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), 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, b) the Creaking Planks, or c) 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 at least a hundred stages across five provinces, 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 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!!)

On the third Friday now Tuesday of every month I host the long-running unplugged "57 Varieties" open stage / variety show, 8-10 pm at Spartacus Books. (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.)
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!

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.

Where did the notes go, however? That is an entirely different matter. Somewhere along the line I've picked up the bad habit of setting something down in a preliminary or vestigial form, satisfying the part of my brain that nags me -- see, I've started! -- and then it never gets done, forgotten in the drafts folder or lost in a power outage or cleaned up with the scrap paper. I don't think I ever got around to sharing my dilemma about (Butchershop) Forbes' invitation for me to play accordion for an opera on a boat-theatre in the eastern Mediterranean for six months (for pretty close to literally peanuts, but with opportunities for professional development pretty much unobtainable in any other way.) While I couldn't believe that I would ever find myself in a position to decline such an opportunity, I ended up doing just that. Living with a bunch of hippies belowdecks sounded a bit too much like Burning Man with extra claustrophobia for months and months to me. (And yes, I might love Burning Man, but I've long since ignorantly decided that it's too much a gamble -- an unprecedented opportunity to spend lots of money I can't really afford to spend to have a really lousy time.) The funniest part of the story to me was my recently retired mother's reaction -- rather than side with the security and comfort I'd assume would be the conservative advice from the elder cohort, she was aghast at my failure to take up the opportunity for free travel (her self-proclaimed one big vice, now retired her life consists of impatiently crossing the days off her calendar waiting for her next big trip.)

So scooting back up to recent events, phenomenal composer Andy Fielding (who played a set at our Accordion Noir festival launch party and delivered a gangbuster workshop the next day) tried to sneak out of the most recent installment of the Vancouver Squeezebox Circle (first Thursday of most months!) without sharing his new composition, simply entitled "Accordion Noir". We said we'd have to use it as the radio show / podcast's theme song, something I've long since had a hankering for (I took a crack at it nearly two years ago, adapting a pretty much perfect poem by Robert Service (however over-long) but it didn't really stick.) We mentioned how with a theme song we could live up to our onetime aspirations of challenging guests to do their own versions of the theme song and maybe have versions of the song performed in different styles depending on periodic theme episodes -- like how Jurgen Gothe's old CBC mainstay DiscDrive would cycle through different takes on Jean-Philippe Rameau's Baroque "La Fanfarinette" done in different musical styles (a onetime aspiration of mine in the MiSTiGRiS days was to get a .MOD-tracked version of the song played on the show -- if that ain't legitimacy and acceptance, what would be? But nobody took it on, and that whole verdant school of electronic music died on the vine.) Oh, exclaimed Andy, I did the ragtime piano version! Once again we underestimated the hugeness of the talents who've chosen to work in our circles.

...

This is all just preliminary warm-ups for my brain and fingers. Actually what I'm here to write about (and which, if I had any sense, I would put into a separate post) is a concert I'm hosting this Saturday night -- not a show I've set up for myself and want you to come see me play at (though one of the acts has requested I back them up and it's not unlikely another may draw on me) but something more like the old Butchershop days, where an interesting and meritorious opportunity passes through town and will fail to pop unless someone designs a poster and engages a venue. Yeah, I may as well be that popper.

( Here's that poster. )

Raghu Lokanathan! Remember that name. While accidentally stumbling across his touring schedule while looking for something else entirely, I noticed that he'd scheduled two shows in my area without actually having anything going on here. But he is the kind of guy I will make a show happen for just to get to see him play; not only are the Planks his favorite band but he's our favorite songwriter (sorry, Al -- you win the lyrics prize hands down, but Raghu has a knack for getting the whole package together.) You can get an earful -- here -- and as a bonus you also get Jenny Ritter of Victoria's charming charming The Gruff as well as Sault Ste. Marie's The Wild Turkeys (playing a show the previous, Friday, night at Cafe Deux Soleils with the aforementioned Gruff.)

It all came together at somewhat short notice (under two weeks), so we have the unconventional venue of Our Town Cafe at 245 E Broadway (at Kingsway -- still happily uncharred after today's conflagration) along with somewhat unconventional Saturday Night Show terms -- 7:30-10:30 pm, by donation! I don't think I can help these folks fill their pocketbooks, but at the least I aim to give them a full room to let their tunes wash over, and if you all end up compelled to buy their albums, everybody wins. I posted about it previously on the vancouverarts community, but I figured I might have a better chance of reaching more locals (and, apologies, plenty more foreigners) if I shared the news redundantly here. And heck, I dropped a couple of crumbs about how my own life has been going these, uh, past nine months! I'm not intentionally fled -- not eschewing LJ for Facebook, since this can still feed that while reaching yet others: it's not necessarily an either/or situation. (As for Twitter... just imagine me trying to boil this post down to 140 characters?)

Hope you're all doing well... I would go on at still further great length but I'm considering trying to dust off the old 57 Varieties / Living Closet e-mail list and let those good people know about this great show, also. Then I've got to haul ass to UBC to play with the Creaking Planks on Live From Thunderbird Radio Hell tonight from 10-11 pm on CiTR 101.9 fm! (Really, this is all you've been missing: the endless accounts of setting up gigs, playing them and recovering from them.)

Previously I'd made some enigmatic reference to testing a cross-promotional mass-posting service -- jack of all social network databases, master of none, I could never be arsed to figure out Twitter-ese, and re-writing the same announcements to suit the particular pecadillos of Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Tribe and Facebook was getting old, fast. So in an attempt to save time and consolidate, as I did with my instant messaging accounts under Trillian, I slowly began adopting the cross-platform announcer over at Ping.fm. What that amounts to is occasionally flipping the settings incorrectly and automatically cross-posting a micro-blog post (suitable for status updates) here, on what ought to be all means be a macro-blog service -- sending out little blipvert missives that by all rights ought to be in my LJ post subject lines rather than as the body of the text.

So, skip to the next paragraph. (I like to exhaustively explain myself here even when my explanation is of no interest to anybody, and even sometimes when the actual explanation is incomprehensible. It helps me to make sense of my history in retrospect... not that these are halls I take long strolls down on a regular basis.) The show in question was just about the best possible show it could have been, with pros including Raghu's very existence and the Creaking Planks getting to join him (and Christina on cello!) for three songs (listen to all you can find and then go out and find more!), tempered with cons including a very brief Outlaw Band headlining set on account of a makeshift PA (on account of an AWOL soundman c/o Cafe Deux Soleils on this particular occasion.)

No more big business for the CPs until mid-September, when we headline the opening party for the 2nd annual Accordion Noir Festival (which you will assuredly be hearing more about here) Friday Sept 11th with a heaping helping of Vancouver's finest box-squeezers at Cafe Montmartre, priming the palate for the following day of workshops, accordion films (fingers crossed) and headlining sets from Story (Halifax), local accordion golden boy Geoff Berner and the man I once described (among other glosses) as sounding like a Unitarian youth camp counsellor bitten by Tom Waits on the night of a full moon, Washington's Jason Webley... at the WISE Hall Sat Sept 12th. Then we lay low (read: then I'll be out of town) until our In the House living-room concert Oct 5th with some further squeezebox ensembles.

But I do have a happy recent musical announcement that isn't much apropos of any concerts for your calendar this month: Adriane Lake released Morning Glow this month! Perhaps referenced in earlier posts by her old Transient Lunacy-era TABNet nicknames Adri or Voi the Analogue Cat, this wayback neighbor recruited me to contribute some accordion licks to an exciting recording back in what must have been the spring of 2007. Having been advised that the market for her "I can't believe it's not Satie" piano compositions was marginal, she decided to get all Tomita on their ass with a room full of electronic gear but, finding a certain organic element lacking on some lead lines despite Herculean efforts on the knobs and dials, drafted me to squeeze a little on an aquatic track entitled "Jacques Cousteau". We leaked it on to our radio show in 2007, then 2008 went by without a blip and who knew if it wouldn't be buried forever? I'm glad to say it is now audible to the general population. (For my part, I was well compensated -- after the squeeze session I helped Adri clean her closet by taking a little accordion home.) (Later, I also inherited a used-by-EuphoniX drum machine and boxes of Amiga equipment, software and manuals I haven't yet entirely figured out what to do with... but that's another story.)

In the meantime, since most of this is recording news I never really shared with anyone, I had another meeting with the Rave On Studios folks I donated Never Give A Puppy For Christmas to (after composing it on the Greyhound ride back from Garann's silent-movie wedding, for which I was paid in the form of a recently-unpacked haunted mask from Bali) and contributed an accordion part to "Somehow Somebody Sometime" off of Richards & Fitch's 2007 album A Couple Of F Holes.

I took up a few improvisational invitations by the Art of Beatz people who were so tickled to find the freshman accordion radio show being the only thing so niche and underground that it followed the experimental electronic music on the Co-op program schedule at 2 in the morning. Eve and Kuma incorporated a couple of my squeezings on to tracks on Gunshae's 2008 recording, Traveling Without Memory, which I found awaiting me upon a return from last year's touring, reminding me of our improbable set at Shindig! in 2007 -- previewed by the Douglas College newspaper as Gunshae is an experimental ambient band, which is basically slang for “won't win at Shindig". I wonder how they even got on to the bill in the first place!

More recently (this year, even), I was drawn upon to bust a furious solo in an Eastern European idiom on "Georgina" by the Red Hot Icicles On Fire after meeting its principals at an art gallery fundraiser at the ANZA Club where we were both on the bill. That particular project's outcome remains unclear... as Jacques Cousteau's did only weeks ago!

Most recently (and accidentally omitted from the first draft of this post), hsifyppah invited me to tfabris' diabolical and haunted lair of mad acoustical science in order to contribute accordion parts on two of her songs, Lost Moon and Mad Science Café, on the album Steel Cage Match immortalising the late, great filk duo of Brooke & John... now available!

This is all just second banana of course to the Creaking Planks finally coughing up "Flogged Round the Fleet", recorded back in March 08 following a week in Quesnel recording Joey Only's Anarchist Mountain EP... and when I say following, I mean "immediately upon concluding a sleepless 10 hour red-eye Greyhound ride from Quesnel whose first 90 minutes had no free seats, walking up Main from the bus station at Terminal to Video In and recording". As a result, our live show has since overtaken and lapped the effort here committed to aluminum, but it remains pretty much our best document of what we do... which can sometimes be difficult to explain even with the new "jug band of the damned" tagline. We're clearing rights for the cover songs before reproducing on any kind of mass scale, but in the meantime we've got some very handsome prototypes together in etched-metal tins guaranteed to not fit on your CD shelf (but great for storing cigarillos, as we are always reminded), including collectible stickers and a booklet lavishly illustrated by Planks pal and frustrated animator Peter Guindon, author of "Sandwich Artist", "Bohemian Resume" and "Man Cougar". Not yet found in stores, you might have luck inquiring directly to a Plank at a show with a $20 bill in your hand.

Bonus! While I'm discussing recordings, here's a highlights clip (free! for one week, to the first 100 downloaders) from my stint substitute-hosting at Wax Poetic (into No Apologies Necessary) with Outlaw Band drummer Kenan last Wednesday ... I read some poems (even one original, that somewhat muddled potato one I mentioned recently) and later get some beatbox accompaniment to the Beastie Boys medley!

Bonus bonus! The week after, the hosts were back and had Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band as their guest. It's a slice, so I threw it up here also. (Same limited conditions apply!)

Playing tonight at Cafe Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial) with the Creaking Planks and Joey Only Outlaw Band with Raghu Lokanathan opening!

Back in the day we enjoyed a chance encounter and I dutifully enshrined it in my daylog. Circumstances being what they are, regretfully, it looks like I likely won't be logging any future interactions with him. As at Lynn's passing at the turn of the century, the upsetting news didn't seem to come as a great surprise to me -- maybe some people seem so tenuously grounded in this world that forces are almost visible pressing around them, trying at all times to squeeze them out like a watermelon pip. They can only ignore the siren's call so many times.

We were never close, so I won't wax on at much greater length than I did when my aunt, uncle and cousin died, which still wasn't much. Mostly hearing his name on everyone's lips reminds me of our intersections -- the opening anecdote, and peeling the onion layers back, my poem inspired by his roommate (the anecdote is out-of-date; I did end up seeing her again twice, once at the Sugar Refinery and much more recently at a house(warming?) party he hosted three or four years back... not even recognizing her on either occasion! Infatuation can be such a fragile spark...) the night I met him at Bluck's housewarming on Kitchener. (A more genuine poet, I like to think, would take advantage of the occasion to eulogize or take commemorative stock rather than to exhume long-forgotten work about someone else. But it is a poem of sincere relief and gratitude, and he played a role however slight in it, and so certainly there are worse ways to be remembered.)

...

And while I'm celebrating things that are pleasant but irrelevant, 100% of our inaugural preserving expedition seems to have sealed effectively. In six months I will probably start asking for suggestions on what to do with canned apricots, joining our frozen raspberries, blueberries and U-pick strawberries. Too bad I fouled the freezer's previous contents of rhubarb and spinach while recording voice-overs for my pre-recorded vinyl-only accordion radio show episode! (How? By unplugging the freezer to eliminate hum and then daftly forgetting to plug it back in when done at daybreak... on the first day of the Planks tour!)

Lumping in a couple of Outlaw Band shows to the Island (the band room at the Nanaimo Cambie once wallpapered in male genitalia, an entire lower male torso drawn around the showerhead), a visit or two to Yolandivar's pre-Cedarton farm (pre-Rufoustan would be ... before 2002!?!), my trip to Saturna with Dominique and my cursed 2007 Valentine's Day visit to Victoria in order to purchase my bitter-medicine accordion mics before playing a show that night and leaving on tour with the Outlaw Band the following day for two weeks on the road, and maybe even the turbulent UVic TABmeet... it's all outweighed by the Planks' "Flogged Round the Fleet" tour (which will someday garner its own entry -- in the meantime, all I have to say is "whaddaya mean you have to go back from Nanaimo to Horseshoe Bay in order to get to Gibsons?!), immediately followed by joining Jen at steel guitar whiz kid Tim Tweedale's (much appreciating superjill's old rockstar uke) much-musical (and temporarily sans-electricity) birthday weekend celebration extravaganza on Galiano with Headwater, Corbin Murdoch, Sarah Macdougall, my sister's dog Fargo and an entire army of mosquitoes, immediately followed by three "why not?" days of impromptu Jen accompaniment to a HEU workshop back in Victoria.

Between those sessions I enjoyed about enough time at home to do a load of laundry before plunging right back into the next round... now I'm back for slightly longer (but not by much -- leaving Wed morning for Quesnel, to play, host and help at Billy Barker Days, returning on the 20th. Barry, the great sound engineer of the Cariboo, enjoyed my musical time-killing while recording the Outlaw Band immediately prior to the Flogged Round the Fleet session (literally -- got a ride from the Quesnel studio to the Greyhound terminal at 10 to 1 am, boarded the bus, 10 hours later disembarked at Main & Terminal, walked up to Video In and started recording with Emme... the sacrifices one makes for free studio time!) so much that he invited me to come up and somehow, against all odds, I was able to get my act together sufficiently to actually do so. Now I have just enough of an opening to put some affairs to bed before gathering my materials for a grander time out for a longer span, further from home.

But first: Victoria! My plans fell through in the specifics but the hopes were generally met: one of the two open mics I wanted to hit (Pluto's) was discontinued for the summer, the other (Ocean Island) I turned up too late for sign-up, and my intention of visiting the Island accordion mecca Tempo Trend one week after their accordion festival was stymied somewhat by the principals having packed up and decamped to KIOTAC, as I would have realised they must had I stopped to think about it for a minute. So instead of dropping off dozens of our new Accordion Noir stickers and presale tickets to the 2nd annual Accordion Noir festival of squeeze (workshops and mainstage Sept 12th at the WISE Hall, feat. Story (Halifax), Geoff Berner and Jason Webley (Seattle)!) I just had a fun chat with the remaining clerk, the guitars-and-drums guy (ironically from Germany, marveling how he had left Bavaria, the centre of the traditional oompah accordion world, traveled halfway across the planet and touched down in a situation virtually indistinguishable from the context he had left behind.)

But it wasn't all disappointment: magpieulysses made an awesome dining recommendation of the Lotus Pond, the closest I may ever come to revisiting Vancouver's legendary Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurant (half-off during the last half-hour of their lunch buffet starting at 2:30 pm, when the room fills with bike couriers and assorted vegan hipster punx), so delectable I was back for supper three hours later. And while Jen was working, I beat a patient path on foot to all the used bookstores and thrift stores within an unreasonable walking distance (90 minute walk) from our hotel, seeing if my trifecta of esoteric interests (gamebooks -- think Choose-Your-Own-Adventure early hypertext, old video games (and game novelizations) and accordion paraphernalia) could be satisfied by their contents. I only found two or three volumes of accordion sheet music (additions to the squeezebox circle learner's library), but hit the jackpot at Island Collateral, which was having liquidation on old video games. I left beneath the weight of some maybe 50 titles for Xbox, PS1 and PS2, including the legendary ToeJam & Earl 3, most obtained for the kingly price of $2 a piece. I thought it was too darned bad that I couldn't justify stocking an entire library of the classics from the SNES, NES and Atari 2600 cartridges (Adventure! E.T.!) they were liquidating at that price, but maybe someone (are you listening, marlo?) else can profit from my nerdy discovery. (The clerks there also recommended a mainland counterpart, Krazy Bob's in Langley.)

I was a massive gamebook fan as a kid (a misremembered endorsement by Michael Wilkison for the Thieves' World anthologies pointing me to Ian Livingstone's City of Thieves and down the lane of no return) and they were a popular enough flash in the pan that scouring secondhand shelves for them grants me a happy dose of nostalgia while I get to play publishing archaeologist (Dude! A Fighting Fantasy by the GURPS Steve Jackson! Yow! A TSR-published Marvel Comics gamebook written by Warren Spector!) and puzzle out why these went virtually extinct at the advent of the WWW, a medium seemingly custom-designed to facilitate their explosion! (I've isolated, I think, three significant factors: Nintendo's popularity sucking kids away from books and on to consoles, multimedia distracting computer game developers from virtually all text-based gaming, and anyone being able to make a CYOA and give it away for free meaning it became exceedingly difficult for anyone to get paid to do so, resulting in a huge field of amateur entries making people forget that better gamebooks were possible.)

I satisfied the bizarre monkey on my back by loading myself down with what must have been 60 or 70 gamebooks and video game novelizations before revisiting a store on day 2 on a hunch and uncovering the nerdly motherlode: a randomized solitaire adventure featuring a ream of tractor-feed dot-matrix-printed gamebook paragraphs, sandwiched between two pieces of construction paper depicting a cruel wizard straddling a mainframe computer with magnetic tape storage. At this point in the very early gaming industry, I figure Flying Buffalo had rented some surplus cycles on a PDP-11 somewhere (used to automatically calculate turns for play-by-mail gamers) and devised this system to deliver a unique dungeon to solo gamers. I look forward to digitally converting the document and analysing how rigorous its algorithms were (ie is the dungeon actually completable?) This sounds like a very mild curiosity to most normal people, but even as someone fascinated by such things I would not have believed it existed had I not held it in my two hot little hands. In 1977 people actually paid money for a computer to madlib a dungeon together and mail them the tractor-feed results? Well, I paid money for it in 2009 so who knows.

The icing on the cake was also finding a paperback copy of a 1960 printing of the Saragossa Manuscript (which I should watch again someday... I recall this inaccessible Polish black and white film once being the only thing to catch tlf's attention during a scattered Rufoustan visit in which he must have started and stopped maybe two dozen movies after five minutes.) So I missed two open mics? It was worth it!

Which brings me to the present: scouring the internet for squeezebox-demonstrative recordings of bands performing at this year's Vancouver Folk Music Festival to air on our radio show tonight -- on which we will be giving away two tickets to the Festival! (So there's the palpable payoff to locals who waded through this largely-irrelevant post. Those have a substantial value associated with them!) We're especially excited about Bellowhead, and Geoff Berner will be announcing the AN Festival.

Then I really really need to unpack the basement boxes remaining from my move (most of them) in order to find my old passport, needed so I can apply for a new one in the interest of attending the Arts-In-Nature Festival in Seattle Aug 22nd and visiting my accordion-graffiti pal Tiffany. That's over a month away but I now require a passport for ground crossing (disinclined from gambling on a porphyre scale) and giving it enough time for processing means I really ought to have it in before I leave to Quesnel... in a few days.

Though I'm finally IN TOWN for the relevant dates, the 57 Varieties open stage is on hiatus due to a volunteer drought at Spartacus... when I can rustle up a partner-in-crime associated with a venue that grants us free use, the series will resume (and until then I will shift my focus and energies to other back-burner projects: the textmode art retrospective gallery exhibition, the Living Closet reunion show, and some text adventure and computer game plots in dire need of hatching.)

Supplementary: after what's got to be close to a decade, another stranger has emerged from the woodwork quoting a fragment of my Elegy for La Quena back to me. The last time it happened was five years ago and it rocked me sufficiencly then to write about it here... certainly after having maintained my decidedly moribund relationship to my onetime poetry career (ah, but who else but a poet would say "moribund"?) it's the last subject I would expect anyone to spring on me. I don't have much further to add, but as I told the fellow, "periodically I regret setting poetry aside in favour of spreading around other people's words with an accordion... perhaps someday these two disciplines will dovetail."

I've been spreading the word everywhere else, so while I'm spamming the geographically relevant LJ communities I may as well throw it up here in my own ghost town journal 8)

It's the jug band of the damned's "Flogged Round the Fleet" tour, in promotion of our finally-available recording of the same name, in a premium package we think will guarantee some grins. We're pleased to say we're returning to Victoria Friday the 26th at the Solstice Festival for the Folk with David Simard and Free Range, the Duncan Garage Showroom the afternoon of Sunday the 28th (2 pm), the amphitheatre at Rathtrevor Beach that evening with the B:C:Clettes, the Gumboot at Roberts Creek 4 pm Monday the 29th and the Wild Bistro in Gibsons that night. Then Tuesday June 30th we're back in Vancouver playing at Cafe Montmartre. A little tour, but it's a start. Fuller details including addresses, showtimes and admission can be found at the link or creakingplanks.com

Please consider helping some new faces gravitate to our shows in hitherto unexplored territory... they'll never have seen anything quite like us.

(And if anyone has any ideas what to do with a band kicking around the east coast of Vancouver Island on a Saturday night, please don't hesitate to make a suggestion -- it could be your living room or backyard party we liven up by cramming some Tom Waits into Britney Spears! Ooh!)

( Cut for poster )

hexalyn

I toss my mini-accordion on my back and consider a prayer to the patron saint of disintegrating straps before hopping on my bike, recently restored to a state of blessed rear-wheel inflation, and start pumping my legs furiously on the pedals with an hour on the clock to achieve my crosstown destination with my cycling stamina nothing near what it once was, the first non-leisure ride in longer than I can recall further than to Co-op Radio.

I stop by an ATM to obtain some cash (my wallet empty as usual to discourage impulse purchases, bank card customarily tucked behind the library card to remind me: priorities!) with which to procure a treat for Jen on the way back, then tooling past the skate park at 10th and Clark some crusty punk sees me passing by and hollers "Accordion Noir rules!" while waving the metal horns gesture at me. The precise reason for this curious outburst likely has something to do with our weekly Friday night all-accordion radio show being situated directly before the punk/metal show "Into the Pit" for reasons I'll have to elaborate upon at a later date.

For the second time in about as many days I randomly encounter Whisky Jar's ebullient banjo player (as the weather improves, I am reminded no matter where I go, both on foot or bike alike I will encounter more people I know than I will in my sitting room), and, hustling up the hill, arrive at my destination in slightly under an hour. Guess the old Popeye calves still get the job done!

Bill throws me on first, where I share the Silverstein tune The Mermaid, picked up for the forbidden May 2 Shel tribute night, and Utah Philips' "No More Reds In the Union" learned for the impromptu Outlaw Band May Day performance at Rhizome, to a somewhat muted reception. Looking back, there isn't that much class consciousness on display at the open stages. I made my plug for 57 Varieties (which turned out lovely -- including a blackmail-worthy Eugene Chadborn performance on the guitar by my Accordion Noir co-host Bruce, currently designing a squeezebox-emblazoned line of "One Less Guitar" stickers) and enjoyed performances by (among others) the Svelte Miss Spelt, Jill Binder's long-practiced duet, and the spirited feature Allen Clayton (who drew on me to provide impromptu backup on a couple of songs). Between these performances I take in the rest of the show from outside Cafe Montmartre, as even in Winter its ambience is a bit too muggy for my tastes. The Creaking Planks convert who discovered us at the LMS and booked us to play with him at Lugz on June 6th toddles by, somewhat embarrassingly proclaiming my virtues to his traveling companion so vehemently Bill Mcnamara has to come out and ask him to pipe down as he's drowning out the performer inside.

I make a miscalculation in plotting a route home, hoping to avoid the supid amount of hills the city planners plotted the bike path courses along. Wheeling around the intersection of 8th and St. George with intent to return to 10th before I hit VCC, I hear what must be the soundtrack of an awesome old-timey movie. But that mandolin sounds almost live... but there are no live music venues anywhere near here! I tool around in circles, trying to pinpoint the music's source. Suddenly, a shadowy figure emerges from the alley, exclaiming "accordion -- get in there!" Ah, it's Petunia, the yodeling cowboy with whom the Planks played a show the previous night. I enter the indicated hedge and find a little house behind the bushes, with a front porch groaning beneath the weight of what must be Vancouver's entire roots music community, elder statesmen jamming as easily as breathing. Al Mader and Ana Bon-bon wave hello and Burcu remains nonplussed at Petunia's insistence I bring Osasa to the jam. (With its shifting tempos and exhaustive complement of chords, Osasa is not much of a jam song, awesome though it is.)

An hour passes as quickly as drinking a glass of water. Petunia plays two notes on his new accordion, but they're all he needs. Is it always like this here in the land of music that time forgot? Only on long weekends -- make a note. Sadly, my travel squeezebox tops out at E and all the guitar players are picking E and B as their favorite keys to jam in, so my ability to button along is limited by technical constraints. Eventually I realise that my sister's dog is waiting for me to take him walkies, so I excuse myself, parting the gawking-in-disbelief crowd of incredulous skate punks that has gathered at the bottom of the stairs.

Further symptoms of a long weekend manifest all over the rest of the trip home, with drunken partiers conducting no end of loud, obnoxious and inexplicable behavior all over public sidewalks and roads. I bring Jen back her treat: cranberries! And she in turn has a surprise for me -- pizza! And all is well in the world once again.

The trick of course is that this doesn't refer to yesterday (when I enjoyed a Strathcona picnic and returned $150 of books to Pulp Fiction), but the previous Sunday... I jotted these notes down and await a chance to share my slice of life for a week! Running my open stage and playing two shows on Wednesday (we brought back Psycho Killer!) really took a lot out of me, then there was all the moving. Packing and going through mountains of papers I have concluded a) that most of it has to go, but b) not until I get a chance to make some scans and share the tales associated with the snips and clips (you see, Jen, this is why I have kept a big piece of paper depicting a large letter Q sexually dominating a much smaller one...) The actual physical artifact is not required to remain in my hot little hands into perpetuity. This means that you may be seeing more posts from me with absolutely no bearing on current events, instead of my typical only mostly-at-arm's-length-from-reality perspective.

(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

Periodically Jen bemoans her lack of a blog on which to post reports from her impromptu adventurous culinary excursions (eg. "let's make a tray of toffee!" "let's boil condensed milk until we get dulce de leche!" etc.) Dismissing my suggestions at utilizing her livejournal for this purpose (it apparently being "retired") these expeditions go undocumented for lack of any species of alacrity in my own journaling tendencies. On this occasion, however, it would be remiss of me to stay silent any longer, as our own Googling investigations into what we had unwittingly wrought turned up nothing useful.

The backstory is that roasted garlic is delicious but hasslatious, picking away slivers of parchment skin, and in an attempt to maximise deliciousness while minimising fiddly work Jen hit on acquiring pre-peeled garlic cloves in a little styrofoam tray at Donald's market, to be roasted in a casserole dish with olive oil until reducing to an awesome garlicky paste of ultimate flavourosity ("garlic butter", when prepared with butter instead of oil.) We tried this on the quantities of garlic available for sale there (each tray containing the equivalent of one to two heads of garlic) to excellent effect, yielding a spread that lent a wonderful kick to numerous dishes -- the three pillars of Rowan food-dom: ricey ones, noodly ones, and splendidly cooking away to stripes of pure flavour on top of my focaccia dough.

Yesterday afternoon, then, en route to a typical weekend garage sale / thrift store destination, at Victoria and 36th I caught out of the corner of my eye a sign in front of a market boasting peeled garlic, $5, in large bags. Precisely how large wasn't apparent until I departed the confines of the vehicle and found myself bearing five pounds of peeled garlic for five dollars, not a bad deal. (As Jen's mother remarked, "would I spend an hour peeling five pounds of garlic for five dollars? Not likely!" Of course, these cloves are likely peeled using an efficient mechanical technique for bulk processing. That or in a room full of children with nimble little fingers. Either way, to delicious effect!)

Following a pretty unprecedentedly rowdy-happy Planks set at a packed Atlantic Trap & Gill (a three-hour death march of musical fun warranting a post longer than this one to itself, and many thanks to those of you we saw out there but were relatively incapable of interacting with, crammed into our musician stations (compared to which Montmartre's stage is extravagantly luxurious) in an elaborate, Tetris-like configuration of an optimization problem with only one solution), I arrived back at Jen's place at 1 am to the sound of the oversensitive but undisableable smoke alarm (or as Travis styles it, the "cooking alarm") tipping me off to the fact that Jen was taking on the feat of cooking all five pounds of garlic simultaneously, in two enormous crocker vessels. As she mixed the cooked cloves down to paste with gentle stirring, the house and everything in it smelled delicious and a slight twinge struck our eyes, as with the tears provoked by chopping onions.

With a final couple of twists of the wooden spoon, rendering the last of the intact cloves to heavenly mush we put foil over the cooling dishes (as a cat-guard) and prepared for bed, slightly dabbing at our eyes as though we'd witnessed something tragical. The house, each of its rooms saturated with the sublime fragrance of roasted garlic, offered no respite from the mild nagging at the corners of our eyes, which slowly intensified. We turned on the oven hood fan and began opening windows and even the back door in an attempt to ventilate the building while rummaging through the bathroom medicine cabinet looking for eye drops and scouring Google in vain for any combination of the keywords "garlic" and "tear gas", helpfully mentioned here as an aid to any future successors to our pennywise/pound-foolish blazed trail: you are not alone. It was frankly a bit of a shock, as we had both chopped onions and roasted garlic before and thought we knew the difference between their effects, but where it may be the case that roasting a single head of garlic (as a sane diner might) releases eye-hostile sulfenic acids in only homeopathic quantities, when you take it on five pounds at a time, more as an industrial process than as any home cooking operation, its byproducts undergo a qualitative change, not just a quantitative one, temporarily rendering one's home and food preparation area essentially uninhabitable.

Eventually the burning subsided and we managed to get to sleep (with tear-streaked cheeks), next to the curious combination of an active heat radiator and open window, and have lived to enjoy the tasty fruits of our labour, the chemical warfare agents since dissipated over the course of the night. All the same, be warned: pre-peeled garlic at a dollar a pound may sound like a good deal, but the price does not account for its hidden costs. Caveat roastor.

(The whole episode came rushing back to me following a postmortem of last night's musical events with Nathaniel our sax player -- "the rest of the story" or, as I described it, "a perfect end to a perfect night". Nathaniel charitably remarked that such an incident could only happen to me, at my curious intersection of thrift and extravagance.)

And though I have an in-progress post that's been languishing for three weeks exploring the transitions ahead as I enter into my fourth decade, am I here to finish it off? No! Instead, I'm here to remark that I'm celebrating my actual day of birth playing a concert at Cafe Montmartre tonight (and not, as Facebook initially announced deceptively, a week ago), starting around 8 pm. If you're allergic to music, you might also find me eating Ethiopian supper around 5 pm at the Red Sea on Broadway just off Fraser.

Eryn only plays once in a blue moon, so any chance to hear her is a good one. (She also modeled this poster after a Hieronymus Bosch painting on my request!) And if you haven't caught Travis doing his magic tricks busking out and about in the world, it's about time you do. And then there's Al Mader, who is already such a legend I can't add to his mound of laurels.

Some people might prefer to /go to/ a show on their birthday than to put one on, but I always like to keep busy.

Gearing up to host the 57 Varieties open stage at Spartacus Books tonight, 8-10 pm!

There's no two ways about it. Pushing the information at people is my primary occupation at this particular moment.

Then there is also a great show I'm participating in tonight down on Granville Island (after celebrating Josh's birthday dinner) but I feel like I've already done more than my share of the promotional load for that one (curiously, he devotes a higher word count to the event he's dismissing than the one he's promoting 8)

On Fernando's recommendation, I ate and ran from a polenta dinner with my folks (num num!) to check out the Wired Monk open mic Wednesday night for the first time, a bustling cultural locus that the neighborhood could have sorely used a decade ago or so (as a nice change of pace from Benny's bagels, which admittedly started to wear a bit thin, though the Monk remains a poor replacement for Black Sheep Books.) It's one of those in-demand events where being five minutes late on the sign-up can be reflected in being delayed three hours in hitting the stage (a phenomenon I've seen especially on the West Side, curiously often in apparently empty rooms with sign-ups that were pre-booked by phone call or somesuch.) Seeing the night's performances had already begun I hemmed and hawed outside the door, dangling in the breeze in a struggle with my inner pessimist to just scratch my promotional plans and go and canoodle. But then an Internet miracle happened, boys and girls, and someone I'd never met came out the door, called me out by name and invited me in. Occasions like that you've just got to step to.

It was former lj-user skygoodwill (who finally, somehow, wore down my defenses and got me set up with a friendcode-required account here in the final months of LiveJournal's wretched elitism) -- no part of any of my numerous significant online time-sinks over the past decade, no Tabber, not an e2vian, nor even a MobyGamer... instead, a onetime denizen of my passing fancy the onetime postcardX site of random mail art. Anyhow, I needn't go on about it at too great an extent since it's not like she's still around here to read the post, but the strange coincidence of being recognized and identified by someone who had only been exposed to me online sufficed to draw me in to sit through a night of endless guitars (a dozen of them, neatly and identically arrayed in their cases against a wall like dominoes -- a comparison untested, despite great temptation) and painfully unironic white boys blues-guitar jamming to the "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" riff (ah, Kitsilano -- I have neglected to mention the ultimate Kitsilano song introduction: "I need to tell you a little story about the story behind this song or it won't make any sense. Back at the time of Creation, there were two cosmic, immortal beings who loved each other deeply and were both blessed and cursed. They had the power of assuming different forms -- they could become animals, plants, bacterias, anything, but the downside was that they could never both adopt the form of the same species at the same time. In this song one of the beings is a noble grey wolf while the other is a golden eagle.")

I made a big impression (the benefit of contrast!) squeezing out the Underground tango (starts ~57 seconds in), the Song of the Count, and Shakespeare's Got A Gun but was unseated by a final act, a bold singer apparently unaware that Whitney Houston was not the origin of "I Will Always Love You", which she very, ahem, faithfully delivered an a capella rendition of.

My exhaustive promotional regimen also took me to the 2nd annual installment of the bitter love songs night at Rick Keating's open mic at the Little Mountain Neighbourhood house... at which I took home the grand prize last year (a pickled heart beet) with my arrangement of Alexandra Oliver's Ring-A-Ding-Ding. Forbidden by Rick from revisiting it, I instead passed the torch with Momus' I Want You But I Don't Need You (plus I sat in with John on Fred Lane's v. creepy "From The One That Cut You"), though in retrospect I should have prepared Weird Al's "One More Minute" (and just what happened to my lofty hopes for this to be the year I would finally play Zappa's "Dirty Love" at Valentine's for real?) The winner was sufficiently charming that I was willing to overlook the Ayn Rand reference in the long litany of intellectual pleasures she was free to enjoy now that her thought-stunting ex was out of the picture.

...

Other notes: I've been walking Fargo the dog the past few days (and will continue for the next week) while my sister is out of town... my first real quality dog time since my nephew's premature birth. I suppose we've both mellowed over the past eight years, but despite Jen's enthusiasm I must conclude that time hasn't made me much more of a "dog person". Of course, I could say that of anyone whose primary intersection with my life was my holding their excrement (still steaming warm!) in my fussy hand (well, with the old shopping-bag glove trick) several times a day. I would prefer to really know someone well and enjoy their company before our relationship advances to that level.

Other, other notes: the Planks did get to jam with Richard Stallman on the Free Software Song last week. Not our brightest moment (songs in 7/4: rehearse them! And jeez, it looks like I was the only one even trying to play along, everyone else just clumping the beat!), but a certain brush with nerd fame.

Which reminds me, if anyone out there (I'm looking at you, Portland) still reading has ended up with any early Creaking Planks demo material, would it be possible for you to send us a digital photo of the design and packaging (such as it is)?

(And while I've got you on the phone, Portland (by which I mean former noders of Portland), what's the deal with this? Is any significant overlap between area residents and visitors expected? Has e2's geek diaspora been reduced to two groups of nerds passing each other in the night?)

...

Finally, in obligatory link dumpage, while hypothesizing over his publishing career with my mother I was pleased to find early and niche work by "History of the Universe" comic book artist Larry Gonick made available online here, here and (especially) here.

I am hoping to put an old notion of synthesis into play and combine a time-constrained songwriting challenge with a time-constrained game-authorship challenge, making a musical choose-your-own-adventure. We shall see how far I get. Perhaps we'll get to play it live at next month's 57 Varieties!

Taking over for Joey Only (on the road without me) during his show Sound Resistance again from 10:30 am through noon... I hashed out a set of political music (and some not) and I'm quiet pleased with some of the train wrecks I'll be ushering out over the airwaves, including such renowned political folk musicians as James Brown, Raffi and Wesley Willis. Join me, won't you?

Then off to scope out the Maritime Labour Centre for our engagement later in the day, specifically the PA setup.

Perogy dinner perhaps?

Meet up with rump Planks to run them through a brief but nerdy set (Kraftwerk? Flanders and Swann?) in preparation for the main attraction:

opening for Richard "GNU" Stallman delivering a talk on Free Software and copyright freedom for Free Geek Vancouver. Maybe I can take the opportunity to pick his brain about the versions in which the games (Dunnet, for instance) were introduced to emacs, awaiting longer-remembering documentation before being addable to Mobygames as a game compilation.

Then off to Co-op for my second radio show of the day, 9:30-10:30, a special "movie soundtrack" installment of Accordion Noir. (But this time, for sure!)

Phew! All I did tonight was host the accordion circle and I'm still pretty winded, but 12 hours of continual toil (I know, that perogy eating is truly onerous labour) ought to zonk me but good. And then how on earth will I have the vim needed to attend two different birthday parties on Saturday? Life is hard.

Your friend galabs2000@gmail.com thought you might be interested in this link:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/Entertainment/life+this+Spirit/1111544/story.html

They also left you these comments:

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_______________________________________
This is a free service courtesy of
The Calgary Herald (http://www.calgaryherald.com)

Thanks, Calgary Herald! Much appreciated!

Warren of the Pooka Press captured me in wax during the Planks' opening set (turns out this show was our fourth birthday!) for Awesome Face's fight against Seasonal Affective Disorder / beach party. (Taking on all our most immature and juvenile material for this "kids' show for adults", we struggled valiantly against SAD but fell beneath its onslaught nonetheless, producing v. v. sad versions of such melancholic epics as The Chicken Dance, a revived Down By The Bay, and closing with a simply tear-jerking rendition of "Early in the morning", the theme music to The Friendly Giant. We are nothing if not thematically consistent!) (And then there were my new, revised, suitable-for-a-children's-birthday-party lyrics to Closer we've been joking about for years:

You let me piggyback you / you let me hackeysack you
You let me underduck you / you let me ... firetruck you.

Help me, I think I've got a boo-boo / Help me, my puppy ran away
Help me, my ice cream fell right off the scoop / Help me to come over and play!

I wanna hug you like a teddy bear...
I wanna make you eat a mud pie...
I wanna hug you like a teddy bear!
My bedtime is so unfair / I put a slug in your hair!

You can have my old Nintendo! / You can have the games for it too!
You can have my mint hockey cards / You can have my fake piece of poo!

Help me, 'cause you broke my treehouse / Help me, I think I wet the bed
Help me I crashed my tricycle / Help me 'cause my goldfish is dead!

At the news of LiveJournal's impending Russian Large Hadron Collider AOL Hometown Black Hole Layoff Implosion, I made like a good little goomba for whom nostalgia and history are nigh paramount, and backed up my entries and comments.

The client I used includes some curious tools for varying kinds of statistical analysis, some of which revealed somewhat underwhelming truths (such as: while I have never dipped below two posts a month (often at least one of which was an event promotion crossposting of some kind or another), that could be described as my mode average) and surprising categories of analysis (which senses are evoked most frequently, for instance, or whether one's word choices reveal a prevalent Freudian drive in the oral, anal or sexual category.)

One thing that came up was a table of the most frequently-used words, a list of which I figure pretty aptly sums up my existence (by which I mean my activities, implicitly binding the two together) over the past five years, with most of my projects figuring prominently. No big surprises, but some top nouns (and how often they were invoked) include: accordion (345), music (272), Vancouver (244), Friday (209), Rowan (196 -- let's hear it for speaking in the third person!), event (174), Planks (156), Varieties (153), Butchershop (152), stage (151), performance (148), events (141), band (139), poetry (136), game (131). I guess I have pretty confirmedly sold my soul to show business... only down around 100 appearances do I begin discussing trivial matters such as eating and sleeping.

(A further step I'd like to see, while we're generating word-frequency tables, is looking at word pairs to permit us to Markov chain in our own voice to reveal subconscious truths, like that perennial phrase "touch-hungry to an almost painful extent" I keep invoking.)

At the news of LJ's staffing sneeze Jen (whose conspicuously un-explicitly-linked LJ is next on the backup pile: "don't make rude posts on my behalf!!!" she asks while feeding me her password for the Windows-only archive program. Fear not, I respond, I will only make polite ones) supposes that this must translate into a migration boom to blogspot and the like. I figure that for ease-of-use alone the rats would be fleeing the sinking ship on to one of the many LJ clones making use of the same codebase, not least because they are presumably autonomous from LJ, Inc.'s parent corporation and hence inured against its ailments.

Which of course made me think back to why I maintain a LiveJournal account in the first place given that I only post using it on average twice a month (, as I just found out.) At the time (2003), all my post-hosting needs were met by everything2.com (which rather than catastrophically evaporating all your contributions in one grim crash would instead gradually haemorrhage away 80% of everything you put into it over a period of a couple of years), itself adopted following a couple of tentative toe-dips into the not-then-ready-for-prime-time h2g2 (somehow managing to sink beyond the enormous boost its central premise promised) and diaryland (for whom prime time was never really on the menu). Previously I'd enjoyed forum-style postings on TABNet, our holdout then (more nominally now) from our brief but formative dial-up BBS echomail network days '94-'98, but a great diaspora was underway and rather than inviting friends into the fray and building up the forum activity people at that heady turn of the century were instead spinning their activity off elsewhere, inviting you to join them at thematically-related but technologically-unattached satellite services, where they would discuss themselves and might deign to grant you permission to make a few comments while basking in the light of their radiant eminence. Because we were their friends and were interested in keeping up with what they were up to, and because we were nerds and didn't do so over phone calls or regular real-life encounters, we slunk away from "our" shared online space to these new personal fiefdoms and watched, aghast, as personal essays were soon supplanted by an endless series of quiz results (a trend I'm pleased to report has been reversing ever since, barring the occasional meme -- which is now generally understood to belong under a LJ-cut. It's almost civilized now!)

(Paragraph break for readability!)

Keeping tabs on 50 people in one forum was easy -- visit one website, no problem. Keeping tabs on 50 people across 50 different, often standard-noncompliant websites was not so trivial a feat, especially in the pre-RSS reader era. Somehow eventually LJ, despite its egregious offenses at the time (for me, the very notion of the cliquey and exclusive invite code system was anathema -- isn't elitism what I came online to get away from in the first place? -- and three people had to offer codes to me before I would take one of them up on it) began pulling the lion's share of my peers, a certain demographic with certain wants and needs. I'm sure from the posters' perspective, its privacy, security and screening capabilities were what sold it; from this /reader's/ POV, the automation of the friend's list blogroll functionality were what wore down my principled resolve. Finally, I can read it all by visiting just one site -- plus get access to protected posts I've only heard about secondhand, PLUS get the ability to comment where anonymous postings are outlawed. (Plus, as it turns out, using LJ as an RSS reader itself -- as long as you have a friend with a paid account to import the feed.)

These qualities describe both why LJ was a killer app in 2003 and why Facebook really has I think effectively supplanted it contemporarily. Similarly, if you opt out, you miss out on a lot, while if you opt in, you may be cut in on a loop that involves a lot of signal so similar to noise they may as well be indistinguishable. But instead of keeping tabs on 250 people who express themselves in paragraphs, I can now keep tabs on 650 people who express themselves in oneliners. (Perhaps in some far flung future I may be part of a social network of five thousand people who express themselves solely in mood icons, while my grandchildren might participate in a network of a million people who set themselves either to 0 or 1 every morning.)

(Outta gas!)

While dwelling on digital ephemerality, I took the opportunity yesterday to pull down HOTU's entire selection of PDF-gamebooks, a recently-revived passion of mine, before they go the way of its tragically unparalleled (and now totally unavailable instead of only mostly) overlooked computer game collection.

...

In totally unrelated news, thanks to the last minute, I am slated to be a guest on Wax Poetic, Co-op Radio's weekly poetry radio show, this afternoon at 2 pm (PST)... a nice complement to my December Poetry Slam feature spot (which I still hope someday to tell you more about) despite having long since set my poet's hat aside. I prepared 25 minutes of supporting poetry material from YouTube last night at 1 am (old hat now following my initial double-dip Friday, my terrifying spree of being behind the control board for the first time... for two and a half hours!) before discovering this morning that the show is only a half-hour long -- so Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate probably will not make the final cut, as interesting as it is. If you like, you can tune in to 102.7 fm (at least, you can try, depending on atmospheric conditions), Star Choice satellite radio station number 845, or there are a few choices of online audio streams for high-bandwidth surfers if you prefer.

Edit: immediately following the posting of this entry, an unknown AIM account asked me "Wouldn't a kitten the size of an elephant be fun to play with?" Looks like a return in fine form from the Great Hatsby prankster bot! Who knows what they'll do if LJ goes under.

I was elaborating on my annotated nerd slam set, but this is new, limited-time nerdy business that pre-empts that:

Left to my own (carless, time-tangled) devices, I am not in a good position to take advantage of this offer Jhayne tipped me off to -- a metric pile of mostly-functional C64 hardware and software. Who, local, will rise to the challenge? Offer only good Fri-Sun. If we coordinate I may be able to federate with you for great gaming justice! But I most definitely cannot haul it all home on the bus in a backpack. (Nor, uh, should I. I figure this belongs in Free Geek Vancouver's retrocomputing museum, but they do better with drop-offs than pick-ups.)

I've been spending much time lately in a digital painting / layout environment (another plug for Paint.net -- free unlike Photoshop and relatively straightforward unlike GIMP). It allowed me to relatively effectively assemble this long-lost and improbably-returned (Ole took it back after a Little Mountain Studio performance, from where it passed to one of his ladyfriends... and into the annals of myth, since how long ago was I playing there with him?) portrait of me by the obscenely talented Ehren Salazar from multiple scans. (Original source: a page from the fabulous small-print-run Butchershop fundraiser colouring book that was wonderful but too little too late.) Apologies for any artifacts introduced through the scanning and collaging process (with such intensive linework and crosshatching if the scans aren't dead-on to a hundredth of a degree the segments just won't match up)... it truly is an astounding piece of work. What a likeness! And yet -- what abstraction! (Am I at a thousand words yet? Maybe I can just let the picture speak for itself.)

Also, you might have noticed, very faintly, the phantom numbers "57" floating behind me in it. Not only have I been stitching together scans, I've also been making event posters (my prowess burgeoning in leaps and bounds! The new tool helps lots, much better than my old "work with what you have" approach of going to town in MS Word with as many free truetype fonts as I could scrounge... also, stealing source material from flickr helps 8) -- Creaking Planks gigs are more numerous and end up having me make more posters, but the axe I'm currently grinding is for my monthly "57 Varieties" open stage (facebook), next up 8-10 pm THIS TUESDAY, Dec. 8th (as promoted more extensively with its delightful poster over here, which is a link, which now (consider this its cue) cumbersomely needs to be explicitly stated for the benefit of people reading Livejournals through some interface other than Livejournal.)

The day before 57 (which is how I put it before spending so much time working on this post, when I now might as well instead say TONIGHT) through some comedy of errors (too sick to travel? a veritable barrel of larfs) I've ended up featuring at the Vancouver Poetry Slam's alternate event, the first annual NERD slam (facebook also) at Cafe Deux Soleils. (Not bad for someone who never even made it to the second round in his brief slamming career!) I don't know precisely how I ended up in the position, but so as not to disappoint I've been conducting some extensive research so as to deliver, as stated elsewhere, "the nerdiest set possible", and may end up presenting my final results, footnoted and hyperlinked appropriately, here to my audience of people who for whatever reason find themselves in the wrong darned city.

My intention wasn't just to bombard you with a litany of gig engagements but rather to make some endorsements... all the same I find I can kill two birds with one stone by inviting curious parties out to investigate my feature spot this Thursday night at Rick Keating's open mic (facebook) at the Little Mountain Neighborhood House. Our posed-dysfunctional relationship is truly something to behold, and the denizens are about the sweetest gaggle of folkies I can imagine, trying (hyperbole disclaimer) to join in with harmonies even when you're just speaking in a plain voice. If I'm lucky I can pull Wyoming Johnny back from his AWOL status (I understand he's had some compelling distraction, however) to join me on his sweet sweet fiddle.

...

I've been meaning to share some remarks here since over a month ago (oh yes, congrats all you Americans: you're now mere weeks away from a more progressive government than that of Soviet Canuckistan!) -- I was going to make a big fuss about my (mom's) focaccia recipe turning out to act as perfectly serviceable pizza dough (and even calzone) when halved, but only as a smokescreen to discuss the earth-shaking shift of my taking my parents' christmas gift offer up eleven months later and paying some mechanics to Frankenstein three basement carcasses into one functional bike, putting me nominally back on two wheels for the first time in nearly two years. (Some pages back I recounted bumping into Sabina at Media Democracy Day last year, now unrecognizable to me without her features illuminated by the flame of my infatuation; apparently my own appearance had tumbled equivalently in her eyes upon my confession of pedestrian self-grounding, when she said "That's not the Rowan I know!") Since I conveniently timed things to get things working just at the end of the convenient biking weather season, this new change in capability hasn't actually resulted in my taking off to the moon, but it remains in the basement like a powerful serpent, coiled to strike. The bike-repair announcement itself was further smoke and mirrors to cover up the observation that I'd then achieved six months of hunky dory company with Jen, and gee gosh it's swell (if resulting in my spending my time somewhat differently -- it's too bad to think that I can only get to a place of mass-production of words when I'm bitter and alienated, but it is looking that way.)

All these revelations, the bread, the bike, and the hemi-milestone were then blasted from my mind when I called 911 on my neighbor across the alley, evicting some street punks taking shelter under his porch with a golf club.

It's not just that I've been idling with a dopey smile on cloud nine, however -- I have been quite busy, not only making posters for shows but actually playing them (and booking them, traveling to them, sound checking at them, arranging set lists for them, rehearsing for them... I don't know about the old radio axiom that you should spend 2 hours of preparation for every hour that you're on the air but being a gigging musician certainly seems to be turning out much the same). Even my main spare-time hobby of submitting game entries to Mobygames has been trailing off (not so much so that I can't make the glowing endorsement -- Windows only, sorry -- of Jonas Kyratzes' new free indie adventure game The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge... and also of Jim Munroe's 3rd-place winner, his first text game since the flawed but still admirable Punk Points, in this year's IF compo: Everybody Dies, which I helped beta-test!) ... to be fair, this is not only a factor of my being busy but in being otherwise occupied during the small hours in which I previously would have been writing, waiting for slumber to come take me rather than charging in to meet it halfway.

Among all this I accidentally seem to have gotten back on the publishing wagon (I know, only when I have the least amount of time available for writing, right?) and look forward to appearing briefly in the next issue of Momentum along with future issues of BC Musician magazine.

...

The radio show has recovered nicely from the festival, with our podcasts more or less caught up and a whole suite of exciting guests lined up for the Spring... currently we're conducting our anniversarial (2 years!) month of "year-in-review" programming, which leaves me frantically trying to plough through all 50-odd hours of broadcast we did this year in search of my choicest cuts (a lot of work, especially when not done on-the-fly as we produce them, but eminently worth it -- my best-of mix from last year still makes me perk up and stand to attention. Why, it's as though someone who knew me inside and out custom-designed a playlist catering precisely to my very particular musical tastes! Oh yeah, someone did... and it was me!) At this juncture it is worth noting two items: first that I have finally been certified as an operator (after having been on the air for two years against the rules... but now I'm qualified to touch the control panel on the air!), and second that we have imported a handful of copies of the Christmas gift too improbable to pass up: the Bay Area Accordion Babes cheesecake pin-up calendar, accessible locally, thanks to our demented genius, only at Spartacus Books. We hope to up the ante next year and respond with an accordion beefcake calendar. (Sadly, there are only so many jokes to be made on the subject of squeezing boxes and pumping organs.)

Someday I'd like to go back and pick up forgotten half-conversations in my LJ comments and fill in all the conspicuous blanks of "I should tell you about this, sometime" I have seeded my posts with. But when? Maybe someday from a hospital bed.

I have been trying to put endorsements here where appropriate, as good work and things well done deserve recognition and promotion, but my spate of catch-up here has left me no opening in which to relevantly tell you to eat at the Red Sea Ethiopian restaurant on Broadway at Fraser. Maybe I should pitch a dinner there in January, sometime after our Planks party at the LMS on the 3rd (one final supplication to the gods of facebook). It's awesome, even for vegetarians (I don't know what our first Car-Free Commercial Drive posse was on about; there is so much to Ethiopian food beyond the goat), fun, delicious, affordable, and then there's the gursha!

In conclusion, what movie is this picture an adaptation of? (Part of a series, but for obvious reasons (there are alligators on my mother's side) this one is particularly evocative to me.)

(hm, maybe it's due to subject lines like the above that I can't read LiveJournal at the library in Nanton) and other dubious forms of recompense I've logged more than a few hours rooting through used-records sections at thrift stores, through which a whole parallel view of popular culture emerges -- stuff that someone once thought was awesome, but then some time down the line changed their mind about, realised they were mistaken regarding, and surreptitiously removed from their house. (I understand that this is a simplified narrative, not taking into account things like the great media format shifts and people's tendencies to die and have their possessions liquidated through estate sales over four decades.) There are some performers who are practically best-known to me through their rejected-discard appearances in used-record bins -- once popular enough to ensure hundreds of thousands of pressings (LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR), but since having diminished such that most of them have been released back into the wild (ultimately ending up in a concentrated form, spurned by the crate-picking retro dancefloor tastemakers like a jellybean bag ending up full of nasty black licorice ones). Exposed this past weekend to yet another iteration of their smiling faces, unaware at the time of the sad fate history had planned for their legacy (an uncontemplated further factor here is how many of them went on to enjoy long -- perhaps even current -- successes overseas or at least on the casino circuit), I saw the names go by yet again -- names most known for once having been famous and not for any actual quality possessed by the named, names first heard in childhood as the punchlines to already-expired jokes I would never understand -- and contemplated to myself that with a computerized scrambler any thriftstore record bin could be turned into a fine game of BINGO. I almost have come up with enough for a 5x5 grid (minus the centre freebee), though some of these picks may be local (or national at least) statistical freak occurrences. Who am I missing? (He really was sitting there on the Value Village floor with his notebook out, scribbling down these prayers to dead gods.)

• Herb Alpert
• Harry Belafonte
• Barbra Streisand
• Liberace
• Lawrence Welk
• Nana Mouskouri
• Zamfir
• Anne Murray
• Barry Manilow
• Wayne Newton
• Don Ho
• Helen Reddy
• Roger Whittaker
• The Kingston Trio
• Linda Ronstadt
• Englebert Humperdinck
• Chuck Mangione (best known as a recurring punchline on King of the Hill)
• and specific albums: Frampton Comes Alive, Vangelis' soundtrack to Chariots of Fire, and anything featuring the theme to Doctor Zhivago.