PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Show #1 – Terry Rasor and Michael Hearne at Chubby’s

    [Note: This is part of my “concert a day challenge“]

    For my first show, I scanned the listings on fortlive.com searching for something free. In the West Fort Worth section, I spotted a gig at Chubby’s Burger Shack. A little Googling checked out that Terry Rasor is a veteran Texas singer song writer with a standing gig on Chubby’s patio, called “Raz and Friendz”.

    Patio shows are typically free, but waitstaff get grumpy if you’re not buying food or drink. Seeing that Chubby’s was a contender in the 2013 DFW Burger Battle (they lost in the first round), and I’d never been there, it seemed like a good pick.

    A buddy met up with me a little before 7pm and the patio remained empty. And the outside temperature held fast at 100 degrees. We opted to enjoy our burgers with air conditioning and then venture to the patio. We finished and ventured outside, and it appeared Terry “Raz” and his partner for the night, Michael Hearne, had yet to play a song. (Sidenote, a waitress stopped by our table, asked if we were going to order anything, and we said no. She ignored me for the remainder of my 45 minute stay.)

    Within a few minutes, the duo took to the front of the patio and Terry began to play while Michael sat, leaned forward with his guitar and listened. Terry’s sound, with his voice and a guitar, reminded me of John Prine or late era Merle Haggard–an earnest guy who’s played hundreds of shows and enjoys strumming his guitar and delivering life truths with a grizzled voice. Michael Hearne complimented Terry, with Hearne’s songs more Americana and country. One song, (I found to be called Evergreen) reminded me of Nick Drake, a light melody that floats up with the chorus, made the entire patio stop talking as if this was a moment to truly take in.

    Raz n Friendz at Chubby's Burger Shack
    Terry Raz Rasor and Michael Hearne at Chubby’s Burger Shack

  • A concert a day in August

    Sometimes we need projects to challenge us. Make a thing a day. Learn a word a day. Appreciate an aspect of life a day. The point is to do something and be persistent. For the month of August, I’m going to see a concert a day.

    That’s 31 live music experiences during summer’s hottest month. I’ll be doing more work than 535 congress people.

    To clarify, for a show to count, it has to be a group or performer putting on a show. Thus, church choirs, curbside troubadors and collective drum circles won’t count. And I have to be there for at least 45 minutes or one set. This is to give an act time to play, especially if it’s an opening act, and also, gives me an out if the music does not move me. Lastly, I can only go to the same venue once a week. I live five blocks from Live Oak, and could hang out there four to five nights a week. This will force me to venture to other venues that I may not typically go to. If I can, I’ll try to meet the acts, and will post a writeup a day to keep track of where I go and who I see. Pictures will be included. If you’re on Twitter, I’ll probably post live commentary.

    Already, there will be challenges. I work a day job with long days and I’ll need to plan shows around currently planned engagements. I won’t be jammin’ at 11:30pm on a Tuesday, and during the weekends I’ll be looking for day time gigs to attend. And my wallet will demand free shows, too.

    For shows, I do intend to seek out an assortment of genres. Amongst the blends of country and rock, Fort Worth has a rap/hip hop scene, as well as a dedicated core of metal heads that rock out. DFW.com, fortlive.com, Fort Worth Weekly and Google will be my main planning tools.

    Anyways, It’ll be fun.

    [display-posts tag=”august concert a day”]

    keep calm and rock out post

  • 30 days of ties

    Through the month of September, I designed a tie a day. A day early, below are the results. Click to enlarge and check out some of the details. I prefer minimalist designs, solid colors and a contemporary look. Some designs could have any sort of color variation, so I only did a few and then moved to a different concept. Day 1 is in the top left, then Day 2 through 6 in the top row, etc.

  • And the arts bring life to your city

    “Creative centers provide the integrated ecosystem or habitat where all forms of creativity–artistic and cultural, technological and economic–can take root and flourish.” Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited.

    Approximately $300,000 will be cut from the Public Arts budget in Fort Worth, a 25% reduction from 2012. That 25% reduction will multiply into other areas of the Fort Worth economy as the people who will receive those cuts create tremendous value for the city–value the city will lose.

    The arts are a tricky thing to value. Painting, photographing, performing, pirouetting, playing with ideas that reflect a culture, mean different things to different people. Through asking a lot of questions and doing math, we can get get a sense of their nominal value. The Arts Council of Fort Worth commissioned a study regarding the impact of the arts to Tarrant County. $200 million dollars coalesce, swirl and reverberate through the economy across industry expenditures, income, taxes and money spent on events.

    To echo the point of how amazing that is, consider that Fort Worth contributes $.94 per capita towards the arts. Our Dallas neighbors to the near east–$3.10. Our El Paso (EL PASO!) friends to the far west–$1.95. Per capita measurements are how we make cities equal. And for a city that prides itself in Cowboys and Culture, the per capita measurement of arts investments ought to be an embarrassing shred in the in the back of our jeans.

    The study also touched on those that put their painters’ jeans on. 3,000 jobs thread in multiple directions due to the arts. Those are people. Creative people. Creative people who know people. Creative people who attract people who know people who know people.

    There’s the rub. There’s the collective tumbleweed blowing through our prarie. There’s the boot in our cowboy rear end.

    The arts attract creative people, to create things or events. They bring skills that we can’t send to India or China, and instead apply them to our community. When creative people combine and share ideas, innovation happens. Also, they spend money, they attract night life, they attract more culture and value.

    A prime example is the Magnolia corridor. A mix of bars, restaurants, shops, galleries and housing that feels uniquely creative. Property values between 2004 and 2011 increased 137%. Some would say that a vegan restaurant kicked it all off. A vegan restaurant in a steak town attracted so much more.

    Much more, innovation, like fortune, favors the bold, the prepared and those who nurture it.

    Fort Worth has a choice, one that isn’t zero sum–public policy is rarely zero sum–but one that is nuanced. The city manager stated in the proposed 2013 budget that this budget is a maintenance budget. Yet, they city wishes to grow revenues and increase economic development.

    Taking money away in the short term will cause longer term impacts for numerous organizations, and consequently, the city.

    If Fort Worth nurtures its arts and creative citizens, makes the policy choice of supporting the arts, it will bring in much more than it invests.

    I grew up in surburban Houston, a place without zoning and seemingly any forthought to growth and development. A trip to the museums encompassed a day trip downtown. Nightlife was the movie theater. Street festivals were neighborhood affairs of a lone street with a couple of pies and a few coolers of cold drinks.

    In staying here after TCU, I live in a city that astutely manages its land for development. I have five world class museums within a half mile of each other and can visit them all before lunch. Rooftops, live bands, speak easy cocktails and amazing food are a ticket to any night of the week. Street festivals in this city bring in those across state lines.

    All of this is possible because we have creative people within City Hall who beleive in what our tax dollars do. These creative people live here for some reason or another. And maybe they stayed because they liked it here. Because it’s a city that supports the arts and creativity. Cowboys that rustle the resources to a diverse Culture that is Fort Worth.

  • Miniature Sky

    [wpaudio url=”http://www.pjhstudios.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/minisky.m4a” text=”Patrick J – Miniature Sky” dl=”0″]

  • 31 flavors of ice cream in 30 days

    For the month of June, I gave myself the silly challenge of doing a Baskin Robbins: eating 31 flavors of ice cream. To count, I had to eat at least three spoonfuls of the flavor. I couldn’t cheat by standing at a counter in an ice cream shop and ask for a taste test. Plus, the person behind the counter would get annoyed. They get annoyed if you ask for two taste tests.

    I learned quite a bit in my pursuit of testing my tastes in ice cream. Ben and Jerry’s, on the whole, sits heavily in stomach. Häagen-Dazs slides smoothly across the taste buds. Perhaps it’s the bias of my Texas childhood, but Blue Bell brings about a comforting feeling with a spoonful. Flavors of ice cream have gone corporate sponsored, combining other popular products or even famous brand names. Oreos, Butterfingers, Stephen Colbert, Starbucks. Jumping food mediums seems to be the norm, causing an exponential assortment of choices in a frozen food aisle. Also, conveniently, where the pint used to be the guilty pleasure size for all midnight snack runs, serving containers can be carried away by the armful at three ounces. A pint of ice cream in a Texas summer inside a car can increase unsafe driving speeds.

    Godspeed, I ate ice cream for all three meals one day. I threw a mini ice cream party for snack day at work. The sales clerks at various Walgreens knew me as I rolled in, heading towards the frozen food section. I could have continued this dessert trip for a long time, perhaps six months or more with all the unique flavors of ice cream, and that’s not including the overlap of basic chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, etc. flavors or the assorted vanilla flavors that Blue Bell alone sells. And, potentially, with the advent of Coldstone or Marble Slab, where you can add mix-ins, you can up your flavor count considerably with the permutations and combinations of Heath crunch and a dozen flavors.

    Stats:

    • 7 Ben and Jerry’s
    • 8 Blue Bell
    • 1 Braums
    • 2 Coldstone
    • 1 Dryers
    • 5 Haagen Dazs
    • 1 Marble Slab
    • 1 Starbucks
    • 1 purchased at Trader Joes
    • 4 from restaurants

    The full list is below, and I made note if there was anything interesting related to it, be it by flavor or experiential.

    • Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia: overrated, flavors too subtle.
    • Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie
    • Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup: like a lead weight in my stomach.
    • Ben and Jerry’s Stephen Colbert Americone Crunch
    • Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough: the flavor to kick off the month.
    • Ben and Jerry’s Envision World Peace
    • Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey: Surprisingly good.
    • Blue Bell Cookies and Cream.
    • Blue Bell Red Velvet: Surprisingly good; enjoyed outside while 4 Fort Worth PD officers arrested someone across the street from Sweet Sammie’s.
    • Blue Bell Dutch Chocolate: Mini ice cream party flavor number one.
    • Blue Bell Cotton Candy: frozen torture that didn’t even taste like cotton candy.
    • Blue Bell Crazy Cookie Dough
    • Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla: Mini ice cream party flavor number two.
    • Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip: a classic.
    • Blue Bell Moo-lineum Crunch: interesting mix of flavor.
    • Blue Sushi Green Tea: heavy on the green tea; I’ve had better.
    • Blue Sushi Raspberry Vanilla
    • Braums Peppermint Ice Cream: for a birthday.
    • Coldstone Pine-berry: like a gelato; ate in the company of a 31 year old and a 3 year old.
    • Coldstone Cheesecake: definitely needed a mix in, which I did not do.
    • Dryers Butterfinger
    • Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche: delightful; Walgreen’s sales clerk was impressed I knew how to pronounce it.
    • Haagen Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip
    • Haagen Dazs Butter Pecan
    • Haagen Dazs Rum Raisin: I’m not a rum fan, so why I picked this horrible choice is beyond me. Pirate, maybe?
    • Haagen Dazs Blueberry Crunch: Amazing.
    • Lanny’s Brown Butter: eaten in the company of an engagement celebration and a graduation celebration; also, the last flavor for the month.
    • Marble Slab Coffee
    • Shinjuku Station Red Bean: I love Shinjuku Station. Enjoyed with a swizzle stick and Yamazaki whisky.
    • Starbucks Java Chip Chiller
    • Strawberry mochi: a Japanese style of ice cream I picked up from my first trek to Trader Joe’s.

  • An internet dialogue about music, creation and ownership

    Emily White, an NPR intern, kicked off the discussion early in the week, stating she never made the transition from physical to digital consumption of music.

    I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I’m almost 21, and since I first began to love music I’ve been spoiled by the Internet.

    I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

    Then, Camper  Van Beethoven and Cracker founder, David Lowery, responds with a nearly 3,000 word essay regarding the ethics and philosophy of creating music (or art) and being compensated.

    Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.

    But Jonathan Coulton takes the idea further in a different direction, using Legos to speculate what may happen with physical goods if 3D printers proliferated.

    Your kid loves Legos. He’s got an X-wing fighter kit that he’s super excited about, and as he’s putting it together, one of the little pointy laser turret pieces on the tips of the wings slips out of his hands and falls down the central air conditioning vent. No problem. You fire up the old internet, and you find www.legowarez.to, the small crazy place where all of the Lego nuts go to obsessively upload and catalog 3D scans of every lego piece that has ever existed. This site is ad supported, and some douchebag in Nigeria is getting rich off it. But you find the file for the piece you need, you download it, and a few minutes later you’ve printed out a replacement piece.

    Jay Frank gets curious and uses Google Trends to seek out data about potential piracy.

    Google, as the worldwide leader in search results, is a strong indicator of actual file trade demand. In fact, industry watchdog Moses Avalon argued such this week at New Music Seminar. Yet, when I went to look on Google Insights to see the level of demand for free music by David Lowery’s group Camper Van Beethoven, the message I get is, “Not enough search volume to show graphs.”This basically means, from what I can gather, that less than 50 people per monthin the entire world are even showing intent to steal his music. Statisticians basically refer to this as essentially zero.

    In the broader sense, creators deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the medium or method of distribution. The transition to legal, digital services to do this is only a recent development. Upon discovering Spotify, friends marveled, “How is this legal? There’s so much.” But if there’s no demand for an artist’s work, irrelevancy seems a much steeper price despite whatever medium the art is in.

  • Creating more Caine’s Arcades

    In the 10 minute video, Caine Monroy shows the arcade he built using discarded card board boxes and other supplies behind his father’s shop. It’s a fully realized vision of an arcade with games, a fun pass and prizes. He adapted materials and conformed them into something new, and in a way, it was a means of play to him, to create a mini-business.

    Children like Caine should be nurtured. How to do this? Encourage interests in a playful manner. By this, get a child to describe what they’re doing or what they’ve done. Ask them about other ways to do things. Show them new experiences and how one experience can be combined with another. Creativity is all about making connections with disparate things or ideas and putting them into novel or different contexts.

    If something isn’t wholly original, point out what you find interesting and ask what if questions. If a child is challenged by a what if question, step back and ask about their favorite activities and how those activities apply to the task at hand.

    As a parent, it’s key to expose a child to different experiences. Early in life, reading to a child increases attention spans, curiosity, language skills to express themselves. Seek out field trips for hands on learning and showing them the world. Shy away from using rewards for creative acts–you want a child to develop a strong sense of self-motivation and restraint and to enjoy the process of being creative. Yes, celebrate and recognize the outcome of the creative work, but recognize what they had to do to get to the outcome. Always reframe a child’s failure as a learning experience for them. They can’t change what they did, but they can affect what they do in the future.

    Here’s a detailed list of creativity for children.

  • Google and Duck Duck Go search results comparison

    I couldn’t remember what Apple’s pricing was for their print on demand publishing for books.  So, I googled.

    That’s… not helpful.  Let’s try Duck Duck Go.

    Helpful, easy to see what I need, and answers my question. (Note: screenshots are same size.)

    Just for fun, I blocked out all the non-search result content for the Google version.

    Pitiful.

  • 50,000

    The truck surpassed 50,000 miles

    Good Friday. Heading south on Bryant Irvin under a clear, blue sky. An LCD readout on the rearview mirror tells me it’s 84 degrees, and a rolled down passenger window catches the breeze. After I cruise through the green light at Overton, I change lanes to the right and the iPod fades into the next song, ‘Ho Hey’, by The Lumineers. As I pass a red Nissan Xterra, my grey Chevy Silverado surpasses 50,000 miles.