unwiredben

Due to the uniform nature of audio track pricing, you can get quite a bargain on a couple of classic Firesign Theater recordings from Amazon. 1969's "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me Those Pliers" and 1970's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus" are both showing up for under $2 each. Why? The albums originally were LPs, and since Firesign's audio-collage style really doesn't divide up nicely into tracks, they end up having only one track per side.

Also worth getting from their catalog is the 28-minute long The Further Adventures Of Nick Danger from their Shoes for Industry compilation, cheap at 99 cents.

scottbateman is a cartoonist and animator who is pretty active here on the LJ. I first got into him a couple of years ago when he was doing a lot of political cartoons, then I started following his Sketchbook of Shame postings and watching his experiment in daily Flash animation, the Bateman365 project. He even animated a voice recording I made for one of the 365 entries.

He's got a new self-published DVD out called "Scott Bateman: Re-animator" featuring about 30 different animations made in the last year. I got my disc in the mail today and watched a few this evening, and they looked and sounded very ncie. While you can watch them online, they're beautifully recreated at high resolution here, and you get a unique hand-drawn cover by Scott with the disc. I highly recommend getting one for yourself and maybe one to give to a special person by going to http://www.batemania.com/2007dvd.html. It's only $15. If you like "Flight of the Conchords", there's a great story about Andrea Rosen flubbing an audition for them, and another bit features the actress that plays Mel on the show animated as a tower-building and kitten-hating femme-bot. There's also a few cool Scottmanimated music videos on the disc, including one by Sarah Shannon, the former singer for Velocity Girl.

Thursday, I didn't do much during the day but stay home and work.  That evening, I picked up my friend Charlie from the airport, we had a delicious dinner at Hao Hao, then headed to the Alamo South Lamar for a few films:

The Pipe - a really funny short by my friend Dan Brown about a paramedic and security guard who have the overnight shift watching an air pipe that's part of a radio station stunt.

Murder Party - dark horror comedy about New York City hipsters/artists who throw a party where they'll kill the guest for their art.  It got too bloody and gruesome for me at times, but I really liked their approach and many of their jokes worked really well.

Severance - British horror film about an office retreat that turns into a flee-the-insane-soldiers hunt.  Again, I found a lot of it funny, but it also was very brutal at times.  I just don't go for gore or for lots of on-screen violence.

On Friday, Charlie and I did a quick Fry's Electronics run, then headed down to pick up Annelies.  We had lunch at Trudy's, found a primo parking spot on Congress, then headed over to the Convention Center to see Flatstock, the big concert poster convention.  After that was a day show where we caught the end of the band Aquaduct's performance when they covered the "Walker, Texas Ranger" theme song.

After that, we caught three films:

"Skillz Like This" - stylistic comedy about a dejected writer who discovers that he can rob banks and stores, and about how he and his friends deal with his new notoriety.  Funny and charming.

"Eagle vs. Shark" -- really cute New Zealand comedy with the Jermain from Flight of the Conchords and a cute female lead playing geeks that fall in love.  There's a lot of "Napoleon Dynamite" in the characters, but the female role was much better realized here, and it was always quite funny.  My favorite comedy of the fest, I think.

"Fay Grim" -- Hal Hartley's sequel to "Henry Fool" is a very different movie; Fay's character is the centerpiece of this complex tale of international espionage, and there's a pile of plot.  However, it worked very well for me, and I loved the bits that referenced the ambiguity of the previous film.  The many out-of-US locations were very well used, and I loved Hal's use of text in some of the scene changes.  Parker Posey does very fine work here.

I'm actually working today (on a conference call as I type), at least until mid-afternoon when I head down to conference center to observe the fun that's the music fest.

Yesterday was a light day for movies.  The only one Annelies and I saw was "The Chances of the World Changing", a PBS documentary about a guy who rescued over 1000 turtles, including many endangered or almost-extinct species, and was keeping them in his New York City penthouse.  He wants to start a research center to preserve species of turtle for eventual reintroduction into the wild, but his plans keep falling through and he gets more and more depressed over a five-year timespan.  I liked the doc, but it suffered from being about 20 minutes too long.  Maybe they'll edit it more before it airs on the POV program on PBS.

I worked in the afternoon, then headed out for dinner at Stalite with Patrick, Tiffany, and Annelies.  It was quite good, and the one veggie entree was a fancy portabella mushroom lasagna with gnocci.  The desserts were pretty good, although I liked the presentation more than the flavor.  There were lots of good conversations.

Then, Patrick and Tiffany and I headed out to the music fest.  First band was Austin's local Oh No! Oh My! who played good music that constantly reminded me of other popular bands (Arcade Fire, Frank Ferdinand, Modest Mouse).  After that was Pony Up, a young female quartet from Montreal who did a song I kept hearing on Pandora that I liked called "Matthew Modine".  I really liked their show, but the acoustics at Flamingo Cantina were quite poor, and they never played their "hit".

The next performance was Lily Allen at Stubb's.  The show was at capacity, but Patrick and Tiffany had gotten into line earlier, so I was able to get in with them as the gradually let in more people.   We only saw the first half, but it was a lot of fun, with Lily claiming to be drunk and cursing out the show sponsor, NME, calling them obscene names and saying she wouldn't have played here if she'd known they were behind it.

The last music of the night was an Irish singer/songwriter named Damien Dempsey.  This was a really nice set with him performing with a full band in an intimate club setting.  I really liked a soulful song about the evil of European colonialization with a proper Irish rant at the end.  The show was helped by a number of Irish fans in the audience that were able to sing along with the faster songs.

I was just glancing at the videos in this year's SXSW music video program, and I'm excited to see another entry from folkie-pop singer Laura Veirs.  Last years entry for "Galaxies" was one of my favorite videos and songs of 2006, and I played the album, "Year of Meteors" non-stop for a couple of weeks.  Her entry this year is "Secret Someones" off the same album, shot in Super 8 while on her US tour. 

Things I love about this video:

• The song is really catchy
• It starts out in Austin, Texas (and I knew that even before I saw the shot of Emo's)
• It makes effective use of low-res film

She's got a new album coming out next month.  It is so going on my wishlist.

I'm riding home from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert with kazanya. Most excellent show! The first opening act was so forgettable that I can't tell you him name. Next was Ex Models who played loud noisy music without much point. We were a little bored. However, when Karen O and the YYY boys came out, the sold out crowd came alive and Stubb's rocked very hard for 90 minutes. They hit all the faves: Maps, Pins, Date With the Night, Y Control, Gold Lion. Karen has a captivating stage presence, and the band was very tight and expressive. I'm very glad we went.

I keep wanting to put together a mix CD containing just songs where primarily English-speaking artists use foreign languages in their songs for special effects.  One of the ones I'd include in the compilation is the song "Parlez-Vous Freezepop?".  They just made a video for it, fantastique!



Other ones I'd include would be the French version of "Judas, My Heart" by Belly, "Fleur de Lys" by Juliana Hatfield, "Copernicus" by Basia (which has a bit of Polish in the chrouses), that song by Regina Spektor on her most recent album that's half-Russian, the Sixpence None the Richer song "Puedo Escribir", and even U2's "Vertigo" which does start off with some Spanish counting, if I remember correctly.

Several of my friends saw the brilliant film "The Comedians of Comedy" at SXSW a couple of years ago.  A few of them even got to see the actual comedians from that tour perform at Emo's.  While I don't think the TV show documentary series of their second tour held up as well as the original film, it was still worth a watch.  I now present the Michael Blieden-directed video for Fiona Apple's "Not About Love", staring the lovable Zach Galifianakis.  It makes me giggle.

Before my trip to California this week I burned a CD of the new Venus Hum album "The Colors of the Wheel" that I'd got from eMusic. I got into the group last summer after seeing the Blue Man Group DVD that featured them as a guest performer. I really enjoyed their first album, and the EP 'Songs for Superheros' was in constant rotation on my CD player. The new material is very interesting. It's a lot more experimental than the Songs EP, with a number of short unnamed instrumental tracks. A number of the songs reminded me strongly of an electronica version of Swing Out Sister. The two stand out tracks are the delicious 'Yes and No', and the hip-hop inspired 'Pink Champaign'. Hearing the singer Annette go

Let your no be no
and your yes be yes.
My no means no, and
My yes means yes... Yes, yes, yes!

Has made my morning commute happier all week. The title track isn't as engaging, but parts strongly remind me of their previous single 'Hummingbirds'.

Recommended.

Once again, I'm more excited by the small names in the Austin City Limits Fest lineup than the large ones. I've not got a ticket yet, but if I do, here's who I want to see:

Massive Attack
Cat Power & the Memphis Rhythym Band
Aimee Mann
The New Pornographers
Stars
Feist
Goldfrapp
The White Ghost Shivers

It's not quite as big a list as last year, and there aren't any "I have to see them before I die" names. Pricing is at Tier 3 now, which means a 3-day pass is about $140 after fees. Blah.

Last night, I went down to the Cactus Cafe at the UTexas Student Union to see a very unique act, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. They were visiting from New York City, and they brought their very funny collection of slides purchased from estate sales and flea markets. They really are a family -- all three of them introduced themselves at the start of the show, with Jason playing keyboard, guitars, vocals, commentary and dad, Tina doing vocals, running the slide projector, and playing mom, and Rachel, drums and daughter.

The songs were melodic in an anarchic sense. I don't think they'd be that catchy out of their context, but when played along with the projected photographs, they were really great. My favorite part was the five-piece rock opera performed using slides from a 1978 McDonald's corporate advertising presentation. Jason composed music to go with each of the pieces and sang the words. The 70's executive pictures that went with their quotes were totally cheesy, and the song called "Wendy's, Sambo's, Long John Silver's" was a highlight. They also did their hit (#79 on the CMJ charts!), "Mountain Trip to Old Japan 1958", which featured slides of a post-war vacation that all seemed to be oriented around death (graveyards, hanging memorials, public executions).

If you get any chance to see these guys, please go. The mid-set Q&A was awkwardly awesome, and Jason's long-winded introductions to the songs were often better (and longer) than the performances. I loved the rant about band names: Death Cab for Cutie isn't a good name because they don't bring death, they don't have a cab, and they aren't really cute, while the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players is a great name because every word is true and descriptive.

Opening for the TFSP was local group The Total Foxes, headed by Sinus Show guy Jerm Pollet. They were quite entertaining, more for their lyrics and on-stage antics than for their musicianship. I'd see them again, if just to hear their song about Jerm's stint in a KISS cover band again.

So, I've been playing more with the Pandora radio client. Earlier today, I decided to try making a few "tuned" stations for particular kinds of music, with the theory being that I could get better selectivity of music by keeping my choices within a genre. So, I've added a few custom stations that I can train with a lot more specifics:

Unwired GrrlFolk - acoustic guitars, banjos, violins, twangy vocals, and lots of strumming (Dar Williams, Be Good Tanyas)
Unwired GrrlRock - electric guitars, feedback, drums, fast songs (Sleater-Kinney, Belly)
Unwired Synthpop - synthesizers, fun for dancing (Freezepop, Depeche Mode)
Unwired Speak - poetry put to music, word jazz, story songs (King Missile, Soul Coughing)

If you want to hear them, just go to http://pandora.com, click on "Shared Stations", and search for my main email address.

One of the annoying limitations of the system is that they limit the number of songs that you can skip in a time period. However, having multiple stations provides a workaround, as you can quit a song by changing to a different channel then changing back. I've been doing that a lot as part of my teaching process.

So, a friend just keyed me into Pandora, the streaming audio service of the Music Genome Project. I've just setup my account on there, and I've added a link to The Radio Unwired to the sidebar here on my blog. I'm still training the station with what I like and dislike, but so far it's been mostly neat stuff, and I've already found a couple of new bands that I'm going to have to check out through it. I've not really been going for any stylistic consistency in what I've been adding as favorites, but I'm hoping my thumbs up/down selections will even it out. Check it out and feel free to send me your station links.

(Edit: Tuesday night, I changed the name of the channel from "Ben Rocks Radio" to better go with this journal's theme.)

Last night, I also got to go downtown to Progress Coffee to see the opening of an exhibit called "Rock Stars are Easy", a collection of photographs of musicians that my friend Mary Sledd produced. There were quite a lot of great works. The picture shows Mary standing next to a photograph of Coldplay, but also stunning were pictures of Sigur Ros, Billy Idol, Spoon, and the Flaming Lips. Mary's got a gift for catching magic moments during shows and using the ambient light as part of her composition. If you're near downtown (it's on Fifth Street, just a couple of blocks east of IH-35), you ought to stop by and check out her work.

I recorded the premieres of two new series on IFC last night. The first was "The Henry Rollins Show", a new series that continues from Mr. Rollin's previous IFC show, "Henry's Film Corner". The new name and format gives them more flexibility to go beyond just filmmaking and look at the whole spectrum of pop culture. When I saw Henry Rollins at SXSW, I knew I had to check out the new program after hearing how excited he was with the broadened scope.

The first show had an interesting interview with Oliver Stone where they talked about the parallels between Nixon and Bush, what we didn't learn from the Vietnam War, and Stone's view of his films as historical dramas. It was too short; I wish they could have had fifteen more minutes with Stone and really gotten into more of the context of his work. Then, there were two Rollins bits -- a funny "Letter from Henry" to Laura Bush, offering sympathy for having to live with GW, and "Rollins Reconsiders", a sarcasm-filled ode to the Blackberry that didn't quite work for me; I guess I'm too close to the technology, being a bit of a Treo fanatic. Finally, the show closed out with a great performance by Sleater-Kinney doing their song "Entertain". The sound was good, the camera work was a little more creative than the usual TV spot, and there was no censoring of lyrics. They've got another performance clip, "Jumpers", on the web site.

The second show was "Samurai 7", a futuristic anime retelling of Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai". According to the guide, this is being serialized over 26 episodes. The visual style was standard anime, but there was some nice work done with processing footage to provide different points of views. The story's been altered quite a bit, introducing the standard tropes of the "magical" girl and guys in robot suits, but it's certainly recognizable. I've setup a season pass for this; I'm curious how their version of the story evolves.

Both shows re-air on Thursday night if you want to catch them, and new episodes premiere next Saturday -- Henry hosts Chuck D and Jurassic 5 for episode #2.

I saw these in the Ruta Maya men's room on Wednesday night while at the Asylum Street Spankers show, and I had to capture them to share with the group:



( Read more... )

BTW, the Spankers were having lots of fun up on stage. Guy Forsyth was there, rocking out, and they mixed up the lines if the "If You Want Me to Love You" duet with Guy and Christina, adding a few that I don't think I'd heard before. For the encore, they all came back on stage and picked up someone else's instrument and attempted to play through one of their dirtier melodies. It was like listening to them on warped-in-the-sun vinyl -- the notes were mostly there, but the timing was very, very off.

There was other goodness that evening too, but I'll tell more about that some other time :)

After a few days of rest, I think it's time to clear out my PDA and figure out just what I saw this year, with the stuff I loved in bold.

16 Feature Films: Thank You For Smoking, Small Town Gay Bar, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Darkon, Danny Roane: First Time Director, The Cassidy Kids, Autumn's Eyes, Maxed Out, LOL, A Scanner Darkly, Awesome: I F*&#in' Shot That, Jumping Off Bridges, Nobelity, Who the $#%& is Jackson Pollock?, Digna: Hasta El Ultimo Aliento, Live Free of Die

38 Short Films: Scotch and Soda, Gray Days, Reel Shorts 1 (7 shorts), Reel Shorts 2 (8 shorts), Music Videos (21 shorts)

14 Panels: Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places, We Got Naked - Now What?, Shooting Docs, How to Create Passionate Users, Design and Social Responsibility, Increasing Women's Visibility on the Web, Conversation with Henry Rollins, Keynote with Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke, Bloggers in Love, Blogging While Black, Case Study - The Cassidy Kids, Behind the Scenes - Developing OS X and Longhorn, 10 Years of "Ain't It Cool", SXSW Film Awards

2 Parties: The Cassidy Kids Party at Karma Lounge, SXSW Film Closing Party at the Produce Warehouse

5 Bands: Sleater-Kinner (SXSW Film Closing Party), Willie Mason (Antone's), Beth Orton (Antone's), Flight of the Conchords (Red-Eyed Fly), The Subways (Stubb's)

Compared to last year, I saw about six more films worth of material, but only about a third as much music. However, the percentage of items in bold is much higher, especially among the films. The quality of this year's programming in film and interactive was much higher, and it was easier for me to see almost everything I wanted. I also got to spend a lot of time with some good friends, do a lot of mobile blogging, and take a mental break from work, if not much of a physical rest.

Yes, it's almost a year old, but I'd not read it until it showed up in the SXSW paper edition of "The Onion" that was handed out at the trade show:
Dave Matthews Not That Into Himself Anymore

I got to see my favorite musical comedy act, Flight of the Conchords, last night for a too-short 45-minute set at the packed Red Eyed Fly. I got there in a sprint from the Alamo Drafthouse and found a line of badges waiting to get into the club, but it moved pretty quickly and I found a spot to stand up near the stage.

Alas, my Treo's sound recording capabilities were no match for the loudspeakers, so I've got no "personal record" of the evening outside of a couple of photos. The group hasn't released a US album yet, so there was no merchandise. However, they were really funny, doing some improvising with the crowd. Britt even did a slightly pathetic stage dive at one point, then complained about the SXSWers who moved out of the way instead of catching him.

The set included "Bowie", a song with a long preface about time travelling using LSD and how Jermaine was trapped in a bathroom with the early-70's Tina Turner and the modern Tina Turner, and the young Tina was asking if she should leave Ike, and Jermain wanted to say "What's love got to do, got to do with it", but realized the young Tina wouldn't get the reference. There was "Humans Are Dead", which imagines a world in the distant future of the year 2000 where only robots exist and the word "yes" has been replaced by "affirmative". And of course, there was "Jenny", "Boom Boom", and "Business Time", and a new song for me, "Mother*ucker", where the F was always silent. Self-censoring is funny!

The audience had a lot of fans mixed with the industry types. I saw one girl wearing a "Team-Building Exercise 1999" t-shirt (a reference to one of the lines in "Business Time"), and at one point, the guys up on stage started commenting on the fans they could hear standing behind the wall at the club, listening through the cracks because they couldn't get in.