It’s true. I work in one of them. Dry towns, they’re called, for the uninitiated. These are places that never got around to repealing prohibition and now contain just enough votes against change to hold back the rest of the public from ordering a nice glass of wine with dinner. Why? It will destroy the community, of course!

Well, there is another side of the community that suffers from this mindset: the local business owners. And all the people who want to order a glass of wine and didn’t realize they had to bring their own. Oh yeah, and anyone who is in favor of forward progress.

Okay, Maybe I’m a bit biased.

I was commissioned, through EduComp, for the cause – to design a website to showcase the language of those working toward legislation that would allow beer and wine consumption at restaurants in one such town: Tisbury, otherwise known as Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts.

I should note that personally, I drink very little, perhaps one or two beers or a glass of wine in a month, although, like many, I went through a typical teenage binge phase. I blame the heat and madenning peer pressure of Savannah, Georgia. That’s beside the point, however: the legislation would be good for the town. As it stands, people can bring their own beer or wine to dinner, so the drunks are just as able to get drunk. If anything, this would be more regulatory, and it provides those who want to have a drink at a restaurant that option. I have had a lot of trouble understanding the logic behind the fight against it, aside from stubborn traditionalism.

Consider this a call to anyone who lives in Tisbury: please vote on this on April 14th. It’s a town meeting vote to get it on the ballot in 2010. It needs your help to pass. For more information, and some words from those involved in attempting to pass the legislation, visit the site itself: PreservingTisburysFuture.com

I will have a more comprehensive post in the web section about the process of the design of the site soon, and about upcoming websites, when they go live.

Wolfie is 13 and goes to the Public Charter School on Martha’s Vineyard (oh hey, that’s him right there on the front page), and he does a rockin radio show on WVVY on Wednesdays at 1 PM for an hour. I’ve been recording his episodes, you can check out past ones in the Radio section. Today I had a scare, thinking the station was going to be down, but I slyly found a stream and was able to get it recorded. Here it is. 128kbps MP3 this time:

Wolfie – Strange Ways in 4D March 25th 2009

Found this stuck on the back of an ATM sign in Edgartown. I can’t tell if it’s an endorsement or not. Can you?

Text Reads: “Stop messin’ with our boats and fix the ozone depleting traffic mess in menemsha and get me a usable cell signal while you’re at it. It’s the traffic, stupid!”

(It’s a tourist based island living joke, I guess)

The next biggest news out of Stockholm since the Pirate Bay Trial is that Aequinox Vintage Clothing of Oak Bluffs is doing a trade show there (okay, maybe not the biggest, but big okay?)

Saturday, with Sarah Goodhart’s guidance, I designed a card advertising her upcoming web store. (With Swedish Babelfish) It was a quick design, but in crowd tests it was received by the ladies as “very cute!” A success if I ever had one! Good luck in Sweden, Sarah.

Link: Article about the show

This Twitter experiment is already yielding me some fruit, I slacked off preparing my show last night (uh, cuz I was setting up PJ at Che’s Lounge with his own twitter). So, since I have very little music selected, I was flying by the seat of my pants. However, my sudden influx of new listeners (thanks in part to twitter itself) blasted me with a barrage of eclectic requests. I couldn’t fill all of them, but I did my best to try, and during the show I got followed by another 5 or 6 people, and turned a few people on to making accounts themselves. This is my second day using the thing, my first day REALLY using it. It’s pretty incredible. Anyway, I took advantage of the requests and did my best to fill the gaps with my own selections. I also played that Clark EP, split up over the course of the show.

So anyway, the tracklist is as follows:

1. Clark – Growls Garden
2. Animal Collective – Banshee Beat
3. Fever Ray – Keep the Streets Empty for Me (by request for Brian)
4. Clark – The Magnet Mine
5. Flight of the Conchords – The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room (Sort of by request for Paul)
6. Sufjan Stevens – The Dress Looks Nice On You (by request for deckhands)
7. Boards of Canada – Oscar See Through Red Eye
8. Justice – Dance
9. Patrick Wolf – Get Lost
10. Zeigeist – The Lake
11. Clark – Seaweed
12. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Young Adult Friction
13. Clark – Gonk Roughage
14. Tim Exile – Don’t Think We’re One
15. Bonnie Prince Billy – I Won’t Ask Again (by request for “humanity” from PJ at Che’s)
16. Dodos – Chickens
17. The Mountain Goats – So Desperate
18. Bob Dylan – Not Dark Yet (by request from My Mom)
19. Akron/Family – Dylan Pt. 2
20. Billy Idol – White Wedding (by request from Chrysal)
21. Clark – Distant Father Torch
22. Clark – Farewell Mining Town
23. Antony and the Johnsons – Kiss My Name
24. Metric – Help I’m Alive (by request from Katherine via Facebook)
25. Plaid – TAK 5

Note that I linked all those who made requests (or something resembling a request). I will try to do that from now on if I’m doing the Twitter thing, although if I have a lot of new music I might be less likely to take requests.

Oh and without further ado: Here’s the link to the episode for download/stream (64 kbps mp3 – i know i know, it’s recorded from the stream)

As some may know, I work at Edu Comp and I am going to be showing some web design and home networking equipment off this saturday at the tech fair at the Oak Bluffs library. Come on by if you are a nerd and have free time (do those two things still go together anymore?) I may post from the event, or at least twitter it.

I’m sure there is plenty of nuance that I, the layman, don’t understand about the process of booking films at local theatres. The expense of renting the reels, the guesswork of understanding what people will want to watch, the desire to get films your kids can watch, the limitations of an island with only 3 theatres…

However, I have trouble understanding where certain distinctions are made. On Martha’s Vineyard, for example, Cloverfield was here on opening night, in sync with the whole nation, but Watchmen is not. Movies that have immense amounts of oscar buzz do not get here, often, until after the oscars have already occurred, while in the mean time Paul Blart: Mall Cop is getting a full 2 week run.

Perhaps my pea-brain is unable to comprehend the logistics of running a successful theatre, but I somehow am not convinced. Everyone I speak to on Martha’s Vineyard wants to see the oscar nominees. Everyone I know anticipates films like Synechdoche: New York and wanted to see Slumdog Millionaire a month before it arrived here. Films that are hyped on The Daily Show and Letterman are ignored completely by the theatres. People often end up traveling off-island just to see movies because they are never made available here, or they get disappointed waiting and waiting for things that never arrive.

It doesn’t help matters that the Edgartown theatres regularly advertise movies that are simply never shown. I walked in and saw a giant poster for “Choke” on the wall, which excited me, but it never arrived. I had to acquire it by other means. The film was a disappointment, but dammit, I was led to believe that I could be disappointed for 9 dollars on the big screen, not for free on my laptop. Ahem.

Right now, people are talking about another disappointment all over the internet: Watchmen. I’d love to join the conversation, I could probably already write my review “Snyder focuses all his attention on making sure that the ‘look’ of the comic is just right, and in doing so completely forsakes the story and the acting.” – Sound accurate? Well, it’s what 300 was like, so I expect the same, but the point is that I want the movie to be here, I want the chance to be disappointed for myself, before the flood of disappointed reviews is able to color my already anticipated loathing with even more antipated loathing.

Let’s build that bridge to the mainland, already.

This is my “messenger bag” (otherwise known as a “man purse”). I spraypainted this one day with a stencil a while back. I don’t really know where the premise of the skeletal man with the tie came from, but I liked it and rolled with it. The text, completely unsuited, is “We Tigers” from the song by the same name, by Animal Collective.

On the street, people often ask what “Wetigers” is, pronouncing it “wet-ig-ers” – I suppose I could’ve spaced out the letters better. Oh well.

The back of the bag you may recognize from this website. It’s a “logo” I designed for myself back when I first started doing web design, in my game design days (eventually some of that stuff will be located here). People always ask me what it means, and quite frankly I have no idea. I basically just took a circle in photoshop and started splitting it into pieces until I came up with something that I liked. It stuck. It’s the only thing I’ve ever considered getting tattooed on myself, although I probably never will.

So, if you see someone walking around with this satchel, run up to them and start beating them over the head, because they stole it from me. Oh, uh, if you don’t know what I look like, hold back from that until you ask for my autograph. I’ll have lessons on how to properly identify a Maury de Geofroy signature soon.

For those who are unaware, there is a little coffee house on Martha’s Vineyard with a beautiful aesthetic and some great music on many evenings. I’ve also been filling up (the owner) PJ’s iPod on a regular basis since last summer, so the daily tunes are often directly from my head. I’m sitting in here right now, it’s freshly painted with new art from the new barista, Angel, on the walls, and it’s a cozy, great place to be.

In fact, I designed a large portion of my website here, sitting on the couch in the corner, occasionally showing whoever was around the progress and looking for suggestions on what to change and what to keep. The place is Che’s Lounge, and it’s off Main street in Vineyard Haven, on Martha’s Vineyard, down a little alley just before the bookstore. Stop in and have a coffee and hang out, if you’re around. Their website is currently unfinished but it features a documentary, Colin’s poster artwork, and so on. I may get around to doing some concert reviews on here in the future.