the dotmatrix project

The Meltdown

VirusWithShoes understands the man:

Every night, a naked Bill O’Reilly sits hunched over in a dark and airless closet surrounded by untold numbers of boxes of women’s shoes. He opens up a pair of sling-backs, and sniffs them until he almost passes out. When his face is red enough he carefully boxes them away, childlike in his movements, already missing the feel of the leather against his face. Quickly, he then takes a rapidly softening whole cucumber and forces it down his throat, fighting the gag reflex while wanting even more. With tears streaming from his eyes, and his body shaking from the exertion, he mumbles a mantra of self-hatred inaudibly into the darkness and onto the cucumber. After 30 minutes of Bill’s Special Alone Time he slowly pulls it out, enjoying the sensation of it moving from his throat, past his tongue and into the dank air of the closet, the smell of the vegetable and his fevered saliva reminding him of the time he fell out the sycamore tree when he was 6 and bumped his head on a rock - the exact moment in his life when everything began to make sense to him.

His voice is reborn.

He stands slowly, awkwardly, his body stiff from holding the same position for too long, though to him — always not long enough. He reaches out to the shoe boxes to help him steady himself. Salty beads of sweat run down his chest, trickles from the pools in his armpits and under his breasts, cooling as rapidly as his innate anger is warming. His penis — an object of disgust to him for so long now — is as hard as it’s going to get without chemical help. His toes clench and unclench with a staccato rhythm of their own. He opens the closet door, and looks at the poster of John Wayne hanging on the inside — the man he always wanted to be, but never could be, no matter how much he screams into footwear or chokes himself on cucumbers. Wayne looks back with his dead eyes — a two-dimensional construct of a dream that never was.

Bill’s chest hitches, and he starts sobbing. Snot runs down his nose, his mouth opens wide and green stains frame this most silent of screams. He cries for all men, for all America. But mostly, almost exclusively, for himself.

Spent, empty, Bill steps into the shower. Runs it as warm as possible. Until it burns. His tears mix with the water.

His fear, his hatred, his shame — his anger. They all fall down the drain.

The Remix

Andrew Dudek — singer/guitarist of Dawn Chorus, former proprietor of Gate City Noise (RIP) and the founder of The Beard and Moustache Club of North Carolina — has a radio show this summer:

Peoples,

I wanted to tell each and everyone of y’all of my new summer Radio Show, as if I didn’t have 1 million things on my plate already. The show is called “The Punk and Soul Radio Show”. The concept of alternating Punk and Soul came from a mixtape that Zach Blue made in our high school days. Pure genius. Anyway, the show starts this Monday night (the 19th) at 11pm to 1am. For all those who live out of town you can stream it. Just look for the live stream heading at the top of the page. Listening to music is a big part of my life and playing some of favorite hits for you gives me great joy. I hope you all can find the time to tune in for a song or two.

Thanks,
Andrew k Dudek

I’m not a huge radio listener, but I’ll definitely catch a few of these puppys. You gotta respect the passion Andrew brings to everything he touches.

Not enough Greensborians realize that our city held such an instrumental action during the Civil Rights Movement. On February 1, 1960, four African American students, from NC A&T State University, sat at a segregated lunch counter in the downtown Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store on Elm Street. Little did they know that their actions would create a sit-in movement which spread to 15 cities in 9 states in only a couple of months.

As part of Greensboro’s Bicentennial celebration playwright Ed Simpson was commissioned to create a performance around the Greensboro sit-ins. Rather than focusing on the 4 who took the amazing first step in the sit-ins the play, Periphery, expresses the thoughts and feelings of everyone else surrounding the event. Students, business owners, black, white, young and old - each displays their perspective while acting out factually based events.

Last night the play officially opened downtown at the Greensboro Historical Museum (130 Summit Avenue) and will continue running May 15, 16 and 17 at 8:00 PM and Sunday May 18 at 2:00 PM. Adult tickets are $20, seniors $18 and all students are FREE. You can call 333-SHOW (7469) for tickets and visit the Community Theatre of Greensboro site for more information. It’s about 1 hour and 30 minutes long, fun, enlightening, humorous, fast-moving and quite uplifting. This photo shown above is from the opening night performance of Periphery which had actual chairs/stools from the Woolworth’s counter that were part of the Greensboro sit-ins. The chairs were graciously lent to add richness to the performance.

Please see the show and remember the incredible events that happened in our community less than 50 years ago. It’s an eye opening perspective and helps us appreciate where we are today. Personally, I was excited to realize that my running route goes along the same path that 1000+ NC A&T students marched down Market Street to participate in the sit-in movement.

I can think of no other way to describe Burma at this point.

I began writing this post before the recent Cyclone Nargis disaster and finished it just days after the cyclone hit. In fact this is actually the first part of a series posts under the same title.

In some ways it would now be appropriate to remove “Disguised as a Tourist Attraction” from the title of this post since the cyclone quite literally blew the roof off of the regime’s charade to cultivate a tourist industry. Though I’ll leave the title as I originally wrote it since the regime is already trying to re-start the tourist industry in the north of the country not affected by the cyclone.

For those not familiar with the situation in Burma I’ll begin with a brief description of the country prior to May 2, 2008.

Burma is a military dictatorship. Perhaps the nastiest I’ve ever encountered of the dozen or so I’ve passed through over the years. The country is ruled by a group of thugs and their leader is a ruthless individual named Than Shwe. In addition to being extremely violent, the military regime running Burma is also deeply superstitious. The regime relies on fortune tellers to guide domestic and foreign policy. Now, while many world leaders have relied on fortune tellers and astrologers for advice — including a number of U.S. presidents and First Ladies — they tend not to undertake major policy changes solely on the word of a soothsayer. In Burma the recent dictator as well as previous dictators have on many occasions made fundamental policy changes based on the advice of a fortune teller.

Some fine examples of policy change due to the word of a fortune teller throughout Burmese history has been:

• The overnight change in the direction of automobile traffic on all of the country’s roads, which of course resulted in a major spike in traffic fatalities
• The sudden introduction of new currency — rendering previous currency void, resulting in countless bankruptcies in the business communities as well as the evaporation of personal wealth in the country for those who were not able to sprint to the bank in time to convert their cash
• A most ridiculous undertaking in the last few years which was the formation of a new capital. The regime actually built an entirely new capital city for the country, forcing thousands to relocate, hundreds of thousands more homeless, while leaving foreign embassies bewildered, unsure if they should move to the new capital or remain in Rangoon the old capital.

This should give one a taste of what the regime in Burma is like. Under these conditions it becomes clearer to see why the cyclone disaster is as bad as it is.

(photograph by Dan Bayer)

Serving, mixing, recording, crafting and shaping Triad musicians one act at a time. That would be Danny Bayer.

Dan is also a Photojournalism student Randolph Community College in Ashboro, NC. A rockin’ self-portrait, no?

I know how very lucky we are to have Dan serve as sound engineer extraordinaire on the dotmatrix project. Thanks again, man.

[photograph by Michael Dunn]

Above is the working cover for the 14 track live album we recorded last month at The Green Burro for the Greensboro-based, Southern Rock, alt-Americana group, The Radials. Our featured act on opening night, Sorry About Dresden, will have their 10 track live album finished sometime this upcoming week.

Each band we put on receives a live album, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered in downtown Greensboro. We record live on 6 to 8 separate channels — depending on the amount of vocal mics and mic’d instruments needed — through our Mackie Onyx 1620 w/ a Firewire card straight to Pro Tools on our MacBook Pro. Dan “Mixmaster” Bayer, our resident sound engineer, has been mixing both live and in the studio for years with outstanding quality.

Once the album is complete, we license it with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. It basically means that anyone can use the music, even remix or sample it, as long as they give proper attribution and don’t use it commercially. Of course individual cases of copyright permission can still be managed individually, so the artists have complete control of their product.

Our distribution plan is where we shift away from the traditional label route — not to say that we consider ourselves or strive towards being a “label” on any decipherable level. Each album will be uploaded to the Internet Archive, where fans can download the tracks for free. We’ll also work with artists to get their albums out to spots such as Last.fm, iLike and AmieStreet while schooling them on how their fans can help them in the internet age by doing simple, free things like scrobbling tracks to their Last.fm account when using iTunes or their iPod, tagging tracks, recommending tracks, etc.

We’ll provide a package of audio tracks to the musicians — along with cover art, a professionally mixed video and professionally shot pictures of the show — but it’ll be up to each band to get their music to online stores such as iTunes and CDBaby or physical retail spots. We’re not interested in managing the machinations of music sales. Our profit margin is much greater designing software.

Once the product has been delivered, we’ll provide a free download of each album, along with links off to corresponding media from the evening back here at HQ. All we ask in return from people downloading the tracks is their email address and an optional PayPal donation to help us recoup our initial costs.

All of this is a designed effort to build community around diverse local artists, with local music fans, while still providing access to people around the world with overlapping tastes of music.

Prego, baby. Prego.

The Radials Live at the dotmatrix project by the dotmatrix project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(originally uploaded by MobileBurn)

It’s a crime that cell phone shopping is so damn frustrating, especially if you’re tied to your phone for business like myself. Finding a device you need that is offered by your current provider seems to be an impossible task.

Reverse serendipity, I call it.

So for the past two years, I’ve been stuck with both a service (Sprint) that I’ve come to despise for its horrible customer service and a phone (Treo 650) that has terrible clarity — amplifying my already present Jersey marble mouth — and tends to reset at completely random intervals. Well, with my Sprint contract running out on the 22nd of this month, I made the move to both a new service, a new phone and the same $99 unlimited plan offered by Sprint.

The Helio Ocean has a tactile qwerty keyboard, a partnership with Google and all the multimedia bells and whistles I’ll ever need. I got a $49 price for a refurbished Ocean by simply calling their 888 number; no need for a promo code. The unlimited plan is a straight monthly $99 and covers all data transfers, text messages and daytime calls w/ nights and weekends free as with all plans. For this particular moment in time, I actually feel good about my cell plan.

Come on, Helio, make it last. I beg of you.

UPDATE: First interaction w/ Helio customer service to transfer my existing number was decent. Not too painful. The second interaction — I was told to call back after three hours to get an activation code — wasn’t good at all. The guy didn’t understand my initial request and sent the conversation into a 30 minute loop. I now have up to a 72 hour window for my phone to become activated. And sometime over the next three days, I have to guesstimate when it will be completed to call in and receive my activation code.

So far, not too smart of a service.

UPDATE II: Activation went through in a few hours, so I’m back to happy. Until my phone rang for the first time and it sounded like a carnival act. Apparently, the ringtones included in the Ocean were designed for 15 year-old kids with no chance of ever getting laid. I just spent the last hour searching for, downloading and converting an old fashioned telephone ring into a mmf ringtone file.

If you desire simplicity, here’s the sound file and the instructions for installing it in the Ocean.

Another John Ford special is hot off the presses and ready to be served. Yes, John Ford is a front-end engineer God. No, he does not pay me to say such things. He simply makes cool shit work on the intertubes, super fast and to spec.

I swear I could take on Silicon Valley if I only had 20 John Ford clones.

What we have to the right is a dotmatrix project event calendar. As new gigs are scheduled, we post the event to Upcoming.org, add them to the dotmatrix project group over there and this fansy, shmansy, customized badge dynamically displays updated show dates within our custom design. It’s not revolutionary or anything, but I dig it.

The super cool thing about this particular pimped badge is that now you can use it as a promotional widget on your own blog, Live Journal, web site, etc.

Yes, you — the person who says that he digs live music, but never seems to finds the time to hit a show. I know you — you tell your girlfriends that you’re going to check out this awesome underground band at this totally cool spot, and then you bail to watch a Sex in the City rerun.

Tell me I don’t know who you are.

So now that you blog and participate with every social network known to man, you can wash away your live music dissing sins by simply posting the following code into your sidebar:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.dotmatrixproject.com/badge/"></script>

For those of you whose sidebar is a different size than the default 210 width here at HQ, simply use the following code and customize the width setting to your liking:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.dotmatrixproject.com/badge/?width=210"></script>

Down the road we’re going to support various visual themes and potentially accept styles submitted by you, our loyal readers. We do things like this because we love you. And because without your uncontrolled fanatical support of this here project, it’s not going to go anywhere.

So if you love music and want a pain-free, cost-free, time-free, guilt-free way to support your neighbors trying to gain exposure in an industry that’s tougher than ever to catch a break within, well, you know what to do.

-Sean

(originally uploaded by Rikke Moltisanti)

If you think you can capture the essence of a live show like in the above picture, we need to talk. Same thing goes for filmmakers with the following video:

The Wigg Report: It Won’t Take Long from Sean Coon on Vimeo.

We’re putting on a monthly show in the Back Bar of The Green Burro in downtown Greensboro. The bands are playing for free, a sound engineer is recording the live show for free, photographers are shooting for free and filmmakers are shooting/editing music videos for free.

Cost of admission: FREE

The idea is that if we all collaborate to create art and release it into the wild — online and off — we’ll be opening doors for each other that might never have been opened otherwise. And over time, if people dig the concept, maybe we can turn it into a sponsored event with a sustainable business model to support live, local music in downtown Greensboro.

Along these lines, we’re looking to build a community of photographers and filmmakers interested in participating at least one time. That means you’ll be joining up with a media team and collaborating with the bands before the show on shot ideas. If you want to do more than one show, we’ll do our best to schedule it. If you want to work with a specific filmmaker, photographer or band, we’ll do our best to accommodate that as well.

We’re good like that.

Photographers: We’re looking to meet photographers who have access to DSLR cameras and can really craft a shot. If you have a great eye, you’re in. There’s no pledging involved, no hazing, no sleeping with farm animals. And while that last sentence read like an extremely male perspective on stupid things adolescent men might have to do in order to join something potentially cool — though this ain’t a corny frat — we’d definitely like the talented ladies in our community to participate just as much, if not more. So I promise, no more horrible analogies, ladies.

So if you’re interested in participating, please follow these two steps:

• Join the dotmatrix project flickr group and then contact Mike Dunn or Stephen Charles to get assigned to a show
• Join our dotmatrix project Google Group to ask questions of or communicate with anyone on the project

Filmmakers: While we’d like to have professional filmmakers participate on the project, we’re very open to amateur filmmakers and videographers. All we ask is that you know how to use a modern digital video camera, have a good eye and have at least some experience editing on non-linear systems. dotmatrix HQ has a digital editing bay with Final Cut Pro, so you’ll be able to edit with your co-filmmaker on top notch equipment.

If you’d like to join up, please follow these two steps:

• Subscribe to the dotmatrix project Vimeo channel and contact either Jason Pierce or Andy Coon to get assigned to a show
• Join our dotmatrix project Google Group to ask questions of or communicate with anyone on the project

Cross-Promotions We’re currently working on finalizing deals with local establishments to cross-promote the material created from the show. I don’t want to jinx the potential deals in the works by naming names, but I will say that we’re close to finalizing we’ve finalized a deal where a major movie theater with Carousel Cinemas on Battleground in Greensboro to present still shots and music videos from our show prior to the trailers run before each film shown in the theater. We’re also working on establishing a quarterly photo exhibit in a well known downtown venue to present the best shots of the previous three shows.

Both of these cross-promotions are in the works to market the name and work of our participating media creators.

So are you down or what!?

For 15 minutes each day our virtual team — three people in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, one in London, one in Knoxville and myself in Greensboro — gets together to report what we’ve finished, what we’re working on and list the obstacles in our way to getting things done.

Reggie “Planet Progress” Valentine, our kick-ass PM takes it from there.

The conference call is over Skype, with video and desk sharing over Adobe Acrobat Connect.

And yes, video meetings bring out the craziness in folks.