Lyricguitar

This is the blurb – in its entirety, that I wrote for the JAN-APR 2013 ATAC program book.

My name is Phil Knudsen and I’m the new guy at Amazing Things. If you don’t yet know me, please be sure to introduce yourself when we finally meet. Please forgive me if it takes me awhile to remember your name. I have a big challenge ahead of me. It is not easy to follow a beloved founder of an organization. I am taking on this challenge because I love Amazing Things and I want to continue to see the vision of Michael Moran continue to thrive and grow in Framingham. I come from a different world; a world of measurement, observation, hypothesis and experimentation. I have spent over thirty years in that world during the day while spending my free time in the world of creative expression, music and poetry. I am looking forward to spending the next phase of my working life bringing my two worlds together. I know I am a lucky man. Not everyone gets this chance, and I’m excited to begin.

The Amazing Things Arts Center is a wonderful home away from home for many of us. Here, we can listen to music from Jazz to Americana, A Capella to Instrumental, as well as Folk, Cabaret and the best original and cover material from current singer/songwriters. We hear old favorites, new artists and everything in between. Several times a year we are treated to theatrical performances; some well known and familiar, some new, some funny, some serious. We have a MetroWest jewel right here on Hollis Street – right in downtown Framingham!

As you look through this program book and make your plans about what shows to attend in the coming months, reflect on how far this little idea for a community built around the arts, has come in the last eight years. From a less than secure inception, renting space for shows in coffee shops and schools, to a store front in Saxonville where the new community started to gel and then to our present location in the old Framingham firehouse, where we have been going strong since 2008. As you look around the firehouse, you’ll see the work by volunteers, the well-spent money raised through grants and also directly from gifts from our members and friends. You’ll see the fruits of hard work and love. Who might have imagined all this when Amazing Things started? Well, at least one person did. His name is Michael Moran.

As is often the case, we have what we have because of the vision and foresight of someone who went before us, someone who smoothed out the rough places, someone who’s persistence plowed through obstacles, someone who worked to make it come together. I know I have big and brightly colored shoes to fill. I am humbled by the opportunity because I love Amazing Things, too!

I’m not going to tell you that nothing will ever change. However, the mission of Amazing Things remains the same:

“The Amazing Things Arts Center brings together a diverse community of artists, arts supporters and arts appreciators of all ages, cultures and interests, through the transformational power of rich and varied art forms that provide a nurturing environment in which to meet, understand and accept each other.”

So, take a look at this program book – look at diversity and the high quality of the shows coming up in the next few months. Michael has done another great job of booking and will continue to do so for most of the shows in 2013 in his new role as Artistic Director. I will be taking on the day to day management of Amazing Things and will work closely with Michael to move us through this transition. There will be more to look forward to and I ask each of you to stay with us, introduce yourself to me, volunteer, become part of the fabric of Amazing Things!!

Have I said it already? I love Amazing Things – we’re just getting started! 

I think this Christmas Carol, more than any other song I have sung in church as a child or adult, is largely responsible for waking in me a sense that something is wrong. I am not one who looks at history and says that Christianity is the cause of war or strife – I do see the danger in using Christianity (or any other Religion)  as a tool to get people to do what those in power would have them do. War is caused by pride which leads to a lust for power and control. The rest, as they say, are the details. In war the details are horrific and senseless.

I hope you enjoyed hearing my offering of peace this Christmas. Maybe someday Trisha and I will do a professional recording – in the meantime, this type of recording will have to do.

We live in a world of absurd irony – and yet – the story of the Babe in the manger, coming to the world helpless and without power, living a life without honor or station, and finally dying a criminal’s death is just absurd enough that the final act – resurrection, can seem somehow, more plausible. None of it makes perfect sense to a rational human being. And, maybe that’s the teaching to take away. If it all made perfect sense to you, to me, then maybe it was all made up by a man. I love the absurd mystery of it all. Somehow, it’s that mystery that lets me believe the story

http://www.lyricguitar.net/ChristmasBells1864.mp3

Since my last full post, Trisha and I have stopped hosting at The Center for Arts in Natick (TCAN). There were many reasons that went into the decision. Some of the reasons are not public. Some of the reasons are: we felt that this particular open mike had lost its core group and we were struggling week to week just to get folks out, there is now too much competition for the same people at open mikes on Monday night and finally, getting out on a Monday night was tough for many people.

Other reasons are less obvious. We felt that the lack of interest by the management of TCAN in this activity had a ripple effect through the folks that used to come. For example, one of the draws of this open mike used to be that you might get an opener for a major act on a weekend. It happened only once in the four years we hosted – and that person happened to show up and was already a regionally known award winning performing artist. I’m not sure the last time it happened for any other open mikers at the TCAN open mike. There were practical considerations of course. At the store front you only had to bring in a few people to make a difference – now the venue holds about 300 patrons. You’ve basically got to be able to draw what a main performer may have had to draw at the smaller venue. I get it. But it did create the impression of our performers as ignored. I heard it often. We appreciate the opportunity that was given to Trisha and me by the folks at TACN to hone our hosting skills, to meet a whole range of great performers and to provide a service to the community that we have come to love.

Finally, with the amount of work Trisha and I put in to the mike, we felt that we could be using that energy better elsewhere. We left the TCAN open mike in good hands with Mark Stepakoff. They changed the night to Tuesday every other week, and we moved on to the Harvest Cafe in Hudson, MA. We think a great deal of our friend Mark and we wish him well.

For us – it’s every Wednesday night at the Harvest Cafe in Hudson, MA. It’s on Route 85 (Washington Street) right across from Robinson’s Hardware. We’ll be open miking from 7Pm to 10PM but Trisha and I will be there from about 5:30PM or so to set up. Come down early, get dinner, sit and relax – then sing, play, read a poem, or tell a story. Whatever. We hope to see you there some week. Email us at knudsenmusic@lyricguitar.net and we’ll put you on the list – or just show up before 7Pm and you get on the list. There’s no feature right now so we’re giving everyone two songs or ten minutes on stage.

I’ve been letting this blog languish for months. Finally, I tried to log back in and forgot how. Fortunately, I remembered just enough to change the passwords and get going.

Now, I’m not sure what to do. I guess I could send this out to an unsolicited group of victims. You know, just copy my address book and let people tell me not to bother them. But that’s not me. If it were, I’d have gotten a lot farther in life. As it is, I try to be a nice guy. I try not to bother people with too much email. I try to be considerate and careful as I use this tool. I also know I have the habit of putting all your names in the “to” field rather than the “bcc” field and even though there’s no carbon paper (that I know of) in my computer, it seems to bother folks.

So, here we are. It’s almost December and we are looking forward to the holiday season which for me and my family means Christmas. There, I said it.

January begins our fifth year of hosting the TCAN open mike and we have moved, during that time from a handful of people at the mike, to a slightly larger handful of people at the mike – most weeks. Some weeks it doesn’t seem worth it to crank up the heat or the A/C but we all seem to have fun anyway. More on that later . . .

It is now the beginning of another winter. My company has been bought by Dow Chemical and I’ve gone over the last twenty years from working for a small family owned business to working for one of the largest chemical companies in the world. And without changing jobs.

The MacBook Pro has not crashed in the 2 months since I got it. It has run relatively cool (even when processing large audio or video files,) the Mac open source software I’ve used works better than most of the open source stuff I’ve used on windows. Handbrake is a good example. I can rip DVDs and convert them for use on the iPod touch very easily. This is a great free program. On windows the program seems to get overloaded and this on a Vista system running a dual core processsor about the same speed as on the Mac. Of course, the Mac is able to use all 4gb of ram that is loaded, the windows machine only has 3gb available after using the other gb for internal functions of some sort or another.

I guess I’ll be using the Apple from now on. It will be very hard to switch back. I hardly ever use my windows desktop anymore.

Last month when my HP laptop failed for the second time in a year I went out and bought a MacBook Pro and installed parallels. I’m not looking back. The Mac hasn’t crashed – Windows XP on the Parallels virtual machine has. When the XP installation crashes I only have to restart that software which is much faster than restarting the hardware on a windows maching. Oh and BTW, when I do want to restart the Mac after it’s been turned off, it takes less than a minute. Why hasn’t everyone discovered the Mac. I never understood it when I used one regularly, and I understand it less when you don’t even have to choose what platform to run. If I wanted to I could just use bootcamp and run a dedicated windows installation.

Last month – several days before my warranty on my HP laptop expired I called customer service for a problem with the internal wireless card. It was becoming unstable and sporadically it would just disappear from the device manager. I got a ticket number but because I didn’t have the computer with me at work they wanted me to call back. It took over an hour of my time to get to that point but I wanted to get the call in while under warranty.  I disclosed in a previous post how the computer finally failed and what I had done to replace it.  I just figured I’d use an external USB wireless device which was working fine. I also found that the wireless would work about 50% of the time. Nothing like a sporadic problem to undermine your credibility and resolve.

 Today – I called HP again. I wanted to know what if anything could be done and what they could suggest to me. I explained the previous call, gave them my computer’s serial number and the previous ticket number. I just asked for a definitive answer on what,  if anything, should be done. After getting off line and keeping me on hold for a good 10 minutes, Stacey ( not her real name, really . . .) informed me that she needed the P/N number off the laptop. I explained that I am at work and that the laptop was home. I asked why the serial number was not enough information – isn’t that a unique number?? apparently not. She went offline for another 5 minutes. Answer: call back tonight in front of the laptop and we will work the problem remotely. And we have to have that P/N number. And you will have to pay for it if the computer is out of warranty.  She never indicated if she had found the previous ticket number. What part of the computer will not turn on does she not understand?? I explained twice that the computer will not come on, the hard drive is fine, and that I cannot use the recovery disks to restore the hard drive. I suddenly realized the HP customer support strategy. Make people wait, have them try to describe technical issues to the first line responder who will drag the issue out until you just get frustrated. Now, to be fair, I could call back tonight. I could go through another 45 minutes of explanation and frustration and then they could magically find a way to ressurect my computer over the ether (not the ethernet cause it won’t start) and then I’ll be on my way.

 BTW – last fall after I owned the computer for about five months the hard drive failed . . . I thought. I put in a new hard drive and used the recovery disks to restore function. This new failure looked just like that one except that this time I knew the hard drive is okay so after transferring my documents I tried the recovery disk again with no luck. Turns out the original hard drive was okay once I reformatted it. I guess I’ll try that again and we will see . . .

I am now the proud owner of what I think is a very expensive paperweight. HP doesn’t seem concerned about their reputation even though I see dozens of postings about overheating Pavilion notebooks from the last couple of years.  There are several postings relating to my model as well as related models from the 2007 product year. I guess I will hold onto the laptop for a while because I’m anticipating a class action lawsuit.

For the second time in one year, my HP laptop (dv2000z) overheated to the point it wouldn’t restart. This had been preceded by random failure of the internal wireless and random video card anomalies. A free utility showed that my temperatures on the hard drive, CPU and the video card had gone to very high extremes (80-90C.) I could’ve burned myself on the case in several places and all this with a laptop cooling pad!

Oh – and the computer is a couple of weeks out of warranty. If I had only spent an additional 30% on the computer to buy an extended plan – If only HP had made a computer that was able to cool itself. Yes – I cleaned the vents, yes, I called HP.

The next night – my wife and I (at her suggestion) went to the Apple Store. I think I’ll be happy with my almost cold running Macbook Pro. And yes, I bought an extended warranty. It made more sense to spend 10% of the computer’s price to get the warranty. To be fair, I paid about $1000 for the HP bun warmer. I paid considerably more for the Macbook Pro.

But – my wife’s Macbook cost about the same as my HP cost last year – and it still runs cold after six months. I used to have Macs, until about 1997 when they just weren’t keeping up in the hardware department. They are now way ahead of windows machines and now that I’m doing mostly audio and photo work – I’ve made the right decision.

This post is dedicated to my friends (and my son) who have gone to Mac and brought me back to the fold.