scrappy jack's random Friday thoughts

Sxip Shirey (that's Sxip with an "x") is some kind of genius. Kind of known him for years, he played at the Theatorium and we have a lot of shady friends in common, but only sat down and talked with him a few days ago. He gave me his eponymous CD, put it on late last night, left it on for about an hour. Crazy-ass musicianship. Here's my pull-quote,

If Ry Cooder were a little crazier and Tom Waits had never been discovered, they both would have been lucky to have become Sxip Shirey.

At the Mayor's Awards for Arts and Culture Wednesday night, Big Mike listed the three reasons that culture is important to New York. Look for the one that triggered an internal double-take in Scrappy's immortal soul:

Culture is central to our quality of life.

Culture is central to our brand identity.

Culture is central to New York City's economy.

That's right, folks, apparently I'm living in the great brand of New York, New York. The brand so nice they named it twice. I'm going to stop calling it "the city" when I'm out-of-town, which is a pretentious and snobby thing to do anyway. I'm going to call it "the brand".

It's going to be great to get back to the brand.

Look me up when you're in the brand.

Can you believe this brand?

Definitely has a 21st century ring to it.

In art news, C.J. Hopkins sent me his latest, America the Beautiful. Holy fuck. We might just have us a thing here. Ostensibly set in an underground interrogation room at an American airport, we see the Smiths, a nice upper-middle class American couple returning from London as they answer questions and comply with requests coming from Jack, a government official. Probably. Maybe. Jack's assistants, the beautiful Ingrid and the stolid, handsome Otis are there as well. And...

Well, it's Hopkins, so things get reliably strange, comic and ultimately just god-awful. Very excited about this one.

C.J. and I are also talking about a Woyzeck collaboration. May spend some time on that this afternoon.

That's me. New laptop just arrived, Nancy's monkeying around with it behind me. She's a monkeyer, that little monkey-girl.

Let's all pray she never reads this post, she'll hit me for that one.