Last night @ the EMU Student Center, the Lyceum, EMU's undergrad Lit. group, hosted a poetry & music event called Bookstock to benefit Willow Run High School in an attempt to raise money for their book budget. All in all, @ 6 bucks a head, I would guess the raised about 300 clams which could end up being a lot of used paperback books for the English classes. The evening started w/ some poetry by a former student of mine. I had him in an intro to Poetry class and now he's out in the world publishing & performing... and he was really good. In fact, all of the student poets were good. If I were to make a guess, I would say maybe 10 people read their stuff, & it was all really interesting. And none of it was pretentious or self-important like so much poetry is, or like so much of this very blog is. As far as the music is concerned, the 1st band, Nightcap, was really musically interesting. The 1st song was a cool instrumental w/ lots of looping & effects. It was sort of a Zappa meets Particle thing. The singer then cam eon stage and kind of messed w/ the situation. He has a lounge-act style that didn't really mesh w/ their weird electronic stuff. I would definitely check them out again though... and the drummer was another of my former students. The 2nd band is in between names @ the moment, but you can see on the flier that they were called Ill Conceived. This band features Jim & Joe on acoustic guitars playing Son Volt & Ryan Adams tunes. When they played @ Steve & Annette's a couple weeks ago, I accidentally dubbed them "Ill Conceived" so when a Lyceum e-mail went out last week asking for their name, I replied & it stuck long enough to get it on the flier. Of course, neither was too pleased by the moniker so as the MC introduced them he said, "This band was never known as 'Ill Conceived,' but they are now called 'Andre Peltier is a High-On.'" That's obviously a fun name for a band, & I went from being the dude who named them to being their name-sake. Joe was shocked to find out that no one else knew what "high-on" means though as we had to explain afterwards that the phrase was not only specific to SE Michigan, but also to the mid to late '80s. In which case, he really just dated himself, showing how old he is. In my defense, I am not a high-on nor have I ever been. I am an upstanding member of my community: a gentleman & a scholar. The final band, Looking for Mammoths seemed good, but the sound was really bad so it was hard to get a real feeling for how they were. It was too bad too because they were the ones working the soundboard for everyone else, then when they played they were w/o a sound person. Overall, I'm really happy these students were able to pull this off. Well done to all of them.
Friday, February 22, 2008
By the time we got to Bookstock we were half a hundred strong
Last night @ the EMU Student Center, the Lyceum, EMU's undergrad Lit. group, hosted a poetry & music event called Bookstock to benefit Willow Run High School in an attempt to raise money for their book budget. All in all, @ 6 bucks a head, I would guess the raised about 300 clams which could end up being a lot of used paperback books for the English classes. The evening started w/ some poetry by a former student of mine. I had him in an intro to Poetry class and now he's out in the world publishing & performing... and he was really good. In fact, all of the student poets were good. If I were to make a guess, I would say maybe 10 people read their stuff, & it was all really interesting. And none of it was pretentious or self-important like so much poetry is, or like so much of this very blog is. As far as the music is concerned, the 1st band, Nightcap, was really musically interesting. The 1st song was a cool instrumental w/ lots of looping & effects. It was sort of a Zappa meets Particle thing. The singer then cam eon stage and kind of messed w/ the situation. He has a lounge-act style that didn't really mesh w/ their weird electronic stuff. I would definitely check them out again though... and the drummer was another of my former students. The 2nd band is in between names @ the moment, but you can see on the flier that they were called Ill Conceived. This band features Jim & Joe on acoustic guitars playing Son Volt & Ryan Adams tunes. When they played @ Steve & Annette's a couple weeks ago, I accidentally dubbed them "Ill Conceived" so when a Lyceum e-mail went out last week asking for their name, I replied & it stuck long enough to get it on the flier. Of course, neither was too pleased by the moniker so as the MC introduced them he said, "This band was never known as 'Ill Conceived,' but they are now called 'Andre Peltier is a High-On.'" That's obviously a fun name for a band, & I went from being the dude who named them to being their name-sake. Joe was shocked to find out that no one else knew what "high-on" means though as we had to explain afterwards that the phrase was not only specific to SE Michigan, but also to the mid to late '80s. In which case, he really just dated himself, showing how old he is. In my defense, I am not a high-on nor have I ever been. I am an upstanding member of my community: a gentleman & a scholar. The final band, Looking for Mammoths seemed good, but the sound was really bad so it was hard to get a real feeling for how they were. It was too bad too because they were the ones working the soundboard for everyone else, then when they played they were w/o a sound person. Overall, I'm really happy these students were able to pull this off. Well done to all of them.
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4 comments:
Poor Charles--you totally left him out of Andre Peltier is a High-On (or the Peltier Effect). He was instrumental in the band's rise to fame (no pun intended). :-)
Good times. Next time you should definitely scalp tickets.
High-on was used frequently in the mid to late 90's too...that's a nice looking poster they made for the event.
The way he turned hmself down and rarely played made me think he didn't really want to be associated with the band.
Nice.
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