sparkrobot

A friend of mine this morning sent me a link an Iggy and the Stooges rider  on The Smoking Gun. TSG declares  it is “the single most entertaining concert rider TSG has ever obtained”. I couldn’t agree more. If you don’t read all 18 pages, don’t miss the last page at the very least.

 Link to Lust For Laughs – October 4, 2006

I made mention of a series of recent articles in The News Tribune regarding the opening of a Carl’s Jr. stirring up quite a bit of attention in Tacoma to my friend Kevin who authors Guilty Carnivore and lives down in Portland, OR. Our instant messenger conversation prompted him to offer this particularly astute summary of the breaking “news”.

In Austin last week while I was in town for the Flash Forward Conference, I took an evening and met up with my brother-in-law and his wife. We went out and had some Cuban food and decided to tool about a bit to see what we could get into. After some deliberation, we decided to stop at the Club De Ville on Red River. When we arrived, there was only the barkeep behind the counter and another guy ordering a round. Dude mentions to bartender, “Kinda quiet around here tonight, huh?”. This overheard I jump in, “Now that we’re here it’s not.” Nothing like an empty bar room to drop a sweet ass bomb like that.

We talked for a few minutes and after clearing up some confusion about the festival(s) we each were in town for, he introduced himself as Jacob [Valenzuela] from the band Calexico, and was in town for the ACL Festival happening the next weekend. I said “Hey no shit? We’re all from Tucson.”. A bit more small talk, I mentioned a couple of their recent records I quite enjoyed but didn’t really want to hold him up in fanatical chatter. “Nice meeting you man, good luck with the shows. Enjoy Austin.” When Bloody Mary returned she goes “Who was that?”. Me and Brandon replied in stereo, “Calexico.”.

We took our beers out onto the patio and found several more members of the band and their friends/entourage were the sole inhabitants of the patio as well. When they saw us come out, they invited us to join them. (Couldn’t really argue with that.) When I went to sit down, the color splash flash unit I had (loosely obviously) attached to my Lomo fell off and broke. Totally annoying, 100% borrowed. (I ordered a replacement later from the hotel) We sat and bullshat with the group for a while, talking about Tucson, bands, the road, etc. At one point a homeless guy wandered in and started a less than stellar performance of an Al Green song, complete with beer belly-tapping, off-tempo drums. Um okay. After some serious eye-rolling and fucking total awkward silence, we kicked down some coins so he’d bail. No offense, but Cinderella wuddn’t invited to the ball. He insisted on doing one more song, though we all tried to refuse. Stones on the box, it was a duet with Mick Jagger—albeit complete shit—in a off-key mash-up style.

When we were all leaving, there was mention of tickets to see the taping of their Austin City Limits performance on Wednesday. Phone numbers were exchanged at we hit the road thinking if nothing else, that it was pretty cool just to hang out and have a few rounds. If the tickets never materialized, meh, whatevs. Wednesday afternoon I got a call from BM saying they actually had called and we had tickets on will call. Fuckinay, fantastic.

We jumped at the chance to hit the taping. I’ve watched this show on PBS for years and evidently, it’s difficult to obtain tickets in the first place. The sound was phenomenal. The lighting was outrageously cool and they also gave us free beer. And it was the cold kind. At first I thought aloud, this Zeigen Bock is awful. I was quickly reminded just how free and just how cold it was and rethunk it:

. o O ( Yeah, I should just shut the fuck up right now. )

They played a lot fo familiar material from the older records and some incredible stuff I hadn’t yet heard from their latest relase, Garden Ruin. The highlight for me being Just Like Stevie Nicks from the Feast of Wire record from 2003. The performance was right on and featured an extended dynamic bit through the middle. Crafty stuff. They’re musicianship was spot on. Hopefully they picked this song for the show that airs November 13th on PBS. Super cool.

So, I guess if this post sounds like I’m bragging a little bit, well, I am. Thanks for reading it… suckehrrrrrrh!

After a recent trip to Austin, TX, I’ve decided to try out the concept of blind double exposing some film. I’ve got a 24 exposure roll of FujiFilm Superia 400 which I’ve run one time through a Lomo LC-A at 200 ISO. The only thing I’ll reveal about the subject is that the exposures were made in Austin, Texas on Sunday September 17th. I’m looking for someone who shoots film—preferrably someone whom I don’t know—to double expose the film and return it to me. I’ll then develop the film and scan and make prints.

Couple of things: I’d like the subject to be people and I’d like the location to be Tacoma. Other than that, I don’t care what you do. Actually, I really don’t even care if you stick to that. What do you say? If your’e interested in this project at all, contact me. Use the comments field. Or not.

I’m in Austin, TX at the Flash Forward Conference. I’ll be posting pictures to my Flickr account from the event using the tag “Flash Forward Austin“. Austin, Texas is hot. The Flash 9/AS3 demo this morning at the Adobe keynote was also hot. I’m in town all week for the conference. I’m sitting in Robert Hoekman, Jr.‘s presentation on Designing the Obvious:Creating Great Software for the Web. Interesting bits coming out of this. He’s riffing on the Japanese concept of poka-yoke—preventing the possibility of error—as it applies to web applications. Good stuff. This presentation is more about web application development than Flash per se, but there’s plenty of conceptual overlap. Another underlying concept is turning beginning users to intermediate users quickly by using uniform design practices to surface important interface elements and reducing clutter in general. I find myself nodding my head.

Technorati: Flash Forward Austin

I was downtown a while back. I dropped by the Kulture Lab at the Catapult Gallery. There were a lot of people out and interested in the event. There was some good stuff on display. Blanco Bronco (sorry no photos), The Plastards (photos), Beat Box Fred (photos) and The Fucking Eagles (photos) played a party at the Blacksmith (Jefferson & Fawcett) later in the evening and I brought some 3200 B&W film. I missed most of Blanco Bronco, but liked the last song they played. I mentioned it to their singer later to which he replied “Oh, that one we screwed up?”. I said “Um, yeah, I think so.” The Plastards played next and call me crazy, but I think they had some new songs. Beat Box Fred was at the show, up from Olympia. Fred drops beats—mostly with his mouth and a wireless mic. I think I heard some Moby Dick in there. Hard to say. The Fucking Eagles went on last and included an impromptu “jam” with BBF.

The reason it’s taken me so long to post about this is that I shot with actual film (the horror!) and it’s taken me this long to get everything scanned and some of it up on the web (blah blah blah). I like film. I like the results. It’s a lot more work. I don’t have any photos from the gallery event, I only had black and white film and it didn’t really suit the scene.

A sidecar: evidently, a woman was murdered—shot in the head—around 2:30 AM (well after we left, but still…) near the Fawcett House at 19th & Fawcett. There were some condos going up across the street at 26th & Jefferson.

Tonight at Hell’s Kitchen. The Dockyard Derby Dames are an all-female, amateur, flat-track roller derby league kicking off in Tacoma. Following in the footsteps of teams from cities like Austin, Texas, Seattle and Tucson, Arizona to name a few, the DDD are attempting to raise money for their new league as well as AIDS reaserch. Live bands include: Devil’s Advocates, Sarah Connor, Organic Guerilla, Bell’s Theorem, I Defy. 9pm/$5/21+

Man, I had a busy Saturday. I also popped into Hell’s Kitchen on 6th Avenue to catch Vancouver, BC’s Taboo Revue and caught the Broken Oars playing their version of anthemic punk rock. The show got off to a slow start with some karaoke with made up drunken harlot lyrics, but revved up and ended up being quite entertaining. Watched some uncomfortable squirming when the boylesque started. I didn’t finish the show, Seattle’s Neutral Boy also played, but I just couldn’t hang any longer.

There are photos of Taboo Revue here and Broken Oars here.

Took the dogs down to the South Tacoma Auto Show on South Tacoma Way yesterday afternoon to get them some exercise. The street was blocked off to auto traffic from about 50th St S down to around 58th. The streets were lined with mid-century classic american automobiles the entire way. In particular, I picked up on emblems as a lost design element that is for the most part missing from modern vehicles. There are a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.

An interesting parallel note, we met a group of people from the Edison neighborhood who were participating in the Edison C.A.R.E.S. Action Team program who were working on their initiative sponsored by the City of Tacoma’s Community Based Services program. The group meets once a week to focus on creating solutions for local issues like clean up, street trash, curbing and lighting maintenance and speeding. All things that have come up in conversations I’ve had with Dionne about what it would take to improve our neighborhood. They’re focusing on the Edison neighborhood, which is south of us, Oakes to Washington, 56th to 66th. If they succeed in simply slowing the traffic on Oakes it would be a major improvement for the area. According to the city’s website, a recent speed sting in Edison netted $2,700 in tickets issued for speeding violations.

Oakes has a 30 mph speed limit, though routinely people buzz through here like it’s a the freeway. It’s scary sometimes. In spite of my usual support for privacy, I’ve even said aloud we should go the Lakewood route and install cameras, as long as a proper appeal process is in place. 5 mph over? Yeah, too bad. Ticket. Slow down. The volunteers told me most of the speeders were from other neighborhoods around the region. Well… duh? Who would speed into their own driveway?

While not without it’s share of issues, South Tacoma is still an affordable option for living in the city without paying exorbitant prices North End homes pull in. Especially as projects like this succeed in polishing up the area. A while back, I ran across a Tacoma city map circa 1887 (via exit133.com) which indicates that the entire area of Tacoma was formerly connected via cable car lines. While the light rail system downtown is nice. It doesn’t do much for connecting the entire community of Tacoma. (Or much of anything for anyone for that matter. Every time I’ve been on it, it’s been almost empty.) It might be an interesting proposition to connect all the areas of Tacoma in a manner similar to what Portland has done with it’s MAX light rail.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that downtown Tacoma is getting lots of attention, but there are other areas in town that could really use some love too. By romanticizing the idea that downtown Tacoma is going to become an urban utopia, and in doing so is going to auto-magically make Tacoma the greatest city ever, collectively we may be unable to see the forest for the trees.

I guess this post is not just about the auto show, but it was still pretty cool.

Bounced into the Parkway Tavern on Saturday afternoon to check out the IPA Festival their blog post described as “An all-day celebration of hops featuring 18 of the finest regional IPAs.” Who doesn’t love India Pale Ale? There was a crowd of already quite rowdy people in the Parkway when we popped in about 5 in the afternoon. India Pale Ales are notorious for being just chock full of alcohol, up to around 10%. The Parkway was bumping. I picked up the scent a block away, there was a bbq out front and kielbasa sausage was being grilled. I haven’t been there in quite a long while, it’s all been redone inside and it looks great. On our first trip to the bar, an outwardly lit older woman instructed me to “try the erection beer”. Okay, guess I will.

She was talking about the Walking Man Homo Erectus Imperial IPA brewed in Stevenson, WA by the Walking Man Brewery. The brewery describes the beer as “An Imperial IPA brewed in celebration of being erect for two million years.” I ordered a 6 ounce glass. This was a bold IPA containing 10% alcohol by volume. Very nice. Even after several libations and cloudy judgement, she had recommended a stellar beer.

I sampled two more IPAs before leaving, the Bend, Oregon-based Deschutes Brewery’s Inversion IPA and Denver, Colorado’s Great Divide Titan IPA. Deschute’s makes killer beer. Already a big fan of their beers, especially the excellent Mirror Pond Pale Ale, it came as no surprise to me that this was my favorite of the afternoon. The Great Divide was also very tasty.

My faves in order:

1. Inversion IPA
2. Titan IPA
3. Homo Erectus Imperial IPA

Eavesdropped the table behind us: “I’ve been listening to Dead Kennedys again recently. I haven’t listened to it since I was about 13 years old, but I realized their musicianship was amazing”. To which I leaned over and injected “Welcome back.”.

The Parkway was still going strong when we left around 6:30. They were giving out tickets to win novetly bar prizes (tee shirts, hats, etc.) and the boisterous crowd roaring and cheering with every glass broken behind the bar. Like I said, IPAs are strong as hell. Better to leave early in the evening than be that guy at the bar who’s lost his pants and is crying uncontrollably at 9:30 PM. You know? Not like I’ve ever done that. I’m jus’sayin’…