Over the past few months I’ve had the privilege of watching my friend work on a video installation that last month, and was honored when he asked me to compose music for it.
The resulting piece, , is an installation that incorporates elements of documentary footage, autobiography, archival materials, and landscape photography, though it’s immediately apparent that the finished whole amounts to far more than those constituent parts. I was pretty thrilled that I was able to contribute even a scintilla of my own fitful stabs at amateur composition.
The piece is best digested in a large three-dimensional space, so the elegant website Nathan designed for it doesn’t quite do justice. But it’s still pretty fucking cool. You can hear my music by viewing the video in the top right-hand corner of , but definitely watch all the videos and read all the text.
Thanks to everyone who came out for Run At The Dog’s show at Lee’s the other night. It was a good crowd and a good vibe, despite (or perhaps because of) the snowfall and the midnight set time. For those of you who missed it … well, you’re lame. But there will be more shows in the future.
In an effort to take my mind, and yours, off Tuesday’s momentous importance and the incipient nationwide dread tying our collective electoral stomach into knots, I want to share the good news that over the weekend I traveled to Chicago with my new band to play a show there.
I think the statute of limitations on referring to as “my new band” has almost expired, which is nice. Especially now that we’ve successfully survived a road trip together. Even though I’ve suspected as much for several months, I’m now completely convinced that we are a good fit for each other as musicians and friends. And I think I proved to them that I am the sort of person willing to drop everything and make a 14-hour road trip, spend money on gas, sleep on the floor, etc just to play a rock show in another city. It’s important for them, and me, to know that I am still that kind of person.
The best part of the whole experience, other than the show itself, was singing along with the Scissor Sisters and Tears For Fears in the middle of the night during the return drive. If a single album can give birth to the collective musical consciousness of five people, it would seem that Songs From The Big Chair is the musical father of Run At The Dog, and we are all siblings living under Roland Orzabal’s roof. This is, happily, true of most of the bands I’ve been in.
Finally, here’s a video of our first song on Saturday night. It’s a personal favorite.
I’m not going to try and justify or apologize for the fact that I recently viewed the new Genesis documentary/concert film, . I did it, and I am not sorry. (Nor am I sorry for riding my bike to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is in the suburbs, to purchase the DVD because Wal-Mart is the only U.S. retailer selling the DVD, and I kind of wanted to be able to say that I rode my bike to a Wal-Mart in the suburbs to buy the new Genesis DVD.)
I have a Masters of Fine Arts degree.
Whether you’re a fan of Genesis and/or Phil Collins or not, I think this short film is a nice little portrait of what happens when a handful of wildly successful musicians in their mid-fifties decide to undertake that dubious endeavor that is the reunion tour, and the developments, both positive and otherwise, that result from a fifteen-year hiatus and subsequent reconvening in lavish rehearsal halls tucked away in Lausanne and Helsinki with seven months to rehearse and a quadrillion-dollar production budget.
Through it all, the person who acquits himself surprisingly admirably is actually Phil Collins. There’s none of the supposed egotism or overweening ambition that has led to various PR issues over the span of his thirty years as a solo artist (); no mention of Tarzan, or any of the other occasionally middling pap he’s churned out during his solo career, or his insistence on collaborating with Eric Clapton, or Tarzan, or his three divorces, or Tarzan. Rather, he emerges as a talented but flawed musician in his autumn years—which was never how I’ve perceived him until a very specific moment in the documentary.
On Saturday I participated in , a bike-based fundraiser. I’ll be the first to admit that while I own a bike and ride it occasionally, I’m far from hard-core. I’m a cyclist, not a Cyclist: My car lacks a “Start Seeing Bicycles” sticker (and I own a car, to begin with); I’ve never done a ; I don’t holler at drivers when they cut me off in the bike lane (though I should probably start). When I arrived at Saturday’s event and saw all the intimidating gear heads, bike shop employees, and bike messengers congregating in Logan Park, I felt immediately out of my element. But Emily and Nathan, who cajoled me into joining their team, made me feel welcome. It’s good for me to try new things.
Our team, which we eventually named One Hundred Years Of Attitude, wasn’t the most aggressive, or disciplined, or tattooed, or dreadlocked, or well-equipped (my $60 Craigslist Schwinn felt woefully inadequate surrounded by all those Bianchis). But several of us have encyclopedic knowledge of the Northeast corner of town, and that helped quite a bit. We’re not sure exactly what garnered us the most points: identifying the five mystery church steeples, the 100-word short story we had to write based on two randomly selected songs on the jukebox, or submitting the correct total of anthropomorphic sea creatures painted on the side of the .
Whatever it was, we surprised everyone (not least of all ourselves) by placing second. We all won t-shirts and stickers, and coffee, and water bottles, and bicycle hubs that I’ve been told are very high-end. We weren’t very popular by the time we left the parking lot of , where the awards ceremony was being held. But we were magnanimous in our come-from-behind victory, and celebrated with a BBBBQ on the Freemans’ deck. (The extra B is for Bicycle; the other extra B is a typo.)
The sweatband: +50 pts
The polyester track pants: +50 pts
The shirtlessness: +100 pts
The chains: +200 pts
The Juno and the Korg: +200 pts (each)
The Rickenbacker: +500 pts
The RotoToms: +1000 pts
The chains: +100 pts
The drum solo(s!): +500 pts (each)
Sebastian Thomson intentionally misstating the names of openers Zombi and Psychic Paramount as “The Zombies” and “Psychedelic Pyramid”: +100 pts
Not playing “Motr”: -1000 pts
Playing “Futureworld” and FUCKING KILLING IT: +1000000000000 pts
The guys at work just pointed me to this bit of awesomeness:
It’s the teaser trailer for the MOTHERFUCKING 2007 TRANSFORMERS LIVE ACTION MOVIE.
I don’t care that it’s directed by Michael Bay, and will therefore most probably suck. This is a warning to whomever I’m dating in a year: I’m seeing that shit at midnight.
