January/February – of Montreal: Microuniversity 7” from Park the Van Records; Voltaic Crusher/Undrum to Muted Da 7” from Suicide Squeeze.
March 15-18th – At SXSW this year: of Montreal, The Essex Green, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Dressy Bessy, and the Orange Twin Records showcase features The Gerbils, Elf Power, Great Lakes, The Instruments, Geoff Reacher, and The Lovers.
The Essex Green – Don’t Know Why (You Stay)
March 21st – The Essex Green: Cannibal Sea. Geoffrey Himes in The Washington Post: “The three musicians in The Essex Green — keyboardist Sasha Bell and guitarists Jeff Baron and Chris Ziter — moved from Vermont to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1997, and Ziter recently moved to Cincinnati. The trio has just released its best album, Cannibal Sea, even if the three musicians still sound undecided about the best place to live. On ‘This Isn’t Farmlife,’ Bell sounds happy in Brooklyn. Against a groove borrowed from ‘Time Is Tight,’ by Booker T. & the MG’s, she calls it ‘a mythic paradise’ and resolves to give it ‘another year, another try.’ Backed by the jittery guitar figure on ‘Don’t Know Why (You Stay),’ Ziter replies, ‘Your legs are wood and tied to the city. . . . I don’t know why you stay.’ Over the vertiginous organ of ‘Penny & Jack,’ they sing a debate between two semifictional characters: Penny, who likes the sunny days in New York, and Jack, who prefers the slower pace of Ohio, even if it’s cloudy. That tension does the trio good. Alumni of the Kindercore and Elephant 6 labels, The Essex Green has always displayed a knack for catchy melodies neatly tied to bouncy beats, but the search for a home gives the band’s pop hooks emotional weight. The lyrics are still a bit unfocused, but the understated arrangements are savvy, and Bell has a soprano to die for. When her yearning voice rises above the chunky, jangling guitars, a listener might follow her to any address.”
March 27th – Robert Schneider and author Kim Cooper discuss Neutral Milk Hotel on WNYC’s Soundcheck.
Spring – Scram #22 features outtakes from Kim Cooper’s book on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Laura Carter: “…I think everyone in Ruston [Louisiana, the birthplace of Elephant 6] had a hard time. And what pulled them out of it was music. And you hear that essence in Neutral Milk—there’s a conflict, and there’s shit, and the music somehow is what is your ticket up out of that. And that is a good message! It’s saved a lot of kids. It’s something that a lot of people in just very desperate places all can relate to, I think, and people not in desperate places, too.”
April – SPIN Magazine offers a “Crash Course” on the Elephant 6 Recording Company. “…By the beginning of the next decade, Elephant 6 had burned up under the spotlight. OTC split, and Neutral Milk Hotel went on permanent hiatus…‘As reviews were rolling in, everyone was getting really pigeonholed,’ says Pat Noel of Beulah. Even now, [Jeff] Mangum won’t define the collective in concrete terms: ‘Elephant 6 is a group of people that I love very much, and without them I would be lost.’ Today a few E6 bands continue to record and tour. In typical ramshackle style, OTC’s reunion gigs left more questions than answers. ‘We’re going to play, it’s cool, let’s leave it at that,’ [Will] Hart says. ‘You talk about it too much, the whole thing falls apart.’”
April 4th – Miles Kurosky is interviewed in Prefix: “Somebody at SPIN contacted me recently, but I didn’t want to do the interview. I think it was about Elephant 6 mostly…We are mostly associated with [Elephant 6] because we put out the only official full-length on Elephant 6. I don’t think we sound like a lot of them either, but it was good for a while.” He announces he is working on a solo album, despite having recently undergone more than one shoulder surgery. “Oddly enough I’ve grown accustomed to the pain and, although frustrating at times, I’ve also come to terms with the fact that my arm may never be the same again. It would be nice to reach into a cupboard to get a glass, maybe do the dishes, or help my girlfriend carry the groceries. That said, all I can really do is continue with my physical therapy and be grateful that it’s not worse. … I mean, it’s only an arm. A few years ago my father broke his neck when he crashed through the windshield of his car, so I’m careful not to whine too much.”
April 7th – AUX: Experimental Sound from Athens, GA (featuring Korena Pang [Jeff Mangum], W. Cullen Hart, Heather McIntosh, Hannah Jones, and more).
April 18th – In an interview with Optical Atlas, Sasha Bell announces she has left The Ladybug Transistor.
April 25th – Elf Power: Back to the Web, the band’s first album for Rykodisc. Creative Loafing: “Back to the Web is a vibrant album, and most of its songs owe that vibrancy to the inventive instrumentation. At times, it seems influenced by the music of the Middle East; at others, Celtic-eqsue folk rears its head. All these sounds form a welcome departure for a band known too long as play-it-safe kinda folks, for a group labeled with the pejorative version of that word, consistent.” PopMatters: “In recent years, Rieger has displayed a desire to grow up, abandoning his fantasy focus and stepping into real studios. On 2004’s Walking With the Beggar Boys, Elf Power tapped into a surprisingly muscular T. Rex rock sound, and the new Back to the Web represents the flip side of the coin, emulating the same band, but in its earlier, unabbreviated years of trippy folk. The result is a lush, hazy cloud of 12-string acoustic guitars, banjos, violins, and cellos raining down Rieger’s refreshing melodies, marred only by a bit of uncomfortable familiarity at times.” The AV Club: “Of the frontline bands associated with the mid-’90s Elephant 6 collective…Elf Power didn’t seem the most likely to stick around the longest. The Apples in Stereo had the hooks, Neutral Milk Hotel had the transcendent vision, and Olivia Tremor Control had the willingness to try anything. On the other hand, Elf Power had the ability to combine elements of each into cute little packages awash in Tolkien-esque imagery. And yet, a decade later, Elf Power is the band putting out album number eight, Back To the Web, while its peers have all entered dormant periods or disappeared. Time hasn’t stood still for Elf Power, either. Holding the reins through several lineup shifts, leader Andrew Rieger has arrived at a sound that’s shed some of the outré touches without losing its edge. Tracks like ‘All The World Is Waiting’ hearken back to the thrift-store psychedelic chug of A Dream In Sound, but the sweet, straightforward, slightly awestruck album-opener ‘Come Lie Down With Me (And Sing My Song)’ best indicates where Elf Power’s heart is these days. Rieger surrounds images from nature and recalled dreams with compact, layered folk-pop songs that mingle joy and fear in equal measure. (Can an Iron & Wine collaboration be far behind?) It might not have been immediately obvious to anyone but Rieger that Elf Power could still be making relevant music a decade after its debut, but on Back To The Web, he proves the band’s ability to thrive with age.”
April – Elf Power: Treasures from the Trash Heap (tour-only release)
The Instruments – Seems So Far
May 9th – The Instruments: Cast a Half Shadow. Heather McIntosh, to Optical Atlas: “The title of Cast a Half Shadow came from this dream Bridget [Mullen] told me about one morning when we worked at R. Wood Studio (a pottery studio in Athens) together. I didn’t remember the whole dream, but the image of this object casting a half shadow really stuck with me. …['Seems So Far'] is a weird one. I picked up the guitar cold after not writing anything new in a really long time and it just sort of came out. I guess it is sort of a meditation. For me, it reminds me of this time I was just driving over the hills in this amazing autumn North Carolina pre-dusk window, listening to this one Luciano Berio tape over and over again, and happy sing-yelling to mix tapes, and just sort of this warm memory of that.”
May – Calvin, Don’t Jump!: Conscious of Conscience; and of Montreal: Deflated Chime, Foals Slightly Flower Sibylline Responses EP.
May 12th – The Apples in Stereo record their own theme song (Monkees style) for the relaunched Apples website.
May 20-26th – The Apples in Stereo tour with The Strokes.
June 13th – Still Flyin’: Time Wrinkle EJ.
June 23rd – Brian Heater’s “I Have Been Floated: An Oral History of the Elephant 6 Collective” appears on PopMatters, featuring interviews with various members of E6. Laura Carter says, “In some ways I think that Jeff [Mangum] is a genius who knew that the mystery of dropping out. Like Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt, who waited another 10 years to make an album. That is cooler than seeing a band grind into the ground playing the same songs and traveling around the country. Part of me thinks that the attitude of the fans was overwhelming. People were like, ‘I was going to kill myself, and you saved my life.’ That’s a hard act live up to, and if your next album sucks, what are they going to do, go kill themselves?”
July – Magnet Magazine profiles Elf Power. “Though the fascination with sitars and drones is often associated with the late-’60s era’s penchant for mind-altering substances, [Andrew] Rieger credits endorphins for unlocking his imagination. He quit smoking a year and a half ago and started going on eight-mile runs along Athens’ Oconee River. ‘When you get going, running kind of gets you high,’ he says. ‘You enter into a little different consciousness, and that’s the time when I came up with a lot of the lyrics.’”
The Minders – Same Time, Same Place
July 18th – The Minders: It’s a Bright Guilty World. Columbia Daily Tribune: “The Minders are crafty veterans who subtly build on the sounds of the past, in this case the infectious Beatles/Beach Boys pop of the ’60s and ’70s. Because front man Martyn Leaper stuck so closely to those influences early on, many foolishly believed he was a step behind his brethren in the Elephant 6 collective. But on ‘It’s a Bright Guilty World’ (Future Farmer), reunited with Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo, Leaper again makes it clear that the ability to pen such a treasure trove of catchy tunes mustn’t be taken for granted. From ‘Don’t You Stop’ and ‘Accidental Joy’ to ‘Crest of the Hill’ and ‘Jenny,’ the songs on World are foot-tapping, head-bobbing gems that won’t soon fade from your memory, exactly where so many of Leaper’s compositions already should take up space.” Martyn Leaper, interviewed in Cut the Chord [August 21]:
I’ll do this as long as I can. The problem sorta starts to happen where, like for us, since we’ve been kind of under the radar for… you always hear that, under the radar or subterranean or whatever it is… It really depends on if we can afford to keep doing it. That’s really what I think happens to most bands, or not every band, but like a lot of bands. Yeah, everything from touring, I mean, if we don’t bring in a lot of people, then clubs don’t want to book you. If you don’t sell a lot of records, record labels don’t want to put you out. You know, your booking agent doesn’t want to do anything for you because you’re not making any money for them… Honestly, yeah, I keep banking on us like being able to get lucky enough to keep putting out records, you know, finding people to do that. I mean, it’s been ten years. It’s very difficult for a band of our size to maintain or garner interest from labels. I mean, the next option is to just to keep doing it but doing it ourselves, you know and that’s how we started.
July 21st – At the New Sound of Numbers/The Instruments show at the Cake Shop in New York, Jeff Mangum joins Heather McIntosh to perform “When the Stars Shine.”
August – Casper & the Cookies: The Optimist’s Club.
August – Elf Power tapes an appearance for the children’s show Pancake Mountain on the Orange Twin grounds. Andrew Rieger, to Optical Atlas: “It was a blast…we acted out some skits with the kids, had a dance party, went swimming, lots of little kids jumping around going apeshit, twas a good ol’ time!”
August 6th – of Montreal plays Lollapalooza for the first time.
August 10th – After an Outback Steakhouse commercial begins to air which reworks of Montreal’s “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games)” with new lyrics (“Let’s pretend we don’t exist” becomes “Let’s go Outback tonight…”), in an interview with Pitchfork Kevin Barnes defends the decision to sell the song: “We thought it would be totally amusing to hear their take on one of our songs as a jingle.” This jingle becomes a permanent part of the Outback Steakhouse ad campaign over the next few years, much to the irritation of fans.
August 12th – At the 2006 Happy Happy Birthday to Me PopFest, The Apples in Stereo announce that Hilarie Sidney is leaving the band. In October they announce her replacement, John Dufilho of The Deathray Davies. In an interview a year later with the AV Club, Robert says, “There’s a personal side of the story that has to do with our divorce that I really can’t tell you. There’s nothing bitter or bad about it; it’s just too subjective. She left on great terms, though. We were finishing up the new album, and all of a sudden, all sorts of people were contacting us. We’ve gotten a different reception on this record than we have on previous ones. There’s been a lot of activity and interest. It was obvious from the time we turned this record in that we were going to be touring a lot on it. I think that all the plans and all the traveling freaked her out. She didn’t want to do it. She quit the band because she felt she was dragging her feet. I’m usually the foot-dragger in the band.”
August 11-18th – The Minders join of Montreal’s tour.
August 22nd – of Montreal: Satanic Twins (remixes).
August 26th – The AUX collaborative art event in Athens features performances by Black Swan Network (Will Hart turns four simultaneously-playing CDs into a quadrophonic sound collage), Lorkakar (Hannah Jones), and Vortex of Withering (Will, Andrew Rieger, and John Fernandes).
September 12th – The Diminisher: Imaginary Volcano and Great Lakes: Diamond Times. Prefix Magazine: “…Albums like Cannibal Sea and Diamond Times are compelling proof that the old Elephant Six roster is increasingly coming into its own, albeit sort of communally. Presumably, they wouldn’t have it any other way.” Ben Crum told SoundsXP: “I went to Georgia and brought Jeff [Baron, of The Essex Green] with me. I recorded in a studio in Athens because it was monumentally cheaper than going to a studio in New York. I’d been playing with Essex Green for about a year at that point and Jeff was just blowing me away, night after night. There’s no one in terms of modern guitar players: Jeff plays Memphis and Nashville 1968-1972. Only. And that’s my favourite kind of shit, you know. That’s what I like and Jeff is so good at it. He didn’t know the songs; that was the idea behind making Diamond Times: you can’t know the songs. I wanted it to be like a Dylan record in the sense that I come in and say: this is how it goes. Start playing. Roll tape. My favourites on it are the early takes. [The musicians] allowed me that situation of being kind of like session musicians for me. They didn’t know the songs but they just came in, I went ‘this is how it goes’ and they tried their best to do it. I think it’s a cool way to get some spontaneity. You never know what’s going to happen.”
September 12th – In Athens, a tribute show is held for R.E.M., and among the performers are The Observatory, featuring members of The Olivia Tremor Control (Bill Doss, Will Hart, Peter Erchick, John Fernandes), Pylon’s Vanessa Hay, of Montreal’s Bryan Poole, and many more. Peter Buck joins in on guitar.
September 18th – Kevin Barnes is again interviewed by Pitchfork about the Outback Steakhouse commercial: “…you have to be misrepresented in this atrocious way, and it sucks, and it sucks for everybody who loves the song, but hopefully it’ll be worth it on…our January tour. We might be able to put on this crazy production like we really want to do. I think that will be interesting to see if people are like, ‘Well, okay, it was worth it,’ or people are like, ‘Well, no, it still wasn’t worth it because, you know, they sucked.’”
A Hawk and a Hacksaw – God Bless the Ottoman Empire
October 9th – A Hawk and a Hacksaw: The Way the Wind Blows. From The Lumière Reader:
It’d be reductive to simply say A Hawk and a Hacksaw play Eastern European music – ‘I don’t focus solely on Balkan music, though that’s the sound people hear the most and definitely, that’s the obsession’ – for example, the first self-titled album in particular sounds like it comes out of the early twentieth century with the ‘60s minimalist loops thrown in. You get the feeling he wouldn’t be content with the simple drums, electric bass and guitar set-up, and he’d be frustrated with the conservative music tastes of most listeners. ‘I think a lot of people view music kind of like wallpaper. They just need something in the background… To me this is completely annoying and infuriating. I think a lot of people, people who don’t really care about music, need some sort of sound in the background… One thing that I really like about music is trying to communicate beyond using language, communicate beyond borders or cultures. If we play in places where they don’t speak English, they can still understand what we’re saying with our instruments. I just love that it’s a universal language. I love that. We do use lyrics, but only when we’ve got something direct to say. There are people out there with great voices, and I’m not one of them, so I only use my voice when I have to. Other than that I like the music to speak for itself.’ Part of the approach to the music comes from Barnes’ background as a drummer, creating a rather dynamic sense of rhythm in the sound. He also taught himself the accordion, something which he confesses to finding quite difficult. Barnes admits that because of his drumming background, ‘it took me a while to get to even think about melody because when I was a teenager I was all about the rhythm and trying to create something rhythmically interesting. I still do that – melodically I try to do a lot with rhythm. I love people who use rhythm or cultures who use rhythm in interesting ways melodically, like Bulgarian music where they play in asymmetrical rhythms and the melodies are just insane in the way they work. And a lot of minimalism when they’re using organically looping rhythms, and African music.’ He and Trost are currently living in Budapest, annoying and arguing with their neighbour over Barnes’ accordion playing. He’s a firm believer in environment seeping into the music. ‘I think once you get interested in a culture, you just have to visit the country you’re interested in.’ An example of this was in the recording of the third album The Way the Wind Blows which was recorded in a tiny Romanian village. ‘Definitely environment always affects recording. I have a problem with recording studios and trying to make it too much of a sanitary environment. Again it’s really inspiring – it’s like travel – if you’re in this weird place, where it’s hard, you’re trying to get this right mic sound and there are problems with electricity. There are always little things which go wrong, but it definitely pays out in the end, I think it creates a different character.’ That particular recording session involved curious Romanian kids playing around with his computer, and chicken and beer being delivered during recording. The people though were ‘incredibly welcoming.’ I ask if he feels a tension for being an American going over to another culture, potentially ‘appropriating’ their music. ‘I feel a tension not from the musicians, or people in that culture, but from writers in the West. And my feeling about that is where do we take it? If I’m not supposed to play music of another culture, who’s supposed to play it? To me the borders are so grey. Who is supposed to play klezmer music? Who’s supposed to play gypsy music? To me music is way beyond borders, and political and racial boundaries, and I understand how people are sensitive about how these rich Americans go over to Romania and stealing music from them. But honestly, to me and the musicians we’ve met, we weren’t stealing, we were doing something new.’
October 10th – The New Sound of Numbers: Liberty Seeds.
October 24th – M Coast: Say it in Slang. The name may have been shortened, but this is actually an expanded version of Marshmallow Coast, with Andy Gonzales incorporating Derek Almstead and Emily Growden into songwriting and vocal duties. He told Optical Atlas, “Well, after five albums with marginal success, you gotta try tweaking things a little bit! I have been thinking about changing the name forever, and this will have the least amount of confusion… Also, having Emily singing and Derek singing kinda makes it a different thing all together… I started out doing another Andy record, and I was really happy with that. THEN! Derek started laying the pressure on me big time, he was all like, ‘Andy, man, let’s put our records together (’cause he was already making his own masterpiece).’ And I was like, ‘Dude, that’s your shit and this is my shit, you don’t mix shit.’ Then he was all like, ‘well, either you take my songs or I delete the files for your record!’ and I guess that’s what won me over… It is nice, because in the future, we can just put about six great songs on there apiece and make a whole record rather than having to rack my brain to write more. Derek and I have always thought along the same lines; even though we occasionally butt heads, it has always worked out. I also want to say that it was great having input from Sara [Kirkpatrick, Andy's wife], Emily, and Derek with stuff like lyrics, because I would have an almost complete section, and they added nice touches that worked well. This is also the first time Sara has helped mix, and she made excellent suggestions; we just need to get more Emily input, which I think will come once she feels more a part of it all.”
October 31st – Icy Demons: Tears of a Clone.
November 1st – The Ladybug Transistor: Here Comes the Rain EP.
November 21st – Summer Hymns: Backward Masks.
December 6th – Flagpole writes:
On Dec. 6, the Athens-Clarke County Commission unanimously approved the final plans for development of the Orange Twin Conservation Community (or OTCC) with surprisingly enthusiastic support. After years of working with the local Planning Department, the members of Orange Twin finally achieved their first critical goal with full backing from the county. There was also notable public support from the surrounding neighborhood. They now open their doors to potential shareholders and homebuilders interested in participating in the development of a community based on conservation and sustainable living. Sitting on over 155 acres of Georgia piedmont forest – most of which is undeveloped and in Athens-Clarke’s greenbelt – the land will become the site of 45 clustered homes lining pedestrian thoroughfares throughout two separate villages, with 20 acres reserved for organic farming and a 100-acre conservation easement. In 1999, Barbara Denvir discovered a newspaper ad about a piece of land being put up for sale. It had been vacant and untouched for 40 years, having once been used for cotton farming in the 19th century and later in the 1960s as a privately-owned Girl Scout camp. Recalls Denvir: ‘It was amazing and beautiful, much more than I was looking for, with many surprises – and it was cheap.’ Denvir, along with Laura Carter and Laura Glenn, scouted the old roads, eventually finding an existing swimming hole and pavilion. A year later, others discovered the remnants of a family cemetery along one of the pathways. The three tracts of land are home to deer, mountain laurel, hardwood forest, and chanterelle mushrooms (which blossom from the roots of white oaks during summer months). Two converging streams cascade through the terrain: Noketchee Creek, which comes from the north, and Helican Springs, which comes from the east and flows through an existing swimming hole. The tracts were purchased in the spring of 2000. ‘It started as a community of friends…. We had the idea before we ever found the land,’ says Laura Carter, who signed the initial holding check. ‘Laura Glenn and I are both adamant about the way kids get to grow up: not in front of a television set.’ Specific criteria then emerged from their shared values: ‘30 acres, woods, a water source, somewhere 15 minutes from downtown, preferably bikeable.’ After finding a plot of land five times larger than what they initially wanted, the vision of the community changed. Says Carter, ‘We came up with a new plan to work environmentally, economically, spiritually…’ Today, OTCC is run by a board of trustees and includes elected president Carter, a vice president, treasurer and clerk. The diverse group of individuals making up the board of 21 trustees includes artists, lawyers, musicians, editors and architects. The Orange Twin vision combines community with nature, art and agriculture. Its concept draws from such influences as Bill Mollison’s forward-thinking work on permaculture as well as the do-it-yourself spirit of the independent music scene in Athens. Creating eco-villages is not a new idea, even in the South: The Farm in Tennessee is one of the oldest eco-villages in the United States. As for the OTCC, their presence is one which has been long awaited in the diverse Athens community. With help from architect Phil Hawes, UGA professor Allen Stovall, and cofounder of Village Habitat Design Greg Ramsey, the members of Orange Twin are preparing to realize the creation of a pedestrian-based eco-village supported by solar power. ‘I like to think we owe it to humanity,’ says John d’Azzo, Orange Twin’s head planner/design scientist, who, with Laura Carter, was responsible for getting the plan through the Planning and ACC Commissions. Located on Noketchee Creek Road in Athens, the eco-village will contain two pedestrian-based communities: Smokey Road and Noketchee Creek. Their basic layouts will contain dense clusters of south-facing single- and multi-family residences placed in the least environmentally sensitive areas. Connecting the residences will be gathering areas and community-owned facilities to include artist studios, a pedestrian boulevard, sports fields and two amphitheaters. The amphitheaters, located in natural depressions in the existing terrain, will be used as outdoor theaters with stages and parks for recreational activities. ‘The sculpted, terraced terrain will also serve as an erosion-control device as it slows down and captures stormwater before it eventually flows into the detention pond below,’ d’Azzo explains. The community will overlook its own agricultural production area, thus, he says, ‘visually connecting the inhabitants to the land.’
December 11th – Will Westbrook of The Gerbils passes away. Calvin, Don’t Jump!’s Kirk Pleasant wrote on his MySpace blog:
My dear friend, Will Westbrook, died Monday Dec. 11 in the evening at his home. The cause of death is still undetermined, but he had been having seizures and went to a doctor recently to determine the cause of them. His life had been spiralling downward for awhile and I haven’t seen him in several years. We moved to Athens, Georgia, within one week of each other. I think I got there first, which is why I was invited to be a Gerbil. I played two shows with them before Will and Scott told me that we were still friends, but Gerbils was three. Scott, John, and Will. You see, I do things very fast and clumsily. Will had, as John said yesterday to me, one speed, reverse. He was so meticulous with every facet of life, and took such time to do any task, but he did them perfectly. He was a beautiful life and remains a beautiful soul. I had hung three of his photographs on my living room wall the day he died. They came from an art show that he did at a brewery I was managing in Athens. He shot, developed and framed five photographs. If that’s not enough, he set up eight speakers throughout a gigantic 600 person capacity second floor space. He had programmed each speaker to operate independently and cycle in the most gorgeous cacophany of soundscapes and polyphonics I’ve ever heard. He sat alone on the stage manipulating a mixer and several small machines, while his perfect black and white photographs hung proudly on the brewery wall. His music lasted for hours, so we eventually walked down the street briefly, but he had programmed the music to cycle faster and louder indefinitely, so when we got back, everything was quiet because the other guy working at the bar said it got so loud and chaotic, he had to pull the plug. He planned the whole thing! In Buddhism, the soul rests 49 days after death before moving into the beyond. Will’s 49th day is January 29th, 2007. I will mourn him then. Until, I will pray for him.
December 12th – Ideal Free Distribution: Ideal Free Distribution.
December 20th – Robert Schneider sings “Stephen, Stephen” on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. Robert, a fan of Colbert’s, had penned the song and sent it to the show unsolicited. Stephen Colbert loved it so much he would play it persistently to his staff. Robert was then invited to the show to perform on their all-star special, a guitar contest between Colbert and the Decemberists‘ Chris Funk (Henry Kissinger, Peter Frampton, and Rick Nielson also appeared).
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Robert Schneider’s Song of Stephen | ||||
|
||||
December 20-29th – Julian Koster performs holiday caroling via singing saw at certain sites in New York and Massachusetts. Those wishing to witness the caroling were required to follow the specific instructions left in his messages at Optical Atlas and the E6 Townhall. Example: “One might lure the aforementioned saw, by drawing a simple picture in the shape of an animal and cutting it out. Attaching to it a string. Writing on its back your address (and simple directions). Going to the Park on Mount Auburn St. that is beside the Cambridge Skating Club with the circular walkway that extends to the Friends meeting place and Brattle Street. This park is located just a few blocks away from the square in the direction of Watertown. Entering the Park and tying it to the fence that separates it from the Ice skating somewhere closest to Mount Auburn Street by 6 on Christmas eve.” Also: “Julian’s saw will accept (non compulsory) donations of hot chocolate which he will drink on its behalf.”
