brian keith diaz: 1800 miles to nowhere @briankeithdiaz - Tumblr Blog

Podcasts starring Brian Keith Diaz

First off thanks to all of my friends with podcasts for allowing me to be on their shows. Secondly thanks to everyone who has listened to anything I have had to say on these shows. It was a lot of fun and I even learned a little about myself! Check out these shows I was on by clicking on each one...

GOING OFF TRACK w. Jonah Bayer

YOUR FAVORITE ALBUM w. Adam Santiago

FELIZ NAVIPOD w. Tony Thaxton

It's the weekend. Buy a book from DeadXStop Publishing!!

Thank You Everyone!

Thank you so much everyone for the positive response to my first book. What started out as a collection of stories mainly intended for a blog turned into something much cooler and, I feel, far more interesting. I've said it a bunch of times before, but I'll say it again now. I never considered myself a writer so this is a pretty huge deal for me. When Chris first handed me that box of books in Chicago in front of The Metro it became very real. Before that it was just this abstract idea that we had been talking about. At least it was to me. I never thought anyone would take any interest in it at all. Yet, here I was holding close to a year's worth of writing in my hands. I know it's a fast read, and a lot of it can be considered a little more damning than I'd like it to be, but there's no time for looking backwards. I mean every word that I've written down.

At this point we're getting close to the halfway point in selling out the first pressing, at which point digital copies will be available.

Again, thanks so much to everyone who bought one. It means a lot. If you keep reading I'll keep writing.

Happy 2014 to you all!

swimming-ly-blog

2013 IN FOOD AND MUSIC - BRIAN DIAZ

Brian Diaz’s book, 1800 Miles to Nowhere chronicles his travels as a musician and guitar tech with Guns N’ Roses, Fall Out Boy, and Anthrax.

What was the food highlight of your year?

Being in my line of work I have a lot of opportunities to check out excellent local offerings from around the world. Everything from delightful French bistros in Paris, to standing room only sushi places in Tokyo, to BBQ joints in Nashville. But, my favorite places and food highlights have always been in my home, New York City.

My standout this year had to be the ax-handle ribeye steak at St. Anselm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Saying that it was anything short of heavenly would be selling it short. Sometimes a good piece of meat can be seen as a bit pedestrian, but when it’s prepared and presented in this way it’s a work of art. I will only go there with my girl, order the ax-handle and a bottle of wine with a side of grilled sardines and fried mashed potatoes, and spend hours talking and enjoying the atmosphere, food, and drink. Every single time.

What was the music highlight of your year?

Traveling with Guns N’ Roses to Beirut, Lebanon has to be at the top of my “WTF?!” list and career highlights. It’s surreal to go to this place where I grew up hearing about the war and strife, and then going into the middle of where it all took place. Some of the war torn, bullet scarred buildings are still standing, and yet a couple of miles down the road we did a show for 15,000 or more people. It was proof to me that music truly can and will unite people around the world. Everyone wants to be entertained and forget where they are sometimes, especially if it’s a historically troubled place. That’s a pretty powerful thing.

For me personally, seeing Local Natives in NYC with my lady was a huge moment because it’s a band that we discovered together and their music has carried us through good and bad times.

Was there a moment when food and music came together in a memorable way?

Visiting the Grill ‘Em All burger restaurant in Alhambra, CA was a treat. It’s a gourmet burger spot with a heavy metal theme. Great burgers, great music, great beers, and amazing owners. I brought one of the guys from Fall Out Boy there and we all just sat and chatted with owner and longtime friend Ryan Harkins about Midwest punk rock - and burgers (of course) - for quite a while. He brought us more food than our bodies could handle all while pumping Slayer and Iron Maiden. I make it a point to head out that way whenever I’m on the west coast to visit Grill ‘Em All and Ryan.

@briankeithdiaz

Available for pre-order in October.

Brushing up on DeadXStop Publishing previous releases via my Christmas gift from Mr. Dead Stop himself. Not a bad Tuesday.

3-D Bacon

We are obsessed with recreating reality. Everything must be recreated. Every moment must be recreated. Even things that aren't reality must be made to look as real as possible.

The first 3-D movie I remember seeing was Creature From The Black Lagoon. You went to 7-11, bought a Slurpee and they gave you a set of paper 3-D glasses with the blue and red cellophane lenses. I remember going home with my dad, who was all excited to relive his childhood with his kid, but it was going to be even more awesome because it was going to be 3-D! All I remember doing was taking the glasses off eventually because the red-blue gave me a headache and when I did the image on the screen looked like this :

Fast forward to the year 2010...

We have technology that we couldn't have possibly dreamed of back in the 1980s. We have phone that we carry in our pocket that can make video calls, map our location, take photos, play music, and do virtually anything a computer can do. Our TVs can connect to the internet, pause and rewind live broadcast, and are thinner and larger than ever. We have video game consoles that you don't even need a controller to play with, you just move your body around and it can SENSE you. Even our cars can do almost anything except fly. Yet, we are still stuck on recreating depth and reality in movies with 3-D.

Just yesterday I plunked down 20 dollars to see Tron, a sort of continuation of a movie that even in 80s I felt looked dated. Now here we are in the year 2010 and somehow we're pretending to care about Tron because it was shot in 3-D and Daft Punk did the soundtrack.

First off, it's a chore for me to go to the movies to begin with. The last things I want to do once I'm there is a) pay 20 fucking dollars to see an anachronistic techno-battle starring The Dude on top of the 20 dollars for snacks b) put on glasses OVER my glasses. Yes, it's been 30 years since those paper red-blue cellophane lenses that came with the Slurpee that was way more memorable than the movie. Yet we still haven't figured out a better technology than "put these glasses on and shit will look kind of cool I guess".

What does 3-D REALLY do other than force the makers of the movie to shoot a bunch of scenes where things pop out of the screen at you? Beyond that happening a few times, the only other thing you get out of it is some headache inducing, unnatural looking depth. For 34 years I have been watching movies and never had a problem implying depth by, ya know, looking at the screen. But, I guess Hollywood doesn't trust that I can watch a movie and ascertain that the characters are not flat in real life and they need to show me how deep Jeff Bridges' weird space/grid apartment is.

Basically all 3-D does is make something into a 3-D movie. Forget plot, forget the characters. Throw some 3-D on top of it and that's all it becomes... a movie in 3-D. Never mind the fact that you already live in a three-dimensional world and can experience such by opening your eyes. Hollywood wants to recreate that and paste it on top of anything they can from cartoon movies, to remakes, to Avatar (to paraphrase 7-UP : never saw it, never will), to anything they can get their hands on.

It's like adding bacon to every meal. Bet you didn't see that one coming!

Bacon is the 3-D of the food world. Everyone you will ever meet LOVES bacon. LOVES IT. Even vegetarians and vegans will tell you they still like the smell of bacon or miss the taste of it. Seriously... go to a hippie commune and ask one.

Bacon, or as I like to call it, "hipster meat", has in the last few years enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. Maybe it's due to the whole farm to table, nose to tail approach to eating, or how everyone suddenly is a self described "foodie", a term which need to disappear from English forever, but bacon is everywhere. Bacon wrapped scallops, bacon wrapped asparagus, bacon wrapped meatloaf, bacon cupcakes, bacon flavored salt, bacon fat popcorn, bacon wrapped bacon, bacon wrapped WHOLE turkey... no seriously, look...

When does this food stuff, which I used to refer to as "meat candy" jump the shark? Yes, we all get it, bacon is goddamn delicious. In all it's greasy, fatty, crispy, pork belly goodness. Why over do it though?

You're turning bacon into 3-D. You put bacon on stuff just because you can and you're making the whole meal taste like bacon. Just because your meatloaf has no substance or taste doesn't mean you can wrap some bacon around it, call it a day and it's suddenly amazing. It's the same old meatloaf you made back in the 80s with some new trendy flash to it and The Dude does NOT abide. The Dude will not stand for this food aggression, man. Just like Tron, the actual story got buried under a lot of flash and 3-D action sequences. In this case, your meatloaf is just a vehicle for delivering bacon to your mouth.

I just want to get back to the good old days when movies were flat and looked like movies and bacon was served with eggs and toast in the morning. I want to be able to watch a movie wearing just ONE pair of glasses. I want my delicious bacon back.

I also never, EVER, want to spend 20 dollars on a movie that kind of sucked EVER again.

lookatthisfuckingoogle

briankeithdiaz

REAL PUNX

lookatthisfuckingoogle:

This is awesome

Congratulations, I hate you. Now what?

Yeah, I haven't used this thing a whole lot. I've been busy in my IRL adventures, jet-setting to such exotic locales as Bristol, England and Hercules, California. Exhilarating, I know.

Today I'm going to set my sights on a fairly new phenomenon. It involves usually terrible bands trolling the internet, in particular Twitter, looking for negative reviews of themselves and responding directly to the person. This NEVER happened before. If I had something to say about a band, I would post something on my Livejournal or whatever rudimentary blog or Usenet site we were using back in the 90s and I could be sure that only my very small group of readers would ever see it. We could have our own little private laugh about it, no one's feelings were hurt, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment because I had "told them"! The world could finally be warned of your awful art! Now I can almost GUARANTEE that if I give my '140 characters or less' review of something I find unsavory, I'm going to get a response from the band that probably has a Google alert set to their name and gets butt hurt every time someone points out the obvious.

Can't people just let criticism go? Trust me guys, for every review you get like this...

There are about 1000 like this...

So don't worry about what some 34 year old bitter, fat, jaded, hardcore ex-kid thinks about your "music". From time to time I've been known to hate a lot things... snow, the color purple, some of my own friends, my parents, Boston sports, drinking, not drinking, airport security, France, boating, etc. Who cares what I think really? Quit Googling yourself. You're not as important as you think. Just go write some better music. And while you're at it, if you're going to play an Eddie Van Halen guitar you better DAMN WELL be playing some licks ala 'Hot For Teacher'. Otherwise just use the MacBook that generated the rest of your tracks.

Freegans

Freegans Well this is about as stupid as humans get. If you don't know what a freegan is visit freegan.info and prepare to have your mind blown by people who can't just come out and say what they really mean.... don't understand? Let me break it down for you. Here are some of the selling points of freeganism and what they really mean... Waste Reclamation - According to the freegan.info site : "This practice of affluent societies produces an amount of waste so enormous that many people can be fed and supported simply on its trash. As freegans we forage instead of buying to avoid being wasteful consumers ourselves, to politically challenge the injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, and to reduce the waste going to landfills and incinerators which are disproportionately situated within poor, non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma." Oh.... so you despise the much needed waste management systems of the world so you eat garbage? Just say that's what you do. You go through the trash and pull things out that others have deemed no longer useful and you eat them. People throw away food and other items for all sorts of reasons. The food has gone bad, the clothes are torn, the furniture is broken beyond repair, etc. etc. This isn't a practice of "affluent society" that they claim it is. Everyone from wealthy down to the poorest throws things away. I'm not going to eat 3 week old bread because it's "perfectly fine". And, there are waste dumps all over the country. Not just in "non-white neighborhoods". Give me a fucking break. I'm not going to eat garbage because someone chooses to live near a dump. Rent Free Housing - The freegans say : "Squatters believe that real human needs are more important than abstract notions of private property, and that those who hold deed to buildings but won't allow people to live in them, even in places where housing is vitally needed" I say "fuck right off". Abstract notions? How fucking abstract is money PAID to someone else for something they OWN. I pay money to a landlord for my apartment. I can choose to have no objects in there and not even be there at all, ever. It's still mine via my landlord. People aren't allowed to live in those buildings because they don't have the money to pay for them. Simple as that. Welcome to capitalist society. Strap on your seatbelt and get ready for the ride of your life, because without MONEY you aren't getting very far. Even the biggest douchebags in the city of Chicago can afford an apartment without having to break the law (i.e. steal housing by squatting). I don't ever want to hear that people aren't "allowed" to do something. That's an excuse people use when they're lazy. Law defeats punk rock ideals every time. Working Less - "By accounting for the basic necessities of food, clothing, housing, furniture, and transportation without spending a dime, freegans are able to greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the need to constantly be employed. We can instead devote our time to caring for our families, volunteering in our communities, and joining activist groups to fight the practices of the corporations who would otherwise be bossing us around at work." Okay, so if you steal, eat garbage, and live in illegal housing, you and your freegan family can eliminate the need to be "bossed around at work". Excuse me.... just say "I don't want to work, I want to play all day" because that's exactly what you're doing. Everyone works at some point. Get over it. Unless you were born a billionaire playboy, work is on your not so distant agenda. I work, you work (or have at some point). It's how we can all afford fancy stuff like food, and clothes, and a home. Not everyone works for some evil corporation. Some people have figured out how to be moderately successful on a small scale on their own. It's something called "not being lazy". Basically all of this is an outline on how to be homeless. My question is, where the fuck did they get the computer to make this website. Didn't THAT cost money? Or did they dumpster dive a Windows 95 Packard-Bell from someone's trash? I wonder. Basically, freegans make me mad and I kind of want to punch one in the face.

This has to be a joke... right?

One of the most mind blowing ignorant super-patriotic bigoted videos I've seen in a long time. Way to use a national tragedy to justify your xenophobia and hatred for other religions. Oh yeah, by the way, the U.S. was supposedly founded on the principle of religious freedom, so this is pretty ironic. Way to try to set us back a few hundred years.

"Swim" - Surfer Blood

If you want to know what I'll be listening to this entire summer, this is it. When it finishes it will be on repeat. How did I miss this band last year? #slippin'

60618 to 11206

For the past 7 years I have lived in the city of Chicago and have been proud to call the Midwest my home. I'm not from here, but when I decided to move out of New York and find "something different" my first choice was Chicago. In 7 years I watched the neighborhood I have called home grow from a sketchy place you don't really want to walk around in at night to a place where condos are going up everywhere, bars open on every corner, and people sit outside and eat food and drink coffee. It's weird.

Walking and biking around the past week I've started to get nostalgic for my neighborhood. I realized that I knew a lot more and appreciated a lot more here than I was aware of. Suddenly every intersection and every storefront I passed held some memory for me. Every bar was a story and every person I saw on the street was someone I knew currently, in passing, or could relate to. Every so often I would see a group of young 20-somethings carrying that ubiquitous case of Pabst Blue Ribbon to their apartment they probably all shared with 3 other people and I'd smile thinking of all those wasted nights that I wouldn't take back for anything. All the barbecues, birthday parties, bike rides, bands playing in basements, buddy tattoos, fireworks, falling down the stairs, Summer Of Blood, etc.... Being a person who tours and got to come home and experience this every day when I was off without a care in the world helped me live my Chicago experience in fast forward. Even if I was a bit (ahem) too old (cough) to really be partaking, I did anyway.

Things change. My first roommates I had here are married and one is pregnant now, due any day. One became a famous DJ. Another moved to California. One is in Richmond. The other is (still) the best girl guitar shredder I have ever met. I still live with Rick and we still do the same things we did when we both lived on California Avenue. I still see people who lived in my building and on my block around at bars and shows. Most of everyone else has disappeared to other cities... Richmond, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Cincinnati... That's fine with me. I'll see them on tour.

I feel like I'm already looking back at this time and I haven't even left yet, but its time to let go of my old idea of Chicago. At this point, most everyone I know has left or has moved to the outer reaches of this city, or is off in their own world and we've disconnected from each other's lives, which is sad, but not totally unexpected. It's called growing up and moving on.

Moving back to New York is exciting, nerve wracking, and kind of new for me all over again. As much as Chicago has changed in these 7 years, New York City has changed twice as much. Every time I go back I feel like I'm somewhere new that I've trodden all over before. Its like seeing a person you've known all your life after they've gotten facial reconstruction. The soul is still there but it got a serious makeover on the outside. It's also strange to go back to a place where people who didn't grow up there now call home and I'M the outsider. Funny how that works out.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. Maybe nowhere. I just need to see it all written down so I can read my anxious thoughts.

11 more days.

People always ask me what it's like to be on tour. This is basically what happens to me every single night. Except I'm not a panda or whatever that thing is.

I give you "Guitar Tech vs. Local Crew"

Seven and a half crazy minutes in talk show history. If you don't think so you haven't seen enough crazy talk shows.

R.I.P. Arsenio Hall.

(disclaimer : I'm not actually sure if Arsenio Hall is dead. The internet is no definitive source of his whereabouts)

thedailywhat

briankeithdiaz

Best ever. This should be posted in every venue around the world.

joshterry:

thedailywhat:

Henry Rollins Badassery of the Day: This is some Grade A inspirational cross-stitch material right here.

[reddit.]

AMEN

Shit just got real... real cute! Who the fuck lets their kids do this!??! Awesome parents, that's who!

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brian keith diaz: 1800 miles to nowhere