The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
When it comes to my most significant artistic endeavors, I haven't always operated alone. About a decade and a half ago, I was part of a collaborative project at Bill's Records on South Lamar (now Botham Jean Blvd.) with my longtime friend and occasional co-conspirator Alex Pogosov. The project was a reincarnation of an earlier open mic which ran from 2002-2006 at Bill's old location off Spring Valley in far north Dallas. The Lost Art Open Mic, as this later enterprise came to be known, began in May 2010 and ran until early June 2011, and has been chronicled on this site since some of its earliest days. Looking back at all the open mic nights we conducted, there are some that stand out as great successes, and others that I don't recall quite so fondly. Generally those not so fond remembrances are related to instances of low attendance or lackluster performances (or, in two cases, because I felt our event was hijacked). But there's one night in particular that I have largely avoided facing for a long time, one I've always been loath to revisit and hesitant to talk much about. And it isn't because no one showed up or because we had a uniquely terrible performer appear who tortured our ears with a blistering sonic assault. It's a night that became stigmatized in my memory due to the series of events that followed it and the impact they had on one of the primary contributors to our scene. And I'm finally going to talk about it here.
A little over fifteen years ago, I produced and released a compilation of recordings from Alex Pogosov's and my open mic at Bill's Records. This CD, ultimately numbering around 200-250 copies, was conceived as a means of promoting the weekly gathering at Bill's and featured performances by a number of our regulars up to that point in time. More than a decade and a half later, I've had that promotional album cut to vinyl, fulfilling a long harbored fantasy dating all the way back to childhood. I'm just barely old enough to (dimly) remember actual records being played on the radio, and when I was three and four years old I wanted to make one of my own. Today's manufacturing on demand services have now made that possible.
The Lost Art showrunners in 2010. Photo by Lilly Penhall.
In November 2010, I put out a CD. Well, kind of - it wasn't exactly a commercial release, and the sound quality wasn't anything to write home about... and it wasn't even of my own work. A twenty track compilation of eighteen open mic performances bookended by introductory and closing remarks by my creative partner Alex Pogosov, it was put out to promote the open mic we had been running together since May of that year.
Continue reading "Remembering the Live at Lost Art Open Mic CD"
Continue reading "Remembering the Live at Lost Art Open Mic CD"