Thursday, Nov 24, 2005

We've had this week off from shows, from traveling, and it's been an almost unfathomable bounty. We didn't really know what to do with ourselves. Michael sat in his room on a foot stool and whacked away at phantom drums with phantom sticks, pausing every three minutes or so to sip from a beer waiting near his feet. Half an hour in he pulled out his camera and took a flash photo of his closet. Chris drove up and down the New Jersey Turnpike; paid tolls; pulled into service areas to grab coffee and pee. Keith spent afternoons at his kitchen table, sharpie in hand, autographing junk mail.

And of course, creatures of rigid habit that we are, we shot another video. This one's for It's A Hit, which will be our next single in both the U.S. and the U.K., and will be out around the beginning of the year. Didn't we already shoot a video for It's a Hit? For the DVD? Yes we did. But you can never have too many videos, and you can never have enough videos, and so by this time next year we'll probably have shot half a dozen videos for every song on the album. Which has never been done before, supposedly.

This new video, it'll be trudging through the post-production muck for a while -- we're going over to Akiva's place tomorrow to see a rough cut and try our damnedest to polish his chopped turd -- but we cut together a short preview for you from some early screen shots. Get a look at this ridiculous bull.

Wednesday, Nov 09, 2005

The East Coast Gets Pummeled Tour, featuring Hot Hot Heat and those rascals The Redwalls, has exploded from the gates.

En route from Columbus to Syracuse we stop at a freeway-side Wendy's to pick up a faux-healthy snack and loose the gallons pent up inside us. The smell blindsides us coming through the front door and sharpens geometrically as we near the restroom. Inside the restroom nothing is visibly amiss; nevertheless, evidence of great passionate crime courses into our nostrils. Adam, our perspicacious new tour manager/sound expert, assures us that it's simply a case of: "A fat man came in here and took his first crap in fifteen years." This has the ring of truth. One further speculates that when fat man jettisoned that long-compressed clay, out scampered a brood of weasels, black as obsidian, wet blinking eyes and all -- smelling scampering dense black vicious primordial weasels, splashing around the toilet bowl, threading their way down fat man's legs, skittering hardshit claws against the tile like snares against the belly of a drum and then out into Wendy's and the World.