Friday, April 16, 2004 2:42 PM | Matthew Jeanes While we were on tour, I really underestimated Cincinnati. I was thinking, "great, we've got a day off in Cincinnati of all places" but as it turned out, there was really some cool stuff to see there. The museum of Contemporary Art in Cincy (or Cinty, as I saw it printed once) was hosting an exhibit on street art that I would have liked to have spent about another hour or two walking through. It chronicled 'street art' loosely defined as art made by people outside of the normal confines of the art world, mostly with a kind of DIY ethic. Think Basquiat, Spike Jonze, Shep Fairey, skateboard decks, graphitti, etc. and you have the basic gist of the exhibit. It wound its way from photojounralism of street punks and skate kids and Run DMC, to skateboard graphics, custom sneakers, hong kong designer toys, poster art, home-made video documentary and beyond and it was the single biggest and best collection of all the kinds of spontaneous creativity that I find so inspiring. The Dog Town guys certainly couldn't have thought that their skate decks, sketched on with magic markers would one day end up in a museum, and it's the fact that they created something beautiful IN SPITE of that, that makes looking at those objects so inspiring. I got to see several hundred skateboards, rows of album covers and cases full of zines, many of which were not ever designed to be objects of art, but have nonetheless become such by virtue of their creators' ability to create out of necessity. So much of the art I find inspiring is from-the-hip, stenciled on the wall of a tunnel or stuck to the back of a stop sign, but recently there's been a weird shift with all of this stuff that really became even more obvious with this show. There's a point at which diy street art stops being that and starts being the gaudy, commercialism that it is usually railing against. If you take something like the Obey campaign, it has a fresh audacity to it at first because it attempts to create a street-level brand awareness of a non-brand. Well, Obey has become a brand now, with commerically available products and a whole slew of immitators and other hanger's-on who use the iconography of the Obey campaign to sell sneakers and hoodies. I used to think Obey posters and stickers here and there were really special because they represented a visible growth of the viral power of word of mouth--it represented people spreading art for no other reason than to share it. Now, I see several Obey posters and stickers EVERY DAY because there was a Shep Fairey show in town and you know, it's become just like any other brand. Public space is now fighting for clarity from multiple sides--from the advertising mooks who see every blank wall as an opportunity for 'impressions' to psuedo-commercial art campaigns to street-advertising that tries to pass itself off as street art (Echo stencils anyone?) to graph writers who have nothing more important to add to the world than multiple scrawled copies of their name. I saw some amazing graphitti in Toronto, and some amazing street art at this exhibit and there's lots of stuff in Atlanta to still get excited about (Slumber Inc, Takio, etc) but when the lines are crossed, a cool idea like Obey can get real annoying, real fast. Let's blast these Giant stickers and posters out of the ATL and make room for the next generation of outlaw artists. There's only so much room. Thursday, April 15, 2004 4:42 PM | Matthew Jeanes I'm looking at a bag of Cheetos right now and I'm wondering to myself if we've really come to this. "Dangerously Cheesy" it says on the bag. There's a curious quest in America for more. Cheetos have always been caked in that powdery orange cheese concentrate and for my money, they've never needed more of it. My fingers got adequately covered in powdery cheese and salt when I was a kid; there's no need for the folks at Frito-Lay to come up with a way to add MORE of that stuff. But in the American marketplace (moreso than in other places, it seems) a product has to continually evolve and it has to offer bigger and better experiences and more and more of them to the consumer for people to be satisfied. At least, that's what Frito-Lay would have you believe. In truth, people are proabably just as happy with Cheetos now as they ever were. It's really not a viable regular foodstuff for anyone over the age of 25, so aside from those of us who crave a salty, nostalgic snack now and then, it's really a product for kids, teens, college students, and computer programmers who subsist off of vending machines. The problem is that Frito-Lay, and any good company trying to earn money for investors, cannot be happy selling to the same tide of kids and teens every year. If they can't sell MORE Cheetos in a year, then they have to find a way to sell them or make them more cheaply, to keep the profit line going up. There's nothing wrong with that business plan if that's the way you want to work it, but consider the consequences... In an effort to make Cheetos more appealing, to grab more market share, and to keep the profits rising, the people who make Cheetos have to get pushy. It wasn't enough for Cheetos to be "Cheesier" as they were some years ago. It wasn't enough to offer "20% more per bag" as I seem to remember. "Xtreme Cheese" could only work for so long because the whole "Xtreme" thing started to wear off on the kids who grew up with it and the new generation want something post-xtreme to call their own. So we're left with "Dangerously Cheesy" Cheetos, a marketing claim that is not only blatantly false, but also one that does a disservice to the language. I'm not here to suggest that the word "dangerous" will forever be tainted in the lexicon because Cheetos appropriated it to describe the copious amounts of preserved, dried cheese flavor blasted onto their corn chips. But don't you see where we've at least started on that path? I watched 4 people chain smoke out of Camel packs that said "SMOKING KILLS" on them in letters bigger than the Camel logo for a week--the efficacy of the warning was obviously lost. What does a label like "Dangerously Cheesy" say to a six year old chowing down on some snacks? The snacks OBVIOUSLY aren't dangerous unless you eat several pounds of them per day, so to someone just becoming familiar with the world of product labels, marketing, language, and reading, doesn't this send a confusing message? Aren't pre-teens kind of oblivious to the kind of post-modern irony that makes someone call their own product "Dangerous"? Are we really going to be raising a new generation of kids who don't believe anything, are cynical and suspicious of everything, and thus just take every warning and every notice with a grain of salt? Where do you go from "Dangerous" Cheetos? "Murderously Cheesy?" "Bloodsplatteringly Cheesy"? "This bag of Cheetos will rip off your head and shit down your neck!" Sure, it's a little silly, but I just don't see a way to curtail it. Tuesday, April 13, 2004 3:28 PM | Matthew Jeanes The tour is over. I honestly have two 'knob-twisting' blisters on my thumbs, so I can return home happy in the fact that I didn't sit idly behind a laptop the whole time. In fact, while Chris and I have nothing on Iszoloscope's and Censor's laptop headbanging acts, I think we were definitely animated throughout most of the tour. It was great fun to see Needle Sharing rock the stage every night. Whether there were 10 people or 200, he always seemed pumped up he and projected the energy of his tracks outward. He also sounded good just about anywhere, which was great because his music can sound really huge and epic when its in the right place, but even over small, over-taxed systems, it just seems to be bursting out of the speakers. It was an honor to warm crowds up for him every night. The tour was a weird lesson in tolerance for me. I had to put up with four people chain-smoking in a van for 11 days and my clothes may never smell lemony-fresh again. The group often wanted to eat here or sight-see there all of which were minor battles to fight since I wanted to spend most of my downtime resting and preparing for the next show. There were hosts with widely varying ideas about what was a reasonable level of cleanliness for guests to sleep on, and while we are always grateful for a free place to stay, we all have limits. The folks who showed up largely identified with the industrial/rivethead culture, and it was trying to walk into venue after venue and not judge people on their appearance alone. I almost always had less faith than I should have had in our audiences who were almost entirely clad in black but were also generally pretty open to what we were doing. What surprised me the most about this whole exercise in tolerance was the way in which is was anticipated by the record, 'Fashion Victim'. I really wasn't thinking about the goth/industrial crowd when I was writing the record or coming up with the ideas that spawned it, but it all seemed so appropriate every time we stepped into a club that looked like it was stuck in a time-warp to the clubs I hung out in when I was 16. In fact, it usually appeared that everything about the 'scene' is related to fashion in some way. Whether it was the goggles on heads, the neon drinking straws woven into dreads, the platform leather boots, or the studded bondage chokers, almost everyone at most of these shows was playing happily into the fashion of industrial sub-culture. I know, because I used to do it too. The thing is, it started to look a lot like any other kind of secluded, isolationist, insular community. Nicolas and Roland would have looked just as out-of place in a hip-hop club as I did in most of these joints, and it started me thinking even more about the themes that the album touches on. It's all such an artiface and in a lot of ways, a barrier. Happily, I think we were able to break down the barrier most nights and I met a lot of really cool people who wanted to talk about the show, the scene, the themes in the video, and on and on. Once people saw the show, they were generally pretty open and friendly and I shook a lot of hands and thanked a lot of people just about everywhere. It was great, and warm, and connected and it really made tangible a lot of the reasons that I do this in the first place. So, the moral of the story? I think it's that fashion is as vacuous and empty as I always thought it was, but that it's maybe not as noxious. The boots and spikes and retro-industrial hairstyles were all a pretty superficial wall between me and everyone else when it came right down to it. Even when I wish people could spend less energy getting dressed and fitting in and more energy creating or doing something or connecting with people, I still have to say that somehow it worked despite my initial pessimism. In fact, I hope to see everyone again really soon. Sunday, April 11, 2004 5:05 PM | Matthew Jeanes Quick, everybody move to Toronto! Really, it does seem like a pretty good joint. The last show of the tour is tonight. We'll see how it goes. It's a dark, dark spooky kids kind of crowd so we'll see. We'll fire it all up one more time then I'm going to go home and sleep for a week. I tried to write from an internet kiosk last night but it was the weirdest, most difficult keyboard to type on that I've ever encountered. There was a bubble-tea place open until 3am right near the venue... pretty cool. Good pizza til 4am, decent record stores, and a graphitti shop. If I could just get used to the exchange rate! Paying $25 for a CD just seems wrong. Friday, April 09, 2004 12:41 PM | Matthew Jeanes The tour is winding to a close. I haven't been able to post as regularly as I would have liked and I still have all of the incriminating photos of needle sharing on my laptop, but more details will be up as soon as I get home. Cincinnati was dope. Sometimes the smallest crowds are the best shows. Enduser was a great host and rocked a nice set on the floor, then we went on and got a nice warm reception. The regional delicasy is apparently chili, which I'd like to try but so far the NY Pizza and Philly Cheesesteaks have not lived up to expectations so I'm skipping the chili this time around. Having now spent a week travelling around major cities in the Northeast, it's weird how the development and architechture are so different in these places than in Atlanta. You can tell that Atlanta is in the south because the way its developed and spaced out is just more laid back. In places like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, New York, and Philly, everything is built up high, crammed tightly together, and developed obviously more quickly than it was planned. We'll have to play out west some to see what things are like there. Big ups to Victoria in Albany, a wonderful host and my most favorite person I've met on tour. Thanks also to Jaime for showing us the ins and outs of Cincy, and to all the other folks who have offered us couches and floors to crash on. On to Detroit. Friday, April 02, 2004 10:58 AM | Matthew Jeanes Mad Props need to go out to the DC crew for the first show of the tour. I was intimidated by the boots and spikes and general darkness of the vibe at Nation, but somehow people found a way to get into our weirdness. Big ups to Colleen for letting us stay at her place and to Sue for showing us around a soggy DC. Seeing the nation's monuments and government offices with three punk rock europeans in the post-September 11th world is definitely interesting. Everything is colored by a weird kind of shame at the way our country often behaves, but over coffee we all agreed that every place has its faults and that in the end, the US is a pretty damn decent place to live. I'm not one to just find faults for the sake of it, but it's healthy to question what is handed to you--healthy to be somewhat skeptical of the power structures. When I saw DC as a kid, it was much more care-free and I saw it through the eyes of someone very proud of everything--in awe of the bigness of all of it. Now, 15 years later, it's good to return with a new perspective. The change can probably best be summed up by our experience at the Lincoln Monument--walking up the steps I couldn't help but crack a joke about the end of the remake of Planet of the Apes but once inside, it was still a place for respectful reflection. As we left, we couldn't help but shake our heads at the POW/MIA booths that had "Iraq's Most Wanted" posters up, turning the hunting down of humans in war into a pop-cultural gag... but then then we walked over to the Vietnam War Memorial and had a sobering look at sacrifice. The world's just a more complicated place than they show you in the brochures.

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