Watching Jamie Lidell on stage it’s all too easy to see his thing as one gigantic piss-take.

The crazy outfits, the big soul numbers. He was dressed in Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat the first time I saw him, in early 2004 at the Sydney Festival bar. He’s got a band now, and at the Bowery on NY’s Lower East Side last weekend, they opened with an explosive version of ‘Another Day’ from new record Jim. Read the record reviews and you’ll see names like Marvin and Otis and Sly and Prince - it often feels he’s tilting an ironic brow to those guys, but it wasn’t always that way. Lidell was an IDM demigod, a hero among Wire critics - Super Collider, ‘media suits’ made from videos, CDs and 16mm film - so his 2006 blue-eyed soul record, Multiply, was something of a surprise.

A couple of years earlier I saw the beginnings of that record at the show in Sydney. I could not stop talking about it. I was blown away to the point that it left an embarrassingly black mark on my name. Lidell took risks. Along the way, his music alienated much of the audience, a crowd attracted by the promoter’s brand of smooth deep house rather than its headliner. Lidell’s live loops and heavily layered performance have since been co-opted by the likes of Final Fantasy and Dan Deacon, though their approach differs from Lidell’s uninhibited blast of the thrill of being there, playing live.

Back to that black mark. A Sydney DJ came to play at a party I organised in Canberra later in ‘06. I picked the DJ up from the airport, and he proudly shoved a demo CD in the player. It was works-in-progress from Multiply. I kept listening when he got out of the car at the hotel, and - to my eternal shame - ripped the disc. I was that excited. Thrilled, even, to hear this guy again. The recorded set was good, too, packed with messy, unmastered jams and Lidell’s playful voice.

A while later, Multiply appeared. Hints of those early performances remained, there were some decent songs too, but musically it was flattened. The spikes and mistakes replaced by grooves and polish. Like a turntablist, his thing struggled on disc. Jim, his latest, appeared this year. But I’d lost interest and only went along to the Bowery show because friends wanted to go.

Flaunting a spray-on beard, dark glasses, embroidered jacket and stripy pants, Lidell stepped out with a full band, including a bearded sax blower in a smoking jacket (and not much else). It was a skronking, funked up jam, taking in 12 songs and both records. The band took a break halfway, leaving Lidell space for a 20 minute knob-twiddling, tumbling beats jam that culminated in an extended version of ‘When I Come Back Around’.

Lidell’s voice is not of the calibre of the artists he emulates - it’s rawer, not quite as versatile - and his songs don’t hit the same heights either. But the thing you need to understand with the guy, the thing I’m beginning to understand, is that all that stuff isn’t the point. The point is the performance. And his band - part Muppets, part Zapp - has a by-the-seat-of-the-pants joie de vivre that’s exhilarating, contagious, and seeing Lidell just makes me want to see him again.

A month ago, out of the blue, I decided it was about time I had an ‘About’ section. I found them a bit generic in the past, but as I get to know favourite blogs, I’ve found a bit of bio information on the author adds a lot. Seems like I was on a micro-zeitgeist, with my friend Rozie doing the same thing (inspired by Oz bloggerati Daniel Boud). So in the spirit of blogging about blogging, here’s my backgrounder.

I’m in Denver, Colorado, and can’t sleep. So I’m catching up on reading, and this one, from Dan Hill, is a great read. It’s an interview with Steve Kulak, manager of Crown St’s lovely Title Film + Music shop. With that and the Melbourne shop, Title’s become a node in the local city scenes, drawing in people from local labels, bands and communities, and doing an about-face on the city’s classic record shops. I hear their next thing is a magazine.

SBS’s Insight program pits musicians against downloaders next week with the question, “Should music be free?”

Knowing how this plays out for independent artists like my brother Tim Levinson (appearing on the show) it’s pretty obvious it’ll won’t be as cut and dried as it’s often presented in the mainstream media.

Insight’s a great forum for frank, open discussion; host Jenny Brockie keeps things on track, and gives every speaker (young and old, those representing powerful interests and the less powerful, different races, sexes and so on) equal space.

This is a debate Insight’s been covering for a while now, and this time they’ve got artists as well as Stephen Peach (ARIA), Peter Coroneos (Internet Industry Association), Rebekah Horne (myspace) and others.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes, at best it could unpack some of the complex issues in this problem.

Aside from the best Hainan Chicken I’ve ever had (the waitress at MGM Grand warned, “You won’t like that, it’s just boiled chicken with rice on the side”), some art, and some bad comedy, I’ve learnt a few key facts from these two cities.

• LA and Vegas are party towns. Suspect both would be a lot more fun if you were partying, and with local crew
• Older women dress sexy in Vegas. Possibly because (a) that’s just how they dress, i.e. Vegas attracts a niche audience (pretty likely I guess) and/or (b) Vegas does it to them
• Hooters Casino is nowhere near as sleazy or tawdry as you might imagine
• The food scene is really not that hot (unless you’ve got Joel Robuchon type funds available)

New York New York, Vegas (who needs to head east?)

Next, the Grand Canyon. And as a sometime geologist that’s exciting.

Sydney’s been overrun by Hummers lately, but Americans know how to rock this stuff properly. Today I saw a Winnebago (a huge Grey Nomad caravan/bus that could comfortably carry Aerosmith around the country) towing a Hummer! It’s like the driver asked him/herself, “How can I burn through the most fuel per mile?” - the answer was all too obvious.

I’m in Williams, Arizona, at the moment - somewhere between Vegas and the Grand Canyon - but I might take a step back. A few days back, I visited the Hammer Museum in LA.

Kara Walker’s show, ‘My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love’, was all race and sex. The intense silhouettes were beautiful, witty, comical, tawdry, depressing and awkward. All that.

Kara Walker’s ‘Work On Progress’

Just (5000 or so numbers) up Wilshire Boulevard from the Hammer is the metastasizing contemporary gallery LACMA. Without a few days to explore we had to choose our targets wisely, which we may or may not have done in checking their contemporary collection and a Chicano show.

I’ve always found Basquiat’s work a bit kitsch. Too much backstory and not enough of the rest. Outsider, I guess. But up close - close enough to see how he’s sewn up the sheets of canvas, the shoeprints scattered over white material, the weird pull to the sheets - I’m amazed how much works like ‘Horn Players’ and ‘Eyes and Eggs’ (both 1983) affect me.

‘Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement’ on the other hand, confirms just how little idea I had before arriving in California of the state’s Spanish history. I’ve read plenty since. Eduardo Sarabia’s ‘Painted Memories’, ‘Tainted Memories’ and ‘Tetris King and Queen of the Monarch Butterflies’ (all 2008, gallery I-20 NYC) were highlights. Sarabia daubs his paintings - landscapes, portraits - with great smudges of colour that obscure or completely deface the subjects. Surprisingly, they don’t nullify the paintings. Instead, they buzz with a fantastic vitality.

Danny Jauregai’s series ‘Stage Set For a Riot (or Whatever Happened to Mt. Vesuvius?)’ (2007) too. Grounded in the frustrated furore following Rodney King’s beating in LA, 1992, by four police officers, Jauregai’s architectural images set rigid urban shapes against a swirling maelstrom. Spellbinding.

Stage Set For a Riot (or, What Ever Happened to Mt. Vesuvius) 2006 - Danny Jauregai.

I think we must have visited one of the world’s least trafficked tourist destinations when we went to the Las Vegas Art Museum. Completely worthwhile though, with a show that pulled together works from local (private) collections, including Jason Martin, and Gerhard Richter’s ‘Grun-Blau-Rot’ - I love Richter.

Otherwise, Vegas was a bit crazy. LA too.

Halfway from SF to LA and after a few days in Monterey (sadly not in time for the jazz or artichoke festivals) I have a few more discoveries to note.

• I have never seen so many limo’s
• Public transport seems more useful/reliable than Australia (sure to be tipped upside down in LA tomorrow)
• (good) coffee is hard to come by
• White guys seem pretty comfortable with hip-hop parlance. For example, they will sign off with “Peace” or sprinkle their sentences with phrases such as “that’s how we do”, etc

I went to SF with a box of Cyclic Defrost mags and traded them (figuratively, guys) for a bunch of records. Plus great mags like Arthur, Mule and even a copy of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia.

Amoeba Records on Haight St, San Francisco

I bought Ornette Coleman’s ‘Twins’, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s ‘Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata’ and ‘I Talk With the Spirits’, Quarteto Novo’s eponymous LP, Yuseef Lateef’s ‘Eastern Sounds’, Lonnie Liston Smith’s ‘Cosmic Funk’ and Pharoah Sanders’ ‘Journey to the One’ from Amoeba. Some old, some new, but, yes, a lot of jazz. I’m a freak for it at the moment.

At Aquarius Records in the Mission district I picked up Konono No1’s ‘Congotronics’ (finally) and on the way down the coast, in Santa Cruz, I picked up a couple of mariachi and Tex-Mex records - a compilation called Conjunto and a record by El Banderillero.

Now for something to play them on.

We have just had the most touristy day ever. Fisherman’s Wharf en route to the Alcatraz ferry at Wharf 33. Alcatraz. Then a Go Car (basically a go cart with GPS that you can take around the streets in SF).

At the bottom of America’s crookedest street (viewed from Go Car).

Key facts noted:

• The food is cheaper than in Australia
• You know the peculiar cognitive dissonance as CGI animation gets better at portraying humans? The US is like that. Everything’s so familiar and yet so weird at the same time
• People are very friendly, especially in shops, but they don’t like it when you change your mind or go against the rules
• Everything is bigger: seagulls, tee-shirts on hip hop kids and jocks, number of tatts on emo girls working in supermarkets, people, buildings, traffic signs, food serves, SUVs
• Infrastructure is old - concrete cancer riddles the concrete roadways, the street signs are battered and lop-sided, pot holes are everywhere
• There is concrete everywhere. I can see why so many kids skateboard. I want a deck too
• Girls giggle a lot
• Most of the tourists are American. I like seeing them in their native habitat

So cold. Feels like snow weather. Can’t believe we’re going back out.

A butterfly flapping its wings in Paraguay has nothing on this. Who knew that the Sydney-Honolulu Jetstar plane bounced back and forward every day, and that the fog in Sydney on Thursday would mean a three hour delay on our Friday evening flight? The airline called us a month ago to tell us the flight had been revised from 6pm to 5:55pm - but they couldn’t manage a call to tell us it’d be three hours late. Could’ve stayed at work the full day after all.

Spent another few hours at Honolulu bouncing between our departure gate and the Qantas lounge as the next flight got revised back - problems with a “metal plate” apparently.

Called our hotel in SF to say we’d be late. They said don’t bother coming after 11pm, so we wound up staying at the only hotel that’d accept us, the airport Westin. Can I just say, best pillows, bed and eiderdown combination ever. And the granola, yogurt and lush strawberries and blueberries the next morning were more than equal to the sleeping arrangements.

I’ve got the latest issue of Meanjin, but I haven’t been in the mood to read it, so I picked up Junot Diaz’s ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ at the airport in Sydney and haven’t looked back. I’ve started talking fast and hip, with liberal sprinklings of Dominican Spanish. Sydney people go see him at the Writers Fest.

Wanted to see Blowfly last night at Bottom of the Hill, but Polly wasn’t into it (surprising considering how she flipped for him when one of the Paradise Lost DJs played his song at a party I was playing at the Sly Fox last year). Instead we went to SF seafood institution Tadich Grill (atmosphere was great, though my poached Halibut was a little short on flavour) followed by beer and coffee at a little bar in North Beach (Congos and ‘I Shot the Sherriff’ on the stereo).

Alcatraz today. Zuni Cafe tonight. And if we get there in time, El Perro Del Mar and Lykke Li at Bimbo’s 365 Club.

I’m off for a USA road trip tomorrow. Danny Jumpertz - Feral Media boss, Cyclic Defrost contributor and once upon a time presenter of The Album Show on FBI - will cover Canvas for the next month while I’m away. That’s Sunday mornings 10-12 on FBI 94.5.