Kin to Stars is kind of ice for the summer as we figure out what to do next. That said, Jerin and I will be performing solo sets at Egan's Ballard Jam House in Seattle this Friday June 28th. Which means the probability of a KtS song or two is high.
YEAH A SOLO SHOW! I haven't played my own stuff in looooong time. And I'm pretty excited because Jerin booked the show so I don't have to do anything except play which the best kind of show because lord (and longtime readers) knows I dislike just about everything about booking shows. So I've been pretty blessed out putting the setlist together and rehearsing after work. And it's motivated me enough to actually finish off a few new songs that I'll slip into the set. Let's hope I remember all the words and that the audience is patient and forgiving.
He's been gone for almost a month now, but I wanted to note his passing here, since Slayer was the first metal concert I attended. It was at the Phantasy Theater in Lakewood OH, during their tour supporting "South Of Heaven" and it was likely the summer of 1988, between my freshman and sophomore years at the U. of Akron.
My roommate during my freshman year, Sean, was a super-smart ROTC guy who played bass guitar and was into thrash in a serious way. Up until then my exposure to metal was limited to Möthey Crüe and the occasional Judas Priest tune. What Sean brought was a huge collection of terrify-your-parents vinyl, not just the standard "Big Four" stuff but also Venom, Deicide and Kreator, Nuclear Assault, Overkill; venerable stuff like Priest and Iron Maiden and Diamondhead; German metal imports on white vinyl and hand painted covers; and just a ton of records by obscure bands you've never heard of and probably never will. But of all of them, Slayer occupied the throne.
At the time, Slayer was at he height of their power, having released their watershed "Reign In Blood" prior to this tour, and Slayer fans everywhere were going LOSING THEIR MINDS. I'd been to shows with mosh pits before, but watching this one from the balcony above the fray, I decided early there was no way I'd be going down there, and Sean and I were content to sit at the railing and air-guitar along to every riff.
So RIP Jeff, and I hope you're shredding with Dimebag up in heaven. Or, you know, the other place, whichever you prefer.
I forgot to mention! We have a single out now from "Sounds Like You" called Grandma's House. SPOILERS: it's about going to your grandmother's house. Listen here:
Kyle took us in a different direction with this one. It's first time we've recorded as a live band, meaning instead of tracking drums first, then bass, then overdubbing guitars and building the recording like a lasagna, we went into Litho and recorded our parts all at once. It's subtle, but there's definitely a X-factor of awesome that comes from that approach that's noticeable in the tracks. They spark and jump with some real energy.
Another thing that's changed: songwriting content. Early on, Kyle confided that he wanted this record to stretch beyond songs about specific superheroes, video games and instead reach for more common themes while keeping the topics nerdy. Last year's single One More Episode is a prime example: instead of being a song about a specific TV show, it's a song about bonding over a shared love of good TV. If you liked that, you're in luck! There's a ton more where that came from on this record.
And if not, that's okay, there's a GoT-themed song on this record that will kick your ass. Anyway, lots more music stuff going on this summer to tell you about.
Lots of Kirby Krackle action happening these days. We opened for Weird Al Yankovic at the Calgary Expo in Alberta CA last weekend. So that happened. My wife put together a cool behind-the-scenes post with photos for you to marvel at. I'm grateful, because I had no time or means to document it all myself.
What's it like to play an arena of 4000 people? Not to downplay it, but a lot like any other gig, except with awesome sound and lights, a huge stage to play on, and you can't see the audience much because of the lights in your eyes. I will say it was a very comfortable experience -- almost as if, oh, I dunno, I totally belonged up there. As Kyle described it: "like bathwater." Actually, the whole band worked the booth the next day and I swear that was almost as much fun as playing the show.
(I did not meet Weird Al. Ask me again later.)
This weekend we're charging into Studio Litho to record the 4th Kirby Krackle album. In the meantime, you may be interested in this, the inaugural episode of KrackleKast, the podcast Kyle and I do while waiting for the rest of the band to show up for rehearsal. This was recorded before the Weird Al gig so we talk about our expectations, a little about songwriting and the new album, and then Kyle grills me about my past. My thanks to Matt, who indirectly encouraged Kyle by encouraging me to encourage Kyle, or something. We'll get better. I promise.
The only "problem" is that Amanda Palmer is a narcissist who has learned to embrace her narcissism, which allows her the freedom to pursue her chosen lifestyle as an artist. We may dislike her music, or be jealous of her Kickstarter success, but on a deeper level we covet her freedom to live out loud in plain sight.
Most of us are taught that narcissism is bad and you must seek permission. You must be at least superficially humble, and you must acquire the appropriate third-party signifiers -- a record deal, radio airplay, glowing reviews -- which indicate that it's okay to like you, that you deserve your success. So when we see someone succeed by flaunting these rules -- especially by someone as brash as Palmer -- we're confronted with uncomfortable evidence that maybe we don't need permission, maybe we can just go ahead anytime and be whatever we want, and maybe it's our own adherence to that worldview keeps us from even trying.
It's easy to hate on Amanda Palmer and people like her, because in being outlandish and brave they cause us to question our own bravery, and to consider that maybe we're just not wired right for this line of work.
This handful of paper is all that remains of an epic text adventure game I wrote in the summer of 1984 in BASIC on an Atari 800 with the 64K memory expansion cartridge. It had two features I was especially proud of: a parser that could understand phrases up to six words, and the ability to save and restore your progress in-game to an external floppy drive. It also barely ran, because the program itself chewed up so much memory.
So much of what I did with that old computer is long gone now, because I didn't have the foresight to save any of those floppies. Also now missing along with that text adventure: "Lunar Lander," a sorta-kinda game where you pilot a landing module to the surface of the moon, and an unnamed Robotron-style game, featuring you as an elf shooting arrows as enemy creatures came at you from all directions (including through the walls, as I hadn't learned how to manage those types of collisions). Plus dozens of experiments and tutorials I had meticulously typed line-by-line from issues of COMPUTE!
Those floppies were either thrown out or sold along with the 800 when I went to college and lost interest in programming for ten years. I was hoping they'd be stashed in a shoebox somewhere, ready to be rescued and archived permanently in the cloud. No luck.
Young programmers! Save your work, no matter how mundane it seems at the moment. Throw it up on Github or Dropbox or Amazon S3, put it somewhere safe where it's unlikely to be lost. I guarantee in twenty years you'll want to see how far you and the world have come. You'll want to remember the feel of those summer days in 1984, the chirping of the keyboard, the anticipation of typing RUN after a few blurry hours. Or whatever your equivalent experience would be these days.
Doc Searls on Steve Jobs. Searls' amazing predictions on the fate of Apple upon Steve Jobs' return as CEO in 1997.
The simple fact is that Apple always was Steve's company, even when he wasn't there. The force that allowed Apple to survive more than a decade of bad leadership, cluelessness and constant mistakes was the legacy of Steve's original Art. That legacy was not just an OS that was 10 years ahead of the rest of the world, but a Cause that induced a righteousness of purpose centered around a will to innovate -- to perpetuate the original artistic achievements.
