I don’t know if I have just acquiesced to the idea that I am hopelessly internet interconnected or my profound case of information overload has become terminal, but more and more I’m okay with my Google Brain.  I know there are videos, blogs, and articles about Google becoming a sentient artificial intelligence.  This is not what I’m talking about.  I’m taking about a low-fi cybernetic relationship between us and Google as stand-in for the internet as a whole and as an extension of our local, native, biological, or natural onboard memory storage system–our brains!  Like eyeglasses for your memory, our Google Brains just help us remember.  I have spent long hours fretting over this idea feeling somehow less smart having to resort to the internet to remember any number of minute facts, names, or places.  But, now that I have friends with 3G iPhones, or access to free wireless hotspots almost anywhere, I am feeling like the time lag I associated with use of my Google Brain has sped-up to make it almost realistically practical to use it in conversation.  On a resent visit from Kristen Spillane (kspill.com) we would be casually walking through the mall, a question would arise and seemingly out of the blue, she would answer it.  Kristen is very smart, but much of the knowledge she forwarded was really obscure, and regurgitation of obscure facts is not intelligence.  It was her iPhone working Google with digital (meaning fingers) acuity to pull information from her Google Brain to her local brain.  Last night at Lowell Beer works a group of my colleagues and I were trying to pullout the bass-player for Spinal Tap’s real name, out popped an iPhone, and the race began, imdb.com was slow and my local brain was quieted slightly by the drawing of an elephant’s ass the waitress drew on the check (really!), and I pulled-out “Harry Shearer” just milliseconds before the iPhone.  I beat the Google Brain this time, but there are numerous times throughout the day I access my Google Brain, and I am getting more comfortable with its use, and I think my acceptance has made my local brain more relaxed and work even better.

Borrowed Eyes took the stage around 9:20 or 9:30 pm with a round setup including a trumpet and trombone player, they were a eclectic mix of sound all firmly placed in America.  They seemed like an appropriate opening act for Cub Country and if they had been the only opening band I would have been delighted.  With Borrowed Eyes I could hear the singer and parse all the music without ear plugs, but something happened with the audio by the time Yoni Gordon and the Goods took the stage, something which seemed to get worse throughout the evening.  Again, Yoni and the Goods played music rooted in an America with a slight twang, absolutely what one would expect in an opening band for Cub Country, however, the audio had shifted and Yoni’s vocals were drowning in his guitar and bass and drums.  I have seen many great band’s shows suffer from a one note johnny sound guy, the worst being the consistently bad sound at the Belly Up in Solana Beach CA in the ’90’s.  Now don’t get me wrong he seemed very attentive stepping out from behind the board, listening, going back, appearing to move things, but the instrumentation just seemed to get louder and louder, leaving the vocals in the background and very hard to make out.  Yoni and the Goods finished their set and then The Big Big Bucks started, and “what the fuck?” was all I could think.  First off they had no business opening for Cub Country, despite well documented punk roots it didn’t work to have Bucks on the bill.  And secondly, they were just not right, The Big Big Bucks did at least three songs on which I’m pretty sure none of the band was in the same key!  This sort of “experimentation” coupled with skewed audio made for a cacophony of crap.  At least their set was short.
So now it is nigh midnight and Jeremy Chatelain and crew take the stage.  By now the thin crowd is even thinner, and it would have been nice to bring the audio down with less bodies in the room, and maybe the audio guy did but not much.  I was delighted by Cub Country, it was the old pros following the juvenile upstarts.  They had a job to do and they did it.  Jeremy apologized about the hour noting their appreciation for us staying as we probably had to go to work.  Cub Country’s set was smooth, if way too short, I wanted to hear more.  Jean and I even danced to one of the new songs, it must have blown the hipster’s minds who stood around almost too cool to head bob.  Professionals to the last, Cub Country played their set and all to soon the show was over with a twinge of sadness.  Walking out I thanked the band and they were genuine in there returned appreciation.  It had a soul, the music that is.

I blame the Middle East for stretching out the bill too far and too late for a Wednesday night, and having some sound issues.

Go see Cub Country in NYC tonight at the Cake Shop or Maxwell’s on Friday or both, praying for longer sets and early on times.

Untitled (UMA! with three planes) by Jim Jeffers, 2009

I walked around Genii Loci (Ghosts of Protection) an exhibition by Jim Jeffers (the guy who runs this site) looking for a piece I knew only to find it not included.  I asked Jim where the “rabbit with the gas mask and the three planes” piece was.  He told me it was hanging in the lobby of the Dean of U-Mass Lowell’s office.  I thought, “Cool” and then on to other matters.  I would not have given the matter another thought except while out with Jim and Jean, I mention to Jean how much I dig the drawing of Uma (their rabbit, the model for the piece), and she asks me if I want to buy it as it is back from U-Mass Lowell.  I’m thinking I don’t have the cash, but then I think, “why is it back?”  So she tells me it only hung for about two weeks before someone in the administration found it “inappropriate.”

“What the fuck?”  I say, “Why? How could this image be ‘inappropriate’?”

Now I understand that maybe the chesty gas-masked ladies might set the imagination off, but a rabbit?  The semiological leap-frogging from rabbit to bunny to playboy playmate might be doable, but who wants to do that?  I think this kind of editing is the symptom of a much larger unspoken secret in Massachusetts.  People here are afraid.  Afraid of seeming unseemly, but ‘gawd’ knows this is only thin veneer.  For it takes a special kind of dirty mind to jump from rabbit to bunny to playmate to bondage scene to the apocalypse!  And it takes a mind so dark and dirty to think the thin layer of prophylactic-like ‘protection’ encasing the purity of essential moral rectitude could be ‘offended’ or compromised by an image of a rabbit in a gas mask that it would defy measure.  People are busy in Massachusetts keeping us ’safe’ from burned-out LED Mooninites and MIT students who are too smart to think the rest of the neighborhood could be so dumb.  Puritans know best what is filthy down below.  Okay, so those of you reading this in the deep south are thinking, “Massachusetts is filled with liberal elites who love abortions and bible burning right?”  No, the brand of liberalness in Massachusetts is grounded in caring for those less fortunate than you.  Which I might point out is not out of line with over wrought protection. After all in Massachusetts you MUST have health insurance or pay a penalty. And again this is not out of step with ‘appropriateness’ and “putting yourself in other people’s shoes.”  My problem with this ideal taken to extreme is “I know what is best for you” arrogance and eventual intolerance.  My response is, “Fuck no, you don’t know me.” and “with that said I think you underestimate the audience in general.”  There are heros who push community standards, Jeffers, sure ain’t one of them.

Perhaps ‘gawd’ blessed greater Boston with a paucity of natural disasters and cursed it with appallingly suck weather, but lighten up will you.  ”Art is the Handmaid of Human Good” (Lowell City Motto) don’t second guess the audience, they are smarter than you think (mostly).

Superheros & Airplanes