So, you all remember that little music festival I’ve been doing for seven years? The one that was in May and took up an entire weekend for me? We had some people out from ReelFM.tv filming and they put together a pretty good video with a sort of recap.

Get a feel for what the festival is actually like (if you’ve never been). It really is a big job that I have loved for the last chunk of my life. But also one I have come to peace with leaving, if it ever came to that.

Anyway, check it out:

I didn’t have an incredibly great week last week. It started out pretty good but got increasingly poor as the days went on. This weekend was a blessing of a break. Even though we did a lot of driving I was still able to get away from here and that was good.

Saturday we drove to Poplar Bluff in Southern Missouri for my friend Ryan’s wedding. It was a 3 1/2 hour drive, but entirely worth it to see him get married. I also got to see my good friend Rod who lives on the East Coast now.

And we slept in. That was really nice. Today we went to the bookstore and I picked up Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue which I’ve been eyeing for a while. I’m excited to start reading it tonight before bed. I think it’s going to be really interesting.

But I am not excited to have work tomorrow. I need a break. I need an extended vacation. I need some time to recover. I haven’t had any time away from work since Christmas and I am definitely starting to feel the effects. I was going to take Jessica to Six Flags last week but didn’t feel I was able to after some things that happened at work and with Kevin taking Friday off. So hopefully I will be able to work out a long weekend this week and we can take care of these cheap Six Flags tickets I have.

And today was Father’s Day. Looks like I will finally be starting on a design for my dad’s site which is good. He needs it and I have a good idea for what I’m going to do design-wise. Hopefully  I’ll have some more freelance coming my way in the near future.

DeanFields.com

Hey, hey. We just launched a new site built on WordPress and using my Prodigious theme.

I built the site for this guy called Dean Fields. He plays some pretty awesome folk-Americana-alt.country sort of music that you should check out. And you should also check out his fantastic new site.

A couple of things: Contrary to what the listing in portofolio says, we didn’t use the Gigs Calendar plugin (which is fantastic, by the way). Dean had a thing going with this ArtistData.com website and he organized all his shows there. The site was a bit tough to work with but I was able to get a raw XML feed to parse for the Upcoming Shows feature. That’s probably what took the longest. The “all shows” view is just an iframe from Artist Data — which I kind of hated to do, but it was the easiest and nicest looking solution.

As far as browsers go, I haven’t done much debugging for IE7 yet. But if you’re here reading my blog you probably don’t use IE7 regularly. Looks great in Safari and Firefox.

The “photo” on the front uses the jQuery Cycle plugin. It’s super cool and I’ve used it on a couple of other projects.

In any case, go check out his new site and his music!

www.deanfields.com

Jess and I are going to see The Elms tonight in St Louis. Should be a ton of fun.

I love $6 shows. And spur-of-the-moment concert outings. Plus I’m not sure we’ve been to a concert this summer yet.

It’ll be a good break from all of this junk going on with work projects. I found out we need to put some Chinese content on the site.

Yeah, I don’t really speak Chinese…

I’ve been sort of obsessed this year with a couple of specific times in American history. The first is the 1920s-30s, and the Golden Age of Aviation. I find the style and class of those days enthralling and engrossing. Beyond that, I love the designs that happened then. I guess this could extend a bit more forward into the early 40s and the beginnings of WWII. Hence, the way this blog is designed (more in the British fashion than American, however).

I love the typestyles and rounded motifs. I love the music and the clothing and hairstyles of that era. I love the shapes airplanes took during that time and cars and travel posters. The idea of wireless radio being pretty novel and prohibition causing raids on night clubs. The glamour of the cities… Indiana Jones. It all brings out a strange sort of longing in me to be on the cusp of the new. It tends to bring out the adventurer in me… and makes me long to create… for some reason. The stories and imagery of that time serves as a muse for me.

But I am fairly positive that many of those feelings stem out of the nostalgia of it all. If I lived then, I’m sure my feelings toward the world would be much the same as the ones I have now. Hopefully not, but probably.

The other time period in American history I am currently engrossed in is the mid-1800s. Our larger cities were growing up and the the West was being settled. The Mexican-American War was fought, the California Gold Rush filled the hills and territories of the West coast with people from all over the world, and what has become a patchwork quilt was still a melting-pot with immigrants arriving to start new lives in the throws of a young nation that was ‘free’–a truly novel concept at the time.

I’ve been reading a book this past week called Heydey by Kurt Andersen that deals with these issues and it is absolutely addictive.

The story follows four different people; three of them are New York natives while the fourth is a recent English immigrant. As their lives become too confined and ordinary for their tastes, the group heads West to see what they can make of their fortunes.

I haven’t finished the novel yet but I love it so far. I always enjoyed the old cowboy stories and the legends of cowboys and Indians. Having grown up in Southern California, I heard a lot of California history in school. That included our rich Mexican history and heritage and all of the wars fought out West during the 19th century.

But I have to confess that after moving out to the Midwest for college, I kind of started to forget all of that. Or at least to not pay any attention to that time period. I never liked Westerns — though I once cruised on a boat formerly owned by John Wayne, I never enjoyed his films (except for The Quiet Man, excellent film), I always found them hokey or just kind of boring. But the stories and books were my favourite. They were just exciting to me. I still love the tales of Zorro and the old cowboy songs my grandpa used to play on the guitar.

The history of the California Gold Rush always made me happy–learning about Sutter’s Mill and then seeing the ghost towns left behind where mines were. I was lucky to have many of those nearby when I was a kid. We’d travel to Calico Ghost Town a lot and even our amusement parks were western themed.

In any case, I was inundated early on with the legends of the Old West and today those recollections create a nostalgia that makes me yearn for excitement and adventure and change.

So, what am I going to do with all of this? I’m not sure. But I think I’ve got the beginnings of my NaNoWriMo novel for this year. It’s going to have to do with a Soviet spy who wakes up in the American Midwest during the 30s. Haven’t got particulars down, but I’ve got till November.

And that is what has been interesting me lately.

Um, so I need a vector drawing done for a new project.

If you’re interested in having some fun doing a small logo-ish illustration and/or want to do me a favour, I’d appreciate it. I kind of suck at Illustrator (most of the time).

I hate having the idea in my head and not being able to put it on a digital canvas. But… yeah. Maybe I should just practice more.

I have a fun new site coming out soon I think… I’m a little excited about it.