So if you're a fan of Keene, the Sea Navy (or both!) and you want to own one of these original paintings for your wall, send an e-mail to freetickets@thestranger.com with Keene on Sea Navy in the subject line. Each painting is 12"x12", and shipping is included.

Good luck!

...So, I guess they're sticking with that whole "preppy" thing for the time being.

The album is called Contra, it's out January 12th, 2010 via XL, and here's the tracklist:

01 Horchata
02 White Sky
03 Holiday
04 California English
05 Taxi Cab
06 Run
07 Cousins
08 Giving Up the Gun
09 Diplomat's Son
10 I Think Ur a Contra

(ht: pitchfork)

Jay Ryan (aka the Bird Machine) will be there and my fingers are crossed that he'll be selling copies of this fantastic Hum poster:

There's a walrus! And a some sharks! And a big-ass buffalo! I want it.

You probably noticed the painting behind the stage, the one with all the beer cans. It was done by our bartender Mary McIntyre.

So I noticed the Abadox drummer admiring the painting during load-in. It's a frequent occurrence, given the nature of the artwork.

While the band is loading out, I notice their drummer trying to smuggle something out the door behind their amps. Turns out it was the very same painting. I busted him on the spot and got nothing but a bunch of smart-ass conjecture. He told one of our regulars that he loved the painting and, since no one else could possibly appreciate its majesty, he decided to liberate it.

He put his time into it — the painting was secured to the wall via a mounting. His unleashing involved unscrewing the painting from the wall. This was not a drunken grab. It was a painstaking labor. I admit that I was not paying attention to the stage at the time, but it's rare that a band tries to steal from us. We run a good ship.

When accosted outside, I was met with nothing but a smart-ass attitude. "Yeah, I tried to steal your painting and I got caught," he said. "I don't know what the big deal is."

The other band members weren't much help. I gave them the benefit of the doubt — they didn't steal anything — but surely they must have been aware of their drummer's doings. And the more I and some of our regulars laid into him about it, the more flip and sarcastic he became. It took a lot of resistance to not make things physical, especially as the harangues kept on coming. He just plastered on a shit eating grin on his face and continued to flaunt his transgression.

What sucks is that he ruined an otherwise fantastic night of music. What sucks even more is that I paid the band before one of the members decided to go all jackass on us.

When I told him word would be getting out about this, he smiled even bigger and said to yes, by all means, let people know what he did. So here you go.

I’ve contacted Thomas-Kennedy to get his side of the story, which I’ll report as soon as he responds.

UPDATE: Here is Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy's response to Josephes' recounting of last night's post-gig incident:

First off, yes there was an attempt to free the painting from the venue; but I, Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy the drummer from the Abodox, was not present at the venue when this occurred. I had already gone home to get some sleep as I had to go to work in the morning at my day job at the Frye Art Museum. That's right, I guard art for a living. I will not throw any of my band mates under the bus though as it is our policy to stick together and support each other's actions...and mistakes. None of us did anything to stop this, so I guess you could say we are all to blame.

Its true that time and care was put into the heist. We respect the work and did not want to damage it. A "drunken grab" would have been much worse as it may have hurt the art which would have been a huge tragedy. We had no intention of getting away with it or damaging it. The painting is fucking huge and to think that it could be easily removed and walked out with is a ridiculous notion. I guess you could say that it was our way of showing our appreciation. we had no intention of keeping or hurting the art which, again, we fully appreciate.

When confronted, we owned up to it and returned the painting. Then in a moment of severe overreaction, we were violently threatened with physical accosting. The specifics of what was said are vague at best, but we did not resist or require this aggression at all. The venue even took some of our gear to "teach us a lesson." Thankfully, they returned it, just as the painting was unresistingly given back to them.

Also, we would like to confirm and defend what was perceived as our "smart ass-attitude" in the face of the staff's aggressive behavior and words. After apologizing repeatedly, it seems nothing more could be done to calm the situation as escalating threats were directed towards us. We are not liars.

JJ is also right that it was a great night. it always is at the Blue Moon and we understand how our actions soured it as such. We have been playing there for over 8 years and we would hate it if last night was our last set there. We are sorry for all the fuss. It was a fucked up thing to do and it won't happen again. We love the Blue Moon and we are sorry for being dumb asses. We have nothing but respect for the venue, the art, and the artist. We sincerely apologize.

As for the show itself, I had to leave before headliners the Abodox played (and thus obviously missed the drama), but Diminished Men acquitted themselves well without their bassist Simon Henneman, deftly moving through smoky, chiaroscuro-enhanced instrumentals that sounded as if they could be gracing Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and Quentin Tarantino crime thrillers.

Wah Wah Exit Wound followed, playing songs that were so serpentine and knotty, they must have taken 10-hour rehearsal days to master them. Seriously. These labyrinthine pieces sound great—especially sans vocals—while they’re happening (thankfully, they aren’t fooling about the wah-wah part of their moniker), but they’re very hard to retain in your brain afterward. They dissipate like passages from a book written in a language you only half understand. But during them, it’s like riding a roller coaster in a forest full of pine trees. Compliment.

Tangent: Back in 1986 when he was fronting the awesome Swans, I interviewed Gira for Creem magazine. It was the scariest interview I ever conducted. The man's onstage/on-record demeanor truly was on another level of ferocity during those days.

We did the interview after the show in the dressing room of a now-defunct Detroit club, and dude was serious—and understandably spent. But he answered all my questions courteously. I got the impression that Gira was one of those pure art-for-art's sake artists, totally in this for cathartic self-expression. At the interview's end, I asked if he wanted to add anything further. He said in a deadpan, "Did we get paid yet?" It took everything I had not to burst out laughing.

Under normal circumstances, I probably couldn't post this on a blog ostensibly dealing with "nightlife." Fortunately for me, tomorrow night the Seattle Art Museum is open late for REMIX, their monthly first Friday event "geared towards adults ages 25-40." (Is that a demographic? Are we IN that demographic, guys?) My band will be playing, DJs I like will be playing, fashion will be showed and burlesque will be burlesqued. It's going to be a really good time. But that's not what I want to talk about.

You need to see this exhibition by Titus Kaphar. The Yale grad in the newsboy cap is doing really brave work about race, miscegenation and American history. History in the Making is on display at the Seattle Art Museum until September 7th and if you can't go tomorrow night, I encourage you to go, alone, in the middle of the day, to let these large-scale works affect you. Kaphar uses tar on canvas. Sometimes he tars an entire painting. He rips canvases apart. He cuts them, so that figures fall down. He inserts an image from one painting into another, creating what he calls a "conversation" and what acts as an awesome interruption of the dominant narrative. I imagine his work might rattle some people, while making others feel intensely satisfied. Either way, he calls history as "we" know it into question, opening up infinite possibilities of "What if...?"

Pen & Pixel was started by these two dudes, who first used photoshop as a way to avoid pricey photo shoots. In a recent interview with abcdrduson.com, founder Shawn Brauch said:

Well, at the very, very beginning, I noticed that people had not really got a good understanding of Photoshop and what you could do with it. People were paying a huge amount of money to go and have themselves in front of a Bentley, and hire models, and rent jewelry, and go to a location… I also had a background in photography, and before Pen & Pixel, your photoshoot could be 15 to 20 000 $ just to get everything right. And there were still not the dimension, the bling-bling, that was limited on what you can do with it. So what I said is "Why do all that when we can actually do that at one-tenth of the price? We have everything: we have pictures of Rolls Royces, pictures of girls, pictures of diamonds, we have all this stuff, including their clothes!" If they didn't want to buy clothes, all we can do is photograph the face, and we will have a body model, mimick up their bodies and we would put it in a place where you would never know the difference. And it worked. That formula worked very very well.

He went on to talk about the company's immense output:

I can work for 72 hours, straight, no problem. My brother also does not sleep, so this was one of the catalysts that made Pen & Pixel so successful because our competition obviously had to sleep. My brother and I would work for three weeks straight and turned out 1450 album covers [laughs]. It was crazy.

Crazy indeed. Read the whole interview here.

(Thanks to Robby for the epic tip.)

Petersen's no-frills cardboard with sewn-on patches aesthetic is a fresh look for CD packaging (well, it harks back to Independent Projects' work with Savage Republic, but fresh for hiphop packaging), and the Arabic calligraphy, minarets, and scimitars imagery alludes to fellow cryptic Seattle musicians Secret Chiefs 3.

Check it out after the cut below.

Designer Logan Walters explains:

A little while ago I put a bunch of Wu-Tang (both group and solo) albums on my computer....The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB's two albums being the only real exceptions)—no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they're looking pretty dated these days. So, armed with inspiration from what Olly Moss and others are doing (as written about by me here, and later by Kottke here) and a book of Blue Note Records covers, I set out to remake all 21. The first seven are here.

The results are gorgeous. Thanks for the heads-up, MetaFilter.

Like many of my colleagues, I spent the best part of last night getting clobbered by My Bloody Valentine, and I agree with and appreciate all the informed gushing that precedes this post.

All I have to add are two questions:

1. What's up with the hot-pink-red color that devours the cover of Loveless and soaked last night's stage show and essentially presents itself as the would-be color-equivalent of Kevin Shields' spirit animal? Clearly it represents something important, but it also makes me queasy, and repels me in way that none of the music does.

2. Who knew the drummer for MBV worked so fucking hard? Jesus fuck he was amazing.

(Photo by Kelly O.)

But this morning Newsweek gives us a chance to listen to a full-length live recording of the winning piece, Double Sextet, which has not been released commercially.

Here it is. The Internet is a beautiful thing. (De Laurenti previewing a recent Seattle performance of Reich's Different Trains here.)

A) It's Acid House-ish-ly brilliant.

B) The artwork on the cover is by the fabulous artist Parra

C) It's a limited edition. Ooooooooo.

D) My number is 4.

I don't think I've ever had a limited edition with such a low number before. Feels good. Like they sent me one of the top 10. Special even.

Sorry. Blathering.

Pink Skulls. Blobbaghanoush. Crazy good.