man oh MAN was the accordion festival HOTT. i'm not even kidding, it was much better than i expected, and i totally want to go again next year. i still haven't downloaded my photos from my camera, but i thought i'd show off the sketches i did of some of the performers we saw.



nick ballarini was one of the first guys we saw perform. he played lovely italian songs on his - get this - $14,000 accordion. he also sold my grandmother (to give to me as a present) an $80 fake book of accordion sheet music. there are about 500 songs in it from all over everywhere.


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anatoliy yegorov spoke very little english and played a bayan, it's a special type of button accordion. he played russian songs, and classical pieces, and he was so amazing that the audience gave him a standing ovation and demanded an encore.


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that's not ruben rodriguez. where we were sitting i couldn't get a good view of him, so i drew his guitarist instead. ruben y su conjunto were from argentina, they played tango and chamame, which is a weird but awesome mix of all of the different musical traditions in argentina. the whole band wore these awesome gaucho costumes.


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merita halili and her band were albanian. they were REALLY, REALLY AMAZING. the accordionist, her husband, played with a sleeve over his keys and drinking wine with his other hand, to prove just how hot shit he was. :) merita's voice was utterly mesmerizing too.


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this is mark halata, he has a band called "texavia" that plays texas czech music. he and some other guys were leading a workshop on eastern european traditions in czech music that gradually turned into a concert of polkas, besedas and waltzes. people were getting up and dancing and some were singing along in czech (i wish i knew czech) and then allasudden, who sidles up to the band and starts playing clarinet with them but this guy from brave combo!


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as cute and young as mark halata was (and d00ds, he totally was extremely hott, and i don't usually go for texans), 1001 nights orchestra was my favorite part of the show. kamran, the band leader, played the guitar and the oud. he's from iran. he kept playing love songs, and the guy playing bass with them - his name's mark rubin, and he sat in as bassist for more than one group, check out his site, he's very talented - joked "yeah, we're about to release an album called 'songs of love from the axis of evil", and everyone laughed. then kamran said "perhaps we should wait until after the election," and everyone laughed harder. :D the only CD i bought during the whole festival was their album. the music was breathtakingly beautiful, all of the artists in the group were amazingly technically skilled, especially the percussionist. we went to their workshop on the accordion in middle eastern music, and then we went to BOTH of their performances after that.

i think that's all i have for now. when i get around to downloading my photos, i'll tell more stories. :)

so, if you feel like it, you can listen to me ramble on and on without really saying anything becoz i was intimidated by the microphones in this gaper's block interview. yay! :) i kid, i kid, i don't sound that bad; i'm just not as articulate as the other people on the panel there.

speaking of articulate, we made up a new word at work the other day:

noddles. adj, crazy. i.e.: "zell miller went completely batshit noddles."

feel free to use and propagate it.

i'm off this weekend for san antonio's international accordion festival!! it is NOT DORKY AT ALL SO SHUT UP RIGHT NOW. it will be awesome and only the coolest and raddest people are going. and when i am the HOTTest accordion player in chicago you will be sorry you laughed at me for going to the accordion festival. i'll come back with photos. in the meantime, check out the photos i took at my friends' wedding! they found out afterwards that the ballroom they had the wedding in used to be the st. louis city morgue, which i think accounts for all the little ghostie orbs floating everywhere.

either that, or it's dust that got reflected in the flash. i like my version better though. :)

well.

jacques derrida died on friday and it looks like i might be the only person i know who had any idea who he was. :( :( :(

so. it might be up to me to edumacate you people. go here, and then here, and then if your head doesn't feel like it's splitting open, try here.

not to take anything away from superman, but derrida contributed a helluva lot more to human civilization than you'd think from the utter dearth of media notice. derrida est mort, vive derrida. disseminate THAT. :)

in antici(say it)PAtion of some soon to be published reviews of some of my minis, i did a quick and dirty site redesign. test it out. any problems?

graphic design tip #725:

sometimes, if you have to design something INCREDIBLY LAME, it helps to use really cool dummy text instead of the lorem ipsum crap:

i've laid off blogging bouts politics for a while, and i didn't write anything about the first prezzy debate, mostly coz i was in the midst of the weddingness at the time. but the veepster debate was last night, and while i had fun watching cheney do encore after encore of his trademark "i'm going for the evil supervillain look" sneer, the best part of the evening, imho, was when cheney, in an effort to discredit something edwards had said, told america to go check out the facts at "factcheck.com", an independent nonpartisan website.

except, it's not. that site he's thinking of is at factcheck.ORG, and they are nonpartisan. they did a really good rundown of last night's exaggerations and blatant lies, and if you actually go to the site and read the writeup, they make cheney look really, really bad. they don't give edwards a pass either, but they certainly caught 2 or 3 cheneylies for every edwards one.

still, not as bad as the original URL cheney mentioned. if you go to factcheck.COM,, it takes you to george soros' website, which shouts from the rooftops WHY WE MUST NOT RE-ELECT PRESIDENT BUSH.

either way, not a good int0rw3b day for cheney. oh, and about that part where he claimed that he'd never met edwards before last night?

vachement cool, the monkeynauts and bucket and dog got reviewed by a comic book store in mchenry, illinois! whee!!

in other news, it sounds like mr. jeffrey brown is backing out of the gaper's block interview. :( poopyhead. i'm still doing it though, so more publicity for me. phlbbbt.

in other, possibly more important news, i married two of my favorite people in the world to each other on saturday. :) i'll have photos to post soon.