On Saturday night we had a cocktail party and prize-giving. Here are some pictures of proceedings:
Steve makes making cocktails on a sort-of "feeding-the-5000" scale look fun and easy.
Ozz man, at this stage still in the happy place.
David has a number of sheets to the wind.
If n is the number of sheets to the wind that David has, the number of sheets to the wind that Phil at any one time has can be expressed as n*sqrt(3).
Our gracious host Tobin, and his lovely date -- whose name I have unfortunately forgotten.
Tobin and date.
Date sans Tobin. I gave up trying to take a pic which didn't involve one or both of them looking like retards.
Tobin (at stage-right) tells another "joke".
Wicketkeeper extraordinaire and Falconhawk Man Of The Year, Dan Cumming, likes to whistle when he's drunk.
Dan Cumming also likes the feel of cold hard metal on his *cough* cheeks. At this stage I gave up trying to take a pic of Dan which didn't involve him, also, looking like a retard.
David and Shauna.
Man of the Year. 'Nuff said, innit.
Some formica.
Yes indeed.
Richard Buckner is the true 'American Wanderer'. The American landscape is the backdrop he moves against (literally as well as figuratively; he's been traveling the North American continent for two decades now) and his relationship to it is shifting and ambiguous, a complicated state of existing within and without a country that is impossible to escape from unscathed. He's worked alongside and recorded with Calexico, Giant Sand, Neko Case among many others, and he's been described by Howe Gelb as having "one of the finest voices on the planet".
Edith Frost walks a fine line, musically speaking, between sanity and utter madness. Since the nineties she's been taking the conventions of introspected folk and alt.country and cramming it with such kitsch oddities and childlike arrangements as occur to her along the way. Her voice is the dusty, low pitched croon you might expect of an old-time country heartbreaker, but this is a woman who also digs on Blondie and has no qualms about forcing the glaring city lights of New Wave onto the quiet country and folk roads that underpin her music. Edith featured on the Drag City super session, alongside Bill Callahan, Brendan Murphy, Rian Murphy and Jim O'Rourke.
My favourite Kurt Vonnegut moment? Encountering his drawing of an anus while reading his novel Breakfast of Champions for the first time at about age 14. It looked something like this:
My recent CD 