I am … unhindered by talent

CoryQ of the venerable Monkey River Town, and also a source of photographs strange and wondrous on Flickr, graduated from UMM nearly a decade ago. Among his many accomplishments at Morris was his many and varied contributions to the campus radio station (KUMM). I’ve only seen Cory once since he graduated, despite the fact that he lives and works in the Twin Cities, just three hours down the road.

So instead, we’re going to meet over here, in London.

Tomorrow.

At noon.

In the British Museum.

At the Rosetta Stone, one of the most amazing artifacts in human history.

Kind of like Cory. (I’ll spare you the stories.)

Wow.

It’s so cool that I’ll get to see Cory and wife again, and in the British Museum to boot! Be prepared for too many pictures…

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Today is Sub-Evil Boy’s first day of school, and my first full day at the office - very exciting stuff! He and I walked most of the way to his school together, and then I caught a bus from there out to the University. After sifting through e-mail, etc., I’m going to enter a bunch of edits on a draft of a paper that my sister and I are working on looking at the impact of changing selection pressures on trait diversity.

Yesterday we (finally!) got a problem with our BT phone line resolved which has (finally!) allowed Zen to move forward on activating our broadband internet account. Now, however, they’re telling us that BT may take another full week to sort some things out on their end, so we might not have internet at home until next week. WeatherGirl may kill someone, and I’m just hoping it ain’t me…

The photo is of a fellow we passed a week or so ago while exploring the town centre. He was quite good, but was being almost entirely ignored by almost everyone except us and this girl.

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I’m sad to report that WeatherGirl and I are in the midst of what will probably be our last radio show here at KUMM for the better part of a year! We leave Morris a week from tomorrow for our year in Colchester (UK), and I can’t imagine that next week we’ll have the time to be spending three hours here at the station the day before we have to leave for a year. Sub-Evil Boy may do his 10-noon show next Sunday, though, so there is some consolation.

Doing radio here is one of the things that I’ll most miss next year - I love college radio, and being able to participate in that for over 25 years now has been a great experience. We’ve got a great staff for next year, and I expect big things, and we’ll definitely be listening on-line!

If you catch this before 9pm central time, feel free to tune in or listen on-line. Or you can check out our poorly formatted play lists on-line. Less danceable, but a lot faster and without all that annoying banter.

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We’re in pretty much full on crazy mode cleaning, sorting, and packing for our year long research sabbatical in Colchester, UK. In the process I ran across two old music lists and felt compelled to share.

The first was a little playbill sheet for bands playing at Karl’s Coffee. Karl’s was the first coffee shop in Morris and had a truly wonderful atmosphere. It arguably wasn’t managed brilliantly from a business standpoint, and this combined with some quite unjustified and obnoxious political machinations in town ultimately doomed them. The coffee shop was purchased and run by another group for a few years, and then changed hands a third time where things seem stable if not nearly as cool as they were in the beginning.

One of the great things about Karl’s was their regular and regularly wonderful hosting of live bands. In their heyday, Karl’s usually had at least one good band play live every week, and we came to love more than a few Minnesota bands through their frequent performances at Karl’s. Sadly, neither of the subsequent incarnations of the coffee shop have been anywhere close to Karl’s either in the quantity or quality of their music bookings. Both of them have been extremely conservative in the bookings they’ll allow, which has moved some concerts up to campus and caused others to just not happen. Sigh.

Thus it was really neat to find this little playbill from those glory days. In April of 1999 Karl’s had:

• Thurs., 1: 3 Minute Hero (also their old label page)
• Sat., 10: Black & White Jazz Project
• Fri., 16: Booty Police
• Sat., 17: Willie Wisely
• Sun., 18: Open Mic
• Fri., 23: Stuart Davis
• Sat. 24: Brenda Weiler
• Thurs., 29: Booty Police
• Fri., 30: John Hermanson

What a great month! Ah, for the days.

The second list is from eight months later, when Sub-Evil Boy did a radio show where he chose all the music himself at the tender age of 6 years (minus two days). For several years he did a birthday show during fall semester finals week where he would choose all the music for an hour, and this was the first (or maybe the second) of those shows. It’s been very cool listening to his shows this summer, the first time he’s ever done completely solo shows on a weekly basis, and it was really nifty to find this list and see how fun and diverse his musical tastes were even in his misspent youth.

• “Werewolves of London” - Warren Zevon
• “99 bats in my car today” - Sesame Street Travel Songs
• “La Vierge” - Al Rapone
• “Marching song” - Bonnie Rideout
• “Drip, drip, drip” - Chumbawmba
• “Geeks on bikes” - 3 Minute Hero
• “Give us room to roar” - Kalevala
• “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” - They Might Be Giants
• “Save the children” - Natty Nation
• A motet by Bach
• “Drive, she said” - Stan Ridgeway
• “Standing at the edge of the earth” - Blessid Union of Souls
• “I love trash” - Steven Tyler from Elmopalooze
• “London city” - Arrow
• “Papa’s got a brand new bag” - James Brown
• “Santa’s got a brand new bag” - The Bobs
• Theme song from “How the Grinch stole Christmas”
• “Prayer for the dying” - Seal
• “Song for Lindy” - Fatboy Slim
• “Under cover, under wraps” - Delgados
• “Hollywood” - Cranberries

Rockin!

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Video of Stevie Wonder performing “Superstition” on Seseme Street that’s looking seriously 70s. Thanks to the excellent folks at Daily Awesome for the pointer, and to Jess Larson for pointing me at Daily Awesome.

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What a crazy couple of weeks! First we had the insanity of the Mutant Variety Show, which has already been discussed at some length here. Above we have a cool photo (courtesy of Joey Iverson!) of “Looking for my leopard”, with Sub-Evil conducting our all-girl boy chorus of Huck Brock (L) and John Hanson (R). You gotta love Sub-Evil’s excellent pink jacket, and that top hat he’s wearing is a silk top hat from the 1920’s, which both I and my grandfather were married in. (I’m wearing the jacket from that same suit, but you can’t really see it in this photo.)

Then I took a couple of students to Owatonna, home of Federated Insurance, for a College Fair hosted by Federated on Thursday and Friday. Federated hosted a fine event (they certainly fed us wonderfully!), and it was cool to catch up with Chad Zeman (alum of a few years ago who now works there). I also got to shadow one of their software developers for an hour, which was a really excellent way to really get a more detailed sense of their processes and operations.

We headed back promptly on Friday because Sub-Evil and I had been invited to perform that night at the annual Pride Week Drag Show. We made good time, and I actually got to watch the entire show, which was thoroughly excellent. Sub-Evil and I didn’t actually perform in drag, or as part of the drag show proper, but instead provided a little light and silly entertainment at the end while the judges were off deliberating. We did “Taco Man” (to thunderous applause and enthusiastic sing-along), “Looking for my leopard” with Huck in his alter-ego form as Zoey Vulturina doing the backup singing (most excellent!), and rounded things off with “No more booze (Fireman save my child)”.

The next night (Saturday) was the 3rd annual UMMys (UMM’s film festival), with yours truly as the MC for the event. We had four nice films, including a very silly comedy produced by various alum-turned-staff at UMM and an excellent short by Tyler Hutchison reflecting on the uncertainties of life and the one’s mark on the world.

Tomorrow we begin the process of on-campus interviews for my sabbatical replacement (oddly enough I get to serve on the committee to find my replacement :->), and Friday morning way too early we head up to Grand Forks, ND, for the 40th Anniversay MICS conference. Somewhere in here I hope to sleep and grade, but don’t hold your breath. Sadly, on-line participation is gonna be very thin on the ground for a while.

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Preparing to fly, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

I’m off to Owatanna today with a couple of students to attend a college fair hosted by Federated Insurance. We’ve never been to their event before, but it looks like it should be fun. I probably won’t be posting for a few days as a result, though. Have fun without me!

Oh, and tomorrow (Friday, 13 April) is the annual Pride Week Drag Show. This is a total hoot if you’ve never been, and this year there’s the added bonus that Sub-Evil and I have been asked to do a command performance of his excellent “Taco man”! I had seriously hoped to do my part in a dress (WeatherGirl’s wedding dress in fact), but sadly none of them zip up on me, and with this Federated thing there’s really not time to explore lots of options. Sigh. So I think we’re just going to glam up some and go with that. The whole beard thing makes the androgynous Ziggy Stardust deal a bit tough, though.

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For the bored among you, I’ve posted the accounting or the Mutant Variety Show as a Google Doc.

I’m writing the checks to the two organizations as we speak, and we’ve raised (to date) a total of $748, or $374 for each organization (the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) and the Cancer Kids Fund of the Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota).

People can continue to donate in our name to LAF via their Mutant Variety Show web site, and I’m sure that Cancer Kids wouldn’t argue if you sent them a check.

Thanks a zillion to all our wonderful performers and our incredibly generous audience!

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Making pancakes for the family and catching up on Brainwashed podcasts, I caught a deeply fun tune. The opening track on Podcast 102 (and someone’s apparently posting them to archive.org now) is “Party Crashers Unite” by Bullets 4 Brunch and it’s a blast. Sonically it reminds me a lot of the excellent Elvis Vs. JXL remix of “A little less conversation”, but this time the reference point is 60’s Motown soul. The material is also much more heavily deconstructed, to the point that there really is no original song structure left, only colors and ideas. It’s a danceable monster, though, and way too much fun to ignore, even if you’re trying to get brunch going.

It’s apparently from a new Tigerbeat6 12″ entitled The final crackdown. No idea what the rest of it sounds like, but I’m tempted to order a copy for that song alone :-).

Oh, and the rest of the podcast was pretty cool, too. Check it out.

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OK, now I’m officially exhausted. The Mutant Variety Show is done, and all the wonderful folks that came were amazingly generous! I just finished counting out the donation jars, and we raised nearly $450 tonight which, along with the (currently) $253 donated on-line at our Lance Armstrong Foundation site, makes a total just a hair short of $700!

You all rock!!!

It was a whole lot of fun. Our many guest performers were really wonderful, and the audience was splendid, singing along, dancing, and generous with their support and applause. We had a bit over a 100 folks in attendance, mostly UMM students, along with staff, faculty, and members of the Morris community. We should have audio and video recordings of the event soon, so those of you who missed it may have an opportunity to check it out later. Stay tuned!

Sub-Evil Boy did a great job, and I was totally proud of him. Well done sir! His great “Taco Man” was a well deserved hit. (There are rumors of another performance of “Taco Man” at this year’s Pride Week Drag Show…)

A final reminder that you can still donate on-line at our LAF site. Thanks a ton to everyone!

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