I’ll be playing at The Blue Rock Shoot this Friday night at 10pm. I will be joined by some great musicians so if you wanna see Rhythma as a band, this is not a show to be missed. Get there early because seats tend to fill up but the crowd does come and go.
Also, I wanted to let you know that Tarradiddle (Sean Michael Imler and Bill Mason) will be the featured performer at the Red Rock Coffee Co. open mic on Monday, May 17. We’ll do a 1/2 hour set starting at 9pm, so come down and enjoy a post dinner coffee.
I just uploaded a new piece of art to Fine Art America called “The Sight of Freequncy.” Take a look, and this time, I’m expecting my url minimizer to work. bit.ly killed me last time when my Socialite plugin malfunctioned. I’m using tinyurl.com now. It’s a little longer but not that much and it works. That’s a big bonus.
The Sight of Frequency
Dream Journal | Comments Off on New Art – The Sight of Frequency
Mel and I had walked into a restaurant that I’d never been in before. It had one of those country cottage motifs that usually nauseate me but it had these quirks about it that captured my interest. We sat down at a table close to the kitchen. Each place setting and menu was a set that came in a shallow dish. The table we sat at was faux green granite. We placed an order with an older waitress but I was talking about wanting to go to another restaurant to pick something up. It was some sort of Chili’s or Tex Mex style place that in my mind was nearby and we’d be able to return before our food was served.
We jumped on a big Harley panhead and rode down an alley that had interesting obstacles like a troupe of old “classic” red Honda Civics and delivery vans that were congregating and driving perpendicular to the alley. Then, there was the a large mound of car parts that had been covered by a giant tarp. We finally made it to the end of the alley where I made a right expecting to see the restaurant on my right, but it wasn’t there. I turned around and started to drive into a parking lot that might take me to a different alley but we stopped and ended up in a little cafe. We sat down at a table and I quickly noticed that there was no music playing. I asked them if they needed music in hopes that I could perform there. One of the girls working there told me that she was going to have a soul retrieval and that the person doing it was going to play the hollow bone. I asked who it was but she ignored me. In the back of my mind, I was feeling a bit guilty for leaving the other restaurant and I really did want to get back before the meal was served.
Suddenly the cafe changed into a different cafe and I had this white brick shaped digital cassette player with me. I was playing a heavy metal ballad for one of the waiters that worked there to demonstrate it’s peculiarity. He didn’t like it too much and walked away. A man sitting at a nearby table grabbed the player and started dismantling it. I got up and walked over to him and started grabbing the torn-apart pieces from him. He told me that he didn’t like the music and I explained that he still had no right to take what wasn’t his and destroy it. I called him an idiot and stormed back to my table. He got up to follow me. He was a very large man and as he got closer, he seemed more threatening. I awoke…
Tarradiddle (Sean Michael Imler and Bill Mason) are playing a house concert with Gazingas at 7pm, Friday April 2nd in Sunnyvale, CA. Contact me if you’d like to attend and I’ll add you to the eVite. If you haven’t heard us, we play folk rock covers and similar originals, both on acoustic guitar with lush harmonies. There are a couple of tracks on mySpace.
Tarradiddle
Rhythma Music | Comments Off on Tarradiddle House Concert
I’ve posted a small subset of the 1,000+ photos I took in New Zealand on Flickr. Mel and I traveled for 18 days in a campervan over both the South and North Islands, sleeping in motorparks and driving incessantly. We covered a lot of ground: South – Queenstown, Fiordlands, West Coast, East Coast, Marlborough, Abel Tasman, North – Wellington, Taupo, Rotorua, King Country, West Coast, Auckland.
The Pohutu geyser at Te Puia continuously spews water into the air. This picture is only a short burst. I have some others where it’s at least 20 feet if not more. I just love all the sulfur and iron in the rock.
Pohutu Geyser, Rotorua, New Zealand
I’m not sure this is really a weta. I actually think it’s more of a beetle but I can’t find anything like it in my search for New Zealand insects. The only bonafide weta I saw was dead unfortunately. They’re just the ugliest or prettiest things, depending on your pov. Kinda like a potato bug with wings. This little guy is just so photogenic tho, don’tcha think?
Thirsty Weta
Kawhia was one of the most beautiful places we visited. I was hard not to take a stunning picture and the day was perfect for it as it had been pouring down rain. The black sand beaches and one of the oldest Maori settlements, it held a lot of charm and the people were very friendly.
Kawhia Harbor
Life in General | Comments Off on Here in New Zealand, Part 4
After seeing the t-shirt with the man plowing the sheep from behind with the caption reading, “Men at Work”, I just wasn’t sure what to make of this advert in a shop window in Wellington for a watch maybe? I don’t even recall.
Man Sheep Advert
Just fantastic seeing this pool of boiling acidic liquid coming from the mother earth. She’s quite the artist. This is White Island, the most active volcano in New Zealand in the Bay of Plenty on the east coast of the North Island. Took a helicopter and a lot of money to get there but you couldn’t take a bad picture. It was amazing.
Acrid White Island Pool
I didn’t book enough time in Wellington. It was a pretty cool city but I was determined to spend more time in the country and less in cities. This motif is based on the ferns that grow all over New Zealand and influenced the majority if Maori design.
Wellington, New Zealand
The one that got away. The ship that was anchored broke away leaving the anchor stranded on the island. The ship got wracked up against the rocks and died there. So sad… But, the anchor sure is cool.
Anchor on White Island, New Zealand
Life in General | Comments Off on Here in New Zealand, Part 3
We went to Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island for the Wildfoods Festival. This was year 21 and people come from all over, dressed in costumes like Halloween. There are booths offering an assortment of edible substances ranging from homemade licorice to grubs pulled from the bark of dying trees. I ate mountain oysters… ack! and Mel ate sand flies because he thought he was getting them back for eating him. We also tried worm truffles from this wonderful menu.
Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika, New Zealand
This was Abel Tasman National Park which we did a hike or “tramp” thru. The lagoon below was probably the furthest north of any privately held land. Chunks of land were granted decades ago for logging and farming and they were going to rampage this beautiful land like most of New Zealand, but for some reason that’s beyond my knowledge, they turned the area into a gorgeous national park but offered the land to the original claimants for habitation only. I’da taken it!
Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand
This was awesome. We did a trek from Tyrrant Bay to Anchorage Bay over an estuary during low tide which was incredible unto itself. But, when we got to Anchorage Bay, instead of heading to where our water taxi was to meet us, we went up the beach into this awesome alcove where we ran into a blue penguin in the wild. It was so cool to get up close to one of these adorable creatures and photograph him/her.
Blue Penguin
Life in General | Comments Off on Here in New Zealand, Part 2
