Jukebox in the family room

For fans of TR noise: Presenting a new feature that will live over on on trkelley.net, a free jukebox. Random snapshots of many of TR's musical projects 1994-present, in no particular order, subject to change, continuous additions, always free of charge, no assembly required, your mileage may vary, meow, blah, etc....
Includes some odd outtakes, sketches, and live festival stuff including the Kemp/Kelley/Wakefield version of "Friend of the Devil" from the radio feed of Mainstage at the 2002 Oregon Country Fair, the palindrome year, the Kesey tribute stage. KozmiK. So definitely definitely stay tooned for cuts from such groovy acts as The Missing Man Formation, Fledgling, John Wayne's Teeth, StoneFarm, The Sconers, Bekitage, Jellymoon, The Leisure-ites, Babes With Axes, The Raventones ........ and more! :)

Mac in a Box

A 512K changed my life was published on Low End Mac today. And also thanks to easy research and buying links at their site, i have a new-used hotrodded G4 iBook en route from Wegener Media, my favorite online used Mac source, deep in the heart of Dixie. YeeHaw!

My First Macintosh

While browsing some of my favorite used computer sites online i ran across a call for short recollections called "My First Mac". How could i not?
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My First Mac
I remember it well. It was January of 1990. My new husband was a young organic nerdy guy from Palo Alto, his mom translated engineer-speak into Apple manuals and his schools had been awash in Apples. I was older and rougher, a flannel-shirted tomboy from rural Oregon where schools were often simply awash, another hick Kesey-wannabe writer with a massive old manual Royal typewriter and a box of manuscripts. The cute little beige box with the tiny black and white screen was just another indication that my beloved was a Genuine Smart Guy, my intellectual equal, and that was all i needed to know.

But one day in the grey slodgy throes of morning sickness and boredom, I idly asked for a demonstration of something on "that little computer".
"It's called an Apple Macintosh 512k.", he said proudly. "
The drive whirred and clicked. He explained how to drive the mouse, click on the "icons". On to the real magic, he showed me a program called a "word processor". Type a sentence. Erase. Start over, change the order, substitute something else..... moving words around with a pointer instead of whiteout and rewrites. Simple. Fun. Economical. Easy.

O. My. God.

The next week the manual typewriter went to Goodwill. I loved the chatter of the dot matrix printer spewing out grocery lists, short stories, letters to the editor, original song lyrics. The word nerd was in heaven. I learned to SuperPaint. Every two years we got a new-used Mac from relatives higher up the financial food chain. I got sucked into many hours of BBS. My band was one of the first in Eugene to have a website. The kids became Mac-literate before they were potty-trained.

Now, a dozen used Macs later, I'm a budding multimedia artist squeaking along with old Macs; an 1996 8500 and a 2000 Pismo laptop, both maxxed out on DIY upgrades. I'm looking to upgrade again, feeling the old anticipation and excitement of another new-to-me Mac, undoubtedly acquired through dealer links on Low End Mac, just like my last two laptops.
But nothing will ever be as quite as biggerly splendid as the complete paradigm shift that occurred on encountering my first personal computer ever, the Mac 512K.
It literally changed my life.

Now look at me. Sheesh. But don't think i'm a complete Mac nerd, as i still don't have an iPod, let alone an iPhone, though i do have an iPee, an iPuff and several iPets.
Dude.

Improv & Audiovisual collage art - The Obamatones!

So here it is, an agglomeration the speech bits and photos we collected at the May 9 rally together with the political ad collage piece and some other props laying about the home. When the desire for art hits, the vision can be realized with whatever you have if your inner Eyeball is burning bright enough to See.
So as promised, this is the result of how i internalized and understood the Obama rally.



(To watch it on YouTube instead, click here.)

Vote Barack! He Loves You Back!

Elvisian frenzy of a confirmed Barack-o-phone

Hey i'm back, after three days of wrestling the voice of Barack through slow old technology into a shape approximating the helical curvature of my brainwaves after listening to The Speech several times at high volume on my 2000w PA system. Two minutes of Pure Obama-as-musical instrument trance-groove over the top of some Raventones instrumental improv. No partisan political ranting, just rhythmic chanting, my Republican readers can feel ideologically untreasonous. :)

What is music? My mom doesn't like new styles of music, it's not familiar, it's not melody based, lyrics are mumbled, profane, irrelevant or silly, and the classic cry inevitably heard across the dial as things move and change ( from blues 2 rock 2 fusion 2 prog 2 disco 2 punk 2 nuwave 2 grunge 2 rap....) THAT'S NOT MUSIC, IT NOISE!!!!!!. turn that thing down! People are often as staunchly xenophobic about their musical preferences as they are about their politics, sex lives, food preferences and other deep emotional triggers.
What is music?
When i hear things in the environment, my mind automatically starts to record, sort and pattern. It makes music. It creates constantly, my job is to get some of the content down and develop it to share. This is my Work. I used to arrogantly think music was a function of muscles and sticks and membranes and air and fingers on strings or keys or valves. Now in this age of dizzying technical options for rearranging sounds, i realize music at it's core is a system of arranging audio signals into layered patterns to produce emotional responses in ourselves and others. Still, it's hard to play a laptop around a campfire as anything more than a jukebox. Leather-fingered guitar players aren't redundant yet. :)
Certain tones and phrases get stuck and start echoing and building and involuting and radiating the echoes of buildings and bodies, and then there's his lovely brassy-dark timbre to play pitch-shift and build chords with ......and ... then....um...of course everybody knows autistics think in pictures right?.... (like we all watch Judge Wapner and can play blackjack like Data - not!) so yes there is a video but it's still processing through this ancient Mac laptop. I figure some of my readers may have old technology or slow connections and perchance an mp3 is as far as we can be invited in at this time. Feel free to distribute either of these tribute art pieces. Stay tooned for the video. ........ . . . . . . . . . . hours . . . . . . . . days . . . . . . trust me, it's neat.

Yes! We all got our ballots mailed in on time to be received by Lane County Elections before Tuesday. An Obama phone-banker getting out the vote called just as i was showing the finished video to my fellow Leisure-ites. Utterly koZmiK, for U, the 'Merrrricun peeple.

Crowd control

O the plethora of gear, the stacks of speakers and racks of amps required for the Voice of Obama!  Well yeah, and he sounded totally faabulous on that Sennheiser, but really all the firepower was for all the pumpin' rockin' funkin' music that the campaign decided would fire up the crowd in the  two pre-Barack hours of  twilight between Doors and Speech. Curious blend of 70's funk (james brown, sly) and 80's working-white guy rockers ( mellencamp, springsteen) slamming thickly out of banks of subwoofers, that literally pushing your guts around inside your belly. Made me queasy, and i like bass. But that was ....... heroic. Psychoacoustics demand a big loud sound to get attention form the pack on a primal level. Rumbling bass is etched in our ur-brains as primordial thunder, earthquakes, the growl of big cats. It gets the adrenaline going whether you want it to or not.
Even standing 50 meters back the effect was palpable, reflected in the overstimulated guts in the line to the portapotties. The ASUO street fair and NASU  Spring Powwow and some huge track meet over at Hayward Field were going on as well.  The smell of food, incense, hippies, aftershave, ciggies, dry-cleaned suits, shoe polish, dog turds, porta pots, mall-flavored accountrements of all kinds... and multilayered roar of gadget-toting humanity and the throb of the megawoofers, yikes. Sensory overload 93% Captain. Good thing we had some Kettle Corn from a friendly vendor outside, and the Feds let it pass through security so i could have crunchy things for comforting distraction.



The presence of dozens of actual Secret Service guys in dark suits and earphones and the banks of metal detectors and TSA-style screeners added to the unreal serious silliness of the whole thing. Security clearances and other policies meant no hanging out at the soundboard with Robson. Cops make me nervous. Feds make me seriously alert. After getting stopped at Customs on the Canadian border last year i'm even more keyed-up. i lose communication ability when stressed, which makes me look more suspicious, can;t make eye contact and all that. Cops don't like weird people acting suspiciously. They shoot them with sad regularity because they felt threatened. "The guy was mental, i had to shoot him." If Balthasar was not with me i would not have gone inside the rally. Not socially able and too anxious and flappy not to come to the attention of security.


But Obama! He was marvelous, but i was so wrung out from being there in the crowd pummeled by the speakers and eyeballed by shiny-headed federales that all i could do was listen to the ricochet of a thousand chocolate  baritone echoes off of the brick walls of the buildings surrounding the rally lawn. It was a beautiful night, i do remember that and i got it all recorded on my minidisc for later listening on my own home theatre in private. I think i had some commentary and descriptive radio-theatre side-talk going on as well, when i'm on DEFEND or TRANSMIT modes i often don't remember what i do. Which is why i like to Always Roll Tape. ART.
Stay tuned right here to MeowBlah3 /Radio Calico for the  trk Obama remix and commentary track or other such weirdness, coming soon as soon as i get my ears back.. I'm sure you could get the actual  real speech somewhere online,  but i want you to hear it like i hear it, which is cut up and sewn back together inside out with transpositions and echoes and interesting shifts of phase....... 
Today i just sat around in a ratty bent striped lawn chair in the spring drizzle and stared into my landmates industrious brush-clearing fires when i wasn't sleeping the heavy dreams of post sensory overload hangover.
But O! It was worth it! and i got the T-shirt. :)
.

He's back, and i might get to carry the microphone.....

More art made from political flyers and elmer's glue.
He's coming back!!! Barack Barack! Tomorrow i am going to Eugene and i AM going to see the Man......because my babe Robson Sensei is running the sound system for the Baritone One, will be handling the very cables and woofers and tweeters that carry the Voice to the uhMerrrricun Peeple. Me & Robson go way back, yep, early 90's and all that, she's run my voice through miles of cables on the biggest stages in the county. But now Obama is the rock star, I'll dress in black and be part of the soundcrew, that's the covert plan anyhow. Will have my roving media accoutrements with me (minidisc, cameras). In any case the rally is at a slightly friendlier place than Mac court. Here's hoping i can pull it off and bring you a podcast from the heart of the metropolis. Yikes! Stay TOONED! I have to go figure out which rumpled black shirt and mud colored pants to wear.
Gear-geekage: Obama is the only politician i've ever seen whose promo pictures consistently feature microphones. ( a SHURE Beta 58 and a Sennheiser, model unknown). When you have a vocal instrument of the quality and emotional appeal of O, it's gotta sound good. But seriously, i bet he could orate, exhort and intone through a $15 Radio Shack special and still make people cry and wet their pants. We'll see!
Thinking about painting a T-shirt "Po'WhiteMama for Obama"........ :)

Bluegrass unsafe for non "hound-dawgs"

Australian Cattle dogs were not bred for this unique kind of abuse, they're only built to withstand getting kicked by cows. Remember, keep Blue-tick hounds, not Blue Heelers, if you share you home with an active banjo.

Culture pushing the envelope