Music

Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.

Dance Off Photoshoot

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Yesterday morning found me heading out of the house sometime not too long after 8am — horridly early for a Sunday morning — so that I could head down to the Crocodile to hang out with the Dance Off Seattle crew and shoot the dress rehearsal. With roughly a half-dozen teams to get through, we got started at 9am, and spent the next five and a half hours or so letting each team run through their routine a few times while I ran around the floor snapping off shots.

Y’know, it’s amazing how heavy a D70s can get after a few hours! I’d picked up a flash sync cable to allow me to run my flash tethered to the camera (while the D70s/SB-800 combination allows wireless flash syncing, the pre-flash trigger sequence introduces a bit of delay that using the sync cable removes), so I ended up shooting nearly everything with the camera in one hand and the flash in the other. It doesn’t take long at all for that to turn into quite a workout!

While I’m going to be one of two photographers for the actual show, the second photographer couldn’t make it to the rehearsal shoot. Since the organizers of the Dance Off are also contestants, they made sure to stay out of the rehearsal space while the other teams were practicing, so that none of the teams know what the others are doing. This has put me in the rather interesting position of being the only person in Seattle who’s gotten at least a hint as to what each of the different teams are doing, and let me tell you…

…this year’s Dance Off is going to be awesome.

(All photos, of course, will on embargo until after the show — no spoilers from me, kids!)

If you didn’t make it to last year’s Dance Off, I’d suggest hitting the videos page on their site, or checking out Propadata Films‘ video podcasts of all of last year’s performers, available either as an RSS feed or through iTunes, and there’s also my photoset from last year. Some of the same teams are returning, some new teams have signed on, and all of them…well, they knew that they were going to have to bring it. And oh, it has been broughten!

And as I mentioned before, last year was sold out and people had to be turned away at the door. The Crocodile looks to have a larger capacity, but don’t delay too long — tickets are only $7, and you can snag them online now. The show’s this Thursday evening, Aug. 2nd at the Crocodile. Be there!

Life imitating Satire

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Five years ago, in the Onion:

“It’s criminal,” RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. “Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album?”

[…]

RIAA attorney Russell Frackman said the lawsuit is intended to protect the artists.

“If this radio trend continues, it will severely damage a musician’s ability to earn a living off his music,” Frackman said. “[Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich stopped in the other day wondering why his last royalty check was so small, and I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a man who’s devoted his whole life to his music that someone is able to just give it away for free? That pirates are taking away his right to support himself with his craft?”

Yesterday, in the Los Angeles Times:

With CD sales tumbling, record companies and musicians are looking at a new potential pot of money: royalties from broadcast radio stations.

For years, stations have paid royalties to composers and publishers when they played their songs. But they enjoy a federal exemption when paying the performers and record labels because, they argue, the airplay sells music.

Now, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and several artists’ groups are getting ready to push Congress to repeal the exemption, a move that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually in new royalties.

Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.

“After so many years of not being compensated, it would be nice now at this late date to at least start,” the 63-year-old Las Vegas resident said in Milwaukee, where she was performing at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino. “They’ve gotten 50-some years of free play. Now maybe it’s time to pay up.”

Rather sadly, the Onion is becoming the new Nostradamus — only a lot more accurate.

(via eukarya)

Edward Scissorhands

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Edward Logo And ImageWhen I posted about the discount on tickets to tonight’s performance of Edward Scissorhands, I left out one small detail of the “very kind offer” — namely, that Prairie and I were offered (and accepted) tickets to see the show last night!

I’m still at a loss as to just how I ended up on the promotional radar for this show, but however it came about, I’m incredibly glad it did. After wrapping up at school yesterday evening, Prairie and I headed downtown and found our way to the 5th Avenue Theatre. We’d been told our tickets would be waiting at the Will Call window, so we walked up and I gave my name to the ticket girl. She flipped through her box…nothing. Could it have been misfiled under my first name? Nope. “Well,” she said, “maybe they’ve got them over at the VIP/Press table.”

blink

Apparently, Prairie and I were VIPs (perhaps press, but since I didn’t get one of the fancy press packets, we decided we must be VIPs — something that we’ve been convinced of for quite some time now, but it’s always nice to get some acknowledgment)! We were handed our tickets (quite nice seats, too: orchestra level, row W, seats 3 and 4), the doors opened just a few moments later, and we wandered our way in. After spending a few moments in the lobby waiting for the auditorium doors to open, they did, we found our seats, ogled the theater (which neither of us has been to before, and is absolutely gorgeous) and settled in to enjoy the show.

The show itself was wonderful. I don’t really know what mental processes it took to watch the film and turn it into a…well, my first impulse is still to call it modern ballet, though the production seems to prefer terming it a “musical play without words”. Whatever you call it, and whatever it took to put it together, it works. It works quite well, in fact.

With very few changes, the story is essentially the same as the film: Edward is created, but left unfinished when his creator dies, leaving him with hands constructed of razor-sharp shears. When a chance encounter brings him and the townspeople together, he is taken in by the community…until his differences begin to overshadow their acceptance. Told entirely through music and dance, the show does a remarkable job of conveying all the emotion of Edward’s struggle to belong (heartbreak and hilarity both, as the story progresses — one of my personal favorite moments was the sudden appearance of a beanbag).

We got a real kick out of the sets, which are obviously strongly inspired by Tim Burton’s design aesthetic for the original film, from the gothic lines of the mansion and graveyard to the off-kilter architecture and bright pastels of the suburban town. They were all very simplistic, too, another nod to the starkness of Burton’s sketching (which always struck me as somewhere between Edward Gorey and Jhonen Vasquez…though, given the chronology, I suppose it would be best to classify Vasquez as somewhere between Gorey and Burton, but now I’m going completely off the subject), and a nice contrast to the admittedly impressive, but often overblown and bombastic sets of productions like Les Miserables or any of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows.

Prairie and I both had a blast last night, and thoroughly enjoyed the show. Finding favorite moments was difficult, but in the end, Prairie’s favorite scene was the Act I closer, “Topiary Garden,” while I ended up deciding that “The Annual Christmas Ball,” towards the end of Act II, was my personal favorite.

I’m very glad that I got this opportunity to see the show. It will be playing here in Seattle though May 13th, and it’s got the official Eclecticism seal of approval (which I’m sure will be appearing on their website, just as soon as I figure out what an ‘Eclecticism seal of approval’ might be or look like…)! Set aside an evening, have a ‘date night,’ and head out to the theater. It’s worth it.

Christina’s Candyman

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Candman Video While Christina Aguilera generally isn’t one of my first choices when it comes to music, one of my co-workers just turned me on to her new single, “Candyman.” Heavily inspired (in a good way) by “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” it’s an incredibly infectious little 40’s swing-style pop tune, and it’s getting a lot of play around the apartment right now.

Apparently Back to Basics, the album that “Candyman” comes off of, has Christina experimenting with a lot of different vocal styles from the past, with Christina describing it as “a throwback to the 20s, 30s, and 40s-style jazz, blues, and feel-good soul music, but with a modern twist.” When I browsed through the album on iTunes, most of the snippets didn’t really grab me — they had a bit too much of a ‘modern’ (hip-hop) twist to them. However, along with “Candyman,” two others ended up finding their way into my collection: “Nasty Naughty Boy” and “I Got Trouble.”

All three songs are together in the second half of the album, and they all concentrate on a very 40’s sound — though each is from a very different musical style. Where “Candyman” draws on the big-band sound, “Nasty Naughty Boy” uses slow, sultry jazz styles (think Jessica Rabbit’s “Why Don’t You Do Right” in Who Framed Roger Rabbit with the vamp amped up — this one is just begging to be used in a burlesque routine), and “I Got Trouble” heads down to play with a very southern blues feel.

Of course, this being late 2000’s pop, and Christina being Christina, the lyrics have a tendency to slip over the line from innuendo into straight-out raunch. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for a good laugh.

As I said above, the rest of Back to Basics didn’t grab me, but those three? I’d definitely say it’s worth spending the three bucks to snag ’em off of iTunes. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you’re listening to Christina Aguilera if you don’t want me to. ;)

Gaiman, Webley, and Toasty Tuckuses

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Nifty randomness of the day: seeing Neil Gaiman quote and promote Jason Webley (by way of someone posting the video to Eleven Saints).

Nifty plan for the afternoon: three movies have been rented (Clerks 2, Scoop, and Slither), much warm finger food has been purchased, and the couch has been covered with an electric blanket so we’ve got a warm place to sit as we spend a quiet evening at home.

Dance Off 2006

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On something of a whim, thanks to having an evening when I wasn’t working and nothing was planned, Prairie and I decided to head down to an event I’d just stumbled across earlier in the day: Dance Off 2006.

Dance Off is an annual competition held in the Seattle area for people who want to prove that they have the heart and soul of a dancer, even though they do not have the training of a dancer.

When we made it downtown and started wandering down Post Alley we were a little concerned that we wouldn’t be able to make it in, as the line just kept going, and going, and going…

Lining Up

…however, we figured it was worth taking a chance and grabbed a spot at the end of the line. I wandered off to snap a few shots, and suddenly saw Prairie heading towards me to tell me that I’d just missed my chance to get a ticket! There’d been someone working their way down the line handing them out, but since I wasn’t in line…oops. Ack! Mere moments later, though, I spotted the girl who’d been passing out tickets, and she spotted me. “You! You were taking pictures!” she said, and handed me a ticket. Once again, all was good with the world.

This Is Your Dance Off Ticket

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Conversation

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Conversation

90’s rock group Soul Asylum gave a free show at the Pike Place market on Thursday morning, and Prairie and I headed down to see them. While we were waiting for the show to start I took a few random people shots around the gathering crowd. This shot is by far my favorite of the morning (the rest are here).

iTunes “Comfortably Numb (ATOC Extended Edit)” by Scissor Sisters from the album Comfortably Numb, Pts. 1 & 2 – Single (2003, 5:39).

Don’t Feel Like Dancin’

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My co-worker Nick got me hooked on the new single by the Scissor Sisters, ‘Don’t Feel Like Dancin’‘. It’s incredibly infectious, catchy, and fun — feels like what the Bee Gees would be doing if they were making pop music today, and would fit perfectly coming over the soundtrack of a roller rink. So far, I can’t get enough of it (and Prairie’s getting a laugh out of watching me bounce around in my seat while it’s playing).

iTunes “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ (Radio Edit)” by Scissor Sisters from the album I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ – Single (2006, 4:10).