Month: January 2004

Matt Weatherford, author of the Filthy Critic, decided to bring Filthy back from the dead and continue his movie reviews. First up was Big Fish receiving 2 fingers and Peter Pan getting 3 (5 if you’re in NAMBLA).

The Grape Street Pub is closing their old bar and opening up a new one down the street. The new venue will be bigger and should attract more signed bands. It will probably also have bathrooms you can actually use. The new place will be called Grape Street Philadelphia and will be located on Main Street in Manayunk, next to the Manayunk Brewery.

Philadelphia, PA ? (January, 2004) Legendary Philadelphia original live music venue Grape Street Philadelphia (GSP) ? formerly known as The Grape Street Pub – has announced the opening of a new, larger venue and entertainment complex.

The current GSP location is a converted row home offering only 1400 square feet of operating space on each of its two floors for patrons, performers and bar alike. Despite the fact that this small performing area proved to be somewhat limiting, the club has assembled one of the best sound and stage lighting systems on the East coast for a club of equal size.

The new GSP, located at 4100 Main Street, is only a few blocks North of the current location in the building formerly housing the Chemistry nightclub. This structure, a four story ?L? shaped building next to the famed Manayunk Brewery and Restaurant, is a former textile mill and offers a spacious 7,000 square feet of space per floor with fifteen foot high ceilings. This added elbowroom will allow GSP to provide far more than their customary hot entertainment and cold libations to their patrons.

I don’t know what a cold libation is, but I want one. You can check out pictures of the new layout here.

I don’t get excited about too many things, but the new Mars Rover is awesome. Just check out the pictures it’s bringing back. What I want to know is, what’s with the corner cropped out of the image? Is that where the rover discovered something like a can of Mountain Dew or a Barbie Doll head? I doubt we’ll ever know.

We had 15 performers signed up to play at the open mic last night. A few didn’t show and a few more signed up, so we netted 16 in the end. I was timing it for 18 performers, but with two no-shows and a cancelation we ended up empty at 10:30. There wasn’t much I could do about it and it was still a good night.

1. Jarod – Started us off again and helped me get the sound straightened out. At the end of the night he played a perfect Keith Lewis impression and it was so good, Tina came downstairs and asked where Keith was.

2. Ben Garvey – I soundchecked with Beck’s “Lord Only Knows”, and then played “Why Now Satan,” “I Hope I Die on the Moon.” Later on I broke a string trying to play Nirvana’s “On a Plain,” forcing me to do a two string version of “99%.” I also played Johnny Cash’s “Big River” in there somewhere.

3. Cynthia Bennett – She did a blues cover, but I forget who’s song it was.

4. August Sky – August Sky is now a 4 piece band and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get their sound right with three mics and three guitars. Luckily, I did. Their playing at the Tree House on Valentine’s Day, 2/14/04.

5. Melissa Cox – Back for a 2nd time and she sounded fantastic.

6. Jason Vertucio – His duet with Sarah was great, especially considering they played the same guitar. Not the same actual guitar. They each played their own identical purple Ibanezes. Later on, James Collings played a purple Ibanez, too, but I think it was a slightly different style.

7. Sarah Allen – I’d like to hear the first song she did on piano. I think everyone who reads this should start filling her journal with comments urging her to write more original material. Demand it damn it!

8. Bob Michel – I wish I could remind you which night Bob is playing at the Tree House, but their schedule is still showing November gigs.

9. Willie Tapps – He snuck in a third song when I wasn’t paying attention, but who cares? It’s Willie. As usual he played some good stuff, including “Universal Soldier.”

10. Matt Winn – Matt’s two songs were really tight, especially the 2nd one. I think it was called “Biker Girl.” He’ll be opening for August Sky at John and Peter’s in New Hope on 2/7/04.

11. Greens – With Eric showing up this time, the three piece was finally complete. They did a really nice job and I think Eric is going to bring his amp in next time.

12. Roz King – He did some nice stuff, but I had his guitar set way too thin. I had it set for Eric of the Forest Greens and I must not have switched it back enought.

13. Matt Parrish – He only did one poem, but I find if poets keep their poems short then people won’t lose interest/

14. John Brennan – Once again played some slide guitar for us, I think some Robert Johnson. I need to learn how to do that.

15. Maria Chambers – First time back in a while and still good.

16. James Collins – First time back in a longer while and I think he got a lot better. He did Leonard Cohen and James Taylor covers that were really damn good.

Come on out to the Tree House coffee shop for the weekly open mic. It runs from 8:00PM – 11:00PM. You can sign up in advance here or just come to hang out, play chess, drink coffee, eat food, etc. It’s been a while since the last open mic and there are already a good number of artists already signed up.

See you tonight.

If you aren’t coming to the open mic tonight you should be checking out Adrien and Steve of Reju playing the Tin Angel along with the Phoenix Trap and Tania Alexander.

Also, Happy Birthday Melissa!

I’ve been tossing around this project since last summer, but it’s finally at the point where I’m ok with letting people try it out. I wrote a tetrisesque game in Perl/Tk with a very interesting twist that may cause motion sickness. I included the source code so you can mess around with it if you have Perl installed. It also contains a windows executable file that should run on just about any Windows machine.

Enjoy Spewtris!

I made some changes to the sign up list today and the most important difference is that I fixed a bug causing people to accidently sign up twice for the same slot. When this happened it screwed up how my code displayed the list. If you notice any new bugs, let me know right away.

The other new feature is that it displays additional information about the event location (so far, the event has always been the Tree House’s open mic, but I made it so it can be used for any sign up list).

Last Friday I went to see Return of the King with my brother. I liked it, but 201 minutes is way too long for a movie, especially when they pad it with 6 or 7 previews. I thought the book went on for too long after the climax, and the movie faithfully represented that. It sounds like I didn’t like the movie, but I actually thought it was awesome. I’m really impressed with how faithful the movies were to the text. Can Peter Jackson direct Episode 3?

After seeing Return of the King I headed up to the Tree House to catch the end of Sarah Allen’s set. I got to listen to a few of John’s songs as well. They both sounded great, despite a low hum in the speakers. I’ve said it before, but I hope Sarah starts writing more original stuff.

Also, I’d like to thank Jason Vertucio for hooking me up with a ton of dorito picks!

If you haven’t seen Return of the King yet, you might not want to read the comments.