Visit the kelpforest....

We seem to have a number of musicians in the neighborhood. I'm just now hearing someone practicing drums in their garage - maybe the kids who have a punk band on the corner of the next block. I shouldn't say kids - they're probably in their mid-twenties. And the lead singer from a fairly well-known band bought the house at the end of my block after it had been sitting empty for almost a year after the real estate bubble. I haven't met him, but runsamuck (who is waaay more outgoing than I and knows ALL the neighbors) sometimes goes down and plays nickel n' dime poker with him and his buddies in the garage. I nod and smile at his wife when we run into each other on the sidewalk when we're out for a walk, and she's walking their little dog. runsamuck mentioned he'd seen something about them going on tour, and sure enough, when I came home from work the other day, there was a big bus parked next to the house. They hadn't been for awhile because their drummer passed away last year.

One of runsamuck's friends found a guitar in the trash out the alley - looks very much like this one, it says S-classic on the head, but I can't find that model on the website - it's a little beat up but still in working condition. He took it to Guitar Center and got it some new strings, had it cleaned and tuned, and the tech couldn't believe someone had thrown it away. Gareth cabbaged onto it and has managed to pick out the first couple of lines of the Skwisgaar's tutorial from the DVD we have. Well, he didn't sign up for band this year, but maybe we should get guitar lessons instead. Maybe when he gets his grades up. He tells me now he'd rather teach himself. Arrogant pre-teen. Skwisgaar you're not. ;p Ah, what do I know? Neil Finn is my musical genius.



We don't have an amp for him yet,and the pickup on the camera is not very strong, so it's very soft. He's only been fiddling around with the guitar for a month or two...I'm actually kind of impressed he's done this on his own.

Wow. From oppressive heat to pouring down rain; weather is bouncing like a rubber band...*

Well, I had been putting up mylife_onceaday photos that I'd posted to the community here, but then I got sidetracked by the scavenger hunts they started doing, and Sackboy Travels and other things. I still carry my camera around everywhere, but I guess I haven't been inspired to use it all that often, unless something really special or different happens. I feel like I seldom go anywhere new, and I'm constantly taking pictures of the same things, maybe just a different sky or another angle.

Anyway, the last non-themed thing I posted (here and in the community) was this, so I thought maybe I'd start catching up from there. And in a timely enough fashion, the next chronological photos are apropos for the month (and show I'm almost exactly a year behind - typical)...

http://www.ladayofthedead.com/



( LA Dia de Los Muertos.. warning - photo heavy )

Fantastic show. Great fun, the music was great and all the creations wonderful. I'm agnostic leaning toward atheistic, but if there is an afterlife, this is the way to celebrate it.

By the way, today is my mom's birthday. I think she might have liked this.


Link to all photos in this set. This year's Dia de Los Muertos at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is on October 30. You might see another post like this after that date.

___________________________
*this damn post started on 10/5 when the weather was being really record-breakingly weird. Need to get 'puters fixed...

Drat. I'm beginning to think I'm destined to never see Neil Finn/Crowded House ever again. Don't think I have since VT and I saw him during one of his solo tours at Downtown Disney (which seems like a weird place to see him in hindsight). They're at Club Nokia which is right across from the Convention Center where we went to AX last month, so we could easily do the train thing again. However, Avalon's birthday is on Saturday, and we were saving $ for that, and even though we got full paychecks this month (for the first time in about 18 mos.), it went for other things we behind on; I didn't buy tickets when I had the money available. Oh well. I'm not sure I could handle that horrendous pornstache Neil's grown recently in person anyway; I might get arrested for assaulting his upper lip with a Schick Quattro or at least trying to convince him to grow out something else around it. Don't get me wrong, I usually like male facial hair - runsamuck's had full beards since becoming a stay-at-home dad - but that thing is awful. Well, maybe I'll splurge on the CD when I pick up Big Time Rush for Avalon, as she gets suckered in by any new Nick show.

This Saturday, on her birthday, this is going on right next to the Aquarium. The last time I heard of this in CA it was up in the Bay Area and it looks like a lot of fun. It reminds of when I was a student at Queensland University in 1988, and there was "Birdman of the Brisbane River" Competition. I have no idea where my pictures of this are now, but I found someone's photo set from a year before which brings back a lot of memories. There was someone jumping of a platform on a bicycle with wings attached, another guy with boxes attached to his arms, decorated with silvery "tentacles" - he was a "box jellyfish" - and the engineering students at some school had made a giant orange papier-mache' crab, claws, legs, eyes, and all, that they had all the spectators sign (in the picture set I see a chicken with what looks like signatures all over it, wonder if it's by the same people?). It was about 20' across, and by the time the students had carried it up to the top of the platform, all the legs had fallen off, but they threw it in the river anyway. Heh. I notice the FM 104 signs on the pictures - I still have a mug with the" 'Rockin' Roo"' on it from that radio station sitting on my desk here at work. Someone broke it, but glued it back together for me when I was back in New Hampshire (boy, it's traveled a lot!), and it holds all my writing implements (a few of which are dried up and need to be chucked), a couple of pairs of scissors and a swizzle stick with a fish on it now.

So we might go to that. Break out the sunscreen.

ETA: Brisbane was the first place I saw Crowded House, come to think of it. They played at the Expo, which I bought a season pass to. Saw a lot of good music with that pass - I got pretty spoiled.

ETA2: Just realized they are playing next week at McMenamin's Edgefield in Portland, where we went for dinner during the Council meeting back in April! Damn, that would be a great place to go see them. ;_ ;

Bad fan am I. I did not realize Crowded House had a new album coming out. I have not kept track of the Tounge in the Mail list for quite a while - I always think I'm going to go back and get caught up with it but it just keeps piling in my gmail folder. Ack, they're even playing at Club Nokia up in L.A. next month - well, I know how to get up there now - just like we did to Green Day and Anime Expo. Hopefully, there will still be tickets left at the beginning of August. Speaking of Green Day, they're in Irvine next month as well, but sold out already. Drat, was hoping to get lawn seats and maybe take Gareth as an early birthday present...And still haven't gotten John Lewis Black tickets...argh... I don't think I can even get the CH album until August either.

Damn. Did I really need that swimsuit?

Watching the July 4th parade, which goes down the street a block from my house. The city has a contest for people who live along the parade route to decorate their houses; I've no doubt this was an entry.

Independence Day Parade
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
4 July 2010

( Sackboy's parade experience )

04. Stars &/or Stripes [Independence Day - USA]

[Error: unknown template qotd]

I do not judge (that'd be pretty shallow if you did, wouldn't it?), although sometimes I wonder. I remember an LJ friend (one who seems to have disappeared) posting something about wanting a recommendation for a very small mp3 player, because they only listened to seven or eight songs. Hmm? I'd go nuts listening to that narrow a range.

Don't shoot me, but I once was a fan of Barry Manilow. My best friend Beth (a rabid Barry Manilow fan at the time) decided to share our first apartment together; the first time either of us had lived on our own. We got along for the most part. It was a one bedroom furnished apartment; all the appliances, counters and the furniture in the living room was that 70's avocado green, and there was a fake fireplace you turned on with a switch.

Of course, we both brought our music collections with us. I'm sure I had stuff she didn't care for. However, she picked a particular Barry Manilow album - I think it was a live concert - and played it (I want to say every day, but that's probably exaggerating) at least several times a week during the whole time we lived together. Quite frankly, I could live without ever hearing Copa Cabana ever again. But we both liked Billy Joel, so The Nylon Curtain and An Innocent Man got played a lot. We often look at each other and head to Naugles at 1 am, because we were both craving a shake (her caramel, me blueberry - yummy but the blueberries would get stuck in your straw).

The neighborhood wasn't all that great and Beth's car got broken into twice (I didn't own one at the time) - once they stole all her tapes and then the car stereo, which wasn't even all that good. Her brother lived with us for a while after he got divorced. Then a few months later, I decided to transfer to Humboldt State, he was on the remarriage track and then Beth lost her job under very unfair conditions. She decided to move back to the Inland Empire, where she still lives, and I went off to college at the far end of the state.

That was all more than 30 years ago. These days I'm more Billy Joe Armstrong than Billy Joel (although I still like him) and I never recovered from the Barry Manilow burn-out; Crowded House and other artists replaced him shortly after. However, Beth is still one of my best friends - pretty much the sister I never had.

As far as romantic partners, runsamuck likes old-school metal; Metallica, Black Sabbath, etc. and the Blues. I like the blues and admit to a growing taste for symphonic metal (mostly instrumental), but in the house, he prefers to just leave the television on and doesn't actually listen to much music; he even uses his iPod Nano more for gaming than music. I supposed it's a mixed blessing - I get to keep my hearing, but the TV is always on, which sometimes drives me nuts.

Another walk down to the pier with Angus. We always like to look in the window of this Antiques store, although it's usually closed when we come by. This china actually has Asian figures on it.

Downtown
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
25 April 2010

( +3 )

11. china ☺
8. bike ☺

And that's it for my unintentional scavenger hunt pics. I think there's about five that will be intentional.

Hmmm, the Iceland volcano is having some local fallout here in CA. I heard on NPR yesterday that a number of bands booked for the Coachella Festival are stranded in Europe because of planes being ground by the ash cloud. They're having to scramble to fill the spots with local bands. The organizer said glumly that he'd never thought about having to buy volcano insurance. Not that CA isn't fairly volcanic itself; just that most of them here have been dormant for quite a while. I think the most recent was Mt. Lassen in 1915 (but it's part the same Cascade Mountain range that contains Mt. St. Helens).

When I was a kid, I used to read the encyclopedia for fun - I read about Lassen and Crater Lake National Parks, told my parents about them, and the following summer we made a family trip to both parks. We camped in Lassen and climbed to the top of the mountain. We did go to Crater Lake, and explore a little, but if I remember rightly, we were running short on time, and were only able to spend a day there. I think my main reason for going there was I wanted to see the little island called the Phantom Ship, which supposedly looks like its name in fog or low light; however, it was a bright sunny summer day, and it only looked like the rock spires that make it up.

I had to go to Portland last weekend for a Council meeting, and it was very cloudy in Oregon the day I flew up, but I think I saw Crater Lake out the plane window.

As for the festival; it's funny, I was asked a couple of times Thursday if I was going to Coachella, but I feel like I'm too old for the music festival scene (if I ever was young enough). They always seem to put them out in the desert - I don't do well with heat - then restrict access, don't allow you to bring in anything of your own (including water), and charge outrageous prices for comestibles (including water). Apparently at this Festival there are at least a few water fountains and grassy areas - it's at a Polo grounds, and you can bring a tent and camp. I did think of going a few years ago when Crowded House reformed and that was the first place they played, but I was content to stay home and watch it on live webcast.

Well, we made it up to Green Day and back alive. I was thinking we would park at the train station, and catch it directly, but John thought it would be a better idea to park at his mom's house, catch the shuttle to the Transit Mall, and from there catch the Blue Line up to LA. Which worked fine, but put a time limit on when we had to be back. The last shuttle back his mom's neighbor hood left downtown Long Beach at 9 pm, so we had to be back on the train before that.

I had packed up a bunch of sandwiches, carrots, apples and carried them along - Avalon was excited enough, she packed up her own. We made it up to the Staples Center without incident and walked over to the Nokia Plaza - that whole development is new, I'm pretty sure it wasn't there last time we were up there. The plaza itself was fenced off, but we had a seat on the planter in from of a statue of Oscar De La Hoya. The website had said the concert was to start at 5:30 - at 6:30 nothing had started yet, and John was getting impatient and saying if they didn't start in fifteen or twenty minutes we were leaving. No patientce, that man. The kids kept going over to the fence to see if they could see anything through any of the gaps in the covering, but there was really too much equipment in the way. Finally, we saw some TV camera platforms go up and heard an announcement, "Cameramen, please put on your headphones." A few minutes later there was actual music. Billy Joe's face appeared on the screens, visible over the fence, for about 30 seconds, then was replaced by little flying skulls and then occasionally "Carson Daly's New Year's Eve," Aha, that's what this was for. The band played quite a few songs, some not all the way through, and some silly things, like beginning of Stairway to Heaven, sequeing into the lyrics to Gilligan's Island, and a lot of joking around, which made me think this wasn't quite the real deal, especially since we could hear the people who did have tickets cheering and applauding down the street - they hadn't been let in front of the stage yet.

Finally the music wound down and the 21st Century Breakdown themed pictures on the screen were replaced with commercials from one of the other screens. John got up, insisted that was it, it was over (I was sure it wasn't), but we did have to catch the train back by the right time to not miss the downtown Long Beach bus. His knee and his feet were bothering him and he wanted to get home. Peeking through the fence on the way back to the train station I could see that all the ticket-holders were still standing in a group in the same place, but whatever.

Anyhow, the train was crowded, and the kids and I stood for quite a bit of it. We had to get off the train at the Willow Station as that was as far as it went, and wait for the next one, but we did make it back to Long Beach in time for the last bus, and a quick visit with John's mom and grandma before heading home. The kids had fun, we got to hear some live music by someone well known, and I think it's good for them to get some experience using public transportion.

I haven't taken the train for a very long time; however I remember the last couple of times we did, I looked out the window and right in the middle of the inner city, Compton or Watts, some graffiti artist had drawn a huge picture of Spock's face, filling the entire wall next to the tracks from top to bottom. I was kind of hoping it was still there, but it's been at least 15 years and graffiti art is ephemeral; if the city or wall owners don't paint it over, other artists or taggers will.