On the 6th I was invited to a show at a place called Fort Seriously. The bands were Jason Stein trio, Hypercolor, and one that I think may have been called Eloe, but I can't be sure.

I knew that it would be a house show, but getting in proved to be a bit difficult. We got there late, and I could hear the music coming from behind a large set of doors, but there was a fence-gate in front of those doors. To the left there was a normal apartment building entrance. Pressing the four buzzer buttons produced no response. I went off to the right and found another set of doors. "Pull" was written on one of them, so I did. It seemed a little sticky, so I pulled harder. I started to see some living room furniture inside. Then I heard a man's voice angrily shout "YO!", and footsteps hurrying over to the door. I ran away, and just then someone let us in to the other door on their way in. Soon we were inside the fort.

The space was a typical hipster residence: high ceilings, lofted beds, sculptures made of 50 computer mice hanging from cords all tangled together, Adult Swim posters, computers stacked everywhere. My kind of place.

The Jason Stein trio played free jazz, with the namesake member on the bass clarinet.

Eloe's set went as follows. A guy in a starfish costume made of out of foam pointed out different locations on a large map of the world they had hung. A girl dressed in black played with a bunch of kitchen knives, making them kiss each other and such. Another guy sat in a go-cart, occasionally wheeling himself around and appearing to play with a toy telephone. My friend Matt, who had organized the show and had been recruited by the others with little or no preparation, sat in front of a TV with a huge rabbit's head costume tied to his head, and rocked back and forth while declaiming an improvised monologue that loosely followed the video that was on the TV.

Hypercolor played hyperactive jazz-rock that was absolutely incredible. They reminded me of Built to Spill's early stuff in the way their songs were sprawling, layered, and spontaneous-sounding yet also quite carefully composed. The guitarist was brilliant. It was clear hearing it that he could express himself far better through a lead guitar line than he could by singing any words, and so there were no vocals. This is a band that I hope to hear a lot more of.

The show reminded me of my days at the Halfass, the venue in the basement of a dorm in Ann Arbor that I helped to book for in college. Partly this was due to the fact that the bass player in Hypercolor was James Ilgenfritz, who played in a band called Larval that I once booked (Jason Stein played in Larval in that show as well), and was generally part of the scene. I was surprised to find out that he remembered me, and we talked of the good old days. For a while it seemed like every few weeks I would attend a show there and discover an amazing new band that I had hardly heard of before, but that I would soon hear a lot of: Ted Leo, Japanther, Liars, to name a few. It's ridiculous to say, but it just hasn't been the same in New York lately. Perhaps it's just that with so much going on it's harder to find the good stuff. Or maybe Ann Arbor somehow has us beat, because it's a real community of bands that love to be doing what they're doing, rather than simply trying to make it big. Then again, Japanther and Liars are from Brooklyn, so maybe those examples don't help my argument.

Either way, Fort Seriously gives me hope again. After the show I checked out their website, and found out that you can download recordings of all the sets in full. I also saw some of the bands that had played there recently, including Japanther and a band called Harry and the Potters, who improbably enough are incredibly hip even though they write songs about Harry Potter. This made me wish I had found out about it earlier.

One way in which my quest for surreptitious photography (originally laid out in the second part of this post) can be described is to say that I want a cameraphone without the phone. The cameras in cameraphones are very small, operate silently, have very small openings for the lens, perform impressively in low light conditions, and lately have been getting into pretty reasonable resolutions such as 2MP. Some can even zoom, without anything sticking out in the process. I tried to find out if I could purchase the camera components that are used for these separately, and make a primitive interface for them by which, absent of an LCD or anything like that, take pictures, zoom, etc. I could achieve great wearability by spreading out the parts, with the camera where it needs to be, the batteries in another place, the memory in another, and the trigger buttons in my pocket, with wires running all around.

My efforts in this direction were frustrated. I found out that ST Micro Electronics is a company that makes cameraphone cameras, including pretty good modern high-res ones, and found old cached versions of Mouser catalog pages that showed that they had sold the standalone cameras and development kits to go with them! The dev kits were expensive, but still, it was more than I expected to find. Sadly, in the current catalog these pages have disappeared. I couldn't find anyone anywhere saying anything about it. I can only hope these products will soon be replaced.

Meanwhile, for Christmas I received what's probably the most readily concealable consumer digital camera on the market: L'Espion S, sold by Thinkgeek and made by Digital Dream of the UK. I'd thought of buying it a while ago, but it used to be even more unfortunately named the "James Bond Digital Camera." I guess they must have realized Bond is not a very hip association these days.

I've only used the camera a few times so far, but here are my first impressions. As I said it's very concealable, and the Zippo case it lives in is really pretty cool--it even makes the right sound when you open and close it. The resolution is not great at 640x480, but I can live with it for now. The low light performance is pretty impressive. The memory capacity is sufficient for me, though it could certainly improve. The image compression is quite detectable, and not suitable for photophiles, but fine for my purposes. My primary gripe is with the "quickshot" feature that allows you to flip it open, press one button, and take a picture without having to separately turn the camera on and off. To be honest, until tonight I hadn't gotten this to work at all. But it turned out I just wasn't holding the button down long enough. The feature is used by pressing the same button that normally turns the camera on, but holding it down for 2 seconds. I think it actually took about 3 or 4 seconds from when I first depressed the button to when the picture was taken. To me that's not a great way to take the picture surreptitiously, although if the camera were hidden I guess it would be alright. But after thinking about it, I realized this limitation is probably due to the fact that the camera still needs to turn on and initialize before it can snap the picture, rather than simply poor button programming.

I should also mention that the camera has a pretty impressive amount of configurability considering the fact that its interface consists of two buttons, an LED and a two-character display. It does make some noises that can't be disabled, but they're high-pitched tones, so I'm hoping to find that in any reasonably loud environment it won't be noticeable. Transferring to the computer is easy, it has a USB plug and appears as a removable drive the same way any camera does. Battery management seems sensible, unlike some of the other tiny digital cameras I've heard about (it takes one AAA).

A side note: the thinkgeek page says "The l'espion S uses ST Micro technology to capture highly-detailed images with incredibly small file sizes." So I think they've done pretty much exactly what I wanted to do, and much better than I could have done on my own. If they come out with a new version with higher resolution and an improved quickshot feature, it will be a really great gadget.

Songfight is a website wherein, once a week, one is given a title, one writes and records a song around the title by the end of that week, sends in an mp3, and then the internets vote on who made the best song. There are currently two titles/fights each week. Clicking the above link will take you randomly to one of the fights currently underway; you can click the other color tab to go to the other one.

I can't really figure out if this is a good thing or a bad thing, or if it will improve my music to participate. But at least it is causing me to make songs again, which I haven't been doing for months. I finally got it together recently and this week my first entry is in the running, for the title "Too Far Away" on the 'black' page. It's a crowded field, with 25 songs total. I'll be pretty surprised if anyone reading this is willing to listen to all 25 and cast a vote. But I urge you not to simply vote for me as a general show of support (as I'm sure hundreds of readers were already rushing to do...). At least part of the reason for doing this is to get honest feedback on my songs from strangers.

Impressions of the songfight scene so far: impressive range of styles. I've heard hard rock, indie rock, solo acoustic, electronica aplenty, noise, rap, jazzy if not quite jazz. Recording quality varies from ultra-lo-fi to major-label-studio-slick. The most common deficiencies are in vocals and lyrics. But I'm just a Johnny-come-lately, the site has been going for 5 years.

Today we say goodbye to a blog that has been by turns edifying, profane, funny, pornographic, punk, metal, hip-hop, drunken, and even poignant. Mr. Schultz is getting deported from Japan, having overstayed his visa, and so it seems that Tokyo Damage Report (latest post is NSFW) will soon reach its end. For at least a couple years and a half I've been reading his reviews of punk shows, reports from all the bizarre design/fashion/industrial food technology conventions they hold over there, rants about the opposite sex, freestyle rap lyrics about political figures, and analyses of innumerable other cultural phenomena that certainly seem like they could only exist in Japan. Let's not forget his occasional epic struggles with HTML--he's one of the few bloggers, especially popular ones, to not have made the move to a Content Management System, though I must admit his archive (scroll down some) has been pretty impressively well-maintained for a while now.

Schultz is a tireless journalist of the Japan experience. It's probably true that Tokyo is the easiest place to find crazy stuff of the kind he writes about, but it's still not that easy. When I was there it mostly seemed like another big city, one that I was ill-prepared for, and even when I found stuff that seemed interesting, like an all-vinyl record store or an all-night internet cafe, it was often intimidating (the common problem of trying to transcend being a tourist when I can in no way deny being one). His writing style is intense and direct, often hilarious, and in a way disguises its quality with its lack of pretension (a quality I'm in no danger of sharing, I admit).

I should also mention that Schultz has a band. They've managed to play a few shows in Tokyo, which I would love to have seen, since he is a connoisseur of live shows. Recently he made an album (by himself, as far as I can tell) and made it available for download. I've listened to a couple of the songs, and so far it's pretty rad punk-metal stuff, quite well-produced. The lyrics are all in Japanese.

First KindOfCrap goes, now this. Here's hoping this entry ends up in error and TDR somehow finds a way to continue. Otherwise, can anyone point me in the direction of a Japan (or anywhere, really) blog remotely as interesting?

In last week's song fight for "Too Far Away" I ended up with 5 votes, or a tie for 8th place out of 25, which to me was not a bad finish at all. In retrospect it was kind of a crappy song, at least crappily recorded and sung. I got a wide assortment of reviews in the forums: "Like a house with good bones but shingles that are peeling." "this is pretty neat." "Suckage." Several people commented on the part where the loud pop-rock verse suddenly broke down and was replaced by a quiet acoustic section, then abruptly went back to the first part. When I make a pop song I try to include at least one thing, whether subtle or radical, to separate it from every other pop song. I always feel guilty about failing to surprise the listener in the least and clinging to the pop formula, even if maybe sometimes, if the song is good, the formulaic is more satisfying. But any time you make the listener think they're going to hear a standard pop song, and then dump a big pile of noise on it or something, it's going to be polarizing. You get comments like "what's with the sudden breakdown into the acoustic part?" and it seems like they just don't get it. It's like criticizing "4:33" because there's not enough going on. But in the end you have to acknowledge that putting something experimental in a pop song doesn't automatically make it better--it can make it better or worse, and probably more often the latter. But if you can make it better and interesting, then you've really got something special.

Anyway, this week we've got a collaboration between the zero effect, Radio North, and Maya, for the song Galaxies Floating On a Dark Matter Stream. The recording process crossed state lines and creative boundaries as we recorded the guitar, drums, and principal vocals in New York, shipped it off to State College, PA for bass, lead guitar, tambourine, and the all-important handclaps, before it came back to NYC for mixing. We're all really happy with the result, a pretty straightahead 70's power pop number, and think the prospects are good.