My insanely energetic friend Irene McGee shot a pilot episode of Microsoft’s On10 show at my place some weeks back. She brought her pal Jimmy Wales over to talk about Stephen Colbert, Wikipedia, video gaming and Wikia. What you won’t see is Irene kicking Jimmy’s ass in boxing on the Wii. For some reason, Microsoft didn’t seem to want the Wii mentioned in the piece. Hmm, I wonder why?
That is the question I asked a cross-section of freaks at the Laughing Squid Paradise Lost party. Knowing Scott Beale and the communities that he has tracked over the past 10 years, I thought it’d be fun to find out how people first crossed paths with the entity known as Laughing Squid. Some people first knew of the Squid from what was originally called the Alpha Squids mailing list, some people know it as the generous web host, some from Burning Man, others from Scott’s event photography and even some newbies only from recent parties. The answers are as varied as the people brave enough to offer them up.
Scott Beale does it again, throwing the only party that matters in this town. Ritual Roasters which is embedded at Flora Grubb Gardens where the party was held, were serving some interesting liquor packed coffee drinks and shots. Here’s a quick video of Miss Rachel Amazonia along with Ritual’s Eileen giving a demonstration on how the KGB shot is constructed and consumed. Shot on the awesome waterproof Sanyo Xacti E1 that Japanese videoblogger superstar Tajee hooked me up with.
photo by George Kelly
My pals Liane and Kevin tipped me off to a special “citizen media” night at the San Francisco Symphony last week that Kevin organized. Now I don’t normally clock up a lot of ear time with classical music generally, but l can throw down to some Tchaikovsky and Strauss now and again. As luck would have it, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet and Strauss’ Don Juan were on the bill this evening.
I invite Audra and we show up at the appointed time outside the side entrance to the Davies Symphony Hall. There’s maybe a couple dozen of us milling about until we are escorted into the famed Green Room where Pepperidge Farm cookies and wine await. Yes, this is a high class affair. The carpet is green but not much else, thankfully. After an introduction from the Symphony’s Communication Department, we get our complimentary tickets and head up to our seats in the orchestra section.
Good seats, beautiful hall, the band, I mean orchestra is already seated and ready for the conductor to enter. He does and we get under way with Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture. I’m digging it but I can’t seem to stop my mind from wandering. I keep thinking about work related crap and repeatedly try and eject such thoughts from my mind so I can fully take in the romance emanating from the stage.
I look down and notice a brass plaque on my seat with David Packard‘s name engraved on it. I ponder if the famous HP co-founder had ever plopped his cheeks in the very seat in which my cheeks now sat snug. Just as I think that might be a weird thought, the first piece seems to quickly end.
After Don Juan, it’s intermission and we hurry back to the Green Room for a meet and greet with the short, young conductor James Gaffigan. The polished communicator from the Communications Department does a lot of communicating, leaving only a enough time for a couple of questions before Mr. Gaffigan has to hurry back upstairs to prepare for the second half of the program. There’s also a horn player from the orchestra present, who’s name I missed. He sticks around a bit longer and takes on a few more questions, some regarding the influence of online communication on the orchestral fraternity. No, he doesn’t have a Myspace page but his 13 year old daughter does.
The second half of the program is a long and often energetic piano concerto by Rachmaninoff entitled Piano Concerto No. 3. The pianist is a young and beautiful Venezuelan graduate from Juilliard named Gabriela Martinez. (She has one of the cleanest, easiest to read Myspace pages I just discovered). While the accompanying orchestra are all glued to their sheet music, Ms. Martinez nails the highly technical concerto from memory. A brilliant performance, easily deserving of the four rounds of applause she garners.
We stick around for the open Q&A with the conductor and Ms. Martinez and then a few of us head off to Sauce for a late night dessert. This was the first time I’ve experienced the SF Symphony in her home and I am dully impressed. I think I could really get into this.
Some bad news today in the fight to save Internet radio. Turns out the courts denied the stay of the royalty rate increases set by the Copyright Royalty Board. If this stands, all Internet radio stations will be out of business as of this Sunday, July 15th. Read Rusty’s analysis of the situation and then PLEASE CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN TODAY! SERIOUSLY! This is huge and grassroots action is critical to get Congress to act.
My panel went well. Packed house, 400+ peeps, standing room only. Having Internet rock stars on the panel probably had a little something to do with that. Hoping someone shot video of it, I don’t think SXSW did anything official. PC Magazine did a nice summary of the major points we hit. No, we were not the only panel to drink ourselves silly throughout. I think MJ downed a bottle of Jack on her panel.
Kind of last minute, but I’m in Austin right now for SXSW Interactive. It’s been a blast reconnecting with friends from far away places. As has been said before, this is summer camp for Internet geeks.
Today at 5pm, I’m moderating a panel titled ‘What Does the Future Hold for Video on the Internet?‘. Panelists include Kent Nichols of Ask a Ninja, Micki Krimmel of Revver, Kevin Rose of digg / revision3 and Scott Watson of Disney Imagineering. We’re gonna shoot the shit about the heady futurism of online video as it relates to policy, audience, community and big media. Join us if you’re here.
Before I completely forget, it’s time for my Austria trip wrapup post.
Vienna: Vienna is beautiful old city, once the center of power during the Austro-Hungarian Empire empire. It has exhibits in it’s natural history museum that are older than the United States. This place IS real history. Austria is also known for it’s copious amounts of meat, chocolate, punsch and beer. I indulged in plenty of all of it.
– Roboexotica Festival – The main reason for trip, this event is like nothing else. Johannes and the monochrom crew along with Magnus from SHIFZ put this thing on, now in it’s 8th mechanically intoxicating incarnation. Essentially, Roboexotica is a week long exhibition in the heart of Vienna, showcasing a variety of robots and other machines related to cocktail culture. Much media was made. GETV videos w/Violet hosting. LunchMeet w/Johannes & one with the Slovenians coming soon. My photos. Jake’s photos. Violet’s photos.
– Roboexotica Symposium – I was asked to deliver a lecture which became a multimedia presentation on undeground robot culture in San Francisco. I covered mostly my experiences with SRL. I was a bit nervous following the creative genius minds of Kal Spelletich and V.Vale.
– Taugshow #9: This is monochrom’s live monthly variety/talk show which was brilliant and hilarious. Since there were so many of us from San Francisco in town, Johannes made this a special English language only edition. Highlights include interviews with Kal, Violet, Vale, the overhead projector song (acoustic and disco versions) and Krack the robot that dances to cheesy techno. Video of the whole thing is online.
Graz: The city of Graz is just 2 hours outside of Vienna and is the home to the football stadium formerly named after famous Graz homeboy Arnold Schwarzenegger. The city erased the Governator’s name from the stadium after his uncompromising pro-death penalty stance. It is amazing that the US is one of the last “civilized” nations to still employ this barbaric method of justice.
– Videoblogging workshops – Johannes asked me to give a series of videoblogging workshops to his students at the FH JOANNEUM- School of Informations Design in Graz. I did four 45-minute sessions to four different groups of students. It wasn’t really enough time to go into much depth but I was able to cover basics of getting video onto a blog using blip.tv and Blogger. Here’s the results.
– Lecture: Videoblogging, Webzines and Zombies – I gave another multimedia presentation, this time in Graz at the same university as the workshops, and relating to videoblogging, independent publishing and underground San Francisco culture. This was fun to do as there is such a wealth of documented material out there on all this, and they are all things I’m passionate about. I think Scott Beale alone deserves credit for the photos I used to illustrate the culture topic. I’ll try and output the presentation from keynote and post it.
It was a great 9 days and I know I’m missing tons. Thanks to Johannes and Evelyn for putting me up at their place for the duration and to Johannes for finding a way to fund this trip for me. It was an amazing time and it’s heartening to know that creative freaks are doing amazing things in other countries AND want to include us often self-centered Americans.
On Saturday, cute, bloody and scary zombies were all over downtown San Francisco. I got some video. Scott got some pix.
