I took this photo on October 31, 2001 at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom. The Papaya Kings (featuring JP Bowersock) and a costumed Moldy Peaches opened up for this Halloween show.

The tickets were $20, and Julian Casablancas was sporting a military jacket and a Joe Camel t-shirt. He also had eyes made of laser beams.

This amazingly awesome shot of The Strokes by famed NYC-based photog Ryan McGinley is single-handedly fulfilling my life at the moment.

(from Fuck Yeah, Ryan McGinley tumblr)

Perfection!

Please always wear your hair like you had it in the W magazine photo shoot with Rebecca Hall. It’s simply the decent thing to do for the benefit of the world.

Loving the photo series of these two in the most recent issue of the mag. So casual, yet glamorous. Beautiful clothes and styling.

If you’ve recently been perusing Curbed.com, you may have seen an item about some a blog post about a 2008 job done by hotter than hot interior design team Roman & Williams for “an actress, her musician husband, and their children.” Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s none other than Coldplay’s Chris Martin and actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Although the original post has since been removed, thanks to the internetz the pictures remain!

And if there was any doubt that this home was in fact the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Martin, egle-eyed readers will recognize the kitchen as the “set” of Gwynie’s most recent photo shoot with Mario Testino for the August 2010 issue of Vogue to promote her new…cookbook. Oh yeah…

Master bedroom:

Living room:

Kitchen:

The decor is aggressively pastel-y and soft. Not sure if I would choose to live in this kind of space — but for the Martins it might be a nice change from the decor of some of their other, full-time homes in England.

Could you live in such a space?

More at The Happy Home.

Just catching up now on ze blogging. A few nights ago I had the pleasure of catching the Julian Casablancas show @ The Fillmore at Irving Plaza for the 101.9 RXP Second Anniversary show.

As you can probably tell from the lack of updates on this site, I haven’t been the *best* at keeping up with the shows, but I knew I would be disappointed with myself if I didn’t head to this show.

I’m happy to report that I was definitely not disappointed with my decision to head to the show. Julian seemed happy and at ease — even more so than the Terminal 5 show I saw him at in January.

He was sporting his latest style (as seen in the “Boombox” video) — with the blue and red stripes and the feather in his hair. The rest of the look included a white and black striped tank top, slim red pants, white Nike high tops and a studded leather jacket.

Julian and the band played a mix of songs off the album (“Ludlow Street”, “Glass” — probably one of my favorite songs off the album, “Out of the Blue”), B-sides (“30 Minute Boyfriend”, “I’ll Try Anything”), and even a new song (simply called “New One” for now), but it was the one-off tunes that really got the crowd going crazy.

For example, when the first few bars of “Hard to Explain” started up, everyone’s ears instantly perked up, and the crowd started cheering. By the time the chorus hit, folks were happily jumping up and down and I’m sure it brought back a lot of fond memories for some of the old-timers (like me) in the crowd. After the song was over, Julian jokingly announce that “that was a new one.”

Another surprise was during the encore when Julian explained that they were about to play a song that people seemed to really like — even though it was off season — breaking into his cover version of the SNL song “I Wish It Was Christmas Today.”

Julian even took it upon himself to do a stage dive or two into the crowd, proving that despite being older, sober, and a new father the guy still has what it takes to be a rock star. He made jokes about how things have changed, yet stayed the same — stating that he had seen so many shows at the venue — “Irving Plaza, or whatever this place is called.”

Openers Dan Black, hit the stage quite early in the evening at 8:15. Although entertaining, Dan Black seem a bit over-the-top and not very contemporary. Like if you ever wondered what Cobra Starship would be like if they had been British and cast as the prom band in a teen movie from 2002 starring Melissa Joan Hart, Dan Black would probably be a close approximation to what that group would look/sound like.

Their blend of synthy dance music was fine, but just not unique or particularly interesting. The front man (a tall skinny version of John Travolta in Grease and Ben Stiller’s Zoolander) was overly dramatic in his stage mannerisms — at one point striking a Christ-like pose. Need I say more?

More over at BriTunes, Amplified, According to G, 101.9 RXP, SPIN.com, JAXFortuna

Superfriends musician Lissy Trullie and blogger/model/party girl Corey Kennedy (EDITOR’S UPDATE: Nope, it sure looks like Corey Kennedy, but apparently it’s not. Corey is in the lookbook wearing the same shirt, but in t-shirt form, apparently this girl is wearing the tank-top version. The girl in the photo is an unnamed friend) and a female buddy are showing of their joyful affection for one another with a playful lip lock (below) in the latest lookbook for Chrissie Miller’s S/S 09 line for Sophomore shot by Cass Bird.

As faithful readers of Corey’s blog will know, she and Lissy have become fast friends as Corey has tagged along during the Lissy/Virgins tour.

Speaking of… The Virgins are also featured in the lookbook… and singer Donald Cumming was a model for the Fall 2008 Sophomore line.

A newer member of the NYC-music centric circle is Mr. Adam Green (formerly of the Moldy Peaches), who has even done a cover version of Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” with Lissy:

SOURCE: Pedestrian News (for more photos)

Have you heard of the latest reincarnation of the music site Lala.com? Yeah, me neither, but according to their site Lala is a hub for you to listen to “any song or album once in full for free…Add the web song (unlimited online plays) for 10 cents, or get the MP3 download for 70 cents more.”

According to an EMI press release, they have signed agreements with all the major record labels (EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group) in addition to 170,000+ independent record companies to license the music on the site. In addition to that, according to The Associated Press the site is backed by some BIG money: $35 million in venture capital to be exact, coming from the pockets of Bain Capital LLC, Ignition Partners, and Warner Music Group Corp.

So it’s a cash-flush site that aims to please corporate and independent music entities by allowing people to pay for the music they want to listen to on the internet–and (hopefully) some of that money gets put in the pockets of the artists who create these works.

While Lala seems to be very concerned with the rights of musicians and big corporations, they clearly do not have the same amount of care for the rights of photographers. Yesterday (one day after Lala had their relaunch) it was brought to my attention that a bunch of concert photographers recently discovered that their copyrighted work was being used on the Lala artists page without their permission. I was included in this bunch, as shown above with my Ryan Adams picture (natch).

It seems as though the Lala team had searched through Flickr, downloaded, resized, and cropped photos they liked and decided to re-upload the newly altered images and host them on their own site for the purpose of adding artwork to their artist pages–without contacting most of the photographers whose work they were lifting. Irregardless of the fact that almost all the photos they snatched were NOT marked as Creative Commons allowing commercial usage. So if this is the case, that means countless numbers of artist photos you see on their site ( on landing pages and thumbnails all over site) are actually STOLEN PROPERTY.

Was there no budget for paying for photos despite that $35 million VC money?

Lala has not only altered people’s images (and in many cases, cutting out their watermarks) and re-uploaded them to their site, but they have not even credited the individual photographers–they have opted to simply credit all photos to the VERY PROLIFIC artist named….Flickr.com. They have also hyperlinked the “Source: http://www.flickr.com” photo credit back to the ORIGINAL image on Flickr as some sort of misconceived props to the people they lifted from, when really it’s just insult to injury to the photographers.

Needless to say, photographers who have caught their work being used are FUMING mad and have been individually contacting the Lala team. Their complaints have already induced some initial changes, Lala has now included a “Report this image” link listed directly next to the Flickr photo credit.

Another stolen pic, this time The Fratellis

But what they need to do is STOP STEALING IMAGES RIGHT OFF THE BAT. They should contact the photographers whose works they are interested in using and negotiate a licensing fee, as I’m SURE they did with all those record labels. They should also remove all infringed images from their site IMMEDIATELY, not wait until someone has time to click through the thousands of pages on their site to discover exactly which pictures have been swiped. As flattering as it is to have one’s photos displayed on a site, in this case most photographers would rather be compensated than receive vague promotion.

I know there is a saying accredited to Grace Hopper, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission,” but why take that risk when your wrongdoing can be so easily exposed? Please tell us why, Lala.com.

UPDATE (4:23PM): Looks as though someone has hit the panic button. Now instead of an artist image at the top of the page there is a giant black box:

Strokes bassist Nikolai Fraiture performed tonight with his new pet project/band, Nickel Eye. They played a number of songs, including “Back from Exile”:

and “Brandy of the Damned”:

Unless I missed something, no other Strokes appeared at the Music Hall tonight.

The first song the band played was my favorite… airy, with beautiful harmonies sung by Joel Cadbury and Jamie McDonald of South. (They flew over from England in order to play the show!)

The crowd was far from packed, but there were a good number of people there—surprisingly the crowd looked pretty young (were all the older-timers out in Manhattan?) with a disproportionate amount of Asian girls up in the front.

One blonde girl, who I think likened herself to being the Brooklyn version of Miley Cyrus was hooting and hollering at Nikolai the whole time, shouting out things like “I LUUUUVVV YOUUUU NIIIKOOOOLAAAIIII!” and “YOU HAVE A GREAT A** NIKOLAIIIIII!” Charming, as you can imagine.

Nikolai’s established shy and understated demeanor hasn’t changed as a result of his new job as the leader. His Lurch-like hunch was still present as he strummed the guitar, his hair was coiffed in the same exact pageboy style for which he’s known. He was dressed in “typical” Nikolai attire—casual suit jacket and pants, button down shirt, big belt buckle and shoes. It was almost as if nothing had changed since the last time I probably saw him onstage in 2006(?) during the “First Impressions…” tour.

Yet there he was, singing his own songs with a new band… it was a little bit like the Twilight Zone to be honest.

However, Niko does has a bit of ways to go as a front man, the best illustration of this point was during the 4th song, which was a Bob Dylan-esque folky tune in which Nikolai played the harmonica. Instead of blowing hard into the ‘monica to get a full, rich sound, Nikolai seemed to tweak air into it with the type of force that one would usually reserve to blowing crumbs off the table.

But I’m sure you want to know, who’s solo effort is better? Albert Hammond Jr. or Nikolai Fraiture. That’s kind of like asking me to choose my favorite child, isn’t it? (OK, it’s Julian.) But seriously, I thought some of the tunes were quite good, and thought that Nickel Eye sounded much better live than the recorded stuff they currently have on MySpace.

Whereas some of the recorded tracks sound a bit too much like The Strokes, live they carry a different vibe and gravitas. When I listened to the songs live, I didn’t feel as though they were just discarded Strokes songs—the lyrics are a bit more introspective, linear, and…softer…instead of in your face, nonsensical, and jagged.

All in all a good night, and a job well done for Nickel Eye’s second live show.

In the midst of watching the new episode of Gossip Girl (Michelle Trachtenberg, really? Vampire Weekend‘s “Campus” playing during a Brooklyn scene?) I’m finding time to log in some quick updates during the commercial breaks.

Last Thursday I headed over to the new Morrison Hotel Gallery, now located on the Bowery in the former location of the CBGB’s Gallery. What for? The opening of rock photographer Bob Gruen’s new show, “Rockers,” which features photos of Blondie, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, the White Stripes, and his famed photographs of John Lennon wearing that “New York City” tshirt.

Some famous faces popped in to take a look at the shots: Yoko Ono dressed all in black with shades and a floppy hat was in and out very early, and later Debbie Harry strolled in, all dolled up in a body-hugging champagne-colored floral dress.

More over at VanityFair.com

New York City homies Vampire Weekend are quickly becoming as ubiquitous as MacBook Air commercials–currently gracing the cover of the music magazine for the “blawg-rockers”, SPIN and now they are featured in the new issue of Nylon magazine:

(Bigger photo on Vorrasi.com.)

The shots were taken at Tom & Jerry’s bar in the East Village by TMA friend Vorrasi. We were lucky enough to be on hand for the shoot. Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot:

VW are currently in the UK, but according to their MySpace blog post, have canceled their shows in Manchester and Glasgow due to illness. They are back in the States starting March 8th with a show at St. Augustine, FL.