This is Boston, Not L.A...Still.

As green versus yellow fire spit across the nation this month, renewing long-forgotten divergent styles of shit-talk, the pertinent dialogue for a moment turned to “cultural rivalries.”

Glancing through an assortment of articles and snippets on the subject in the Boston Globe one slow morning at work, I was reminded of how strange of a chasm still sometimes sits between pop-culture and the counter- or sub-, the mainstream media and the underground-/ arts-media… and how well the idea of this sort of “cultural rivalry” can sometimes demonstrate this. What seems pertinent and obvious within one lifeblood can often fall irrelevant on deaf and confused ears within the context of another.

The articles in the Globe (and, as I’ve noticed since, most other mainstream sources that covered the “broader” implications of the basketball playoffs) seemed to want to insist (with a suggestion that, to the readership, it would be a given, an obvious assumption, something only briefly worth mentioning as an afterthought for those of us living most extremely under a cultural rock) that the rivalry between Boston and Los Angeles, culturally, as cities, was forgotten since the days of Bird and Magic, and completely dominated by sports over all other elements, paling in comparison to the Boston versus New York rivalry, which is driven (obviously) by the same sort of sports-first cultural tunnel-vision. Duh.

There are those of us, however, within the varied readership of these mainstream publications who most definitely do not live under cultural rocks, yet were still a bit surprised by these supposedly “obvious” assumptions.

For those of us who grew up and live daily within various facets of an art-driven “counter-culture” ( I use that term hesitantly, but am unable to come up with a succinct replacement that better conveys the idea), the pertinent rivalry has always been Boston vs. L.A.

The “forgotten rivalry,” huh? I assure the staffers at the Globe, to musicians and artists in the Boston area, the bad blood with the city of angels has never completely left our minds, while the feud with New York has always seemed more like a fairly good-natured (albeit violent) sparring about sports among “friends.” Hell, with the distance separation being as small as it is, holding legitimate grudges between Boston and New York would be incredibly creatively and culturally limiting for artists and musicians. We trade shows and gallery-appearances on a weekly basis; our cultures and tastes are similar enough any sort of “real” rivalry would be self-defeating. Whether the team-flag-waving fanatic is willing to understand or not, for the sub-culture there is a daily, pragmatic need for us to leave the Red Sox vs. Yankees grudges in the pubs and on the fields.

If the mentions of rivalry in the media-coverage was limited to sports-fanaticisms, I would concede the cultural over-looks as aspects of a suburban-mainstream American culture outside of my realm of most-adequate experience. Unfortunately, license has been taken to translate “sports” and “culture” into interchangeable terms, and translate the entirety of one into the limited scope of the other. “Cultures” were contrasted, in ways that had nothing besides context to do with sports.

The arts scenes in both New England and Southern California have been acutely aware of a “cultural” chasm separating them for quite a long time. Having worked as a musician extensively in both parts of the country, I can assure you that this separation is far more fundamentally life-style-based than any assumptions that a mere sports rivalry can caricature during a play-off period pitting one commentator’s accent against the next, or compiled lists of celebrities residing in one locale over another (which reminds me that I should point out for those in my readership that are bound to quip that I’m not even “from” Boston [the city proper] or a citizen of the commonwealth of Massachusetts that EVERY of the articles to which I’m referring that boasts of Beantown’s celebrity roster lists Adam Sandler, who has largely touted his allegiance to the neighborhood that he’s from mere blocks away from where I grew up and currently reside [once again] in the Queen City of the Granite State… not to mention Aerosmith, who’s members hail from a rather rural area even further north in New Hampshire [and I would prefer not to even mention the rednecks from Godsmack, as I consider them a bit of a disgrace to the state]…)

Flipping stations on a car-ride during the playoffs, I caught an afternoon DJ on WBCN spinning The Freeze’s “This is Boston, Not LA” as a rallying-cry for Celtics fans prior to the evening’s game. Great song, great compilation… and I promise, it spoke to so much more than basketball, and still does, to New England punk fans. When I got home, I cued up The Showcase Showdown’s classic Boston anti-Cali-anthem “213.”

I promise, for artists and musicians, this rivalry has nothing to do with basketball. I am disappointed that “credible” and well-staffed publications such as the Boston Globe and the LA Times, who operate in cities whose “dominant” cultures are more dominated (possibly ironically) by the “sub”-cultures than most others in America, seem to be completely and naively oblivious to this.

Dirty, Shiny Shellac; Metro-Grime in Fragmented Pastiche.

I'm working on collecting my thoughts.

The image in my mind is a splattering of acrylic paint, a combination of of drab, dirty colors and the bright, slick, and jarring, across a tattered piece of newsprint, torn and scattered on the shiny floor of a creatively-lit club. I'm scooping up the pieces, spreading some shellac on the wall, and reassembling the fragments into something completely different.

I have so much that I want to say in giant brush-strokes of sticky, shiny goop. This entry will be a bit messy. I know that you like it that way.


The term Metro-Grime has become the new catch-all. It began as a tongue-in-cheek mock-gimmick label for a music-genre. Then we realized that it could be applied to so much more. It's a way of seeing things. Something slightly less than a "lifestyle," but pretty close. It has to do with the combination of the dirty and the fashionable, where the juxtaposition itself is essential to any conception of either. The beauty itself is derived from the decay and disorder, and the individuals who embody the movement are acutely aware of this and thrive off of it. This is how many of us have lived for years. Metro-Grime embodies an unabashed love and embrace of the pretty dirty things. Manchester, New Hampshire, for instance, IS a Metro-Grime city, and serves as home to healthy numbers of such individuals... but is merely a single example, the most pertinent to my present analysis, of a nearly endless list of just those grimy/ gorgeous neighborhoods, cities, and districts that I know well enough to pull merely off the top of my head.

Manchester is my city, and always will be, no matter how much I may enjoy a span of time elsewhere. I love the city, its quirks, its dirt, its problem... and these things are among what makes it a beautiful and creatively pertinent place. Thus, as a cultural critic-at-large based in this dirty/ pretty city whose life-blood could use to be documented, I'm prepared to call the flaws as I see them, as part of the creation of an ongoing aesthetically important documentation of a place that deserves one.

So bear with me as I drag you through the dirt and glitter. I'll start in with some specifics tomorrow.

Asbjorn Updates... Ongoing and Evolving Projects..

Since my last post (part 1 of 2 in the "reluctant beat-freak" series) has yet to incite the sort of argument or "lively debate" that I was hoping and assuming that it would, I think I'm going to put off the second installment a bit further, hoping that some of you speak up in the meantime. For now, I'll give you guitar-music/ rock'n'roll aficionados all the benefit of the doubt that you're waiting to see how I defend my stance before throttling me for it.

Plus, I'm a bit overdue for posting my quasi-monthly updates about what's new from the various and scattered members of the Asbjorn Arts Collective. So this would probably be as good of a time to do that as any.

I wish that I have more to report this time around... but as I don't, this will be a relatively short entry. If you're an artist even loosely associated with Asbjorn (if you don't know what that means, email me and I'll let you know whether you are or not, and what it would entail) with new work that I left out of this update, or if you want to be sure that your project gets included the next time around, by all means, let me know.

Dandy Apparel is releasing a limited-edition first run of its 2008 t-shirt line this week, and they've already begun to take orders for the eight initial designs in the catalog (follow the link above).



I recently added a new track to my acoustic profile on myspace. It's called "Strange Sutures," and the recording that's up right now is a REALLY rough demo that I recorded the night (or morning, more literally) that I wrote it. I hope to have a better recording of the more refined version of the song that it's now evolved into up soon.



In other Asbjorn music... I've been working with a couple other Asbjorn wackos/ conceptualists on a new indie-dance-rock project called "The Immaculate Conceptions." We're in the song-writing stages as of now, getting a solid set together and preparing a demo EP called "Tipsy Cougar." Keep your eyes and ears open; I PROMISE that we'll be in-your-face about it, forcing you to notice, soon enough.

On that note... I was prompted recently to contemplate the perpetually problematic "separation" and subsequent confusion of "artist" and "character" from whose perspective he speaks when someone brought it to my attention that, if casually reading the lyrics to the new project, without the context of the music and the show, scribbled and tacked to the walls in the room where we write our songs, I sound like an arrogant creep. Really, I swear, songs like "The Thrill of the Chase" make sense within the context of the project. But with the written words alone, understanding the nature of the character that I'm presenting in the overall art-statement of The Immaculate Conceptions is impossible. So, if you happen to stop by the downtown pad where guitarist Mac Ming and I live and make our art, take the scribbles around the room with a grain of salt. You'll eventually understand why the cockiness of the words is relevant.



As for the progress of on-going projects, Miss Chloe Claustrophobia (the ever-evolving concept-art project referred to and explained in quite a few past entries, most recently here) has taken another unexpected turn, which is once again perversely appropriate to the concept that she is intended to address. The mannequin, in its physical form, is now across the country from me, may very well never be modified in the ways that I had intended, has no new image-renderings available to me, and is apparently (to my great aesthetic displeasure) dressed as a belly-dancer. This is all so very far from the future that I had envisioned for her (that's always the way, isn't it?), but that fact in itself is almost sickeningly and ironically appropriate to her intended concept. Expect to find "her" popping up as the female subject of several songs by The Immaculate Conceptions in the very near future. See the reference already? "The Thrill of the Chase"? Eh?

In a past entry, I mused about my inability to finish a certain painting after putting it down to work on another that was very different in style, mood, and inspiration. I recently realized that, although I finished the work a couple of months ago (and presented it to my mother for Christmas, at least a year after I had intended to do so initially) I had never posted an update on what became of that work. Basically, I ended up having to reinvent it, and the meaning and purpose of the painting became very different than I had initially set out to create with it.

This..


...became this.

"Ill Seen Ill Said In Time, Words, and Decay."

If you can tell me what the new title of the work is a reference to, I'll give you a cookie. If you can venture any sort of theories about the relevance of the reference, I'll give you a whole lot of cookies, or something far better.

In another prior entry, I had mentioned my search for a certain set of books. Thanks to Jenn, who read my post and tracked a first-edition set down to a book-dealer in Texas via the internet (which she is apparently far more savvy with than I am), I was finally able to procure copies of the out-of-print texts. Come to find out, however, the preface of the work, which is the element that my use of the text most directly pivots around, wasn't added until the second(?) edition of the work's publication. So, now I have a couple beautiful copies of limited first edition books, but I'm still searching for what I needed from the perspective of scholarship.





I think that's all for now...So much for this entry being short.

Confessions of a formerly reluctant, overly critical beat-freak, part 1.

I have to admit, what is now my rather long-term love-affair with electronic music has been heretofore rather tepid and reluctant. Up until recently, there was part of me that was still trying to resist admitting to it.

I assume that this was the part of me that started playing guitar at age eleven. The part of me that was foaming at the mouth with a childhood fervor to throw myself headlong into a life where chord-charts and equipment and pentatonics and techniques and woodshedding were important things for reasons that didn’t need to be explained, merely because their importance was just part of “who I was.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not claiming that these formative tools and obsessions haven’t served me well. Being “a musician” is still an integral facet of my identity, as anyone who knows me, however casually, or regularly reads this blog, can attest. Without the musical hang-ups of my youth, my current way of identifying myself would not have been able to evolve as it was. However, I’m well aware that, to people who think “as musicians” in the sense that I did when I was younger, some passing mentions of my current musical preferences and critical opinions can verge on downright sacrilege. It might, therefore, be time to venture an explanation, with a mind to a broader sense of “cultural criticism” to tie it all together.

I have to admit it now. Even though I am primarily (loosely) “a guitarist,” the music that, to my critic’s ear, gets me the most excited for future artistic/ cultural progress with music as the medium rarely (if ever) features a guitar as the dominant instrument. Hell, I’ll go even further than that. Even from a non-critical, more personal and taste-based perspective, the music that tends to get me excited, the music that I enjoy that makes me feel comfortable, is nearly always, at this point, driven primarily by well-programmed, atmospheric/ textural electronic beats. I’m well aware that, to most of my brethren of the fret-board, this is something that no self-respecting guitar-player should ever say.

To be continued…

…but in the meantime, I’ll end this installment by continuing my series of “marginalia as visual art, art as criticism, marginalia as criticism, criticism as art itself…” I forgot to bring a notebook with me to work the other day, yet started brainstorming the ideas for this entry while on break… leaving me no place to write down my ideas besides on full-page advertisements in the current issue of “Poets & Writers” magazine that I happened to be reading… producing this mess.

Literary Tourism, Book-hunting, and the Blurring Borders of "Fiction."

After years without the access, while I'm in New England my trips to certain literary/ historical sites have become much like ritual pilgrimages to shrines.

As I am primarily a Hawthorne/ 19th century New England Lit. scholar, Salem and Concord Massachusetts are among my most frequent and revered Meccas. I was down in Concord last week, visited some familiar sites, and I took some pictures.


Hawthorne's famous "Old Manse," where the "Mosses" were from.


Nathaniel's grave on "Author's Ridge."



The commemorative stones for Nathaniel's wife Sophia and daughter Una, placed on this spot in a ceremony that took place since my last visit to Concord, next to the author's own stone within the Hawthorne family plot. These were actually among the things that I was most interested in seeing on this particular trip.


The stone at the center of the Alcott family plot at "Author's Ridge." I love the stonework on this one.

I'm considering buying a video-camera, filming these nerdy excursions, and becoming the next Fritz Wethersbee. Think I can pull it off? (For those outside New England unfamiliar with Fritz, check this out.)

A large part of these trips usually entails searching for long out-of-print books that I need to find for research purposes. On this particular trip, I once again didn't find the one that I was most specifically looking for. If anyone happens to know where I might be able to find a copy of Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father in two volumes, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," please let me know. Yes, I'm well aware that there's a copy at the Fletcher Library at ASU West. And yes, it does even happen to have a book-plate inside the cover from a New Hampshire parochial school that later became the high-school that I graduated from. Unfortunately, that's not terribly helpful to me right now, which is a bit of a sore subject.

I DID find something else interesting while searching this time around, though... I stumbled on an early Italian copy of Hawthorne's "Transformations," which was later released in America, in a "slightly" different form as "The Marble Faun." What I wasn't aware of, however, as I had never actually seen a copy of the earlier European form of the work, was that he "slight" differences between "Transformations" and "The Marble Faun" somehow made the earlier version of the work about a quarter of the length of the final American version. I can't wait to dig into the older work in more detail and figure out where the differences lie. Differences in the prefaces of the two works in particular could potentially add pertinent depth to some of my present research, and thus I consider the dusty old book a rather essential and exciting find.

When I started flipping through the book, I found some other suprises that made me smile.





There is a pencilled inscription in the front cover of the book, with a girl's name, a rather antique date, and a town in Italy. My mind naturally imediately began running with stories of the situations that led to these flowers becoming pressed within the pages of this book, and the symbolic and poetic significance of the words that surround the dried Italian flowers and thoughts of the girl who had placed them there, with presumably little thought of how alligned she was with which characters of the tale that she happened to be reading.

Even if it's not completely true, even if the flowers were placed in the book a mere year ago by an elderly American woman before her collection was sold with her estate to the book-seller, I don't want to know. These thoughts of the little Italian girl drying flowers a hundred-something years ago in her early-pressing of my favorite book definitely made my day.

In other news of the blurring of the lines between "fiction" and "non-," I stumbled on an intriguing set of quotes in the "Author's Preface" to Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw."

"I wondered, I confess, why so fine a germ, gleaming there in the wayside dust of life, had never been deftly picked up. The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to act on a perfectly clear field, with no 'outside' control involved, no pattern of the usual or the true or the terrible 'pleasant' (save always, of course, the high pleasentry of one's very form) to consort with."

"The charm of all these things for the distracted modern mind is in the clear field of experience, as I call it, over which we are thus led to roam; an annexed but independent world in which nothing is right save as we rightly imagine it."

"Hun, this is just syntax and prowess;" A Literary Look at The Stiletto Formal's "This is My Boomstick."

After more of a delay than I had anticipated (it’s been a pretty strange week), I’ll try to attempt to pick up where I left off in my last entry.



The first time that I saw The Stiletto Formal, I was familiar with their name, the sort of audience they tended to attract, and several of the bands that they habitually played shows with, and based on these alone I was prepared to dislike them fervently. (See my description of the third sort of band discussed in my prior entry and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The whine-whine-scream, slanty-hair bit.) I went to the show at Modified Arts in Phoenix to see TheStart, an electro-rock act from L.A. that they happened to be playing with that I have been a fan of for quite a while. I thought the choice of billing was strange for one band or the other, which definitely peaked my curiosity a bit.

To be brief, what I saw from the Phoenix-based act proved to be far from what I had expected. The instrumentation was diverse, the performance energetic and dramatic in a way that had more in common with an opera than a hardcore show, and the songs were extremely well-written. This was a far cry from what we’re used to hearing 15-year olds who think themselves “fashionable” erroneously calling “screamo” post-Thursday and Blood Brothers. (When I hear the word “screamo” I still stubbornly think of band like Small Brown Bike, The Casket Lottery, Coalesce, etc… which are a far cry from Atreyu from the standpoint of sound…)

I’ll admit, the moment that completely sold me on the act came fairly late into the set… singer Kyle Howard announced that they were about to play a “new” song called “Tastes Like Black Licorice”… to which a white-belt-wearing high-schooler near the front yelled “Yaegermeister!” Mr. Howard looked down at him, with an expression somewhere between perplexion and contempt, and stammered in a ‘Like, duh’ tone into the microphone “Uh, no… absinthe.” I tucked my hands deeper into the pockets of my tweed coat, smirked, and nodded. There was definitely more to this band than a good portion of the trend-jumping facet of their crowd seemed able to process and appreciate. To me, that’s always a positive sign.

Shortly after this show, I picked up a copy of the band’s “This is My Boomstick” EP, which had been recently released around the time.

I would love to be able to take this EP and conduct a song-by-song in-depth analysis, viewing the musical context as creative utilization of objects in the act’s diverse poetic toolbox, but I fear that would prove far too long-winded for this medium; I can only cross my fingers that this band becomes as popular as they deserve to be so that I can someday pitch a longer form of this to some University Press or other as “pertinent” cultural analysis. Pipe-dreams from all angles, I know. But this is a possibility for music crit. that is able to be approached as lit. crit., which is far more rare than I wish that it was. This is what I live for. This record is Literature written without the confines of writing with mere words alone, and this hybridity, to my ear, suggests its staying-power, although as more of a museum-specimen of Art with a capital “A,” (destined most likely, as most of the sort, to be truly appreciated only long after its appearance) than as a commercially-viable object of current “music” alone as it is currently produced, bought, and sold.

In continuation of a past discussion of how a critic’s marginalia can be criticism, and thus Art, itself, I present here a sample-page of my scribbles on a print-out of the lyrics to the record.

Yes, once again, I am well aware that my hand-writing is atrocious.

So, visit the band’s website, pick up a copy of the EP (which, if you haven’t noticed yet, I highly recommend) and give it a few really close listens.

Pay attention to the way that the music is sculpted in such a way as to ebb and flow with the meaning and tone of the lyrics, how Kyle’s voice (which, I will be the first one to admit, takes most people a bit of time to warm up to) rises and falls in intensity and emotion with an operatic sense of melodrama and attention to detail that very few acts would even consider putting the effort into achieving (after getting to know the songs, you’ll find that every time he slips into the falsetto shrieks that will most probably seem jarring at first, it is completely appropriate and necessary to thoroughly express the purpose of the piece). Pay attention to how accurately the overall experience of the song “Tastes Like Black Licorice” captures the foggy lucidity of a good absinthe-buzz, and how the escalation and climax of the song’s plot, the turn from tender to sinister, affection to threat, situates the band as a torch-bearer of a poetic tradition that has been utilized in the past by artists with such names as Poe, Tolstoy, John Fowles, Nick Cave, and hundreds of others. Listen to “The Fall of Ambrose Bierce” with a mind to the work of Bierce himself, who, from what I can gather, the song is written from the perspective of, and replicates the ideas and verbal stylings of extremely well. (For those who aren't familiar with the idiosyncracies of Bierce's biography, and thus the civil war scenarios that lend the song its substance, check here.) Listen closely to “I Sing The Body Electric” and try to figure out what the Whitman connection is that the title implies. I have some pretty good guesses, but I’m not positive. If you have an interesting idea, I’d love to hear it, discuss, and try to piece it together further.

My guess has something to do with this-

“4

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop on company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any on, or rest my arm ever so lightly
Round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea.

-Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"

Lamenting a Lack of the Eclectic; A Preface to a Record-Review.

I never would have thought, prior to leaving Arizona, that I would be spending a clear and cold New England winter evening sitting on a spot on the bank of Manchester’s Lake Massabesic familiar to me for mostly forgotten reasons from years past, lamenting the local lack of certain types of musical acts that I had taken a bit for granted for the time that I was in Phoenix.

To be rather blunt, some conversations with varied musician-acquaintances in New England since my return have not proven terribly optimistic. It seems that the musical situation in these parts has stagnated quite drastically; for all my digging around to see what’s new and what various players are up to, it seems that nearly every act falls into one of three categories, none of which I can seem to get particularly excited about.

There’s a peculiar sort of distinctly “American” (*cough* redneck) shout “metal” that doesn’t seem to exist to the same extent anywhere besides here. This sort of thing is mostly perpetrated, apparently, by musicians who were playing in bands heavily influenced by Korn and The Deftones back when that sort of thing was viable, and, in an act of collective panic when nu-metal proved outmoded, added a dose of influence from Slayer and Pantera for the sake of “credibility” so that they could claim (in a naive bout of angry irony) “Hey look, we play real metal now”… this is something that I could rant on for pages, but I‘ll spare you, with just the reminder that, if you look at its history and formative influences, Heavy Metal is a distinctly European phenomenon. I know, to legions of guys who are much larger than I am with Kerry King goatees and tribal tattoos these are fighting words. Oh well.

There seems to be a bizarre revival of mid-’90’s-Boston-style tough-guy hardcore and street-punk, played mostly by guys who were a bit too young to have been terribly involved in those scenes the first time around (I mean, I was pretty young when I was listening to the older guys lament about the good-old-days, and I could have baby-sat most of this new crop…), with some acts and performers who have apparently been hanging on through the last decade and are now seeing their popularity unexpectedly resurface (the number of recent “reunions” that I’ve heard about by bands that I saw at Café Savoi and The Elvis Room when I was fifteen boggles my mind).

…And then there’s the glut of bands playing a cookie-cutter form of “screamo” that passed its flavor-of-the-minute lifespan at least two years ago. You know the type… whine, scream, whine-whine, scream…octave-chords, octave-chords, breakdown, octave-chords, breakdown, breakdown… Slanty-hair, girl-pants, white-belts... you know the cliches, you get the drill.

(Of course, I’m leaving out the “I was on a music-based reality-TV show a year ago and now I play acoustic cover-songs to drunks and draw big crowds who think I’m a ‘celebrity’” phenomenon… This is by far the most disturbing to me of all, but it’s a different cultural animal entirely that needs a much wider scope to tackle adequately)

Add to this what seems to be a near-complete lack of consistent or reliable venues, lack-luster and clique-ish crowds, etc. (sound familiar, Phoenix? These seem to be national concerns right now) and I’ll admit that I’m in no particularly educated position from which to review the state of the “scene” around here, as I have yet to get wind of any shows or performances that sounded even remotely worth attending, or any new act worth giving a listen to and getting excited about. (If anyone in my readership feels able to help me out in this regard, I’m all ears… but I’d prefer to steer clear of anything that falls formulaically within the aforementioned categories, which, I know, makes your task considerably more difficult.)

In short, what the New England music scene north of Boston seems to be lacking right now is the emphasis on ecclecticism that I earnestly felt was in the air in the area when I left a few years ago. There was a time, in fact, shortly before I left Manchester, when I might have even complained that a potential problem with the state of New England music was that everyone was trying a bit too hard to be different, to the extent that most of what was going on was almost "artsy" to the extent of being unlistenably abstract. I am utterly confused as to how things have apparently headed in such a polar-opposite direction in such a relatively short period of time.


These thoughts lead my mind to early scribbles in a “blogs to write” list that I jotted down when I first started posting here.

When I initially thought to review it, “This is My Boomstick” by Phoenix’s “The Stiletto Formal” was a bit closer to being a “new” record than it is now. I kept putting it off, however, as new ideas found their way to my pen, and thus this page, faster.

At this point, it’s a bit late, but seems a pertinent undertaking, if based on my personal present local-music-woes, if for no other reason.


…to be continued.