Paul Ryburn's Journal

If you’re into the blues, check out the Center for Southern Folklore, on the Main Street Mall just south of Gayoso, tonight at 8 PM.  The Daddy Mack Blues Band’s new documentary DVD, by Jim O’Donnell, will be screened at 8 and the band will perform at 9.  $5 cover.  Details below, pasted from an e-mail they sent me:

The Daddy Mack Blues Band and cinematographer Jim O’Donnell celebrate the official DVD release of “Plain Man Blues,” the Daddy Mack documentary that premiered last fall at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.  The fun starts Saturday, July 26 at 8:00 p.m. with a screening of the documentary followed by a blistering set by the Daddy Mack Blues Band at the Center for Southern Folklore Store located at 123 S. Main @ The Peabody Place Trolley Stop.  Admission for the DVD party is free while the cover for the live concert afterward is only $5.00.

DVDs of “Plain Man Blues” are now available for sale in the Folklore Store for $18.99.  You can also pre-order your copy by emailing store@southernfolklore.org or calling the Folklore Store @ 525-3655.

“Plain Man Blues” traces the late blooming career of Daddy Mack Orr who taught himself how to play guitar at the age of 45 after years of picking cotton, working construction and starting his own auto repair shop.  Now in his sixties, Mack makes his living fixing cars by day while playing the blues music he loves nights and weekends.  His talent was apparent early on when he joined the legendary Memphis-based blues band, The Fieldstones. As the leader of his own band, Mack and his crew have entertained audiences around the world from fish fries in Paris, TN to music festivals in Paris, France.  Along the way, he has achieved success as a recording artist with three consecutive albums in the Top Ten of the national blues charts – “Fix It When I Can,” “Slow Ride” and “Bluestones.”  Even so, life as a musician doesn’t come easy and Mack is still waiting to hit the big time.  “Plain Man Blues” shows what it takes for Mack to make it as a blues artist and the road he took to get there.

The creative force behind “Plain Man Blues” is Jim O’Donnell, an independent Memphis filmmaker.  He produced and directed the award-winning documentary “Ray4theNBA,” which aired nationally on College Sports Television, as well as, being screened at film festivals throughout the country.  He has produced several Memphis-centric documentaries such as “The Party Ain’t Stopped Yet,” about the closing and re-opening of The Center for Southern Folklore and “75 Years of Pink,” the history of Memphis’ Pink Palace Museum, as well as the fiction film “Presumed Dead.”  O’Donnell has also been nominated for a Regional Emmy for his work as a photojournalist.  He is a graduate of The University of Memphis Department of Communication’s Graduate Program.

For more info on Daddy Mack and “Plain Man Blues”, check out: http://www.insidesounds.com/artists.php?ArtistId=1693

http://www.plainmanblues.com/

Last night was “Christmas in July,” a fundraiser for Make-a-Wish at the Red Rooster, with The Dempseys, The Plaintiffs, and Frankie Hollie and the Noise.  Here are a few pics.

The rooster guarding the front door was in the Christmas spirit.

Christmas decorations, a Christmas tree, and the Dempseys.

Sam the thinking elf

Me with August BFF of the Month candidates Kristin and Darbi.  Note that Darbi has a tube top on.

Outside:  A Christmas tree, snow machine, a sleigh, and reindeer.

The Plaintiffs rocked it out onstage and got the crowd dancing.

The St. Jude scientists make a blog appearance for the second consecutive day.

My co-worker Tanner, making a rare Rooster appearance.

Darbi liked The Plaintiffs so much, she tried to get on stage and sing with them.

Here’s a link to the full photo album (44 pics). It’s a shame The Dempseys played as early as they did (6 to 7), because they sounded incredible on the Rooster’s stage.  Hopefully the club will bring them back for a full-length performance sometime soon.

It was a block party, with bands inside and outside… but July is a rough month to throw a block party.  With temps around 90 and mosquitoes biting, most people chose to stay inside the club.  I felt sorry for the girls working the 4 outside beer stations, who weren’t making any money.

There were a lot of people inside though, which is a good thing because they raised some serious money for Make-a-Wish.  I tip my hat to the Rooster for finding a way to give back to the community and provide some quality entertainment at the same time.

Plans for today:  I’m going to walk up to the Election Commission and cast my vote, for Steve Cohen of course.  Then I’m going to spend the afternoon building my next website.  Tonight:  Not sure, no definite plans.  I’m 50% on skipping brunch tomorrow, depending on the progress I make on my website today.

Probably more blog posts to come this afternoon, since I’ll have the laptop with me.

There’s a yellow booth giving away free King Cotton hot dogs outside Easy Way at Main and Jefferson this morning.

Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger turns 65 tomorrow, and as such, will be eligible to receive 91 pounds (about $180) per week in benefits, according to this article.  That pension should nicely supplement the $558 million his band grossed on their 2005-07 world tour, and should provide him a little extra financial cushion in case his $450 million net worth is not enough to support him for the rest of his life. 

Happy birthday to Mick, and here’s hoping there’s another Stones album and tour to come, if they can ever get guitarist Ron Wood to sober up.

I’ve been hearing about a new video camera called The Flip which is only about the size of a pack of cigarettes, starts and stops recording with the touch of one button, and which is relatively inexpensive (not much more than a hundred bucks).  They’re becoming the rage to whip out and film at parties and clubs.

Hmmm… I can see another use for this.  On the Handling-Panhandling group, we’ve been trying to get video evidence of Downtown’s most aggressive panhandlers in action, following people and harassing them for money.  Of course, when they see us whipping out big, bulky cameras and video cameras, they quickly stop their activities and leave the area until we go away.  But if this new camera is the size of a pack of cigarettes – and I’m thinking maybe it can be disguised as a pack of cigarettes – this may be a way to get video of the species bummus downtownis in its native habitat, behaving as it naturally would in the wild.

Fellow Downtown Memphis blogger Sig shot me an e-mail this morning to let me know that there’s something even cooler out there than OpenOffice, which I recommended yesterday.  It’s called PortableApps, and it’s an entire suite of open-source software that you can carry around with you on any storage device – for example, a USB flash drive, iPod, or external hard drive.

Being able to carry all your software, files, and bookmarks around with you has a number of advantages.  I can see this being especially useful if the main computer you use is not a computer you own.  For example, if you use the computer lab at school, you can use the word processor running on your flash drive with your customized settings and preferences, rather than the school’s.

It’s also useful because it doesn’t leave a footprint… no evidence is left of what you’ve been doing on the computer you’re using.  This could be handy if, for example, you want to use your office computer to edit your resume.

Sig tells me that he has an 8 GB flash drive with PortableApps installed, and still has 7 GB left for files.  That’s really cool.  Sounds like a real winner.  We’re starting to see a lot of innovations in software, and this time around they’re not coming from the big dogs like Microsoft.

These two St. Jude scientists have been trying to figure out what to do to get on my blog for months:

Finally the one on the left figured it out:  Wear a tube top!  It may not be Tube Top Month anymore, but still, tube tops are a good way to get your pic on the blog year ’round.

Finally made it to the Peabody rooftop party last night, and had a very good time.  I’ll try to make it back next week for their season finale with Dr. Zarr’s Amazing Funk Monster.

Got to get to work right now, but I’ll be back later today with cool technology stuff and more reader comments on the Trader Joe’s/wine in grocery stores debate.

I’ll be at the Red Rooster at 6 to support Make-a-Wish and catch The Dempseys.

There’s an excellent recap of the CCC’s forum on re-opening Main Street to cars on the Memphis Limelight blog.  You can read it here.

For the past year, I’ve been debating what to do when it’s time to replace my laptop, which is now 2 years old. One option would be to buy another PC-based laptop, probably from Dell (although, I’ve had good luck with my current Gateway laptop). However, I’ve always wanted a Mac, and have thought about a Mac laptop even at the extra cost. Well, yesterday, a co-worker REALLY made me want a Mac. Our VP of development showed me his new iMac, with 24-inch screen, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive. Not only does it run MacOS, but it runs Windows and CentOS (a flavor of Linux) at the same speeds those operating systems would run on PCs. It cost more than your average computer ($2500) but it’s like getting three computers in one, without even one tower to sit awkwardly on or under your desk (the screen itself is the computer). With 500 GB storage, there’s plenty of room for each operating system’s files. Not to mention that the display is the best looking display I’ve ever seen. Wow. I really really want one.

However, being a mobile person, I actually wouldn’t choose the 24″ iMac, but rather a Mac laptop, probably a MacBook Pro with 15.4″ screen (they make them with 20″ screens but those are too big to fit into a standard backpack or laptop case). The top-of-the-line MacBooks come with only a 250 GB hard drive, but I could still probably find a way to make that work, given that I don’t do extensive video editing. My current laptop has a 100 GB hard drive and I’m not even close to running out of space. There are three options for running Windows on Macs, all three are available for MacBook Pros, and all three appear to give acceptable performance. I’d probably install Linux too, just for cross-browser, cross-OS testing of my websites.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying out more and more open-source and free software. I’m now of the opinion that people shouldn’t have to pay for any software products except operating systems and small niche products. There’s just too much good free stuff out there to pay. I’ve been using OpenOffice for a year now, especially the word processor OpenOffice Writer, which is not only as good as Microsoft Word, it’s BETTER. And free.

This weekend I downloaded The GIMP, an open-source image/photo-editing program that has been around for years. Due to all the collaboration in the open-source community, all the sharing of ideas, the GIMP is now on par with Photoshop in terms of capabilities. After downloading and installing, I fired it up, and was immediately like, “WTF?” I had no idea how to use it. I had heard The GIMP has something of a learning curve (Photoshop does too), but it’s worth it once you understand how to manipulate images. So I got on Amazon and ordered Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional. Once it arrives I’ll start learning The GIMP. I’d much rather spend $31 on a book to learn a program as good as Photoshop than to spend over $600 on Photoshop itself.

Hmmm… maybe I’ll do a page of the best open-source and free software.  I recommended Nvu to a friend the other day.  It’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get web page editor that lets you design the page on screen (you don’t have to know HTML).  It does almost everything FrontPage can do, and it’s free.  There’s lots of software like that out there.  Yep, I think I’ll put an info page together.

Lunch break is over… I had crawfish enchiladas at Cafe 61, then stopped home to do this post.

This week I didn’t forget.

• Mean Green Music Machine on the Peabody rooftop.  6-10 PM, $5 cover, ladies free ’til 8.  This is the next to last rooftop party of the season, and don’t forget, it’s Wired Memphis night, where IT, marketing, advertising, PR, and entrepreneurial professionals are invited to network.
• Reba Russell on the Madison rooftop, 5:30-10:30 PM, $7 cover.
• Jazz and blues by two people whose names I can’t remember on the rooftop of the River Inn of Harbor Town on Mud Island.  Also Ladies’ Night at Tug’s restaurant with half-off drinks for ladies.
• Party on the Patio with the Mississippi Mudslingers and Q107.5 at EP Delta Kitchen, 9:30-’til
• Deep Shag at the Flying Saucer, 9:30 PM, $3 cover.
• Gabby Johnson at the Red Rooster
• Eric Hughes Blues Band at Ground Zero
• Frankie Hollie and the Noise at Alfred’s
• ’80s for the Ladies Night at Hollywood Disco (Raiford’s) with doors opening at 9, mixed drinks and Bud Light quarts served
• Boy does our crowd suck night at Club Atlas
• Team trivia at TJ Mulligan’s Pinch

I’m going to try to make it to the Peabody rooftop tonight to do some “Wired Memphis” networking and dance and drink.  After that, don’t know… Saucer or Rooster probably, will play it by ear.