It was a beautiful grey day at Ocean Beach last Thursday, when I participated in a beach cleanup with the Metallica crew and some folks from the S.F. Giants, sponsored by the Surfrider Foundation. Kirk and Robert of Metallica were there, as was Giants pitcher Jeff Samardzija. Met the CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, Chad Nelson, who had flown up from SoCal for the celebrity-studded janitorial opportunity. The Surfrider Foundation does great work – check them out.
Zen Jam News
New York filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland will be appearing and showing some of her films at Anthology Film Archives in New York City this Thursday at 7:30pm. Tessa is one of the defining figures of the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements of the 1980s. A full description of her work can be found on the Anthology Film Archives web site. Tessa has used my music in a few of her films – Hippy Home Movie, Gift and Watch Out…
Rob K — trash-blues artist extraordinaire, and front half of both the Jam Messengers and the Workdogs — has broken through to academia. Rob's solo work, the Purgatory Home Companion, has come to the attention of the Dante scholar Arielle Saiber, associate professor of romance languages at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Professor Saiber is co-editor of a blog called Dante Today – Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture…
We have an update in the works for the Henry Jackson iPad app we developed earlier this year. A refresh was in order to make sure the app continued to work well with the new version of iOS. The update is currently under review at Apple, and we expect it to be available on the App Store within a week or two. The video in this post is the short "studio visit" video we made as part of the multi media package included…
We recently launched a new web site for San Francisco-based singer-songwriter Mary Kelley, officially titled "Mary Kelley Music." We have been working together for a few years now, producing recordings, arranging tunes, playing instruments and even co-writing some songs with her. The Tumblr-based web site finally gives Mary an anchor for her material, a place for her to show what she can do and for people interested in her work to find out more…
The iPad app I developed for artist Henry Jackson has been approved by Apple, and is now available for download on the iPad App Store. The app is essentially a 21st Century update of an artist catalog, with high-rez imagery that one can pan around and zoom in to, audio clips and video. A navigation system and help system is also built in. Similar iPad apps could be developed for other artists to showcase their work, or for art galleries to produce catalogs of specific shows…
In an effort to broaden the services I can offer, I've undertaken to learn how to use the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. This set of add-on features for InDesign allows one to develop digital versions of publications designed in InDesign. In the case of magazines it can be used to develop the kind of publication you might find in the Apple App Store's Newsstand, such as the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. The system can also be used for other types of…
Issue 20.4 of So What! magazine, Metallica's fan club publication, was finally released at the beginning of February, 2014. The release of last year's final issue was delayed by the band for a couple of months, in order to confirm some of the juicy details on their upcoming activities. Better that than a retraction. They were also busy in December, as they and their entourage travelled down to Antarctica to shoot a commercial for Coke Zero…
Here's a preliminary mix of new song that San Francisco singer-songwriter Mary Kelley and I have been working on, entitled "John Donne's Song," an adaptation of a poem of that name by 16th century English poet John Donne. This all-acoustic piece is a bit of a departure for us, much more traditional and spare than the majority of our pieces. But it's got a great feel and still fits in well with Mary's other work. Aside from Mary and myself, the piece features…
In mid-September, only a few weeks after printing issue 20.2, we slammed out issue 20.3 of this year's series of So What! magazines. The issue was fast-tracked so that its release could be timed with the release of Metallica's new movie, Through The Never. It was a crazy deadline, but all concerned – editorial staff, design and production, pre-press and printing – rallied to get the job done. The issue was entirely devoted to movie-related content…