D.J. Corndawg
DJ debut of worldclass songster journeyman & leather craftsman Jonny Corndawg spinning plenty of turquoise party platters and dusty gems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Corndawg
Tambler’s Choice will kick it off around 9:00 so please come on come don’t dawdle!
Weather permitting NAFAS-e´-AARAAM will do their thing on the roof around 11:30! Bring your own drinks as we won’t have anything to sell but admission to the show!
MAJOR WAREHOUSE FIND: We’ve got 80 copies left of this beautiful sucker—this is the last of the 500-copy jewel case run—and then they’re gone forever. Orders will start shipping June 1, 2010.
Thirteen gnarly tunes gathered from high and low by ETHAN MILLER of COMETS ON FIRE and HOWLIN RAIN back in 2006. “For lovers of bloody nose street folk, dangerous shit rock, drunken cosmic slop and those wandering down the outer and under paths alone.”
Track listing:
1. Albert Ayler – Truth Is Marching In
2 Monoshock – Crypto-Zoological Disaster
3 The Colossal Yes – The Honey Creeper Smiles
4 Ghost – Piper
5 Electric Six Organs Of Admittance – Close To The Sky
6 Michael Yonkers – Swamp Of Love
7 Shit Spangled Banner – Cuntshine
8 Brother JT – Country Blues/Be With Us (live)
9 Joshua – Look Floating
10 7 Year Rabbit Cycle – Meditation
11 August Born [Six Organs and L collaboration] – Providence
12 Dark Inside The Sun – Truly Cursed
13 Comets On Fire – Death Squad
Special Live Event –“Return to the Pleasure Dome”, a benefit concert event for Anthology Film Archives with a Life Achievement Honor for Kenneth Anger. Featuring Technicolor Skull (Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler), Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, The Virgins, Moby & other special guests, Wednesday, May 19 at the Hiro Ballroom, NYC
Benefit Ticket Options:
$99 – Mezzanine tickets available through Ticketweb!!!
Floor seating available through PayPal:
Tables at $500 / person (4 people per table):
Booths at $5000 (priority seating for up to 6 people)
Seats / Tables / Booths
For further questions, please email us at 40years@anthologyfilmarchives.org, or call 646-450-3247.
From Technicolor Skull’s mySpace page: “Technicolor Skull is Kenneth Anger (pictured above) and Brian Butler’s magick ritual of light and sound in the context of a live performance. Along with Brian Butler on guitar and electronic instruments, Anger performs on the Theremin while his psychedelic Technicolor Skull images are projected.”
From left: Larry Lalli, Mario “Boomer” Lalli and Tony Tornay
Larger Than Life: Casting shadows with Fatso Jetson by Jay Babcock
A much shorter version of this piece was published Thursday, Dec 12 2002 in LAWeekly
Look closely at almost any significant rock band’s background—at its deeper, hazier context, at its place/space in its particular subcultural zeitgeist—and you will find someone who acted, perhaps unwittingly, as a crucial instigator: a subtle yet critical link without which the chain would not hold. Led Zeppelin had Roy Harper. Nirvana had King Buzzo. And Queens of the Stone Age, arguably the best American melodic hard rock band since Cobain exited in self-disgust, have guitarist-singer Mario “Boomer” Lalli.
“Boomer has this one quality that I’ve been searching for since the moment I saw him, and that is Boomer is un-heckle-able,” says Joshua Homme, the leader of the Queens of the Stone Age, who’s been watching Lalli play since he (Josh) was 14. “There could be a wide array of reasons to heckle Boomer—but it’s impossible when you watch him play. The second he starts to play, when he squints his eyes? I’ve never heard anyone go, ‘bleh, shut up!’ I’ve seen people not like it, but I’ve never seen anything thrown at him. Nothing. Because you believe it.
“It’s for real.”
* * *
Born in 1966 as “Mario” and quickly tagged with the impossibly appropriate nickname Boomer, Lalli was raised in Palm Springs, where his parents, a pair of opera singers, ran an Italian-themed restaurant called “Mario’s—Where They Sing While You Dine” with Mario Sr.’s brother Tullio. At Mario’s, which re-located to Pasadena earlier this year after three decades in the low desert, Mario Sr. and Edalyn lead the Mario Singers, a small group of performers, most of whom have other roles at the restaurant, in belting out two 30-minute shows (three on weekends) every night for the diners. (Now 80, the senior Lallis are still working/singing every evening, even on Sundays at 9.) [Restaurant’s now closed.—Ed., 2010]
“Our family has had a restaurant there for 30 years,” says Boomer. “For 20 of those years it was very successful, and summers off were just party time, just great. But now, it’s just changed. There’s a lot of big corporate money doing the restaurant thing there, so a unique little place like we had? It’s tough to make it work there these days. Our lease was up in the desert and we just thought What the fuck, let’s go for it in Pasadena.
“And you know, as great as the desert has been for our music, it was a terrible place to play music.”
Since he was 16, Boomer has been doing music in the desert that didn’t exactly fit the format at the family restaurant—or anywhere else.
“We grew up on Aerosmith, but that was fantasyland. Then we saw D. Boon and Mike Watt and the cats in Black Flag and the guys in Redd Kross and Saccharine Trust, and we saw these guys were guys like us! They‘re just dudes. And skateboarding too had a lot to do with it, because it was all about: Find a place. You wanna go skateboard? Find a pool, bail it out. You do all that work, you put effort into it, and then you’ve got this place. And that bled over into music.”
SPACE STATION RAINBOW: “On May 12th, the International Space Station passed high over Queensbury, New York, where John E Cordiale was waiting … with a prism. When the bright light of the streaking spacecraft passed through the glass, it spread into all the colors of a rainbow”
and! “…Ready to make your own space station rainbow? Grab a prism and check the Simple Satellite Tracker for flybys.”
Los Angeles, the space station passes over us this weekend so keep your prisms to the sky!
According to the Griffith Park Sky Report: “On Monday, May 17, the ISS makes its best evening pass, crossing the sky from northwest to south-southeast between 8:53, and 8:57 p.m., appearing 53 degrees high in southwest the at 8:56 p.m., P.D.T.”
and! there are planets all over the place too, “The planets Venus, Mars, and Saturn are all bright and easy to see at sunset or shortly thereafter. They are the brightest objects forming a line across much of the sky, from northwest to southeast during the evening twilight. Orange Mars, in Cancer the crab, is close to Leo the Lion’s bright star, Regulus, and yellow Saturn, in Virgo the Maiden, is between Regulus and Virgo’s bright star Spica.
Planet Jupiter is 19 degrees high in the east-southeast at 5:00 a.m., appearing brilliant and with a cream-yellow hue. Use binoculars or a telescope to see its four Galilean satellites.
The waxing crescent moon returns to the evening sky on Friday, May 14. It may then be found 17 degrees to the lower right of Venus, and just above the west-northwest horizon starting half an hour after sunset. On Saturday night, the moon is only 4 degrees to the lower left of Venus, and on Sunday, 8 degrees to the upper left of the planet.”
Mario Caldato, Jr. on FELA KUTI
interviewed by Jay Babcock
This short article was originally published in Mean Magazine in 1999 as one of the many sidebar to the massive feature on Fela Kuti (see below for links to the other articles that comprised the feature). Mean’s publisher, Kashy Khaledi, wanted to have contemporary artists of a certain notoriety talk about their admiration for Fela, who we knew would be an unknown, slightly outre quantity for most of the magazine’s readership. These sidebar interviews would be a way in to digging Fela for some of the less-curious readers.
It was a good idea, and easily executed, as there were plenty of Fela admirers ready to testify—including the semi-legendary Mario Caldato, Jr. (aka Mario C.), a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and skilled carpenter, at the time best known for his work on the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head lp.
I interviewed Mario at his home in late summer ’99…
Q: How did you first come across Fela?
Mario Caldato: One day I heard about this guy Fela coming to town. They just couldn’t stop talking about amazing the guy was. And he was gonna be at the Olympic Auditorium. I was working for a promoter at the time, Milt Wilson, who did Heavy Traffic Productions and was responsible for bringing all these reggae bands from Jamaica directly, and he started doing African shows also. He actually hired me. I rented some DJ turntables and I set up for the opening, you know, they were playing records, and I was there at the show, working the show. I heard all this hype about the guy, but hadn’t really heard his music. I didn’t know what I was in for.
As soon as he came on, the power was just so intense. As soon as they got onstage everybody just got hypnotized…the rhythm, the dancing, the lights and the sound, it just all came together. Unbelievable. A 20-piece band as I recall and 15 dancers. They did four or five songs all night. It was just an experience—I couldn’t stop talking about it. That’s when I started listening to his records and buying em whenever I saw them.
A couple years later, he played at UCLA at Wadsworth…I actually took the Beasties. We were at the studio working on Check Your Head and I told them, hyped em up, ‘This is an incredible show, we gotta go see it.’ It was just an EVENT. We were all blown away. Log drums and talking drums, two bass players, four guitars, horns, percussion… The way he orchestrated and commanded the show was very impressive. I hadn’t seen anybody conduct a show, sing, perform, direct, play keyboards, play horns, play percussion…he even got on the drums, and would go and turn the amps up and down. Creating dynamics, you know? Doing everything!
They’re still the best concerts I’ve been to, as far as overall involvement of audience and just music and dance and everything.
Arthur Magazine 