Well, just to put the icing on the s**t cake my life has been lately, my motherboard on my main desktop computer seems to have died. Of course thats the photography and music machine, and I use it for, really, everything. It will probably be some time before I manage to straighten this mess out. Boo.
I just dumped an enormous pile of photos into a gallery called Mike’s Picks. Lots of cool stuff, some of my favorites – see it here.
“The Seventh Veil”, with Ann Todd and James Mason, a really excellent psycho drama that is part Pygmalion, part Svengali, and part Cinderella. Todd is lovely and Mason is menacing, and the taut drama and psychobabble lead to a great surprise ending, just really excellent. Todd was also in H.G. Wells “Things to Come”, an awesome sci-fi from 1936(!) which postulates that we’ll all be living in malls in the future! Whoa!
Thursday in the Square was excellent last week: Nickel Creek was really a refreshing change of pace, with their brand of dare I say “indie” bluegrass. With mandolin and fiddle featured (played by boy and girl siblings), and huge dynamic range, they will likely remember the show as the one where the sometimes heavy warm rain and mud scared almost no one away! Their vocal harmonies were excellent, and they even played the Dylan cover that Michelle and I stole from them for Sportsmans open mic. They made the audience do an umbrella toast and it looked cooler than crowd surfing! After jokingly doing a few Pete Townsend leaps with power chords (on his mandolin), Chris Thile said “and now we’re going to play a song that so doesn’t rock. I wish we rocked”. Really likeable, and stellar playing.
I spent a few days without internet, and let me just say that it was a bit weird. Good thing I am half way through a giant book on Flash (animation/web stuff), so I wasn’t feeling especially communicative. I hate to rely on much, such as the internet, but I guess the future has arrived. I did realize, back in October during the storm when I spent two weeks without electricity, that none of it is at all important – but it is awfully damned useful!
