WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DCQ???

Give us pristine walls, a savaged Merry Prankster bus and A LOT of pies, and we'll come through...

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DCQ???

It don't get much better...

We dint do it.

Pimpin' Benches All Over the World...

From SF to BK to LA to ??? The DCQ crew gets around...

Telefon Tel Aviv, coming soon to a smallish venue near you

Telefon Tel Aviv is half the band it used to be: Charles Cooper died in January in Chicago at age 31, with media reports suggesting he may have committed suicide. TTA's surviving member, Joshua Eustis, has remained mum on the circumstances surrounding his bandmate's death. In any event, Eustis recently tapped a longtime friend and collaborator to join him on tour this summer. Telefon's playing a number of September shows in DCQ territory -- find a way to get there (dates below). And if you still don't have Immolate Yourself, cop it stat or follow the album's instructions.

Sept. 11th: Bell House, BK

Sept. 12th: Mercury Lounge, Manhattan

Sept. 25th: Spaceland, LA

Sept. 26th: Bottom of the Hill, SFC

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DCQ???

Hint: It may be one of the locations in the opening montage of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, which we're not saying we've seen, but we might have talked to someone who's seen it, so don't even go thinking what you're thinking of thinking. Because really. Have some faith.

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DCQ??!?

Ancient Mycenae? Kosovo? Sleeping under the Williamsburg Bridge?

Only TigerCat knows for sure...but that there wall sure looks Cyclopean (HINT HINT).

Kalistera...

...desde Grecia. That's a semi-sorry attempt to merge a language I haven't yet learned with one I've already forgotten. A couple quick observations from my brief stay in the country:

- America doesn't have a copyright on public parks littered with used condoms and needles.
- Spain doesn't have a copyright on placing copious amounts of crane next to heavily-touristed national treasures.
- The exterior of the National Archaeological Museum is very similar to that of Cairo's Egyptian Museum.
- The interior of the National Archaeological Museum is much more impressive than that of Cairo's Egyptian Museum.
- Greeks like Dead Prez.
- Those wildfires everyone (BBC) was talking about in 2007 were no joke.
- The dollar is weak.
- The dollar is weeeaaaaaakkk.

More gems to come...kalinihkta, jovenes.

Yiamas!

A portion of the DCQ team is currently en route to Greece for a month long sabbatical. You may ask, how can he vacation for a whole month, and not lose his esteemed position as a DCQ contributor? Well, he's just that smooth. And also, he's promised to provide some Greek-related posts during his travels. Enjoy some ouzo for us, buddy.

Symptoms: Robbed.

We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.

The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined -- ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne. 

The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three -- and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find -- they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed. 

Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule -- someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find. 

Fuck you world

I just watched a Southwest Airlines ad whose selling point was "Your Bags Fly Free!" This strikes me as analogous to Craigslist apartment ads highlighting "Free Use of Toilet!" and hookers throwing in handjobs with Eliot Spitzer specials. 

That is all.

Who's up for a taste?

Mindblowing Hip-Hop Guest Spot of the Year:

Little late on this, but eh. Reckunize? Another brother whose inebriated persona made him a star. And no, Eminem is not the guest. If you're still at a loss, consider that mystery doc's pals are trying to get their crossover on too, with mixed results.

Dude's back with Relapse, by the way, if ya ain't heard it (even though the resurgence of the psycho homophobe comes off as stale on a couple tracks). It doesn't hurt that he channels the cadence of DCQ OG faves The Pharcyde and Brotha Lynch Hung on "3 a.m." and "Stay Wide Awake," respectively.

From the Welsh woods a hobbit house springs

Byrne and Mogwai Catherine Zeta-Jones and corgi dogs are no longer the only worthwhile things to come out of Scotland Wales: Today, SFGate introduced to the non-paying American mainstream Simon Dale, a woodsman of sorts who built an earthen yurt/hobbit barn/mudhut for him and his clan as a big "fick oof" to conventional residential building norms and Western consumerism. Dale and another Scot Welshman or two slapped it together in three months for less than $5,000. No mortgage, no neighbors, no meter maids and no Trainspotting bathroom scenes (AGAIN!? Really, is there a difference? Is there?!?) more lamenting Christian Bale's abandonment of his native accent every time a Terminator ad comes on.     

And on a minor yet essential side note, it's come to our attention that a significant portion of our fanboys and girls, as well as members of the more general public, are under the impression that the aforementioned Welsh dog breed is pronounced "cor-ghee," and thus flaunts one of the English language's few relative consistencies (see: bunGEE/GEE whiz/GIZZmaster). Also, according to the omniscient canine authority The Westminster Kennel Club, 'corgi' means 'dwarf dog' in Welsh. I had begun to construct an impassioned criticism of the corgi creator's choice of nomenclature, because everyone knows abnormally tiny creatures with disproportionate limbs and heads are technically considered 'midgets,' when I learned through the endless miracle of Wikipedia that I had the dwarf/midget distinction backwards. Of substantially more use was my discovery that the term "midget," a leftover from the glory days of the circus freak, is now considered taboo. Instead, one should refer to the small-statured by using "dwarf, "little person," "LP," or, as the Little People of America suggest, "their name."