mwhybark posted a photo:
Soundfest
This weekend, Seattle Soundfest happens at a variety of venues in Seattle. The venues are:
Neumos
The Comet
The Funhouse
The Vera Project
El Corazon
Soundfest has umbrella pass pricing for the events at $150 (which includes free beer, probably PBR) and $100.
Single-day pass pricing is $40. Individual shows are also priced; I only looked up the prices for the shows I want to attend.
The full published schedule is here.
http://seattlesoundfest.com/schedule
Please note that while the schedule lists starting times for each band and the organizers undoubtedly intend to hold the bands to them, there is nearly no possibility that these time will be accurate for shows that include more than four bands.
There are many, many bands playing. I do not want to see them all. I have identified the artists I wish to see and note the published starting times and locations.
FRIDAY AUGUST 19th
NEUMOS – $25 (6 bands, doors at 6p)
Avengers, 9:45. Jello Biafra, 10:45 (5th and 6th)
FUNHOUSE – $12 (6 bands, doors at 6p)
Austin Lucas, 9:15 (4th)
It’s not likely to be able to catch Austin’s set and then catch Penelope, so my plan here is just to catch Austin.
SATURDAY AUGUST 20th
EL CORAZON – $25 (6 bands, doors at 4p)
The Dickies, 7. Angelic Upstarts, 9. The Vandals, 10. (3rd, 5th, and 6th)
NEUMOS – $25 (6 bands, doors at 6p)
John Doe & Exene, 10:30 (6th)
I might actually just sit this night out. The only band I haven’t seen listed above is the Angelic Upstarts.
Seeing John and Exene is a possibility, though, because Exene is sick (multiple sclerosis) and it’s not clear how much longer she will be able to tour. I had thought that they might slip Dave Alvin into their lineup because I saw that the Blasters are playing the next night in town, but he’s playing gigs in California on both the 20th and the 21st. Looks like the Blasters in town on Sunday will be a Phil-only incarnation.
SUNDAY AUGUST 21st
THE VERA PROJECT – $17 (5 bands, doors at 6p)
Cro-Mags, 8:30. Zero Boys, 9:30 (4th and 5th. Very likely to be on schedule.)
NEUMOS – $20 (6 bands, doors at 5p)
The Blasters, 9:30 (6th)
EL CORAZON – $30 (6 bands, doors at 4p)
Stiff Little Fingers, 10:00 (6th)
This is only a little tough. There’s no realistic way to hit all three of these shows for the headliners. The Zero Boys, of course, are from my home and even though I have seen them a zillion times, the last time was over a decade ago at Second Story in Bloomington. The first time was at Ricky’s Canteena in the same town when I was seventeen.
I have never seen Stiff Little Fingers nor the Blasters. Both are treasured bands in my listening habits, but especially the Blasters. I nearly *booked* a Blasters show when I was about 19; I can’t recall the details about where it was to be or why it went off the rails but for whatever reason it never happened. So it will be hard to miss both bands. But the main reason I go see bands these days is to see old friends, and the Zero Boys are old friends indeed.
Final tally: Friday night at the Funhouse for Austin and Sunday night at the Vera Project for the Zero Boys. That’s $12 and $17, so no pass for me.
Zero History
Finally started Gibson’s Zero History, which I had been putting off for months. I’m happy to report it is entertaining me very much.
The book is about industrial espionage in the global clothing industry. A major supporting character is introduced wearing a ridiculous suit in International Klein Blue, and the hardback’s boards are this color. This little joke make me smile every time I pick up the book and, distressed, note my oily finger stains here and there on the spine.
An aspect of the book I find very peculiar is that it feel tremendously nostalgic to me – Gibson has allowed his futures of the past to merge with ours, and rightly so. Reading his earlier stuff always felt like some sort of message from a prophet as he described various improbable ways of navigating a comprehensively networked world. Well, now we live in that world, albeit without widespread use of wetware jacks and eye-glasses based HUDs.
I have developed a fascination with Japanese pro baseball in the wake of the Tohuku quake, and have been flabbergasted at the ease and accessibility of any given thing to do with it. Mind you, not via completely constructed tollways.
There’s no automated crossposting of NPB team goods from the primary site of the Japanese ecommerce giant (and Tohoku Sendai Golden Eagles team owner) Rakuten, but it’s trivially easy to view any given subsite on Rakuten in English, if machine-translated.
Likewise, only the tiniest amount if imagination and investigation was required to find unofficial internet relays of any given live Japanese (and Taiwanese) baseball game, the largest challenge being staying up lat enough to watch the games. I have mostly been watching them, as I did the tsunami, on my iPhone.
Resist False Winter
Yesterday was the warmest day of the year to date, reaching 69 degrees at this nearby weather station.
According to UW professor Cliff Mass, the spring has been the coldest on record since 1948 from an off-the-cuff perspective (number of days over 55).
I moved a bunch of the furniture from our main living area out on to the deck and did a thorough de-furring and vacuum run. Wehn that was done I moved outside to weed whack and take on some other chores.
We are expecting a new grill on Tuesday, so Viv cleaned up the deck for me while I turned and repaired our compost bins. I still have a huge pile of scrap from our deck demolition a couple years ago and I used the rest of the afternoon to build a standing potting bench. I may add a shelf or two in service of bracing the structure but not until the weather improves.
Using deck scrap to build furniture produces very heavy furniture.
It went very quickly, though, and makes me think i might build that x-braced picnic table after all this summer.
Viv has dug out nearly all the beds and transferred many of the potted plants to either new pots or the ground. I got my potatoes in a week ago but still haven’t popped any starts into the vegetable bed. Well, one start – Viv found a volunteer lettuce in one of the flowerpots.
Lacking a gas grill at the moment, I cooked a couple steaks over wood, which is always a challenge as charcoal is so hot. They came out nice, though. I used a teriyaki-and-mustard glaze that burned black much faster than the steak did so what appeared to be horribly charred was actually nicely medium rare.
All this yard work meant the dog did not get his walk; we are hoping to get a good one in today despite the return of rain and cold.
I Dream of Maakies
I awoke on April 23 from a dream, which I felt immediately compelled to share with the artist concerned (Tony Millionaire, of Maakies and more):
I had a detailed dream of a huge, twenty-five-pound signed-and-numbered limited edition Maakies book, 24 x 12 or thereabouts and and two inches thick, indigo dyed upper edging and deckle pages on the opening side. The book’s cover featured a large illustration and the book itself and the printed cover’s primary color was a light fawn brown. The printed cover of the book and the boards themselves felt soft and smooth, something like leather in the case of the boards and an unknown substance for the jacket.
The book came in an even larger box with a separate interior tipped-in ‘tear sheet’ (which appeared to be a signed silksceen). The box itself was possibly square, as the sales display literature referred to the book and box set as ‘Uncle Gabby’s Square Deal.’
The box was made of heavy cardboard wrapped in a kind of faux morocco leather, roughly the color of a 1940s Scrabble box, but the cardboard was much heavier, say 5 to 7mm. I did not see the cover art on the box that I remember but I think it was different from that on the book.
The interior of the box was lined with green baize, and the inner side of the box (the bottom of the box, which separated as does a board game box) was subdivided into several small compartments in addition to a large one for the book. Included in the compartments were at least two small croupier’s rods, apparently made of a fine hardwood and with delicate handwrapped leather grips, and a set of ivory or ivory-colored standard six-sided dice. It’s possible there was more stuff.
I don’t recall if the baize had gaming markings on it or not, but the intent was clearly to present the box as a kind of gambling surface.
The book was not titled ‘Uncle Gabby’s Square Deal’ and featured a large, intricate illo of Drinky Crow and Henrietta, possibly on the high seas, and whatever the title and copy on the cover, they were ensconced in classic, Greg-Irons-by-way-of-Millionaire nineteenth century bannering devices, possibly worked to appear as engaged in the rigging of the ship.
The book was signed and numbered, one of an edition of 550, and tucked behind the book display were three watercolor collage works by none other than you, Mr. Millionaire, only one of which I got a good look at. Apparently the watercolors were swag the proprietor was intended to bestow on purchasers of the tome at whim. They appeared to have careful and sarcastic or insulting instructions and invective to the bookseller on them in your hand, incorporated into the design of the works.
The book-and-box itself was priced at $550.
It seemed incredibly urgent to me that I let you know about this on awakening. I would say that I would be likely to buy such an improbability.
I wanted to get it in here too.
Bee
Bee
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photo.JPG
Up in the Air
A couple of weeks ago, just before heading to California to visit family, a friend’s tweet alerted me to something I should have known long in advance. The Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT “Eureka” was headed in to town for a two week stint out of Everett’s Paine Field.
A bit of online legwork, and I had left a message with their ticketing department, seeking to arrange a hop for myself and Viv.
The next morning, there was significant media coverage in the region, and their ticketing staff was flattened by the call volume. I started speed-dialing them, realizing what was going on, and in the process managed to fumblefinger the note one, but two callbacks they kindly provided. Eventually, I got through, and we booked a flight for September 5, the weekend after our return to Seattle.
After we were back in town, I realized that one of the flight-education tenants at Paine, the Historic Flight Foundation, was sponsoring an event that coincided with our visit, the Vintage Aircraft Weekend. I had long known of and intended to visit the Flying Heritage Collection as well, so I told Viv we would be making a day of it.
Ages ago, I tracked down Kent Leech, an illustrator who (with his father) created a striking cutaway illustration for National Geographic of the USS Macon, one of the pre-World War II dirigibles that served as a part of the US Navy’s lighter-than-air fleet. In June, Kent contacted me with some more information about the image, and I wrote about it here. “Hm,” I thought, “I wonder if he’d like a copy of that flown on the Eureka?”
I dropped him a line, and the answer was yes, so while in California I ran a couple of giclee prints to bring along.
On checking in, the Airship Ventures staff were all curious about the folder I was carrying. Above their work area was propped a large print of the Macon partially in Hangar One at Moffat Field in the Bay Area. The Eureka is based next to that hangar in Hangar Two.
Several of them immediately recognized the ship in the illustration, and Brian Hall, the company’s leader, said that he’dlove to be able to display it in their check-in area at Moffat. Unfortunately, the illustration’s rights are 100% resident with National Geographic, so licensing it for other uses involves more than a phone call and a handshake, and I explained this as best I could.
Brian took a picture of me holding the prints and blogged it himself:
A few minutes later, we were getting a safety briefing (the same stuff you hear once seated on a conventional commercial aircraft) and it was time to trundle out to the landing area to await the return of the ship.
We lined up in two rows, six each, and were waved forward in pairs, two folks climbing aboard while two folks debarked, in order to permit the ship to maintain it’s relative weight.
One thing that struck me was the fact that the ship’s pivoting propellors permitted the nose-line ground crew to consist of this:
The boarding process was over quite quickly. Viv and I were the last to board and consequently were seated directly behind the control area, in two rear-facing seats. This was fine with me, as I wanted to be sure to buttonhole our pilot, Katharine Board, as soon as possible in order to get her signature on the Macon prints.
I’ll pick this up later!