PEDESTAL & THE ALL-GIRL BAND

A.SKILLZ “CALIFONIA SOUL”

ooooooooooooooooof

Kids & Explosions

siiiiiiiiiiiiick

From this position
I will relax
From this position
I can see the whole place

From this position
Oh, just relax
From this position
I make some stand
I make my peace with the man

And it goes pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow
It goes pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow

From this position
I can see both of them
From this position
I totally get how the decision was reached

From this position
I can say “serious” or “cop-out” or “hard to define”
From this position, from this position
It’s kind of like eating myself to death

You on the outside
Me on the inside
There’s advantage to both

And me being uptight
And you being all right
There’s advantages to each

From this perspective, from this position
I have a good grip on both of them
Because I have stayed home and have learned a little more about my neighbourhood, which is important
You know, there’s a lot of good places to eat

So it goes pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow
Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow

So it’s pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow
It goes pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow

With you on the keystroke
And me in the gang blank
There’s advantages to both

And you have been all right
And I have been filmed being ridiculous
Oh, eat it, Michael Musto
You’re no Bruce Valance

I have been untied
And you are all cross-eyed
There’s advantages to each

And I’m coming back, coming back, coming back
Until there’s nothing left in the well
Is that what they call it, the well?

I’m paralyzed and looking through you
But if nothing’s right, we try anyway

As we compromised an arrogant person
I’m amazed at my decision to blame

On this occasion, there are a couple of things that we know that we learned from fact magazine
One, the king wears a king hat and lives in a king house
Two, your time will come, but tonight is our night, so you should give us all of your drugs
Three, we have a black president and you do not, so shut up,
because you don’t know shit about where I’m from that you didn’t get from your TV

So times have been tough, and times have been tough
You have been put down, washed up, erased out
But honestly, and be honest with yourself, how much time do you waste?
How much time do you blow every day?

So pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow
Oh, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow

So pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow
Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow

The return of the police

With you on the inside
Me on the outside
There’s advantages to both

With me being wired
And you being tired
There’s advantages to each

From this position, I feel affinity for the both of them, which is confusing
But honestly, I should be careful because otherwise, I’m being, I’m being, you know, what’s it called?
Oh, fuck it

Reclining, I’m getting used to it
Like kissing under a bridge
It’s an entirely new discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery

A couple of weeks at home
And then a couple of weeks away
And then home and away, again
To use up your desire for discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery

For an instant, you could have pushed through
But it’s a plagiarized regret anyway
But what you want for now is someone to feel you
And that’s the thing you like, is planning to stay

The return of the police!

VOX an evening of video & performance

Saturday February 26, 7pm

Craftswoman House, 929 N. Oakland Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91104 

featuring: Flint, Pedestal and the All-Girl Band (Otis Public Practice Alumni Andy Manoushagian, Paige Tighe, Hataya Tubtim), Felicia Montes (Otis Public Practice), Stephanie Soule-Maggio and Christine Suarez,  Alyce Haliday McQueen, Ursula Brookbank, Andrea Chung, McLean Fahnestock, Elizabeth Leister, Tricia Lawless Murray, and Sister

http://craftswomanhouse.blogspot.com/

for additional information, contact craftswomanhouse@gmail.com or pedestalmail@gmail.com

Pedestal & the All Girl Band presents ‘Life?? In Wartime’ a Karaoke songlist presented and performed (by you) at Kristi Engle Gallery on February 19, 9pm. Join us as we reminisce on the Top 10 of the Modern World, songs that were number one pop (American) hits during some of recent history’s most significant conflicts.

(from Kristi Engle PR)
…P$tAGB ‘s tongue in cheek motto is that “Pop is Universal Truth.” Pop songs are meant to spark intense emotions, to make you feel like the world is a profound yet comprehensible place: one in which we can all sing along together. Indeed, even when people have extreme, powerful, and violent disagreements about their deepest held beliefs, they may all be singing the same songs.

The first causality of karaoke is innocence.

http://flavors.me/wearepedestal
http://www.kristienglegallery.com/index.html

DON’T-CARE-WHAT-YOU-SAY-JAM-OF-THE-DAY:

We Will Become Silhouettes (Mexicans With Guns Remix) (2009)

Yes, the Postal Service was all the rage in freshman year but, this track feels so right, that I just don’t give a damn.

<3, P$tAGB

THE ORIGINAL COVERS OF RHONNY26

Recently, while on YouTube, I was in the mood to hear/see Billie Jean and after searching Michael Jackson, I happened to stumble upon a video ‘cover’ of  ‘Beat It’ created by an 18 year old music videographer named Rhonny Tufino (Rhonny26). After my initial amazement that he hadn’t yet been muted by the corporate narcs of YouTube, I was blown away at the creativity and inventiveness of an apparent ‘copy’ of a pop music and video classic.  Of course, this version has its own twists, but the basic storyline is there. In the O.G. version, two opposing groups of adolescents get into a Sharks vs.Jets in the 80’s- style street brawl. In R26’s version, the brawl takes place at what could be the campus of High School Musical, except that this school is populated by some extremely angry teenage girls that are ready to kick each other’s asses…that is until R26 and his pop intervention shows up. 

I was impressed enough to subscribe to his channel. Upon inspection, I noticed that I was one of our over 900 subscribers and that this prolific young man has done a number of remakes and interestingly enough, most of them are of current popular artists. Amongst his repertoire are some of Lady Gaga’s (Alejandro, Bad Romance), Miley Cyrus’s controversial opus, Can’t Be Tamed, even some of Justin Bieber’s singles.

Comments from fans often stated that R26’s videos were better than the originals despite the lack of extensive camera crews or thousands of dollars worth of equipment and professional dancers. I have to agree. This is not to say that R26 doesn’t know what he is doing. There is some knowledgeable technique with editing and camera work going on, one can see. For many of these videos I haven’t even seen the originals and after watching the knockoffs, I don’t feel like I need to. Also, R26 never uses the actual songs, but utilizes original covers for his remakes.

At the end of my nostalgic quest for Billie Jean, I settled for a fan video and was quite satisfied. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised and satisfied. But why surprised? Is it because we assume that a fan remake would naturally be inferior to a commercially made, commercially packaged and commercially sanctioned product of culture? Seriously, I’ll take Rhonny’s version of Can’t Be Tamed over the OG any day.

Up until recently, YouTube had been the ‘free space’ for fan appropriation and/or experimentation with pop culture. Amateurs could try their hand at producing their own culture and distributing it to the mainstream via web. Motivations…hmmmm…. Fun?…. uuuuuh….Joy?…. oooooh….LOVE?? I think this idea seemed ‘cute’ for awhile, as culture-mongers could smirk at the awkward trials and errors of low budget maestros. But as the Rhonny26’s emerge, there is obviously some real competition afoot. The powers that be couldn’t let that loophole go on untapped. These days, if a video is popular enough, the author may opt to join the YouTube Partners Program, where in return for allowing overlays (those annoying ads that pop up on top of your video) to appear on their uploads, they can get a share of the revenues those ads generate. For others who have uploaded unlicensed content, or unwittingly utilized the audio swap mechanism, ads may appear on their uploads at any time, as the owners of such content, feel that since you are using their media they now have the right to parasitically feed off your media. Hey! its either that, or mute your edited home movie, or remove you altogether, or threaten you with a legal suit.

Long to short: if you want to refer to or utilize a piece of mainstream culture in a personal work of art, and then distribute it through YouTube, you may do that, AS LONG AS the owners are allowed to use your work as a vehicle for their ads.

Well… at least your video will get seen.

Commercials or not, Rhonny26 is awesome.

Link to Rhonny26’s “Can’t Be Tamed” Miley Cyrus vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_8OpxKCl4&feature=related

Rhonny’s fan page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rhonny-Tufino/121914661189223

<3, P&tAGB

I know what you’re thinking: who’s this Glenn Gould character?  Well teammates, that’s a good question.  And bonus: we know the answer.

Mr. Glenn Gould (1932-1982) is considered by many to be one of the most prolific piano players of the 20th century.  Do you not listen to classical music?  No?  That’s ok, we do sometimes but not all the time.  Anyways, Glenn was a piano prodigy, learned to read music before he could read words, and achieved “pro” status by the age of 12.  By the age of 31, however, he had grown weary of performance, believing that the institution of performance was a “force of evil.” But, his eccentricities and perfectionism were perfectly suited to the recording studio environment and his use of technology to splice together recording to achieve what he thought to be representational of his visions anticipated the methods that just about every musician uses the studio now.  Which brings us to the juicy part…

In addition to being a piano player, Glenn was also a well known writer and musical theorist.  This edition of Notes from: comes from his essay, “The Prospects of Recording.”  Admittedly, Pedestal’s interests are not quite the same as Glenn’s but, nevertheless, there’s some interesting stuff going on here…

..The role os the forger, of the unknown maker or unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture.  And when the forger is done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of our civilization…

THE PARTICIPANT LISTENER

- At the center of the technological debate, then, is a new kind of listener - a listener more participant in the musical experience.  The emergence of this mid-twentieth-century phenomenon is the greatest achievement of the record industry.  For this listener is no longer passively analytical; he is an associate whose tastes, preferences, and inclinations even now alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives his attention, and upon whose fuller participation the future of the art of music waits…

- He is also, of course, a threat, a potential usurper of power, an uninvited guest at the banquet of arts, one whose presence threatens the familiar hierarchical setting of the musical establishment.  Is it not, then, inopportune to venture that this participant public could emerge untutored from that servile posture with which it paid homage to the status structure of the concert world and, overnight, assume decision-making capabilities which were specialists’ concerns heretofore…

- The keyword here is “public.”  Those experiences through which the listener encounters music electronically transmitted are not within the public domain.  One serviceable axiom applicable to every experience in which electronically transmission is involved can be expressed in that paradox wherein the ability to obtain in theory an audience of unprecedented numbers obtains in fact a limitless number of private auditions.  Because of the circumstances this paradox defines, the listener is able to indulge preferences and, through the electronic modifications with which he endows the listening experience, impose his own personality upon the work.  As he does so, he transforms that work, and his relation to it, from an artistic to an environmental experience.

MUSIC’S ROLE IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE

 - As this medium evolves, as it becomes available for situations in which the quite properly self-indulgent participation of the listener will be encouraged, those venerable distinctions about the class structure within the musical hierarchy - distinctions that separated composer and performer and listener - will become outmoded.  Does this, then, contradict the fact that since the Renaissance the separation of function (specialization) has been the professional lot and that the medieval status of the musician, one who created and performed for the sake of his own enjoyment, has long since been supplanted by our post-Renaissance orgy of musical sophistication?

- The technology of electronic forms makes it highly improbably that will move in any direction but one of even greater intensity and complexity; and the fact that a participational overlapping becomes unashamedly involved with the creative process should not suggest a waning of the necessity for specialized techniques.  What will happen, rather, is that new participation areas will proliferate and that many more hands will be required to achieve  the execution of a particular environmental experience.  Because of this complexity, because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing.  Not that this identity reduction will be achieved without some harassment from those who resent its implications.

-  The most hopeful thing about this process - about the inevitable disregard for the identity factor in the creative situation - is that it will permit a climate in which biographical data and chronological assumption can no longer be the cornerstone for judgements about art as it relates to environment.  In fact, this whole question of individuality in the creative situation - the process through which the creative act results from, absorbs, and re-forms individual opinion - will be subjected to a radical reconsideration.

- I believe the fact that music plays so extensive a part in the regulation of our environment suggests its eventual assumption of a role as immediate, as utilitarian, as colloquial as that which language now plays in the conduct of our daily lives.  For music to achieve a comparable familiarity, the implications of its styles, its habits, it mannerisms, its tricks, its customary devices, its statistically most frequent occurrences - in other words, its cliches - must be familiar and recognized by everyone.  A mass recognition of the cliche quotient of a vocabulary need not suggest our becoming saturated with the mundanities of those cliches.  We do not value great works of literature less because we, as men in the street, speak the language in which they happen to be written.  the fact that so much of our daily conversation is concerned with the tedious familiarities of common courtesy, the mandatory conversation openers about the weather and so on, does not for a moment dull our appreciation of the potential glories of the language we use.  To the contrary, it sharpens it.

- It is my view that in the electronic age the art of music will become much more viably a part of our lives, much less an ornament to them, and that it will consequently change them much more profoundly. 

Pretty neat stuff!!

<3, P$tAGB

Mixmaster Mike (whatcha got 2 say?) rethinks “Ramblin’ on My Mind”, from the Robert Johnson compilation record King of the Delta Blues.  This is a scene from the 2001 documentary, Scratch. 

Sickkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

<3, P$tAGB

http://unhearit.com/

http://www.facebook.com/unhearit

We created this site for those of you that have a song stuck in your head and you can’t get it out no matter what you do. Using the latest in reverse-auditory-melodic-unstickification technology, we’ve been able to allow our users to “unhear” songs by hearing equally catchy songs. So really all we’re doing is making you forget your old song by replacing it with another one… sorry.

hahahaha

<3, P$tAGB

this track feels so good in my soul organ.

<3, P$tAGB

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll [insert music of all kinds that creates connection and emotion]. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. we could call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.

Patti Smith

What are our instruments of revolution?

copycats:

She’s Gone by Walter Sobcek
originally by Hall & Oates

HEY HEY HEY.  We’ve got another fiesta coming up.  It’s going 2 be hottt poppin’.

THE PROLOGUE: CHAPTER 2

Saturday, August 7th, 10 PM-??

18th Street Arts Center: 1657 18th St, 90404 (click for link to map)

Once again, we’ll have karaoke, dancing, and bad decisions.  Also, we got the Coolhaus Gourmet Ice Cream truck to stop by for a bit.  Check out their site here.  Somebody will probably pass out somewhere along the way.  It’s science.

More info to come.  Check the site everyday! Maybe even every hour!

Too good not to post.

<3. P$tAGB

thedailywhat:

Look At This F-ing Dog Video of the Day: I’ve got two turntables and a chicken-flavored Milk-Bone.

[ihahd.]

JUNIOR SENIOR lays down the hammer with “move your feet”

no matter how shallow people say pop music is, and in particular, its origins (part organized crime, part teenage werewolf), it continues to confound, astound, and seduce something deep, in all of us—-that is the desire to change culture and possibly, if it only be for a moment change life itself. no matter how shallow people say sex is, it continues to occupy and post-occupy everyone’s thoughts, forcing us to be irresponsible, childish, and everything this society hates, and why not? let’s be shallow, i thought.

here’s a 2fer since its been like 2 weeks since we last posted- sorry yall, we were working on some proposals that will published here sometime.  if ur cool.

anyways, for those of u who like music, here’s a pretty nice mix by The Twelves who are apparently something like Rio de Janeiro’s Daft Punk.

The Twelves - The Twelfth Hour by mononnm

and if u like The Swayze, u might like this mashup of iron man and dirty dancing. considering iron man 2 is coming out in a couple weeks, we can’t help but be skeptical of the timing, here; like they planted it on some insignican’t dude’s youtube account to appear more authentic. oh well, we’ll bite.