Oh man awesome. Childhood hero to the max. I still have a poster/painting of Feynmann hanging in my garage. I just tried to google for a picture of it and I couldn’t find anything and now I’m worried it’s rare and that I shouldn’t have hung it on the ceiling by pounding nails thru the corners. Whoops!
What’s with the run of exclusive community events? I know what you’re thinking – “what’s an exclusive community event?” Yeah. I just made that up. The term, not the exclusivity. Though it’s really less of a term than it is just traditional string of adjectives. This stands in contrast to the time I tried to coin the term ‘metata’ – which you longtime readers may remember and which I still think rules and is totally workable. Case in point: NBC shows Olympics time shifted to the evenings, people flip out about it and immediately take the conversation away from the games and make it about the coverage of the games. Two years ago the NYT would have written a story about how people were using twitter to bitch about the time shifted coverage – a full frontal metata: talking about how people are talking about how the networks are covering the games. Though now that twitter isn’t “omg look!” news anymore maybe metata stories are dead? Hmm. Did anyone write a story about someone tweeting about how innovative it was for DeRusha to use a webcam to host a debate about the coverage of the games? Hope not.
But to get back to my exclusive community event, here are two examples. Ha. I gotta look up how to do numbered lists in HTML, it’s been awhile. Standby.
Nice!
The Current Birthday Party – Was I the only one kinda shrugging my shoulders about the Current’s birthday party bash thing at First Ave? The one that sold out in 2 minutes, crashing servers and breaking ticketless hearts along the way? And how you had to hear on-air reminders like 4000 times a day about how amazing it was going to be and how tickets were impossible to get? Because why? Because after spending 5 years building a community and engaging with their listeners and pledge driving for distance and for speed all alone in their time of need they go and book their birthday party at a historically cool but unquestionably undersized rock club. Which just seemed weird. And for the record, I’m not bitter. I didn’t even try and get tickets. I’m sure it was a great time, but that’s not the point. The point is WHAT A GOLDEN opportunity it would have been to really get a bunch of that Membership and/or omg Sustaining Membership and/or just a bunch local 89.3 fans who feel like they’re part of something because they follow rss feeds and tweets and post comments on websites and send emails to DJ’s and MOST IMPORTANTLY LISTEN TO THE STATION together for a party and TOTALLY they’re part of something duh and to inflict that type of exclusivity (size constraints) on a community so carefully crafted and ACTUALLY SINCERE seems boneheaded and unfortunate and phony and sad. Learning opportunity, I guess. (Full disclosure: my mancrush on Bill DeVille grows stronger by the day. It’s like a force of nature at this point. The Sunday morning show? I mean come on.)
The local Ignite thing over at the Bedlam. Last time it was at Solera and it was packed and rowdy and fun and communal it got a lot of buzz and people -again – start to feel like they’re a part of something and it’s getting awesome word of mouth and hey, I’ve got an idea, let’s book it at the frickin’ tiny Bedlam and watch tickets sell out instantly and then make people write poems and answer silly trivia to try and win tickets DANCE MONKEYS DANCE!!! Seriously, one of you social networking genius kids out there should take this one down as a ‘what not to do’ case study and/or explain to me why you book your big buzzworthy event in a venue that holds less than 10% of your rabid fan twitter following* Because doing that doesn’t make people feel like they’re part of something, it makes them feel like outsiders or – worse yet – duped. Or maybe it doesn’t? Like maybe it brings more credibility to the event – and the community?? – because people are getting shut out? That notion really feels old fashioned. This isn’t a Zeppelin show, right? I didn’t get up and sleep in a lawn chair on the sidewalk outside of Dayton’s to get tickets or anything. That’s a different kind of community for sure. I think this is just a fun local community event with bad planning and then a splash of insultingly bad/weird community interaction after the fact see also: dancing monkeys. See also: learning opportunity. (Also fd: didn’t try and get tickets, would have, but have conflicts.)
That’s probably enough. Mainly because I kinda forget where I was going with this. I think I had other thoughts about ‘deliberate’ and ‘virtual’ and all kinds of other stuff, and I’m sure I could go on and on over beers and tator tots if I had to. And not just because beers and tator tots go with everything even though they totally do. Book it.
Nope, this isn’t an illusion or trickery of the camera or bad photoshop work, it really is an ENORMOUS kite shaped like a bear sporing a red shirt that said “Hug Me” and it was flown by some people who drove up from Iowa for this year’s kite festival and it was super duper awesome on a whole lotta levels. But really, isn’t that what you expect at a kite festival on a frozen lake?
Yes it is, because kites are awesome and so is winter, even when the wind is maybe admittedly a TINY bit chillier than you’d prefer, but at least there’s plenty of it to hold up the kites and the cocoa is free and the sun is bright and they play “Summer Wind” over the PA every year and every year it rules I don’t care if it came off some “songs for kite flyers” mixtape.
We went back on Sunday and more or less had the whole lake to ourselves and our kites. Why must there be a festival to be festive, right? Right.
Easily easily easily one of my favorite events of the winter. (No offense to Huna’s annual ‘Christian Bale’ movie night, of course.)
Here’s the balloon drop and ‘gag’ from Phish NYE in Miami. I’ve watched it 3 times. I was in bed before the ball dropped here. Because I’m old. But good lord would I liked to have seen this run of shows. Tho that’s easy to say, I suppose.
It’s in HD, so go full screen and turn it up.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Here’s me and Vic at the 400 back in 2003. I told him I liked his stocking cap. He told me it was cold in Minnesota. I thought maybe he’d say he liked mine. He didn’t. I didn’t care, I liked him because he was weird and awesome and emotional and unpredictable and funny and sad and seriously ‘Zippy Morocco’ is just one of my favorite songs and it’s a real bummer that he’s gone. Vic Chesnutt, Singer and Songwriter, Dies at 45
Oh man it’s almost time for the Olympics and you know what that means, right? Right. Snowboarding coverage in the NYT, baby! Today’s sports COVER PAGE featured an article about the run-up to Vancouver and how the double cork is gonna be the move to beat. It’s some new move that’s hard and twisty and you know what else – it’s actually kinda stylish, which is nice to see for a change given the ever present obsession on SO MUCH ROTATION that looks yes, hard, but also clumsy and awkward and silly. Stupid 1080′s.
But back to the double cork. Here’s the vid of Shaun White hitting it back to back earlier this year, which is mentioned in the article, and which pretty much freaked people out.
How crazy was it to roll into the parking lot the day winter decided it was time to party and see all these cars with their wipers pointed up at the sky. Super crazy. And totally new to me. And I’ve lived thru winters before. Several of them. And I’ve been around parking lots in winter. Several of them. And you’d think that given my extensive background in both winter and parking lots that I’d be familiar with most local genius tips and tricks for winter parking (LGT&T4WP). Especially if there was a tip that instructed you to “pop your wipers” before you go into the office. I’d be tuned into that, right? Right? Oh man.
Either way, here’s my theory on this. I work in a building with a lot of people who are either ex-pats from warmer (non-snowy) climates and/or travelling road warrior consultants in from other parts of the country. Many of them aren’t overly familiar with snow or cold or whatever. Some of them obvs are – like the Canadian guy I work with who rode his motorcycle every day up until like last Sunday – but there are seriously tons of people in the building who are from Honduras or Brazil or Georgia and just don’t know about winter beyond the “concept” and/or “youtube”.
My hunch is that it’s a regional thing. Some guy who flies in from Cincinnati or something. Everybody pops their wipers in Cincinnati, duh. So he does it here. Then the clueless non-wintered masses roll in, see Mr. Cincinnati’s blades, jump out of their car, yell something in Portuguese, and pop their wipes, too, assuming that’s how it’s done here in the Great White North. Such rubes. We don’t care about blades frozen to windshields. We take PRIDE in frozen blades. We put on our choppers and pound away at them with the thick blade of a scraper we purchased at a store that also sells large chains, coveralls, and deer urine. We use push brooms and shovels. You pop your blades like that and 9 inches of snow is gonna drift over your windshield anyway. You may as well hang a white flag on the tip of each blade because yeah, you just surrendered before the fight even started.
So now my mission is to a) find Mr. Cincinnati and b) find out if he’s really from Cincinnati and c) buy him a pair of choppers. Stupid Cincinnati, so much to learn about winter.
So here’s the recently released video for Dylan’s song ‘Must Be Santa’ off his new Christmas album that – like the rest of you – I thought was a joke when I first heard about it. But it’s not. And weirder yet, it’s actually not that bad.
And now here’s this video, and it’s one of those things where you laugh when it starts because it’s so absurd but then when it ends you’re immediately clicking the play button again because while you’re not sure you really saw what you just saw, it’s everything you want a Dylan holiday house party to be and you go check your mailbox and pray that today is the day you get the invitation. But it’s sunday, and there’s no mail today. So let’s just watch this genius all over again. Perfect.
Also: Here’s the ‘official’ youtube vid for the song. Bob’s people refused embedding on it. It’s slightly better quality.
My sister makes these. They’re for sale in her etsy shop. You should do some holiday and/or regular shopping at her site because they’re magical and seasonal and amazing and seriously she was crafty way before it was cool. Book it.
There are also watches made with safety pins and beads that look like they would take way more patience and squinting than I would be able to tolerate. You know you want one.
