Ben, one of my dinner partners this evening, displays a well advised interest.

(Special geek interest note: This post originated as a 100% remote post, sent from the dining table moments after the shot – sadly, I was not conversant with all of the steps required to create the post with the image embedded. Suffice to note that the image was successfully uploaded, if not resized.)

After dinner, Rose and Eric and Viv and I trekked to a house in far Ballard where we enjoyed the self-deprecating Jason Webley. Among other things, Jason read the forty or so that assembled a story (that’s a link to the performance, in a 3-odd mb mp3) by Carl Sandburg.

Jason opened for Aaron Seeman, whose specialty is a blend of Dead Kennedys covers, mainstream pop, and traditional tunes, all pumped out of a “Linex” accordion – I assume Torvalds is holding out on the licensing agreement.

At the end of the night, Aaron and Jason led the six-or-so folks who took Aaron’s accordion clinic in a rousing chorus of “California Uber Alles” – most of which I actually got on undoubtedly-awful-quality video. However, it will take some work to get it off the phone – when I try to send it, I get an out of memory message – I assume this is because the bluetooth transfer has to stuff the whole thing into RAM before it will go over the, er, wireless.

But when I get it over, I’ll at least link. It’s in this newfangled “3GP” format, which Quicktime is supposed to fully support, but, like, YMMV.

I also tried getting as much of the show as audio as I could, experimentally. It looks like I got about an hour and a half of the show, close to the theoretical capacity of the card I’m using.

Also, I think I have learned some things. First, it’s gonna make you paranoid even in a relaxed and intimate space if you have to leave your expensive cellphone on a shelf to use it as a music recording device. Second, if you do, you can’t take pictures with it. Third, while low light and no flash means relatively poor image quality, it’s also much less obtrusive than the flash, and therefore probably better from a documentist’s perspective – you stick out less, and have less to worry about and can be more ‘in’ the event than if you’re fiddling with your gear to keep it from blinding people all night.

So, off to try to excavate that video before Morpheus sweeps me away.

UPDATE: California Uber Alles, performed by Aaron Seeman and the Seattle Punk Accordion class of March 2005. 320×160, 3.6mb, 3:37min, and I clipped the first fifteen seconds of the song because it took me that long to realize I had enough storage to shoot it. Warning: the clarity of the audio and video achieved in this clip gives new meaning to the word “crappy.”

There’s a tiny test clip of Jason from much earlier in the evening in that same directory, in which Jason leads the crowd in a rousing rendition of the Columbus Day song.