Category Archives: Slice of Life

This Slice of Life section is where all of the standard, journal-style blog entries end up.

Song: Manwomanchild – Recent History

As promised, we are releasing an entirely new track today! It’s called Recent HistoryDownload it for free here.

–David Child

Chicago Month One

Concept-15bHi All,

This past month has been crazy. We’ve been doing our best to hit up all of the bars, coffee shops,  and art shows we could – making up for lost time in getting to know a city that this time last year we had never once even been to. Last night we went to the opening of the Heartland Exhibition at the Smart Museum which was exceptional. Go to the official site here or see a write-up in the Huffington Post. There was a great, great piece by Deb Sokolow. See more of her work here. This piece was sort of a sprawling, graphical, choose-your-own-adventure style mural made up of hundreds of bits of drawings and narrative text interlinked by arrows, dotted lines. Construction was partly on paper and partly stenciled directly onto the walls of the museum itself; a great delivery mechanism for the captivating and paranoid storyline. Speaking of narrative, it was also amazing to finally see some of Kerry James Marshall’s RYTHM MSTR work.  We had read about this originally on the PBS ART:21 website a while back, but couldn’t find a way to get our hands on any of it. The work was beautiful, brilliant, a completely unique vision. What else? There was an amazing dual-channel movie called Rites of Passage by Judika Rudelius (seemingly about young politicians coming of age), a feature length music video and documentary by Ssion. A giant boat with wings. Over all, an awesome show. Completely worth checking out if you are in the Chicago area.

OK. So music shows. What did we see? Well, we went to see Jon Langford at the Empty Bottle; also Psychedelic Furs and the Happy Mondays. Both shows were amazing. We were Psychedelic Furs fans before but we came out of that show having a now newfound respect for them. Their set was extremely tight and totally engaging, but moreover it really seemed like they loved being there, playing these songs that are now, what, like almost 30 years old? And Jon Langford…well, exactly what the doctor ordered really. We’re huge Mekons fans so it was great to see the man engaging in the sort of twangy bar music that makes that band so epic and mundane at the same time. He also played a Go-Betweens cover which really put the show over the top. What else? Well, tonight we’re going to see Monotonix at the Logan Square Auditorium. If rumors are to be believed, that show should be nothing short of legendary.

Okay, that’s it.

More soon,
manwomanchild

Manwomanchild gets social

Good news! Manwomanchild is now on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter! Come join us! Stay up to date on all the latest news. Help us spread the word about upcoming shows and song releases by adding us to your pages and telling your friends!

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Dustin Long…

Excerpt from an interview with Dustin Long, author of Icelanders:

What tips would you give to aspiring writers?

This has been true for me, at least: If you want to write novels, write novels. By this I mean two things.

  1. Don’t concentrate on writing short stories, thinking you’ll build up to a novel. They’re completely different animals. I still can’t write short stories very well, and I don’t feel that writing one has ever taught me much about the craft of writing a novel.
  2. Actually write a whole novel. Don’t begin a novel, decide it’s bad, and then begin another one. Finishing a novel, however bad, taught me much more about novel-writing than beginning a novel ever did.

Taken from an 8/31/06 interview at Notes of a Defeatist.

More Great Stuff from the Internet

Hi Everyone,

Some days the world is just filled with cool stuff. Here are my picks for this morning:

This gorgeous New York times drawing by Lauren Nassef.

Found here: http://www.laurennassef.com/ny-times-showing-the-patient-the-door-permanently/

This profile of Alvin Lustig who designed the cover art for countless classic albums from the 1950s. A sample here:

I have a bunch of these that I enherited from my grandmother so I seeing these brought back some nice memories. Also, I’d never bothered to look at the cover art.

Amazing long exposure photographs of St. Petersburg by Alexey Titarenko.

It’s an old technique. People have being doing this forever but I don’t think I’ve ever seen photos of this type that produce quite this effect. That smokey mess that you see going up the stairs is hundreds of people passing over the same spot.

And finally…some sort of amazing diorama.
I didn’t really bother to investigate this much but I really, really like architectural dioramas. Always have. Little toy trains, too. Growing up in Switzerland everyone had those little N and HO-scale model trains. I had a Lionel which was pretty cool, too.