M is for Myg

Clockwork presents:

(n)eXt

Three hours of (mostly) new music
6-9 pm SL time
Topgol (205, 144, 65)

I used to spin on Mondays for an hour. Now it’s Thursdays for three. Lots of new indie rock, most of it good. Plenty of old faves and tarnished gems. Come on out and start the weekend early. Cross posted at Everything Hits at Once.

Burgess here. Just wanted to drop in and talk about a few things. First, those of you who I haven’t seen inworld recently, I miss you. Okay, not all of you. If you’re thinking, “Nah, he doesn’t miss me,” and you’re inclined to think well of yourself, you’re probably right. Everyone else, I miss. The depressives should just kid themselves and try hard to believe I miss them too. God, this is coming out all wrong.

Second, I started another blog where I can not post as much as I don’t post here: Everything Hits at Once. There is currently a post or two up there, including a truncated version of this one. If you’re at all interested, peruse it while it’s hot, because it will likely go dormant shortly. I’m reminded of the Dread Pirate Roberts: “Good night, Westley, sleep well. I shall probably kill you in the morning.”

And C, Clockwork is doing well, but there are only three of us dj’ing at the moment and we could use some assistance and promotions. So this is an open call for djs and a manager.

In terms of djs, I’m picky. Could be that’s why there’s only three of us at the moment. I want either college radio geeks or club freaks. It’s all right with me if you went to college in the 80s, I just want someone who was at some point obsessed with indie or punk rock, or serious about dance music. I want people who can both please a crowd and turn people on to rare gems and fresh tracks. I’m not interested in FM Pop, what passes for R&B these days, or the same house hits and industrial trance that three-quarters of all SL clubs spew forth 24/7. You work for tips. The club doesn’t take a cut. Drop a notecard on me, Alexander Burgess, with a short 12-song set or IM me inworld to talk about it. Impress me. Non-North Americans welcome.

If you think you’d like to help manage the club, you should to be able to:

- Be there a few nights a week, particularly when I’m not there, just to check that things are running smoothly, help bring people in, chat with the crowd
- Help find new talent and devise ways to promote the scene at the club without running the same pajama-and-peanut butter contests we see elsewhere. Okay, maybe a pajama-and-peanut butter contest or two, but nothing less ridiculous.
- Share my vision of a club that combines good conversation and serious music appreciation
- Get along with—or at least put up with—me and my occasionally crabby flakiness

I know that’s asking a lot, but it would be a paying job for the right person.

Please let your friends and enemies know and sic them on me. Thanks.

Did you know that in the world of flesh, he, Alex, has the fair skin and I, Myg, have the darker olive skin? Well it’s not all that dark but it is that mediterranean hue given me by my Hungarian/Italian heritage.

I’m sorry, it’s been awhile I know. My Second Life still in shambles, sort of. My online life scattered between too many blogs and too much time spent frittering away over US electoral politics.

I spend a good deal of my time here, which is why you don’t see me so much in Second Life these days. I’m finding out that I suck at multi-tasking.

I have been spending some time learning how to make t-shirts for Second Life. It’s not easy to do this when you’re not even in a small way talented in graphic art, so bear with me. I did make a Clockwork T to commemorate Alex’s new club opening. It’s got some glitches in it, but it’s wearable enough. IM me or Alex if you want a copy. It’s brown and orange. (I TOLD you I had no talent for graphic art, what do you want?)

So, what’s been going on folks?

It’s been a long time coming, long train running, or some shit like that, but Clockwork is moving to a bigger space to accommodate the massive crowds. No, really.

When Romana crashed her blimp into one of the main speakers last week (see below), it destroyed the sound system that even Butterfingers Paine could not kill when he unbalanced the compressors. So we’ve moved across the street (above the not-yet-opened Mygology retail space), installed a massive invisible sonic barrage-and-subspace bass rig designed for maximum euphoria, and we’ll christen the “new” space with a hat trick of Clockwork dj madness, Wednesday, Aug. 27. Doors open 5:30 pm SL time.

-=Clockwork=-
Wednesday, August 27, 2008

5:30-6:45 pm – dj keTchUp
6:45-8:00 pm – dj Xax
8:00-9:15 pm – dj Esteban
9:15-? We’ll see how you’re all feeling…

And for those of you who heard rumors that the old Clockwork space was going to be blown up, we’re sorry to disappoint, but those plans are on hold after we were offered a lucrative deal to permit a high-end retailer to use the space in the hope of giving their merchandise more street cred. Hope we see you tomorrow, but if not then, real soon.

i

Frst post in a long time: I’ve been playing for a bit but I’m gonna try to get back into the swing of postings anyways.

This set is mostly a result of the Toronto propane explosion that occured on Sunday morning near where I live – one of the few positive things to come of that…hence the darkness, the noise and the bits of fear and anger. In any case, I found it relieving myself to express some of how I felt hearing all the explosions and crap in the middle of the night – not knowing what it was, fearing bombs or worse.

Anyways – the stuff is a a fair bit mixed so the tracklist isn’t totally linear! As always, feedback and stuff is appreciated!

The Mandelbrot Set – Aftermath: Aug 10 08 | Click to Play or Right-Click / Save As To Download

Tusia Berdize – Hero
Ellen Allien – ITS
Leila – Mettle
Byetone – Plastic Star (Dr Walker Remix)
Plastikman – Disconnect
Autechre – Sim Gishel
Radio Slave – Grindhouse Tool
Mathew Jonson – Symphony For The Apocalypse
Modeselektor – In Loving Memory
Squarepusher – Vacuum Garden
The Black Dog – Floods V3
Stimming – The Anger
!!! – Pardon My Freedom
Holy Fuck – Tonebank Computer
LCD Soundsystem – Give it Up

We were having a little talk, me and Alex, about how funny it is that of all the things that are possible in Second Life, one thing we really enjoy is having a club.  We could be winged creatures, out ransacking mythic lands. We could be gangters with bigass guns setting up hits and extorting $L from our neighbors (actually, maybe we should do that…). We could be part machine – in fact, in SL we actually *are* part machine. But what do we spend our time doing the most? Recreating a part of our history that we never got to live in the first place.

Alex and I have spent a lot of time playing in clubs in our indie-rock band. I have spent more hours in stench-riddled dives from Boston to Charleston, rocking out, drinking cheap beer and squatting to pee over nasty public toilets than I probably have in shopping malls. We often fantasized about owning our own club but never wanted to deal with all the alcoholics.  And it wasn’t conducive to being in a band either. So we never did, and came to terms with the fact that we never would.

Then came Second Life, which offered the chance to have a version of that experience without the drawbacks.  Here we managed to create some of the club atmosphere, share good music, meet digital people and make friends, without having to deal with the drawbacks of a real club. The other day Alex and I discussed this and said, “huh – that’s damned cool.” And it is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “real” in Second Life and what that means. Last post talked about identity a bit, as that’s the blog topic ablaze in the SL Blogosphere.  Now I’m thinking about what it is we do. It is funny how sometimes we choose to emulate the physical world – we shop, we hang out, we hook up, we dance.  And even though those experiences in some ways pale by comparison to the real world experience, they are not without value.  Like when you can own a club and NEVER have to clean up some drunk’s vomit or blood, maybe it’s even better than the real thing.

So what’s your god damed dream, and how are you realizing it in SL?

Why do so many SL stores have information desks and cash registers that are almost always abandoned? I get the idea of trying to make the store feel like a “real” store. But then that’s the problem. If they’re trying to emulate the vibe of a “real” store, and there’s never anybody working there, then you feel like the store isn’t really open. And I don’t think that’s the feeling retailers want their shoppers to have, is it?

It makes me think about the trend of realism in Second Life, and about how silly it sort of is – at least from my perspective. For example, James/Hamlet Au had two pieces in New World Notes yesterday that talked about how “real” Second Life is or maybe could or perhaps should be. In one, he showed a lovely photo of a pregnant woman (or female av, at least) and her partner, and quoted the photographer as saying the inspiration is partly “to show how much SL can be real.”

SL can be real, but doesn’t it have it’s very own reality? And that reality doesn’t actually include things like pregnant women, which is reality borrowed from the world of skin and bones. New avies don’t pop out of female avies’ nether regions in SL. That’s a “make believe” playing house moment in SL, not a “real” moment. A real moment is when an asshole orbits you off your own property for fun, or when you bust a gut laughing at something Romana says while Alex is playing kick ass tuneage over the stream. At least, to me that’s SL “reality.” Pregnancy is not.

In the other, he asked “Would you give your avatar a more realistic shape?“  I for one have to say, “Hell no!” In fact, I should probably have a less realistic shape. Trust me people, my shape is a little too realistic these days in RL. I think that the trend of representing oneself as realistically as possible in SL is a bit lacking in imagination, to be honest. It seems to ignore vast opportunities for creativity and vision in the creation of our digital selves. (Sophrosyne Stenvaag delivers a helpful smackdown on this topic at her blog.) And by the way, I appreciate Hamlet’s posts – I’m not arguing with them. They were pretty thought provoking.

Now, I understand that some folks want to have plus-sized avatars, perhaps because they are working to towards through (sorry, the typo was making me insane. edited 8/11/08) their own feelings of acceptance about being overweight in real life, and/or maybe they are pushing an agenda to get others to drop their prejudice against people who are overweight. That’s cool, really. There’s a purpose there and it’s a damned good one.

But for me, the opportunity to create a digital self (and multiple digital selves, as I have more than one, and some are far less realistic than I normally am) in any form my imagination conjures, is the actual reality of Second Life. And I consider it one of the most important features Second Life has to offer.

You are you every day. Don’t you want a chance to be someone, well, different? In some way?

So, here’s what we’re up to. Me, I’ve been shopping a lot, though on limited $L. It’s been all my willpower not to upload cash for all of the new skins I want. Alex was generous enough to share some of his tip money with me from his gig last week and I got this Nomine (SLURL) windlight skin. My good pal Orchid tipped me to this place, which I can’t believe I’d not been to yet. I’m wearing Windlight Vamp-Black, and I really, really dig it. I wanted drama and this does the trick. In SL it doesn’t look exactly like this, as I fucked with this photo in Picnik (omg, if you don’t use picnik to edit your flickr photos, you are so deprived! It’s easy even for graphically challenged folk like me, and a lot less time consuming than PS!). But in the $1000L skin range, these seem to be right up there with my all time favorites like Celestial Studios, Cake and Chai skins.

As for him, AlexB, he’s scheming and building. A new Clockwork, that is. Miles up in the sky is where he can be found these days slaving away at what will hopefully be a bigger, better club.

We seem to be getting right back into it, right? I still find it’s not so easy to have a SLife on a couple of hours before bed, which in some context sounds totally fucking ridiculous. But I recall the hours upon hours I’d spent before exploring and getting involved in all kinds of shit that went on. It made for good blogging, anyway. Better blogging than these boring updates, which I probably don’t need to bother posting, but which I shall nonetheless post.

Bear with me. I’m re-acclimating.