Flux Fortuna Kickstarter
I am a firm believer in the power of crowdsourced funding through Kickstarter. Small projects get wider exposure and individuals who want to think like venture capitalists manage a portfolio of small investments with well-defined rewards or returns. I’ve supported ten different projects, ranging from print editions of web comics to Devi Ever’s cartridge based [...]
Hands On A Hardbody: A Real American Musical
“Hands On A Hardbody” opened last week on Broadway after a run at the LaJolla Playhouse, bringing some of the west coast cast with it. I grabbed tickets on the pre-sale because the last tow musicals that looked appealing during previews (Once and Book of Mormon) took home wheelbarrows full of Tonys that put ticket [...]
Splitting An iTunes Library
I hit the point a few weeks ago where my collection of Phish shows (all downloaded legally, paid for happily and listened to frequently) was consuming a double-digit integer percent of my desktop’s hard drive. My $100 solution: buy another external hard drive (the area under my desk looks like the spawn of Ursala the [...]
The Way Up and Down: “The Afterman”
Following closely on the heels of October’s “Afterman: Ascension” Coheed & Cambria dropped “Afterman: Descension” this week. Parts of it have been released as previews, and “Iron Fist” was an acoustic staple of the 2011 headline tour. I loved Ascension, and had the nagging worry that Descension wouldn’t quite measure up. My doubts were as [...]
Tend Your Garden: Three Views of Rush’s “Clockwork Angels”
“Hey Dad, play that ‘We Are Young’ song again” asked my then-four year old son. Referencing by chorus rather than title, I knew he meant Rush’s “Dreamline” and the request was another case of life imitating art reflecting life again. He’d heard it as the opening song for the Rush show at the PNC Bank [...]
Borrowed Tone Store
I love toys. The bigger, flashier, and more accessorized with knobs, dials, cables and batteries, the better. For the past year and a half, I’ve been a huge fan of BorrowLenses, a web site that stocks an inordinate variety of lens formats, focal lengths and camera mounts. I “borrowed” (rented) four different Canon telephoto lenses [...]
Coheed and Cambria at Webster Hall
[Setlist spoilers] I’ll make my concluding argument first: Coheed and Cambria’s show at Webster Hall (NYC, October 11) was easily one of the five best shows I’ve seen in more than thirty years of concert-going. I put it up there with Springsteen’s “The River” tour in 1981, Genesis, Rush, and Yes (with the Wakeman-White-Howe-Anderson-Squire lineup), [...]
Coheed and Cambria’s “Afterman: Ascension”
If you’ve been on the fence about listening to Coheed & Cambria, because they were too screamo, too sci-fi, too lyrically obscure, too infaturated with punctuation in song titles, too metal-turned-prog-turned metal, or too anything else, give up all preconceptions and give “Afterman: Ascension” a listen. It has a hook for everyone, from long-time child [...]
Review: Bill Bruford, The Autobiography
I’ve finished Bill Bruford’s obviously titled autobiography, and I’m almost relieved I made it to the end. Bruford is an accomplished, amazing, creative and adventuresome drummer. The names dropped in his book range from the obvious (Yes, King Crimson) to the obscure (Pierre Moerlen) to the overlooked (Allan Holdsworth). While I learned that Bruford’s drum [...]
Concall Blues: The Album
After another evening of later-night concalls, punctuated by the Bubba on lead guitar (with adequate doses of crunch, fuzz, wah and phase shifting), I mentioned in passing that blues guitar accompaniment makes conference calls that much smoother. His response: an all-blues album of songs about conference calls. Here’s my proposed track listing: 1. 65 minutes. [...]