LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to local film aficionado, LFM advocate, and personal hero, John Beifuss, for his outstanding journalistic efforts appearing in today's CA.  THANKS JOHN!!!

Photo courtesy of JD Graffam (clickboom.com)

Check out the Beifuss article: Site for the city

Listen to songs about Beifuss!! Hey Mr. Beifuss by Scandaliz Vandalistz

Don't forget - LFM birthday celebration tomorrow night @ 7pm.  Click for more info.

Photo by Mike Maple // Buy this photo

The Live From Memphis crew clowns around on the set: Brad Phelan, Andy Bond, Chris McCoy (chair), Sarah Fleming and Christopher Reyes, Eric Swartz (with balloon) and Jonathan Postal (ladder.) Live From Memphis works "to promote Memphis and its people," according to Reyes.

James Brown was known around the world as "the hardest-working man in show business."

Christopher Reyes and Sarah Fleming work nonstop to keep Live From Memphis functional and purposeful.

But those in the know in the Mid-South will tell you the hardest-working folks in the arts-and-entertainment community may be Christopher Reyes and Sarah Fleming, the ubiquitous and apparently tireless camera-slingers, artist-wranglers, video producers, Web designers and all-around masterminds behind Live From Memphis, a company that works "to promote Memphis and its people," in Reyes' words, with a Web site (livefrommemphis.com) and numerous online video projects that offer a definitive guide to local arts and culture.

MOre

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/jan/28/site-for-the-city/

The first sign that it's time for the annual International Blues Challenge are all of the people with guitar cases roaming Downtown. Sure, it's Memphis, and that means that there are always random people roaming around with guitar cases, but it's the sheer numbers of them that tips you off. For three days, the 26th International Blues Challenge had bands and individual performers playing 25-minute sets separated by 10-minute setup breaks in 12 venues, including the Orpheum, on Beale Street. That adds up to a lot of guitars.

I've been in New York since the end of December. I've posted another blog on my website with similar photos but I wanted to still keep my LFM blog about Memphis despite me being in New York. Luckily, there happens to be Memphis-transplants here in New York like I am. My goal for this blog is post photos of my experience here as a photographer from Memphis living in New York. Check out what I've been up to after the cut:

One of the materials I’ve been most inspired by in the last year is felt!

Now this is not the felt of Joseph Beuys that's easy for me to love and is industrial grade and beautifully thick, but rather the felt of craft stores that comes in those awful little sheets.

OMW to a flipside shoot back in the summer, yeah on my bike!

Xtracycle with Ghost River Beer... yeah baby. Shave Ice machine inside the black case...ready to party. heh

Hello, loyal LFM readers.  You may have noticed that this blog temporarily didn't exist (or at least that it hasn't been updated since September).  All I can say is, "my bad."  It is a New Year's resolution of mine to do a better job with this thing here, so in honor of that, I present the following:

2009 IN PICTURES!

(Yes, yes - the easy and inevitable "year-in-review" post.  Keep in mind, these are photos from shows/events that I either played or attended, so I'm in some.  Also, all photos by me and Jennifer.)

Shabbadoo @ the Shangri-La Records "Valentine's Day Massacre" show.  This show was tons of fun.

Booker T performing with the Drive By Truckers @ Bonnaroo 2009.

I really should've written this post sooner. I say that because what I want to talk to you about—my deep, rapturous and newfound adoration for Star and Micey—was born this week as a result of the fact that their self-titled album has been streaming on Spinner. And I should've told you sooner, because it's only going to last the week and frankly, I want you to fall head over heels for this record, too.

So E.J. called me last night to talk about Jay Reatard. He said he had found out about it at the Willie Mitchell memorial. I heard it from my wife, who saw it on Twitter. I couldn't believe it. I thought the Goner Records site had been hacked by one of Reatard's internet stalkers. But no, it was true.

E.J. and I talked for a good half-hour, a meandering conversation about Memphis music and Jay's place in it. We kept coming back to the same theme: As Memphis music bloggers, we felt a duty to write about Jay's passing, but neither one of us knew what to say. Here I am, the next day, writing this, and I still don't know what to say.

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Developed by the American Museum of Natural History, this six minute video zooms out from the Himalayas of Tibet, pulling farther and farther from earth to the limit of the observable universe — the afterglow of the Big Bang.

So after Novembers big Hard Drive crash which cost us a little over $3500 for data recovery, we decided it was time to invest into a better but affordable backup solution. We went with the ShareSpace 8TB 4-bay Gigabit Ethernet Network Storage System with RAID. It was a little over $1,000 for each unit for a total of 16TB. Why would you want this kind of storage solution vs. the standard 1TB for $100? Well, the great thing about these drives is that the fact that you can stick them on you network without a computer and share them between several computers on you local network. Another nice thing about them is that you can set them up for RAID 5. What is RAID 5 you ask? RAID 5 lets you take the 4 2TB drives and it allows them to act as a single volume with automatic backup. However, you don't actually get a full 8TB because 1/4 of the total space is used for backup. The system also monitors the internal drives and if a drive goes bad, it lets you know via sending you an email. All you have to do then is pull the bad drive out and replace it with a new one and the system will then automatically copy your data onto the new drive! It really is amazing that you can have stuff like this on you desktop!

A word of caution, when you are dealing with this much backup space be prepared to twiddle your thumbs for a couple of days while the drives format themselves for RAID 5. After that its pretty kewl! Too bad I didn't do this before spending that $3,500 at Drive Savers. It was a hard expensive lesson but I'm glad Drive Savers was there. If you ever run into problems they do a great job. It's expensive but its better than going back to your client and saying ..."oops i lost your whole project!"

i've been out of memphis for a week now with a week to go and who woulda thought i'd be missing it so bad.  it's not just my studio, but the coffee shop across the street and damnit if i didn't miss all the snow.

Determining the top ten songs from the avalanche of ballots was tough because voters spread their love out among several different songs for each of the top artists. Like the albums, there were multiple ties—so many that I'm going to devote an entire blog post to the honorable mentions. The fact that so many different people could pick so many different songs as their favorites from these Memphis artists is pretty amazing in itself.

So here they are, the best Memphis songs of the twenty-first century, according to you, the readers of Live from Memphis.

Following suit on Laura Jean's post, I thought I should pay some homage to the past year through pictures.

Here's my photo collage homage to 2009.

[click for a bigger version.]

The voters have spoken. Asked to name the best Memphis music of the last decade, Live From Memphis readers nominated a whopping 177 different albums and 179 different songs. In the days ahead, we'll bring you the winners of the popular vote in the song poll and selections from the Live From Memphis blog crew, but first up is the list of your picks for the albums that defined the Memphis sound in the twenty-first century.. Except for the winner, the vote was extremely close. So without further ado, we present The Memphis 10.

One of our own Memphians, Tam Tran, a University of Memphis journalism graduate, has been accepted into the Whitney Biennial 2010 exhibition.

january. my friend margaret came from chicago and we made origami cranes.

This past week, I was forced to wake up considerably earlier than I wanted to, and to operate a motor vehicle at that, but rather than chasing the fantasy that bed might still be warm, I decided to power through the morning. I needed help though, so I stopped into one of my favorite midtown establishments, Otherlands, for a cup of a coffee and a bagel sandwich thing. Typically, I read as much of the Memphis Flyer as I can during the time it takes me to down a cup, inhale a bagel, and smoke a cigarette, folding the rest in half and tucking it under my arm with the idea I might actually finish it later. (Unfortunately, most of those newspapers are in the floor of the backseat of my car...) But instead, I decided to sit and slowly caffeinate, prepare myself for the day, and read the Memphis Flyer cover to cover.

The response to the Memphis 10 music poll has been great. As of this writing, 143 albums and 123 songs have been nominated for the best Memphis music of the twenty-first century. This is a testament to the incredible music scene we have in this city. But here's the problem: The wealth of talent means the votes have been spread thin. After crunching the numbers, no less than 35 albums currently qualify for the top ten. The situation with the songs is even more confusing—so much so that I am considering scrapping the idea of ranking songs by votes and instead ranking artists in the order of who has the most songs nominated.

So, what this all means is, it's still anybody's game. The voting will remain open until December 31. The popular vote list will still be published here on January 1. Since there is now a godawful amount of music to sort through, publication of the LFM Blogger's List will be pushed back to the Sunday, January 3.

Your vote counts! The margin between the albums and songs that make it into the Memphis 10 and those that don't will be one or two votes. If you've already voted, please forward the ballot link to your friends. If you haven't voted yet, read the rules and give it a whirl! We need to your help to determine the best Memphis music of the decade!