You've reached the LiveJournal of Rowan Lipkovits, renaissance man of letters about town. I don't maintain A Homepage (typically in its place leaving a link to a Google search of my unique name combination) (to say nothing of its frequent misspelled permutation), but this LJ most likely is the closest I get.

Someone asked me recently in the Fall of 2006) "what I do" (with that weighty implied subtext for a living), and I had to take a few moments to ponder my various cultural (mis-)adventures, literary and musical, through inception, promotion, production, and performance. Finally, I remarked that while I do a number of things, their sum never seemed to quite pay the rent¹. "Ah, then you must be an artist." I don't know about that, but I'm certainly no businessman.

First and foremost these days, consider me a musician. It's been a long and winding road that's delivered me back here (video games -> ANSI art on BBSes -> poetry slams -> event production -> Britney Spears on the accordion) but if you see me about town, there's a good chance I'm heading to a rehearsal or gig of a) the Joey Only Outlaw Band or b) Trev's "Good Rockin' Tonite" for the '80s at 8. (Truth be known, the majority of my performances are solo guerrilla mindbombs on the accordion, but how tacky does it look to be hyping yourself on your journal? Hey guys, you've gotta come visit my website! It's ... uh, oh, you're already at it. Never mind, then.) My performance adventures have taken me to well over a hundred stages across three countries, six provinces, one territory, two states and the District of Columbia, and I've also recorded and performed in a backup capacity with Sight Unseen, the Devils With Blue Dresses On, Leah Abramson, Shane Koyczan's Dangling Participle (with Jaren and Jess Hill -- what a dream team!), That's My Brain... And You're Killing It!, da Bjorkman, Monsterdinosaur, Adriane Lake, David Roy Parsons, Bobby Richards, Peppersprey, Gunshae (... and informally with dozens more.) One of my medium-term goals (of admittedly mixed value) is to become personally synonymous with accordion use in Vancouver -- a stiff row to hoe in the home turf of Geoff Berner! (First step accomplished: now one half of the proud team behind the weekly Accordion Noir radio show, 2-3 am 9:30-10:30 pm Fridays NOW 10-11 pm Wednesday nights! on CO-OP 102.7 fm (or at your leisure via podcast!) Update! Now also the host of the Main Squeeze monthly accordion circle 2nd Tuesdays 1st Thursdays at the Little Mountain Studios the Salt Spring Coffee Co. at Main + 27th also Spartacus Books!!) Please note, as of Jan 2011, I am now taking students to follow in my idiosyncratic accordion footsteps, about which more can be learned at the no-surprises url http://accordionteacher.blogspot.com

On the third Friday now Tuesday of every month I host(ed) the long-running unplugged "57 Varieties" open stage / variety show, 8-10 pm at Spartacus Books After a 5-year run, 57 Varieties is on hiatus. (In addition to my various roles at the Butchershop (I like the title "mascot"), I also enjoyed a long stint as performer coordinator for the Living Closet. I spent a spell helping to run the Vancouver Song Slam at Cafe Deux Soleils with Trevor Spilchen, was the Vancouver agent for the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, and also helped to produce Jeff Younger's Alternative Worlds series of improvised music. I had hopes to get together some like-minded people and do more, more, much more in 2007. But 2008 may just have to do.) ('09? Okay, '10 for sure!)
I write, have written and will write, for among other places the Capilano Courier, Terminal City, Momentum Magazine, the Columbia Journal, everything2, MobyGames, and BeyondRobson. It started with poems but thank goodness seems to have settled into the self-indulgent (vestiges of the poetry background) essay style known as "creative non-fiction." (Most recently up 06-02-12: dig my cover story on the B:C:Clettes in the Dec/Jan issue of Momentum 07-01: review of Reading the Riot Act in the Columbia Journal!) 07-04-12: a survey of homelessness as played in videogames up at the Cultural Gutter!) 07-05-31: a history of speedrunning, also at the Gutter! (more to come from there) (edit: -- or not!) 07-06: Piece on UNARC's Tipping Point potlucks in the Tooth and Dagger to complement my T.Paul obit the previous issue! Not quite at my goal of a published piece per month, but I have a good chunk of the year to try to even out that disparity. Two more pieces just sitting in the queue! (And, it seems, stubbornly stuck in that hopper. So much for that resolution!) Somehow clattering back into motion I snuck in the end of 2008 with a profile on Trike in the Dec edition of BC Musician magazine and you can find my memories on Rusl + Jane's bike wedding in the January 2009 edition of Momentum! And now in Jul/Aug 2010, you can find me penning a review of Joanna Chapman-Smith's "latest" album again in BC Musician, and then another review of Scotty Dunbar's double album in the Sept/Oct issue.

I rid(e) my bike most everywhere I can (2007-2008: that's a big fat lie), and in the interest of being reachable by anyone who might want to find me (why hide from opportunity?), have similarly (all right, not so similarly) strewn the internet with half-completed profiles and half-baked presences on as many sites as I can -- Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Friendster, Tribe.net, Orkut, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Last.fm, Nexopia, Tagged, Buzznet, Zaadz, Gazzag, hi5, Hyves, Bebo, Plaxo, CyWorld, FotoLog, Naymz, Tabber, Virb, the Impersonals, OKCupid, Upcoming.org, 43things, Deviantart, SITO... etc. The worryingly-named ex.plode.us seems to do a half-decent job of consolidating those furtive scatterings, if you're a lumper and not a splitter, or ProfileLinker or Mashable (or the equally-distressingly-titled Profilactic) if you prefer.

... and so, if you would like to, uh, connect to me in some fashion... please feel free to. (Stalkers... start your engines!) Historical nicknames include Cthulu, Pseudo_Intellectual, UnwashedMass, Rasputin and, well, a plethora of others. I was one of three charter members of the Work Less Party, and sit on the board (albeit nominally) of the Vancouver Poetry House! (mascot, again.)

(anything you need to know about this journal? the short answer is: heck no! It's all available to the public (this is what I mean by "extimacy") and you certainly don't need to justify your existence or qualify your appearance to me. You want to read what I have to say? Great: I want to talk to interested people.) (Doesn't hurt when they're interesting, too, but don't let your doubts hold you back -- I can judge that for myself well enough 8)

That'll have to do for now! (oh, "that's all")

(follow-up: the livejournal name and quote; then the potted bio explication.)

( Would you believe he's using footnotes now? )

In the meantime, we will comparison-test some flavours of free website traffic counters.

Greetings, mass snail mail for which my mother subscribed me without my authorization. I see that, like many stereotypes of older, less computer-literate people, you appear to be writing in all caps.
( it progresses )

Increasingly since December, the upstairs neighbours across our shared yard had demonstrated a growing propensity for developing into party people. What started as people who enjoyed making regular use of their balcony turned into daily aromatic 4:20 celebrations as Spring pawed at the door. They began throwing parties every weekend, culminating a couple of weeks ago in one where the windows were blacked out and floodlights installed in the back yard, with people coming and going at all hours of the day and night.

A recent visit from our mutual landlord recently set the story straight: the upstairs was apparently inhabited by film students. Their term project: shooting a short film taking place at a bitchin' party. (Work with what you've got!) The lead-up: practice parties, to gather material. (I gather they are students of The Method.) Even if an irate neighbour called the police to break them up, it would have provided great and realistic footage to add some drama to their piece of cinema verite.

The film shot, their project edited and submitted, their lease is up and they're moving out. But before they did, last weekend they threw their film's wrap party, the final holdouts still holding court on the patio (hilariously, judging from the cackling) during Pickles' first morning walk. Pre-production for a sequel?

Thanks for your support, everyone! The numbers came in and the Creaking Planks progressed to the 3rd round, down to the top 25 of 300. Next will come the top 10, and then ?three? popularity contest winners get to travel along with a half-dozen nepotism bands who never had to compete at all, about whom the less said perhaps the better.

The unusual interest and unexpected enthusiasm from our supporters is bittersweet in a sense; after all this time keeping the flame going now that it seems our favors are finally being called in for a big reward (admittedly, an exciting opportunity to play unpaid gigs for a week and then find our own way home out of pocket from halfway across the continent) but even as unexpected victory dangles near our hands I understand that should we somehow win, I can't in good faith partake in this payoff. My child should be only a couple of weeks old when the train departs and musicianing off like that, despite the circumstances of my initial courting of Jen, would be just a little too deadbeat-ly cliched. Her family already is scratching their heads over my efforts to recruit strangers into helping me get as far away from my newborn as possible.

Of course, we can't count on winning yet -- in a very real sense we are underdogs, albeit ones with a large membership and a very plugged-in fanbase. Abstractly it never occurred to me that I even might be going, just that I needed to string things along and try to take this contest as far as it could go, in hopes of raising general interest in and awareness of our ensemble (Facebook Insights report current interest in our activities is 100 times its average) in hopes that it might boost our exposure and yield further opportunities for us down the line even if we didn't win. (And, who knows: maybe the band can go without me.) So really, I can't go along if we win, but I can still campaign like hell! The link to click on, until noon PST Tues May 1st, is cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-4

On a whim, a month ago the relief (and what a relief she has been!) uke player in the Creaking Planks, devon8, entered our ensemble into a contest, with 300 other Canadian bands, to bring three musical acts across Canada by train to Toronto (with a few stops en route) and the NXNE festival. We snickered at the improbable chances and casually shared a couple of links across various social media, inviting people to vote for us. Last week, to our surprise we discovered that we'd risen to the top sixth of the pack, the most highly-voted 50 bands of 300, and made it into the second round of voting. Since then we've been hyping our chances extensively and I've been watching our Facebook group's "insights" like a high priest drunk on offerings, rising from a standard of "44 people reached" (when it's just me talking about our affairs there) to our new high-water mark of "2,398 people reached" (unbelievably achievable when, y'know, other band members also talk up our business a bit. We have a lot of members.)

To sweeten the promotion a bit and lessen the blow of being repetitively asked by me for votes every day, I came up with a whimsical daily series of creative photocollages showing the Creaking Planks' success (er, or lack thereof) in train-related ventures throughout history (which is why we need your help to do it right this time!), which you can currently enjoy up at creakingplanks.com

Also to stir up interest in Planking affairs we were able to rustle up a few videos of recent band performances, most interestingly a live soundtrack/sound effect foley number we did two weeks ago at the Rio Theatre on top of a silent, black and white 1928 Felix the Cat cartoon, which I will embed at the bottom of this post. It's rough, but I think we made a good choice and worked out some good ideas for it.

Anyhow, the second round of voting ends tomorrow, on Tuesday, at noon; supporters get one vote per round (per web browser, apparently) and so today approaches my last opportunity to hustle you kind LiveJournal readers for your vote of support to send me and my crew to make heads scratch in Toronto, which you can lodge at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3 ... actually you get to nominate three bands for the traveling honours, but I can hardly tell you who to spend your other two votes on. (You can find us down in the "T" section, for The Creaking Planks.)

If we're lucky, we'll make it to the top 25 in the third round, at which point our campaigning will grow a little more crazy and you'll no doubt be hearing about it. Thanks to everybody who has already supported us and please don't forget, even if you voted for us back in the first round, we can use your vote again in this, the second!

I'm not just randomly spamming you with stuff I came across, however, but rather I'm entrenching a few further online extrusions of myself.

a) So as to put myself in a better position to intercept potential paid accordion work if and when it comes up, I opened a little music portfolio site. It isn't yet touching on the elements of my repertoire that make me stand out from the crowd, but while my cover of Psycho Killer may win me top honors at the DiSCORDER Talent Show at the Astoria, I don't know if it'll land me that vaunted spot playing for pay at the Rhododendron Festival. My biggest kick was digging up choice excerpts from recordings I've played on. (Naturally, all of my bigger recording clients never cut me in on copies of the final product. But typically there I'm quite low in the mix anyhow 8)

b) I just made public my contribution to the Glorious Trainwrecks GDC Pirate Kart, an enormous compilation of over a thousand very hastily-assembled and poorly-considered sketchy game prototypes, demonstrated in a kiosk at that game conference in San Francisco last month. After getting up to speed with the Twine engine on the train ride back from Portland, I used it here to whimsically elaborate on an idea I'd once floated with my radio show co-host, of using a series of questions of dubious taxonomical value to determine what kind of instrument you have before you. To mix it up I plunged deep into sub-Borat broken English and imaginary Iron Curtain web design sensibilities, plus inserted a lethal cameo (hidden through Babelfishian retranslation) from the monstrous subject of everyone's favorite Czech folk song!

c) Because portions of our house are soon to be designated to store supplies for a new human being, I am liquidating the most expendable of my nerdy nostalgia stockpile. That being, the comic book collection -- or at least, those portions of it not essential to retain as reference material for side-by-side comparison with ANSI art conversions of their contents, at my someday exhibition you have heard me pontificate about so many times. But because I am an inveterate nerd with interests that would be well past boring for most human beings, before I give them up I am scanning all of the old video game ads from their pages... and am gradually posting their contents with commentary on a bizarre new blog.

Okay, we're back from Portland. Yes, as the howling mobs in the comments section of my last post noticed, I was talking around big news (after all, it would foolishly be to the detriment of my anniversary concert's promotion for me to overtly confuse the main message of the post.)

If you've seen Jen lately you don't need to be told; that said, most of you (who is "you"? Most of you are gone, old friends-I-signed-up-on-LJ-to-keep-up-with, but I can say: most of the remainder at least) are not seeing us anything near frequently. (And then many of you I will never meet at all! Plus my activity here has become so sporadic the name "Jen" may not have made much of an impact on my regular readers. Pish tosh, I must have mentioned her a dozen times since July '08, and I must have made barely a dozen posts in that time. A person you rarely see mentioning a name on a quarterly basis. Surely the significance must sink in, albeit perhaps subliminally.)

So anyhow, Jen and I are having a baby at the end of May. Nobody saw that one coming! Rowan, 2008, certainly didn't see that one coming. You never heard me say "I really want to be a dad someday", as to this chronic catastrophist setting any hopes higher than not being alone, forever, seemed perhaps an unrealistic aspiration that would only lead to disappointment. I have more explicitly come around to the idea of having a child, though I'd never seriously considered parenthood (typically shrugging and mouthing some poorly-considered platitudes about overpopulation) as I never expected to be in a position to responsibly contribute to the upbringing of another human being. It turns out that (as with many things, like being employed or knowing how to drive, that latter another new development hopefully in service of the former) if you don't explicitly plan to be in that position, you don't end up in it by accident. Fortunately, Jen doesn't need (would definitely LIKE, but not need) my act to be together in order to get the ball rolling (which is good, as fertility treatments in our 60s, when my act might finally start coming together, would probably be very costly).

(I don't think that overuse of parenthetical asides is a sign of anxiety, or else I've spent a lot more time chronically anxious than I'd ever imagined.)

Unlike many of my open-ended creative projects, this new one is on a fixed deadline, and many things need to get done and make way for the future, swelling more grandly with every passing day. I need to get rid of a lot of things -- paradoxically, things associated with the nostalgic memories of my childhood -- in order to clear the path for a new childhood to establish very different memories. I have a lot of learning to do, about meconium and colostrum and cord blood, about perineal massage and about breast pumps. (And that's just for the first week!)

Jen has been very studious about many of the bewildering and costly supplies required to rear an infant, but having navigated the morass of cloth diapers, strollers and car seats, in a nod toward equal shouldering of the burdens of getting up to speed, the breast pump decision has indeed been left to me, that I don't get an early lead on becoming the tragically clueless and alienated dude described in TV commercials and in momblog forums: an ignorant, indifferent incompetent. (Q: Who likes velcro fasteners on cloth diapers? A: Dads. Q: Who leaves the spoon in the peanut butter jar? A: Dads. Q: Who mixed up a shirt with a pair of pants and got trapped while getting dressed looking for the head hole? A: Your toddler, who picked it up from their Dad.) I hope the momblog forum denizens are prepared to discuss their lactation experiences with J. Random Dude, because I'm on the beat.

I think that I will be an attentive and supportive parent, and I think that my child will have fun with me. Even my pessimism can't tarnish that! Also, it equips me well for my upcoming role as a sleepless diaper launderer.

In conclusion: things are going to get real. (But I most likely still will play the accordion, so an occasional strain of surreality will still run through things.)

As you may recall, I am part of a band called the Creaking Planks. In the pages of this blog you have seen me join their ranks, produce, promote and perform in many of their concerts. So I can't say I wish I'd told you (and you can't say I didn't,) here is the poster to (at least) one more show -- our 7th anniversary show at the Railway Club, Wed Jan 18th with Prince George's singer-songwriter philosopher-king Raghu Lokanathan and accordion gospel diva Ana Bon-Bon visiting from London, England.

hexalyn has really gone beyond the pale in designing this poster, and hopefully we'll have it available as a button also (maybe magnets?) and, who knows, perhaps someday a t-shirt. Y'know, for all the cephalopod/aerophone enthusiasts out there. I know a few.

The author of the Creaking Planks' website (and gee, he sounds familiar) expounds at somewhat greater depth if you'd like to know more about this concert. (But it's not like I won't acknowledge questions asked in comments here!)

...

While she's still in shape to enjoy some travel, Jen and I will be visiting Portland, Oregon Feb 6-10, and this antiquated "push media" form may be the best way of giving you PDXers a heads-up. Our plans include visiting the Avalon nickel arcade, having supper with some family members, the City of Books naturally, interviewing an accordionist or three, intercepting such old friends as can be ensnared, and eating whatever vegetarian food we can find fried and sold out the back of a truck... which actually doesn't rule out that much in Portland. This'll be my first trip south on a train, which will be nicer than Greyhound but unfortunately means I can't get out to socialise with the wonderful people I know (you know who you are) in Bellingham and Seattle.

So Facebook won't auto-import LiveJournal posts anymore. Is this change in LJ's favour (a return to blessed privacy!) or against it (alack, a return to wretched obscurity!)

They're not fundamentally estranged; we can still of course manually plug in links to our posts to the wider audience, where desired, and I have seen services such as http://ifttt.com/ touted as doing that grunt work for you. That said, who's going to bother?

Veda Hille apologises about the maps -- in addition to singing about the (awesome) False Creek Flats, they were supposed to distribute a map of their former expanse. But if we leave our address at the table, they'll mail maps to us when they're ready. Some wag in the crowd yells out that he doesn't want to get signed up on a spam list, but Veda stresses that no, this one is only for maps. And it is a real, almost physical struggle to avoid further interrupting the performance to indicate an anagram two strangers have accidentally invoked.

In honour of the immortal but apparently indefinitely suspended @petermolydeux:

* Jen told me how dogs' sense of smell is difficult to even describe to nose-deaf humans, how when a dog continues to sniff at a tree whose endless nuances of three dogs' urine sprays must surely be exhausted by now, it's almost as though the dog is sniffing through /time/. So, how do you make a game design out of this? The player controls an abstract space explorer, crash-landed on a strange planet, captured and adopted as a "pet" by its strange alien captors... who keep it alive but fail to stimulate its intellectual faculties. On a daily basis, the protagonist is bound up in a harness and brought along on a promenade around one of several regular outdoors routes. Along these routes, the player can detect locations where other captives have left secret invisible encoded-only-for-captives messages. Each location bears the stories of several humans, each communicating several episodes in their lives. The player walks a thin line between trying to reveal as much of each message in the palimpsest as they can at every pass, but is only free to do so when the leash has slack in it... and reading them takes time, like searching furniture did in Impossible Mission. At every message "drop" location, the player has the option of revealing maybe all occurrences of a given letter in that message... the ultimate goal being to reveal enough of the contents of enough of the message at enough of the locations to be able to piece together enough information to successfully mount an escape attempt. (With sufficient compliance and collaboration with the captors' unintelligible expectations and demands, a player can eventually escape anyhow, but without the information, won't make it far.) Some domestic mini-games fill time between the outings, but they're the primary substance of the game. Maybe at the end the big reveal is that instead of Samus being a babe, the spaceman is Laika. I know that PETA has been developing games lately, but as Jen says, the fight against animal companionship is a particularly unpopular one.

* Chatting with an acquaintance about their first-time IF compo entry (placing third! well done! playable by all of you through your web browser), about a local IF meetup, and unrelatedly about DDR, and bandying about a text adventure game controlled through a DDR directional foot-pad. (Compass rose aptly accommodated by the directions, but what happens during those DDR occasions when it wants you to press UP /and/ DOWN simultaneously? (Deirdra supposed: XYZZY. Or that could work for pushing and popping your stack, as in Beyond the Tesseract...)

* Anyhow, that interface let me to imagine a simulator of a medieval victim of the punishment of being hung, drawn and quartered (at least, the last of those three), applying equal but opposite pressure in the directions the horses were pulling at a given moment. Ultimately players are ripped apart, but you can see how long you can hold out for high score purposes. (Reminds me of Orisinal's awesome rhino-pulling game Hold the Rope! ... but only thematically, not in gameplay.)

So, where was I? In my early '20s, I broke from my writerly bent to produce reams of depressing poetry because I concluded I did not need to so continuously celebrate my depression and constantly ferret out new nuances and subtleties in the art of feeling bad even about good things nearly all of the time. Instead I felt I'd put the poet's pen aside in favour of flexing a different muscle, a musical one (what is the most musical muscle? you in the back... don't answer that), hearkening back to the start of my piano lessons at age 3 (my parents claimed I'd been trying to hammer out Vangelis' Chariots of Fire theme song on the keyboard) well before the Mistigris days of high school and its associated techno-fetishism and false intimacy. The rapport between a musician, their instrument and some other person's musical composition was just the recipe for low-level creative activity without my ego needing to take centre stage; playing music my inability to introduce a wry and sardonic twist to any pleasant scenario was immaterial and I was happy to take other, perhaps more stable and balanced people, at their face value. (Instead I got to indulge the impish and perverse thrill of wrenching something musical out of its proper musical context and presenting it in a novel setting.)

Glancing lightly over a few years then, I heard Geoff Berner, was inspired to pick up an accordion in his wake and apply my atrophied keyboard and theory talents, and had a fortuitous crossing of paths at the anarchist bookstore: an accordion enthusiast who needed a second to back his bid for a squeezebox radio show, playing everything that you didn't expect to hear. How could I not support it? The show's mandate was nothing less than the history and present day fate of all music that you don't hear on the radio! By accident, we found a podcast listenership; then, to indulge my instinctive need to foster community, we mounted the monthly squeezebox circle gatherings. Finally, my mentor Geoff told us that the time was ripe to start a festival; he would put our name on one of his concerts and we'd get a ball rolling that would lead to a future of wonderful strange musical performances and grant money somewhere down the line. Well, we haven't quite figured that last one out yet, but the wonderful strange musical performances are back.

Every time I start a tweet (@UnwashedMass) or a Facebook post, I ask myself why I'm not making a LiveJournal post. Here, what I write stays up for everyone to read at their own pace; it's easy to search (sure, I like to believe that my every casual remark will be of interest to long-tail Google flaneurs years from now! because of its subject or turn of phrase if not necessarily because of its fascinating utterer), while there if you blink you miss it. Posts here are like books in the library you can check out when you want to, while status updates are like bloopers on radio or TV which are aired once and never seen again. I tell myself I do it "there" because more people will see it, but of course the only ones who see it there are the ones chained to their screens watching what flows by on the river... also a specious line of reasoning due to the fact that, as I have noted, what I post here also gets syndicated there; it doesn't have to be an either/or situation.

Nonetheless, I'm not saying much here (or there, for that matter.) I'm conducting lots of terse correspondence in a businesslike fashion, but not much is being said there either except for Where, When and How? As a recent culmination of Getting Organized and consolidating some five or six e-mail addresses, I built a searchable master archive using a local mail reader (Thunderbird), putting at my fingertips nearly every piece of e-mail I've written since, say, 2001. (Mail to my old addresses pseudo_intellect@hotmail.com, alone@positive-thinking.org, rowan@butchershop.ca and of course the old Infomatch and Blaze addresses aren't included, but this still covers the lion's share.) E-mail correspondence as a communications medium is in decline; generationally, there are plenty of people online now who never use e-mail for anything other than registering for sites, and soon those sites will register through Facebook, Twitter, Google or other OpenID identification credentials instead. That said, from the looks of things, I'm sending a lot more e-mail than I did back in the day... but everything I send today is just a matter of terse Where When Howing, a perhaps crass matter of Getting Things Done instead of my old late-night sprees of Thinking Out Loud, where I would be reminded of related things, ponder philosophical conundrums, keep up with people's lives and emotional landscapes generally and liberally pepper it all with my strange sense of humour, wordplay and irresistible obscure reference-dropping first. These posts here are the end of the line for that kind of extemporizing, and as I keep noting, they only happen once in a blue moon. I miss Being That Guy, but where did I ever find the time? (Admittedly I didn't; even as an unemployed dropout, there were never enough hours in the day for me to get everything off my chest.)

The people I was conversing with at great length in 2001, 2003, and 2005 were and remain very important to me, but almost without exception have drifted out of my life as surely as the very medium of our interaction (much as with web forums or IRC chat channels) has drifted away into irrelevance. (That's a bit of projecting; I need to own a bigger share of responsibility for the drifting, as I was always a tardy respondent; it's just that eventually I got so late I reached The Point Of No Reply; not only does this e-mail address no longer reach this person -- having graduated from that school or changed their last name after the marriage I wasn't in the loop about -- but they no longer even use e-mail.)

So, huh, got that off my chest. Is what's up in Rowan-land really Rowan thinking about resuming suspended conversations from literally a decade ago with people whose whereabouts he's no longer conversant with? Well, yes, but not really. The weight of nostalgia has always crushed me, especially in regards to instantly obsolete technological matters, but always I keep pressing forward with new projects, however backward-looking. My latest endeavour, the accordion festival, about which I will go into great detail in the post immediately following, both represents my biggest and most successful project arguably ever, arrived at almost by accident, and also is just about my only passionate project that hasn't been on some level a conscious attempt to re-create the messy creative milieu I inadvertently fell head-first into in high school (with Mistigris, TABNet and Concrete inspiring my work with the Living Closet, which drove me to the board of the Butchershop Gallery, whose last lingering huzzah was the final gasp of the 57 Varieties open stage series at the end of its 5-year run sometime in '09. It's really been just about that contiguous, save for a couple gaps of a year or so between them where I was totally adrift and miserable. Deprive me of my projects and I just don't know what to do with myself!)

So huh, now that I've cleared away those obligatory cobwebs that cloud the blog-posting window every time I remember it exists and open it up, I'll write you a new post about what's up, yo.

(Oh no wait, I remember now, this post was going to be about how, despite how tweet-syndication to LJ enrages me, I was considering making digest posts of them here plus additional context which Twitter maddeningly inhibits. But it turns out I don't need to annotate my remarks in order to extemporize; I threw myself from my own conversational track my verbal floodgates are so backed up!)

Congratulations to Gerry Hummel - Winner of the "What Will Rowan Look Like Without His Hair" Contest

For those of you who were at the 2010 ArtsWells Festival, you may recall the "Great 2010 Beard Off," where a very bearded Rowan Lipkovitz, agreed to shave his face to raise money for the festival. Thanks to Rowan we raised close to $1000! In addition to this fundraiser, ArtsWells ran a contest to see who could draw the best rendition of Rowan without his hair. Gerry Hummel of Kitimat, BC was the winner and will recieve 2 weekend passes to the 2011 ArtsWells Festival. Thank you to all the entrants to the contest.

I'm currently baking a loaf of banana bread, a simple activity that was once entirely commonplace and now feels like a routine from a different lifetime. Another extinguished activity: writing to LiveJournal! I've been working on a "what we've missed since the last post of substance" epic catch-up photo-essay, but as that piece begins with the 2010 ArtsWells benefit concert I presented last Spring and it's now been a couple of weeks since I hosted the 2011 AW benefit concert, I'm only making Achilles-and-the-tortoise progress in my sporadic updates-to-its-updates. Maybe I will eventually share it, but I can no longer let it logjam my tenuous bottleneck here.

I want to elaborate upon many things! To wit:

• Why don't I regularly bake banana bread anymore? Back in the day I'd always have a loaf to share at any Butchershop meeting, to keep spirits and blood sugar high, but back then I also lived in the grocery cachement area of Famous Foods, land of regular access to near-free black baking bananas. Now I live near Wall Street (waterfront, not financial district) and though Donald's is a perfectly respectable grocery store, the black bananas are not as forthwith. Also, my upscale living arrangements now preclude the stockpiling of dozens of frozen black bananas like so many rounds of potassium ammunition.)
• Why don't I write on LJ anymore? No conscious rejection -- my stalled mega-post praised the enormous response, both natively on the allegedly defunct LJ and also exported to Facebook, to my career prospects exploration post -- I've just been a very busy man, schedularly, and lacking the calm and centered focus needed to prosaically wander the paths of my experiences and reflect upon where they have led me. All I would have been writing for months would have been posts that look like "Holy spit, why didn't anyone tell me that investing my '20s in arts organizing would leave me with a totally toxic CV rendering me ineligible for any entry-level position, anywhere?" What little writing I can squeeze out in the brief and intense moments of concentration have been populating the blog at creakingplanks.com , where I have been playing many exciting shows (Jason Webley! the band's 6th anniversary!) that I've totally been failing to tell you about (likely because I concluded that you were indifferent at best and unlikely to attend 8)... also I occasionally (though output has fallen dramatically) write up old or intriguing computer games at MobyGames still (in brief: pls keep an eye on the activist games of Molleindustria and Jonas Kyratzes) and most humorously have been trying to boil down my sprawling essays of weak soup to tweets of strong stock. Sadly, the self-indulgent writing style I ardently cultivated often interferes with my managing to express even one complete thought phrased in the approved allotment of characters. I like words a lot, but when confronted with the minimalist constraints of postcard fiction, learned to write smaller (and, eventually, gave myself scrivener's palsy). I just can't think small enough for bite-sizes; my ideas are full of particulars and examples.

I had a lengthy and long-overdue blog post in the works (My Busy Summer, or Why I Am Currently Unrecognizable) but circumstances being what they are, I'm going to leapfrog my originally intended sequence and give the burning issues priority. To wit: I'm a pleasant fellow who's lived to his early '30s with a very colourful CV full of whimsical volunteer experience, but who now needs to orient himself imminently toward the first regular day job of his life -- a task for which my years of writing poetry and playing accordion haven't left me the best equipped. But the money is about to run out and there is no doubt that I need to line up another vine to swing on to -- BEFORE I reach the end of this one, ideally. I've now applied for more jobs this year than in my whole life prior, but that's not really saying that much.

I know that there's potentially a happy side line to be made marketing and manufacturing merchandise for my band and radio show, especially once I get my dual-citizenship paperwork in order, and that's one I'll be glad to investigate in my spare time (right before "open an etsy store and deal vintage garage sale finds to collectors") once I have a regular way to ensure that the bills get paid lined up. Ditto for "accordion instructor", a fate that this self-taught player has been struggling mightily to avoid almost as vigorously as "busker who serenades the Roxy lineup with Britney Spears". Certainly I put on plenty of shows that some people come to and that a few even spend money at, but even after a decade, on average, I'd be paying myself far less than minimum wage to make them happen when I actually get paid at all. (By outsourcing some of the time-sinks -- hello, postering! -- and getting serious about selling alcohol (by getting my Serving It Right certification), there might be a future for this activity. But worryingly, I can no longer afford to do anything that's not a big success.) (Learning how to operate A/V equipment competently I see more as a money-saving skill than a money-making one, but maybe I'm thinking too small. Conversely, soon I will be learning a lot about writing grant applications -- but I need work, not lottery tickets.)

I've long had basic computer skills down like the back of my hand -- a whirlwind typing speed and enough familiarity with how things work to at least work as a temp in an office, if not to write and sell computer programs. That's likely my best short-term avenue to explore, though my mail merge and spreadsheet knowledge will need to be updated.

I've been told that what I need is a job, as I already have a career -- just a very poorly-paying career. But a series of odd jobs is just a stopgap measure (and here comes the gap, so do feel free to suggest away to this oddball: I can't drive yet, but I'm working on it), and after each one I'll have no clearer a course than I do now. So I petition the jury of my peers and ask for advice or suggestions toward some profession, field, or trade in which to seek training and, eventually, regular work. My parents always thought that I should finish my bachelor's degree (wouldn't they, though?) and get a teaching certification; Dominique on the other hand said that a plumber will never want for work (as with, apparently, a train engineer -- who must be prepared to pilot thousands of tons of metal to any corner of the country at a moment's notice.) Brooke thought that I might find what I'm looking for in the back of a warehouse and she might well be right. My passions haven't thus far directed me to anything that will come close to paying the bills (someone is getting paid to write about video games, but it ain't me -- meanwhile, the only way to be supported by traveling musicians in Western Canada is to own a gas station) and so I'm shaking down the respected brain trust for hot tips and words of wisdom -- what worked for you (and might for me) and missteps to avoid.

Cutting corners and scrimping, my traditional mainstays, will only forestall the inevitable, nor do I really have the option of relocating to a more inexpensive place (like, har, the notoriously affordable San Francisco). My ears are open. No reasonable suggestion will be ignored. (You in the back, with the "songwriter" sign -- I said reasonable!)

A camp on Bowen Island for blind children, performing a set of songs engaging the camp's theme for the week: cryptozoology. Having satisfied both the vampire and werewolf camps, I realise that I've arrived at Margaret Atwood's fabulous Frankenstein song. "Ah, Frankenstein," I begin, "a man made from the parts of other dead men, brought to life with lightning." A child's voice sounds out from the back of the room, weighing in with a reflex response impossible to stifle: "That's AWESOME!"

The Laughing Fool kindly is offering to host a BBQ to put our brains together and address some of the problems facing the textmode art exhibition (ie location, promotion, fundraising, obtaining old hardware and addressing their power requirements, other stuff I didn't expect.)

I'm back home (briefly) on July 25th; I vaguely recall (damn you unloggable Facebook chat!) he's offered to host us on the 26th or 27th; that latter works best for me. Folks (including I imagine Woody, Jocelyn, Gordon, Travis, Chris, plus the silent masses gawking at this scheme like rubberneckers at a car accident) ought to weigh in if one date works better than the next.

(One more for the "I'm getting old" file.)

Before my sister departed she advised my parents to monitor the online activities of my end-of-primary-school nephew, using the internet to fuel his two totally appropriate little boy interests: researching easter eggs in his PlayStation 2 games and new origami folds. My parents take the advice with a grain of salt, seeing how well I turned out after adopting the 'net as a nanny, but sitting adjacent to the computer at the other end of the dining table from them I get a more distinct earful of what my nephew is tangentially unearthing.

You might think that the narration in an internet video of someone trying to replicate an exploit in Ratchet & Clank would sound something like: "Now, I run under the guy... get the pie... up, over the pipe, and -- ouch! he got me! Now, land this jump, or... well, we'll try that one again." Actually it goes more along the lines of: "Shit. Fuck. FUCK! Shit. Shit. SHIIIIIT. EAT A DICK, ASSHOLE!" Berlitz language instruction: Xbox Live-ese.

Fortunately there is a more civilized passtime the little boy is also enamoured with, the folding of paper into elaborate and ornamental shapes. Loading up an eight-minute video (elaborate folds! Some instructional videos are multi-part, exceeding the maximum length YouTube supports!) I am tickled to hear aggressive rap music accompanying the depictions of clean folds. I imagine urban hoods calmly reproducing flapping cranes from squares of paper between drive-bys, then writing songs about their achievements in topography.

Sadly, 50 Cent is not rapping on any subject apropos of the activity at hand:

Now who you know besides me who write lines and squeeze nines
And have hoes in the hood sniffin on white lines
You don't want me to be your kid's role model
I'll teach them how to buck them 380s and load up them hollows