Wow, what a week, lots to write about.... but not right now. Right now I just want to mention that tonight is a set of free concerts in Columbus at the Promowest complex on Neil Ave (across from Nationwide Arena). It's all part of a "beat Michigan" night at the three different venues there, and The Other Paper has the full story on the controversy the led to the whole thing being FREE, and Watershed has posted their own take on it.

Anyway, the Dead Schembechlers are a Watershed side-band (which is why both bands are playing) that comes out only for the annual "Hate Michigan" rallies. I've never seen them play, but then I'm not so into the whole OSU-UofM rivalry anymore anyway. But a Watershed show is pretty rare these days, and a free one is always a good thing.

Oh yeah, if you'd prefer a different free show, you can also choose the All-American Rejects. The third show, Escape The Fate, is sold out.

Columbus has a couple of interesting festivals going on tomorrow....

First, every year at Vet's Memorial there's the India Festival, which I expect to have some really good food.

But there's also a new but ambitious festival downtown on Gay Street, which has been given the unfortunate name "Independents' Day". The organizers seem to want it to grow into something similar to Austin's famous SXSW, and to that end the schedule includes lots of music, lots of visual and performance art, and even a track of "Interactive/Idea" talks, many of which look pretty interesting. I'm really intrigued by this one.



Oh yeah, and while I'm at it, I should mention that the sixth annual Ohio LinuxFest is coming up on October 11, with a long list of talks as well as a bunch of exhibitor booths. Be sure to register soon so they know how many are coming.

Sadly, I only managed to make it to one evening of Comfest, and that was dominated by watching two performances: Circus Of Cool and bellydance-enhanced Yogi Poets. I got some good pictures though.

The 2008 Comfest schedule is up.

Looks like the big news is Black 47 and Michelle Shocked.

Some fun coming up in the next couple months.....

Sat May 3 - OSU Medieval & Renaissance Faire (a.k.a. RenFest), where I'll be running sound for duriyah's bellydance troupe.
Tue May 13 - Eddie Izzard at the Columbus Palace Theatre (We have our tickets!)

Wed Jun 4 - i:Scintilla at High Five
Sat Jun 7 - She Wants Revenge at the Newport Music Hall
Tue Jun 10 - Gogol Bordello at the Newport Music Hall
Fri Jun 20 - Peter Murphy at the Newport Music Hall
Fri-Sun Jun 27-29 - Comfest!

I've been listening to the Pat Radio podcast, which is a weekly show focusing on the Columbus music scene. The show's theme song is called "OH/IO (Washington Beach Party)" (by Magic City). That song title is apparently a reference to a neighborhood just northeast of OSU. (Which in turn was apparently derived from Grand Theft Auto.)

Granted, this label for the neighborhood was apparently just coined five years ago, but considering I used to live near there I'm surprised I hadn't heard it before. Have you heard that neighborhood called Washington Beach?
( There's a video for the song! )

(BTW, another music-oriented podcast I've just started listening to is Sound Opinions, a public radio show out of Chicago. The show with Bob Mould got me hooked.)

A few months ago I started going to the monthly meetings of the Columbus Ruby Brigade, basically a computer user group of Ruby programmers.

( Short version: three meetings, all useful and interesting )

So I've gotten something useful out of every meeting so far. That beats my experience at COLUG. I think I'll keep going.

Growing up in Columbus, most of the pizza, especially from the small non-chain shops, was pretty much the same -- most characteristically, a distinctive thin semi-crisp crust and cut into small rectangles rather than triangles. I've found that people who grew up anywhere east of here aren't so fond of it though.

When I moved up to Canton (130 miles to the northeast), I found it hard to find my favorite style of pizza; the pizzas were more New York style than Columbus style. The only place to get pizza somewhat similar to my favorite style was Donato's, a chain that started in Columbus in the 60s before spreading and then being bought by McDonald's in (I think) the early 90s; it's not exactly like my favorite shops though (Tommy's, Rotolo's, Panzera's). (I also noticed that all the pizza places up there also served fried chicken and smelled like it. This still seems strange and unpleasant to me.)

Now someone's posted a list of various regional pizza styles, and I now know that Columbus-style pizza is part of a midwestern pizza tradition I didn't know about, which also includes Chicago thin-crust pizza.

Where does your favorite pizza fit on that list?

Hey look, Watershed is touring again, and is playing in Columbus this Friday January 11 at the LC Pavilion. I'm pretty sure I'm going. How about you?

Background: Sometime in the murky mists of time (the 70s and 80s), Ohio State University had a student-run radio station, WOSR. I don't know why it died, but when I got to OSU in the early 90s the only radio there was the staff-run classical/NPR station. At one point I was on the far periphery of a movement to get student-run and community-oriented radio back to OSU, but the best they managed was some internships at WCBE, the other (more community-oriented and musical, but also NPR-ish) public radio station in town. FCC rules and the crowded central Ohio radio spectrum prevented them from achieving their goals. Eventually a different group managed to get student-run "radio" on the campus cable system and then streaming Internet radio; after being called Underground.fm and KBUX, apparently it's now known as Ohio.fm.

Anyway, since I last paid much attention, broadcast radio have become somewhat less important as Internet radio and podcasts have become possible. But the FCC also finally changed their rules to allow low-power FM stations; this was a major goal of the early 90s group.

So today I learned about WCRS, a low-power community-oriented station being started by Simply Living, which is a local sustainability-oriented community group. Among other programming, WCRS will broadcast a local music podcast, which is how I found out about the station.

So if you're in Columbus, see if you can pick up WCRS on 102.1 or 98.3 FM. It looks like they're still in the early stages of building a schedule, so I don't know how interesting it'll be to listen to (or how far the signal goes), but it's worth keeping an eye on. It looks like they started small, with 11am-1pm Mon-Fri broadcasts, but the podcast is on at 6pm Wednesdays.

It's been a long time since I've posted about upcoming shows, partly because I've been so far away from them. But now I'm only half an hour away from lots of good ones.

Last.fm pointed out some of these to me, and from there I decided to see Ticketmaster's entire list of concerts for the next couple months....

Tue Oct 2 - The Donnas @ Newport Music Hall
Mon Oct 8 - Johnette Napolitano @ House of Crave (She was the singer for Concrete Blonde.)
Tue Oct 9 - Bad Religion @ Newport Music Hall
Sat Oct 13 - Loreena McKennitt @ Palace Theatre
Wed Oct 17 - Raveonettes @ The Basement
Fri Oct 26 - Oswald & the Herringbones @ House of Crave (They were big in Columbus in the late 80s and early 90s but then disappeared, so this will be a rare show.)
Mon Nov 26 - Tegan and Sara @ Newport Music Hall

This Saturday I'll be moving from the North Canton house where I've lived for six years to duriyah's house 30 miles east of Columbus. I've been gradually moving things down there for some weeks already (what would fit in my little car), and I suspect I won't manage to get quite everything packed up in time, but this weekend will be when I rent the moving van and get at least the big stuff.

So I have a lot to do this week. Including working out the logistics of getting everything loaded, moved 130 miles, and unloaded, in one day, without leaving any people or cars or furniture in the wrong city.

Then, after a week to settle in, we're disappearing for a much-needed vacation to Myrtle Beach. I'm sure by then it'll be needed even more.

I spent quite a bit of my time in the 90s going to see a lot of great indie, unsigned, or local bands play around the OSU campus area. While there were many venues, two stood out: the literally underground Bernie's Distillery, and Stache's. Every band who came through town a few years before hitting it big played at one or both of those.

In 1997, Stache's lost its lease and the building was torn down in favor of a suburban-style strip mall, but it was soon reborn in a larger building in the Short North as Little Brother's. It's now been a decade since LB's opened, and there are 10-year anniversary celebration shows scheduled for mid-May. (That will include some bands that were regulars at Stache's back in the day, such as Scrawl.)

Unfortunately, we now learn that the 10-year anniversary may also be the end of the Stache's and Little Brother's legacy. The landlord has raised the rent exhorbitantly and shown a desire for a new tenant. Dan will probably have to close the place and retire from the business, a great loss for the Columbus music scene.

Too bad Joel at Cringe doesn't send out his weekend live shows list until Friday morning. This morning I learned that Jonathan Coulton is playing an early show at Little Brother's in Columbus tonight at 6pm. Well, the opener is at 6 anyway. And there's a totally different show at 10.

No way I'd be able to make it down there in time tonight though. :-(

I've been intending for a while to mention Last.fm and comparisons between that and Pandora for purposes of discovering new music and generally listening to music you like.

The short version is that with Pandora, you tell it what you like, and it uses musicological traits and mysterious algorithms to determine similar-sounding music. While with Last.fm, you tell it what you're listening to (automatically via a "scrobbler" plugin to your music player), and it compares your listening habits to other people, then can play you things that other people with similar listening habits also listen to. At least that's the theory; I haven't played much with the Last.fm playback mechanism, and the web site is extremely unresponsive. (But it does often know what I've been listening to.)

Anyway, the reason I mention this now is that Pandora is on tour, with an informal town-hall style gathering in Columbus scheduled for Monday, October 16. They want to discuss the following questions:

-How is technology changing the nature of radio?
-How important are community and peers when it comes to discovering music online? What's the best way to foster community? [This one sounds directly related to Last.fm's community-networking nature.]
-Can services like Pandora help create a larger middle class of artists who aren't superstars, but have enough of an audience to support themselves through their music? Do music lovers want more music discovery?

The schedule for Comfest has been posted!

Friday through Sunday, June 23-25, I'll be in Columbus spending almost all my time in Goodale Park. Here are the parts of the schedule that currently have the most interest for me:

Fri noon-1 (Live Arts Stage) drum circle
Fri 2:30-3 (Live Arts Stage) Kate Weilnau (poetry)
Fri 7:50-8:20 (Solar Stage) Marcy Mays (ex-Scrawl)
Fri 10-11 (Bozo Stage) The Sun

Sat noon-1 (Gazebo Stage) Room Nineteen
Sat 1:30-2 (Solar Stage) Michelle Lundy (ex-Dogrocket)
Sat 4-5 (Offramp Stage) The Townsmen
Sat 6-7 (Bozo Stage) Watershed
Sat 6-7 (Jazz Stage) Circus of Cool
Sat 7-8 (Bozo Stage) Willie Phoenix Band

Sun 5-6 (Live Arts Stage) Poetry Slam
Sun 6-7 (Live Arts Stage) drum circle
Sun 6:15-7 (Offramp Stage) Red Dahlia

Obviously there are a couple evenings when I'll have to make a decision about what to do....

Update: I somehow missed Marcy Mays on the Solar Stage when I first looked at the schedule, and was surprised not to see some Scrawl presence. Too bad Manda And The Marbles are still missing; I think they're trying to figure out who their guitarist is. (Watershed and Willie Phoenix are others I'd be surprised to see absent from the schedule, but happily they're there.)

This weekend we'll be heading to Columbus for Marcon. Every year at Marcon I end up buying a pile of books, usually stuff that's hard to find locally, and often rare or out of print stuff. Last year's take included my first real effort to get into graphic novels beyond Sandman.

( And also Elric... )

( My fictional influences )

Tonight at Oldfield's On High in Columbus, Room Nineteen is playing. Since the venue's calendar lists another band and "TBA", while the band's website mentions two bands besides themselves, I'm assuming that Room Nineteen is going on second of three. Edit: Turns out they were headlining, on last, and didn't get to start until after 1am.

Tomorrow night, former Room Nineteen member Fletch is playing at the same venue, apparently playing first of three bands.

We're going to Columbus this weekend (and nontacitare likes both of them), so I'm hoping to be able to catch at least one of these and maybe even both.

I've thought it might be fun sometime to go to Notacon in Cleveland ever since I learned about it at the first Ohio LinuxFest a few years ago. But I never seriously considered going until this year. I even got on the mailing list and was alerted as $50 pre-registration was closing a week or two ago. I figured I wasn't sure about going, I'd probably only go for one day if I did go, and I was too busy to bother pre-registering.

Of course I discovered that this was a mistake.

Today I looked at the schedule and some some things that would be really interesting to attend. I'm also thinking that going there next Saturday could be the sort of fun I could really use right now. Then I saw that to register at the door is $100, with no lower-cost day-passes. I think it would be fun and interesting, but I'm not sure I'd get $100 worth of fun and interesting out of one day.

Ah well. Two months until Marcon in Columbus. And nontacitare already took care of the pre-registration and hotel there, so I can't mess that up. I think this year I'll check out more of the music than I have in the past.


In other geeky news, I think I finally got my 5-year-old laptop all set up with Kubuntu running on its new hard disk. (Maybe I should update my web page about it.) So far it seems to be working better than ever; for example I might not even need to use a PCMCIA card to get public wireless access anymore, just hit a key to activate the wireless adapter on the back cover. It's kind of odd seeing its old hard drive sitting bare on top of my other machine, hooked up through an IDE-to-USB adapter -- especially when it whirs to life as I read data from it.

Hey, it looks like Manda And The Marbles are playing some shows again for the first time in many months. Tonight they'll be playing Skully's in Columbus.

Too bad I won't be able to make it, but I highly encourage Columbusites to go. (Check out their MP3 page to hear what they sound like.)