An Evangenital in Spaceland

*** THIS JUST IN ***

Evangenitals drummer David Hurlin is going to be drumming with EZRA REICH (http://ping.fm/f4xDC) TONIGHT (Tuesday Dec 2nd) at 11pm.

Since I can't be there (I'm in San Diego recording Johnny Cash/June Carter tunes with Cash'd Out) I'm hoping YOU can go and see this rare spectacle. :-)

Ezra Reich's music is (in my opinion) like John Maus arm-wrestling David Lynch in a Technicolor water ballet. Yes, you can quote me on that.

Regardless of how you felt about the 80's, you will be sure to appreciate how friggin' TIGHT this act is. I'm talking ORCHESTRATED. With STRINGS, man.

So go do it, dig it, and support our dear David Hurlin on his fantastic voyage. :-)

Much love,
Juli Crockett & the Evangenitals

Awesome Article and Free Show to Boot!

The Evangenitals are playing a free pre-Thanksgiving "Thank You" show on Wednesday November 26th, 11pm at Mr T's Bowl that is sure to be SUPER-AWESOME.

Why? Because our alt-country hillbilly love punk rock revolution SEXTET is taking it to the next level (SEPTET!) with the addition of Killsonic Marching Gang accordion player Ari Desano on this glorious night! Yee-haw!

AND...

We just got an AWESOME write-up in the Pasadena Weekly that speaks in great detail and descriptiveness of what a spectacular LIVE act we are... so if you've been putting off seeing us in the flesh, THE TIME IS NOW!

Check out the article here:
http://ping.fm/X4lEo

Wednesday November 26th
Mr. T's Bowl
5621 1/2 N. Figueroa St
Los Angeles, CA 90042
Seeing Thingz, We You and Under the Asbury are also on the bill.
Evangenitals at 11pm
Call (323) 960-5693 for details

WE LOVE YOU IN THE GOOD WAY!

Juli & the Evangenitals
http://ping.fm/vKQej

Can't make it? No worries!

More upcoming shows:
December 3rd: Mr T's Bowl, Highland Park
December 4th: The Buccaneer, Sierra Madre
December 14th: Redwood Bar, Downtown Los Angeles

A Poem

There is a statue in Baltimore, MD of Edgar Allan Poe in which he is portrayed with an enormous penis, tightly packed in his slacks,
bulging & unmistakable.
I wondered, upon beholding this vision, if it was perchance stipulated in his will that he be portrayed thusly,
in perpetuity.

- Juli Crockett

Brewing tea, listening to some good beats, and getting down with the 5 Rites in the sunlight streaming into my living room. Bliss! :-)

Testing out the Ping.fm, Great Lord of the Micro-blogging Aggregatortomitrons!!! :-)

Stick Figure Renaissance

I'm so friggin' excited to have been turned on to the Paintbrush program for Macs! Ever since I quit my job at the sex toy factory, the one thing that I have missed about my PC was MSPaint and my daily practice of drawing stick figure drawings.

Well... I'M BACK, PEOPLE!!!! :-)


SEE YOU TOMORROW!!!

I like music, and I like YOU!

What an awesome night...

Lisa Dee and I went to see Evangenitals gift from the Lord and bassist (among a multitude of other instruments-player) Keith Lubow play with Deborah McColl at South Pasadena Music. Her tunes were sweet and deep and philosophical and heartbreaking and when she crooned "it's raining, it's raining, but we're connected now" my heart did in fact break open and the tears began to flow. It was such a beautiful set I had to water it like a flower. :-)

The next song, she announced, was co-written by her and her lover, soul mate, and guitarist of 15 years (Keith's dad, guitarist Patrick Lubow). They started the song a month before he died, and they finished it, together, she said, a month after he died. Gorgeous. Lovely. Love. Straight up Rumi and Shams. I dig it.

You can download the song "We're Connected" for free, here: We're Connected mp3.

Post-show, I went back to Keith's mom's house (she and Deborah are both huge fans and supporters of the Evangenitals) and we ended up having an impromptu all-requests Evangenitals hootenanny, with Keith and I on dueling guitars. I, of course, am no match for his ludicrous multi-instrumentalist abilities. It's awe-inspiring how many different things he can play: bass, guitar, mandolin, banjo, trumpet, trombone, ukulele, harmonica... and that's just what was available in the room! I'm sure there's more.

Accompanying us were violinist Andrea Baker (formerly of Evangenitals pal-band Shaped Like a Gun! Small world!) playing the mandolin, her husband (a composer who's name is totally escaping me) playing the uke, and James Graham, mandolin-player and vocalist for Deborah McColl, plucking around on the banjo. Nashville guitar genius Gary Talley of The Box Tops was in the room and listening... however, he was on to drinking wine and off of playing for the night.

We did a ton of Evangenitals songs, including a bad-ass version of The Hole with Keith on the Trumpet, and some really awesome covers of June Carter's "Tall Lover Man", Johnny Cash's "Long Black Veil" (with 4 part harmonies!), and Bob Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight". Good times, and such an honor to get to hang out and harmonize with such incredible musicians.

(FYI: There's actually a pretty dope video of Keith, myself, and Evangenitals drummer David Hurlin playing the new Klezmer-punk version of The Hole atop The 1 Second Film's Road to Oprah bus with iJustine and Brookers here: Evangenitals, iJustine, & The 1 Second Film.)

At 2:30am I sold an Evangenitals CD to a nice man visiting from Australia who said that my vocal stylings reminded him of one of his favorite Australian vocalizing twins, from the band "Johnny Cash Converters" in Melbourne, which is a clever play on words in Australia, where a "Cash Converter" is a sort of high-end thrift shop, he explained. The fact that I am the June Carter in the premier Johnny Cash tribute band Cash'd Out made the associations even more aligned. Then he showed me some Australian currency, which is beautiful, and it even has a little plastic see-through window in it. Transparency in Currency?!? Whaaaat?!?!

My Evangenitals heart was stretched all over the nation tonight, though, as guitarist Henry Bermudez was up in San Francisco playing with Unpopable (one of his many awesome bands) at the wedding of balloon artist Addi Somekh, and David Hurlin is in Fairfield, Iowa getting indoctrinated into a new job at the soon-to-be-launched awesome music site 3mix.com and playing some gigs, tonight's with the Jefferson County Green Band.

The gang will all be back together soon, however, for the Evangenitals Family Hootenanny at Molly Malones on Tuesday September 9th. Hopefully a bunch of folks will come out, as every show I get to play with this current collection of Evangenitals is a spiritual experience and I have a feeling the 9th is going to be a new height of sublimation. It's a feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeling.

In other news, I'm officially, thoroughly, and totally addicted to Twitter, so if you find yourself wondering what I'm doing just about every second of every day... I'm doing my damndest to share it. The MICRO-blogging is, I realize, having an effect on my MACRO-blogging, though. After giving mini-updates all day long via text message, sitting down and committing to a full testimonial of the day has proven rather difficult to muster the enthusiasm for. It seems, however, the trick is to have more ludicrously awesome nights like tonight which make me want to share the love and link every single person place and thing that I encountered for the world to see. I'll do my best to say yes to more of these experiences and keep the news a'flowing.

In the meantimes, however, you can totally follow me on Twitter. :-)

p.s.
You can follow David Hurlin on Twitter, too. :-)

p.p.s.
I love you. You know who you are. Yes... YOU! :-)

The Trinity

Evidence of the Union of All Things Betwixt Heaven and Earth in Trinity:
A Visual Essay

by Juli Crockett


Exhibit A: The Triangulum Nebula

Exhibit B: The Jellyfish

Exhibit C: A latex glove found on the streets of Downtown Los Angeles

Mind Body Spirit

Sky Land Sea

Waking Sleeping Dreaming

Hypothesis, Antithesis, Thesis

This is This

I am That


The End.

The Code

This is a blast from the past that was brought to mind while strolling along a surprisingly peaceful and lovely chunk of the LA River today...

Back when I was writing The Dawn of Quixote: Chapter The First and reading lots of Unamuno's Our Lord Don Quixote, I had a sort of Code of Ethics written on my wall which I am reprinting here for your possible enjoyment and edification. If you go so far as to take the word into action, all the better!

The Code:

1. Set Loose a Delirium
2. Commit an Outrage (a Barbarity)
3. Let Your Horse Lead You
4. Fight (Adventures which Befall)
5. Find the Selpulchre (Search)
6. Love (Chaste, from Afar)
7. Assuage Self-Loathing with Self-Annihilation
8. Endure the Inevitable
9. Judge Not (Lest Ye Be Judged)
10. Explore all Caves (Caverns, Crevices)
11. Attack all Puppet Shows
12. Speak Fair to All Goat herders
13. Commend Thy Self to Thy Love and Thy Lord
14. State Your Full Name and Purpose
15. Have Faith
16. Trust Not Thine Eyes, Nor Ears, Nor Tastes
17. Treat All Ladies as Maidens
18. Fear Not
19. Read Until Mad (Delirium)
20. Believe in Fairy Tales, Myths, and All Dieties.
21. Do Not Debate (Debacle) Do not Reason with the Reasoners
22. Face Ridicule
23. ________________________

We're on the Radio!

Reports have been CONFIRMED that the Evangenitals (that's Evangina + boys) single "I Just Forgot" off our new album Everlovin' was played over the airwaves of KGLP - Gallup in Gallup, New Mexico by one Mister Tom Funk of the "Green Chile Revival & Medicine Show".

Mister Funk requested that more Evangenitals tunes be sent to him as soon as possible.

You can pay a visit to KGLP (listen online, let them know what great taste Tom Funk has, etc) by clicking this link: http://www.kglp.org/

You can listen to "I Just Forget" on Last.fm by clicking this link: http://www.last.fm/music/Evangenitals/_/I+Just+Forgot

And heck, you can buy the tune in mp3 form off of iTunes, CDBaby, or the Snocap store on our Myspace page

McCann

I can tell from the "backend" reports on our website that someone out there has been searching for the lyrics to the song "McCann" -- written about the Irish writer and awesome human Colum McCann, whom I met while he was a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where I'm pursuing my PhD.

I'm guessing this may have to do with the fact that Evangina just started playing this song out and about town this fair 2008. Though written long ago, for whatever reason the Evangenitals never picked this tune up and ran with it. It is, however, just folksy and forlorn enough for Evangina to let it emanate from our lovesick breasts, so we have been doing so -- from Mr T's Bowl to the Hyperion Tavern. (So, Silverlake, if you've been smelling some melancholy and Irish jigs in the air lately, maybe it's the spirit of McCann seeping into the groundwater.)

Always quick to respond to public demands, I have gone ahead and posted the lyrics for the McCann song. You can find them here: "McCann, McCann..."

Love,
Juli

Happy Birthday to YOU!

Holy Moly... I think a new business for the Evangenitals/Evangina may have just been born!

Today Lisa & I provided a few hours of entertainment for a kid's birthday party in Sherman Oaks and it was friggin' AWESOME!!!

We did clean-versions of a ton of Evangenitals & Evangina tunes, some cover songs (including the debut of some new Dead Milkmen covers) and ended the whole thing with some rockin' version of classics like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "The Wheels on the Bus"... we even got to pass the mic off to the kids for some rousing renditions of the "Alphabet Song" and "You Are My Sunshine".

With 30+ parents present, many of whom said this was the best birthday party they'd ever been to, and the 20-odd kids who absolutely LOVED it, I'm thinking we may be getting some phone calls for future birthday party business. :-)

A major highlight of the day was when one of the kids asked for a "really fast song about a race car" so they could run around in a circle really fast... after a few clarifying questions on what he wanted out of the song, I composed "The Race Car song" on the spot. Lisa was a champ, right there with me on accompaniment, and all present agreed that we could make a lot of dough if we did a kids album. Suddenly Gwendolyn is making a whole lot more sense to me.

Evangina at the Hyperion Tavern TONIGHT!

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Good Feeling

There's nothing better than receiving a heartfelt "Thanks" from the SOUNDMAN after a gig.

Those poor folks have to listen to every single band that drags their gear onto the stage... for better or for worse. So when a worn and torn up soundman wants to give us an earnest thanks and a big hug for bringing something beautiful to their club, it really means a lot to me.

That's what happened last night after Evangina closed the bill at Mr T's Bowl. Arlo and I had ourselves a real "moment" after the show. I really love that guy, and I love playing that venue. I can always just plug in and trust him to take care of the sound. I've yet to get very involved with monitor levels and such, as I'm always just eager to start playing, so it always sounds weird to me onstage (too much ME most of the time) however, when it was all over we had nothing but rave reviews from the crowd about how great it sounded.

It was a really fun and tender set, with Ramones and Misfits covers - Evangina Style! -- and Sarah Peters (from the Road to Oprah tour) guesting on bass and violin. We played some new versions of old songs, and some old songs that had never been played live before (like McCann). What's more, I played the electric guitar that Albert gave me as a present, and Lisa Dee played the bass (awesomely!) for the first time ever.

The audience stayed up late (we played at midnight) and was super-lovely. We brought the "instrument box" and had folks sitting down in front playing along.... just like old times. The whole scene warmed my heart and got me real excited about 2008.

It was a perfect show to kick off the New Year. And there's more on the horizon... we may be playing the Hyperion Tavern on Thursday, the Barn Burner on Friday, and we're even playing a birthday party for a friend. Creative juices are flowing, we're growing, and all is well on the Evangina front.

Everlovin'
Juli