Still playing with some “How To” footage. Still hate iMovie. I don’t want you all to think I’m just sitting on my ass, so I’ll provide an update and then share some open mic love with you that I stumbled across in my experimentations. But first, let me give you the rundown on progress headaches in the editing world. Amy with the Boom and the Pow after the jump.

As my many two regular readers know, I’m trying to work with film editing. I ran into some issues with iMovie a while back, but I skipped telling you about one detail in that process. The biggest problem I’m having across the board is that my iMac G5 won’t recognize my analogue Sony digi 8 camera. Macs “just work” right out of the box, right? Right. So.

The workaround is to boot into XP and use the proprietary Sony app to import the footage onto my machine. The problem here is that I made the Windows partition pretty small when I created it, so I need to be able to access my external FW drives, which are Mac formatted. Because they are Mac formatted, Windows won’t see them. So I go and find MacDrive, and use that until the free trial expires. I got a lot of footage imported that way, but it’s in the shitty .AVI format.

Which my Mac can’t deal with.

Seriously, when I merely click on an AVI file, if I don’t attempt to open it right away, Finder crashes. WTF? So I install 3ivx as instructed. Still no love. Quicktime won’t play them, VLC will, but that still doesn’t help me with editing. iMovie won’t recognize them either. I keep getting a “wrong file type” error or something. So I need to convert the AVI files to a format my Mac can digest. I found iSquint, a free program that does just that. Works pretty good. Just takes a long time.

The biggest problem I have with this process, though, is that the quality of the footage is being degraded every time I treat it in some fashion. I want to be able to just pull it right from the camera an play with the original footage. To give you an example, the AVI clip that I used for the YouTube video you’ll see here in a bit was 642MB. The .mp4 clip was 47.4MB after conversion from AVI. I know that if I were working with footage streamed directly from the camera, I’d be up into the gigabyte range, so I’m a little pissed that I’m expending large amounts of time on what inevitably will be a film with less than perfect image quality.

So, I gained access to a professional quality film editing program. Granted, it’s an old version, but even when running FCP, the program won’t recognize my camera. I might be doing something wrong, too, and I have a call in to a director friend of mine that left me two voicemails explaining the less-than-intuitive way to capture footage into FCP. (Set four scratch discs, File–>Log and Capture. Log and Capture? But there’s an IMPORT option there too, why not just name it IMPORT and call it good? Sheesh.)

Until I get a little bit more guidance, I’m leaving it sit for a time while I work on other projects, which I’ll talk about later this week. If anyone has any guidance they can offer me, I’d love hearing about it. Let me know in the comments.

Now, though, it’s time to watch a little bit of open mic night. This footage was shot at Red’s Blue Goose Saloon in Gardiner, MT, 1999. The guy running sound was known as Shifty Brian, and Amy was dubbed Amy with the Boom and the Pow. I don’t remember her last name. She does a killer rendition of Hattie McDaneil’s 1929 song “Any Kind of Man Would be Better Than You”

…

I ran into one of the musicians last night, and he informed me that two from the group will be performing at Dauphines next week. Sweet.

Meanwhile, you can find them on YouTube here and here.

These folks are the most exciting artistic thing happening in Missoula right now. They are amazing. If you are in town, and have the opportunity to attend SURFACE UNDERGROUND on Friday, make every effort.

This week, I’ll be featuring some writing I did upon first seeing them perform. Writing I did mainly to help me process for myself everything that was going on at the time. Incredible. Not to be missed.

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Join Us For an Exciting Evening In Missoula, MT

OpenField Artists
present

SURFACE UNDERGROUND

April 6th - First Friday
The Loft - 424 Higgins

An evening of Performance Art and a Night of Dancing.
Theater, Dance, Live music, Sock puppets, Aerial fabric, Spoken word, Visual art, Electronic music.

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7-10pm -
Surface Underground
Featuring the OpenField Artists & Friends
(see names below)

10-2am
Live Music and Dancing
Sueño Lunar

The Mermaid
Aaron B

Production: Heidi Junkersfeld and Aaron Bolton

Upstairs Gallery (7-10pm)

Jonathan Marquis and Adelaide Every

Performance Art (7-10pm)
Actors/Dancers
Heidi Junkersfeld
Naga Nataka
Abbey Stevens

Robert Sears
Yohana Weaver
Dawn Hartman
Kaila June Gidley
Tricia Opstad
Thaddeus Haas
Amanda Cevallos

Musicians
Martin McCain

Catlin Hill
Nate Distlehorst
Nathan Zavalney
Nate Biehl
Lee McAfee

Installation
Jonathan Marquis

Digital Art
Cabe Lindsay
Bob Boyer

Color Design
Joseph Welles

Electronic Music (10pm-2am)
Sueño
Lunar
The Mermaid
Aaron B

As an interdisciplinary art collective, the Open field Artists experiment with themes that animate the exhibition space, using myth, diversity, and identity in relation to contemporary culture. We create experiences in a variety of performance spaces, utilizing improvisation, various artistic mediums, and the presentation of original artwork. This allows for the formation of a range of atmospheres intertwining and blurring the mundane into the mythical. Our mission is to move within the field and increase awareness by bringing the process of creation into the open.

Technorati Tags: Performance Art, Dance, Theatre, Music, Spoken Word, Art, Missoula

John Dendy’s first release, I Got Lucky is a desperate, tragic beautiful and heartfelt collection of eleven songs spanning over eight years of songwriting. Taken as a whole, they are a soundtrack to a wandering soul in search of his own truth on a desolate landscape of heartache, confusion, yearning and hope. All good art extrapolates an inner truth, or a search for it, and with I Got Lucky Dendy succeeds in carving a definitive path through the darkness of abandoned empty roads followed on late night drives, of loud bars where quiet conversations bring redemption and on porches on the summer where friends gather to play music and knock back a few PBRs.Dendy grew up in the South and moved to Montana in the mid 1990s. His education and intelligence betray themselves in his well rendered lyrics which never come off as trite or contrived. Imagine Springsteen’s Greetings done in the style of The Ghost of Tom Joad with a healthy dose of whiskey sung in a roadhouse somewhere into which you stumbled after a long day of driving across the Dakotas in the heat of summer and you might have an idea of how I Got Lucky sounds. You don’t need to imagine, though, because you can hear samples of the songs which appear on the disc over at John’s website. Explore the site a little, then click BUY MY CD to listen to clips. You’ll be taken to the CD BABY page where the clips are available in MP3 streams and where you can get the disc.

It’s the first CD I’ve bought in a long time, having migrated my listening habits mostly to digital because of the radio show I do over at KBGA. It’s a $15 well spent, and I have been listening to the album for two solid straight days. The flow of the songs from one into the next is well thought-out, and illustrates the care that went into selecting the songs that appear on the album, as well as the order in which they appear.

The disc opens with a bluegrass infused “Where are You?”. After the bleak Never Was Golden, which includes the brilliant metaphor of a “hazelnut heart”, we get Tattoo, whose lyrics are one-liner after another through the better part of the song (I can’t give away the punchline, sorry), and then the very short “Communist Party”, a playful song whose social commentary won’t be lost on most listeners. Dendy then lays down Gardiner River Bridge, an ill-named(?) song that remembers walking across the bridge over the Yellowstone River in Gardiner, Montana, thinking about lost love. He’s smart enough not to dwell in self-pity, and pokes fun at the emo kids with the driving bluegrass tinged Restless. You can almost hear the laughter and the clanking of empty beer bottles on the porch on this one. With “Men”, Dendy pays tribute to some of his close friends and what makes them strong human beings before taking a country-western turn with “Just Because”, a favorite. “Stupid to Them” nods back to “Men” with its message about the importance of being true to oneself, which Dendy questions on Selling Myself. The album closes with a hard song that features one of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever heard Dendy sing, “…the only part of me that’s still grieving/is you”. Nobody Home is a kick in the gut because of its honesty and rawness.

The danger with songs of this intensity is that the singer might fall into the depths of self-loathing and depression that make for the bad emo-band poetry written with black ink on black paper in the darkness of one’s mid-western suburban basement. Instead, Dendy sings with self-confidence and honesty that is missing from much of the mainstream music being released today.

BUY THE ALBUM

You can also pick up the album by catching John play out. He’s scheduled to play some Montana shows. If you get a chance to check him out and you live in Helena, Bozeman or Livingston, you can see John play. All shows are free:

Saturday, January 21st, 2006 9:00 PM MST
Helena CD Release
Windbag Saloon
Last Chance Gulch

Thursday, February 16th, 2006 7:30 PM MST
Leaf & Bean - Bozeman
Main Street

Bozeman friends. Come give a listen and check out my new CD.
Friday, February 17th, 2006 7:00 PM MST
Chadz - Livingston

Friday, March 31st, 2006 8:00 PM MST
leaf & bean - Bozeman
Main Street

Saw Kool Keith at the Elks Lodge last night. Yeah. Kool Keith in Missoula, Montana. It was quite surreal. Also on the bill were Ambidext, R. Biz, Verbal Threat and the F.I.L.T.H.E.E. IMMIGRANTS. It was a good show, not many attendants, though. Maybe 300 people?

Keith handed out thongs to the ladies, porn for the guys, and a variety of other things throughout the night. Now I have Blue Flowers stuck in my head.

They had a kid who looked to be pretty young behind the turntables, but he held his own.

And, of course Kool Keith himself was in fine form. Then again, I wasn’t feeling critical, I just came to have a good time. And I did.

The Angry Mullet Bouncer Guy was a riot.

So I got called into the radio station to fill a show one recent Friday morning. I am not A morning person. At all. And I had to be in the studio @ 5.45AM. I knew I needed to do something to motivate myself so that I wouldn’t sound all tired for my listeners.

Here it is. (You need Quicktime to view.)

You’re not the Cat’s Pajamas anymore, Baby.[clicky]*

*Note: Originally I had the movie embedded, but thought better of it. No sense forcing you to watch.

The show went well. Previous to playing it, I emailed the GM and the Program Director at KBGA, and got no response from them, so I assumed it was a go. When I arrived at the studio, the new general manager, who will replace the current one at semester’s end, gave me a little resistance ‘cos she didn’t understand what I was trying to do. I explained it to her, and she encouraged me to call the GM and make sure I had his permission. I did, and he said, “go for it,” so I did.

Add to the setlist Springsteen’s new one, available at the iTunes Music Store exclusively until the album comes out, “Devils and Dust”. Also add Radiohead’s “Everything in its Right Place”, Wilco’s “Reservations”, and Public Enemy’s clean version of “41:19”. All available on their respective websites for free download before they were available for purchase anywhere else.

You can download the Extroidinary Machine album in its entirety at TorrentBox, and learn more about the onging fight to get the album released at Fiona Apple dot Org. Read the comments on the blog, there is an interesting dialogue occurring there. And there, I also learned that, in addition to The End in Seattle, a station out of Iowa/Omaha NB has played the album as well.

I read pieces from articles on CNET quoting studies done indicating that filesharing does not affect record sales, a scathing indictment of the record industry by Cortney Love, who has also utilized the Internet to distribute her music, as well as stuff from Chuck D, as quoted on CNET. I’d link them, but did not save the links, opting to print the stories instead, and the URLS are pretty long, I’m pretty tired, + my typing hands are less than happy to be still in front of a keyboard.

Conversations I had with other DJs at the station seemed positive. One DJ who had already heard the album said it’s the Blood on the Tracks of our generation. Being a Dylan fan, I don’t know that I agree with that statement, though the album is definitely a good one. Other DJs voiced their view that since Epic/Sony and Apple herself have had no comment about the album being available for download, that this is a marketing ploy. Maybe. But the album is out there. Get it if you need it. I love it, and I’m not a huge Fiona Apple fan.

Meanwhile, for those of you in need of a writing fix from me, head over to CPFA to read my latest, Broken Window.

Thanks for dropping by, I’m headed to bed.

Rock + Roll has always been about rebellion. From Alan Freed’s Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland, Ohio, the first rock + roll concert, to the original Woodstock to the Rock for Change tour of 2004 and, even closer to home, to the infamous last night at The Ritz here in Missoula.Rock music, all music, should be seen and heard live to be able to be fully appreciated. The 45 RPM, first developed by RCA in the 50s, the 8-tracks, the vinyl, the tapes, the CDs, even the MP3s are all incidental. Yes, artists must make a living, and they should be paid for what they do, but the current business model, which, strangely enough, seems to be based on the same type of business model that is shared between pimps and hookers, a business model encouraged by the Recording Industry Association of America, does not support innovative music + creativity + does not pay artists the money they deserve.

Napster began to change all of that. Napster was rebellious in the way that it delivered music to the people. The consumer now had a choice as to how he acquired his music. Now he had the opportunity to download his music for free. The money he saved could be spent at concerts where artists actually get paid. He could use the money he might have spent on an overpriced CD where most of the profits would go into the pockets of the suits at the RIAA to buy merchandise at a concert, where more of the money goes directly to artists.

Napster gets shut down. We see MP3.com get revamped. More legal download music sites spring up, from Rhapsody to the iTunes Music Store to Sony and Napster 2.0.

People still download music. Downloads do not hurt music sales – and this is a fact that must be understood. Music sales may be suffering from a variety of other ailments, including the poor economy, or, gasp!, mediocre music, but downloads are not the issue that the RIAA wants you to believe that it is.

Technology changed the way consumers and artists think about music distribution. People could now get music on Usenet or via P@P programs such as Grockster and Limewire. And now, Bittorrent.

Artists also realized that they have a unique opportunity to take back control of their music and its distribution. They are no longer chained to the record companies to help them distribute their music. They could release it themselves – on their websites.

Artists as diverse as Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys to REM and Radiohead to Wilco and the Smashing Pumpkins have embraced this new opportunity, and Radio Dystopia was founded on the idea that this opportunity is a good one which encourages artistic control of the music, of the creative process.

The first part of tonight’s show will explore artists who have released entire albums for free on their websites either before the album was available in stores, or as web exclusives. The second hour will push the limits of the conventional music industry as a way to encourage the industry to re-think its business model as I play Fiona Apple’s newest album that her record label, Sony, refuses to release.

“Music has always been a craft of borrowing. In traditional, or folk, music, melodies and lyrics were handed down from generation to generation. At every stage, musicians would change the tune or substitute words at will, adapting songs to their own situations.” (From the liner notes of the Illegal Art Project)

Illegal Art is sponsored by Brooklyn-based Stay Free! magazine, with support from the Online Policy Group, a nonprofit ISP devoted to free speech, and Prelinger Archives.

Found Illegal Art from a link on the Banned Music site. You might remember these guys as the ones responsible for Grey Tuesday last year.

So I am going down that road this week. Should be fun. Tune in: KBGA

Hope to write at some point today. Right now it’s almost 2AM. Headed to bed.