Archives for September 2006
Silent Summer Nights 6
5 September 2006 | miscellaneous, music, movies | 1 Response
Saturday & Sunday night it was my pleasure to volunteer for Silent Summer Nights at Grandview Park on Commercial Drive. SSN is a really neat project co-produced by the Eye of Newt collective, Radix Theatre & Rumble Productions. Each year they get together & present silent movies in the park, accompanied by live orchestras.
Saturday’s features were two Chinese animated films: ‘Three Monks’ and, um, something slightly longer about dragons. Both were very nice, but I think I liked 3 Monks best because it was really cute. Both movies were accompanied by the Orchid Ensemble, an incredible blend of experimental jazz & traditional Chinese music. Their music blended so well that I soon forgot they were even there. Amazing.
Sunday’s film was Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis, accompanied by the ‘Monster Orchestra’, a 30-person collaboration of three orchestras (NOW orchestra, Eye of Newt & Orchid Ensemble), simultaneously conducted by all three conductors. The music that emerged was pretty amazing. It was like experimental jazz improv meets, uh, experimental orchestral music? Seriously, I dunno what you would call it, but it was pretty awesome. It didn’t feel like the music was very attuned to the film, especially since the conductors were most often standing with their backs to the screen, occasionally glancing over their shoulder for inspiration. Still, there were some pretty magical moments.
Here’s a brief audio snippet from Sunday night that I recorded on my phone. It’s pretty terrible quality, but it might give you a sense of what it was like from my vantage point, behind the band at the ‘box office’ (more like a box than an office, really). Enjoy!
Tags: jazz, theatre, vancouverNew Toys 01/09/06
1 September 2006 | tech, mac | No Responses
Here’s a little list of things I’ve started playing with this week:
MAMP: actually, MAMP (Mac, Apache, Mysql & PHP) isn’t really something I’m playing around with, it’s something I’m now using. It’s the Mac equivalent of a LAMP stack: basically an easy install all of the software you need in order to run a php/mysql environment on your local machine. Super-handy for developing for those low-to-no bandwidth moments. I’m using it to run basic test installs of Drupal & Wordpress, and I imagine that pretty soon I’ll use it to run local development versions of production sites. Woot.
Locomotive: the Ruby on Rails development environment for Mac OSX. Before you go thinking that I must be one of those cool guys who know Ruby, I’ll tell you a secret: I’m not. But after hearing Jeremy & Aaron evangelize about RoR last Saturday at Barcamp, I’ve decided I’ll give it a try. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even make something neat.
Project Opus: a really nice social-network-for-music-lovers. I haven’t had much time to hang out and build/exchange playlists, but I’ve created a page for a thousand times no, and I’ve started to upload a bit of our music there. I’m excited to play around with it some more — it’s got lots of cool features, including two new portable players for sharing songs offsite.
Tags: locomotive, mamp, os x, project opus, ruby on rails, webserver