The Black Lips issue Basketball challenge to OJ Da Juiceman and Jim Jones

April 26, 2010 in Music, With Video

The Black Lips have been scheduled as contenders in Converse‘s BAND OF BALLERS basketball tournament being held on May 1st in their hometown of Atlanta, Ga.  This is the second time that the event has been held, with the squad of rapper Jim Jones taking the championship crown the last time around.  This year, The Black Lips have not only issued a challenge towards the other celebrities and musicians on the courts, but have directed one towards their pockets.  This post is pretty straight up, so I’m just going to post the majority of the press release directly:

BAND TO DONATE THEIR EARNINGS FROM THE EVENT TO CHARITY, CHALLENGE OTHER PARTICIPANTS TO DO THE SAME

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If it ain’t Baroque… : “Instant Everything, Constant Nothing” by UNTIED STATES

March 6, 2010 in Global Destruction, Music, Reviews, With Video

Untied States (“un-tied” states) is the musical creation of two childhood friends from Atlanta, GAColin Arnstein and Skip Engelbrecht dropped their first release, Bird of the Blood Feather, as a duo in 2003.   That EP was followed up by the two full-lengths, Ineffable, by Design (2004) and Retail Detail (2006).  Although all three of them were self-recorded/self-released efforts, the latter two found the duo collaborating with a plethora of rotating additional musicians.  The group spun through various incarnations for their live performances until connecting with Darren Tablan in 2001.  With Tablan operating as an engineer/keyboardist/sound-sample manipulator, US released the 7″, Bye Bye Bi-Polar (b/w These Dead Birds) and was subsequently signed to Distille records.  With the addition of drummer Satchell Mallon, Untied States has now released their first large studio recording, Instant Everything, Constant Nothing.

I hadn’t heard the group’s previous releases and I nearly didn’t hear this new one, either.  I had already received an email about the band from Distile, but I paid it little mind.  We receive so many emails these days that I can’t focus on them all and most have little to no connection to anything that we would even be slightly interested in dealing with.  I think that I had even given a quick listen to an album link for IECN but, for whatever reason, I wasn’t immediately impressed and instantly went back to what I was doing.  Maybe I’m just like a toddler and need pictures to get my attention because, after receiving the following video of the guys performing live for the WRAS | indieATL music series, they had captured my full attention. Read the rest of this entry →

Big Trouble Near Little 5 Points

July 31, 2008 in Global Destruction, PSA

Hotlanta is the jam. Since I live here, I am probably a little biased yet the fact remains that if you come and visit this city, there is plenty of trouble to get into in a heartbeat. Most of the time when someone says something like that it’s taken in jest. “Oh sure, I know what you mean, man!” That type of thing. “You can get real drunk there, go to strip clubs, do drugs, blah, blah, blah”. Fuck that bullshit. I’m talking about REAL trouble. The fuckin run for your life, here come the cops type of shit. Please let me elaborate.

The other night the ol’ ball and chain wanted to go out (She loves it when I call her that). She used the kind of non-descript, “take me somewhere honey, I wanna drink” type of whine that girls are prone to do sometimes. It was a Wednesday night and I couldn’t think of an excuse not to go so, of course, I obliged. In any event, I was as hungry as a carnivorous platypus and, since there was nothing goin’ on, I thought a drink and some delicious eats would do me good. Well, we didn’t end up going to “Eats” (which is a cheap ATL staple, since forever, for food and it is delicious), but I did remember this one other delicious place called O’Terrils which is near Central Park where my friend used to live. Of course it’s an Irish pub, and they have good food like cranberry and turkey sandwiches, and all sorts of shit on rye bread. It is usually a pretty safe place to eat. As “safe” as anywhere near a Central Park (see MLK Dr.) and a methadone clinic, that is.

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Klingons vs. Furries – Reality on Acid in Atlanta.

October 11, 2007 in Global Destruction, Politics, PSA, Technology

The Bowling Tournament of your Life

Sometimes you go places looking for an adventure. Sometimes, you go places looking to have fun. Yet, sometimes still, you get to these destinations and just try and figure out what in the fuck is going on. I guess you could put the Furries vs. the Klingons bowling tournament into all three- with a serious emphasis on the latter.

On the night of Saturday Sept. 29th, I was in the big city of Atlanta. The city of bright lights, an uproarious nightlife, and now suddenly, a Mecca of nerd shit. Just a few weeks ago Atlanta hosted the national sci-fi convention “Dragoncon”. If you have never heard of it, it consists of 80,000 geeks, freaks, and passionate onlookers, mostly dressed up as variety of comic book, movie, and television show characters. I went to it and it was awesome. They all get together for 3 days of science fiction related geek-dom, rent out all of the hotels in the metropolitan area, and surely mate to spawn future leaders of fictional obsessions. It’s also a drunken madhouse, and good for fan fare. I’m assuming we (the city of Atlanta) had a few participating holdouts from this event. For it was truly evident at Midtown Bowling Alley in Atlanta just the other night. Read the rest of this entry →