When my spouse and I found out Scottish legends the BMX Bandits were scheduled to play at the 2007 NYC Popfest, we quickly booked some decent lodging and grabbed a red eye to JKF. For their first visit to our shores in a decade, the band played a poorly-attended weeknight show in Brooklyn and an afternoon acoustic pickup gig in the basement of a cafe on the Lower East Side. Then they scrambled back home on a red eye of their own in order to immediately drive four hours to the next gig. As if this weren’t excitement enough, one of their members was arrested and spent 20 hours in a Manhattan holding cell. Luckily, he managed to free himself in time for the show (which was great, by the way). In a nutshell, it was a textbook example of why I retired from touring.
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Back in August 1978, convicted murderers Gary Tison and Randy Greenwalt broke out of the state prison in Florence, Arizona, assisted by Tison’s three teenage sons, Ricky, Donald and Raymond. Their inept plan to slip into Mexico began unraveling the minute they left the prison grounds. After a hectic week-long scramble, during which they killed six innocent human beings and one defenseless chihuahua, the fugitives were caught just thirty miles from where they started. Their desperate swath cut a ragged figure-eight through three states, starting in Florence, sneaking down to the Yuma area, then all the way up to Flagstaff, down through the White Mountains and over to Clovis, New Mexico, then up to the four corners area. From there, they returned to Tison’s home town of Casa Grande, where they ran into a police road-block. After a gun battle that killed one of his sons, Tison fled into the desert. He endured over a week of searing summer temperatures before suffering the same fate he consigned to the chihuahua: an agonizing death from exposure.
Continue reading ‘Things I Should Throw Out: Readers Outraged By Tison Escape’
Not much excitement around these parts lately. Oh, well actually, we did experience the Slashdot Effect last week when Boing Boing featured one of our articles. Somehow, the Powers That Link were attracted to the Johnny Arthey album of British Invations covers we posted a couple weeks back. Must have been a slow news day. Anyway, whereas our previous album share of “Don Kirshner Cuts Hair” mustered only two dozen downloads, over eight hundred people downloaded the Arthey record.
Bostworld received this kind of attention about a year ago, when Boing Boing linked to an article of excerpts from an old Uncensored magazine. That time, fueled by the promise of smut and acerbated by the fact that the files were actually served from my shared host account, the onslaught of visitors took the whole site down (as well as its sister blog over at Meat Puppets Dot Com). Tech support wasn’t much help: “Give us more money” they suggested, “or maybe take your business elsewhere.”
Continue reading ‘Your Favorite Little Podcast: Episode Four’
I’ve been a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology ever since I first learned about it from Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders site almost two years ago. Compellingly wonky and full of heady cult-like terminology (“open loops,” “next action,” “runway”), “GTD” was just what I needed to help me kick start my creativity and stay focused in the face of a fragmented and interruption-driven existence. Allen’s system not only helped me to recognize the pain of the breaking commitments to myself, but also gave me some tools to renegotiate those commitments.
Johnny Arthey is a rather typical product of the British pop music machine of the sixties. He came up through the ranks, distinguishing himself first as an instrumentalist (he was a pianist for a military orchestra during his national service), then later conducting orchestras for the BBC. Soon he was one of the clique of go-to producer/arrangers for radio, television and, of course, pop records. He holds the particular distinction of scoring the strings added to records by such Jamaican artists as The Pioneers and Marcia Griffiths when they were released for the British market. He also masterminded the Reggae Strings and co-wrote the theme to the popular British children’s program, “The Double Deckers.” Like so many of his contemporaries, Arthey also recorded his share of production music records. Along the way, he released an intermittent string of instrumental recordings of popular titles.