I wanted to post about my experience managing a music stage this past weekend. Make Music New York is a yearly DIY event featuring over 540 artists and groups this year playing on sidewalks and playgrounds across the city. DIY stands for Do It Yourself, meaning there's no formal stage and whatever happens depends on the participating artists, and as I discovered, the audience.

So about a week out from the event, the coordinator for the Astoria events called me up and invited me to the production meeting for the event. When I got there I discovered I was the only artist performing at Hoyt Playground that bothered to show up. So I became the de facto stage manager. What the heck, I thought, and threw myself into it, volunteering my equipment and time and sending emails out to the other artists also playing at Hoyt.

Unfortunately I was the only one willing to put any generosity out there, other than the coordinator. So my speakers and his speakers became the only sound equipment offered to the group, which ended up being fine. Only one of the artists put up flyers, and few of them invited people to come see them. So most of the people seeing the event would be people who would be at a playground on a saturday afternoon. This means kids.

So after a mad scramble to set up with help from a few of my good friends, we had flyers at the major entrances, power via an extension cable leading around the handball courts, and a DIY stage set up in front of a chain-link fence. It felt good to pull off that part of the challenge.

The first couple performances went well, and my set went smoothly. But towards the end of my set a group of 8-year-olds came over and started being slightly rowdy in front of me, doing cartwheels and dancing around. No big deal, but they were just warming up.

The next act, unfortunately, was an older woman playing flute along with a couple surly men. The music wasn't fun for 8-year-olds and no crowds were there, so the kids got bolder. One of the men got angry and told them off. Bad idea -- from this point on the kids would be a problem.

It was at this point that my role of stage manager went from being coordinator to authority figure. As the kids got bolder they started yelling "You suck" and "Get off the stage" and doing what they could to fluster and disrupt the performers. I approached them and told them to respect the performers, and of course that didn't work. So I threatened to call the police which calmed them for a few minutes until they decided the threat wasn't real. So I made a compromise and called the park superintendent. As soon as he drove up in his park van the kids scattered.

The next few acts went off fine, and the superintendent decided it was safe to leave. Well of course, as soon as he left the kids came back and brought a larger group of their friends. What was 4 kids became 9, and things started getting out of control. We were down to the last group so I decided to stick this one through and get out of there. The kids seemed to respect me as an authority figure so when I monitored the initial band setup they were behaved, so I took the opportunity to take some equipment back to my apartment a couple blocks away.

When I got back it looked like a nightmare. The kids had thrown the earplugs the band had brought all over the park, they had stolen drum sticks and were running up and hitting the drums at random times, and they were taunting the band, yelling at them to stop playing. The band had cut their set short and were finishing up what they decided was their last song.

Now as soon as the event was ending, the kids changed the tune. "When are you playing here again?" they asked. Some asked for autographs from the band members. And in the end, one of the more charismatic band members convinced the rowdiest of the bunch to actually help them bring equipment back to their van. In the end the kids weren't really against the event, but their way of participating was to show off in front of their friends and test their limits.

So, quite an experience. I think it may have been different if artists had invited crowds of their own to the event, or if it had been hosted somewhere other than a kid's park. In any case I learned quite a bit about managing stages and managing children. Neither of which are particularly pleasant experiences, but good to try once.

I've been listening to Kimya Dawson lately and spontaneously recorded via Garageband what ended up being a manic cover of it. I really, really like giants.

http://www.bayardrussell.com/ilikegiants.mp3

This year I attended Swap-O-Rama, a yearly event near Washington Square Park where like-minded DIY folks donate clothing and items to a mass collection, then pick out other items to silk-screen, stitch, and decorate to create new clothing. I went crazy with the silk-screening, my one sewing machine job was a black hoodie which I added a zipper that goes all the way around the hood. Anyhow, here's my stuff this year, I'm looking forward to participating next year!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11399139@N06/tags/swaporama/

I was reading an article in the New Yorker about the Murakami exhibit, and later while learning more about him on the web I stumbled upon this music video made to promo his Louis Vuitton line. The music was by Fantastic Plastic Machine, which I've been exploring and loving. I'm taking an interest in artists (Deltron 3030, Daft Punk) that explore science fiction and futurist themes, and FPM is definitely playing with ideas of "flat modernity." Here are my favorites.

Murakami "Superflat Monogram"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C84FLwm3DA

City Lights
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlYwWfpBDAE

Disco at the End of the World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1w-rI71g24

Why Not?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfLVb0yMenA

Theme of Luxury
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WppwGogsrUI

Dear Mr. Salesman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl-lPihWfkA

My friend Miss Moon was able to take some videos of the President's Day concert, thanks Moon! The piano you hear in the background is from the talented Rightsaiddave. I felt like my delivery of "Hello Goodbye" and "Apocalypse Music" came out well so I might move towards doing my vocals that way more often. Anyhow thanks everyone that could make it that rainy night for the free beer and tater tots, and here's the vids for folks that were unable to come. :-)

Hello Goodbye
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDomtE_kKYY

A Candle That's Burning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4T6YxoSdaA

Apocalypse Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo040VW3QqM

http://digg.com/music/Bayard_Russell_n_Selftitled

I got my first glowing album review on neufutur magazine ... I posted on Digg to maybe generate a little extra attention, so if you want to check it out and Digg it I'd appreciate it.

Date:	2008-01-07 12:31
Subject:	None More Comic is back!
Security:	Public
Mood:	creative

Inspiration comes in waves -- after years of daily comics, followed by years of neglect, I felt the touch again and bought a new scanner over new years and started inking and posting comics. For the next two weeks, starting today, there will be a new None More Comic daily.

http://nonemore.comicgenesis.com/

These daily comics may end as abruptly as they started, but please enjoy for the next couple weeks. :-)

This morning I learned that Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee won Iowa. Having some familiarity with their positions but not having seen either of them speak, I listened to their Iowa victory speeches:

Mike Huckabee


Barack Obama


Though their policies are radically different, I can tell you why each of them won Iowa -- both are in their own way the best speech-makers on either side. They are personable and inspirational and practically ooze charisma. Even knowing what Huckabee actually stands for, I can't help but like him after listening to the speech -- and though I am behind what Obama stands for, that's not why people voted for him. It goes to show you the power of the spoken word -- it worked for Hitler (one of the greatest speech-makers the world has ever seen), and on a smaller scale it worked for Bush (not the most eloquent but powerfully charismatic). If New Hampshire goes the same way, we may be seeing an election that may seem like a battle of polarizing extremes of policy, but is really a battle of powerful personal charismas.

Date:	2007-12-29 13:22
Subject:	Very Unnecessary Photoshop
Security:	Public
Mood:	artistic

Some months ago Rach and I discovered one of the scariest baby pictures we've ever seen in a Red Envelope catalog -- a creepily enthusiastic baby named "Katelyn" swaddled in a blanket that made It look like a baby lamb. That is, if lambs had human faces, no arms or legs, and were completely psychotic.



Yesterday, Rach found a picture off a Digg article on religious tolerance that is one of the more bizarre images I've seen, titled "Buddha Eats People". It's an image of a laughing blood-red Buddha below a thunderstorm sky with a freaked-out baby in the foreground. We shamelessly cracked ourselves up for hours staring at this.



So this morning, I decided that the most logical course of action would be to bring these two great images together in a kind of Rosemary's Baby unholy matrimony. Like nachos and cheese product, or Hilary Clinton and the ThighMaster. After an hour of Photoshop magic, here's "Katelyn and Buddha Eats People" ready for your wallpaper desktop. Happy New Year indeed.


right-click to download, if you dare

Date:	2007-12-15 19:05
Subject:	Stones Verses Bones - Nothing More Metal Than Metal
Security:	Public
Mood:	crazy

I present to you the hit single from space metal supergroup Stones Verses Bones, from their album Rocket Sauce, released in 2055 from Space Jammer Records. Ralph, Animal, Baybi, and the rest of the spacers say "Yowdy."

http://www.bayardrussell.com/oldsite/music/stonesvbones.mp3

Please enjoy, and remember: in the future, the Kuiper Belt is the new East Village, pirating music is a capital crime, but there's still nothing more metal than metal.

The gig at Pussycat Lounge on Nov. 16 went really well - perhaps the best performance we've had. The venue was really pleasant and not sketchy at all (all the sketchy stuff happens at the strip club on the ground floor, the upstairs music venue is a different planet), and the sound engineer did a great job so there was zero feedback the entire night. I am also told that we were pretty tight-sounding, which is hilarious because we practiced a total of 3 times leading up to it. Anyway, here's the gig pics, we look dumb in a lot of them (I've learned that most everyone looks dumb while in the act of singing) but I think I look great in my blue jumpsuit. :-)

http://picasaweb.google.com/leemstern/PussycatLoungeNov162007

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I'm thankful for Renewal. I'm not always virtuous or kind or having a good time, but I'm thankful that life is always giving second and third chances for all of those good things to come back.

Hey guys, I have a few digital-camera videos of myself playing at Sidewalk Cafe for those of you that couldn't make the concert. Enjoy!

Crazy For You
Bayard Russell at Sidewalk Cafe - Crazy For You

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Apocolypse Music
Bayard Russell at Sidewalk Cafe - Apocolypse Music

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I went for dinner with a few folks to a place around the corner called Bistro 33 -- we had gone there once before right when the place opened and had a nice meal, though now that I think back I recall that the head cook came out after the meal and mentioned that normally he doesn't encourage ingredient substitutions but to accomodate my girlfriend's allergy his sushi chefs picked a few combinations he thought we might enjoy. In retrospect this was foreshadowing. This time around, my girlfriend orders the same meal and asks for substitutions as was done last time because of her allergy to crabmeat. Then the head cook comes over to our table again and angrily demands that we tell him which waitress helped us last time we were here because he needs to fire her immediately.

Huh?

Taking some liberties with reality, the head cook claims that he would never allow food substitions of any kind, and clearly if our meal had substitutions last time then the waitress that helped us before must have "gone behind my back" and needs to be fired. I point out that he had come to our table last time we were here and had accommodated those substitutions, and he says "no, I would never do that." He goes on about how his dishes are a delicate balance of flavors, and repeats that he needs to figure out who the waitress was because she went behind his back and needs to be fired. I argue with him that firing a waitress for accomodating a serious food allergy is very different from not allowing substitutions on an artistic level, and he replies repeatedly that it is not my decision to make. My girlfriend starts crying and needless to say we leave and eat at another restaurant, and that evening review the incident on the various internet food venues (Citysearch, Menupages, Chowhound).

I suppose one could chalk this up to "another New York moment", but it is still disappointing. I can see where this young chef is coming from and where he is going -- he is a struggling new cook who has just opened a restaurant in the middle of nowhere in Queens, he has watched Hell's Kitchen and Top Chef and has the cartoon notion in his mind that all top-notch chefs have attitudes about their food. So within a couple of months of opening his restaurant, he adopts an angry attitude and starts defiantly protecting his artistry - to play the role is to be the role. In the meantime he is unaware that his food is ordinary and that he is losing basic human decency. He will alienate his customers and his staff will periodically quit and find easier work, and this restaurant will eventually go out of business, and he will tell himself, "they just didn't understand what I was trying to do."

As we were leaving I saw our nice waitress standing in front of our now-empty table. She wasn't helping the next customer or cleaning up. She was just staring at nothing in particular with that dead look in her eyes. Maybe she was the one that helped us last time. Maybe she's about to get fired, or maybe she's about to quit. But she will land on her feet somewhere else. She is a good waitress and a kind soul, and restaurants in New York are a dime a dozen.

Months after reading Blink, I finally received Dr. Ekman's METT/SETT training program (microexpressions and subtle expressions). Both programs were simple but effective - it shows faces in a neutral state then flashes an expression for a fraction of a second, either subtle or obvious, and you learn to identify one of the following basic emotions from that: happy, sad, suprise, fear, anger, disgust, and contempt. Contempt is the less familiar emotion for me but one of the more useful ones to recognize -- it is the emotion of moral superiority. It is a sneer in the full expression, a slight smirk in subtle, and it is the only unilateral expression, meaning it only happens on one side of the face. I realized that in everyday life I had been mistaking contempt for happiness -- oops. I will need to go through the course a few more times and get better at subtle recognition. Interestingly, the course specifies that you should wait a few days before taking it again. Clearly Dr. Ekman takes the unconscious process seriously -- give your underself time to digest, and when you come back you will be better. I've followed this process continuously in my songwriting -- dropping songs for days or weeks then coming back to it and finding fresh, instantaneous-seeming developments. So it is interesting to receive a course where that process is spelled out specifically like that.

I am also trudging through Foucoult's Pendulum, which seems to be an intellectual's version of an action and conspiracy thriller. The back of Umberto Eco's book made it sound a bit sci-fi, but upon reading it is more about deep conspiracies throughout history in man's mystic and occult search for meaning. Interesting, but not my particular indulgence so it is a bit of work to get through it.

On the flight home from the wedding this weekend I picked up a book named BLINK.
It talked about things like faces on strings, and reading it sure made me think.
So I went on the web and it got in my head, Paul Ekman's the doctor I'll see.
I studied a session of facial expressions -- these sites were useful to me...

A Flash Toy, Make Faces On This Boy
http://www.artnatomia.net/uk/artnatomy.html

A Ten Face Microexpression Test, Make Your Best Guess
http://www.cio.com/article/facial-expressions-test

FACS - First Two Chapters, Jack
http://face-and-emotion.com/dataface/facs/manual/TitlePage.html

Dr. Paul Ekman's Site, It's All Right.
http://www.paulekman.com/

In other news, I got the blues, so tonight I'm losing my shoes and fooling with Final Fantasy 1 2.

Hola amigos! Long time since I've rapped at ya, I've been busy with all sorts of shit. Aside from the drama at my old apartment that I'm still feeling the post-shockwaves from (ex-girlfriends are frequenting my apartment on a regular basis, I'd like to think of Astoria as an ex-Oasis, but not in the Liam and Noah way), I'm flying out in a couple hours for a wedding in Detroit, then I work for a few days and am off again for another more important (to me anyway) wedding in Chicago. In the meantime I've been so slammed at work I can barely get by, it feels like 4th quarter of a Cleveland-Detroit game where I'm LeBron James and I don't know whether to shoot or pass but it doesn't matter because it's not going in and I'm gonna lose the game and eventually the series but it's all good because I still have my Nike endorsement deals and have been a made man since I was a teenager. My shoulder's still bothering me despite the endless months of physical therapy, but that might be because every time it feels good I immediately hang from a bar or play tennis or yank at it to see if it's healed and it just gets bad again. Maybe I should quit doing that.

To add eyesight to injury, I've passed all the doctor's tests and have lasik surgery scheduled. They're going to replace my corneas with flat-screen TVs so I can't see you but you can see Heroes end in a very disappointing way where saving the cheerleader ends up having little to nothing to do with saving the world, unless you consider the cheerleader saving the world by earlier guilt-tripping Nathan for being a momma's boy, and honestly saving the world through the power of guilt is a pretty lame ending to a season. Anyway, by June 14th I will have become a completely different person, complete with cybered eyes and short blond-tipped hair (I've already taken care of the haircut portion of this).

Also, on a band note I finally have another gig coming up, and a braggably good one this time -- Negative Ken is playing at Arlene's Grocery. On June 27th, wednesday at 8pm. One thing we've discovered is that you're a half-good band with a CD you can play pretty much any cool venue in the city, provided that it's on a wednesday at 8pm. We have a second gig on our latest tour at The Annex the following month July 24th, also wednesday at 8pm. I'm pretty sure wednesday 8pm is your trial, and if you pass you get to court Thursday.

Courting friday right now, peace out ya'll.

Likes for today:
http://www.weneedgirlfriends.tv
A very cute webisode series about three recently-dumped friends who are all looking for new girlfriends. There's only 5 short episodes but they're all great. I really need them to make more!

Hates for today:
MYSPACE
Myspace has officially jumped the shark for me. Most of the spam I get in my inbox nowadays is from fake friend requests autogenerated by MySpace layout companies and porn sites. I haven't filtered them out before because then I'd miss genuine requests for friendship, but at this point I've conceded that MySpace is MySpam, and condemned it to the filtering dungeons.

Date:	2007-02-21 23:12
Subject:	Chinese New Years Resolutions 2007 V3
Security:	Public
Mood:	rejuvenated

1. Smile and be open to others.
2. Don't give up on happiness.
3. Be less self-centered in one's viewpoint.
4. Live with less anxiety and hesitation.
5. Understand and accept the world as it is.
6. Keep reconnecting to what you enjoy.
7. Take good care of the body.
8. Continue to develop one's craft.
9. Make time to meditate and regroup.
10. Be forgiving to yourself and others.

Date:	2007-01-22 11:42
Subject:	I'm on iTunes!!!
Security:	Public
Mood:	accomplished

Great news, my solo album is on iTunes now! So now you can pick up the full album digitally, or buy just the songs you want. :-)



I know I was already available on CD Baby, but being on iTunes is somehow so much cooler.

Like before, I would love it if you could leave Customer Reviews on iTunes, so people could have more of an idea of what they're getting themselves into.

I have to give props to iTunes for their 30 second sampling choices -- I figured they would just take the first 30 seconds of each song, but instead they excerpted 30 seconds that they thought sounded interesting, and they did a really good job with it.

Hi friends! After years of babbling on about my progress, I'm happy to announce that my solo album is finally DONE. Recorded, mixed, mastered, and published! Thanks to all of you for your encouragement over the years, to Mike Prochilo for mastering it so it sounds way better, to Kunaki for printing it up, and to CD BABY for helping me sell the tanj thing. When I get back from the holidays, I'll be putting a live solo act together so I can do that silly last step of promoting it. :-)

BAYARD RUSSELL: Selftitled Deceptively simple, catchy, and tender indie pop songs you will find yourself humming for the rest of the day.

Something you can all help me with - if you would be willing to listen to the samples on CD Baby and write me a review, that will help me reach out to people I don't already know who might dig it. That would be awesome.

ALSO, my band Negative Ken almost simultaneously finished our first album, and on Wednesday played our CD Release Party at Crash Mansion. You can listen to songs from the CD and see very-dark photos from the gig at our website. It's very weird that both albums got finished at the same time like this. It's a Mr. Russell's Opus of sorts.
http://www.negativeken.com

What a crazy December...Thanks for everything and have a good holiday ya'll.