Send-Off Shindig!

We're throwing a send-off party!
All are invited--the more, the merrier!

Good For A Short Laugh

I discovered these today in the Design For Mankind newsletter. The Celebritea bags made me chuckle, as did the portable birthday cake for those times you totally forgot someone's big day.  Plus, they're by a German company called Donkey Products.  It's a well-known fact that I just adore the Germans.  No reason, just do.

SXSW 2010!

It's only the second day of the official SXSW music fest and we've already lost one of our party to the croup and the rest of us are struggling along trying to rally the troops each night.  Although, in all honesty, we did start last Sunday at the annual Austin Kite Fest in Zilker Park.

Festival Finder

We want to hit up as many music festivals as we can on this trip, but there seem to be so many different festivals that I didn't really know start researching.  I just found Festival Finder that seems to have a pretty comprehensive listing based on genre of music.  Check it out.

Festival Finder

It would be good to go ahead and scope them out now because the only way we're really going to be able to afford a music fest is if we volunteer.  It'll be good to sign up early and get in the back way.

SXSW Marketing

As a resident of Austin, Tx there are two events that we use to orient ourselves throughout the year like the North and South Poles; one in the fall, Austin City Limits, and one in the spring South By Southwest.  These are the times that Austin is transformed into the best party scene ever.  Frankly, its the reason I moved here in the first place.

My personal favorite is SXSW; video games, film, and the largest part, music.  The whole city essentially shuts down for more than 1,400 bands over 4 days; UT even arranges to have spring break coincide with with festival because they know everyone would be skipping class to go see a show.   Although that number is a little misleading because it doesn't include the huge number of "unofficial" shows that happen in makeshift venues that pop up in backyards and abandoned warehouses.  And the fashions, I've never seen so many hipsters in my life; it's like a constant parade of eye candy.  My favorite way to tackle SXSW is to go see as many day shows as I can handle.  In the past the day shows have all been sponsored by some liquor or beer company and you can drink for free.  Plus, the day shows tend to be smaller and more laid back.  Then around dusk I like to retire with some friends and have a cookout before heading back out to one more show.  My favorite site to scope out all the bands and get the low-down on where they're playing is Showlist Austin for the unofficial shows and SXSW for the official ones.

Since SXSW is so chaotic and confusing at times the Austin Music Foundation hosted a discussion panel at La Zona Rosa to help musicians navigate the festival with the most marketing know-how as possible.  The AMF is an excellent resource for local musicians learn the business side of music by hosting free lectures around town.  Get on the mailing list, you won't regret it!

So I went and took a couple notes:

**Don't worry about giving out demo cds or merch in any way.  Most people don't want to carry it around and if they do, they probably end up breaking it or loosing it before the end. 
**Have business cards made with your photo on it; eople remember faces before names in a crowd, and myspace address on one side and a list of shows you'll be playing at SXSW so people can come hear you play.
**Research  label owners, marketing people,  musicians that you want to meet before the festival starts and scope out where they're going to be so you can ambush!  But in a nice, non-overpowering way of course.
**If you're playing an unofficial show then by all means DO NOT put the words South By South West or SXSW anywhere on your poster.  They could sue you to protect their intellectual property.
**Most relationships you'll make at the festival are going to be with other musicians.  Don't negate that face.

And that's what I learned.

I can't wait! 
*A graphic designer who's been working with SXSW just came in the store and said that Home Slice on South Congress Ave is having some really good shows and to keep a lookout.  Word to the wise.

Mammy Rock

Ruth Flowers is not your average DJ. Coming up to her 70th birthday, when many are well settled into retirement, the grandmother from Bristol has become an international sensation, in demand in clubs throughout Europe.

With spiky silver hair and scarlet lipstick, gold bomber jacket, baggy tracksuit bottoms, bling jewellery, and trademark giant black sunglasses, Flowers plays down the new-found fame of her twilight years.

"I'm not a superstar DJ," she said, before donning her diamante-encrusted headphones and starting her set. "I'm just a DJ."

Mamy Rock, as she is known on the circuit, came to the wheels of steel later than most. She fell in love with dance music after accompanying her grandson to a London nightclub.

"The bouncers didn't want to let me in at first, I was quite a lot older than the usual clientele, but once I got inside I hugely enjoyed it. I thought 'I can do this.' My husband had died, I was retired, I had the time, so why not?"

Entire article can be read at Guardian UK

How wonderful is this?!  She reminds me of the rapping grandma from The Wedding Singer.

I just found some more styled photos of Mammy Rock on Advanced Style.

"Our Song"

I've never had an "our song" with anyone I've ever dated--it never came naturally.  I envisioned that it would be necessary to sit down over dinner and say, "Baby, it has come to my attention that we don't have a song.  Do you know how that makes me feel?  Wretched, it makes me feel wretched.  We simply have to choose one this evening before this gets any further."

So, I've never had a couples' song.

It made me think about all the other songs that couples claim and the list doesn't seem that long.  

 1. At Last - Etta James
2. Unforgettable - Nat King Cole
3. When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge
4. Have I Told You Lately - Rod Stewart
5. We've Just Only Begun - The Carpenters
6. Fields Of Gold - Sting
7. Everything I Do - Bryan Adams
8. Only You - Roy Orbison
9. Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper
10. This I Promise You - NSync
11, You Are So Beautiful - Joe Cocker
12. Can You Feel The Love Tonight - Elton John
13. My Boo - Usher and Alisha Keys
14. Crazy In Love - Beyonce
15. Hopelessly Devoted To You - Olivia Newton John
16. I Just Called To Say I Love You - Stevie Wonder
17. The Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Middler
18. Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton
19. I Will Always Love You- Whitney Houston
20. Maybe I'm Amazed - Paul McCartney
21. Baby, I Love Your Way - Peter Frampton
22. Our Song- Elton John

Frankly, there's not one on that list of songs that I would claim for myself.  They were all written for someone else and it just feels disingenuous to say that it's ours.  Frankly, I would throw the whole list away and say, "Babe, if we really gotta have song then let's grab 'Fishin' Blues' cuz darlin, that's what I wanna do with you...grow old and go fishin with you although, after we get good bait of course."

Les Triplettes De Belleville

Several years ago I got into the habit of requesting friends and acquaintances to make me a mixed tape of their favorite songs.  I had the idea that this excersize would be the musical equilvalent to looking through their trash--a very telling way to get to know someone in a flash with a bi-product of enhancing my musical library 10-fold.

This is how I discovered M.  A French musican who is hugely popular among coissants and brie but who is virtually unknown in our land of milkshakes and hamburgers.  He even worked on the soundtrack for The Triplettes of Belleville which leans heavily on the gypsy swing music of Django Rheinhardt with a super cute music video.


In fact, I quite like French music.  I like world music in general because when the words are in a language I can't understand, I focus on the music as a whole while the voice becomes simply another instrument and less a vehicle for some deeper message.  However, of all world music, French is my favorite.

Jacques Dutronc-Les Cactus (1967)

This American Life

  

I love This American Life.  Words cannot express how much I adore the idiosyncratic stories that make up the hour-long radio show.  It often comes up in dinner conversation by saying, "I was listening to This American Life the other day and I heard that..."  There's one episode in particular that I just love called Numbers.

"Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want. It turned out to be a landscape, with a mountain and a lake, and deer, and a family, and George Washington. Then they applied these techniques to music, with composer David Soldier. They surveyed audiences about what kind of instruments and topics they liked most in their songs. Then they produced one song based on what people most want to hear—and one song based on what they hate the most. The one people hate includes bagpipes, children singing, lyrics about holidays and religion, wild volume and tempo changes."

The thing about both experiments is that the artwork resulting from what people want is completely weak and uninteresting; like a Thomas Kinkaid painting.  However, the painting and song that were created out of everything that annoys people ended up being different and amazing.  You can go to Melamid and Komar's website and buy the songs or you can listen to the streaming episode for free.

The experiment reminds me of an ancient Greek sculptor that allowed fellow Grecians to critique his sculpture of an ideal feminine beauty and he would make changes as requested.  The resulting sculpture was considered grotesque.

It also reminds me of a contemporary French performance artist named Orlan who has been undergoing multiple plastic surgeries to combine the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, nose of Jean-Leon Gerome's Psyche, lips of Francois Boucher's Europa, eyes of French School of Fountainbleau's Diana, and the forehead of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  Entitled The Reincarnation Of Saint Orlan, the project began in 1990 to morph herself into an ideal beauty as suggested by men who paint woman.  She even makes the act of plastic surgery into performance art by staying awake and reciting poetry while filming the procedure. A few stills of the operations can be seen on her website.  I love her.  She's extreme but fascinating.  By combining all of these various elements of feminine beauty she's making herself look rather disturbing, but in a very feminist way...there's lots of articles about the whole thing.

Darwin As An Opera

Swedish rock group The Knife, who's Heartbeats was repopularized by Jose Gonzalez, has recently gone is a wholly new direction.  They've been commissioned by Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma to write the music for their opera based on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species.  In collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, they will release the studio version of the opera entitled Tomorrow, In A Year, on March 1, 2010.  A streaming version of "Colouring Of Pigeons" can be heard here.

Chladni Plates

Invented by German physicist Ernst Chladni in the late 1700's to illustrate the patterns of two  dimensional sound waves.  They are created by stroking a bow against the edge of a steel plate that is covered with a thin layer of sand.  The plates' unique vibrations will cause the sand to move and settle in various nodal patterns; nodes are the points of absolutle zero vibrations.  The more complex the vibration is, the more elaborate the resulting pattern will be.  Chladni Plate techniques are commonly used to aide in the design of acoustic instruments such as violins, guitars, and cellos. 

I love that when I'm searching for something in Google Images, I often stumble upon something wholly unrelated yet amazing.  Chladni plates are one of these.  They have a couple videos online showing the technique in motion which are pretty cool.

Happy New Years!

We went and did it again.

My best friend Kat, my boyfriend Conner, his brother Dan, and I wish you all a Happy New Year! 

I don't know what everyone else has planned for their New Years resolution however, I've finally decided to ditch my eternal resolution of "getting buff" for something a little more practical...I've decided that it's time I try to learn a little something about the stock market.  Haha, not exactly my idea of a good time, but I might as well get the bandwagon.

Love and kisses!

Rachel

Happy Christmas!

Oh my goodness!  I love Christmas!

Conner got me a tripod for Xmas which we used to make our Christmas photos. It's a Finn family tradition to stay in your bath robe--Robe Day-- for as much of the day as possible...which is what we did up until we decided it was time to go be physical, physical and play Frisbee golf.  

Now Dan's making some rib of lamb over green beans and risotto.  I love having a chef in the house.  It's encouraging me to go running more and more.

Two Legged Dog

This has nothing to do with music what-so-ever but I just thought it was hilarious and awesome.

The Tipping Point

I'm late to the Macolm Gladwell bandwagon, but better late than never, eh? I just finished The Tipping Point and aside from being brilliant, it is also an endless well of party conversation starters. "Oh! I just read that George Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody In Blue" in my hometown of Asheville, NC...and Zelda Fitzgerald was totally institutionalized there too. Great town, great town.", or, "If you want to get a really good deal on a new car, you gotta go to a fleet buyer on the 25th of the month.  It's true, it's the word on the street."

Despite the inexhaustible sources of information available, we're now entering the word of mouth epidemic. The way we find out about new insurance plans, restaurants, or drugs for depression will be ruled by what we hear from people we trust, which will just happen to be one of three kinds of people: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Connectors are people who have a natural talent for making friends and acquaintances. There is a test in which out of 250 last names, randomly taken from the Manhattan phone book, you get a point each time you know someone with that last name. "Knowing" spans from being good friends to merely meeting someone in line at the grocery store. If you know multiple people with the same last name then you get one point per individual. What you score on the test should give you an idea of how social you are. Most people average around 21 points, a Connector typically score around 100.

In addition to knowing a ton of people, the types of people they know are spread over many different social circles. Despite the fame brought about by the game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Kevin Bacon actually isn't that connected in Hollywood--he ranks 669th out of all Hollywood actors. The most well connected actor is Rod Steiger who has been in all types of movies from On The Waterfront to the abismal Car Pool.

The Mavens are the information specialists. They collect information from all sorts of different sources and are socially motivated to share that info with others, they can't help themselves.  They are essential in the word of mouth chain because people trust them to have the low-down on a given subject and pass that along for no particular reason except they like you and want to help; they are the trusted unbiased source.

In a cultural epidemic the “mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people –Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing.” When people interact they fall into a mutual rhythm of speech and movement—called cultural microrhythms. Salesmen possess the power to draw others into their own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction, which is crucial in convincing someone one way or the other.

Another facet to understand in order to make a cultural movement explode is the power of the group. If you want to change someone’s behavior or ideology, you need to create a community around them where those new beliefs will be expressed and nurtured.

Say, for instance, you’re trying to break a new band, I think all of this information is invaluable. It’s essential to identify who the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are and target them with info about the new musical group. On a national scale, I think the best way to identify these people is through blogs. Blogs such as Aurgasm, The Corner, or Said The Gramaphone are all written by total music mavens and contacting them would be my first bet. Locating the music Connectors is more geographically specific however, with a little research finding the local what’s-happening guides and their writers, and local record shop proprietors would be where I would start. Creating a community around a certain band or type of music seems to happen organically, but I think you can facilitate the growth through staging a series of house parties. The community that would arise through the house parties would associate the community with the music and continue on to support the band as they moved on to more official venues.

Just some ideas…