Monday, March 08, 2010

3.7.2010, oak cliff, dallas, ftw

HIO opted out of our early a.m. sunday recording sesh inside the vortex outside the modern due to rain. rode over to the o.c. with mr. horn and met up with hickey outside the kessler theater. dance class had just gotten finished when we rolled up, and they've got a stage in place now. we could see the aftermath of the past two nights' benefit jams for sandaga market jazz venue.

jeff liles shot video of us in the upstairs green room, in front of some mirrors with some hanging lamps. looked real v.u.-like. he wanted three-minute pieces, but we suck at controlling time, so he wound up shooting five snippets of four or five minutes' duration apiece, using both a static and a handheld camera. all three of us played cigarbox guitars, terry through his laptop, plus i sawed away at a violin and dropped my keys on a cbg.

my fave moment came when i was playing the violin and the contact mic fell off, so i started tapping on the mic with a screwdriver, then moved to the cbg. jeff's posted three clips so far, one a compilation of bits from different pieces, and terry has the raw footage from the static camera, edits from which will wind up on virb.com at some point. when we fell by jeff's apartment to watch vid and pick up a dvd, he made us smoothies from the contents of a couple of unused catering trays from the previous night's show. a top fella.

onward to the phoenix project through dense traffic (accidents in both directions on i-30 around downtown). we arrived late but jessica (my middle daughter's ex-roommate who runs the phoenix project) said they'd just gotten there too. changes in the phoenix since we were there last -- they've got a decent little heater inside, similar to the one at 1919 hemphill, so no more hobo fire outside.

the stage was different too, but terry still wound up wearing half of it on his pants. i got a copy of their zine ...from the ashes, which included a review i wrote of aaron gonzalez's age of disinformation and a history of the daagnim collective by his dad dennis gonzalez.

michael chamy showed up to augment us, as did terry's teacher friend who was going to play chess on camera while we performed. two out of four bands didn't make it, which meant that the other chess player was absent, so jessica volunteered to step in instead. we wound up playing twice, because there were sound issues at first which made terry inaudible, then hickey had to leave to "slop the hogs" before we played again.

so the "world tour" is now complete, including a couple of performances we hadn't planned initially that wound up being among the highlights. we definitely learned a few things about what works and what doesn't with this project that we'll be applying in the future.

home to steak sammitches, then off to lola's 6th with my sweetie for tommy atkins' wake. good to see so many good folks there together, albeit for the worst reason you can possibly imagine. overall, it was a pretty good day.

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