I think I’ve finally recovered from the events of last week here in Austin. SxSW took over my town, leaving the streets and people a mess while filling the airwaves with tunes from every genre of music. There were Americana bands playing on rooftops next to dubstep raves, metal shows in between hip hop sets, punk rock icons punching promoters and droves of half-naked men and women looking for a hole or a pole to hump. If you could manage to filter all that out, there was actually a lot of great music to be had. We already saw my coverage of Dark Castle’s set at the Thrasher Magazine Death Match, so let’s take a minute to soak in some bass.

Ever since 2006, I’ve been going to Trouble and Bass shows in Brooklyn and lemme tell ya, the guys have come a long way from packing it into Club Boogaloo on the South Side of Williamsburg. When people talk about music scenes blossoming, I can name a few bands but the label that’s blossomed before my eyes is T&B. From their early days of 4×4, dubstep and riddem beats, the guys have become a full-blown bass army. I caught up with them at this year’s SxSW Trouble and Bass showcase at Barcelona and tried to take as many photos as I could before the club got packed at 6pm.

2011 SxSW Recon: Trouble and Bass Showcase at Barcelona

The last show I caught at the Thrasher Magazine Death Match SxSW showcase was Brooklyn’s NAAM. I’ve seen these guys countless times and they’re easily one of the better doom metal bands in NYC. I know that’s not saying much but their performance was quick and to the point. From bloody knucks, to big beards and breaks, NAAM brought a good mix of the sludgy shit we all love to the showcase.

2011 SxSW Recon: Thrasher Magazine Death Match – NAAM

The whole time bands were playing at the Scoot Inn, skaters were outside shredding the Thrasher Magazine mobile half-pipe. It was a great break from photographing bands and the mob-scenes that engulfed Austin.

2011 SxSW Recon: Thrasher Magazine Death Match Half-Pipe Photos

When I was trying to figure out how I’d review The Body‘s performance at the Thrasher Magazine Death Match here at SxSW, I remembered my review of All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood I wrote last year.

“It is my opinion that it takes unique individuals to create engaging music, regardless of the genre. While genres will influence the individuals, there is something within them that drives and motivates them to create something new and fresh. Countless examples exist and yet only few truly succeed at producing quality and original sounds. Lee Buford and Chip King make up the Body and no, that’s not an homage to the Judea-Christian belief of the body of Christ, more of an allusion. In fact, Buford and King are about as far from religious as you could get, citing influences ranging from Manson to Body Count.”

As a metal band, you want to express your personality on stage as much as you do on the album and The Body did just that!

2011 SxSW Recon: Thrasher Magazine Death Match – The Body

With all the doom and death (metal) surrounding the Thrasher Magazine Death Match showcase at the Scoot Inn, I was glad to see Brooklyn-based Liturgy on the bill for Thursday. While I’m not the biggest fan of their first EP, Immortal Life, their album Renihilation hit a bit closer to my taste. The guys put on a great live show and since they went on before Zoroaster, the crowd was a bit bigger than The Body’s.

2011 SxSW Recon: Thrasher Magazine Death Match – Liturgy

Since their first self-titled release, through Dog Magic, Voice of Saturn and Matador, I’ve been a huge fan of Zoroaster. Regardless to what you might think, the South reigns fucking supreme over doom metal and Atlanta is one hotspot that is ready for battle. At the Thrasher Magazine Death Match Zoroaster showed how they wage war in the South. They fight with the right equipment, with massive, crushing riffs and vocals.

2011 SxSW Recon: Thrasher Magazine Death Match – Zoroaster

Now I’m gonna be really brief here with this band. I grew up in Wilmington, NC where the music scene revolved around a handful of bands. One of those bands was Weedeater. At the time, I remember being in highschool and seeing them in 1999 at a local spot. All I could think was that Weedeater front-man Dixie Dave was like Ozzy but on more drugs. Here we are, over a decade later and I’m still seeing them live. Yesterday at the Thrasher Magazine Death Match, Weedeater absolutely blew every other band straight out of the fucking water.

2011 SxSW Recon: Thrasher Magazine Death Match – Weedeater

That concludes my coverage of bands but we all know that the real fun is people watching. I headed out each night with my 35mm film camera loaded with some B&W and shot photos of all the crowds. As a part of my ongoing Recent Roll series, these photos came out fan-fucking-tastic!

Recent Roll: The Freaks Come Out at Night in Austin

In the event you haven’t yet heard, The Strokes have a new album, Angles dropping this April and earlier today debuted the lead single “Under Cover of Darkness.” I have to admit that I haven’t really paid much attention to the Strokes since they released Is This It? The follow-up, Room On Fire really bored me and I don’t think I’ve ever even been able to sit through it in it’s entirity. Their third album wasn’t much better for me.

But I always really liked Is This It? era Strokes. “Under Cover of Darkness” is available as a free download right now at their site and really sounds like a return to that sound. A sound that in 2001 was pretty fresh infusion into the stale Indie Rock scene during a time when there weren’t “Hipsters,” but rather “Scenesters” and that was it’s whole own dirty word (which more or less meant the same thing). *Sigh* I miss those days. Viva La Scenester rock!

Hello Art Lovers,

Toilet Cobra here.  I haven’t been blogging on the Mishka Bloglin much recently except in relation to products.  I’ve been busy doing more important shit.  Mishka’s had me working in the Mishka sweatshop, grinding up the babies that we melt down and turn into T-shirts.

No seriously, I been busy as Hell.  I did a fourteen page interview with Genesis P-Orrdige that will be available on this site soon.  I did a watercolor portrait of Jay Reatard which you can get on a T-shirt by joining his official fanclub.  I did a few paintings for Scion, the car company.  I drew that T-shirt in the photo above and I made art for my show of paintings and drawings at the Mishka store.

Here’s some of the art.  It was just one giant cluster of either fifty or fifty-one pieces.  Some were framed, some were new.  Some were just old shit.  None of them got bought because I priced them too high for the kind of dirtbags who come to the Mishka store.

Maybe some zany billionaire will swoop in and buy all my art.  Either way, I’ll be fine.  This isn’t the Nick Gazin giftshop, THIS IS MY FUCKING ART! ART! ART! ART!  Imagine me slamming my head on a piano over and over again like Schroeder as you read that last outburst.

I dedicated the show to my brother Charlie. I miss him a lot. I also dedicated it to my old hair. I miss it too.

It was a fucking shitty evening but the Mishka stores throbbing purple light drew out the streetware nerdos like a bug zapper.

My dad showed up kind of looking like Indiana Jones when he shows up as a bearded and elderly Indiana Jones in the second season of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. You ever try to watch that show? It’s so fucking unwatchable. They tried to make it educational but the information they offer up is either mostly fake or common knowledge. Also, Indiana Jones was full of magic and shit.

The point of Indiana Jones isn’t to teach kids about Ancient Egypt, it’s about seeing girls covered in rats and bugs and then seeing a nazi’s head explode.  Remember when my dad exploded the horror convention with his meanness?

I think these girls got their hair from the same wig shoppe.

It’s reassuring to know that the goofy and hot high school goth chicks who walk around with candy and giant stuffed Pikachus are still roaming the land, proud and free. They’re like buffalo that make me feel horny and old and bitter. Good candy though.

Way to try to hide how cute you are with big glasses, lady. Doesn’t work. I still know that you’re hotstuff. You need to get bigger glasses.

Hey, it’s my pal Karen. My favorite pastime is flirting at her mom. She commuted to the show in a bi-plane by the look of her outfit.

I talked to these NYU girls for a little bit.  Apparently their video art professor told them about the show.  They all look so cute but there’s something that’s also kind of apologetic and naive about them.

I wonder if there’s a place i can go to meet thirty-five year old divorcees who’ve been beaten down by life. There was just too much youthful energy at my show and it made me sick.

(more…)

Our beloved Toilet Cobra is a true renaissance man: a photographer, a writer, a hipster and a pervert. But this Friday, January 28th, he’ll do what he does best – be an artist – and be the focus of our next show at 350 Broadway.

Nicholas Gazin is a twenty-seven year old Brooklyn-based furball who fancies himself a jack of all trades and does all sorts of creative activities in order to stave off boredom and starving. He serves Vice Magazine as their comics editor and has also been writing, photographing and illustrating in their service for a few years. He’s also our copywriter and one of our regular illustrators. He/I wrote this very thing you’re reading now! Trippy!!! His connection to the music scene has led to him creating shirts, posters and album artwork for his favorite bands. He recently started doing the art for Scion’s sponsored garage rock shows and designed the vinyl records and T-shirt for Jay Reatard’s Shatter Records Fan Club releases.

No Escape is Nicholas’s second solo art show and is about the same thing most art shows are about: alienation, the life of an artist, how it feels to live in a place. The title directly refers to the grim realities of being a “creative professional” or an “artist” and living in New York.  The pressure to produce consistently good work is draining. The high costs of living in New York, the violence and the filth make you want to move in with your parents and abandon your responsibilities. The world seems like it’s on the brink of apocalypse or at least devastating economic collapse. There are no other options and there’s no turning back at this point. The world sucks and there’s no escape.

Friday January 28th, 7-10pm
Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725

J/M/Z to Marcy Ave
G to Broadway
L to Lorimer

Very rarely do I see something so truly awful that I actually want to turn it off. I’ve sat through my fair share of shitty TV, and I actually don’t even mind a lot of it. Hell, I watch fucking Outsourced. But Skins…oh god Skins. This thing is like the ultimate terribleness. This is the TV version of the purple goo from Ghostbusters 2. Pure, pure evil.

I’ve heard from countless friends that the UK version of this show is actually really great, so the experience of seeing it turned into a steaming pile of human shit must be extra excruciating for them. I’m not one to think that it’s impossible for a concept to successfully cross the pond, but something, a lot of things must have gotten lost in translation here.

The show follows a bunch of 16-17 year olds who’re supposed to be really cool and edgy and like little Bret Easton Ellis characters or whatever. Fuck this show is aggravating. Here’s really the biggest problem though, and why I think literally no one could like this show: the kids aren’t cool. At all.

I expected this show to be a walking talking American Apparel ad. I would’ve found that terrible, but at least I would have understood why MTV was doing that, and can totally acknowledge that there’d be a large contingent of people who’d probably want to watch that. This show is lame as fuck though.

How could they have missed the mark so entirely? It boggles the mind. The acting is across the board atrocious. So, so bad. The writing is equally awful. All the faux hipsterisms and manufactured edginess. It’s really no different than Poochie from The Simpsons. There’s not a shred of genuine anything on Skins.

In the first episode the kids buy a bunch of weed, steal a car, destroy a bunch of property, but all in the most boring fucking way possible. You really just want to laugh at them, at least for the first fifteen minutes. After that you want to punch them in their smug little faces. It’s not even good in a so-good-it’s-bad way. Do not. I repeat: do not watch Skins.

Are you a white person? Do you often find yourself wondering what you should be doing with your life? Well look no further my fellow crackers as the man behind Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander shows you, and Time Magazine, what white people should really invest their time in.

Before watching this video I always thought I had it goin’ on since I am the whitest person alive and now as I’m slowly approaching my mid-twenties I realize, thanks to Christian, that I need to reevaluate my interests as a human being and more importantly as a white person.

In his travels across Brooklyn (which is white person Mecca these days) Christian stops at vegan-friendly restaurants, coffee shops, and a tattoo parlor.

In case you didn’t notice, the lovely tattoo apprentice is Sara Martin, a regular Мишка illustrator who’s stylin’ in an old school Keep Watch sweater, which is coincidentally in white!

So what has this video taught us my fellow whiteys? It’s that while you may not come off as hip or cool in your new white person ventures you can at least look good while doing it.

Hipsters sleepin’ on couches, hipsters drinkin’ Sparks (so retro!), hipsters hangin’ in the woodz, hipsters playin’ guitars real fast: these are just some of the things that hipsters do in this video for “Silence,” the new single from Brooklyn based, self-described BLΔCKOU†WΔV3 (nice one) band Food S†Δmps.

The music isn’t actually half as dark and cold as the surrounding evidence would suggest: these kids’ve got some nice solid pop sensibilities ‘n shit. Plus, I mean, look at those haircuts. The youth: what’ll they think of next?

We’re really loving being in LA right now: the weather is nice, music is good and the people are great! We’re also glad to be associated with some of the best parties happening on the left coast… Dance Right and the new and improved Check Yo Ponytail 2! You know we love to mix up dance floor vibes with indie rock, so it’s great bringing you these two party options.

Check out the video recap from last week’s edition featuring Bounce’s Queen Diva, Big Freedia driving the crowd into a frenzy and makes everyone drop 20 lbs in sweat! Don’t make plans on Tuesday, for this is the place you’ll always want to be for the best in new music and all around good vibes!

This go around CYP2 is bringing you two bands whose 2010 albums cracked our top 100 list. Hitting the stage this Tuesday are Abe Vigoda, whose Crush was our #38 and Dum Dum Girls, whose I Will Be was our #13, to get you in the holiday spirit. We’re always trying to book Abe Vigoda, so we’re glad to finally catch them before they embark on another world tour.

Tuesday December 21st, 9pm
The Echoplex
1154 Glendale Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
$12 Advance Tix | 18+

Every once in a while—a nested while, as it’s more like, ‘While surfing the internet, every once in a while… (but still)—you come across something really special. Something really hilarious and poignant; something that cuts to the motherfucking BONE of the issue with effortless grace. Something that at once worships and crucifies it’s idols; brutally tender or tenderly brutal. Whatever it is.

Whenever you find one of these things, it’s always a good sign when the genius of it all bears an inversely proportional relationship with it’s complexity: the simpler the better.

And so here you go, all you post-sartorial haberdamondashists. Fuck Yeah Menswear. I subscribed so fast and so furiously that Vin Diesel gave me a football-phone (Or something).

And-and, before: I would also like to point out (while I’m featuring a site that juxtaposes fashion photography against literary riffing whose main appeal is juxtaposing pop-hop reference against hipster high-mindery) that this site (this one…not that one…The Bloglin) is owned by a couple of dudes who are at once depraved b-movie gorehounds and also say words like ‘erudite’ in conversation without skipping a beat. They also have no problem with my tendency toward hundred-word sentences. Behold the post-web. It’s here…better ask somebody.

A few of my favorites below. Enjoy.

—–

The ballad of solo steez.
A G’d up Lucifer.
Banished from Heaven for stunting on Yahweh.
Exiled from the blogosphere.
Brought before the inquisition.
My charge?
It’s blasphemous how on point my shit is.
Deuces to the LES.
Trading open bars for open skies.
One last round of LOLZ and Mexican Cokes with the squad?
Nah.
No goodbyes this times.
Peaced out quicker than Draper with a jumpoff.

—–

I took the fucking Ivy.
Standing on my hardwood floor.
Pennys with no socks (natch).
POV shot.
This shit is straight porno.
I’m a fucking cinemotagrapher.
Who the fuck are you?
I’m Trad in a toaster.
Fucking crispy.

—–

I had a dream.
I was Italian.
I was the stallion of steez.
I was the consigliere of crispyness.
I matched my Ferrari’s to my Stubbs.
I matched my speedboats to my ascots.
My women were bespoke, just like my suits.
Double breasted.

Always.

Yes. Always indeed.

There are a lot of things I like about taking photos. I like cameras, I like interacting with people when there’s a camera between us, I like trying to make pleasing compositions. But more than anything else, I enjoy doing better at photography than most of the people I knew in art school who were studying it. Pouring a ton of money into schooling, fancy cameras, film and dark room time with nothing to show.

You’ve probably seen a bunch of my photos here on the Bloglin whenever I do a “Scene Report” for either a party I throw or go to. Since I got mugged this Summer losing my camera in the process, I’ve been using point and shoots or borrowing better cameras whenever I can. I’ve been primarily just using the photos for my Facebook but eventually Vice started using them on their site and in their magazine. Then Metropolis Vintage hired me to shoot all their online lookbook material and now this. I’m featured in here with people who probably put a lot more thought and sweat into the photog game…I’m only being partially serious.

The L Magazine chose five of my pictures to publish and had me talk about them a little. I am honored as hell when anyone likes my photos. Gill’s nails got a cameo and I name checked Мишка, natch.

I also get the dubious honor of being the first one mentioned in the article. Since we aren’t listed in alphabetical order I’m just going to have to assume that I’m the best of the best!

See The Best of NYC’s Nightlife Photography (Click Here)