The National Game
I uploaded three Hockey Night in Canada theme contest entries this morning. To rate and comment on them on the CBC Hockey Anthem Challenge site, follow these links:
The National Game
Better Get It In The Net
Precarious (which you’ve heard if you’ve been following my podcast)
You can also get from one entry to another under the “More from Steve Castellano” link once you get there.
Martha Wainwright performs at Harbourfront Stage as part of Canada Day celebrations. She told the all-ages audience that she was wearing red and white to celebrate Canada’s birthday, plus, “I just got my period backstage.” Click on the image to view more pictures on flickr.
don’t forget to vote
Caught Otros Aires, the modern Argentinian tango ensemble, at Lula Lounge last Sunday night. Took some pictures. Check out the video for “Milonga Sentimental” on YouTube. Click on the photo for some of my pictures from the show.
If, instead of being cars that turned into robots, the Transformers were Anvil cases that turned into discotheques, they’d be International Dance Party.
Via Niklas Roy on Vimeo.
If you’ve visited my flickr page you’re already familiar with my sobriquet Steve of the Web, which I use not only for that purpose but as a general catch-all for the various and sundry domains and sub-domains that my web host has foolishly allowed me to devise, under the somewhat indulgent and wholly inaccurate label of the Steve of the Web Web Empire.
And what’s the obvious thing to do in this day and age once you have a catchy new brand name? Keeping in mind that trademarks are tools of the oppressors (and I’m just guessing here but I think they cost real money too), the correct answer is “register yet another domain name.”
SteveoftheWeb.com is a music and photography portfolio site coded in Panic’s excellent Coda application with freely available open-source multimedia scripts and applications. It currently features some of my favourite photographs from the past year, including shots from the Spiegeltent’n'Tavern, the Toronto International Circus Festival, and a variety of portraits and miscellaneous images from locations around Toronto and southern Ontario. The playlist accompanying these slideshows consists of a mix of mp3s currently available from this site as well as a few ambient instrumental compositions that you won’t find anywhere other than SteveoftheWeb.com.
For those of you who are interested in the code side of things, the slideshow is currently running on Lighbox2. I’m planning on migrating over to Lightbox Slideshow, which is based on the same code but has some added features I’d like to incorporate like automation and looping, as soon as I track down the source of some show-stopping JavaScript errors – which may take some time as I’ve already forgotten most of what I ever knew about JavaScript, which was never very much to start out with. Music is running off Franco Zuardi’s Hideout XPSF Music Player.
Best viewed, like all images, in something other than FireFox, which sadly does not understand colour profiles. Go figure.
This tune has been kicking around on my hard drive in various forms for a few years now, but I finally have an edit that I’m satisfied with. The majority of the tracks were composed as part of a remix contest submission, which I didn’t win, and then the sponsoring label refused to give me permission to make my losing remix available on my website free of charge. They have standards, I guess. This is why I don’t enter remix contests anymore. After all the unlicensed copyright material was excised I was left with a lot of bed tracks that I felt could stand up on their own. Archival recording supplied by the Internet Moving Images Archive (at archive.org) in association with Prelinger Archives.
In the Radio Studios of America (7.1 MB MP3)
I got a copy of Ableton Live Lite with an audio interface I picked up last year and had been meaning to fire it up and play around with it at some point. Likewise I had been thinking about remixing Mike Doughty’s “Thank You, Lord, For Sending Me the F Train” for some time, because I’m a fan, it’s a great tune, and there’s a solo acoustic version on his Skittish album. Some of you may know Doughty as former front man and songwriter for Soul Coughing, and since that band’s breakup he has released three solo CDs (that I know of, plus a live CD) and is working on a new one according to his blog. So if you like the sound of this and want more original Doughty stuff, check out his online store.
I’m pretty happy with this version. Beatmapping a solo acoustic performance was a bit of a challenge, but Live is pretty intuitive and I got the hang of it after a while. I think I’m coming to the stutter party a little late, and some of you might find the obvious trainyness a little on the cheesy side. But that’s what I did, I had fun building a train machine combinator in Reason, and I’m on to some original stuff next time.
F Train Remix (3.9 MB MP3)
My edition of Arnold Schönberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke op. 19 features an odd choice for a cover image – Renoir’s Young Girls at the Piano. And I find it odd not just because it’s anachronistic, having been painted 20 or so years before Schönberg composed the op. 19, but because of the attitude and expressions of the young girls. You can almost imagine that the pre-serialist atonal work has been transported back two decades, and these ingenues were expecting something charming from someone like that young impressionist upstart Debussy, and while they’re willing to give it a good old drawingroom try, things just aren’t going the way they’d expected. “That can’t be right, Yvette,” the older one seems to say. “But that’s what he’s written, Brigitte! A flat! C’est vrai!”
“This is yet another group in what has become a fixed New York pattern. Black leather jackets, a parodistic macho camp swagger, and furious blasting rock and roll. But what the Ramones offer is non-stop energy (based on double-time guitar strumming), a few clever hooks, and sudden start-and-stop endings to their songs. For all the underground image, this is a band with obvious commercial potential, and one imagines that potential will start being realized very soon.”
–John Rockwell, The New York Times, 1975“John Rockwell’s a shithead. Nobody should read the New York Times.”
–Johnny Ramone, 1980
