Occupy the Yellow Sofa--a Rant and a Plea

For too long have the .000000001 percent corporate-sponsored musicians maintained a stranglehold on the megaphone of musical consciousness in this country.

What gigantic thumb on the scales of popular taste accounts for Foreigner's "Double Vision" being played on thousands of trips into Trader Joe's and in the airport news stands where $4.00 bottles of water are sold. I don't mean to single out "Double Vision"--which is a well recorded and composed song. To be honest, after I goofily pretended to boogie out on it, as a joke to my shopping partner, I then found myself a scant few minutes later without mental filter, actually humming it, no more reflectively than a parrot (or leg humping dog) might do. . .

"Ooh, when it gets through to me/
it's always new to me/
My double vision always seems to get the best of me,
the best of me". . .

It is time that we stopped regarding the infinitely echoing soundtrack of competently produced banality as music. It is actually as a kind of vaccination against anyone either caring about music, or trying to make it themselves. Why do Selena Gomez and Foghat get all the fun, while the souls of billions of people at a time of epochal change must die with the music locked within them? Just asking?

We are the 99.99999999 per cent. . .
We are the 99.99999999 per cent. . .

As Mario Savio might have said.

"There's a time when the operation of the mass-media dominated music becomes so odious that you've got to put your fingers on the power buttons, upon the faders, upon the sliders upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless music is free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." That time is tonight.

Come to the Sofa tonight. Listen to real humans like those pictured below, articulating sounds as only doomed, big- brained primates can.

Be one of the people bearing witness to the sublime and ingenious and touching sonic invention and expression that redeems the human experiment to the angels. Be one of these people. Support the Sofa, one of the rare public spaces where it can happen. Make your own music, and listen to music. The whole world is watching. . .(--television, and that's part of the problem). Occupy the space in you and in all of us that isn't!

--A message brought to you by Thursday's Open Mic host,
an unpaid person using the internets

Open Mic Tonight

Tomorrow is Armistice Day--the anniversary of the end of World War I--an event which led people to see criminality and barbarism of elective war as a dead end (and sparked the beginning of the American Public Relations Industry, in order to reverse such common sense in the mass media). If you study or work in a school or work in a government office, chances are you don't go in on Friday. Consider staying out late tonight to celebrate the progress of humanity towards a better world.

Could coming to a cafe for a gathering of live performers bring about world peace? Consider: When a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, so the theory goes, a hurricane forms somewhere eventually.

The Law of Unforseen Consequences isn't just a good idea--it's the Law.

Example: Unseasonably warm weather preserves foliage on trees late into October.
Then, an early, but heavy, snow in the Northeast
weights the leaves and branches,
which causes limbs and trees to sag and break and fall on powerlines,
which causes more than two million people to be without electric power
giving a lot of song writers extra time in unheated homes to write a bounteous crop of new
songs on acoustic instruments
many which get played at the November 3rd Open Mic:

Noah Schmitt (cello) and Rob Douglas (guitar) play Noah's song "Dish After Dish". An insanely catchy tune written from the perspective of a brilliant rock cellist/dishwasher. Rob later debuted two new songs himself, including "To Think That There is Always Hope," a highlight of the evening which he performed in a characteristically humbly-humorous way, (nearly, but not ultimately) obscuring its (and his) fabulousness.

Felix Harvey plays "Sorry, I Missed the Bus," a song of his so finely made, that once heard, it is that is hard to imagine that there was a time before it existed.

Electric (even during power outages) and talented Laura Titrud, who would headline at the Sofa the next night, unveils a newly-written song, last Thursday.

Your correspondent, and bassist Rob Douglas play a new song Thursday night.


Peace Out
--The Yellow Sofa Open Mic

Oh My Gosh I Should Go to the Open Mic Tonight

You know you would be glad.

What the Open Mic is. . .

It is tonight beginning at 7:07 p.m.
It is for anyone who wants 10 minutes on a stage with an appreciative audience.
It ends up being a performing community, but just because people come here a lot, and like what they hear and like each other, but if you like that sort of thing, all you have to do to be part of it, is be there.
It is a place of tremendous possibility that the, with performers and musicians and talkers and stand ups and poets and bands show up in a one of the highest creative talent areas in the northeast, and regularly surprise and amaze those who are there.
Sometimes bands who are going to play at the Iron Horse come in to do a live practice (that has happened more than once).
Sometimes people who have never gotten on stage come up and delight everyone (that has happened a lot.)
It is a place to hang out.
There is middle eastern-style food felafel, babaganosh, soups and more, as well as coffee, and more.
Don't let television win. Come out and take part in live performance. It needs human power.

--Sofa