FatsLeroy.com

Steven Lipski has vowed to stay off the booze for a bit after the Jersey City Councilman urinated from the second-floor balcony of a Washington D.C. nightclub onto revelers groovin’ to the sounds of a Grateful Dead tribute band Friday night. Cops dragged Lipski out of the popular venue after staffers spotted his drunken weenie raining down on concert goers. The 44-year-old Democrat refused to comment on the peeing incident, but told reporters gathered outside his home that he’s “resolved not to touch alcohol again.” Doin’ Jersey proud, one peeing legislator at a time!

[ Truemors ]

I did some checking, and it was definitely the Dark Star Orchestra show in D.C. Man, that is just bad vibes all around…

[ Google cache of DSO Tour Schedule ]

The other day, I mentioned something about Phish - reuniting for some shows and a recent release from their live vaults.

The release that caught my eye was Vegas 96 (available on disc from Phish Drygoods and for download from LivePhish.com), a show that I attended personally. That was definitely one of the greatest live shows I have ever seen. Listening to the opening “Wilson” from the live recording yesterday, I had to catch my breath - I still remember the music.

Read the rest of this entry »

They just couldn’t resist… 

Phish returns to the stage for three concerts at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia on March 6, 7 and 8, 2009.

A limited number of tickets are available directly through Phish Tickets’ online ticketing system at http://phish.portals.musictoday.com/ . The ticketing request period is currently underway and will end on Wednesday, October 8th at 11:59AM EST.

Tickets go on sale to the public on Saturday, October 18th at 10 AM EST and may be purchased online at http://ticketmaster.com or by phone at 757.671.8100, 757.872.8100 or 804.262.8100. Tickets will not be available at the venue box office and there is a two-ticket limit per show.

The band intends to announce additional touring in 2009 early next year.

I’m so excited I’m actually going to purchase some goods from the boys in the form of a live concert recording of a show I went to (and subsequently contracted pneumonia from - thanks Ginger) in Las Vegas in 1996. Flying Elvises (or Elvii), half of Primus, opera singers, and plenty of goodies - that was one hell of a show, and it took me two weeks to recover.

[ Phish :: News. ]

I caught a song or two from this Phil & Friends show on one of Jaybird’s archived podcasts from his radio show, Endless Boundaries. I think it was show 542, but I’m not sure. I was blown away - the band is tight. But who makes up the “& Friends” portion of the band on this gig?

• Trey Anastasio
• Joan Osborne
• Larry Campbell
• Rob Barraco
• Jeff Sipe

Phil was gracious enough to allow soundboards for this show to be seeded, and that is what I grabbed. Thanks Phil!

[ Download from Nugs.net, or check out one of the many stellar recordings at Archive.org ]

And somewhat related… I spotted a great one-of-a-kind interview with Jerry Garcia back in a hotel room in ‘81. He covers quite a bit of ground and even addresses the issue of taping - which is surprisingly much more convoluted now that he’s not around. The recording can be found at the Internet Archive. Worth a listen.

The story here is that I first learned about these guys a couple of years ago, probably at Cool Hunting. I was hooked from the moment I saw their video for Summer Goddess (above), but it didn’t seem very easy to come some of their recordings. On Friday at the coal mines, something was bugging me. I remembered some ultra hip Japanese jazz group with a funny name, but I couldn’t figure it out until I got home and looked at my bookmarks…

[ Soil & "Pimp" Sessions' English website (Brownswood Recordings) ]

Note: This is a post that got lost. These guys are just too fucking great to ignore.

I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for a way to make a living.

The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.

I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I was hooked.

[ New York Times ]

Technorati Tags: Japan, jazz, writing

According to his recently released financial disclosure forms, Giuliani made eight paid speeches, each on a different day, during the 23 days the Iraq Study Group met. What hasn’t been noted is that two of the eight speeches were for an organization called Life Win, Inc. (Get Motivated Seminars).

What is a “Get Motivated” seminar? According to a 2003 report in the St. Petersburg Times, a Get Motivated seminar is:

A daylong program infused with Christianity, patriotism and pumping music suitable for aerobics. Many among the roster of speakers urged the audience of about 25,000 to find their inner power — and to sign up for more seminars and books.

At the seminars, Rudy would take the stage to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” with red, white and blue confetti swirling around his head. He would then launch into a speech using the attack and the aftermath of 9/11 to illustrate his “six principles of leadership.” For his two appearances during the Iraq Study Group meetings alone, Giuliani pulled in a combined gross fee of $200,000.

[ Think Progress ]

Technorati Tags: christian wrong

My wife isn’t a drummer (as cool as that might be), but I play sax so this is actually very informative.

The measures that my wife and I took — spending thousands of dollars (and countless hours) on consultants, contractors, materials and gadgets in order to turn our new dining room into a professional-caliber music studio — might go beyond the needs of many people.
But the lessons we learned would benefit anyone who entertains thoughts of soundproofing their home.

[ Wired ]

Technorati Tags: studio, living room, soundproof

The parents of all of these children attended the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City, Oregon. Nearly eighty children whose parents attend this church are known to have died from preventable causes since 1955, and none of their
parents have been charged with any crime. Children who attended the Followers of Christ Church between 1989 and 1999 died at a rate twenty-six times more often than other children in Oregon. If their parents had let them die because of their politics, or aesthetics, or favorite musician, or nearly any other reason, they would have been charged with neglect if not outright murder. But because these parents denied medical care to their own children for religious reasons, no charges were brought against them.

[ Key 64 ]

Technorati Tags: baby-killers, child sacrifice, christian wrong

Every year the P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in Long Island City hosts a series of summer music concerts called Warm Up. For 10 Saturdays, 5,000 partygoers converge on the museum’s 15,000-square-foot courtyard to pump up the jams with bands like the Scissor Sisters and Afrika Bambaataa.

Shows happen during the blistering heat of the day, so P.S.1 creates a place where partygoers can drink and dance in the shade. Rather than put up humdrum tents, the arts center holds a competition for temporary structures in the courtyard. The center takes proposals from five, hand-picked designers, before choosing a winner. This year’s finalists range from Yale and Harvard architecture professors to set designers for the Matrix movies. While each proposal has to address the same requirements to create a kind of urban beach environment — shade, seating and a water element — the solutions vary from high-tech plastics to water-jet in brass.

[ Wired ]

Technorati tags: tinfoil, architecture, concert .