The Undercover Treasure Chest Parade will be playing at Milly's in Manchester on Saturday, June 17th. We will be playing with other bands, including the well established Lamont Smooth.The cover is 10 bucks for 18-20 and 5 for 21+. We will be rocking out hard at about 8pm. Come check it out. (photo by Katie Ritter)

Brian, Cameron, my brother and I recorded a new song, "Lunch Time", which took about 4 days to do. It sounds quite good. The instrumentation is:
Acoustic Guitar/Lead vocals/Kung-Fu Hampster: Brian; Bass Guitar: Cameron; Electric guitar/backing vocals: Me, Drums: Mike.
At about 1:40 we managed to integrated the combined reading of page 132 (second paragraph) of several novels into the track. You can listen to or download it right here. If you're Dima, you already have it.

Today after a prolonged period of sitting around thinking about how tortureously hot it is outside, and how few clean clothes I had, I realized that a good solution encompassing both of those factors would be to wash my clothes and hang them outside on the line. Yes, the old fashioned way. No lint collectors, no ventilation ducts, no noise, no dryer fires, and most importantly, no electricity expended. Electric clothes dryers take up about five to ten percent of your energy bill. If you hang out your clothes, as I did here...


for the price of a rack, clothesline, and a few of these handy pins, you can dry your laundry using the free power of the Sun. You will save money, exert a little energy of your own, and reduce pollution. Precipitation is the only limiter. In the winter, you can dry your clothes indoors on a small rack, or (carefully) dry them outside. Any high school chemistry student can affirm this. A great resource on hanging out your clothes and links for the necessary accesories is Project Laundry List, a group run by my good friend and activist Alex Lee. Think twice next time you turn on your dryer when it's 80 degrees and sunny. Lastly, here's a picture I took of my self in the bathroom mirror.




PS. The show last night only paid 10 dollars. Time to get a real job.

Yo.
Tomorrow I will be playing the bass guitar with the Brooks Young Band at Milly's Tavern in Manchester. The show starts at 9pm and will feature a lot of John Mayer Trio-sounding blues and funk stuff. Come support the band and get drunk for(if you are 21 or over, of course). The cover is 10$ for -21 and 5$ for 21+ But no one reads this so....

Beatles songs of the day:
1. Tomorrow Never Knows
2. I Want You (She's So Heavy)
3. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

By request of Dmitriy, the only person who will ever read this, this photograph did not involve any photoshop trickery or editing. It was taken in my freshman dorm room which was lit only by christmas lights, as I asked my good friend Sarge to sit still in a chair. I donned some dark clothes and used my handy LED flashlight on my cell phone to write "POO" in the air for a 15 second exposure. Here you see the results. Questions? Comments? Click below. Though I know you won't, and if you do, you'll be Dmitriy and I'm talking to you right now anyway.

First: anyone who reads this can comment on it down below each entry where, oddly enough, it says "comment". You don't have to be a registered member of anything to do it; please do if you feel so inclined. Insults are appreciated.

Today I played a show with the A&B Wrecking Company (sponsored by Strings and Things Music) for an American Cancer Society event at the New Hampshire Technical Institute, known locally as "the tech", which was still a little flooded.
Of course, they had to have a DJ too, which just created a battle between the band and the DJ as to who was going to make noise when. I ended up sitting in the wind and cold with my bass in hand and my amp politely on "mute" as the theme to "Rocky" (I'm serious) and several other over-played hits from the 1970s were played to get the party started. A word about Disc Jockeys:

I play in a band. I play in several bands. I've done so for many years. In doing so I have carried quite literally, tons of equipment, practiced for weeks, and dealt with many technical problems including, but not limited to: on several occasions not even having electricity and being severly shocked. Being a musician is not easy, and being good a good one is even harder; also you tend to make very little money, and many people want DJs more than they want bands. Today's DJ plugs in his/her laptop, buys a few PA speakers, a microphone, a couple swirly lights, and makes 500 bucks to play "Stand By Me" for 50 year olds who pretend they're still happily married. These DJs for some reason feel that they themselves are somehow specially qualified to download songs off of limewire and operate windows media player. I am a musician, a person with the creative capacity to write and perform music for specific events. I can set up and tear down quickly. I have played with large bands in very small spaces. I am too often told to "please turn it down a little bit" or "do you mind if I make a quick announcement?" The whole while I am expected to smile, act very professional, and wear a collared shirt. At the end, if we're lucky, a group of 5 might get paid as much as the one DJ with a laptop and a disco ball. Have I made the unfairness clear enough? I am a very frustrated person.

Well, since I don't feel like being productive, I've made the obligatory list of favorite albums of all time. Sorry if this isn't interesting.
in no particular order:

Wilco-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
This album got them dropped from their label and if I had to recommend one record to everybody, this is it. Jeff Tweedy is a genius.
Beatles-Rubber Soul
I was listening to this in the back seat of someone's car one time and decided it was all I wanted to listen to for the rest of my existence.
Against Me!-Acoustic EP
The hidden track is among my favorite songs ever.
Ben Folds-Ben Folds Live
This album is a great performance and has a lot of meaning to me which I won't share here.
Postal Service-Give Up
I only heard this recently but the lyrics are really remarkable...even if it can sound like a video game.
Ben Kweller-Sha Sha
I find my self listening to this entire album start to finish and realizing that I sang along with every song.
John Scofield Band-Up All Night
Modern funk/jazz at its finest.
Radiohead-Hail To the Thief/OK Computer
These albums just amaze me. I think Thom Yorke might be Mozart born again.
Sigur Ros-Agaetis Byrjun
Some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard and I can't understand a word of it.
Green Day-Nimrod
My first Green Day experience was with this album. It's fairly long and has got a lot of variety on it for a band of that type. One of the few albums that can make me dance.
Paul Simon-Graceland
Graceland came out around the time when I was born and it must've been played a lot around me because I love it.



Here's an unrelated picture from an old mill in Jaffrey, NH.

Well there was sun today. Yes, sun. Remember that large 74% hydrogen sphere with the mass of 332,950 Earths which is the source of all life of which we are aware? (Thank you, wikipedia) Well it made a brief come back for most of today. People were crawling out of their flooded basements and rubbing their eyes in disbelief. I know I was. The Concord Monitor's Mark Travis puts it more cleverly:

On Channel 9 this morning, meteorologist Josh Judge showed a graphic explaining what the sun is. (For the record, it's a bright star that shines in the daytime sky.) And at the Beanstalk store on Route 106 in Loudon, the talk at the counter was about calling 911 to report a strange object in the sky.

I'm not the only one who noticed.

Also in today's news I rode my bike to the library and renewed my card, and decided that Gatorade® tastes better when diluted with an equal amount of water. Here is the product in question:Gatorade Frost® "Glacier Freeze®" ingredients: Water, sucrose syrup, glucose-fructose syrup, citric acid, natural flavors, salt, sodium citrate, monopotassium phosphate, ester gum, blue 1.

I saw the syrup with two "-ose"es before it and wanted to water it down.

It's raining now.

Here is the flood situation:
and there are some good photos from around the area, including some i've submitted, at this site

Bow, NH...this is normally a very small brook.

Bow, NH near the end of Interstate 89

Bow, NH Route 3A

Concord, NH Clinton Street...this officer was at first not happy to see me, as I approached on foot with camera and tripod she stepped out of the car and stood in my way. I asked, as I planned to anyway, "How far can I go?", "right here", she said, which was very far away. The concern was that the road was likely to fall apart. I said "okay well I can't get anything good from here so I'll go somewhere else." "Well you can go up to that driveway there but that's it", so I was able to get some okay shots, these guys were with a third person with a camera who was also allowed where to where I was. We were special.

Paraphrase from the 2nd person from the left:
"All these people who toss their cigarette butts and don't recycle this is it all coming right back to you."

Bow, NH Route 3A

Stay dry.

After my fifth consecutive rainy weekend in Montreal, my first glimpse of home is this.



Floods. Roads closed. The pump's running in the basement. The internet, and it's usually right about these things, doesn't forsee the rain stopping any time within the next ten days. After those ten days? Only god knows. There may not be an eleventh day. This could be it. Rain until all the damned pot holes are finally filled and we can't breathe anymore because, well, we're under water.
In the mean time here are some outtakes from the big city. It was raining hard most of the time so I only took the camera with me once.

Oh, and welcome to my blog.