Crystal Frontier

crystal frontier

Calexico has a new album out and the name of the first single is called "Crystal Frontier".

I love it. It's great. It's very layered and has different tempos running through it, and tells a story. Gonna play it more on the show.

mud

The sky here is almost like the color of dried lakebed mud. The air burns your eyes a little. It reminds me of hot summers in San Pedro in the 70s, except in that case it was smog burning your eyes. Also, the layering you see in the air in the LA basin is not so noticeable here. We do have inversion layers, but more in the winter time, but the air today is pretty still for now and layers might still appear for a little while before the thunderstorms move in.

product

Yay that "some of the jammers" video was taken on the new camera.

I've never owned a video camera. In my life. Never even had one available to me. So this is not just an old toy in a new way, but a totally new toy.

Cue up the Lydia Lunch!

some of the jammers

my heart soared

and then crash-landed into a remote, snow-capped peak, bursting into flames and leaving no one alive.

Something big and shitty just happened with our festival. It'll go on, but not how we had intended it to.

kf tactic

I got to witness an interesting tactic by the police at the jam last night.

Seems they like to hang around the rowdier establishments. They wait outside, not really doing anything. Eventually word gets back to the people inside that the cops are here. All is quiet for a while, and then a really drunk person goes out to needle them. Bam! Into a car they go. For whatever reason, who knows... Then another drunk goes out to see what happened to the first one and to needle the cops his own self. Into the car with him...

So yeah I don't know what the hell was going on at the jam last night, but that's how it appeared to me.

Good times. Who needs TV?

so much fun

the camera got here yesterday. I put the batteries in, threw in a card, formatted it, flipped through the user manual for like 45 seconds and then started pressin buttons. For shits and giggles i stuck it on the dashboard and took video of the ride to the jam.

on the dressing habits of guys from Oregon's hinterlands

They don't wear their pants looking like they are walking around with a load of shit in them.

Out at the party in the woods, one did not see many loaded pants around. One saw long legs with jeans that fit ahem *really well*. Was almost shocking, because you never see men's asses anymore.

Let's hear it for the farm boys!

still chomping

shipment details show the new camera to arrive between tomorrow and the 28th. Squeeee!

pretty damn cool

I got sort of inundated the last couple of days with CDs and links to some great bands from the area to play on the show. I will be changing my usual "play one artist at 10:30" thing to at least an hour of stuff every week. That's how much came my way.

Dug up some Nothingface to play early on. The bass player from that band has gone on to do some great shit of his own in the form of In For The Kill, and I'm stoked to find out that they are heading into the studio to record a full album.

Blues society is playing on the courthouse steps on 4th of July at 9 am. zoiks, scoob... will have to grab everything after the jam thursday in order to get it downtown by set up time of 7:30 or so.

the wait

agh the only thing worse than wanting something really badly is getting it and having to wait for it.

the new camera should be here BY the 1st. Well, I simply won't have any furniture left by then, having gnawed all the legs off.

The old one I'm sending up to Rude and his mom. It still works, still takes pretty damn fine pictures, but has some frustrating quirks for me that I'll explain for them. Rude's a photographer at heart but never can remember to buy film or process it. Yeah I know how that feels. Hopefully he'll enjoy the old Kodak and stuff.

In other things, Smart Half tells me that his mom has never come to visit him anywhere he's lived, either. So this summer is kind of big for both of us. He and I have sort of similar issues with one of our parents. For me, it's my dad. For him, his mom. I joke that we should introduce them and they can go bowling. They're very similar people. Driven, work-oriented, maybe a little inattentive as a parent, maybe a little oblivious to what their kids needed in the past. Both of them were suspicious of the wrong kids behaviors. Well, my dad's suspicion was perhaps justified to a certain extent but while he was accusing me of stuff, my brother was getting away with much, much more than I ever hoped to.

So yeah. Fun summer. Hoping soon to get MY mom up here, and maybe eventually untether my biodad from his unhappy household for a week or so.

not much funnier sometimes

farts

math class!

Ok my first one was today. We got something like a 20 minute intro to the class and what the teacher expects and then ran headlong into the work. Eight chapters in eight weeks is the schedule.

I wasn't sure if this was the right math class for me, but after a day in it, that isn't the case. I KNOW its the right one. hahahah. Math 20. woot!

carlin

Wow that's kind of a shame. He sure was funny as shit. I have always especially liked the bishop (or whatever he was, maybe just a priest) in "Dogma".

thanks pop!

I needed a new digital camera some kinda bad. I'm supposed to be shooting the festival in September, and my nearly-decade-old Kodak EasyShare is tottering along. Doing it all on film crossed my mind but would be prohibitively expensive. Sent dad a note asking if he could pick one up cheap over there in Thailand and bring it when he visits in August. He said they're more expensive there, weirdly. Then he asked what I needed in one. Then I shot for the stars and said I wanted, basically, a Nikon D40. Now, I of course knew that this was not going to happen. But this is how you ask for (expensive) things from my dad. You ask for the golden plate, and bargain down to the silver goblet.

On it's way is a brand new Cannon PowerShot A720.

WEll, one of these days I'll have a digital SLR.

And I messed around some more with the Minolta Maxxus (maxxum?) yesterday. Took it out to Blystock and finished the roll that was in it. Then spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to rewind the thing to get the film out. I don't have a manual for this camera and the one I found online is, like, translated straight from Malaysian which makes for fun reading like "press the buttons being on the top in blue". Ok got the film out. Another half hour trying to figure out how to wind the new roll in. Embarrassing, I can rewind unload and load a manual camera in just a couple of minutes and now I look like a total idiot of course scratching my head at this automatic thing. Successfully shot through another roll getting used to the autofocus and hoping the shutter speed was right- I see no way to set it so back to the online manual I will go.

The camera has a lot of buttons that work together or separately, it appears. I just don't know how yet.

Using film again after a digital for so long took getting used to. There could be no deleting as I went. Every frame was precious again. There is maybe one decent picture on the roll I shot yesterday, which is ok. That ratio will get better as I learn the camera. I do intend to do some of the festival with film, I just was not wanting to do ALL of it.

blystock

this weekend was blystock. The fourth annual. It's the first one I've been to. It's waaaaaaaay out in the woods. It's a whole weekend of food, beer, live music and good times. They have mostly local musicians playing for all three days from sun up to whenever. It's dirty, dusty, there are portapotties but no water and people get shitfaced drunk but there are no fights. It's all kinds of people. It's dirty little kids with twelve toes pushing a toy dumptruck around the crowd for hours on end. It's stove-up people sitting on couches in the dust. It's walking around through clouds of sweet smoke. It's Oregon mountain boys and girls, in perpetually brown clothes with skoal rings in the pockets. Bikers, yokels, rednecks and hippies and Indians.

It's a rockin good time and I want to spend the weekend there for the next one.

i love the universe

last week, as I was driving out to Tulelake, I was designing flyers in my head. The one I was working on particularly was one I had intended to hang around school to offer proofreading services. Another one was something similar to give businesses who do a lot of print advertising. (note to Gibson Concrete- You can't just take Gibson Guitars' name logo and slap it on your 2 x 2 newspaper ad and call it yours). Then, when I came back home, I looked around online for what the going rate is for proofreading and copy editing. Liking what I saw, by the way.

Yesterday at the Third Thursday thing, the girl who is in charge of the company who is doing our web page for the blues festival asked me if I did any copy editing. Why yes, yes I do. I had sent our prez corrections for our page and she sent them on to get fixed. I also sort of lambasted the logo they designed, because in all honesty, it looks to me like someone raided their clip art file and has no idea about composition or using lines to draw one's eyes to the thing that you want to have the most attention. No skill with advertising art, basically. I have also sketched out three different designs for next year's festival because I'm so irrationally hostile to the one for this year.

So she has my number now and hopefully this will work out. I decided on a price and I think it's reasonable considering we're in a smaller place. I am officially burnt on the merchandizing thing.

Oh and the KF City Council has a member that is about to run headlong into our prez. This will be very amusing to watch.

check your hundreds

as you hand one over for a tank of gas...

No seriously there was an article in the Grants Pass paper about it, and in Weed today I was told one of the stores had gotten one yesterday. I guess they look like 100s but the watermark has Abe Lincoln's face on it. They didn't have it still :( I would have liked to have seen that.

whole fam dambly

and then smart half's mom is flying in at some point after July.

well, FINALLY! We've been here 12 years and family is coming to us for the first time.

We've made trips to Wyoming, Illinois, SoCal, Arizona to see them, and it's so nice to not have to make those arrangements this year. Especially since it wouldn't be as easy as paying a friend $100 to stay in the house. We'd have to board pewhead so he'd get his shots and all that.

I have to say that I do love traveling. I love traveling to go camping or something where there is no itinerary once we arrive at the destination. I don't love traveling somewhere and then being dragged all over the place seeing and doing things I'm not interested in. Like going to Reno and then being stuck in casinos the whole time.