shewmaker, Charlie Pilzer & Cecily, and Marika. Tomorrow (actually today but after i go to sleep and wake up again) we go to Philly. I’m going to watch “Magnificent Ambersons.”

i’ll just…  pleas watch.

we’re starting a new tour diary on the brassland site but the best diary entry ever is this comment on one of my youtube videos posted after our first show which was tonight in seattle. punkypippi says:
“I saw your collaborative show tonight at the Triple Door. I made me think of so many things and want to do so many things. I ate dessert for dinner and dinner for dessert. Then I thought of how my old roommate used to shower with the lights off and clap and thought how fun that might be. Then I wanted to play music or go do karaoke. Wow when you all played Oh the Dreadful Wind and Rain, I felt bathed in evil. Funny how I’ve listened to the Jerry Garcia version so many times. bye ”

this is part one of the fountain of youth, a tv pilot by orson welles. parts two and three are on youtube

From an NYT article about the sports brand Under Armor:

“Brands are effectively stories,” he said. “Our job is managing that.”

activities: swimming in the ocean and at walden pond, running in the woods with the dog, getting my ears clogged with water and earwax and going partially deaf for the whole week until today when i got them cleaned out at the doctors, leaving the doctor’s office and hearing the high frequencies with such intensity scrape scrape scrape!, playing irish music with my friends matt and shannon, reading the idiot, downloading and listening to a bittorrent file of the complete miles davis at montreux in the 80s which is still some weird music, watching vantage point, superbad, the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford, and a cynical & novelistic old anthony mann western called The Furies.

Read this insanely fascinating article about the serial impersonator Bourdin - he channels Brando here:

“People always say to me, ‘Why don’t you become an actor?’ I think I would be a very good actor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. But I don’t want to play somebody. I want to be somebody.”

At age 31, after 13 years of child-impersonation (in the late 90s he lived for months with a family in Texas, conning them into believing that he was their teenage son who had gone missing a couple years before; most recently he was caught living as a 15 year-old boy in a youth shelter in France, his native country), Bourdin has gone straight - he has a wife and kid and a youtube channel.