survival skills tips part one

i generally know a lot about survival skills. they are extremely important at times. i have been watching all the episodes of discovery channel’s ‘man vs. wild’ on youtube because it is the most extreme show. the guy ‘bear grylls’ is an expert at everything and he does wild things like eat rotting zebra, jump into ice crevasses, and climb down waterfalls to survive the extreme environments around the world. so i feel that my survival skills have become keen. now that i am living in new york city i don’t really need to know how to survive the australian outback or a costa rican jungle, but who knows.

in fact, this morning there was a survival situation in my house. at ten the carbon monoxide detector started beeping every 30 seconds. i waited for a few minutes before getting up to see what was beeping very loudly. my brilliant survival technique was to open the window and then go back to sleep. that did nothing. victor, a friend who was sleeping on the couch finally got up to stop that shit. haha. i would not do so well in a desert or jungle if my survival skills are that bad in an apartment. the point of this story is that i like shows about other people’s insane survival skills.

the books in new york city

i saw the books perform last night at the bowery ballroom, a charming venue with chandeliers and creaky wooden floors, and it was undoubtedly one of the best shows i’ve ever been to. adrianne and i arrived in the middle of the first opener, rich remsberg, expecting to hear music. instead he was presenting a video slideshow of old, found photographs of early americana coupled with his commentary and appropriately grainy traditional songs that were clearly recorded around the same time the photographs were taken. at this point the audience was sitting sleepily on the floor in the dark. i guess any opener livelier than that would be too energetic for a books show.

i was also unfamiliar with the next opener, a violinist/ambient/electronic composer named todd reynolds, who has collaborated with steve reich and yo yo ma. if you ever get a chance to see him perform, do it. he played hauntingly beautiful, virtuosic violin fed through a delay pedal and manipulated using a foot-controlled loop sampler. he built up incredibly complex, looping polyrhyhtms by playing pizzicato style, and then fleshed it out with layers of his equally incredible solo skills. he inspired me to buy a mic pickup for my violin.

the books! two guys, one on guitar and the other on cello. backed up with preproduced electronic skeleton tracks and clever videos that accompanied every song in the set. the videos really sold the show for me. hilarious, clever, rhythmic, ambient, geometric, and a mixture of both abstract and mundane footage. each song was a jungle of fresh sound. there’s something about seeing this kind of music being performed live, ten feet away from you in a wonderfully acoustic setting that is infinitely more smile-inducing than hearing it on record or mp3. i left the show in a great mood, feeling inspired to make intelligent ambient music. listen to the books.