tigertoy

It's OVFF time! If any of the three people who read this care, I will have EFRC calendars available as usual; if you tell me now you want one, I'll make a point of finding you at the con.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing lots of music, as many hugs as possible, and painful choices for the Pegasus awards!

I had two cool experiencse as I was driving home from EFRC today, both related to breathing.

( this is a bit long to force into your feeds )

Now I've played the CD I just got from Cheshire Moon.

Oh.
My.
God.

It is awesome. It's like Cheshire Moon except even better. If you didn't back the kickstarter, they probably have a few left :-) and you should definitely buy it. Or I'm sure you folks with technology from this millenium can find a place to buy it digitally.

A shout-out and thank you to bedlamhouse and Brenda for hosting their annual April housefilk. It was a wonderful evening with friends and there was some darn fine music.

Just a quick shout out to bedlamhouse and ladyat for hosting their annual spring housefilk. We had a nice sized circle and I got to sing a bunch of songs and hear many more. poltr1 joined us and showed off some electronic gadgets as well as his saxophones. quadrivium had her piano and played a few fine things, and added some magic to a few others. harperjen was there. min0taur was there briefly and gave us a couple of songs. Most of the others were locals who aren't AFAIK on LJ and whose names I mostly can't remember, but the music was fine. And the snacks were good, and Wesley served up a fine paella.

Music is a wonderful thing, and a good circle makes it even better. I hope I find some opportunity for more before October.

I went over to Indy today for s00j's concert.  Getting there was a bit of a pain.  First there was a bill I remembered I really needed to get in the mail, so I was a little late leaving.  Then, just before the Crawfordsville exit, traffic came to a complete stop and everyone who could was bailing out at the exit.  I decided to do so also and go through Crawfordsville rather than sit, but it ended up costing me another 15 or 20 minutes.  Then coming into Indy there was a really bogus work zone, (I'm a bit worried that I may have gotten a photo ticket), and then I had to get through construction on 38th street which can only be described with an 11 letter word that starts with C, ends with K, and might upset a few readers.  Thus my plan of being half an hour early turned into being a few minutes late, so I missed most of the intro, but I didn't miss any songs.  And I certainly wouldn't have wanted to miss any.  I didn't get the new album because they didn't have any, but by way of apology, we got to hear several songs even newer than the album.  I can get the album at OVFF.

When I got home (which involved less stress than getting there), I decided to take a night walk and admire the full moon and Jupiter.  It was just past local midnight, and when I was half a mile away from my house, it was all clear and I got the crazy notion to try to use my honkin' big telephoto lens as a telescope and find Jupiter's moons.  Unfortunately, by the time I got back to my house, clouds had rolled in.  There were a few breaks, but not many.  It was very pretty, but I didn't have the ambition to switch to a less extreme lens and figure out a good exposure.  I could easily see Jupiter as a disc and I think I saw one of the moons, but there was never enough of a gap in the clouds to set up a long exposure.  Maybe I'll be inspired to try it again and it will actually be clear.

Well, it was much too late when I started that, and I really didn't enjoy doing it, but I have new strings on my guitar, they seem to be holding their pitch well (for brand new strings), and the guitar sounds a lot better.  Of course I probably still won't sound very good because I've practiced so little.  And I hoped to be at least in bed by now, if not asleep.  But hopefully I will gain more in not feeling ashamed that I still had the same ancient strings than I lose from being up a bit later.  DucKon ho!

So, I'm back from my jaunt over to Indy for s00j's concert.  Hopefully I can write a few words about it without falling into the trap of sitting at the computer until 4 AM.

She was really on tonight, from the opening Alligator in the House, with schtick that only comes out in the live show.  The alligator as the guilt-tripping Jewish mother is something that simply has to be experienced.  And then she followed this with Wendy, which isn't usually a comedy number -- but tonight she was ad libbing some jokes and faces, for an audience that wanted them, and it was great.  Wendy holding off the pirates with the threat of "Don't make me get my wooden spoon" was even funnier than the alligator.  Far too few songs later, we got to the end and K joined her on stage for a priceless duet of Salad of Doom.  With the whole audience chanting DOOM-nom-nom.  To read this, it sounds like I'm saying that all the good parts were the comedy, and that's not the case -- but it's the comedy parts that are really different from the recorded version.  But Taglio and Manticore's Lullabye are beautiful on the records, and I know Were-Owl will be when the new album comes out.  But the schtick only comes with the live audience; if she did record it it wouldn't be that funny anyway.

It was also good to have a little conversation and a few hugs from the Wild Mercyites and the Indianapolis filkers.  min0taur is one of the wisest people I know, and if I could spend more time with him I could be saner and probably even more functional in life.  So a shout out to tollers for putting this show together!

In an effort to prove that I really am crazy, when I heard that s00j was doing a house concert at Casa Middleton in Waukegan today (Sunday, July 5, that is -- it's still "today" until I go to bed), at 2 PM, I decided that I would go, even though I had already bought my membership and made my hotel reservations for the aforementioned InConJunction.  I actually succeeded in my plan of getting up in time to be on the road at 11 AM EDT, which would have actually gotten me to the venue on time, except that I was so stupidly full of myself for knowing where I was going that I didn't actually consult the map.  I failed to recognize the area as I came to it, and roads that I was looking for by name were labeled only by route number, so I drove on by and spent at least an extra 20 minutes on my trip.  So I missed the first couple of songs.

I'm not going to try to recap the concert in detail.  I just want to say that, while I'd gotten enough of an impression of s00j at DucKon that I actually did this trip, I was completely blown away.  She was much more than I was expecting.  Amazing voice, great guitar accompaniment, wonderful stage presence and showmanship, and some songs that just reached right down into my soul.  I'm still riding in the afterglow of multiple musical orgasms.  Plus, I'm also aching from laughter.  I hope tollers won't take this the wrong way, but I only knew "Alligator in the House" from her.  When she does it, it's a fun little song, but with s00j's schtick, it's oh my god I think I'm going to die funny.  The Jewish mother alligator just has to be experienced to be believed.  However, that hilarity paled to insignificance compared to a number she did in the circle after the concert, "Don't Lick My Toes", in which the singer belabors in excruciating detail how that particular kink just does not work for her.  There was a line in there about how it felt like being flossed with warm liver.  I laughed very nearly as long and hard as I at DucKon for the Howl for Mayor McCheese.

Absolutely the only thing wrong with the concert was that it was too short.  But any more wonderful would probably have burned my brain out entirely, so maybe it's for the best.  Even though some people who had said they would be there weren't there, we had a good song circle after the concert.  I got to sing some of my moldy old crap filk classics that I don't believe s00j had heard before, starting with Chris Weber's "Beware of the Sentient Chili" in response to her song about the salad of doom.  I also got more hugs at the concert/party than I had at the con, and I got to snuggle exapno too.

EDIT: corrected the title of "Don't Lick My Toes" -- I plead lack of sleep when I originally posted.

As I have for the past several years, I headed up to Milwaukee this weekend for Irishfest.  I couldn't take time off work this year, so I had to leave Friday after work and come home today, which means I could only go Saturday.  This is usually OK; I've done it before.  But this year, it rained pretty much the whole day.  During the day, things went on mostly as normal, though the crowds were thin, but in the evening, they closed down most of the stages.  In particular, Leahy was rained out.  Our group spent most of the day at the Celtic Roots stage which had a tent.  Unfortunately, with the exception of Liz Carroll and John Doyle, who were of course awesome, I found the acts much less wonderful than the others in our group.  Liadan was not bad; they're technically good and sounded pleasant, but they didn't really grab me, and a couple of the other acts really struck me as trying to be Celine Dion rather than trying to be Irish.  The day had gotten started on the wrong foot when we were almost there and I realized I had failed to transfer my earplugs to something I brought with me.  We spent at least 20 minutes looking for a place where I could buy some while I sat there being mad at myself and feeling like my stupidity was hurting everyone else in the car, and it ended on a bad note when I walked all the way from the Celtic Roots stage at the north end of the park to the Pabst stage at the south end to find that it was dark, because while they'd told us that the Leinie's Rock Stage was closed, they hadn't mentioned that any of the others were.  So I walked all the way down the park in the cold, soggy rain, alone because nobody else wanted to hear Leahy anyway, and then turned around and walked back and listened to music I didn't like that the others seemed much happier with.  We wandered south to the Tipperary stage where a band called Scythian that seemed to me to be trying to be a fusion of Celtic with bad current club music.  They were loud (fortunately I had the earplugs), they were enthusiastic, their audience was drunk and happy, but while there were some pieces of what they were doing that were good, the whole package was awful.  As soon as the people in our party who'd bought things to eat or drink had finished them, we wandered on, past Gaelic Storm who were dreadfully loud but not that interesting to the Snug, where a group called Millish was playing the most interesting music of the evening to a crowd of perhaps 20 people.  They melded jazz and rock influences into some traditional Celtic stuff and then played some non-Irish stuff that was fun, including a medley of a whole bunch of Michael Jackson songs (instrumental only), and a set of extended solos by the low whistle player, the upright bass player, and the drummer while the fiddler tried to wring out his bow.  Each of the soloists demonstrated very impressive chops.  But we only got about half an hour of them before they were done for the night.

It was nice to see friends, and there was some good music, but if I'd realized how bad the weather would be I would have stayed home.