At the Zee Avi show alone. May resort to hiring a young lady for a “girlfriend experience” in the future - rhythm a plus, but not required.

Tags: twitter

Zee Avi at Mercury Lounge on Sun. Any takers? So I have a thing for ukuleles and Asians with interesting voices. Sue me. http://bit.ly/idF5s

Tags: twitter

Not only have I been absent of my writing duties to you, my loyal reader, I have also been absent of my responsibility as a pop culture consumer.   6 weeks after the Grammy Awards, I finally took the time to lookup the performance that I’d heard so much about: MIA performing while 9-months pregnant.

After watching the video, I went through my typical logical progression of thoughts:

• I wonder what the doctors said when she said she wanted to perform.
• I wonder if her back hurt from bouncing around.
• I wonder if the child is now the coolest child in popular music history without directly performing [the Nirvana Baby comes across as kind of a weiner].
• I wonder if anybody thinks her outfit looks like…

And the Google quest began and ended like many a deflowering - within a minute and with great satisfaction.  The keywords toad mario mia grammys netted: Fashion MIA on M.I.A. at the Grammys… and the following Photoshop job:

While I am extremely appreciative of not having to fire up a graphics editor, I couldn’t disagree more with the author of the post:

“The polka dots on her belly, derriere, and each of her breasts did not look good.”

The writer?  The owner of a maternity clothing store.  While I appreciate that she does have an opinion (as she well should), I am a bit stunned that the best she could do was “did not look good”.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, I thought the outfit was great and could be logically validated - anybody that watches BET After Dark knows that black and semi-transparent is wholly appropriate when in the midst of rappers.

Done and done.

NOTE: The title neither a typo nor temporary bout of Dyslexia.  See the awful joke here.

Thanks to the fine folks at FreeNYC, I found out about this event on Monday - a free concert put on by Puma to celebrate their 60th birthday.  

puma60_bk

I decided that I had to attend because the show featured Charles Hamilton, an artist featured recently on the NY Times Music Popcast.  While I’ve heard of rap being described as “accessible” (a pleasant way of saying “white people won’t be scared”), Hamilton really takes accessibility to a new level - to the Asians.

In addition to the usual rap topics of women, success and confidence, Hamilton tacks on references to video games, cartoons and the Internet.  In Windows Media Player he makes frequent references to his own online presences while sampling operating system tones.

Have a listen:

• C Food [samples of a Family Guy episode]
  
• Windows Media Player [samples Microsoft Windows system sounds]
  
• Stutter [samples of the Peanuts/Charlie Brown theme]
  

Last night, I got an email from a friend asking me if I wanted to go to the Crystal Castles show tomorrow [Thursday] at Webster Hall.  When an opportunity like this crops up, I usually perform a little bit of due diligence if I’m not directly familiar with the band.  Usually, this involves a little research on MySpace and Hype Machine combined with what I think of the suggester’s musical taste.

l

I skipped these steps last night, because another friend had mentioned that she was going to the same show.  I figured, if two people I know and whose musical sensibilities I agree with both want to go, then it must be a good idea.  The clincher was when I used Facebook to make sure that these two people aren’t friends with each other.  A sample size of n=2 from independent sources?  Sounds like a highly successful utilization of microscale crowdsourcing ["taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call"].

If the concept is good enough to sell T-shirts [threadless.com], label images [Google Image Labeler], promote important news [digg.com] and sell as a service [Amazon Mechanical Turk: "Artificial Artificial Intelligence"], then it is probably a good enough way to figure out what to do with my night.

I guess I’ll know soon if my faith is well-founded.