enjoy IMPROV EVERYHWERE’S WORK

enjoy GHOSTS OF PASHA’S WORK”

Amen, Chris. I’m going to disable comments on this post if that’s ok with you. (Shoot me an email if it’s not.) I think everyone involved is tired of talking about this, and I’m getting tired of reading comments that show up here every time TAL reruns on Showtime or someone hears the radio broadcast for the first time. I think we’ve talked every aspect of this mission to death over the past four years.

If you’re hear for the first time:

To learn more about Ghosts of Pasha’s work outside of this one gig four years ago, visit: http://www.ghostsofpasha.com/

To learn more about Improv Everywhere’s work vist our missions page to see the 75 other things we’ve done outside of this one night:
http://www.improveverywhere.com/missions/

WE had a band for over a year before thousands of people came along, and it was a recording project. every time we recorded something, it was different. COMPLETELY. a different singer every time, sometimes a different GENRE of music altogether.

the idea of this “band” from the very beginning was to blur the lines of what people thought of as a band, what a band could do.

when one small window of time, one VERY LIMITED ASPECT OF THE MYRIAD OF THINGS WE DO on a regular basis,one small growth period of ours was hyper focused on, discussed by psychiatrists and professors as a study, taking focus off of what we had done before, and, ultimately everything we would do afterward, that was the problem.

at the time, we just happened to have fallen into a very traditional musical lineup, so right there, thats a way for people to slap on the “generic” label.

right before the mercury lounge show, we had just 2 months beforehand changed the band entirely from a 5-piece where the singer you all got to know us by did not sing, but instead sat behind a giant wall of keyboards and made weird sounds, and the singer was not a burly bespectacled red-beard jerry garcia-eque character,
but a 5-foot-tall vermont-born nu-indie poster boy with a penchant for..womanly troubles (at our first shows with him as the singer, sometimes truckloads of gorgeous women would show up, all for him, and sometimes when i would be out recruiting interest for a show i would meet women who said they hated us because they thought we were all womanizers)

and we had recorded a great, mogwai-meets radiohead 7 song which we had worked months on and then had to be scrapped-we had to write and learn all new music 4 months before the best gig ever.

milo had just gotten new glasses after learning he had a debilitating eye condition and possibly only a few years before he would no longer see. so, that night, for the FIRST TIME EVER to my knowledge, milo played a show without wearing his glasses after a weekend of hard partying at our home base in mid-jersey, where our parents still live.

only a few months before that, we were a home recording project-i sang, played guitar, bass, and clarinet, milo played keyboard, and the guy playing bass in the best ever clip played drums at that time.
there is a video of us covering a song from the popular final fantasy video game series on youtube which i think is up to about 6000 plays now.

after the best gig ever, the band could not get shows, and when we finished shows we were often not paid money we rightfully earned.i am not blaming anyone but it didnt help that the world though we were a bunch of idiots. say what you will, like us or not, we are famous for the most part because of a flouke, and people dont trust that. they want their artists to have slaved in the trenches for years so they feel they deserve attention. the way the story was slanted we come off as beginners.

i have been in 23 bands, lived in 8 major US cities, produced 15 recordings varying from home-spun video game music compostions to noise collage to rock. my music has been included on short film soundtracks, commercials and webisodes.

between me and milo we play all of the drums, guitar, bass, keyboard vocal, harmony and clarinet tracks on our now 9 recorded releases in 5 years; we produce everything ourselves and book all of our goings on without the management, outside organization and MONEY that is required to TOUR and release music.

this may sound no different from any other band but its not the case.

any other band might not be featured in major magazines, on television, on dvd’s sold at borders worldwide and still have trouble getting a gig, much less getting anyone to come to one of them.

then the issue of our contract/money problems with the showtime network crew.

at the time that piece was filmed, our decisions were all being made by our drummer at the time, who has since left the group and now lives in new york city where he played drums professionally with a bevy of signed and unsigned bands.

this ex member of the group was the one who decided to get his lawyer and ask for money (we were never approached and asked to sign anything) inreturn for “letting the production continue”

SO, the whole time all i wanted was for the project to be green lighted but instead i had to wait for greed to transpire…

im not trying to play myself off as innocent, but there is alot to this mess that was never focused on and instead we were given a cookie cutter story with no information about THE BAND’S STORY and creativity , and especially no indication of when this happened, so now it is possible that people think thats what we do RIGHT NOW;

and in my opinion having to hear about this annoying shit every day of my life instead of the volumes of clarinet, noise and video game music ive recorded, the 9 completely different albums of material GOP has recorded and all of the details about WHAT WE DO instead of WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT US is very taxing to say the least.

i have no problem with work, i am a social worker and i work alot, and i LOVE IT.

at that time, i had been homeless for years all over the place and was hoping for the story to translate into at least a local or small record label interest or some kind of musical part-time employment,
but now i am VERY HAPPY in my residential life making recordings and playing shows sometimes, so in a way it is damaging to me to have an OVERLY DRAMATIC AND CHEESILY DEPRESSED likeness of myself circulating constantly and representing us every day while in the subsequent 4 years since best gig ever we have changed our lineup already twice and produced 84 songs..

what do we do other than continue?

we could change the band name but were too strong for that.

all we CAN do really is somehow continue dispite the fact that everyone thinks the best gig ever is our best try, the fact that everyone thinks we are easily duped and therefore not worth paying for services that other bands are paid for no questions asked,
and the fact that the negative likenesses of ourselves are forever emblazoned onto the internet and a large percentage of people see the bad stuff and look no further, whereas if they did they would find a deep history of varied material and much more of a story than was boiled down, cut apart, re-configured for mass TV audiences.

i may be a little long winded, but i have been doing this for so long, in so many different ways that i finally am ready to say i feel i deserve more than being a flash-in-the-pan would be success story, like william hung(spelling?) or some reality show cast-off.

i am a multi-talented artist, and i respect myself enough to say that. i also have been around and done so much that for anyone to assume that at 34 years old i am about to give up, or that i cant do a host of other things besides play music, or that i feel i am too old to be doing what i do (or anything) is ridiculous to me.

MOST IMPORTANTLY i think the only thing IE did wrong was assume on some subtle subconscious level that we “will never have a gig like that again” or that we have peaked is in for a surprise.

we have already accomplished more and have had more positive, MASS APPEAL exposure after our debut/instant career “death”
than what seems like more than half the people that become aware of us are even aware of,

and the reason they dont see us NOW is:

we are unstoppably famous for our past.

we were having some significant trouble moving past this.

not because of our mental health, but because of an overwhelmingly daunting reputation.

i admit i didnt help this phenom, but i am more excited these days to see that people are not just watching the best gig ever clip, the dvd of the gig, the showtime and radio shows but now

FINDING US AND WHAT WE DO NOW, WHICH IS different.

not to mention our character-s being in question.

personal slander is one thing, even slander forever on the internet, unable to scrape off, like being sprayed by a skunk, everywhere we go people recognizing us for that story and not for our accomplishments which have been hopelessly overshadowed by the immense power of the music industry’s hearsay, TV’S mind control qualities and general word of mouth through blogs and the like.

its not like i didnt have credibility before.

i did, and it was taken away from me.

i would like it back, and the only way that can happen is by the truth getting out.

and the truth is, our band doesnt suck,
we are GREAT - and we deserve better than being known far and wide as some kind of famous characters in a hard luck story, but for what we really are:

funny, weird, crazily talented awesome people who do it all.

we make videos, are working on a movie that shows the band from the beginning in all of its phases - so that people can see that what those thousands of people saw was just a fleeting moment, just one face on a media creating machine that has had and DOES have the potential to create:

soundtrack work
film
music videos
situational real-life visual

and anything else we feel like doing.

it is not wrong to be ambitious,

BUT - filtered through the lens of what we have distorted out to be

it might look silly.

we might have a female singer over digital music next,

make a commercial with weird music,

the list is endless.

and so is this entry, so ill bow out.

just one more thing:

WILL EVERYONE PLEASE JUST STOP TALKING ABOUT THE BEST GIG EVER?

enjoy IMPROV EVERYHWERE’S WORK

enjoy GHOSTS OF PASHA’S WORK

just move on please, so that it is easier for us to move on -

because until people start looking further than what is shown to them
there is a criminal act happening here:

ART IS BEING IGNORED.

thank you,
chris partyka

For the record the tard was wearing a blue sweater.

I think every high school/junior college has that group of kids who thinks it’s their responsibility to show people what banal, robotic lives they’re leading by shaking things up, being wacky, being weird, doing something unexpected, defying convention, and generally being enormous pains in the ass with no regard for those around them. All this serves to communicate is that these dicks-in-my-face have so little regard for my intelligence that they honestly believe that without their intervention, I would be unable to provide variety in my own life. This enormous condescension on their part only makes me hate the living balls out of them.

The support that IE receives on this site basically seems to all boil down to, “They’ll thank us in the end, and if they don’t, they’re way to SQUARE, man.” Is it square wanting to read on the subway instead of being hijacked by drama-school kids’ impromptu “birthday” party? Does IE not trust me to “Look up more” if I feel like looking up more?

TAL introduced me to the pranks of IE and left me with this impression: a group of comedy-club washouts who think they are more clever and in touch with what’s really important in life led by an unapologetic smirking tard in a purple sweater. For the love of God and all that is holy, we have enough douchebaggery in this city without you forming clubs to celebrate it.

Too bad some folks can’t appreciate a little extra fandom.
I know at least a dozen bands who would kill for this experience.