The Antlers opened up and played some decent groove-rock-tastic tunes. From light to building to overdrive-monster noisefest. During a cigarette break, I met a gal whose friend vehemently objected to Red Hunter’s handmade paper CD envelopes. Art and originality conversation ensued. Verdict: Well, it’s not my problem.

Back to Red and the “full band”. They took the stage a little late, reducing the set to a mere 50 minutes :( Too bad Union Hall is so strict about set times. Red wanted to play some solo requests at the end, but that was nixed.

Back to the music. The set was heavy with new material from Mellow Owl, released only days ago. I was so excited I downloaded mine from Amazon, and wish I had waited to buy one of the hand-drawn CDs to compliment the other two in my collection. Such is life. Wonderful start was opening with “The Ballad of Red Hook” - one for the locals!!!

My favorite song was the closer, though “Safe Travels”. Ah, wonderful. Listen to an MP3 here. If you fall in love, go to WhiskeyAndApples.com to get your own hand-drawn CDs. Be patient… Sometimes it can take a bit for them to get in the mail.

Other highlights included the very first time an electronic beat was played by Red and the band for the first of two “dance parties”

And Red busted out the electronic hand piano for the second dance party (during which both he jumped out onto the floor with us and danced around)

I shot the hell out of the show - small set on Flickr here.

Life is good when beauty like this is in the world.

While poking around to get tickets to Peter and the Wolf, I saw an ad on TicketWeb.com for ohmyrockness.com.

Verdict: Excellent resource for finding great, cheap shows for fantastic indie rock bands in NYC, Chicago and LA

Cheggitout.

They are running a contest called, “Dear Wayne” where you can:

Get your own login to watch a special pre-screening of Christmas On Mars. All you have to do is upload your own Dear Wayne video explaining why you are a huge Lips fan. We’ll be selecting 50 lucky fans to receive an exclusive login to watch the movie November 10, 2008.

And of course at the store you can pre-order the movie and lots of nifty FLips schmodkas.

Why is Wayne Coyne my hero? Well:
NPR’s “This I Believe”
OKC Classen Commencement Speech Part 1, Part 2
Wayne Coyne’s Guide to Stagecraft
And, of course, the music (MySpace)

© Matt Hill, 2008

I shoot both film and digital. Ever since I got the Nikon D700, I’ve fallen in love with the RAW file again. First off, the low-light files from the D700 are outstanding - in fact they look like film shot at high ISO (sexy!). Secondly, it’s truly like having an exposed roll of film with a latent image you can process over and over again. The possibilities are amazing. For instance, the shot above could easily be a tosser if I shot it in JPG, but being able to tweak the hell out of it without resampling and degrading the image makes for lots of visual fun.

ABove was shot of a crane on the waterfront in Greenpoint (Williamsburg), Brooklyn during the intermission of the burlesque show. I love the moodiness of the light-strewn skies over Manhattan. I did not retouch anything - it’s all adjustments made in Camera Raw 4.5 - part of Photoshop CS3.

At this moment, the election is being called in favor of Barack Obama. Hope. Hope, is the key word used by all the campaign posted, shirts, banners and image bugs I’ve seen, as much as I have tried to avoid being in contact with any of it.

Hope.

Hope combats ennui.

As dictionary.com defines “hope”

–verb (used with object)

–verb (used without object)

—Idiom

There are apparently many things in the media now that people are talking about: police actions in foreign lands, recession, stock market woes, apparently bad leadership, and I believe all these things do affect many people. But it does affect more people in an adverse way than I believe necessary. The media effect echoes and reverberates opinions loud and long… But in the end, whose responsibility is it to change the world? Each and every one of us.

Many chose to add their personal power to today by voting in favor of a man who stands for change. Change from what we’re unhappy about to perhaps what we can be happy with. I hope this is the case. In no way am I stating a negative view of this, I just know that I take my personal responsibilities very seriously.

This is one reason why I did not vote. I do not watch television, read the newspaper, listen to radio or engage in news media on the Web. I was and remain am blissfully unaware of all details leading up to today’s win by Obama. I am glad that people are happy at this moment, however, I remain clear in believing that we all make change on a daily basis one thing at a time.

Congratulations to everyone who believed passionately in hope. Please keep participating as passionately. Do not remove hope from your motivators. Roll up your sleeves, keep smiling and start changing the world YOU live in.

And true responsibility? What do you believe in? Good. Live up to it. They are your beliefs, now go live them.

Link

Looks like three new songs during the show, plus one of my favs - Sailing by Night - excellent, open take on the song. I must repeat that Daniel Rossen is a musical genius.

Two nights ago, I went out with a co-worker who almost completely schooled me. Amazing. If I hadn’t huddled all my balls around the 8 ball, I would have lost at least two more games. And, he pointed out, I know nothing about english and I hold my stick too high.

Old habits die hard. SO I went out again last night and it was no better. I am still amazingly sucky at pool.

Riveting post, eh?

For about 3 weeks now, the Ghost Glacier album from Breathe Owl Breathe has been filling my moments with happy, smiling music. I really can’t express how much joy it brought to my life. Sincerely, thank you for making such beautiful, touching music. And thank you, Michigan for giving them someplace to live.

My favorite tracks from Ghost Glacier are Sabertooth Tiger, Playing Dead and Drop and Roll, but there is nothing to complain about on the entire 8 track album. It’s a peaceful, passionate state of being.

Links: Main Site, MySpace, CDbaby

And now that I visited CDbaby, I found that there are three more albums I don’t have! How exciting. I just bought them and am going to listen to them tonight as I drift off to sleep with a smile on my face.

Let’s talk about photographs. One of my passions! Love shooting them, love sharing them. I could easily be a professional, but instead I choose to work inside the industry and enjoy my photography as a fun, yet serious passion (I have been shooting for 15 years now). The social photographs are very tempting to upload and share on Facebook, but not everyone holds my beliefs (grin). Point being that some people still desire to have a separate private and business life and some things cross the line. Definitely fair, and I respect that.

Note: On the heels of a burlesque post, you may be tempted to think this has something to do with that… you would be wrong!

In fact, some have gone so far as to de-tag themselves from photos I posted! Whoops! So, I simply adjusted my process. I’ll post photos now, but not tag people in them. If my friends wish to identify themselves by tagging, let them do so. In fact, an old memory popped into my head of when there was a photo of me of when I was, ahem, a bit more robust than I am now. I de-tagged that one only five months ago. So, not only do I respect that point of view, but at one point I completely empathized.

I did discover that AFTER you upload a photo, you can set privacy options. Nice touch, but it should be DURING upload that you can set this (think: flickr).

Here is how to do it. In your profile, click on the edit button next to the photo:

Click on edit privacy and you will see this:

You can also customize the privacy to tailor who can and cannot see the photos:

As you can see, you can be considerate of other people’s wishes for privacy after posting a photo. :) And, you can post a picture just for someone else! Awwww, how romantic.

Originally, I had set this to “friends of friends” in the situation I describe above. Clearly not a good choice! 

Another option is to always just send the photos to your friends via email (LOL). But how would I have learned this wonderful lesson if I had not?

The part I need to test out is if you choose to allow a photo to only be visible to one of more specific friends, does it indicate to them? Must test! To the Batmobile!

After editing, I went out to the “Home” page and the test image I allowed only three friends to see is not in my list of updates. Interesting. Since it’s late and I spent about 2 1/2 hours on the phone with various tech supports trying to get a domain and eCommerce site up tonight, I am not going to go ask my friends what they see. But, I will soon and post an update with screenshots of what they see. 

I seem to remember an article where they spoke about college coaches going on FB and seeing what players broke the drinking code via photos posted by friends from the previous night’s shenanigans. Hilarious. 

To reiterate, on Facebook be yourself, post photos, have fun. But if someone else wants a little privacy, you may want to consider it (right after) uploading.