Categories
It Happened to Me Music

“Must-Know” Canadian Tunes?

The two weddings that I’ve attended with Wendy have both been for
Canadians of my generation, which meant that the DJ played Spirit of the West’s Home for a Rest (a song where they managed to beat The Pogues on their own turf) and a couple of
big hits that she didn’t recognize. I’ve decided to give her a hand by
making her a mixed CD of the essential Canadian rock and pop tunes for
people out age (specifically people who went to high school in the
mid-to-late eighties and university in the late eighties to
mid-nineties).

So far, I’ve come up with:

I need more songs! If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Some guidelines:

  • The
    songs should have been hits only within the borders of Canada, or even
    my area of Canada (Ontario/Quebec). There’s no point in putting Tom
    Cochrane’s Life is a Highway or Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 on this CD;
    the point is to give her music that’s new to her.
  • The term
    “hit” is relative. It the song had a cult following in my neck of the
    woods (say, a hit in the Ontario/Quebec university zone in the early
    90s but unknown in New England), it counts.
  • More than one song by the same artist is okay.

Oh, and could someone tell me if the Dream WarriorsMy Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style was or wasn’t a hit in the Excited States? It did well here in Ontario and was also a minor club hit in the UK.

Your suggestions, please…

Categories
Music

A Question Mixing Pop Music and History [Updated]

If I were to start a very image-conscious commercial-sounding boy band named Gavrilo Princip, would anybody get the joke?

Update: Here a hint — there’s an alt-rock band that the critics seem to like called Franz Ferdinand.

Categories
In the News Music

R.I.P. Rick James

It was announced only 20 minutes ago: Rick James, the man behind the hit single Super Freak and Dave Chapelle’s most-quoted routine, is dead at the age of 56.


I have got to get me boots like those.

Super Freak was my first “signature song” when I started DJing at Clark Hall Pub at Crazy Go Nuts University: when you heard Rick singing “She’s a very kinky giiiiirl…”, you knew that I was manning the booth.

Thanks for the music, Rick!

Download Super Freak (3.1 MB, 128k MP3)

Categories
In the News It Happened to Me Music

Weekend Update

For those of you not familiar with Canada, today is that most generic of Canadian holidays, the Civic Holiday,
the defining purpose fo which is to “not work”. Although it is not a
statutory holiday, it’s highly unusual for any non-retial,
non-restaurant employer to ask you to work.

The Civic Holiday is so generic that it goes by different names in
different provinces. In Ontario, the province in which Accordion City
is located, it’s Simcoe Day, named for John Graves Simcoe, the first
Lieutenant (pronounced “leff-tenant”) Governor of Upper Canada (the
original name of Ontario).

I decided to spend the long weekend visiting The Redhead
in Boston, where I am currently filing this blog entry. Unfortunately,
it isn’t a holiday here in the Excited States, so I’m making this entry
from the lounge of The Redhead’s workplace, the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society in a cute little postsecondary education facility
the locals like to call “Hahh-vahhd”.


For some reason, I’m always out of town on a long weekend during which
my name or weblog gets mentioned in  Accordion City’s local media.
It’s happened again for the third time this year: on Saturday, the Globe and Mail
featured the Secret Swing on the front page of section M
of the
Saturday paper and a number of my friends and family have already left
messages on my cell phone promising to save me a copy of the paper.
Thanks, guys!

(In case you hadn’t seen it before, the post that got the ball rolling is here.)

The Globe and Mail fail to mention Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan, whose photos of the
swing
are much better than mine (even though mine have the lovely and
talented Christine from the blog Purplecar) and predate mine by weeks.
This omission is even more glaring considering that they phoned him,
asking for the location of the swing. Rannie is the heart and soul of our local blogging group, the GTAbloggers, and I feel that he should be mentioned.


Cory at BoingBoing linked to my last entry, The Breakup Style of PowerPoint, which has proven to be a topic to which many people can relate, if the comments and trackbacks are any indication.

In honour of the post, I shall provide some notes in point form:

  • The
    article points out that the swing was installed by local artist Corwyn
    Lund, who documented it in the short film (very short, at one minute,
    twenty seconds) Swingsite, which debuted last fall. There’s a little more about the film here (you’ll have to scroll down once you hit the page).

  • An anonymous reader points to this relationship evaluation form, which is reminiscent of both standardized tests and annual employee reviews.
  • Laurent Bossavit says that the PowerPoint-styled breakup is a
    form of “incongruent communication”, which is the opposite of the
    “congruent communication” style that is emphaszied at the AYE (Amplifying Your Effectiveness) Conference. He also points to an entry in the AYE Conference wiki titled WhyWeDoNotUsePowerPoint.

  • 4thAce points out quite correctly that the slide I created breaks
    PowerPoint convention by using full sentences. He suggested that it
    should look more like this:

  • Clay Shirky, who pointed to my article on the Many 2 Many blog, points to an article on breakups by cellphone text messages (“WELCOM 2 DMPSVIL, POPULATN: U!”) . I’ll see your prior reference, Clay, and raise it with this article on Philippine catholic churches banning confessions by texting and raise you this PowerPoint slide for a hypothetical confession:

Wendy and I saw Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
yesterday. I haven’t laughed this hard at the movies in ages! John Cho
(“Harold”) was merely okay; it’s Kal Penn (“Kumar”) who really carries
the film. One of my favourite scenes is the daydream sequence in which
Kumar imagines himself falling in love with an marrying a one-pound bag
of very fine weed.

The outdoor shots give away that it was shot in Toronto, especially the
parking lot scenes in which you can see signs for Country Style donuts
and Chapters. In the credits, one of the institutions they thank is
Toronto’s most notorious speakeasy, The Matador.
I don’t recall any scenes that could’ve been shot inside the Matador:
were there any, or are they thanking them for a wonderful night the
cast and crew had there after a shoot?


I had a lovely evening on Saturday night hanging out with Wendy’s friends at Clery’s, which we followed with a walk through Columbus Ave and then Newbury Street. On Sunday, I had an equally lovely brunch at Johnny D’s Uptown with the some Boston bloggers including Michael “Dowbrigade” Feldman, Cynthia Rockwell, her friend Guy, Jessica Baumgart, Sun, Andrew Grumet and Matt Stoller.


In response to my request to record a number just like William Shatner did, Wil Wheaton left a message in the comments saying “You know how to get in touch, if you’re serious.”

I’m quite serious. Perhaps we can record it at Gnomedex?


I return to Accordion City tonight and I hope to spend most of tomorrow at the Exploring
the Fusion Power
of
Public and Participatory Journalism conference
and blogging it. Notable friends and acquaintances of mine who will be attending are: Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca MacKinnon and David Akin. The conference will take place downtown at the Sheraton Centre, which is crawling distance from my house.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music

From the backlog: Kickass Karaoke 5th Anniversary Photos

Another entry in the series of things that have been sitting on my hard
drive, awaiting posting: photos from the 5th Anniversary of Kickass
Karaoke
!

I know I keep saying this, but I’m busy building a new developer
relations site for Tucows: more stuff later. It’s my new blogging
mantra: “More later. More later. More later.”

In the meantime, you can check out my photos, either in photo album form or as a slideshow.


The obligatory cute chick shot. That’s why you come to the blog, right?

Categories
Music

This Land is Your Land [Updated]

[via Guile] Woody Guthrie’s classic folk song, This Land is Your Land, is the basis for JibJab’s funny Flash animation featuring John Kerry and George Bush trading insults:


“You’re a U.N. pussy…”


“Kick ass!”

The Richmond Organization is the publishing company that owns the rights to Guthrie’s classic, and they’re a little peeved at the JibJab animators.
They think the parody, which is getting hits in the millions, is
“damaging” the song. There’s probably not much that they can do, as parody (“an imitation which ridicules another’s work or as any burlesque or
risque occurence that would not happen in an original instance”) is protected speech.

It’s called fair use, and it’s not dead yet.

Addendum: Cory in BoingBoing points out that Woody Guthrie’s standard copyright notice was:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085,
for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our
permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a
dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote
it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

From the backlog: Movies from the White Cowbell Oklahoma concert at the El Mocambo

They’re trashy, they’re vile, and they’re ugly paunchy men who  sometimes play the guitar butt naked. They’re White Cowbell Oklahoma, and they put on one helluva show back in June.

Opening Sparkfest [2.2 MB QuickTime]
The opening number, accompanied by one of the band running a circular saw against some scrap metal to spark-o-riffic effect.

Chainsaw 1 [2 MB QuickTime]
Chainsaw 2 [1.5 MB QuickTime]
No White Cowbell Oklahoma perfomance is complete without a chainsaw performance. Here, they chainsaw two stuffed dinosaur toys.

Freebird in the Worst Way Possible [Not safe for work: full frontal male nudity; Lynyrd Skynrd — 1.6 MB QuickTime]
The wrongest way to play slide guitar: butt naked, with the glass slide
on your member. I’ve seen every episode of Beavis and Butt-head, so I
find this sort of thing mildly amusing.