On Friday I went to an open mic poetry night run by the Leman Poetry Workshop. I had forgotten about it until my calendar reminded me the day before, so I didn’t have time to prepare anything to read. In the end, I read two poems I’ve already read at other gatherings, and also recorded for YouTube. They seemed to go down well. I told a few people there about my blog, so I’m reposting videos of the two poems here in case they want to see them again.
I started with Love Letters. Despite the fact that I memorised it for this YouTube performance, and it has a built-in mnemonic, and perhaps because of the fact that I also had the text in front of me on my iPhone, I still managed to mess up a few lines.
Now, that could be the story of almost any couple. But there are some lovers whose stories are not often told, and I decided to tell their story next. Fork and Tongs, the first poem I recorded for YouTube.
I have also had a part in some new creative output. December 1 is Jonathan Coulton‘s birthday, known to his craziest fans as JoCo Day. You might remember that last year I edited this collaborative video for him:
Well, this year the idea to make a JoCo Day video came up again. It had to be something special, since it’s his 40th birthday, which is an integer multiple of the base of our number system. I put forward all the ridiculous ideas that came to mind, and one of them (40 cakes with one candle each) was accepted and improved upon (elliomeg suggested passing the candles.)
I volunteered to edit the video again, but by the time enough contributions were in I didn’t have any spare time left, so Sara Chicazul (who made the finale for last year’s video) edited the whole thing, on top of making several cakes and hanging from the ceiling. All I did was make a pavlova, decorate a virtual cake on my iPad, film a friend’s robot, and try to motivate people without inadvertently turning into some kind of leader. As you can see, Sara and the rest of the contributors did an excellent job:
JoCo even posted about it on his blog, and he rarely addresses the internet with more than 140 characters at a time these days.
In case that wasn’t enough video for you, I’ll share some concert videos I took recently of other creative people. I know, I don’t usually do this here, but they were great concerts these are the most complete concert recordings I’ve made. I didn’t accidentally record the whole concert in time-lapse mode and I didn’t miss parts of any songs due to file-size limitation, like I did at the two Jonathan Coulton concerts linked earlier in this sentence. Even though these artists are not full of Creative-Commonsy goodness like JoCo is, I still got permission to film them and share the videos.
The first is Mark Berube and the Patriotic Few at the Chat Noir, Geneva. He became one of my favourite opening acts when he opened for The Cranberries in Geneva a while ago, so I had to go and see him when he came back to Switzerland with the Patriotic Few. My tripod was on a table which vibrated with each loud drumbeat, so the picture is not perfect, but it sounds good. Here’s the playlist.
The second one is one of my favourite main acts, K’s Choice, at La Cartonnerie in Reims. This was a standing concert, so I attached my camera to the barrier with my GorillaPod. I’d done that at another concert of theirs, but that time the camera got knocked halfway through, so some of the videos are crooked. I filmed continuously, apart from a few stops to zoom or to avoid hitting the 4GB file size limit. Here’s the playlist.
Enjoy!
Creative Output 