Postercrastination!: And the Awareness that Awesome Band Names Do Exist

The Darryl Strawberries? Really??? Why does this name make me want to give people high fives? Usually I'm into strawberries, but not strawberry flavored things. Why does this hit that sweet, fruity spot?

Perhaps because 'Darryl' serves as the flavor in this case, lending heartbreaking memories of glory turned to ruination to the band's identification. Maybe because this forename, so often chanted from the stands in the drawn and yawning, "Daaaaar-ryyyyyyyl," contrasts so nicely with the sweet sound of pluralized fruit. Perhaps because even though it's easy to love Darryl Strawberry in the same way people seem to love David Hasselhoff these days (ironically), I love the Strawb as my friend Sarah loves Baywatch's leading man -- wholeheartedly and a little more when he's shirtless. I could fill an-about-to-be-knocked down-stadium with genuine affection for the first baseball player I - the daughter of a lifelong Met fan - ever recognized by name.

I haven't been able to find much info on The Darryl Strawberries, but I did come across their Jersey-based doppelgängers. For some reason Darryl and the Strawberries doesn't work quite as well. (Though I do like their poster.) I don't want just one Darryl and some fruit. I want a band of fruity Darryls.



***UPDATE: The best part about being in a fantasy baseball league is that your fellow managers will send you pictures like this one (The Awareness that Awesome Photographs Do Exist) and have conversations like the one that follows, when you tell them you posted something about Darryl Strawberry to your blog:

C: I have two questions for you, unrelated
K: shoot
C: did Hassellhoff ever make a Simpsons cameo
K: not to my knowledge
K: unless it was post season 10 or something
C: and from Stacey, do people love Darryl Strawberry ironically
C: or do they just love him
K: oh
K: that's tough
C: ie, do they love him the same way people love David Hassellhoff
C: I say no
K: if you can call it love it's certainly not ironic. absolutely not
K: i love straw for the reason i don't love doc
K: straw overcame himself, at least as far as baseball
K: rather, he never stopped trying to beat his demons
C: I'm with you
C: hadn't made the Doc leap, but I like it
K: doc just never gave a fuck
K: both unfairly talented who did whatever they could to waste that talent--it just strikes me that doc was into it and straw was not
K: does she love straw ironically?
C: do you mind if I copy/paste this to stacey
C: I just don't want to retype it
K: no please do
C: she claims to love Straw wholeheartedly
C: and was saying most people love him ironically
C: I said no
K: ahh
K: i think straw proved himself w/ the 99 yankees

So people don't love Strawberry ironically. Everyone's just full of Berry nostalgia. It should be noted that though I'm in a fantasy baseball league and have been privileged to have a father with season's tickets to Shea since '88, I haven't really been measuring the way males in particular have felt about Darryl over the past fifteen years -- so I apologize for being one of the many to throw up her hands and claim irony at the first sign of complex cultural affection. Still, both Hoff and Sir Strawberry will end up on hipster t-shirts, if they haven't already.

Postercrastination!: Seek and Find

Though concert posters with illegible text usually get under my skin (why bother making a poster only to obscure the information it's promoting?), I couldn't help but take to this poster by Fast Friends Inc. with its technicolor muppet doodles, perfected in high school detention. This is one of those hand drawn numbers that reveals its wonders both at a distance, like a magic eye, and up under the magnifying glass where you can take notice of its tiny, kindergarten-culled artifacts. While pulling mini treasures from my first grade teacher's rewards drawer and the toy chest at the dentists office, these guys still managed to spray the whole image in large-cocked ludicrousness. A stick(er)y recipe for success!





See if you can find all of the surprises:

1. elephant
2. hamburger
3. sunglasses
4. 2 kiddie pool tubes
5. Hello Kitty
6. the name Alice
7. Superman
8. blue crab
9. 5 magic mushrooms
10. large multicolor penis (spewing a band-name-explosion)

Le Groupe Cinématographique

The following article recently appeared in the Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts, a paper I know exists because I swiped a few copies the day they landed on the stoop of Pharmacy Neapolitano (on the corner of Graham and Metropolitan), but whose inexplicable lack of online presence serves as a serious inhibitor to proof of print for anyone living outside of my immediate neighborhood. The piece was written for the paper's LOVE issue, and I'm posting it here so you can share in it. (The LOVE , that is.)

Love of Cinema Powers Rock from Williamsburg's La Laque


credit: Sean McCabe

La Laque’s sole collective asset as a band is a DVD of Tenacious D’s "The Pick of Destiny" that lead singer Devery Doleman picked up before band practice one day at the FYE on 6th Avenue for $9.99. This may appear to be an odd investment for a band whose elegant style and sultry sound seems derived more from classic noir movies of the thirties than overlooked stoner comedies of 2007, but it’s astounding how many films this Williamsburg quintet has effectively combed for inspiration.

“We’re all HUGE, HUGE movie fans,” says drummer Ben Shapiro. “It’s kind of all we talk about, and all we think about all the time.”

Though the band initially formed in late 2003, La Laque has been together in its current incarnation since 2004, weaving songs initially born as straight surf rock and 60’s pop pastiche, into darker, sexier compositions, fraught with dirty surf guitar and swathed in Doleman’s textured, breathy vocals. The band’s evolution into, as guitarist and main songwriter Michael Leviton describes it, “a dark indie rock band with French, surfy elements,” has pushed them far beyond the borders of kitch and gimmick. Their songs, lustful and tragic, paint pictures of smoke filled dives, intimate rendezvous, and haughty femme fatales.

Doleman is partially responsible for guiding the band down this storyteller’s path. Since the band’s inception, she has penned La Laque’s lyrics completely in French, both to take advantage of her incredible talent for manipulating the language’s vocabulary and diction, and because she simply finds her voice to be a suppler instrument en Français. This presents her bandmates with the unique challenge of creating music sympathetic to lyrics in a foreign language.

“Most of us don’t know what the lyrics mean,” says Leviton. “Leah (Hayes) and Devery do – but the rest of us are responding to a kind of story or visual feeling of what they evoke. What it sounds like it’s expressing, as opposed to what it’s expressing in words. We may react to something that seems scary, or intensely romantic, just as you'd write music for a movie, I think.”

Luckily, the band’s organ player and backup singer (Hayes) is a horror movie fanatic, their main songwriter and guitarist (Leviton) also writes screenplays, and their bassist (Brad Banks) and drummer (Shapiro) have been known to seek out screenings of Otto Preminger noir films on the weekends. The band's recently released, self-titles EP suggests There may not be a band better equipped to spin French-led songs into luscious, compelling, cinema-style narrative.


credit: Sasha Rudensky

Though the dramatic interplay of Doleman’s cool, delicate delivery with the dark, lush waves of sound summoned by the rest of the band is clearly articulated on record, on stage the vocals can at times be sacrificed to the energy of the band’s live show. But even if her voice can’t push through the raucousness of the rhythm section, Doleman serves as a guide through La Laque’s live landscape with her sleek stage mannerisms, punctuating Hayes’ organ chords with perfectly timed bats of her eyelashes and dancing to Leviton's guitar.

“Devery, as a focus for the band, channels all of that smoldering energy on stage out to the audience,” says Banks. “Kind of like a lens that we all focus thorough, all that heat kind of comes through her to the crowd.”

Thus, even in a live show that rocks hard, something classic and cinematic is transmitted – a reflection of old glamour, and the sexual potency and mystery of the films the band collectively adores.

La Laque’s self-titled debut EP is now available on iTunes.

Hatch Show Me Love

(aka Holy Shit It's a Post About Posters!)



The first rock concert poster I ever bought was a White Stripes print of two adorable Asian cartoon karate kids against a geometric red, white and black background. The poster was designed by rock screenprint legend, Frank Kozik (though if you didn't know it you'd never guess, it's way too cutesy), and though that meant nothing to me when I purchased it in 2002, in 2008 all I can think about when I look at it is how Kozik's signature was most likely cropped and discarded when the dumbfuck at the framing place on Newbury Street cut the print to fit it in a standard frame. It's totally possible the poster I bought was a fake - I did purchase it on eBay - but the quality of the ink leads me to believe otherwise. I may never know if the piece is authentic, but my very first poster is still much loved and hanging on the Jones family walls (now at Raquel's new place):


Frankie, did you sign me?

The second rock concert poster I ever bought was also a White Stripes print, purchased at show I attended in Boston (I believe at the Orpheum Theater). The print had such a homegrown, familiar feel to it, a welcome departure from the slick, posed photograph band posters so popular in college dorm rooms. It lived in my Boston living room for one year, and it wasn't until the end of my senior year of college, at the tail end of a feature writing project I was doing on rock concert poster art, that I walked up to the poster, took a look at the tiny imprint beneath the bottom border and exclaimed, "Holy shit, this is a Hatch Show Print!"


My first Hatch Show in it's old UWS home

Hatch Show Print is rock and roll history. The oldest letterpress in the country, the shop has been handpulling bold, two and three color block printed posters since the 1920's, creating prints for everyone from Elvis and Louis Armstrong to, now, more contemporary acts like Tool and The White Stripes. Located in Nashville, TN, Hatch Show is now supported by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (since 1992), and in addition to producing some of the most striking block printed imagery imaginable, also serves as a forum for the historic preservation of the letterpress artform.

Tonight I saw Hatch Show's Lead Designer, Jim Sherraden, who has been with the print shop since 1984, speak that the AIGA, and he was pretty freaking awesome. So awesome, he - after showing slide of an intern proofreading a poster - poked fun at a typo on the event poster produced by AIGA and frog design that the event planners had DEFINITELY not yet noticed:



To be fair, it took me 40 seconds to find it.

I found out Jim was speaking through my usual means of poster-related procrastination. I was working (or looking for new ways not to work) on a piece about poster art in New York, and found myself trolling the usual poster and design sites when I happened upon Hatch Show Print's web store, where I became instantly infatuated with a series of Monoprints Jim has been doing since 1992. For these art prints, Sherraden takes odd woodblock images and screens them over each other with slightly transparent inks in bold colors. The results are euphoric -- messy and retro in their imagery, but modern in their collaged style and potent colors. I fell murderously in love with a piece that was already sold, and when I wrote to Hatch Show inquiring if there were other pieces like it, Jim replied to me himself telling me he is always working on new stuff and that I should come see him speak in New York in February.

I could not pass up the opportunity to go to an event with screenprinted wine labels:





Sherradan opened the show with a history of Hatch, reassuring his audience that he'd run through these points many times before.

"I figure it's about three minutes a decade," he said.

The man has a sense of humor, willing to exploit himself for jokes. The first thing I noticed when I took my seat was an old school projector in the middle of the room, and of course , when picking up the remote and drawing the tangled cord out five feet to the front of the room he raised his remote arm and quipped, "Being the true luddite!" adding, "The slideshow quit being cute about two years ago." During the slideshow he also showed a picture of himself in his high school wrestling outfit, and made a comment about his "eight inch stapler."

I am on board with this man.

I am also on board with the way Hatch Show Print is run. First of all, at their new location, where they've operated since 1992, there is a 54 foot WALL OF TYPE containing all of the original wood block fonts that have become Hatch Show's calling card. The shop is a non-profit or a "working museum," as Jim calls it, and part of the responsibility of the shop in Jim's eyes is to preserve the original woodblock fonts that have been collected by the shop for the last eighty or ninety years. This is why, although Jim encourages his fellow printers/designers (the terms are one and the same at Hatch) to create new image blocks, he refuses to accept any new type carvings into Hatch, so as not to "pollute the collection." Jim also believes in preservation through production -- the woodblocks he uncovers from the archives, he feels obligated to use in new prints. A large part of his impetus for starting the Monoprint production was to employ woodblocks that lay dormant for decades beforehand. The record of the ancient craftsmanship of letterpress and woodblocking in this way comes alive on paper.

Jim also talked a lot about why there has been a resurgence of interest in Hatch Show Print over the last few years, which has been a noticeable phenomenon. The shop recently did all of CNN's posters for the California debate. The network that used touch screen maps to show election projections during the primaries, also employed a hundred-year-old letterpress shop to make their posters. (Which are AWESOME, btw.) When Finding Nemo was released, Pixar had Jim and the crew make 150 posters, one for each animator. Hand-printed posters for the kings of digital animation? Wade through the irony there. How does Jim explain the enthusiasm for his seemingly antiquated artform by even the most digitally engrossed?

"The computer is the best thing that ever happened to Hatch. We're the antiheroes of digital design," he says.

And it's true, in a world where everything is slick and digital, people are still hankering for real, raw, handcrafted art.

But Jim does admit, "times are a changing -- nobody wants the big paper up in their storefront," and that posters "have changed from being practical items to being more decorative." Most of the posters Hatch Show prints these days are resold as "concessions." But if the posters Jim sells to bands and promoters for $3 a pop are sold off for $20 at the merch stand, he doesn't seem to have a problem with it. His number one duty is to keep ol' Hatch Show and the art of letterpress alive.

If the shop continues to produce work as stunning as what was displayed on the walls tonight, I don't see how it will ever die.


My new favorite.

5 More Things I Didn't Know About Hatch Show Print Before This Evening:

1. Hatch Show Print is one of the top ten tourist sites in Nashville.
2. BB King is currently Hatch Show's most active client. He commissions about 7,000 posters a year from the print shop.
3. Hatch Show has a lot of interns, some who work for six weeks, and some for six months. Jim says he has trouble teaching interns the value of a good border (something he believes in strongly, and uses often) because they are used to the full bleed of a computer screen.
4. The print shop, quite obviously obsessed with archiving, saves three of everything made, "even wedding invitations." The fact that Hatch Show prints wedding invitations just gave me a real reason to get married.
5. Jim is hoping to focus more on the Monoprints over the next 5-10 years so he can pull neglected woodblocks (about 40% of the larger blocks filed in the shop are out of use) into the printing rotation. What this means for Miss Stacia: A buying spree is inevitable. Hopefully by the time Jim is finished I'll have some damn money.

Cut and Play

Avoiding the hi-top fade.

For women, getting a haircut is serious businazz. A bad cut can set a fella back for maybe a week or two, at worst triggering nasty sideburn envy after a shaving mishap, or forcing him to wear one of those douchebag beanie caps to cover up when a near-blind barber accidentally buzzes everything down with a one instead of a two. But for ladies, one trip to an overeager hair "artiste" can result in the way-too-short bangs from hell, or a Little Richard-style mullet that flaunts it's top heavy puff and tail for the better part of a month.

This is especially of concern to females with high maintenance hair, a category the frizzy/wavy/curly Jones family women have covered from every angle. My monster mop requires a hairdresser with an intimate understanding of Wavy Jewvolume, Straight Jewangles, and the curse-of-all-curses Jewfrizz-humidity factor. Once you find a scissor-wielder who is familiar with these tricky follicular properties, you don't let him/her go, which is why I have been returning to my West Village godsend of a stylist for the past three years. This woman - who I'll call Valerie - is nothing less than a genius, who in addition to carving the sexiest, most versatile looks into this mop of mine, also knows when to talk a woman out of chopping all her hair off (after a breakup), which she has done for me twice, much to my future relief.

In fact, only recently (three weeks ago?) did Valerie allow me to cut significant length off my locks, giving me a fun, gradual bob that prompted my mother to introduce me at a Superbowl party with the line, "This is my daughter, Posh Spice."


Beckham's bathroom is bigger.

When Miss Raquel (little sis), who has super curly hair, mentioned to me that she was looking for a new hairdresser, there was no doubt in my mind she needed to see Valerie, though I'd never seen the woman attack a head of curly hair before. And Miss Raquel's hair is no joke. Back when she was in middle school (when ladies are just beginning to learn how to work with what God has given them), it took a third of a bottle of green LA Looks gel to tame those crazy corkscrews. There was a closet in the Jones family basement that held no less than fifteen bottles of ecto-green, Level 3 gel (Maximum Hold, which trumps Extra Hold, FYI) in reserve. A seven day Mexico vacation would prompt the packing of THREE BOTTLES - God forbid there wasn't enough gunk to combat the extra showers, effects of chlorine, and Jewmidity. I imagine Miss Raquel carried around a pound of product in her hair each day. Not fun. The evolution of hair products, good advice from stylists and YEARS of experimentation have led Miss Raquel to a lower maintenance, green goop-free hair care routine, but the girl still has some serious (though gorgeous) hair to contend with.

Which is why I almost shit myself when I walked into the hairdresser to meet Miss R for brunch after her appointment with Valerie to find this



had been transformed into this



Miss Raquel is one of the few Long Island Jewish girls who didn't find it necessary to default to the long arduous straightening process and iron the fuck out of her beautiful curls in the high school days. Instead she embraced her curly genes (which for my father - before balding - produced the most magnificent 60's fro you've ever seen) and was undoubtedly more beautiful and less aggravated for it. I can only remember one time when, out of sheer curiosity, I tried to straighten the lady's hair and it was a nightmare -- over an hour of brushing and heat and sizzling split ends, resulting in all pouf, no gloss. 70's Diana Ross style results. But apparently it's standard procedure at Valerie's salon to finish cuts on curly manes when they're blown out straight, so Miss Raquel got the professional straightening treatment, and ended up looking way more polished than she did after my botched attempt, and just a touch more like...well...



Like moi! (Granted I don't wear glasses, but I'll meet her in the middle here.)

In the eighties we would have raked in the dough for Doublemint gum commercials. Now we'll have to settle for a career in twin porn.

My fascination with little sis' straight hair lasted for the seven or eight hours we spent together during a long, hungover Saturday. In between our catch up sessions and futile attempts to do work (which consisted of more childhood reminiscing and advice about men, punctuated by occasional exclamations of, "Okay, time to do work!"), I took about thirty pictures of Miss Raquel in various poses related to the unfamiliar silkiness of her hair. Since I has gone to bed at 5am on Saturday morning and woke up to join Rachel at the hairdresser four hours later, it took me a little while to realize the significance of this particular photo:



I took this picture of Miss R as she was explaining that she never gets to run her fingers through her (curly, gelled) hair, but what I didn't think about at the time is that this also means Rachel has gone through 22 years of her life without OTHER PEOPLE running their fingers through her locks. As a major proponent of (receiving) hairplay, 'twas a sad, sad moment when I realized ma chere soeur Raquel has been missing out on one of life's fundamental pleasures for all these years.

I'm a hairplay SLUT - I'll take it from who/wherever I can get it: mom, grandma, lady friends, and boyfriends (or nice boys who wanna make me loooooove them). It's kind of disturbing how much I enjoy the feeling of someone's fingers dragging through my mane from scalp to ends. My eyes instantly close. Sometimes I let out sex moans. Occasionally I even lift my leg and do a canine shake. OHMIGOD it's so good. If you're a lousy lay but you rub a mean scalp I'll keep you around, but not vice versa. You have to give good head.

The thing is, there are strict rules regarding when hairplay can and cannot be administered, especially for curly and wavy haired ladies (or ladies who do both straight and curly). Men, even the ones who are kind of touchy about their own hairstyles, never seem to understand that running your fingers through waves and curls will turn a lady's head into a ball of frizzy mess. There are ways to play with wavy hair that minimize style disturbance (scalp massage only), and special cases (right before washing) where curly/wavy hairplay is sanctioned, but I know it is difficult for fellas (who understandably don't really give a shit) to identify when their ladies are going to give them hell for trying to show a little affection. A boyfriend once suggested I draw up a chart outlining these guidelines, so I decided to finally make it happen. Hopefully it will serve as a worthwhile teaching tool for devoted hairplaying men around the world:


**Rules may be amended based on hair washing schedule, approaching gym time, and the promise of hot sweaty sex. Consult the owner of the hair in question for with inquiries about specific scenarios.

In the end it's pretty simple. If you move to play with my hair and I don't want you to, you'll know it. Otherwise, I will shake my leg uncontrollably and sigh. And probably put out.

And to Miss Raquel I say, HONEY. Take advantage of the straightness while you can. Make the boyf take a sick day and have him feed you grapes while he runs his fingers through all twelve inches of it for 18 hours, nonstop. Holy shit after 22 years locked in gel you deserve it.

And then go back to curly, cause I love you that way. Besides, the Doublemint days are over and neither of us are desperate enough to do porn -- though it is nice to know we've got that niche option.

Faith in Fashion

Little Sis: What does one wear to an Orthodox bachelorette party?



LS: I'm going to wear my Hanukkah socks.

How I Met My (Potential) Roommate

(20 minutes into our first meeting)

Her: So since I do the window design, I get a discount at Bloomingdale's.

Me: You should have walked through the door, shook my hand, and opened with that.

Her: They do Friends and Family, you know...

Me: I hate to tear down the hipster façade, but I happen to love department store shopping.

Her: Of course you do. You're from Long Island.