Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Rehabilitated Rudolph

I always thought that Xmas should sound more like this. The track is just a bit of fun, a reworked ready-made from a very dark mulled wine and rum filled Xmas in the studio a couple of years ago. Rudolph obviously would have approved, his bright red nose was the result of gin blossoms. I’m sure his drinking stemmed from the gruelling delivery schedule Santa imposed upon his reindeer and his relative bad-boy celebrity image compared to the rest of the gang. Don’t believe me? Look at him. He’s so wrecked his eyes are crossed.

Rudolph caught Red-Nosed

Rudolph caught Red-Nosed

Rudolph the Rehabilitated Reindeer

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Features

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Imagining U2’s Next Stage

A logistical breakdown of U2’s next world tour:

Colin Gronning, Production Manager

The main stage, just the manta ray’s head and wings, rolls out in one hundred and ten, eighteen-wheeler twelve-ton trucks. Those vehicles are our lead roll, so those trucks are first out of the current stadium and first in to the next one. And we’ve got three sets of those trucks, because we’re leapfrogging three manta rays. In other words, while you’re watching this show tonight in Hyde Park, we’ve already got a one hundred and ten truck convey on its way to the Go-Green EarthAid™ festival in Oslo with our second manta ray rig, and another one hundred and ten trucks on convoy to, say, Iceland for The World is Hungry® Global Relief Concert. So the band does three nights on and one night off and we’re always set up at the next stop on the tour, all over the world. People say, “Do you really need to roll with three hundred and thirty 18-wheelers for the stages, and the answer, obviously, is yes.” It seems a lot less extravagant when you consider we’re able to roll the band’s instruments and gear using only nine trucks, the outboard lighting grid in just twenty trucks, and the crew on thirteen busses. Then we’ve just got four planes for the band and front office management. When you look at it like that, you realize we’re pretty scaled down out here. It could’ve been a much bigger transportation setup, but the band stepped in and said, “Let’s do the right thing here, let’s keep it small, let’s let the music speak for itself.” So we did.

More at McSweeney’s

Features

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

The Zombie Porn Factory

Tired of aspirational interiors magazines where a single piece of featured furniture costs more than an average yearly salary? Apartamento magazine has carved a niche of exposing the interiors of the everyday profiling folks that have actually built and received splinters from that wonky shelving unit featured in its pages. 

Apartamento editor Marco Velardi paid our jumbled abode a visit last summer before it turned into a winter ice skating rink and took some pictures. Welcome to the Zombie Porn Factory… 

 

Apartamento Magazine Issue #3 Cover

Apartamento Magazine Issue #3 Cover

 

Photographs by Marco Velard

Photographs by Marco Velard

Here is the text by David Piper:

Among the more odious habits of the gang that live here is showering naked. Fat Fingers Miller (not to be confused with Footwank Miller and his brother Asterix) in particular really goes for it with the soap, which tends to rile Demolition Dave something rotten. But it’s just one example of the many little idiosyncratic paths of behaviour that develop when people live in a place while they’re slowly building it. Putting blinds up in the bathroom wasn’t as important, at the time, as the electrics, say, so it never happened, and now they like to joke they’re just performing a service for the neighbours.

Similarly, a random accumulation of objects and amenities from a variety of extremely fascinating sources constantly hints at an imminent aesthetic disaster which somehow hasn’t quite materialised: you’ll find a giant mirrorball and huge green fist, rescued from a friend’s failed sustainable disco campsite venture. But just you wait ’til they build the trompe l’oeil maze…

They recently became the first house in Europe to adopt Digital Time, the revolutionary new system espoused (in his book Power of 10, currently out of print) by good friend and frequent guest of the house Stanley Mchale, the arch-guru of the new chronologists, entrepeneur, and motivational speaker extraordinaire. A typical day might be divided into the following digital hours:

1. Light weapons training
2. Swim/run/darts
3. Horticultural inventions
4. Poetry team
5. Rain/hail/sleet/snow
6. Advanced time-wasting
7. Brain freeze
8. Freakbeat/psych/mod

Current plots being hatched within the house include an exhibition of drawings of boobs, Dandy speed-dating, a 6-star luxury obstacle course, and a handful of miscellaneous jokes and chat-up lines - it is something of a hub for hopeful young men (and women!) keen to gain whatever advantage they can on the Sexy Battlefield. If you’re there you should check out the plumbing, which they did themselves - they have 24-hour hot and cold running sex on tap!

 

Photograph by Marco Velardi

Photographs by Marco Velardi

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