windom earle world

WORDS VISUALS MUSIC BEATS REMIX SWAG LINKS GUESTBOOK

saturday july 22 i finished up the film camp friday. now i have to edit hours of rough footage for a 5 minute movie.

last night, the best episode i've ever seen of tom green was on. it's the episode where the audience is filled with cardboard cutouts and tom cuts them into a bloody mess with a chainsaw. my favorite sketch is when an old lady consoled him after he screamed at a bingo audience.

i had to drive my dad home from kensington yesterday. he came to pei this weekend to hangout with a bunch of old people from the royal canadian legion at a ball tournament. on the drive home he put on joe cocker's greatest hits, and i was surprised to hear that the piano riff used in california love, and several other hip hop classics that dr dre and tupac stole from. i wonder if any rappers have sampled from you are too beautiful.

most dj's get their jollies at vintage record stores looking for rare vinyl to plunder samples from, but since windom earle is not a dj, and is a nerd, i went to the library and looked at their selection of educational videos for an hour today. i think the main difference between myself and djs is that they look for samples for rappers to put some original rhymes over, and, since i make my own music and samples, i tend to get excited when i find media samples to put over them. anyway, i took out some really good videos to search for samples. i got an old episode of bob macdonald's cbc show, wonderstruck, and video of safety tips hosted by eugene levy. there were a lot of other great videos on peer pressure, and one i almost took out called don't shake your baby, but the librarian kept handing me videos she wanted me to take out, that i didn't bother. when i was finished looking, i had over ten videos, but since i was walking home, i narrowed it down to five: justice denied - the donald marshall movie; manufacturing consent - a noam chomsky documentary that boost owns, but wouldn't share; projections - some visual arts nfb documentary that the librarian put in my pile of tapes; wonderstruck presents understanding animals - i found this tape next to project grizzly and took it as a sign. the picture of bob macdonald on the cover is priceless; and eugene levy discovers home safety - this tape also has a good cover. levy has a bloody face covered in little pieces of toilet paper and two bandaids crisscrossed on the lens of his glasses. not to mention the old woman who lived in a shoe, that animated old woman dressed in red.

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thursday july 20th joey fucking jerimiah has a link to degrassi funk on his site, patmeup.com. a canadian icon has linked to little old me. it really makes me want to squeak to think that someone i idolized growing up has listened to my music. next stop, mrdressup.com (i'm not sure if that url works. it might be a site for drag queens). props go out to ryan o'connor for finding it. it's in some sort of contest section of the site. he's obviously a dedicated degrassi fan.

wednesday july 19th needless to say, port citizen kicked some serious arse last night at baba's. john holmes' drumming is the best. the band mixed up a set of reggae and blues for their first show at the lounge.

mike gillis is a genius. i recieved another glimpse of what he plans on doing for the album cover. i can't look at it without laughing uncontrollably, so, as a safety percaution, i'm putting the picture here, in case someone visits this site and bursts their pants because of the picture. mike has some brilliant ideas for cover, i just hope dr laura doesn't find out about them.

i finally got to see x-men, and was not dissapointed. it's the most entertaining "hollywood" film i've seen in a while, and i hope any sequels stay true to the vision of the first.

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tuesday july 18th i saw a hideous outdoor musical today at work. every year at the film camp, we take a van load of the kids from kensington and visit the confederation center. we go on a tour, then watch somewhere in the world, which is supposed to be some kind of tribute to canada. by the end of it, i wished i lived in greenland. canada sucks.

i got an invitation to sheumas macneil's wedding. he's the piano player for the barra macneils, and they are notorious for their non-stop wedding parties. i'm supposed to work the same week as the wedding, but i'm hoping the film camp will schedule another trip to the confederation centre the same day as the wedding.

tommorrow, island screenwriter, lars davidson, visits kensington and gives the kids a presentation on hollywood, and writing. i took a screenwriting course from lars five years ago, around the same time he sold his first screenplay to hollywood. he is responsible for my being in the film camp, and i really enjoyed his course.

joe e. legend, now known as joe, keeps making appearances on wwf's sunday night heat. his gimick is that he is a shitdisturber and he starts feuds between other wrestlers. no big entrance music for him yet, but their is a 0% chance that he might use the theme song i made for him.

i'm going to see port citizen tonight at baba's. island edition recently put one of their songs up in their gallery. the write up on it says, "this charlottetown outfit describes themselves as 'tighter than a pair of acidwash jeans'" but the truth is that i made up that stupid description of the band's music when i put their mp3.com site together, so i don't think they even know i wrote that about them.

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sunday july 16th i'm back from cb again. this time i was lucky enough to catch a performance by the squatters at chandlers. they are a country supergroup made up of sydney's coolest musicians. they get dressed up like hicks and cover old school country songs. at their best, they sound like lil orton hogget at their worst, but that's a good thing. they had four guitars on stage compared to hogget's wimpy little two, and they had a similar sense of humour as hogget. they definitely had skills too, and a campfire on stage.

i start work this week at a film camp in kensington. every year i throw a script together days before the camp starts, then drive 45 minutes out of town to film whatever mess i put on paper with a bunch of eight year olds. the movies always suck, but i gain all sorts of experience trying to make short movies.

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friday july 14th i might be heading for cape breton again this weekend. it'll be good to see mike gillis, and tom cheese again because last friday was only a short visit.

boost won a b4-4 contest. the lucky bastard got a new sony cd player that will not skip courtesy of the ugliest boy band in the world.

i nearly wet myself yesterday at the city cinema when i saw a poster for the coen brother's blood simple 2000. i had no idea that this movie was being rereleased, and i was pleasantly surprised to see the poster. blood simple is one of the few movies that i can watch repeatedly and learn something new everytime. it's probably the tightest script ever written. apparently the rerelease is going to be a director's cut, so i'm really interested in seeing what's going to be different. the movie's pretty far out in the first place, and i think it was independently made, so i assume that the original release is pretty close to a director's cut. the coen's are supposed to be control freaks, and they threatened to walk out on the hudsucker proxy if they didn't get their way. i'm going to camp out at city cinema the night before this movie opens.

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thursday july 13th check out the pics from the boys and girls club show.

sophia coppola's virgin suicides is a great film. it's beautifully filmed and has an excellent soundtrack featuring air and sloan. trip fontaine reminds me of vince.

i'm surprised how much i like the new everclear album, songs from an american movie vol. one: learning how to smile. i don't like their first single, wonderful, but there are a lot of tracks on this disc that would make better singles.

boost sent one of my cds to the halifax experimental music festival, and i got a rejection email. it says that i need to submit a proposal to state what i plan to do. it says my music is "boderline experimental being more pop and beat than exploratory, experimental," and i agree. i doubt that windom's current incarnation would go over well with the experimental crowd, but i plan on actively making a performance to open commercial audiences to something more experimental. after watching daniel macivor's house last saturday on cbc, i've been getting weird ideas.

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wednesday july 12th i scanned pics from our show at the boys and girls club. i'll try and get them up right away.

i watched terry gilliam's time bandits. it was a great, stylish fairytale with midgets.

i can't get material's intonarumori out of my discman. there is some really good hip hop on it featuring flavor flav (he redeems himself from being in that puff daddy video, boy), kool keith (more or less what you'd expect from the black elvis), wu tang's poetic genius, the killah priest, and all sorts of people i never heard before, but want to hear some more. the album's style reminds me of the sebutones, and one song even has a sample that the tones used on 50/50 where it counts.

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tuesday july 11th windom earle's world tour is on a temporary hold as vince heads back to school in calgary today. it might continue around christmas when vince returns. i hope he doesn't want us to go to gordon falls in december.

it was great having him back. playing shows with him and sarah was so much fun because not only are they on similar wavelengths as me musically, but they are also the best friends i have in charlottetown. i think i'll replace vince with a robot in a harley davidson shirt.

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monday july 10th vince called yesterday afternoon and said, "expect to play tonight." his brother's friends were putting on an all-ages punk rock show at the boys and girls club, and they agreed to let us play. sarah wasn't working, so she came over. we watched the video of our sydney show (it came out great), then headed over to jj larosa's to watch vince's old punk band, dcu, practice. they were going to play a reunion show.

we headed down to the boys and girls club where a bunch of young punk rockers were hanging out.

when we started playing, the kids didn't react at all. whenever i looked out, i'd see their arms crossed and blank faces. we were playing pretty good too. the practice in sydney really helped us out. by the time we got to beefchowmein, we had the audience participating with stuff like, "when i say windom you say earle. windom _____! windom ______!" then vince yelled, "when i say grade 10 you say girl. grade 10 ____! grade 10 ____!"

jim henson is dead skipped on us again, but somehow we managed to get through it. the rest of the set went well.

vince showed us some pictures he got of our sydney show. they came out great. i'll put them up soon. i'll probably change the layout of the site with a pic of the band with sarah on the top of this page.

we used a roll of film, and video taped the boys and girls club performance.

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sunday july 9th we left charlottetown at 1:00 pm friday and arrived in sydney at around 7:30. we were relieved when port citizen showed up at chandlers a couple minutes after us because they didn't get any directions to where the place was or anything. we were going to all drive down together, but we couldn't get in contact with each other before leaving.

while hanging out at chandlers, i bumped into my grade 7 math teacher, mr penny, at the bar. tom cheese, iain gillis, and mike gillis came down.

we did a shound check, and my acoustic guitar was cutting out, so i went to iain's to borrow his brother, brendan's guitar. there was a guy sleeping on the couch when i went to gillis house. john, iain's father, told me that the guy on the couch was supposed to have a cd release party that night with his band, but, before the show, his band kicked him out. poor guy. i started worrying that when i went back to chandlers, vince and sarah would kick me out of the band.

when i got back to chandlers, i wasn't kicked out of the band, but i missed the beginning of port citizen's set. they were excellent, and even though there wasn't a lot of people in the bar, the put on a high energy show.

after they finished their first set, it was our turn to go on. we got in costume, tuned our instruments, and gave the soundguy the signal to play our backing track of beats on cd. sarah's saxaphone fit in well with our songs, and created a much fuller sound that lacked in windom earle's previous performances. we played the best version of i wish you were mary we've ever done. and degrassi funk never sounded cooler. we rapped up our first set with beefchowmein, which vince and i threw together and practiced on the way up. it was awesome.

we took a short break to cool down. the costumes were super hot, and the plastic police helmet i wore made me sweat buckets. so when we went back on for our second set, we were stripped down quite a bit.

the first track on our second cd of beats was skipping, so we did the next song on the disc which didn't skip at all. the rest of our set went smoothly, with the exception of a few blunders i made on guitar. it's weird that no matter how much i practiced my parts before the show, once i go on stage everything's completely different. playing standing up is one thing, but playing in a loud sound system, and in front of people really affects me. i think i'm getting kind of used to it. this was our seventh show, and i was a lot more comfortable than usual. sarah and vince were great, and went through the 6 new songs we put together a week before the show without difficulty.

after our cd of beats finished, we invited jonathan holmes from port citizen to drum for us, so we could do the song that skipped on cd. his beats kicked the shit out of all our samples. his energy helped us rip through a super fast version of jim henson is dead. it was a lot of fun to play.

sarah, vince, tom cheese, and i left after our set to grab a slice of pizza at wild willy's. our waterproof costumes from the show came in handy for the rain outside. we got back to chandlers in time for some more port citizen. they rocked. everyone in the place was dancing.

when they were finishing up a couple of friends of mine from jr high showed up. ryan macleod and ryan joseph, who were going to see the show, but got caught up drinking and didn't make until around 1:30 am, hadn't seen me since grade nine, when i moved from sydney to charlottetown. i went outside with them to see brad macdonald, another friend of mine who wasn't allowed in chandlers for throwing a beer bottle at the dj a while ago. we talked for a bit outside the bar, and i missed the end of port citizen's set. brad and ryan were trying to convince me to ditch everyone at the bar and go down to smooth hermans with them and get loaded (despite the fact that they know i never drank when we hung out in the past, and i still don't drink). it was funny seeing them again.

vince and sarah started packing things up while i was talking with the guys. when they left i helped organize the trunk. while putting guitars away, two drunk guys were talking to me about ski instructing. after a couple of minutes, i managed to get away from them to help port citizen move their gear. most of their stuff was packed by the time i got away from the ski instructors. iain gillis and his brother, brendan, wanted to hang out with us for the night, so their father, john, picked up brendan's guitar and waited around until we all squeezed into the tightly packed car. we drove to a gas station, divided up the money we made from the show (we ended up with $18 each), and lead the way to big beach with port citizen following behind us.

it was really late, and the drive to big beach seemed to last forever. when we got there, we set up our tents (we were thinking of staying in an empty bungalow, but there was too much rat poison, and squirell shit). brendan and iain didn't have any sleeping bags, so they slept in the car.

in the morning, i ate some food that my mother sent down. brendan headed over to my uncle's house to use the washroom (there was a washroom in the bungalow, but i think brendan was frightened by it). my little cousin, mary emma, came out to show me her cat. my aunt theresa invite us in for tea, coffee, and homemade waffles. my cousin, maggie, entertained us while we ate.

after breakfast, we packed up and my uncle, donnie, gave me a charred baby doll he found after burning down a barn. mary emma wanted to show us a monkey swing before we left, so we went into the woods, crossed a small bridge, and saw a huge opening with a rope hanging from a tree. we swung on it for a while then left big beach to catch the ferry (port citizen were heading to halifax for another show).

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friday july 7th tonight's the night. are we ready? we'll soon find out. we haven't had a full band practice yet because vince had a few dates. i'm sure the details of these dates will be posted on vince's online diary.

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thursday july 6th the deadline approaches. friday in sydney is the first windom earle show featuring sarah on saxaphone, and vince and my first show since february. anticipation for this show is similar to the feeling i got before jumping off the cliff at gordon falls.

i can't believe accordian player, john whalen, played with the max weinberg seven on a rerun of conan o'brien. i'd love to mix accordian with some beats for the next album.

i watched barry levinson's diner. it was a good movie, but it didn't make me want to hang out at restaurants and act like an asshole. their loveable assholes, but not the types of characters you want going out with your sister.

i uploaded a photo documentary on my cat, allewishes.

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wednesday july 5 happy 5th of july. right now i'm watching the duke-a-thon on tnn. there's a decent documentary on the life and times of the dukes of hazzard. i'm taping it in case of samples.

i watched an excellent errol morris documenatry on stephen hawking, a brief history of time. it's pretty mind blowing. morris manages to mix in hawking's brilliant scientific discoveries with philosophy. phillip glass did a cool score for it. i would love to hear a collaboration between glass and angelo badalametti.

windom earle had our first full practice of the entire set for our sydney show. it's coming together.

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tuesday july 4 happy 4th of july. i noticed a strange thing on tbs in honour of independence day. they're promoting some sort of american movie weekend, but one of the films they're showing is jackie chan's first strike, a movie made by chinese filmmakers filmed in australia.

i watched beyond the mat, a documentary about the lives of wrestlers. it was excellent, as most documentaries are. "everybody knows who jake the snake is...except maybe santa claus."

speaking of wrestling, grand prix superstar, joe e legend, is now a wwf superstar. joe appeared on sunday night heat. i met him last year when grand prix came to charlottetown. my friends and i were so impressed by his attitude, that we composed theme music and sent him a tape of it. check out legends never die at the indigo jones site.

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monday july 3 port citizen's mp3.com page is up and running at www.mp3.com/portcitizen.

i watched mst3k's manos hands of fate today. it is definitely the worst movie i've ever seen, but, as bad as it was, it still had some redeeming qualities. i can't think of any right now, but there must have been something keeping from shutting off the tape during the film. i like big knees.

i also watched jackie chan's project a. it had incredible fight sequences, but the movie was way too long, and the story about pirates wasted a lot of comedic potential.

the second windom earle practice with sarah and vince was excellent. songs that i didn't think would sound good live are sounding fantastic. i was a bit worried about not being prepared for a show so soon, but the talent sarah and vince bring to our jam sessions helps build my confidence. for most of the shows i've done with vince, we usually throw the songs together a couple of days before we perform (like we're doing now), but everything comes together and we end up having a lot of fun. i'd love to really work on some live songs without a deadline approaching so fast because if we can manage to sound competent without practicing a lot, imagine what we could do with enough time. i'm really going to enjoy playing sydney with vince before he heads back west.

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sunday july 2 i spent canada day cooped up in coolbreeze city, but i was led to a url that made me feel somewhat patriotic. www.standonguard.com is a nice looking site that encourages canadians to take over the world. thanks for the tip, kent.

if anyone has advice on how to burn a continuous mix cd, please email boost ventilator. if your advice helps us, then we'll send you a free copy of the new album. boost is using toast, and he sets the time between tracks to zero, but there are noticable spaces between tracks that are supposed to flow together. shiznit.

brodie read, the front man for island rock group, port citizen, stopped by today. i started an mp3.com site for him (it's probably not up yet) and uploaded some tunes. check it out when it's up. the songs are fantastic.

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saturday july 1 happy canada day!

i got a glimpse of mike gillis' artwork for the new album, and i'm pretty excited. here's a peak:

i listened to the cds i got at the heroes of hip hop tour. fermented reptile is a lot more serious than pippy's performance the other night, but it deals brilliantly with social issues and materialism. sage francis's cd has all sorts of surprises. it's kind of a compilation of songs, radio freestyles, live stuff, and poetry. it's really good. i checked out sage's web page, www.non-prophets.com and found all sorts of interesting goodies. reading sage's opinions reminds me of listening to buck 65 talk about the state of hip hop. not only are both guys innovative artists, but they are also teachers who want to share their knowledge and help anyone willing to listen to have a better understanding of their culture. check out the site.

going from the sublime to the ridiculous; choclair was on jonovision today, and i was reminded of a funny story pippy from fermented reptiles told me involving the chiznocka and a bathroom at a record store.

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friday june 30 breakbeatniks, dj's, and a human beatbox makes for a perfect evening at baba's. fermented reptile's pipi b skid kicked things off with his unique/insane style. he was a first class entertainer with a bucket full of talent. next up was martinez, a gruff voice with a lot of soul. he had a lot of energy and a bit of asthma. the goods with thai chi chi did a long set. they were the only group of the night with two mcs and one dj. after they finished up, a human beatbox (who's name escapes my memory) took the mic and provided beats and music at the same fucking time. it was insane, like a cross between bobby mcfarren and dougie fresh. while he amazed the audience, some of the best rhymes of the evening were spoken by all the mc's on the tour during a free-for-all freestyle. it was magical. next up was sole, from anticon records, spewing aggressive poetry laced hiphop. then came sage fracis who stood on top of a chair centerstage, and extended the mic a couple feet above eyelevel. he started reciting a poem about having something to offer better than latenight bar chit chat while a couple of charlottetown's thug hip hop heads were jabbering loudly and disrespectfully. after his poem, he started yelling "that was for you, motherfuckers!" it was beautiful and sad at the same time. then he did a rap laced poem/rant on the devolution of hip hop into pop music. it was funny, true, and made me realize how necessary this tour of underground hip hop artists remaining true to their culture while pushing the artform forward really is. sixtoo finished up the show with his scientific/poetic hip hop. all of the other mcs started dancing and rhyming along to sixtoo. it was a real party atmosphere. when the show was over graymatter spun the wheels while everyone else put stuff away, sold merchandise, and mingled with the fans. i bought a sage francis cd and a fermented reptile cd for twenty bucks. sweet jesus, i wish i had more bucks to splurge on deals like that. they were selling noam chomsky spoken word stuff too for cheap. i'd love to hear that, but i don't know how often i'd listen to it. i talked to pippy b skid for a bit, gave some respect to sage francis, and went home to listen to my discs.

sarah, vince, and i jammed together for the first time. we put together our most complicated song, jim henson is dead. it was sounding cool by the end of the jam. a few more practices before our show in sydney and we'll be tighter than iron maiden.

i archived most of the posts for june because i ran out of room to type.

and for all y'all that missed it, windomearle.com is the domain name for the lame. and grunties@windomearle.com is the email address for the rest.

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may june