Posted on by mwhybark

A Wolf is Gone

Matt notes today’s passing of one of his favorite “rock and roll brothers,” Billy (Hideaki Sekiguchi), the bassist for the very kick ass Japanese band Guitar Wolf. Guitar Wolf was in the midst of a US tour, now cancelled, and had recently played both Seattle and New Orleans, where Matt is located.

Matt has posted a great picture, taken this week, of Billy rocking out, and not long ago wrote about his excitement at seeing the band cover one of his songs.

I am not a believer in any form of post-death consciousness, but I do feel free to use the idiom: what will Ms. Schiavo and His Holiness say when they run into this guy on the elevator?

Posted on by mwhybark

You don't love me yet

The Vulgar Boatmen Trade List includes at least one recent-ish show from Schuba’s which I have not heard.

Found while attempting to determine if the VB’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet” is, in fact, one of Dale’s crafty covers (in this case possibly of a Roky Erickson song) or his own original material.

Cars, sitting in the back of the car, Laura’s friends, they are going back to New York, radio’s on…

That’s gotta be Dale.

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Odd I see

I left work early today because of a dental appointment. It was a cold, sunny day and a chilly wind was blowing. I was not dressed for it and the walk to the bus stop took on the aspect of a struggle.

I paused and called Viv, and then one Eric, and then another. As I spoke to the final Eric, a tank-tread construction shovel started up, lunch hour evidently over, and squeaked and clanked an end to our conversation. Moments later, my bus arrived, and I wended my way down the crowded aisle.

A lanky young man in loose-fitting black slouched into the aisle atop one of the two benches in the very center of the bus. He sported a lovingly braided mohawk, dangling and flipping about his face. His face was vividly painted in red, black, and white greasepaint, the angular shapes apparently applied carelessly and without direct cultural reference to Native American facepaint, or, I thought, to circus entertainers.

I seated myself next to a man in filthy clothing who was absorbed in a battered Marion Zimmer Bradley paperback. He refused to share the seat with me by not moving from the expansive sprawl he had adopted prior to my unwelcome appearance on the scene. A few stops later, the lanky young man shifted seats, and I could see his sweatshirt was emblazoned with the art and name of the Insane Clown Posse. He was down with the clown. I should have known.

As I emerged from the bus tunnel, a melodic voice singing in a language unknown to me filled the echo chamber in front of the Nordstrom tunnel entrance. I listened for a moment and heard some pretty good guitar picking behind it. I paused and hit the record button on my phone. As the song ended, I had become certain that the singer was my acquaintance Karen Olsen, a fervent Jason Webley admirer who has lately taken up her own creativity and begun to exhibit at the independent gallery Art Not Terminal as well as to busk and perform in public. This was the first time I had heard her, and I was pleasantly surprised.

I stopped and chatted with Karen and offered to host her demo at mp3.whybark.com, promising to email her the URL and to explain what all is involved. She might not want to post the material. I believe she may have concerns about people taking the music for free or stealing the songs. The option is there and her concerns are legitimate ones that should be addressed as a matter of education. I’m pleased that Karen has been pursuing her muse and am happy to lend a hand when I can.

Emerging from the side of Nordstrom into a driving, stinging rain, I was amused to note a mannequin posed in one of the windows, holding a cheap guitar with open case at her feet, filled with shoes. The windowdresser had seen fit to provide the doll with a sign reading “Will play for shoes,” and the windowdressing gnomes had done so.

Posted on by mwhybark

Victoria

I want iTunes to bust in every n tracks and use the “Victoria” speech synthesis voice to say things like “…and that wass Meeles Dahviss with Eena Silent Mood. Right before that we heard…” and so on.

Someone must have written this plugin, surely. If not, here’s a set of scripts that nearly offer the answer; the obvious deployment is to tie it to a key-command and randomize the wrapper script, so that the voice says different things as it announces the trackname and artist. The current implementation also only draws the variables from the current track, and speaks as the track is playing (paused counts as not playing, in this instance).

This has the unfortunate effect of placing the speech right over (or, as in my case) under the audio, making it even harder to understand. I’d hack it up, but I really should be looking at fixing those comments.

Posted on by mwhybark

Ben makes his move

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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.

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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.

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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.