Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in The Velveteen Saint's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
3:30 pm	Peaking Haven't used this in a while - usually more into making quick status updates on Facebook these days. But I'm getting to that phase of the trip wherein I realize that it's time to pack and talk about the plans. In two weeks, I'll be completing a round-trip that's taken about twenty years, though I didn't know it when I'd started it... When I was a kid, my family went to see the New Old Town Chautauqua at the Mount Baker Theater - a touring circus show that has been running since the early 80s, and lives on today. I'd only remember a small piece of the show, but it would be ingrained in my mind forever - a juggling troupe whose finale was a challenge from the audience to juggle three random objects chosen by applause-meter. One of the members of the troupe - the Flying Karamazov Brothers - juggled a jello mold, a beheaded salmon, and a small pumpkin for the audience's ten-count. Almost two decades later, a bunch of circus friends invited me on this tour. I would have gone last year, but I was already on the road - I swore that I'd go this year. So this new tour goes like this: 70-someodd performers jump on a boat and float up Puget Sound toward Canada, stopping in little island communities to throw circus shows and workshops. I'll likely be the Token Contact Juggler on this trip, which means I'll be bringing a bunch of spare balls and teaching kids and parents the fine art of illusory object manipulation while otherwise volunteering my services as an usher, sound tech, ticket-taker, and so on. Expenses are paid, and I'll be busking whenever we stop at street fairs to pad my wallet a little. It's a three-week tour - July 10th to August 3rd. There's a festival every weekend afterward until Burning Man - with one exception, which malariathegreat and I will use as an excuse for a weekend campout. That is: Chautauqua, Meltdown/Shambala (undecided), Hempfest (money!), camping, playa. After Burning Man comes a week off, followed by Lopez Island Jugglefest and Portland Juggling Festival. Unless the Bellingham Circus Festival comes through - doing some of the preliminary legwork on that one. If that happens as plans are suggesting, I've got every weekend booked until October... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 19th, 2009
1:02 pm	Let's dance! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
12:21 pm	Images from Tehran The story thus far: -Iran's elections close. -The incumbent President, predicted to lose in the polls, declares for himself a landslide victory. -The reigning religious leader and supreme authority, an opponent of the challenging candidate, endorses the victory. -The country's access to the Internet and foreign media is shut down. -Martial law is declared in the university. -The police and the government's private militia go to war against demonstrators in the street in Iran's largest street demonstration since the 1979 revolution. -Now. Naturally, hackers are using Twitter to circumvent the gov't ban on electronic transmission. CNN and Reuters are already WTOing this bad boy, implying that the protesters are just a bunch of sore losers because their guy lost in a landslide. Stay informed. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
12:26 pm	Lappy I: May 2006 - June 2009 "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up?" he asked, "or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." She wasn't at my first Betty Show, but she made the show happen. She wasn't my first personal laptop, but she may as well have been. And she's been within a hundred feet of me for the majority of the last three years of my life. She kept me warm on cold studio nights and sang me awake in the morning. I learned Scratch Live on her, I learned Photoshop and Dreamweaver on her. I did my first RAM upgrade on her. She traveled on the road with me for thousands of miles. I met a technophobic hippy kid in a coffee house in Long Beach, to whom I described her as a magic tome. She's full of spells - the one that summons rides, the one that lets me communicate to people all around the globe for free. The map that tells me where lunch can be found, or a place to stay. The massive encyclopedia and the library of beautiful songs, all in a single notebook. My little machine! My first Real computer. She first started having issues last summer, when she just about bricked during the middle of my walkabout. I uninstalled her Bootcamp partition and she just stopped recognizing her HD. Fortunately, I found a quick finagle and she recovered for a while, but the signs of aging just didn't stop. Now, she's got dead pixels and a bum optical drive. And right before my last road trip, she just shut down and wouldn't start at all. She's OK now, kind of - I think there's some issue with the way her battery connects - but just Tuesday morning, she did it again. Got the fading grey screen of doom - or half of it, before she shut down entirely. And last week at the Betty Show, she developed an unsettling display glitch. Last night was her very last Betty Show. She behaved marvelously, with but a single display hiccup near the end of the night. She retires today; I'm on my way to Seattle to buy her replacement. I need a reliable work machine - my computer cannot crash mid-show. I'm picking up a newer version of the same laptop, two inches smaller, lovingly used by a psych grad student who dumped a pile of upgrades in before his job bought him a new one. Lappy II; twice the RAM, slightly faster processor, and three times the HD space. I love this machine so much. I'm gonna spend today backing her up; tomorrow, she'll get wiped while I install the freshness on Lappy II. All things pass, but man, I've loved this computer more than any other device in my life. You've done well, little machine! Current Music: Beck - Replica (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
5:03 pm	Next week! By "donation" we mean "please help Lotus buy a plane ticket home." (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 25th, 2009
2:08 am	1:19 of the last three days (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
7:02 pm	Victory over bureaucrats. Came home today to a funny sight: a metermaid parked in my parking spot. I backed out and parked on the street, came up to give her a funny look. "Hi. I live here. What's going on?" She then points to two cars - one Malia's, the other our housemate Hue's. Both are laid up with pending "when we get a spare few hundred bucks" kinds of repairs so we can get them outta there. "These cars have been parked in this city right-of-way for over 24 hours. And they have expired tabs, so I'm writing two tickets apiece; one for expired tabs and one for parking over 24 hours." Apparently, she came by the other day and saw cars parked in our driveway with expired tabs. So, because she apparently didn't have any better way to make her quota, she went to the city and looked at a map of the street. This apparently said that our driveway was not behind our property line - that it's city property. Which means you can't park there for more than a day, and you can't park anything with expired tabs there, ever. This is news to me. In case you haven't seen our driveway - it's a gravel lot clearly off the asphalt, set back toward the trees. When the street sweeper rolls up early mornings, it's not like the dude jumps out to maintain our driveway - because the city doesn't own it. But hey, I could be wrong. "So, I've lived here five years," I respond. "Why haven't I heard this before? And is there any reason you didn't give us a letter or anything while you were doing all this detective work?" But hey, I've had a long string of bad luck dealing with city officials lately, and I don't really expect that this lady has any obligation to give a fuck. So I ask her whether it's OK to gimp one of the cars over to a different corner of the parking lot. Sure, that's fine (why?), so I go inside to grab my housemate who's lived here since the beginning (1970s). Hey dude, there's a metermaid outside says we've gotta get our cars out of our driveway because it's city property. Does yours move? Well he jumps up and goes, "No, it's not city property!" And we head outside to do battle. Dude rocked out. He's been politically active since sometime around Pilate's day. It also turns out he's lived here since the street was installed. So here's how the rest went: HUE: "I was at the City Council meeting when this street was created." METERMAID: "Well, I went and checked with the permitting department." ME: "We'll just have to see you in court. It would be stupid to pay $20/day to park in my driveway." METERMAID: "Well, I'll go back and get that map." Time passes; later, Hue tells me that she came back with a map that suggests the city owns our entire woodshed and at least one of our outbuildings. He told her again that he'd see her in court with the minutes from the City Council meeting where they'd drawn the property line at the edge of the concrete. Her response: "Well, I'm not really coming back. We're good then. Have a nice day." Harass us? Get fucked. You wanna make the city some money charging us $40/day to use our driveway? How about I save them $50K a year by advocating your layoff? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
3:30 pm	paradox Funny how the kind of change you want comes at the moment of giving up on it. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 11th, 2009
4:25 am	womped Just saw Bassnectar at his best. At least, the best out of the four or five shows I've seen. I do believe that is the hardest I have danced at a show in my entire life. My earplugs were the saving grace. I was standing right in front of the speaker stack - during one of the set's last climaxes, I could feel the hair on the back of my arm vibrating. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
10:54 pm	Two things I finished today: (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
10:35 pm	the sky's on fire Lappy's sick. She's had issues for a while, shutting down mysteriously in her sleep. Then she started shutting down whenever she was on battery. Now she's shutting down while powered and won't turn back on for a while. I got her running, but she's still shutting down intermittently. I don't know whether it's a heat issue - I was working in the supremely hot back office at the Nightlight when it happened. I got her home and her most important data (in-progress posters and the Nightlight's web site) backed up. I'll run her for a while tonight and see how things go. There's a significant buffer between now and when she'll need to be running tip-top; Saturday, when I'll be DJing for 500+ audiences for almost ten hours straight. Still, if she doesn't crap out between now and Saturday, she's basically trustworthy. I hope. It was that buffer of time - and the fact that she'd still start back up - that gave me hope, but I still found myself dwelling on the problem during my bike ride home. As I left downtown, I realized that I really had nothing I could do about it from the back of a bicycle, so I let it go. Happenstantially, the sun had just dipped below the horizon, washing everything from the surf to the clouds in a shroud of pink and orange. I couldn't remember the last time I watched the gently wrinkling undulations of the bay; possibly sometime in September, the last time it was warm enough to do much more than blaze through the park toward a warm fireplace. As I reached the park, the sky glowed electrically. I slowed my pace to a cruising coast. A couple sat next to a pair of toppled bicycles, caring little about the soccerball careening dangerously near. On the boardwalk, two skaters blocking the way looked over their shoulder as I coasted behind them sluggishly; wordlessly, they parted and we swapped smiles, sharing a muted understanding that there was really no hurry at all. Young lovers pulled away from a long kiss, laughing and wiping their nose while a golden retriever happily panted away, watching. Finally, I gave up and marveled at the verisimilitude of the sky and the sea. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
3:37 pm	Ding! Flyer's done! SO EXCITED to close the Le Serpent Rouge show. Also super-stoked to get a chance to play with Abby Norml again! This'll be nuts. Will do another burst promo next week. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
3:26 pm	Beautiful. Hanging out in my new office - aka the front porch, where there's power and wifi and no more huge piles of crap. Getting into the swing - headphones are arriving in a few days, new business cards should show up before Vaudevillingham, and this Friday's payday should land me enough bucks to pay off my music gear. Just got accepted to Aqua Chautauqua this morning. The majority of my July will now be spent on a three-week tour of the San Juan islands with 80 other performers, a handful of whom I first saw perform at the MBT when my age was perhaps just in the double digits. Back to being able to afford to do things like dates again - the activity, not the food. Hasn't been hard hangin with malariathegreat with all the sushi and gardening and stuff! As activities become more simple with practice, I'm finding more time to hang out with more people I like. And the last few years of yardwork are threatening to make Poplar House look more like a fairyland than a haunted house. Keeping up with the "two paid gigs a week" stretch, which now holds through the first week in June. Circus is paying for itself, and is threatening to put some actual, real money in my pocket. I've got plans for some more big expansion this summer that, if I play my cards right, will keep me through next winter; after that, the sky's the limit. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
2:06 pm	fuckin fuck Fire jam in the downtown plaza is off. Rationale: liability, same stupid fucking excuse that everyone uses when they own property they don't want you to use - even a huge flat concrete parking lot. Thanks a lot for caring, guys - the piteously apologetic tone of voice you used really helped me feel better after the row of bullshit excuses I've been hearing from lazy authority figures since middle school. I swear I'm going to coin a Godwin's Law for performers. I may as well end a conversation the second anyone says the word "liability." Just an endless stream of "Well, I see your point, but... yeah, that's a really great argument, but..." But what? Oh, but it's private property, so even if you have no impact on the space, even if you get appropriate fire safety permits, it's still OK for cops to come shoo you out of that space. No point in getting discouraged, I guess. Why did I expect to get cut any slack on this when fire artists have existed on the fringes of society? Well, time to start looking into other venues. More energy poured into creating a viable artistic scene in Bellingham? Sure, why not? Idea: next week, I might call back and try to organize a prayer group in the same lot. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
10:29 am	Happy Earth Day Thanks, Earth! You're the best. Free buses today! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
9:36 pm	Holy hell news Gavin Newsom announces candidacy for governor. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
11:38 am	missing ooah, dammit The problem with residencies: for each one you've got, there's a 1:7 chance that the show you'll wanna see falls right on your work night. Regardless, I have no qualms telling y'all that you should really go see Ooah at the Buffalo on Wednesday the 29th. Holy hells, I've been waiting to get a chance to catch this guy live for years. Another excuse to haunt the Bay more frequently... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
1:02 pm	Science Turns out you're only as old as you think after all. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 10th, 2009
10:53 am	Republican teabaggers *ahem* Conservatives preparing en masse to tea bag the left. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 4th, 2009
3:52 pm	Sore! Whoa yeah, first day of the Farmer's Market. Made myself about twice as much money as I'll need to replace the ball I dropped. >.< Still, had fun juggly time, but really starting to wonder about the viability of the Market. Reminds me why I stopped last year and did coffee instead. They've decided to start kicking buskers out unless they buy a badge. The badge costs $5/day or $25/season. This earns you the right to one of ten (read: five) spots that the Market staff has set up specifically so you won't block foot traffic. Then you have to pack up your setup and move it every hour (or half hour, depending on who's on duty that day) so you don't, um, block foot traffic. Fortunately, since every single busker (and several of our friends and fans) arrived at the info booth en masse to let them know how obvious it was that they hadn't really consulted anyone with a clue on this one, a lot of us skated. It's now my job to compile a report on the way street performers reflect the health of a public gathering. Talking to the lady felt like talking to my assistant principal in high school. Board meetings are closed; no transparency in leadership or the decision-making process; no assurance that anyone even exists to pay attention to the issue. The allegation: that "some vendors" (nameless, naturally) complained about impacts on space. Funny - last time I got bounced from a good pitch at a Farmer's Market, the vendors put together a basket of food for me to take home. Perhaps these are the "some offended people" that Mr. Baglio invented in tenth grade as an excuse to wipe out controversial student art. But let's extend a gesture of good faith and presume these vendor complaints do exist. Isn't it their obligation to sort out that kind of conflict themselves by simply asking a performer to move ten feet down? Short of the "GTFO" approach taken by many Farmer's Market organizers, this is probably the worst I've ever seen it. On my first day a couple years ago, I was told that I couldn't perform in any walkways while a ten-year-old kid played his violin in a walkway. Last year, they installed a row of trashcans where Jules the Juggler did his circle act. And now they're trying to push street performers out by charging a prohibitive enough daily fee that the only way to make it remotely feasible is to go seasonal. Y'know, out of sympathy for the professionals, right? Right before I tracked down the market director to ask her which avenues we had to deliver input to the Board from the artist's side (hint: none!), I watched one older guitarist pay out five dollars to the info booth. His gross today? Seven fifty. Ready to party it all away, of course. Come on over! Bring booze! Bring food! Bring smiles! ARIES PARTY WOOOOOOOO (8 Comments |Comment on this)