moxie street songs #1

this is an ongoing show i'm doing for spine tv. my camera work is total shite, and my editing skills are fair at best but it was so lovely to hang out with jared (the banjo player) and the rest of the baby soda band on this charming n.y autumn afternoon. it's becoming increasingly tricky to find musicians outside as the weather chills out, and subway recording is technically illegal, but it's a rousing way to spend a day, and forces the hermit in me to begrudgingly crawl out and interact with artists far less yellow than i.

amelie's christmas present

lucky for me, my 5 year old sister amelie doesn't make a habit of checking my blog, so i feel quite safe uploading these pictures from my shoot with meghan where i am wearing her christmas present: a terribly soft handmade bear hat. jeff and i are ridiculously excited to go home for the holidays and play with this little cutie pie and her dimpled big brother.

the internet is sticky business

even though there are still a couple of kinks being de-kinkified, and the 'under the sea' video's page won't be up until next week, you people are on to me. you sneaky, sneaky little spies, with your sunglasses and your stylish berets. hiding on dark staircases, whispering suspicions. bastardos!

so yes, much like a slightly crumbled, painfully slow, funny for all the wrong reasons zombie from a 1930's horror film, www.moxieblock.com is very much undead. in fact. it is live.

i hope you have fun exploring it. everything was made by big fat hands with big fat moxie love.

here's to taking the long, low road. collaborating with perfectly perfect strangers and making something you can be proud of.

....2 squishy caaaaaattttts!12 sci-fi monkeys, 633 bloody boggies, and a partridge in a pear tree

I am in bed with a dirty head cold, reveling in the disgusting snot, squish and smells that is i. borderline hallucinatory, me and the cats' current game consists of the bed being a caravan that we all bundle into and drive to miami to avoid the inevitable n.y Apocalypse. eugene is currently at the wheel and ezra is cooking up a batch of scrambled eggs. i am having a quiet little lay down whilst i tend to a nasty looking head injury which i endured when the brooklyn bridge fell onto the subway train i was riding.

lay your head where my heart used to be

last night jeff and i split our heads and hearts in a night out somewhat jarring in its schizophrenia, but nourishing non the less.

we started off at the enchanted venue that is jalopy in red hook. perched on creaky benches sharing freshly popped popcorn from a brown paper bag, swigging on a couple of red stripes and scratching the velvet ears of a giant dog called pirate, we were bewitched by the 'little green apples'. this quaint troupe, both little in number and green in newness comprises of our lovely friends and my fabulous band mates: zara and stefan. they made up for lack of participants with approximately 17.5 instruments between them!

it was the sort of show that makes you fall back in love with life, and just went to reaffirm that, in my opinion, zara has one of the greatest voices on the planet. seriously, she's everything i look for in a singer when it comes to delivery, phrasing and personality (she was fake toothless for this performance which didn't hurt non), and that's before we even get started on her perfect technique. anyhoo. team zara! rar rar rar!

after that we went to brooklyn bowl in williamsburg with a strange collection of poker club workers and their spouses. To be honest, jeff and I had sort of resisted this place since it opened. we didn't really want to give our business to a venue whose owner is one of the most emotionally crippled mullet adorned skimpy tipping penis faces the n.y poker scene has ever had to endure. kudos to him and his big business hat though, this venue was pretty great. bowling and blue ribbon mac and cheese in a giant warehouse can be mucho fun (especially when jeff comes first and I come second, even if the name of our fictional bowling team would be the 'hors de combat')

our night ended in some strange sci-fi marathon drunk nightmare insomniac bedroom rumble which is still going, 24 hours on.....

she must be plum crazy. i kinda think i like her.

why oh why did u2 have to go and ruin one of the greatest bands of our generation? I'll never forgive them, and I'll never forget louise, jacob, eli and i laying on the pebble stones of that italian woodland driveway watching shooting stars and singing what our drunk memories could remember of this song as insanely giant insects speaking foreign languages crawled in our hair

i lebron james's head n.y

seeing lebron james last week from 15 rows back was pretty incredible. many people had 'lebron please come to n.y and save us all' themed shirts on, but i thought jeff's was the best.

having these semi-season tickets have ignited a real interest in the sport on my part. I still don't really know what's going on, but am listening out for lots of phrases to steal so that i can sound like a seasoned spectator. my go to line at the moment is 'you know what match up i like? that one. yeah, that's a good match up'. of course i'm thinking of pie and chips when i say it, but between that little beaut and my nba jam staples, i think i'm set.

let's get together and feel uncomfortable

spine tv has been steadily adding a bunch of very cool films to it's archives. this is my favorite so far.

potato loves potato:

one jump ahead of the breadline!

Cave of Wonders (Aladdin Remix!) by DIRTY LONG LEGS

eli finally sent me the link to this amazing aladdin remix he made in n.y this summer. it's like some sort of turban clad fist pumping middle eastern school trip to corfu final disco party in my ears.

your beard....is weird. nice rack though!

After just returning from a night out in which I was systematically persecuted and shunned for my lack of Halloween photo-bloggery, here I am. but let it be known that i write this entry under grumpy faced protest, and shall not reach for my thesaurus at any point.

As a lusty 'Halloween in new york' aficionado, I was so sad to be in no-dress-up-no-fun-times london last year. as of late, my days have been mostly preoccupied with crying and hallucinating, so i had no time to construct my planned (sexy) Hamburgler get up. In fact, as recently as friday, I was fully exposed as a normal civilian, deeply fearful of the line of accountants and substitute teachers brewing outside of 'Ricky's', their inner 'pimp' and 'slutty army cadet' menacingly close to coming out and acting crazy! I was pretty much reliant on there being enough weird shit on the floor of my apartment to improvise.

Slipping into something far less comfortable, on Friday night Jeff and I went to a vampire themed haunted house. When eli lived in new york he 'worked' (essentially sat in the ball pit watching scooby doo and lamenting his daily hangover) at the childrens halloween house next door. The company that puts it on does do a top notch job, but I do hope that somebody reminds me next year that it's essentially the single worst way you could spend your money and time. It was jumpy and claustrophobic and generally a disgusting scene. I think i shed a single petrified tear when, at one point, we were pulled from the back of the group and locked in a foggy room with the scary easter bunny from bill and ted. the only reason we survived at all was because our 10 person group was largely made up of 14 year old virgins who were clearly much more palatable to the bloodthirsty demons than me and jeff's mutton tummies.

after consoling one another that we would never get those 20 minutes of our lives back, we went to see the movie 'paranormal activity', which was essentially the blair witch project in an ikea showroom bedroom, but served it's purpose in creeping us out at bedtime.

Back to the question of the missing costume.

as you may have noticed, jeff has got some serious man beard action going on. I am a huge fan. most others are not, and are not shy about telling us. my dad, who has met jeff a grand total of 5 times, spent an entire day of relative unemployment constructing this little beaut and sending out a mass email. it was a marvelous demonstration of embarrassing dad humour meets embarrassing dad technology. smooth. I was secretly impressed at the wonderful inappropriacy of it all, although was previously unaware that the radically religious had a monopoly on facial hair:

Jeff, of course, got a huge kick out it and started excitedly googling images of a middle aged billy joel for his counterattack, before i put a stop to the madness of it all.

anyway, beards, yes. beards are awesome! we are avid fans of www.beards.org, what with their tips, tricks and success stories, and are slowly but surely becoming accepted into the grizzly arms of the local beard community.

problem solved. face glued. eating impossible. smiling improbable. streets of brooklyn rendered uncomfortable. halloween is GO!

on halloween itself we went to the n.y knicks home opener. the game was by far the most fun i have ever had at a sporting event (of which i am a clearly seasoned expert). even though the knicks lost in the end, they delivered the most disney scripted come-back imaginable. I guess in the end the moral of the story was that friendship is more important than winning, and all the high fives and chest bumps in the world can't make up for a good old fashioned hug from somebody who really cares. to win would have been cool, but to comeback was king.

then we met up with the homies for a hoedown. i mostly creeped out in the corner and drank out of straws....

"my two dads"

our little dom dom came for a visit from l.a. we are so very proud

(his costume was a two bit thief and vandal with questionable decision making skills):

it was a teenage wedding for ip and marty:

hands down, best costume for the night went to vic as the chinese delivery guy, complete with raised backwards cap, fortune cookies and personalized smart crew menus:

even though i hate chinese food, i ordered the peking dick with rice and a side of unicorn blood pudding, the service was shaky at best:

simone was 5 and 3/4 and pierre was drunk:

john cusack had a tough night though:

just say no to prop 8:

weeping with pain, I spent the cab ride home trying to separate fantasy from reality and face from beard. feeling like I had taken part in some sort of MTV preventative measure show where they force a broody 13 year old to live with a screaming fake baby for a week, I was filled with a deep sense of empathy. never again will I take jeff's facial decisions lightly. eating an egg salad sandwich with that shit on your face is no fucking joke.

it ain't easy being beardy.