Month: October 2003

Happy Halloween! Wednesday was another busy night at the Tree House open mic. A few new performers came out as well.

1. Ben Garvey – I played with a bongo player for the first time in my life. John Shaughnessy brought his bongos and played along to “I Hope I Die on the Moon,” “All my Dreams are in Cartoon,” and “The Genius of it All.” Later on I played “99%,” John Prine’s “That’s the Way the World Goes ‘Round,” and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees, but sans bongos.

2. John Shaughessy – I liked my joke about John being lucky he came out of each farmer’s market gig unscathed. He covered John Faye’s “Deathbed” which sounds perfect for John’s voice.

3. The Forest Greens – Eri confused me during their first song by switching from violin to guitar pretty quickly. Somehow it looked as though violin and guitar were coming through on the same channel, which doesn’t make sense. They sounded good though and even brought a few fans with them. Thanks goes out to the girl who helped me untie the mic chord!

4. The MDs – Bowie’s “Major Tom” Space Oddity got a nice treatment from the MDs. Of course, the first time I heard the song I thought Bowie was singing, “Ground Control to Major Tongue,” which makes almost no sense.

5. Bob Michel – I think this guy is winning fans each week.

6. Sarah Allen – A mellower night for her, but still great.

7. tomjohn – I half expected this guy to start telling me about how I could get free money from the government to start my own business like that guy with all the dollar signs on his coat. I liked his song about the movie theater closing and a pharmacy opening up in its place right across the street from another pharmacy. There are a lot of freaking drugstores these days! Also, I miss the old Eric Theater that used to be on Cuthbert. I saw the Shawshank Redemption there for $1.50.

8. Haiku Riders – Their 2nd time out and I think I got configured their setup a little better this time.

9. Transitions, featuring C-Lovett and Akademics – I’m not sure but this may have been the first hip hop act since I started hosting. These guys from Camden expressed their politics and social concern through rap.

10. The World Famous Crawlspace Brothers – I’d describe these guys as two trucker hat wearing, soul selling, acoustic rocking, anti-folk musicians.

11. Entheos – Following the Crawlspace Brother’s song about Satan came Tina, Randy, and Jarod’s Christian set. It’s good to balance things out. Tina’s voice sounded awesome.

12. Chris – Sorry Chris, I can’t read your last name on the sign up sheet. Hopefully you can still hook me up at Starbucks in Cherry Hill. Chris improvises his songs on stage, but hopefully he’ll sing louder so we can hear his improvised lyrics better.

Yesterday someone posted a comment to my bio page.

You were born in Illinois. I was born in Illinois. Your birthday is October 26. My birthday is October 28. You are an accoustic musician. I am an accoustic musician. You play Johnny Cash. I play Johnny Cash. Your name is Ben Garvey. My name is Ben Garvey…Happy Halloween.

your alter ego,

Ben Garvey

Strange! If the other Ben Garvey reads this, please send me an email. This reminds me of coming across Ben McGarvey over in the UK.

If you don’t know about the open mic yet every Wednesday at the Tree House coffee shop from 8:00 – 11:00PM, then you should definitely come out tonight. You can sign up in advance here.

If you don’t know what a coffee shop is, it’s a place where people go to hang out, hear music, and drink coffee.

If you don’t know what coffee is, it’s a beverage made from ground coffee beans making a bitter, caffeinated concoction that millions of people drink every day.

If you don’t know what a day is, it’s the time it takes for Earth to spin around once.

If you don’t know how many times “once” is, just count to two, subtract by one, and that’s how many times the world has to spin around in a day.

About a week ago I saw some plants for sale at 7-11 that could grow in artificial light and only need watering 6 times a year. They’re called Cyber Plants. I picked one up for my cubicle at work and so far it’s still alive. A few of the leaves have died and fallen off, but the main section is thriving. The soil it comes with is some sort of clear, water holding dirt of the future. No name for the plant yet, but I’ll try and update you on its status as the year goes by.

Be sure to check out the Cyber Plant website to read their ridiculous slogan.

One decision I’ve been toying with for a while is whether I should free up the content on this site with a license agreement. I decided to go with an extremely open license that allows you to pretty much do whatever you want with this site’s content.

You are free:

* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works
* to make commercial use of the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.

* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the author.

What exactly does this mean? Basically that you can steal every photo from this site, print any article I’ve written in a magazine, record my songs and sell them on CD, and a number of other things, without having to pay me a dime. The only requirement is that the work, or derivative works, must credit me as the original author. This might be a dumb decision, but it’s something I’ve thought a about a lot. There are a few possibilities of what could happen to me as a result of the work I do on this site.

1. Some big company could see value in what I do and pay me to create content for them
2. I go through life making things (programs, music, writings) freely available, but with restricted copyright and nothing major ever happens
3. I give up copyright control over my work and someone uses it to make big $$$
4. I give up copyright control over my work and nothing major ever happens

.

Financially, number 1 is the ideal outcome for me, but it’s obvious to everyone that it’s also the least likely. Also, I’ve read horror stories of bands who put out successful albums, but still went into debt with their record company. Number 2 and number 4 are the most likely to happen, and wouldn’t affect me much one way or the other. Number 3 is not as likely as 2 and 4, but still more likely than 1. Some might think 2 is preferrable to 3, but I disagree. If someone made a work of mine famous, that would certainly help me out even if I had no legal grounds to get compensation for that work. I still retain the ability to record, release, and make money off the famous work. Also, the fact that the work is now famous gives me a nice reference point for getting compensated for fully copyrighted works I might create in the future.

So from now on, any artist (local or national) can record the songs available on this site for their own CDs without having to worry about me suing them. I can’t. Steal away!

I was about to go to bed when I read this on Google News. Four kids in Collingswood ages 10-19 were found starving in a foster home.

COLLINGSWOOD, N.J., Oct. 26 ? The parents of four boys adopted from New Jersey’s troubled foster care system were arrested Friday, two weeks after the police found that the children, ages 9 to 19, had been starved to the point that none of them weighed more than 50 pounds, according to the Camden County prosecutor.

The boys were so badly malnourished that their shriveled bodies gave no hint of their ages, investigators said. At 19, the oldest was 4 feet tall and weighed 45 pounds. The police initially thought he was just 10 years old. The boys’ condition was discovered when a neighbor called the police because the 19-year-old, Bruce, was looking for food in the neighbor’s trash at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 10, according to the county prosecutor, Vincent P. Sarubbi. The boys were removed from the home later that day.

The boys had been locked out of the kitchen of the house in this blue-collar Philadelphia suburb and were fed a diet of pancake batter, peanut butter and breakfast cereal. They ate wallboard and insulation to sate their hunger, investigators said.

I lived 2 blocks from there until last July. I hope their parents get locked up for years.

Today was my 25th birthday, which puts me at about 1/3 of the current life expectancy. My 20s are now either half over or half left, and in this case the optimist/pessimist argument seems to agree with itself. The good part is that I’m having a great time these days and I couldn’t be happier. Maybe I could be a little happier, but if I compare my life to the average earthling I’m doing fine. I have a good job, a good education, creative outlets, and a beautiful fiance. What else do I need?

On Friday I saw the impressive, My Morning Jacket, at the TLA. I’m glad Adam dragged us out to see them. Their band name is terrible, but I really enjoyed the show. I hadn’t really heard their stuff, but I knew they were touted as one of the best alt.country bands, one of the few genres that haven’t been exploited by mainstream music. I wouldn’t call them alt.country at all except for their fashion sense. My Morning Jacket is 5 guys with tons of hair playing a methodical, stripped down, version of rock to surround their singer’s awesome voice. The singer and the keyboard player completely defined the sound. It definitely isn’t what I’ve come to known as alt.country which is usually indie kids playing country music. My Morning Jacket are rednecks playing indie music.

I also took in Kill Bill and I thought it kicked ass. I thought the characters were pretty interesting and Uma Thurman comes off as the coolest chick ever.

The main difference between Kill Bill and Tarantino’s other films are that Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown are slick pacakages to deliver Tarantino’s witty dialogue. Their entire plots are designed around the interactions and conversations between the characters. Kill Bill has far less dialogue and it’s obvious that the plot is built around the fight scenes. I’m sure there are a million references in there I missed, but I still enjoyed it. It’s extremely violent, but don’t let that scare you off. The plot is there and I will definitely be there for Volume 2.

Swarthmore College is getting a great reputation on the net for defending civil liberties in the Information Age. Recently, an internal Diebold memo floated around the net admitting security problems in their e-voting machines. The Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC) posted the memo to raise awareness that these machines may not be fool proof. Diebold responded with lawyers citing the DMCA and claiming copyright infringement on their internal memos which pretty much confirms their authenticity. Sadly, Swarthmore College caved and took down any website linking to the memos. What happened to the idea that universities were defenders of truth, ethics, and free speech? At least the students get it.

Read more about it here

My mom mentioned she found a few of my old high school gig flyers, so I went to their house and scanned them in. Click on the images to enlarge them.

	This flyer is for a show I had on Saturday, July 5th 1997 at Coffee World in Marlton. Coffee World went out of business a few months after the show. I vaguely remember making this flyer and thinking, “This will look cool if I take these stone heads and put real eyes in them.” Jeanne is mad at me because I didn’t remember it was her eyes in the round aztec thing.
	Jake still thinks this was my best flyer ever. I seriously hope I fixed the errors and spelling mistakes before putting it up. The flyer promoted a pair of shows I had, both at Coffee World. One of the shows was at their South Street location, which is now a Subway!
	One of the only survivinig flyers from my short lived band, Stickfigure. I think Jay and I made this flyer together and it sucks. What is with that cartoon guy? Jay used to draw that thing all the time and it would piss John off to no end. There is another version of this flyer that had our picture on it, but I don’t think any of them made it into the 21st century. The venue is the infamous Down to Earth on High Street in Mt Holly. It’s no longer there, but in the mid to late 90s it was definitely the place to be in South Jersey. The show went great and we opened for two kick ass bands. Some people told us later on that it was our only good show. hah.

Thanks to Keith Lewis for sending this in. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is doing something awesome. He wants to be your backing band.

Ian Anderson is looking for volunteers to appear as special musical guests on some of the upcoming shows on his USA “Rubbing Elbows” tour. If you are a resident of, or live near to, the following cities and are a singer/songwriter with some preferably professional live-performance experience, then he would like to hear from you.

You need to send a CD of three or four of your songs ? ideally played live ? so we can choose a suitable number for Ian and his musicians to learn and ?back? you on. Solo performers preferred. A duo will do at a pinch but, for production reasons, NO BANDS, please. There is no fee for this appearance ? Ian is far too mean for that ? but you will get a recording of your spot sent to you later as a keepsake and possibly a free beer, a couple of concert tickets for mom and dad and a wrinkled T-shirt from the bottom of the merchandise box.

Remember, you have to be a nearby resident. No good sending your CD to cover the whole country as we are looking for LOCAL musicians for whom the appearance might prove helpful in their career.

This is AWESOME. I’m burning my CD right now. Head here for details on where to submit your CD. They’re playing on here on November 15th at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood. I emailed them and they said they are definitely looking for an opening act for this show. What are you waiting for?