David Byrne Rocks Seattle

Quickie photos from the David Byrne concert in Seattle a few hours ago.

As many of our eight readers know, I shot the Talking Heads almost 30 years ago in New Orleans for my college paper, The Driftwood. And also, for myself. Awesome to see him again, for the 3rd time, tonite. The show was great and excellent. How awesome to have a birthday boyfriend who loves the same things I do. Happy birthday, Mark Matassa! How does it feel to be 49?

(Check back later for some scanned B&W photos from back in the day.)




For bigger photos go here.

Mother Flippin Rhymenoscerous

A few weeks ago I wrote about the awesome viral campaign Flight of the Conchords -- my favorite band and TV show -- are running. They're asking fans to create videos of themselves lip synching to the Conchords song, Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros. Of course we had to create a MatassaLosi version. Here it is, starring Gina and Franny.

A visit to the rainforest

For a slideshow with larger images go here.

There's audio with this one, so lissen to it!

Pie Tour, Weeks 1 & 2

For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Jazz Fest 2008

One of our big early stops on the Pie in the Sky Tour of America (II) will be to attend the second weekend of the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Here's a slide show of our last trip to New Orleans and to the Jazz Fest:



For a slideshow with larger images go here.

In case you're wondering just how jealous you should be of our Jazz Fest pitstop, here's the lineup:

Friday, May 2

Art Neville, Stevie Wonder, John Prine, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Richard Thompson, John Butler Trio, John Hammond, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Ave., Marva Wright & the BMWs, Terence Blanchard & the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Papa Grows Funk, Sunpie’s Tribute to Clifton Chenier, Zigaboo Modeliste, The Jackson Southernaires, The Lee Boys, Bonerama, The Bad Plus, John Boutté, Soul Rebels, Ingrid Lucia, Coco Robicheaux & Spiritland, Theryl “Houseman” DeClouet, Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band, Bluerunners, Wanda Rouzan, Driskill Mountain Boys, Ann Savoy’s Sleepless Knights, New Orleans Jazz Vipers feat. Sophie Lee, Stoney B & Grampa Elliot, Gina Forsyth & the Malvinas, Clive Wilson & the New Orleans Serenaders feat. Butch Thompson, New Wave Brass Band, Tuba Woodshed feat. Matt Perrine and Kirk Joseph, Belton Richard & the Musical Aces, Eve’s Lucky Planet, Larry Garner with Henry Gray, Ritmo Caribeño, New Orleans Jazz Ramblers, Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, Betty Winn & One A-Chord, Lyle Henderson & Emmanuel, Kid Simmons’ Local International Allstars, Pinettes Brass Band, D.L. Menard & the Louisiana Aces, Legacy – the students of Alvin Batiste, Greater Antioch Gospel Choir, New Orleans Mardi Gras Rhythm Indian Section, Ebenezer BC Radio Choir, Loyola University Jazz Ensemble, Casa Samba, The Smooth Family, Eulenspeigel Puppets of Iowa, Original Big Seven and Original Four SAPCs, McMain High School Gospel Choir, Fi Yi Yi & the Mandingo Warriors, New Orleans School of Circus Arts and ISL, Gospel Inspirations of Boutte, Rosedean Choir of South Africa, Scene Boosters and Old N Nu Fellas SAPCs…


Saturday, May

Marcia Ball, Jimmy Buffett, Diana Krall, Steel Pulse, The Roots, Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Bishop Paul S. Morton Sr. & the Greater St. Stephens Mass Choir, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Henry Butler, Aaron Neville’s Gospel Soul, John Mooney & Bluesiana, the subdudes, New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra, Ruthie Foster, Irvin Mayfield & the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, Savoy Center of Eunice Saturday Cajun Jam, Charmaine Neville, The Dixie Cups, Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, James Andrews, Dr. Michael White & the Original Liberty Jazz Band feat. Thais Clark, Lillian Boutté, Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie, Stephanie Jordan, War Chief Juan & Young Fire, Pine Leaf Boys, Bionik Brown, Treme Brass Band, New Orleans Blues Serenaders, Spencer Bohren, Don Vappie & the Creole Jazz Serenaders, Roddie Romero & the Hub City Allstars, Lil’ Buck Sinegal feat. Rudy Richard, Feufollet, Pinstripe Brass Band, Storyville Stompers Brass Band, Tribute to Max Roach feat. Herlin Riley, Jason Marsalis, and Shannon Powell, Tondrae, Chappy, Danza feat. Evan Christopher and Tom McDermott, Beyond Measure, Lil Nathan & the Zydeco Big Timers, Rumba Buena, Rocks of Harmony, Guitar Lightnin’ Lee, St. Joseph the Worker Mass Choir, Big Chief Ke Ke & Comanche Hunters and White Cloud Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, Leviticus Gospel Singers, Tulane University Jazz Ensemble, Secondline Jammers, New Generation and Undefeated Divas SAPCs, Trouble Nation and Mohawk Hunters Mardi Gras Hunters, Archdiocese of New Orleans Mass Choir, Bester Singers, Donald Lewis, Young Guardians of the Flame, Stephen Foster’s Mid City Workshop Alumni Ensemble, Westbank Steppers, Valley of the Silent Men and Pigeon Town Steppers SAPCs, Golden Blade and Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indians…


Sunday, May 4

The Neville Brothers, Santana, Maze feat. Frankie Beverly, The Raconteurs, Dianne Reeves, Galactic, The Radiators, The Derek Trucks Band, Keb’ Mo’, Rebirth Brass Band, Sonny Landreth, Snooks Eaglin, John P. Kee & the New Life Community Choir, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Tribute to Mahalia Jackson feat. Irma Thomas, Marva Wright and Rachelle Richard, Vernel Bagneris: Jelly Roll & Me, Amanda Shaw & the Cute Guys, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, DJ Captain Charles, Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet feat. Bela Fleck, Kenny Neal, Sherman Washington & the Zion Harmonizers, Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, Elysian Fieldz, The New Orleans Bingo Show!, Benny Grunch & the Bunch, Goldman Thibodeaux & the Lawtell Playboys, Jonathan Batiste, Rotary Downs, George French, Chris Ardoin & Nu Step, Guitar Slim Jr., Grupo Fantasma, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Ovi-G & the Froggies, The Revealers, Pfister Sisters, Salvador Santana Band, William Smith’s Tribute to Kid Sheik, Eddie Boh Paris aka Chops, SUBR Jazz Ensemble, Chris Clifton, Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Ensemble, New Orleans Spiritualettes, Zulu Male Ensemble, The Jazz Jam, Tribute to Tuba Fats, Highsteppers Brass Band, Black Eagles, Hardhead Hunters and Apache Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, Lady Rollers and CTC Steppers SAPCs, Guyland Leday with Family & Friends Zydeco Band, Young Traditional New Orleans Brass Band, Watson Memorial Teaching Ministries, Wild Apaches, Young Magnolias and Black Feathers Mardi Gras Indians, Original Prince of Wales and the Original New Orleans Lady Buckjumpers SAPCs, Tornado Brass Band, Judy Stock, Minister Jai Reed…

If we get there early enough on Thursday, we might be able to stop in for Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and Tower of Power.

The Dogs of Greenlake

For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Europe slideshow

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New M&M site!

If you just can't get enough of M&M, come check out our new supplemental website. Not much there yet, but someday it'll be cool, trust us.

Facebook!

Last year when the girls got into MySpace I reluctantly set up my own account, just so I could keep an eye on them. I'm glad I did. Although they've stayed out of trouble there, I occasionally read a frightening story like this one -- about a girl their age who was so harassed online by the parents of a friend that she ended up killing herself -- that makes me thankful I have a way to supervise.

Anyway, I had managed to avoid Facebook, the so-called grown-up version of MySpace. It's a "social networking" site where people stay in touch with old classmates and colleagues and establish groups of friends with common interests. E-mail is so last century, or so goes the pitch. Then this summer Franny said she had a Facebook account, so I dutifully went online and signed up. Not many of her friends were there so she stopped using the service, and I did too.

But last week I was trolling around the Internet and ran across this very interesting story on Slate by Emily Yoffe, a 50-something writer who decided to stop fighting the Facebook tide and go see what the big attraction was. Her story was so compelling that I signed back on and looked around.

There, I was surprised to find, a bunch of people from the P-I and an old friend from the LA Times had requested to "friend" me. Even more surprising, there was Michelle with a fully developed profile, tons of online friends and little networks of fellow Internet news nerds. An entire ecosystem had taken hold all around me while I wasn't looking.

My first instinct was to run away. I'm not a joiner, for one thing, never have been. And while I like plenty of my potential Facebook "friends" just fine in short bursts in person, I really don't care to be updated with the news that Jen is now single and Candace is now a fan of "The Office." Who cares. Plus what about my own privacy? I don't want to live my stupid life online, with everyone I've ever known one click away from monitoring my likes and dislikes, my moods and "relationships."

But then, I thought, what's this blog anyway? Kinda the same thing. So I clicked around -- on purely a sociological mission, I told myself -- and next thing I new I was friending people, listing favorite movies and compiling a little list of books I might read next. Michelle even found a Facebook poker applet and invited me to join her there (she's already achieved the official status of "Facebook Poker Pro").

Like so much about the Internet, it can be addictive. I see how they make their money. The Los Angeles Times just today has an interesting story about the business model; less than four years ago Facebook was being run out of some kid's dorm room; now it has 54 million users and is valued at something like $15 billion.

I don't know. The last thing I need is another online distraction. I still think it's dumb. And it could steal time from M&M. But it did confirm that Michelle and I are "soul mates," at least where our taste in movies is concerned.

I may be checking in there from time to time.

Here are our stupid profiles:

Mark
Michelle

Oregon Coast Slideshow

For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Maybe smoke was in everyone's eyes

Turning first to the entertainment coverage on a morning when I find a lot in the papers that could be better:

I saw the Seattle Times' venerable rock critic Patrick McDonald at last night's Neil Young concert, hunched at intermission over a laptop with a Verizon wireless card. Good for Patrick, I thought. Next-day coverage, maybe even same-night coverage of a live event! I almost stopped and said hey, but he looked like he was on deadline and I didn't want to interrupt. I needn't have worried, apparently.

No sign of the concert in either local paper or on their web sites this morning. Deep in the Times' site, on the Entertainment page, a purple-shaded box with the photos of two editors offered their "Get Out" recommendation: Neil Young. But when I clicked I got some kind of this-file-is-empty error message. Lame. The recommendation has since been changed to "Spamalot."

I don't get how the papers could punt this. Even if I found the concert a bit disappointing it's a big deal, with a lot of expensive tickets sold, three generations of fans, a brand-new CD being pitched and almost an entire tour left to come. It's news. Sporting events are covered live every day of the year. Come on, man, even M&M was able to post a review by midnight last night.

Update: As of midday the Times has posted McDonald's review -- "a great, unforgettable, powerful show ..." -- and the P-I has posted a nice photo gallery, but still no review.

Moving on: The big news all over the Internet again today is the still-raging SoCal fires. The cool LA Times Google fire maps, first pointed out around these parts by Kaye's great NiteNote blog, have spread like, well, you know. The Seattle Times and P-I have been linking to the LAT map off their front pages, and now I notice the New York Times has gotten into the act with its own, staff-produced, non-Google multimedia map. Pretty good, but no better than the much quicker and totally intuitive Google version.

Although Long Beach hasn't been hit directly by the fires -- Kaye's been keeping us updated -- the LA Times has a good piece today about how topography funnels the smoke right into our old hometown.

The P-I "localizes" the fires with a front-page feature about some evacuating Californians who ended up here in Seattle. It's funny, when people first started leaving their homes down there I thought of the running gag in this year's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" show on HBO, in which a black Katrina-victim family comes to LA to live with Larry David and Cheryl. Maybe next year, I thought, the smoked-out Davids could pack up and head to New Orleans. When they get off the plane some bored-looking couple could say, Oh, you're Jewish! (You'd have to have seen the show for this to make sense, and don't worry, it really wasn't funny the first time around either.)

Other than the fires, which dominate both local front pages, it's one of those days when you could make an argument for two Seattle dailies. The P-I has one of its periodic cold-case murder stories (not my cup, but pretty well done) and a James Wallace takeout on the Airbus A380 superjet, of big interest to local Boeing-heads.

The Times has a good political profile of Richard Pope, a dumbass perennial loser candidate who unexpectedly -- probably even to him -- finds himself in the thick of a race this year because his opponent for the King County Council was caught driving drunk. Good take.

And David Postman, an FOM&M, has a sharp Postman on Politics post about how Republican Dino Rossi should frame his campaign for governor. The other day I complained that both papers were underplaying the news that Rossi would run again. But I also understood the editors' decisions; neither story had more than: He's running again. What they need, I thought, is a good second-day story (but on the first day) that explains why Rossi's decision is important and spins it forward. Postman, who is a good political reporter and must have had some brilliant direction somewhere along the way, gets that. His post still could be fleshed out a bit in story form and run in the paper, but it's a good start.

Paging down his blog, I notice he took a typically Postmanesque swipe at his bosses, complaining that his coverage of Hillary Clinton's Seattle visit was buried and providing a link to his own story. But it's followed immediately by this: "UPDATE: Apparently I wasn't paying attention and the story was on the homepage. Apologies to all. I hadn't had coffee yet." Sigh. As I've told my friend David a thousand times, Be cool, man.

Finally, in sports news, tonight is the beginning of the World Series. It looks like a decent matchup between the storied Boston Red Sox and the come-from-nowhere Colorado Rockies, this year's Cinderella story. But the LAT's terrific sports columnist Bill Plaschke isn't buying it.

Plaschke, who was from Seattle before moving to Los Angeles, minces no words in his take: "The Red Sox are a much better team from a far superior league. The Rockies are the Seattle Mariners with galoshes."

Ouch.

"So the most celebrated glass slipper in recent baseball history comes clacking to the World Series," Plaschke writes. "Good. The Boston Red Sox can use it to drink their champagne."

Bill's probably right. Still. I know where I'll be at 5 o'clock.

The Dinner of Dinners: Now featuring, the slideshow

You have heard of the King of Kings, my friends. Well, dinner at the Cohen's last night was the dinner of dinners. Observe: How to put on a kick ass dinner party, by Kaye and Val Cohen:



For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Farmer's Slideshow

For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Check out our tag cloud

At technorati. Cool.

Also, check out the new Facebook page I made for the Knight Digital Media Fellows group. I've been a Facebook refusnik for a long time, but they do give you a lot of cool group tools. It was quick and easy to upload 24 photos, start a form and post a notice. Pretty handy set of tools.

What's up with the yard?

I'm so glad you asked!



For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Val Makes Pizza!

If you're looking for a delicious quick dinner to make, check out this cool new fig pizza recipe Kay posted over at her site, The Nite Note. It's a really gorgeous slideshow. I love the Italian colors she's got going in the photos.

She used the Soundslide software that I use here -- and that most news sites are currently using to create slideshows. One of my big plans at Seattlepi.com is to start asking our readers to submit their own recipe slideshows, just like this.

If you'd like to try making a slideshow, I can't recommend Soundslides strongly enough. It's so incredibly easy. Basically, you open the program, and it asks you: Oh, you want to make a project? Okay, what file will you save it in?

You select a file and it says, Okay, now where's the pictures at?

You browse for the folder where you've saved your project folders and bang -- the program assembles the whole thing for you. Then you go through and drag and drop the pictures until they're in the order you like. You can add captions, a title, and bang. You're done. 10 minutes.

Really an amazing piece of software.

If you are interested in narrarating your Soundslide it's super easy to add an audio file. (Where's the audio file at?) Just like with the photos, you point the program at the audio file on your computer and woosh, it uploads it. You drag a little slider around to change the timing of when the pictures come up in the audio. Super easy.

You can get Soundslides here for 70 bucks -- and incredible bargain.

You can get a free and relatively intuitive audio editing software here.

While I'm at it, perhaps the best free photo editing software is Picasa, offered by Google.

What to see how cool your results can be? Check out the seattlepi.com's past soundslides here.

Need to upload your soundslide to the interconnected tubes of the Web? CuteFTP is my favorite free software for doing that.

Need a place to upload them to? Blogger's free, dude. Get to work.

Making Pie

This isn't all the way done yet, but here's a start on the Soundslide on how to make pie...



For a slideshow with larger images go here.

Blackberries

Today we are making a blackberry pie. Blackberries are in season right now -- there's ripe juicy berries all through the alleys just waiting to be picked. Here's some pix of the girls having a taste of the berries we picked last week.



For a slideshow with larger images go here.

San Fran slideshow

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