GRRRRRRRRRRRR…

http://groupees.net/hunger

Football

Ref needs an eye check! Glasses! Saw it bad!

Piled of spires… desperate to, to…

NASCAR

I look at these reminds me of my old race sets…

Teachin’ table French.

Swimming

This has to be some kinda new joke, this style of, am I ahead, am I behind, what’s the next… It’s what’s the next MEANING for these guys, in reality.

Beads

Goddamn god in HEAVEN but they shimmer…

This guy’ll put his needle’n'thread through everything catches the light, grandma bless him. He’s Alexander the Great out there.

Soft-Core Pornography

Even if his tongue ISN’T touching her pussy right now, he can definitely taste something. I mean he’s tasting SOMETHING in that bufferzone of air, and he knows exactly what it is.

Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Dreams”

No, you leave this ON. I’ve heard inCREDIBLE things about this film. You wanna go watch some goddamn Michael-Bay-Avatar-3D-paint-by-numbers BULLSHIT… [tears flooding the eyes]… you go ahead… [breathing heavy]… Me I don’t mind getting some CULTURE on my pizza… [hands covering face]… Pass me some peetz–… [sobs twice]… pass me a BEER [extends hand, cheeks wet].

So, people, Chris and I went to see the Katy Perry extravaganza last night at Madison Square Garden. Our old friend, former Scientist Max Hart, is now her touring keyboardist, you see, and so our attendance at the show was just a demonstration of friendly solidarity.  That’s all.  We love Max.  We went to cheer for him, not to leer at Katy Perry.  Definitely not to leer, no.

"You guys aren't just going to come and leer, are you? Dudes . . ."

The whole thing was a bit last-minute and entirely up in the air: guest list spots for the Katy Perry Show are, understandably, at a premium, especially in New York City, a town positively brimming with high-visibilty Perry fans like Edward Burns and Anna Wintour and Mike Bloomberg, who are apt to use their celebrity and political muscle to snap up all available tickets.

"Baby, I'm a firework."

So, at 8:15 pm Chris and I were at Huckleberry Bar in Williamsburg, expecting to be shut out, crying into our high-end cocktails.  We were ready to call the night – hell, to call our very lives – a total wash.  That’s when the text came.   We were in!  Cut to the desperate pounding of our precious beverages (mine, a rye/absinthe concoction, and Chris’, a weird-sounding but well-received chai/whisky thing) in the interest of making haste to MSG. One feels very safe assuming that we were the only of the 14,000 Perry fans in attendance last night to preface the show with a pair of superior tipples.

"Me? I just slugged a handle of Gordon's gin in the lavatory at Penn Station"

By the time we arrived at the venue, it was several minutes after show-time, and the lobby was peppered with a few stragglers.  By and large, these were desperate ticketless bastards, who impeded our progress at the will call window with their blubbering and fuming over the attendants’ unwillingness to hand over tickets that, clearly, their contacts had failed to arrange for pickup.  Having secured our iron-clad tickets through the ever-reliable Max, we had little empathy for these wretches, especially since their endemic unwillingness to accept defeat caused us to miss at least a few of the opening numbers.  I relished imagining the fees they’d have to pay the thuggish touts outside, or, failing scalping, the degenerate sexual exchanges they must have negotiated.

"My daddy forgot to procure tickets in advance and ended up having to give Edward Burns a handjob right out on 8th avenue."

Golden tickets in hand, Cain and I scrambled to our seats, which we we were surprised to find occupied by a gaggle of girls in their early teens.   We let them keep our seats and took a couple of empty spots next to them, which seemed like a good, generous move until the gang of nasty hags started metastasizing and flooding our row and shrewishly bitching every time Chris or I had to wriggle in front of them to go get more beers, which, admittedly, we needed to do very frequently.

Don't you judge us.

But, people, the show was great.  It was simply great.  It had everything: tremendous set design, extravagant costumes, boobs, phenomenal dancers, boobs, a couple of acrobats, and Katy Perry’s boobs.  It also featured, as a framing device for the evening, a video backstory, which was admittedly pretty inscrutable, since we’d missed the beginning of the show.  It centered around Perry’s search for her cartoon cat (?) through an Oz-like candyland, and it was batshit crazy.  At one point, the floating, disembodied-but-still-very-much-alive head of some bald pederast appeared and seemed to be threatening her, while pharmaceuticals orbited around it.   When video-Perry finally found the cat, she learned that it had intentionally led her [spoiler alert] to a blue wig, which was on display in the middle of fucking nowhere. This development seemed to delight Perry, but I’ll tell you what: if I had chased a cat around some nightmarish candy-riddled hellhole for hours and battled antagonistic severed heads and other shit I’m currently forgetting, only to find out that the cat just wanted me to experiment with some new hairstyles, I would positively thrash that damned animal, forfeiture of future “PETA’s Sexiest Vegetarian” competitions be damned.

"It's good enough for Billy Zane"

Another unexpected thing about the show was that it demonstrated a fairly heartrending rift between Perry’s personal sensibilities and her audience’s collective maturity level.  The whole production was ribald as hell, which is fine for a couple of salty old dogs like Chris and I, but, no shit, people – a good 70% of the audience seemed to be pre-pubescent girls, with a large portion of the remaining crowd composed of their fathers.  Most of the dads, let’s be honest, didn’t exactly appear to be complaining.

"I like exactly two things about Katy Perry"

The father sitting in front of me demonstrated far more enthusiasm for the show than did his five-year-old daughter, but I’m guessing that’s because she didn’t catch the connotations when Perry, while singing a song dressed as a Peacock (Lyrics: “I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock”, which, I’ll tell you what, if a woman ever referred to my dick as a “pea cock,” I can pretty goddamn well guarantee that I would not respond by showing it to her), but, so, anyway, while she sang these lyrics, she held her microphone perpendicular to her mouth and she bobbed her head back and forth, ostensibly maybe mimicking the nod of a peacock’s head as it walks, but, really, it just looked like she and her dancers were orgiastically fellating the hell out of some microphones.

"I'd fuck me."

Or maybe the seven-year-old girl to my right didn’t catch it when Perry kissed a guy from the audience on the cheek and then salaciously reported to the crowd that one thing she likes about American guys is “that they give back.”  Or maybe the kid just thought that Perry’s spandex leotard was itchy when she (Perry, not the little girl, you asshole) rubbed her crotch as she sang, “We kiss, we make out” during “Hot and Cold.”  Or maybe the children just weren’t semiotically savvy enough to digest the symbolism in video projections of cartoon bottles of champagne blowing their loads in the final, climactic number.  Or maybe they just thought it was cool to be doused in the foam that spurted from a decidedly phallic candy-cane squirt-gun as Perry stroked it, suggestively.  Maybe these nine-year-olds misunderstood Perry’s question when they squealed (in a disturbingly high pitch) in response to her wondering aloud, “Who’s feeling sexy, tonight?”  Referring to the two almost impossibly cherubic kids who danced in the row behind us during one particularly lurid number, Chris worried, “I sure hope they didn’t see the lascivious tonguing of that dancer’s asshole.”

"We admit it - we enjoy watching a little tastefully-simulated eroticism every now and then."

But, you know what?  The kids loved it, even if they were too stupid to catch all of the great sex junk.  At one point, as I was looking down at my phone, writing a gloating text to an absent friend, a section of the crowd let out a huge cheer.  “Why’d they scream?  What’d she do?” I asked Chris.

“She pointed herself in their direction,” he said.

So, yeah:  Perry’s got panache to spare, and she’s got a handful of totally badass songs, and her band is fantastic, and Max Hart gets a couple of really top-notch keyboard solos, and the whole thing is just generally very joyous and over-the-top and must cost a goddamned arm and a leg to produce, but it’s worth every penny of the expense. Look, if you see only one show this year (and it won’t be a We Are Scientists show, since we’re gonna be writing the next record for the next couple of months), make it Katy Perry’s Porno Fuckfest, or whatever it’s called.

"Bring the fuckin' kids!"

Paragraph 2: Last night, after the whole cartage episode, we went to K80 Perry’s show at Madison Square Garden and got blown the hell away. Max Hart was there, up on the stage, behind a keyboard, is why we were there. At least, that’s why we *initially thought* we were there. It quickly became apparent that we were actually there to witness an incredible spectacle. Keith is presently gestating a full review of the K80 Perry MSG show; as soon as its ready, we’ll change the font color to black and publish it right here at wearescientists.com. Sorry, that last sentence has gotta be confusing as hell if you’re reading this in Vanity Fair magazine right now. The thing is, the only reason Vanity Fair printed this article in the first place is because it deals heavily with vans – with a van – and they thought it reinforced their brand (VAN-ity Fair magazine, you see). But so, although we offered it to them, they decided to pass on Keith’s K80 Perry review. The review would only serve to diminish their brand, they said, with all its frank talk about sex, music, and culture. The readers of Vanity Fair magazine, its editors told us, are more interested in things like “vans and articles about state fairs,” which is of course Vanity Fair’s slogan. So, if you’re reading this in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair magazine right now, just know that you’ll have to plug in your computer and scream the words “wearescientists.com” at it if you want to read a full review of the K80 Perry thing. 

And for Vanity Fair readers only: turn to page 118 now for a tasteful photo spread of Nicole Kidman’s bush. It’s one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever seen. One of the photos we actually cut out and taped to the wall next to our bathroom mirror, so we could study it while we brush our teeth each morning and evening. Nicole Kidman’s success is no mystery once you’ve seen her bush, just how goddamn perfect it is. Anyone who maintains such a fabulous specimin obviously possesses dedication and persistence and grit in spades. Yes, we strongly suggest you skip right to page 118 and get a good look at these great photos of Nicole Kidman’s prize-winning rose bush, shot right there in her back yard. Finally, a tasteful photo spread from Vanity Fair instead of the usual close-up celebrity pussy photography.

Okay, so hey! We’ve got a couple more shows to tell you about, and you don’t have to live in (**spoiler alert**) Russia, Ukraine, Italy, or New York City in order to be thrilled. You just have to have a little compassion. If you have ONE OUNCE OF FUCKING EMPATHY, you can’t help being thrilled when we tell you we’re supporting Muse later this month in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. If the temperature of your heart is even A COUPLE DEGREES ABOVE THAT OF A SNAKE’S, you will brim with contentment when we reveal that on 9 June we’ll play the “Heineken Jammin’ Festival” in Venice. (Yes, of course we’re going to get onstage and just “jam” for 45 minutes. Obviously. Bring a harmonica in D-sharp if you’d like to play along.) And needless to say, ONLY A MONSTER would not clap with excitement at the prospect of our free June 23rd show in Red Hook Park, in Brooklyn, in New Yorkin’ America.

Your reaction to the above news can be used as a tremendously accurate personality test. If you’re not TUGGING AT YOUR HAIR WITH GLEE right now, then you’re a piece of shit — a world-class sonofabitch. If your mouth is not BONE-DRY WITH ANTICIPATION, then you, sir or madam, might best never have been born. And if you have not SOILED YOUR TROUSERS WITH YOUR OR ANOTHER’S SHIT, well then you are either in possession of some seriously uncommon restraint, or you are a villain of literally FAIRYTALE description.

Here’s a shot of a chimpanzee who, back in 1974, sold a person a can of marbles at a fair price:

The end of May/beginning of June is heating right up! Even as we prepare to embark on a chilly mini-tour through Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and Barcelona, we are pleased to announce several scalp-flushing shows happening later this spring that, combined with the overall climatic trend of spring, should produce some really genuinely warm weather in much of the world! New dates include chest-tingling UK stops in Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, Cardiff, & Exeter; a triple-dope Berlin club show; and a totally phatlucky festival headliner in Bangkok. Full dickfresh details HERE.

Tonight, excitingly, terrifyingly, Keith and Chris will (ask to) pilot a Virgin Airlines flight from New York to London (!!!), where they’ll meet up with Andy for three days of hard work on the new album [tentatively titled "Unfuckingreal Discounts"] before shoving off to Helsinki. We’ll try to post a few pictures from the practice space this weekend, as well as full, well-recorded demos of new songs. (Psych!!!)

We’re flying to California tomorrow, and here’s why:

San Diego IndieFest!

Schoooooool Night!(?)

It’s going to be warm, the weather man tells us, which is why we spared his life… THIS time. To understand why his life was in jeopardy at all, you need to have been in New York City for the last couple months.

Will post images of our second-degree sunburns.

Next week: Austin, TX, home to 6th Street, an actual real-world green river of margarita.

Will post video of marg-induced garbled descriptions of temporary epiphanies.

Our last-minute show at the Bull & Gate in London last week was successful on every imaginable level: we remembered all of the songs; we didn’t spill any beer; and no (warm-blooded) animals got (very) injured. So we’ve decided to tack on a few more club shows this June while we’re in England. Ticket links for these intimate, awkward, embarrassing gigs are now up on the Shows page. (Ha! They’re not going to be awkward and embarrassing. That’s just the NyQuil talking. In fact, they aren’t even going to be very intimate. More like “slick” and “professional.” Just kidding — that’s the Tabasco & Redbull talking. When have you known us to be slick or professional? Okay, maybe if you’ve dated one of us, but never at a show. Let’s just say these shows will be “successful,” we hope, and leave it at that.)

If you missed last week’s now-historical show — “historical” in the sense that it happened in the past, we mean — consider putting one of our vinyls on the ol’ scratching droid and scrolling through Camden Crawl’s photo set on flickr. For better accuracy, mess with the record player’s speed a little bit every few minutes, and pour grape jelly all over the platter sometime during track 7.

Shrieking, shrieking, shrieking.

Fatigue sets in; Keith decides to have a lie down.

Also! Details on April’s Barcelona festival have been updated on the Shows page. Ticket links are working like dwarves in a silver mine.

We’ll begin this update by addressing something that’s been causing plenty of confusion and consternation for a great many of you: Who were the “cat-faced Vikings”? The answer couldn’t be simpler! These were Vikings (8th-11th cent.) who, through rudimentary plastic surgery, looked exactly like cats. So far so good. What’s little understood is the derivation of the “cat-faced” assignation. Why not, for example, “cat-like,” or even “cat,” given that these Vikings were, in every cosmetic respect, identical to cats – legs, paws, tails, tummies, flanks, ears, and, of course, faces? One clue may lie in a linguistic irregularity found in dialects spoken by several subdivisions of the larger group known as Vikings. In these dialects, a single multipurpose word – “face” – was used to describe any specific part of the body. Thus one might say, “My body hurts,” and when asked, “Which part?” one could point to one’s stomach, from which half an arrow protruded, and say, “My face.”

If you want to come to our show tomorrow in Pennsylvania, and you don’t attend Washington & Jefferson University, take heart. The show is open to the public, though it’s only free for students, who already blew their February budgets on glow-in-the dark “hot ice” condoms and tequila, which was poured into the condoms, which were then tied shut and thrown at deer, who were largely delighted. The thing is, you can’t buy tickets online, so if you’re driving out to Western PA from Philly or New York or San Francisco, you might justifiably worry about arriving and finding that all the tickets had been snapped up by students, their shoulders too sore for the moment to feed any more deer. Well fear not. Here’s how you can reserve tickets, according to the show’s promoter:

We’re doing will call, or they can purchase at the door.  Tickets can be reserved by emailing name and number needed to sail@washjeff.edu, and can be paid for by cash or check at the door.  No credit or debit cards.

See you there, if you come! If you don’t, we won’t see you at all, because we’ll be there.

Luckily, this isn’t our last chance to meet up. We’re not doing any extensive touring in the first half of 2011 – we need time to begin crafting our next release (tentatively titled “Brain Thrust Mastery” again) – but we’ve set up shows in a few enticing cities in hopes that those of you whose doorsteps we won’t be muddying will consider meeting us halfway. Why not hop a jetliner to Barcelona, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Isle of Wight, or San Diego and find out first hand what we sound like? (We’ll be adding a few more options in the near future.)

A few things coming up in the immediate future post-Pennsylvania show: on Sunday we’re going to get on a Virgin Airlines airplane and watch movies all night. All the free red wine we can drink won’t hurt one bit when it’s time to push through “Yogi Bear.” When the plane lands, assuming everything goes smoothly, assuming the continents don’t rearrange while we’re up there, we’ll be in London. We’ll spend next week crafting tunes with Andy (Burrows (the First)), hitting the NME Awards in search of our two free drinks, hanging with old pals, just palling around, etc. There’s a chance we’ll succumb to the inevitable desire to play in front of people with Andy, in which case we’ll drop some hints on the ol’ twitter feed (est. 1921).

That’s all for now. Onward!