Google’s web-hegemony has become so unquestionable at this point, that any attempt to topple it comes off not as merely futile, but as a kind of Brechtian joke. The successors to the search-engine standard line up, boast revolutionary features and vamped-up security. They have vague, inviting names like ChaCha and the Jeeves-less Ask.com. And yet, it’s all tech-nerd theater. Nothing changes, nobody cares. In a best-case-scenario, most people will simply search Google for the details on its own ostensible competition.

A new model named Cuil (and pronounced, unexpectedly, “cool”) goes online today. Engineered by former Google employees as reported by HuffPost , the engine boasts access to a larger pool of websites (120 billion) than its rival, and can organize search results graphically by category. The site’s homepage is a troubling, portentous black, and the logo, “Cuil” in a Helvetica-ish font with a blue-dyed “i”, is decidedly less cheery than the G-spot’s rainbow Times New Roman. The presentation, sparse, spacey, and emphatically inhuman, needs some work. By contrast, Google’s homepage today features an adorable drawing of Peter Rabbit being chased with a rake. Even though the massive Menlo Park-based corporation might be evil underneath its pastel sheen, I still feel safe searching in its coddling hands. With Cuil, I couldn’t shake the creeping fear that the system would throw me nothing but tentacle porn and pages in German.

But how about the crucial diagnostics? Here’s a rundown of my intensive trial sesh:

-Search for my name turned up 6,040 hits on Google, 384,375 hits on Cuil. I’m obviously more ubiquitous on the latter, but also less existent. There’s a lot on nonsensical stuff about Linux and some guy named Jeff on the first page. Google, meanwhile links to that video of me singing a song about pirates on YouTube pronto. Verdict: TIE

-Looking for illegal music is hit or miss with both methods. As with before, Cuil racks up obscene numbers of hits, but doesn’t focus content to the extent Google does. I know what I want is here somewhere, but it might take weeks of clicking “next” to find it. Also, Google puts up more links to viable commercial outlets, like Amazon or Rhapsody. If I wanted to pay for music, I would pay for it. Verdict: CUIL, by a hair.

-Google bombs are alive and well on Cuil. “Miserable failure” still nets a million articles on Bush. The first link for “French Military Victories” on Google remains a mock-up page referring you to the search term “French Military Defeats”. Cuil, however, goes the whole nine yards, displaying no search results and delivering the devastating message “We didn’t find any results for French Military Victories.” Verdict: CUIL.

Of course, Cuil does not have a lot of the nifty featurettes we’ve come to expect on G-love. There’s no “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, there’s no maps, or images, or video search. There’s no cloud-computing gadgetry. But unlike most of the search-engine also- rans, the app manages to impress with the sheer brute force of its content turnout. The web is big, but Cuil makes it seem bigger. Which, of course, is terrifying. But also, well, kind of cool.

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The queue never ceases to amaze me. Folks line up dutifully for an iPhone upgrade or a last-minute look at the Telectroscope or the All-Star Game, and a grandmother’s position ahead of an American Gladiator is respected as tantamount to a constitutional commitment: do not cut, do not push. It’s a British convention that, while retaining that country’s predilection for rueful politesse, not to mention a uniquely Stateside bent towards compassionate competition, is still about as close as the common capitalist can get to egalité, fraternité, liberté while still pursuing his gadgety passions and hard-on for spectacle. It’s a sublime compromise. To get the things we want, we must wait our turn, stomach a couple seconds of social collectivism in the name of stuff, stuff, stuff.

Sunday’s Santogold/Diplo show at Central Park’s SummerStage not only had a queue out of Exodus, but an aesthetic mentality poised on the cusp of one-world wishwash and consumerist crassness. Waiting in a line that snaked about a mile out into the wilderness, we panted and smoked and looked for shade, all the while hoping that the thuds emanating from over the foliage-soaked horizon were, in fact, the concert and not some carefully concealed guy with a boombox having a picnic. When the baggage check did come into sight, so did the skeletal outline of an impromptu mini-stadium, covered in banners for Time Warner, Snapple, and white-dudes pistol-poking the air. For some reason, security at these events are under the impression that they’re responsible for peacekeeping at a Gaza checkpoint. They gesticulate and yell like everyone is under fire, waving the crowds through with a gritty desperation I haven’t seen since those tapes of Hilary Clinton landing in war-torn Bosnia.

Somewhere, a friend of mine had seen this show advertised as the “sounds of the future.” While that pitch was obviously written by someone over the age of forty, the claim does have some basis in fact. Diplo and 8-Track are masters of the mash-up, not so much DJs in the traditional, coherent sense as much as rap-radio recontextualizers, patching our favorite bits of our favorite thug anthems into each other and changing the recipe often enough to let us forget that we’re hearing a Frankenstein. It’s cool for about twenty minutes, but then you just want to hear a fucking song, one full song, any song! The strategy works in clubs, where it’s air-conditioned and dark and loud as an airport. But in the open air, in pulverizing heat, on a surface that seemed to be stolen from the nearest putting green, only drunk, fat people in bikinis want to dance. At one point, a hype man shouted “Get your guns out!” If he’d been serious, I’m afraid we’d have had another Jonestown on our hands, except the Kool-Ade would cost something like $7.

I missed Santogold and went to hang out under a tree. “Get off the grass!” yelled some enormous guard from afar. This is something I wouldn’t expect to hear in a park, but of course, it had been years since I’d been to football camp. In the distance, I could hear the boom-boom of the backing DJ, the singer’s quasi-bhangra balling. It was a short set, by all accounts, about 6 songs and half-an-hour in length. When I opened my eyes, I saw a sea of people cascading out of the bleachers, a queue rolling downhill with terrible and anarchic velocity. It was like the stadium had suddenly gagged on the thousands of hands that fed it.

Photo courtesy of Gayborhood Gringo on Flickr



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No Age’s exodus out of the L.A. Smell scene into the larger taste-made universe is even more auspicious for the fact that their sound is more timeless than timely. When everyone else is busy dabbling in afro-clash and new kinds of irony, the duo opts to iron punk’s ragged remains and cut out a few patches. While they keep a white-noise board on hand, the static breakdowns are more transitional than compositional, a cowry of cultural currency that doesn’t necessarily need to be there, even if it makes the band look cooler.

No Age did look pretty cool, though, Friday night at the South Street Seaport. Kind of amazingly, their fans, a lot of whom might be prepubescent, are completely crazy, moshing like bros, climbing over barriers, patting red-faced guards on the head. It’s a wild vibe, kind of like wandering into the edgiest mall in Burlington. If the blogosphere can make music like this teeny-boppable, then I’m all for the inevitable after school special. No Age indeed.

The band held up their end of the bargain pretty well. The stripped down combo sound works better in the open air then many of the Seaport’s past choices, and the whole thing was scuzzy and loud without dissolving into the fuzz puddle I’ve come to expect from the venue. No Age didn’t talk a lot, but when they did, they seemed very polite. No one threw anything, and the duo invited us all to Death by Audio after the gig. A Place to Bury Strangers didn’t do that a couple weeks ago, and they fucking live there.

But with aww-factor comes the prospect of backlash. I could feel it brewing under the sea of fresh faces in HEALTH shirts, in the sweat-drenched security holding them back. When the unmarketable is suddenly fielding questions about Fall Out Boy, more than a few fans are going to feel like their baby has been dropped out the window. No Age are growing up. Catch them while they’re hot.

Photo by Ben Lasman


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The holiday weekend taught me a few new things about how to get out of the city on the cheap. I was headed home to Boston and decided on BoltBus (rather than the always dubious Chinatown bus choices). BoltBus steals the “$1/seat*” concept of the Midwestern Megabus venture, but throws in the added flash factor of onboard Wi-Fi, power outlets, ample legroom and flatscreen TVs that don’t turn on.

“Bolt for a Buck,” however catchy, is not entirely true, as the $1 seats typically sell out days before you plan on leaving. For the non-neurotic, expect to foot a $15-$20 bill for a one-way cruise, that, despite what the ticket says, will arrive at its destination a minimum of half an hour late. Ignoring the fine print, Bolt is a comfy, clean experience whose preppy, tech-y riders could constitute an Apple commercial unto themselves. All good things to keep in mind as the next summer weekend approaches and you begin to get that itch to escape the simmering city streets.


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This Saturday, artist Michael Alan plans to fill his Williamsburg house with nude Marilyn Monroe impersonators, sparklers on the roof and in the butt, a cake on someone's head, and an orgy. It will be, promises Alan, wild fucking fun. As the next installment of Draw-A-Thon Theater, Saturday’s event would mark the healthy continuation of the much-covered, well-attended public performance art-cum open studio trip Alan and his troupe founded in 2005 were it not for the nagging fact that the project, as of this writing, is homeless.

“We had an arrangement with a Chelsea gallery through the end of August,” Alan explains via telephone, “But they didn’t want to pay the $500 insurance.” Booker back-outs of this kind are nothing new to the group. Alan has sought legal action on at least three occasions against flaky curators.

“I always win because they’re always wrong,” says the artist. “They think, ‘Here’s this painter who’s crazy that we can take advantage of.’ I might be a painter, and I might be crazy, but I’m also intelligent.”

Draw-a-Thon stagings, which typically last 12 hours and, due to ever-present and tumescent nudity, don’t serve alcohol, have failed to jibe with the Modigliani-and-a-martini crowd. The show, packing the floor for an entire working day with amateur artists, naked things on fire and hurled eggs, has become considered something of a money pit.

The communal bent of Draw-A-Thon Theater seems increasingly at odds with the prevailing curatorial trends of the city.

“People say New York is the art capital of the world, but I’m not sure what that means anymore,” says David Koren, producer for the ongoing Figment arts fair on Governor’s Island at which Draw-a-Thon performed two weeks ago. “Does art capital mean where art is bought and sold? Dragged out of a cave and exhibited?”

In 200X New York, art means money and scene means graduation party. Underneath the bohemian veneer of Williamsburg (now available at Target) and the insta-bar openings of the Chelsea strip runs a current of privilege at once potent in its cultural influence and potable in its neuvo appeal. Thousands of kids, descending from the ivory tower into Brooklyn and Soho, are drinking the hipster ale. It’s a funny balance. These days it’s harder than ever to afford the tubercular lifestyle craved by cash-in creative types. For everyone else, there’s not much of an escape. Threats of moving from Bushwick to Baltimore, or Austin, or Portland are essentially clichés of their own at this point.

Alan, too, has considered the possibility of leaving the Apple, but has opted to hang on for the time being because of personal and self-actualizing obligations towards his hometown.

“I want to do something to make this city better for artists and bands,” he says. “If I could change something here, in this climate, I feel like that would be significant.” Draw-a-Thon is currently looking to purchase a space of its own, something Alan has dubbed the Positive Art Machine.

“We were thinking of Warhol’s Factory, but positive,” he describes. “It’s going to be a huge eyesore. I want everyone to come in.” With a fundraiser scheduled for September, the PAM may be a time away. But, Alan contends, the backers for the endeavor, not to mention the support of hundreds of collaborators, artists and musicians itching at the status quo, is there.

In the meantime, Draw-a-Thon will have to improvise. When their outdoor Governor’s Island gig was threatened by rain and lightning, the troupe spontaneously relocated to an abandoned church nearby. “We baptized a guy in paint over the altar,” Alan recalls, “It’s a statement of, OK, ‘What is the Church?’, but also points out that Draw-a-Thon is a new kind of church that’s weird in a positive way, the real positive way.”

The Figment performance drew a crowd of well over 100 people, a turnout which, while heartening for the performers, begs the question of how Alan will fit those kind of numbers into his digs this weekend. “I’m just looking for a space with a radio, a stage, and the ability to keep its word in the contract,” says the painter. “Until then, I’m just hoping I won’t get evicted.”

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Strange things happen when bands move up a stage size. Instant fans via Forkcast flock to shows with cameras and girlfriends. There’s massive buildup until the backlash. Suddenly, the bassist and the drummer are playing stints in Atlantic City with a rotating cast of cocktail waitresses. Friday night’s free A Place to Bury Strangers gig at the South Street Seaport felt like a set-length condensation of the buzz trajectory.

On a stage sandwiched between antique schooners and an Uno, the trio kicked out cuts off their debut LP, played some film-school-y super 8 business about ski slopes and pained women behind them, and destroyed a guitar. Other things demolished: My expectations of seeing a group that at one point, I was told, played a set in the dark with a single strobe hitched to the kick pedal. My irrational urge to check out the appetizer sampler at any one of the family-friendly joints down the diner canyon. The until-now uncontested notion that noise-freakouts, no matter the context, are wicked fun. Things oddly untouched: My hearing, which, if this showcase had gone where I was anticipating, should have been the evening’s first casualty.

The mix was fairly shite as well. It’s a major thumbs-down for a group whose entire claim to semi-fame lies in their effects pedal collection. The overall sound quality of the event was inexcusably poor, varying wildly in volume, levels and clarity depending on one’s orientation around the boardwalk. Obviously the environment, packed as it was with visiting families eating oysters on the half-shell and onion blossoms, played a factor. Apparently, Death by Audio, APTBS’ gear workshop, manufactures something called the Total Sonic Annihilator. This was more along the lines of a total yawn. Even when head-dude Oliver Ackermann pushed his vocal mic into his amp for the final feedback breakdown, the result was more irritating than abrasive. Everyone started cheering, like subjects in a white-noise conditioning experiment. Perhaps Uno’s should have employed such a strategy. A Place to Bury Strangers? How about A Place to Buy Burgers!

Photo by Ben Lasman


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There are tons of bands with idiotic names. Then there’s the rare instance when one such band creates a sound so meticulous in its batshit ingenuity that it not only transcends the offhand stupidity of the group’s moniker but, in a sublime reversal of expectation, actually justifies it in a way that makes you feel stupid for being so nominally apprehensive in the first place. Thursday night I saw DinoWalrus, from “the County of Kings” at Galapagos in Williamsburg.

But before I actually discuss what DinoWalrus sounds like, let’s parse the etymology a bit more. Essentially, this is evolution in microcosm: The prehistoric reptile growing fur and whiskers and becoming, over time, a sizable, adorable aquatic mammal. Extrapolate this Darwinism to music and we get something like a progression from T. Rex to—why not?—Mastodon.

DinoWalrus definitely psychs you out, and occasionally bursts into face-peeling shred, but what it really comes off as is a pre-Perestroika Krautrock broadcast picking up pirate AOR-and-disco playlists from some buried offshore wire, and then rocking that shit backwards in really tight pants. It’s pretty great.

The trio switches instruments like mid-life crises in a Guitar Center, whipping out guitars, keyboards, extra toms, some flashlight/loop-trigger, more guitars. Axeman/jump-around man Pete Feigenbaum mentioned to me that he’s working on building up big walls of sound with all this stuff, but the effect, like this guy’s wild-man-in-the-burbs stage dives, is surprisingly nimble. No matter the tech-buildup going on under the lights, it’s really all about watching dudes straddle, in descending order of complexity, instruments, tables and confused waitstaff. De-evolution, it turns out, is slightly more fun to watch than the slog out of the Cambrian stew after all.

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I don’t remember the last time I saw dudes in Dashikis dancing alongside briefcase-wielding Wall Street types, but if the U.S. is finally moving towards some kind of cultural/racial reconciliation, then Wednesday’s free show in Rockefeller Park courtesy of Senagalese nonet Orchestra Baobab might have marked a decisive tick on the timeline. Let’s just say the future will be awesome, and will feature tons of bad dancing. Also no booze, per park regulations. A coincidence?

The only thing louder than Orchestra Baobab’s tenor player is the band’s collection of polyester shirts, and the only thing bigger than their Heart of Darkness-deep poly-grooves is their bass player. For a performance conducted entirely in French, Spanish and Wolof, these guys put personality on a pedestal to rival even their thorniest of conga breakdowns. When you’re backed up by a cast of musicians who switch instruments (sax, to congas, to kit, to vocals) as casually as most of us change socks, a bit of grinning showmanship, razor-honed after three decades of touring, doesn’t seem so much cocky as irrepressible. After a few minutes, people were walking up to the risers and handing the band cash.

With a back catalog that extends so far into the past, it’s conceivable that the Orchestra could have jammed for a couple of days without breaking. As it went down, we got two hours of sticky, infinitely-expandable Afro-Cuban Highlife grooves, which, I felt, was plenty. OB isn’t so much into songs as it is obsessed with the rhythmic and melodic iterations of a constant sound. Occasionally, someone would drop a bomb on the timbale or the guitarist would beam out a luxurious, skin-smooth solo, but despite the ample virtuoso variations, this stuff is all about moving your legs around like an idiot and singing along to creamy harmonies in languages you don’t know. Exuberant incomprehension is the new globalism. Even the kids, a pile of whom began accumulating at the base of the stage early into the performance, totally get it.

After the encore, bandleader introduced his entourage to the politely roaring, pit-stained crowd. “This,” he said pointing to the guy on his right, “is my son.” Everyone cheered. Crossing the stage to the congas, he put his arm around another player. “This one…he’s my son, too!” he said. It was a bit of a tease, since we all felt adopted at this point.

Photo by famillediaoune via Flickr


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NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image is the new home of an original, prosthetic mask worn by late actor Andreas Kastulas in his role as Narn ambassador G’Kar on the marathon sci-fi series Babylon 5. This news is probably most exciting for the 11 die-hard fans who, after meeting in a Usenet forum and pooling their finances, purchased the latex artifact off of eBay for an undisclosed sum and donated the prop to the Musuem’s roughly 130,000- item collection of television, film and video apocrypha. For the rest of us, it’s the kind of incident that reinforces the notion that even though people like this are probably crazy and difficult to hang out with, they can still find companionship in one another (online) and come together to do great things (buy souvenirs online). “This is a wonderful story of how members of a fan community gathered online from around the world to preserve an artifact that otherwise would have gone into a private collection,” gushed museum director Rochelle Slovin via press release, “The mask itself is a beautiful example of special-effects makeup, used in the creation of a principal character on the show.” The mask, which looks like this, probably wouldn’t qualify as “beautiful” or “makeup” amongst the non-cognoscenti, but it’s significance within the series, which ran five seasons, spawned six TV movies and engendered a spinoff dubbed Crusade, is undeniable. G’Kar, a major figure in the B5 universe, played a crucial role in founding the Interstellar Alliance, and wrote its Declaration of Principles, which, ironically, sounds a lot like this quote from Amy Guskin, the primary force behind the mask’s purchase: ”To say that I am humbled by my fellow Babylon 5 fans’ ability to trust, and willingness to donate money for something like this, would be correct; however, it’s not all that surprising, considering how much Babylon 5 means to so many serious science-fiction fans all around the world. It’s a deep, meaningful, incredible show that engenders deep, meaningful, incredible feelings in those who watch it. By donating the mask to Museum of the Moving Image, we wanted to carry on the show’s legacy.” It’s stirring stuff, an even more so considering that the matter under discussion isn’t the sentencing of a Dilgar war criminal or the overthrow of the Centauri Republic, but the extradition of some anthropomorphic plastic from the private collection of a TV writer. Has Obama been watching this show? Of course, it’s super-easy to poke fun at these kinds of dorky escapades in commerce. All the tropes are here: costumes, aliens, wacky stentorian dialogue. But for those of us feeling superior to these cosmically-inclined spenders, just wait for the June 11 unveiling of the new iPhone, which I’m sure we’re all going to buy. If sitting in that lawn chair outside the Apple Store gets boring, I hear there’s this old sci-fi series on DVD that’s pretty awesome.

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On Sunday, a lot of people with kids, cigarettes and fantastic outfits paid between $2 and $5 to check of the Summer Opening Celebration of Public Farm 1 at PS1 in Brooklyn. Two bands, Hex Message from NYC and Ecstatic Sunshine via Baltimore, played sets of melodic drone under a tarp, and a beer-pavilion served up bottled water and brews in plastic cups.

Public Farm 1 (PF1) by WORK Architecture Company, the winners of this year’s MoMA/PS1 Young Architect’s Program, is a pretty excellent idea whose execution lands somewhere in the middle of sustainable urban agriculture and a Discovery Zone. Essentially a lattice of raised beds in circular containers, the network houses all kinds of crops, has a red periscope attached to its underside and a rainwater pool at its center. Lots of handy information concerning herbs and irrigation techniques can be found in the soggy manuals inexplicably placed in pouches under the water-collection apparatus. The whole thing smells delicious, except for a spacious coop where a collection of fat chickens is housed. At intervals during Sunday’s gala, museum employees would grab a bird and carry it around the courtyard to show to patrons.

It's an unsettling companion image for a project so precariously perched on the threshold between conscientious progressivism and bourgie solecism. PF1 felt uncomfortably similar to that sizable, healthy, immanently parade-able hen in the sense that both seem like plump symbols of Green reinvention without actually constituting effects commensurate with their sunny affectation.

I don’t mean to dis the project, which I’m sure will pump out legitimate boons—farmer’s markets, educational programs, etc.—independent of its institutional gloss. It’s not like this incline of soil barrels is intending to topple the agribusiness moloch in the course of its showing, and, in this modest sense, it’s inevitably symbolic and catalytic status is OK. If the design makes us want to buy veggies from it, perhaps we’ll see more architects adopt or develop the concept to a point where its ubiquity might actually warrant a round of drinks. Let’s get some bands to play that party!

Perhaps the problem is PF1’s leech of art-market privilege. These kind of celebrations, ripe with cool shit, undoubtedly will attract a mostly affluent, mostly White, mostly post-collegiate crowd well-versed in the anticipation of our species’ looming extinction at the hands of all manner of environmental and economic fuck-ups. Even if it’s not explicitly elitist, it is elitist by implication. The cultural snobbery that demands microbrews on tap, noise collages on the PA, and half-winking chicken demos for the ethical and gastrointestinal sating of its self-selecting demographic, is an unfortunate caveat to the Farm’s wholly legitimate appeal, one that, by all means, should be as universal as its aims and initiatives are needed. It’s a tall order, but no niche should have prerogative over these plots. Of course, in the meantime, I’ll try and become a vegetarian.

Photo by Gatto Arancione on Flickr


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