If you live in New York and don't have plans this evening, Fred Armisen and I made a new thunderAnt video, and it's screening at MoMA. We'll both be in attendance to present it. From the MoMA site: Silent but Deadly: An Evening of Comedy Shorts Tuesday, January 6, 2009 7-10:30 P.M. MoMA The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Watch a selection of silent comedy shorts from MoMA's collection, followed by short videos made in response. Ron Magliozzi, assistant curator, Department of Film, along with his colleagues Steve Massa and Ben Model, have selected some "cruel and unusual" slapstick comedy shorts from the silent era that explore social, cultural and political subjects in rude and shocking ways. PopRally has invited contemporary comedians to react with their own video creations. MoMA silent film accompanist Ben Model will be at the piano. Comedian Max Silvestri will host this unique evening of historic shorts and comic creations by Nick Kroll, Joe Mande, Gabe & Jenny, ThunderAnt (Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein), You Look Nice Today, and more. A reception follows. Doors and bar open at 7; show starts promptly at 8.

For the past few days, I've been in New York City. Last night, I went over to Williamsburg to see a friend's boyfriend's band play a free show at a small club called Zebulon. I liked the space immediately: low light, low stage, a wide-open floor in which to see the music, a Fellini film being projected on the wall, and reggae music courtesy of the DJ. After the boyfriend's band (American Tenants) played, there were mumblings that the next act was a fantastic garage band from Brazil. I had every intention of heading back over the bridge, but I took one look at the Welcome Back, Kotter appearance of the guitarist and decided to stick around. The band is called Garotas Suecas, and I urge you to remember the name. Within two songs, I went from sitting at a table nodding my head to the front row -- only about eight Brooklynites were willing to dance -- at which point I became that person standing in front of the lead singer basically losing my mind. I am 34 years old. It has literally been a decade since I went up to a stage, closed my eyes, danced like a fool and never wanted the moment to end. All I kept thinking was that I wished everyone I knew could witness this show. Garotas Suecas has six members: five boys and a girl. I call them boys and girls because their ages range from 19 (the drummer) to 24 (the singer). The musicianship in the band far exceeds most groups you'll witness these days, but not in a showy, wanky, excessive way -- in the way you'd imagine having your jaw drop at the sight of the Hi Rhythm Band or The ...

Let's have the first post of 2009 be about dance. Though I couldn't quite get it together on New Year's Eve to put my dancing shoes on, I did hear stories from friends, all of whom told tales of professional, semi-pro and amateur DJs whose one goal was to get people out onto the floor and make sure they stayed there. My history with impromptu dance parties -- in my opinion, the best kind -- goes back to Olympia, Wash. Usually, there was only one turntable and a small stack of records courtesy of whoever lived in the house or apartment. The time it took for the DJ (and I use this term in the loosest sense) to take one record off and put another one on was when we all took a moment to catch our breaths. Hardly anyone populated the edges of the floor; you were sucked into the movement by force, even if dancing meant merely flailing about or continuing your conversation. Everything occurred in the center. We danced to garage, mod and punk -- it was all about the guitar buzz and the foot-stomp, our form reckless and amateur. The two songs I recall boosting the collective enthusiasm were The Who's "My Generation" and "London Calling" by The Clash. One specific dance party I remember occurred after my band played a show in Syracuse, N.Y. In a rare moment of willingness, we followed some students to a house party. There, we sipped cheap alcohol in plastic cups (fill a cup with vodka, add just enough soda to turn it brown), raided cheese plates, and sat on carpeted stairs -- the kind where you make a mental note to wash whatever pant...

The comma key fell off of my MacBook Pro. Thus, my first resolution is to regain easy access to commas in 2009. Trust me that each comma in this sentence was a pain in the ass to type. Remember when people used to have to write out commas by hand? Not as laborious as the ampersand but still. Reign in my love affair with Facebook. Yes, we're still in the honeymoon phase but I'd rather do the preemptive break up than end up hurt and rejected. A few months ago, Facebook membership among my friends reached a Gladwellian tipping point. A lot of people who would theretofore never have considered joining a social networking site caved in, shed their mistrust of visibility and nostalgia, and embraced the concept wholeheartedly. For the two Monitor Mix readers who are not on Facebook, think of it like this: do you ever wonder what the guy you sat next to in high school math class is doing? Right now? Well, Facebook answers that question. He is doing his laundry. Yes, it's that exciting. My highest Facebook achievement to date entails a mobile photo upload of a Gresham police officer issuing me a speeding ticket. But I actually do love the site for making sense of all of the disparate groups of friends I have around the world, gathering them in a single virtual sphere, and making my relationship with them present instead of past tense. And Facebook has also become a repository for our old photos--the pre-digital ones--creating a very fluid historical space, linking one music scene to another, charting one decade's transformation into th...

As some of you may know -- or perhaps you read about us in the national news! -- Portland recently went through Arctic Blast 2008. But if you watched even a few minutes of our gleeful local newscasts, you would realize that it should have been called Snowgasm. The newscasts interrupted everything short of Blazers games, snow-plowing over (someone's) daytime favorites with callous, foreboding comments like, "You'll be able to catch Days Of Our Lives at... 3:05 a.m." When someone on TV tossed in a Hurricane Katrina comparison, I felt doomed, but only in the karmic sense. For a few days, most of us were stuck indoors with only foot power to rely on. Then, once adult vs. child sledding lost its luster and the novelty of cross-country skiing in our yards went from cool to embarrassing ("Need anything at Trader Joe's?" I was asked, more than once), Portlanders braved the streets in their cars and said to hell with cabin fever. Eight rental DVDs later, the low point being House Bunny, I too was on the road. Now, thankfully, we have put this local tragedy behind us. All we're left with is rain in the forecast -- no one here is stupid enough to complain about this yet, but give it a few days -- and dirty, slushy snow. Imagine living inside a week-old Coke Slurpee, and you get the idea. I should add that the new Bon Iver Blood Bank EP was the perfect soundtrack to the snow. A less welcome guest arrived in the form of an email from a publicist with this asinine information: Even celebrities are being hit hard by the current economic ...