Remember a while ago I talked about the “bitchin’ metal hurdy-gurdy solo” that Nicolas Boulerice did at a Le Vent du Nord show in Victoria? And I talked to him after the show and found out that he had in fact been in a metal band before going onto Quebecois trad music?
Hey, remember I extended the raffle deadline – any Bandcamp download for free – to Wednesday, right? Then I didn’t post the winner because Second Thanksgiving and a Lair full of visitors and all that. Well, I did in fact roll the dice to determine a winner, and that winner is Kimberly Turriff on Facebook! Kimberly, I’ll tag you on the Facebook link of this post, please contact me and tell me what you’d like!
Also, thanks to everyone for entering! If you didn’t win, well, this being Cyber Monday, well, I think you can make a guess about the post I’m about to make right after this one. But that’s for the next post. 😀
Meanwhile, this weekend a few of us got out there and shot some material for Mary Crowell‘s upcoming new video. Tune in for EXCITING RAKING ACTION:
Actual raking not included
After all, that’s why I have Minion Rachel and Minion Ian. Note the stylish Minion sashes.
It’s all for Mary’s cover of “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked.” The video is due out later in December. I’ll link when it comes out.
Also in hey news, the Facebook band page hit 200 likes! That’s awesome, so let’s celebrate with a giveaway of any download you want from the Bandcamp site, including the apparently-we’re-now-allowed-to-say-Grammy-nominated album, Bone Walker. Apparently we’re allowed to say that now!
(Being me, I will of course remind people it is the long list, not the short list that most people think about. Still, we made it past the jury, and apparently that counts. We’re nominated! Yay! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧ )
Alternatively, since most of you aren’t reading this on Facebook, you can drop a comment right here on the official blog to enter. I know that’s an extra step but it’s a Facebook achievement, right? So they get it easier this time.
UCSB digitised 10,000 old wax cylinder recordings and has put them all online. Since they’re all public domain, which is awesome, the opportunities to play around with and even insert into recordings is essentially unlimited.
BoingBoing has an article up which describes how they still have 2,000 in their collection to record. You can help by “adopting” a cylinder. Or, you can just go straight to the online archive. Some of them are just bizarre.
The craziest and best thing about these – conceptually, anyway – is that they were all recorded mechanically. Electric recording didn’t exist yet, so microphones what even are those? No, these were recorded using giant funnels aimed at the performer, who performed as loudly as they reasonably could – at which they had practice, performing in unamplified halls – and a needle etched the grooves directly into the cylinders.
And with the earliest cylinders, those would be the ones sold. They’d do however many at a time they could manage to fit into a room, so you’d get maybe 40 recorded at once, then perform again. Some cylinders kept being recorded that way for years – Edison’s Concert series in particular.
Very quickly, they moved to recording a master that they’d then physically replicate, either using copying or casting techniques – copying yielding awfully poor results, casting techniques doing far better. But either way, cylinder recordings are basically fossilised sound waves, and that is pretty much just deeply awesome.
They say the first band you’re in should be a cover band, and while in a lot of ways my musical history is the opposite of typical, in that way, it wasn’t. The first band I was in was Three Good Measures, and it was a mostly-Great-Big-Sea cover band. We did some other music as well – Billy Bragg, non-GBS Newfoundland trad, a couple of Popular Monsters tracks, Ivar Haglund (no, really, “Acres of Clams”), things like that.
But the majority of material? Great Big Sea. When we came back as Twelve Good Measures for a one-shot video contest? Great Big Sea.
Most people, I think, if they were honest with themselves, knew that the last GBS tour was a farewell tour. They’d just released a box set that had very little new new material – plenty of unreleased old stuff, but very little new. We saw them at the tour’s start, Tor Bay, Newfoundland, and it was like going back in time to 1998. (Which was awesome.) Darrell Power, the original bassist, even came back for “Excursion Around the Bay,” his old signature song with the band:
Later, on the other side of the tour, we saw them on the other side of the continent, in Vancouver, at the Expo. That was a lot less like 1998, but it was still a great show.
Finally, almost two years after their last show, Alan Doyle has said it – Great Big Sea is retired. I’m fine with that; they had a hell of a run (20 years is a lot) and the last couple of real albums, honestly, sounded to me like they were finished. They sounded like they wanted to do other things.
While it’s sad – they meant a bunch to me as a band, and as a musical force – it’s good to have official word, and it’s good – as Alan said – not to see anyone “fighting over the spoils.” Anna has her own thoughts on the statement over at her blog, including video of the time she almost died from swoon.
I’ll miss them. With the possible exception of DEVO, I’ve never seen any band before or since do a live show with as much impact, and who knows when I’ll ever see it again. But hey, I got to see it, and more than once. So thanks for everything, guys – it’s been great.
Meanwhile, the other band I’m in now – Leannan Sidhe – has a show today with several other bands at Shoreline Community College. 4-6pm, I’m not sure when we’re on. C’mon by!
This is The House that Calculus Built and it is wonderful. And though they aren’t using the word, it is brutalist as all fuck. Look at all that raw exposed concrete! Look at all that exposed bare metal and glass and stone. Look at all those repeating patterns and curved, plastic forms. Look at the exterior massed forms, particularly in the front. Look at WATER AS A GODDAMN DESIGN ELEMENT AND NOT DECORATION. (Again, watch the video at the link for that, and also look at the stairs inside the water I AM DYING here.)
FUCK YEAH BRUTALISM!
Seriously, this is what happens when you do brutalism the right way instead of as an excuse to throw up a bunker building on the cheap. I am crying a little it is so beautiful.
That quote in the previous post about Happy Fun Pope – specifically, the quote where I’m talking about traps – is from Missy/The Master in the first episode of Doctor Who this year. I rewatched it last night while Anna was watching it for the first time, and it held up! So… yeah! Better than anything last year, which is certainly a very low bar, but still. And quotable, even.
Stonewall, the “fictionalisation” of the Stonewall Riots that I talked about back in August, is finally getting reviews.
It is even worse than originally feared, rewriting history carte blanche to eliminate and/or outright mock the actual people of the Stonewall riots, replacing it with a straight-looking white-guy butch hero narrative, filled with caricatures of pathetic too-femmy-to-ever-find-love gays, abusive and vaguely pedophilic drag queens, and comic-relief trans and gender-variant people of colour.
It rewrites history, taking the actual revolution from the hands of the real heroes – the transwomen, the lesbians, the bulldykes, the drag queens, almost all people of colour – and actually has the straight-passing cisgendered corn-fed white-boy hunk start the action. (In real life, those guys mostly hid out in back, because they could pass, and didn’t like going to jail. Can’t blame them for that – and neither did the cops, who generally didn’t arrest them.) It’s whitewashing, it’s erasure, it’s the elimination of women and people of colour from history, all exactly as the trailer promised. It is a bundle of abominable racist lies.
Real-life Stonewall hero Marsha P. Johnson only gets a little screen time, and is played as comic relief, flatly, by Otoja Abit. Many of the characters who don’t look and sound like Danny are rendered as jokes, silly people who need Danny’s relatively rugged masculinity to get them angry and organized. Stonewall is ultimately yet another cartoonish fantasy about white saviors and square-jawed heroes; it should be called Independence Gay.
There’s lots more like that. Do not see this film. Do not support it, do not give it your money. Do not participate in this travesty. Simply. Do. Not.
