I played my gig at The Woodhouse, and played it well. The other feature, Carmen Schreyer, fell ill, so I played a giant 16-song set. Mostly mine, but a few covers, including Worst Apartment, by request. Simon Loban was kind enough to take some pics of me, and I also took some pictures of Kim Boyce.
Here are the pictures.
PermalinkI'll be performing on Saturday, Dec 2 at Holy Joe's. Signe Miranda's Veranda will also be playing, and another band. Details to follow.
PermalinkI've been spending an awful lot of time with Dominic Major lately. For Dominic and Sarah's Jack and Jill party, I decided to write new lyrics for the Kindly Ones song "Never learned to love". This song postulates that Dominic will be sad on Sarah's wedding day because when he wrote it, Dominic couldn't predict that he would be the groom.
It's just a wee bit out of date, so the plan was to make an up-to-date version.
I didn't have a thought of changing the music, and in fact I figured it would be a good challenge learning to play that song exactly as Dominic does.
But Major suggested we should try changing the style while we were at it, and so we settled on doing it reggae-style. So we spent weeks rehearsing it.
Only to flub it on the big night because we let Dominic and Sarah play with us, and they had no idea what we were doing.
PermalinkHere's another review: The Savannah Lounge Open Stage
PermalinkAs it turned out, it's quite easy to to put a Flash player on your music site these days. Just get a copy of XSPF Player, write up a playlist, and stick them both on your site.
I've put up the same selections from Theatre of the Perverse that appear on my MySpace page, plus Overtired, and a bunch of live recordings.
XSPF Music Player is Free [1] software, so not only is cheap, but you can modify it if you don't like the defaults. And it uses MP3 as its format, so uploading your songs doesn't require any conversion. The downside is, you don't have a choice about whether your songs will be downloadable, or just streamed. They must be downloadable – it's how XSPF works.
While I'm here, folks may find these instructions useful: How to correctly insert a Flash into XHTML.
| [1] | "As in freedom" |
I've gone and MySpaced myself. My myspace page page has final-master versions of Wish I Were an Asshole, Blue Skies, and Pennies to the Pound, from my soon-to-be-posthumously-released CD, Theatre of the Perverse.
Plus a bunch of myspace friend listings, most of whom are actually my friends, not just MySpace friends. And my typical excuses about what I mean when I say I sound like Green Day.
If you can't tell, I'm more than a little ambivalent about joining this giant flytrap of a web site. I'm doing it mainly for the connections, and for the music player. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy running my own site. Hmm, I wonder whether I can leach my own music player? Mwahaha! Or maybe just use a grotty HTML hack to incorporate my real site into the myspace page...
13 plays today. I think most of them were me, though.
There's an extra reason to hit The Free Times tonight. Tom Glenne, the original Oasis open stage host, will be hosting the open stage. That mean more Oasis alumni will make the effort, which means more Oasis alumni will make the effort. It's a stone soup thing. Or maybe Tom's the speck of grit at the center of the pearl.
Regardless, I'm betting it will be a special night, just because of the vibe. And it will be special for me, anyhow, because I'm bringing my Les Paul to The Free Times for the first time. You can't normally go electric there, because no one brings an amp. But I'm betting Tom will, and worst case, I go through the P.A.
PermalinkHere's my first review: The Degrassi Jam
PermalinkThe web site now provides Atom feeds of news posts. Which means you can keep up-to-date with your favourite feed reader, instead of checking here every 5 minutes in case I've updated.
That's how I keep track of friends' blogs (Sarah Ternoway, Marcus Walker, Dominic Major), and also many of the web sites and web comics I regularly visit. It's pretty sweet, really.
Atom feeds like to have permalinks to the entries, which I was planning to do anyway. After all, if you want to refer to the "Site goes atomic!" post in 5 months' time, it's unlikely to still be on the "News" page. But if you use the permalink, it should still work.
PermalinkHello, folks.
I have started working on my music site again. Starting with this news page, I'll be gradually rolling the whole site over to this new style.
As well as a new look, this new site is also created differently. It's written in Python (TurboGears) instead of PHP, and the source code is available as a Bazaar branch here. If you want to see more of my technical side, see Code Stuff.
I'm thinking of running posting a series of open stage reviews. Back when I was hosting open stages, that would have been a conflict of interest. But now I'm free, and interested in checking out new places. Does that tickle anyone's fancy? Let me know.
I have joined a band, temporarily branded "The Core". This is Dominic Major's band. The other members are Dominic von Riedemann, Sarah J. Ternoway, Simon Loban, and Derek Stroud.
Albert Anyone has lost its bass player, Bill Kimberly. But we do have some ideas as to who might satisfy our low-frequency needs. And yes, we're aware of the spam problem on the site.