Jaysus! What happened to the “Majestic” Ventura Theater?

This place where I’ve spend so many evenings jammed onto a urine-stained, main floor mosh pit, even coming out of there covered in sweat and with a bloody nose, seemed to have morphed into a rest home for the labotmized last night.

With a couple of exceptions there wasn’t even so much of a head bob going on as TR buried the room with a freaking wall of heavily distorted strato-noise.

I doubt if we’ll ever see him there again after such a disgraceful turnout of sleepy geriatrics.

I didn’t really get any photos worth spending more than a second with except for the above, taken upstairs outside the bathrooms.

Took this with the iPhone, there’s something I like about the smeary blues from the star print wallpaper up there. Kind of errie.

Ah, weekend.

Here it is Sunday afternoon, 2:15 and I’m still sitting here in my boxers, only. This is not a pretty sight.

My boxers are green with little snowmen on them, maybe the snowmen help to subliminally cool me off since it’s probably like at least 90 degrees outside. Which I’m not complaining about since last weekend — Labor Day — we couldn’t go outside at all. I think the high was around 116.

So it’s much better this weekend. Ninety degrees is very tolerable.

Later on tonight we’re actually going to drive up to our beloved Ventura, go to our beloved Ventura Theater to see Todd Rundgren.

OK, please. Don’t start with the “Oh, isn’t he the guy that did ‘Hello It’s Me’ back in the 70s?”

Yes, that’s him. But for those of you who aren’t any more familiar with him than that (ie all of you) you should know that there is so much more to TR than Hello It’s Me and Bang the Drum.

I won’t — even though I could — go on for page after page describing his 40+ year career but suffice it to say that he’s been one of the most influential and innovative musician/songwriter/producers ever, always breaking new ground in progressive rock, synthesizers, recording techniques, interactive CDs and DVDs, video and computer programming.

He’s recorded in any number of different musical genres and is one of the most sought after producers in the business. He also sings like an angel and plays guitar as if straight from his testicles.

Am I a fan? Duh.

I’ve probably been to his concerts at least 30 times in 3 different states, own 29 of his CDs or vinyl albums, talked to him on the phone, shook his hand numerous times and finally met him and had my photo taken with him at some record store, which is now defunct, in Hollywood.

That photo is currently in hard copy form only or I’d post it here. It lives somewhere in a box in the rafters of my garage. I’ll get it down and scan it someday.

The photo above was taken at the Royal Oak Theater in Detroit probably around 1978. That’s Kasim Sultan playing bass, Willie Wilcox on drums and Roger Powell playing moogs etc.

This is the core of what would end up being his band Utopia.

Todd’s playing a black Strat through a Marshall stack, not seen.

So, we’ll be up late tonight and I’ll get up early for work tomorrow, tired and hungover, kind of like today.

Hopefully I’ll get a couple of photos worth posting here tomorrow but that’s unlikely since the best camera I’ll have will be a point and shoot Canon or my iPhone.

Stay tuned.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

WordPress up and running. Goodbye iWeb. Righteous!!

This is all starting to take a decent form now.  WordPress pretty much kicks ass. After a couple of days getting things configured correctly on my host server and with a little practice it actually looks fairly close to what I was trying to do previously in iWeb. You know, I love the Mac and most Apple software and iWeb really has some sweet features, not the least of which is it’s Aperture aware, meaning it “sees” my entire Aperture library and I could select images from the library directly in iWeb, drag em into the page and they just resize to fit the way you want them.

Very nice but of course the program is written for your aunt Bernie who has a new iMac and a Canon Elf and she just spang (sprung) the $100 for a subscription to dotMac. So if you publish your blog or website to dotMac, it works really nice and it’s easy as shit.

But I don’t have, or want, dotMac. Besides I already pay somebody every month for hosting services so I wanna get the most out of that service that I can. Not to mention the cleaner URL to tresgatos.net.

Keep watching, all two of you, this could actually get interesting.

The above photo taken during the most recent Art Walk in downtown Ventura. This was in the elevator at what I call “Hotel Freakshow.”

Long story.

No less than 5 people asked me today, “So, aren’t you sorry you got your iPhone the day after they came out?”

This of course was a reference to the fact that Apple released a bunch of new iPods today and announced they were discontinuing the 4GB iPhone and lowering the price of the 8GB by $200 to $399. This is $100 cheaper than my 4GB cost.

I answered honestly, “Naw, I’m not sorry, now I can afford to buy another one.”

This pretty much shut them up.

The fat person in the mirror is me taking this photo with … my 4GB iPhone.