tonight's show

GALLERY 1412

Bedizzled

** See it at SIFF **

New Show

trees don't lie

More than a feeling

Kirk rehearses his part outside the studio...

...and then inside the studio...



...and then it's time for a break.

It may not seem like it, but we're an incredibly productive group of artists ^tm .

So...

Anyone have photos of our Crocodile show they wanna post, er...

I'm looking at you johnemofunk and vic2. I know you were there!

Put them in our photo hole!

[confidential to moxie: you're off the hook for this. good job.]

New Show

The Sun: Bringer of Life and Destroyer of Civilization

You travel west. Maybe it's because of rumors of gold, or cheap land, or just an escape from the crowded East. You reach the pacific ocean and it seems you've come as far west as you can. Any further west and you've arrived in the far east. The only thing more west is the setting sun, bringer of warmth and life.

It's the early morning of September 1st, 1859. The gold miners around San Fransisco can feel the early light through their tents and begin to prepare breakfast, already thinking of where to pick up from yesterday's digging. But something isn't right. It's too early for the sun to be up. The light in fact comes from an extremely bright aurora -- never seen this far south before. Most of the men have no idea what it is. Suddenly all the telegraph machines on the planet simultaneously fail. The world's electrical systems (still in their infancy) have been knocked out by the Carrington Event, set of powerful solar storms -- a coronal mass ejection caused by a giant sun flare.

According to a recently released NASA report, a sun storm of this magnitude happening today would destroy much of the world's power grids. Western civilization comes to a screeching halt.

From The New Scientist:

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

Nuclear power stations wouldn't fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."

The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

The sun's storm activity comes and goes in roughly 11-year cycles. It's quiet now. The next peak of solar activity comes in 2012.

David Nixon, inventor of the Mellotron

the hunt is on

H

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H

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s

New Show

More Horses

New Show

New Show

Uneasy Heavens Await Those Fleeing:

A somewhat secret show tonight at 7pm, open to the public, only $5, and featuring:

• new music from John Osebold, John Ackermann, Rick Miller, Marimba-ist Erin Jorgensen, Sunday Services, Brangien Davis and Daniel Spils;
  
• a music video piece from Sean Nelson;
• dance pieces by Amy O'Neal, Mark Haim, and Zoe Scofield;
• readings by Rebecca Brown, Trisha Ready, John Olsen , Matt Briggs, Jennifer Borges Foster, Karen Finnyfrock and more;
• visual art by Ben Beres, Jed Dunkerley, Counsel Langley, Elizabeth Bisegna Gaston, and too many others to name;
• plus a performance by me that I'm not quite sure how to classify.
  

The space is directly above the Theatre Off Jackson in the International District: 409 7th Ave S.
doors open 6:30.

If you come to our show at the Crocodile on Saturday...

.. you might see me playing this instrument.

New Show

This Friday and Saturday: Small-Town Rumors and Chicken Tales!

This Friday and Saturday, one night only (each night), your second-favorite monkey bluegrass side project, THE HALF BROTHERS brings you a show of positively golden proportions featuring approximately 5/7ths of the members of "Awesome" and so many other people and things and objects and stuff that you will most likely explode in an icy ball of bacon-wrapped ham.

First of all, we've got a brand (spanking) new thing by Sgt. Rigsby And His Amazing Silhouettes, called The Epic of Gallus Domesticus. If you don't know what I'm talking about because you blacked out after the last Sgt Rigsby show you saw, maybe the picture there will remind you.

Yes, shadow puppets. And chickens. With a multitude of voices done by our own trumpeteer Evan Mosher and drummist Bort Kleisterton. Plus the accordion playing puppet master Rob Witmer mooing and quacking and "shaking a chicken" or two.

Annex Theater's own writer/raconteur Bret Fetzer (left) directed the show, and will also be on hand to read a few BRAND NEW fairy tales written just for this very special special evening.


Then we have punk marimba virtuoso Erin Jorgensen (right) who will debut new arrangements of Appalachian mountain gospel songs. I don't know how she does what she does, but it blows my mind every time. I think it has something to do with her yarn-ball mallets. Man would my cats love to get a hold of those.


And Erin will be bringing with her the sweet soul-saving singing of Sunday Services. Allah be praised!

AND!!!!! (Saving the best for last!) This show also features the unparalleled puppetry talents of the inimitable BEN LAURENCE. (Pictured here in last year's Broadway smash, the screwball action mime-opera comedy, Every Which Way But Noose.)

The Stranger gave the show a "Stranger Suggests", and tickets are already selling fast.

(Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave S, www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri–Sat at 7:30 pm, $12 adv/$15 door.)

New Show

Finally!

Ah, see I knew it would work out in the end.

Almost there!

Seriously. Anyone? Bari sax?

It's getting better.

This is sooooo going to work. A bari sax is going to fall out of the sky. You just watch.

Still waiting

I'm not stopping until I get that baritone sax.

HERE is a snippet of a rough mix of The Boy From Lam Kien.

Anyone have a baritone sax we can borrow?

We're almost done recording The Boy From Lam Kien Salon. We just need to add a bari sax. Anyone? Anyone?

New Show

What The Internet Is For

This.

Quote of the day

"One thing reason does is really force you to make choices, because the universe is pretty much infinite."
-Pete Remine 3/14/09
(during the recording of Robot Ghosts at Dubtrain)

And the elephant is wearing rollerskates

What grade should I give this project?

more on writing lyrics

the students brainstormed a list of things that make for good lyrics and then we made it into a handout. What else should we add to this list?

Writing Lyrics
Topic – what’s the song about?
• Beware of hackneyed, over-done topics:
---> How about a misogynistic rap song about how you’re the best rapper, the toughest gangster and how all women love you? BORING!
---> Love songs? Well, 90% of pop music is about love and relationships, so if you’re going to do a song on that topic, you’d better have a new take on it.
* Think about topics that you don’t often hear in songs. (This is one of the great things about Kunjabunja titles – they often make you write about topics you’d never think to write a song about.) I’ve never heard a song about getting stuck in an elevator with someone who hums along with the elevator music, or a song about why hermit crabs are cooler than giant squid, or a song about the Pythagorean Theorem, or a song about the Financial Aid Form, or a song about a guy who always uses orange (never yellow or green) highlighter pens, etc. etc. etc. You can take a real story and change some of the facts (a song about George W. Bush in 2004 deciding to pull out of the Iraq War, or do a fictitious story about what happened behind the scenes in a real event (e.g., a song about John Wilkes Booth hiding in the Ford Theater, waiting for Abraham Lincoln to show up so he can assassinate him, but he’s really got to pee, and he’s not sure how long he can hold it), or just do a song about a real event, but concentrate on some tiny obscure detail of it (e.g., a song about the design on the tie that George Bush was wearing on 9/11).

Wordplay I – the sounds of the words:
• Rhythm – vary it up a little. Make one word long and slow and then cram a whole bunch of words into one space. Set up a pattern of rhythm and then break it.
• Rhyme – remember internal rhymes too; rhymes don’t always have to (or only) come at the end of a line. Sometimes not rhyming when a rhyme is expected is a powerful way of focusing people’s attention. (There’s a They Might Be Giants song that does that: “you're the only one here who can tell me if it's true. / That you love me and I love… me” – you expect to hear ‘you’ because it rhymes with ‘true’)
• Repetition – a good tool to emphasize something, but beware of beating your listeners over the head with something that is repeated too many times.
• Alliteration / Consonance – repetition of similar consonant sounds together, like “the sun settled on the south hill with sudden color”
• Assonance – similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words, like, “Yo! Yo! You better go mow that fro you’re growing”

Wordplay II – the meaning of the words:
• Irony – sometimes it’s a great tool to say the opposite of what you mean.
• Metaphor – Instead of just coming out and directly saying what you want to say, why not say it indirectly with metaphor? But beware of using clichéd, obvious, or over-used metaphors.
• Imagery –This is crucial in good songwriting. But beware of using clichéd, obvious, or over-used images.
• Storytelling (beginning/middle/end).
• Call-backs – weaving in a theme. (Sometimes it’s fun to just pick some idea at random and challenge yourself to work it into the song at certain points. Like polar bears. Even if your song isn’t about polar bears.) Think about weaving in your theme in different ways each time.
• More than one thing going on. The lyrics mention one thing, but really you’re talking about something else. E.g., the song seems to be about how the spotted owl is disappearing, but really it’s about how all your friends are growing up, getting married and moving to the suburbs. That’s much more interesting than a song that’s just about the spotted owl, or a song that just comes out and baldly says “golly, all my friends are growing up, getting married, and moving to the suburbs.”

Other things to keep in mind:
• Brevity / the concise nature of songwriting. Remember that you don’t have to have complete sentences, or pay attention to the rules of grammar. Ask yourself – can I take out this word and still get across the general idea? Think of the famous William Carlos Williams poem: “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.” It conveys so much with so little.
• Use your thesaurus. For each word, ask if there’s a better word, a less-used word, a more interesting word.
• Avoid cliché’s!
• Use specifics! Avoid generalities. This is very important. With one specific example, you can get an idea across succinctly.
• Show don’t tell. Instead of saying, “It was a very cold day”, say “I could see my breath puffing through my chattering teeth”
• Don’t spell things out for your listener. Let them figure it out for themselves. You just give them the clues.
• Set up a pattern and then break it. This could be with the rhythm, or rhyme scheme, or with ideas, or with the structure of the song.

New Show

It's almost time for the Final Exam.

vote for your favorite.

(A):

(B):

The story of how I came to be in the band known as “Awesome”

I used to be in this show called Carlotta’s Late Night Wing-Ding. I played Carlotta’s wayward son Slaw (named after my daddy’s favorite salad – if I was a girl they was gonna call me Ambrosia). Occasionally I’d play the banjo. The show would have musical guests, and one of them was Jose Bold, aka John Osebold. (Now John and I had a tiny bit of overlap in the theater department at UW, but we didn’t really know each other from back then. Also, he used to have a band named Player King and I used to have a band called Mah Jong, and we both played together one night at a crappy bar in the U-district. But other than that, we didn’t know each other.) John invited me (as Slaw) to play a song with him (I think it was an arrangement of Dueling Banjos), and then another. (Click HERE to hear one of these things, a song John wrote to celebrate the 8th year of the Wing Ding.) Around the same time John doing things with John A and Evan, and pretty soon the four of us were doing things together and we called ourselves “Awesome,” as a joke more or less – I mean, I know that I didn’t at that time think that it was a permanent thing. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that we’d still be playing together 5 years later. No one said, “hey, let’s start a band and really make a go of this. And I have our band name – It’s ‘Awesome’.” We just kept playing together because it was fun and the name stuck.

So anyway, I haven’t performed with the Wing Ding in a couple of years now, but the reason I started thinking about all this is that this weekend (Friday and Saturday, 10:30pm at Open Circle Theater), I’ll be in the Wing Ding again, reprising Slaw. So if anyone wants to see me do a southern accent and fall down a lot, this is your chance. Oh, and the Half Brothers will the be musical guest, and we’ll be debuting some new songs from a piece that we’ve informally been calling The Chicken Cycle – it’s basically a Sgt. Rigsby’s shadow puppet show with Half Brothers music.

Oh, and this weekend is also NAKED NIGHT at the Wing Ding: If you come half naked, you get half off your ticket. Come buck naked, get in for a buck. (Nobody’s required to be naked of course. Most people don’t.) But you may see people in various states of nakedness. The Goddess Kring (of cable-access-TV fame) will also be a guest. It’s going to be a strange strange night.

research for The West starts back east

Good Lyrics?

I need some examples of songs with great lyrics and/or songwriters who are particularly good at writing lyrics.

Retreat Movie

No Banjo Left Behind

These are my students.

Western Room Jam!

Wrap-Around Horse.

Remember that.

Off Into The West

See you in a few days.

This Whale Is Too Tasty

You don't know what pain IS

this parachute is golden

i ain't kiddin' around

this blog is black

captain lady mancastle and mccormick and schmick's fish stick president's day sale

(Over)dubtrain equation

beef + heat - oxygen = nap

Lucky Friday

Not that I'm superstitious, but playing a show on Friday the 13th gave me a bit of trepidation. (Two shows, actually, since I also played the opening set with We are Golden.) But as far as I could tell, my lack of luck only manifested itself in forgetting to wear my green "I got Lucky" shirt under my suit, for the pre-planned encore reveal. A small price to pay, I suppose, considering how lucky I am to have such a great group of friends to play music with, and even more friends who seem to enjoy seeing us perform. Thanks to everyone who came out and helped celebrate our 5th birthday!

Now, where's that shirt...

Oh great. You made the cat's head explode.

That's just great. Now what are we going to do?

Last Poster

"The musical selections are eclectic and inspired"

That's what Paste magazine says about our musical score in David Russo's gloriously weird and unexpectedly poignant feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle.

Is there an emoticon that means "self-congratulatory"?
If so, please insert here:

John Cage's 4'33" on Banjo

Last week in my Music & Philosophy class we were trying to answer the question, "What is music?" We talked a lot about John Cage. And I performed John Cage's piece 4'33" on the banjo for my students.

HERE is the recording of it.

It sounds like I might have played a little too long, but I think maybe I didn't start right away. Other than that, I think I performed it flawlessly.

eating you alive with joyous celebration

Captain L.M.C. says

here nother

Also, CAPTAIN LADYMAN CASTLE
or
CAPTAIN and LADY MANCSATLE

i'm not done yet.

and also for this.

and this too.

and this

turing five

"A"'s 5th Birthday: Save The Date!

This show happens to be on the ONLY Friday the 13th in February. We are happy to be joined by our good friends We Are Golden and Central Services.
Show starts at 9:30pm. Only $10!

Tickets available here.


woo hoo!

Song a Day, 1-26-09

This one's not all mine. The words are an e.e. cummings poem (not the one shown above, although maybe I'll try using them in a song someday if I'm feeling like punishing myself).

The Real Thing