Well folks, we’ve done it again.  We love so many projects on Kickstarter.com that it’s hard to pick among them, but we also love experimental music and Boston, so when we saw that Non-Event, organizers of experimental music concerts in Boston for 10 years – is raising money on kickstarter… well, that’s a no-brainer.

So if you’re in New England and you like experiencing new and unusual kinds of musical entertainment, check out Non-Event.  For a small pledge you can even get tickets to one of their concerts, and maybe we’ll  see you there!

The widget below shows how far the project still has to go to reach their funding goal…

I’ve been wanting to get involved with Kickstarter for some time now but keep putting it off.

Kickstarter is a great site for people like us, who like to make things and create, but may need help getting their ideas off the ground.

The first project gruvr ‘backed’ is a cool FuzzBox type distortion pedal made by a small company in a college business incubator…  here’s their promo video about their new pedal:

The project looks like fun; these guys seem to really love making what they make – and it’s amateur-music (as opposed to Indy, or Commercial) music related.  So check out the Carolina Olympia Fuzz pedal, especially if you play guitar and might want to use one!

And check out Kickstarter while you’re at it.  You may find a project you like – or start one of your own!

For the past 4 years,  I’ve been making variations of these cookies for the Exam Bake at St Mark’s School, and I always get requests for the recipe, which I haven’t written yet.. so if anyone would like to make these again,  here is the latest version.  Lions need more than zebra meat for exams.  They enjoy granola-like cookies.  The idea behind this recipe is  to take oatmeal cookies and crank up the amount of grains (4 times the usual amount!) while reducing sugar & butter, until they are almost like clumps of granola, not cookies.

This recipe makes about 4  batches of about 1 doz cookies each, which you can  split into different add-ins – one for each exam topic.

1 oats, 2 mixed grain

Ingredients:

• 1 container   (4 cups) oats
• 2 containers (8 cups) of multi-grain (oat, rye, wheat) cereal (Trader Joe’s)
• 4 sticks (32 oz) unsalted butter
• 3 cups brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 4 tsp vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1.5 tsp baking soda
• 1.5 tsp kosher or sea salt
• 3 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• add-ins:  black raisins, cranberries, dried blueberries, expresso beans, about 6 oz each

The trick is to pre-toast some grains to drive moisture out and add baking powder to get the grains to just stick together while still remaining light and crumbly.  I also  use sea salt instead of fine salt since it creates ‘sparks’ of flavor and requires less sodium overall.

Preheat oven to 350F.  Pour the 2 multigrain packages (not the oats)  into 2 or 3 baking dishes and put them in the oven to brown the grains as you prepare the rest of the dough.   Here’s what they look like before browning:

color of mixed grains before toasting

after toasting

Stir the grains every 10 minutes or so to keep them from browning too much at the edges, and don’t leave them in longer than 30 minutes.

While the grains are toasting, melt the butter (microwave is fine), mix with butter, sugar, vanilla, and eggs. Beat with a mixer until smooth.

In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, baking powder until well blended.  Then add the flour mix to the butter and mix it all up well.

When the multigrains are done toasting, take them out and mix in the oats-only package.  This will produce a variety of lighter and darker color grains.  At this point, you have a large bowl of dry grains, and a bowl of sticky batter, which will combine to make the dough.

granola dough with black raisins mixed in

Next, combine all the grains with all the batter and blend together in a very large bowl.

Then, split up the resulting granola-dough into 4 or 5 batches  - one for each add-in ingredient you’re using.

Blend in the add-in to each batch and create the cookies. Use a plastic 1/4 cup measure to scoop out enough dough for each cookie, pack it together slightly, and place on nonstick buttered baking sheet.  This dough won’t look like regular cookie dough – rather, it should be so granular and loose that it’s almost falling apart.

falling apart on cookie sheet... it's all good

Starting today, the City Parks Foundation is announcing one SummerStage performance each day for twenty days. The first of these SummerStage concerts was just leaked via the Summerstage twitter as promised — and the kickoff is a doozy, guaranteed to get both Beliebers and Phans excited if not downright shocked.

Justin Bieber and Trey Anastasio of Phish to play New York

Phish management along with Scooter Brown, Justin Beiber’s manager, have announced a joint concert to be held by the bands to start this year’s SummerStage festival!   The show is scheduled for Saturday, May 21 at noon in Central Park. This is just one week before Phish starts their tour in New York at Bethel Woods, and several weeks after JB returns from the Justin Bieber European tour ending on April 9. No word yet on ticket prices or sale dates yet but Summerstage prices are great and all expectations point to an awesome event.

We’re not actually that surprised by this announcement.  Think about it — the signs of something developing have been there for months now.

Dan Kanter, Bieber guitarist, told Rolling Stone magazine “[Justin] is going through a huge Beatles phase right now, and I’m trying to teach him about Phish and how great they are.”    Bob Weir’s Daughter loves Justin, and Bobby Weir has been to a few JB shows.

What kind of show will it be?  Well, we have two very interesting rumors.  The first concerns the JB band rehearsing Phish’s Catapult.

The second tidbit is that he’s gotten into Bob Dylan.  Kanter reported walking into Justin’s dressing room to find him singing Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower“.  Yep, the same Dylan song famously covered by Hendrix – and played by Phish on occasion.

So my main question is… will Justin be wearing one of those Fishman dresses ?

We’re psyched. Please let us know the moment you hear any details about ticket sales – there could be a prize in it, like some free tickets – for you

Canadian teen pop star and heart-throb Justin Bieber is changing his name.  Or at least, he is correcting the spelling of his last name.

The manager of pop star Justin Bieber has confirmed to gruvr.com that the young star will file papers to change his last name to “Beiber” once he returns to Ontario next week.

Bieber, 16,  is the youngest solo male artist to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since Aug. 24, 1963, when the then-13-year old Stevie Wonder spent one week at No. 1 with “Little Stevie Wonder/The 12 Year Old Genius.

Justin’s last name is pronounced “Beeber”, not “Buyber”, yet its correct spelling, given its pronunciation, has been a source of constant confusion and errors. According to manager Scott Brown, questions over how to spell the name are costing the enterprise time and money in having to correct and clarify the spelling for press, promotional literature – and especially for fans.  ”Now that Justin has reached the top, it’s time for us to move quickly to correct this before things get any worse”, said Brown.

Bieber, 16, whose hits include One Time and Baby, recently signed autographs at a clothing stall at Roosevelt Field Mall in a New York suburb.  One fan waiting for an autograph commented that Bieber didn’t know how to correctly pronounce his own name, and a scuffle broke out in the line among devoted fans, who were offended by any criticism of their idol. Nassau County district attorney Kathleen Rice said in a statement the event had quickly become overcrowded, putting fans in danger of being “trampled”.

Further compounding the comedy of error is recent coverage by major news organizations like the BBC, who spelled it “Beiber” in their latest news release .

According to Brown, the problem is not a new one for Justin. “Justin has been frustrated with the spelling of his last name since he could write, and his friends began pronouncing his name wrong.

Tour Tickets

The change is expected to be complete by June 1, before Justin’s extensive summer tour begins on June 23 in Hartford, CT .  This is important so that the many tickets to be printed can use the correct spelling.  One side effect of this change could be that already-issued tickets, using the old spelling, will become instant collectors’ items.

A second practical issue is Justin’s twitter account, at http://twitter.com/justinbieber – which has 1.6 million followers.   Bieber management is hoping to work with twitter directly to get the spelling changed, without requiring all fans to unfollow @justinbieber, then follow @justinbeiber.

One issue which won’t be resolved by this change, however, is the long-standing dispute between Jonas Brothers fans and Justin Bieber fans.  Both groups of fans like to refer to “J.B.”, and tend to dispute the right.  On the Jonas Brothers vs. Justin Bieber inter-fan beef Justin calmly says, “Our fans seem to fight and I don’t know why. But I don’t care, you know? It’s whatever.”  Management reports that negotiations are underway to reach some compromise with the Jonas Brothers whereby they could agree to use different initials.  ”For example”, Brown says, “they could decide to just call themselves the ‘Jonas Guys’. Problem solved!”

Music Directory

Our fellow humans in Haiti are going through hell.

So, what should you do about it?  How about getting out to hear some great live music?

Yep!  just make sure to find a local Haiti benefit concert to attend!  How?  Check it out – we hacked gruvr to  locate Haiti concerts near you .   Just go to gruvr ,  type “haiti concerts” in Band Search, and it will do the rest.  Or, use this shortcut link:  Haiti concert finder

If gruvr can’t find haiti events within your desired search radius, it will at least put up the 10 closest events, no matter how far away those are.

Here’s the scoop:  for the past week, we’ve been seeing lots of searches for Haiti concerts and talk about them on twitter. We’ve been seen lots of “haiti benefit” concerts get added to the gruvr map – dozens per day!  Some have been big artists- like Lady Gaga, but we did a quick search and found over 600 small events planned, happening everywhere - in VFWs, churches, schools , museums – you name it!  As of today, about 30 new haiti events are being discovered per day.

If we can help more people find these events, more will attend.  And if more people help Haiti, well – it’s worth the hacking.

Now some details:

• The normal gruvr reminder function will work for events you discover.  Just add shows to your favorites list by visiting them, tell gruvr your email, and it will remind you.
• Want to add your event? Just post the gig on a myspace band profile,  use the word “Haiti” in the venue part, and put the band on the map
• We disabled all adsense ads for the time being since that’s not the point, but they’ll be back in a week or so.
• got a legitimate haiti relief ad you want to show to 15k people/day? contact us.

So now it’s up to you.  Please share this and spread the word, so these events get discovered by your friends, too.
Go experience one of these events.  Dance a little, cry a bit,  give until it hurts… and you’ll be glad you did.

Let us know how it works out.

Thanks, and let’s hope your country never collapses on top of you.

Mark

You know how to use gruvr to find upcoming concerts by your favorite artists and connect with nearby fans beforehand by commenting on the event page.   But after the gig occurs, it is gone from our map, along with any discussion – gone for good!   Yet the greatest thing about group experiences can be – well, sharing those fond memories that nobody can take away!

This summer, we ran across a nice site called Gig Memories global gig and event archive .   The point of GigMemories.com is to allow concert fans to build an archive of past performances and capture their recollections along with videos,photos, etc.    You can enter gigs and put them into a ‘pool’ shared with other users.  If you find a gig you attended already in the pool,  you can “adopt” it and add your thoughts.

There are some sites with similar functions, but we like Gig Memories because it is similar to gruvr:  it’s a small, independent, grassroots style service.  It’s got a simple design, not overly ‘featurized’… and its creator is a Deadhead from way back, just like gruvr’s founder.Gig Memories was conceived two years ago when its founder realised how difficult it was to find info on past gigs on the web.

Over the summer, we integrated gruvr events with GigMemories so that expired gigs from gruvr are now stored in the GigMemories archive, where they can accumulate commentary and recollections from fans who shared the experience.  Problem solved!  If you like, you can search for gigs from gruvr archived on Gigmemories

Go check it out and let us know what you think!

As you probably know, grüvr is all about helping you discover the music that’s all around – right next door, and often free.  What’s great about small events is that artists are so accessible, seating is great, and it’s a more social venue – you get to chat without being deafened by a monster PA system. Grüvr finds these more obscure artists mostly from myspace – but sometimes the band doesn’t even post gigs on myspace.. so they aren’t on grüvr.

On Nantucket, the Dreamland Foundation is sponsoring a series of free concerts on Wednesday afternoons – usually local folk musicians – so I figured I’d go check it out. The venue is the grassed-over lot where the old Dreamland Theatre will be rebuilt. I took my Kodak Ki6 and captured this nice 720p hi-def video of Dave performing Bob Dylan’s Visions of Johanna. You can even see some dense clouds of Nantucket fog blowing around the corner.

It might be nice to see Bob Dylan himself live but he’s not playing near Nantucket. The cool thing is I got to heckle Dave by requesting Desolation Row (which is so long nobody without a laptop can remember the lyrics!) but also Tom Thumb blues, which he played a great version of later. The vid is a bit jumpy because I used my knee as the tripod and well – just had to keep tapping my foot

Enjoy!

Here’s something simple & fun you can do to win concert tickets from  grüvr :  make  a grüvr tshirt and post a video or photo of you  (or anyone)  modelling it and we will send you a discount code for $25 off tickets for the concert of your choice from grüvr tickets.

Details:

1. Have fun and make your own design – tiedye, magic marker art, iron-ons, needlepoint –  get creative and use map imagery, dancing stick figure, recycle your fave band T  - whatever!  It just has to feature the grüvr logo prominently and permanently.  Or if you want, you can just buy a shirt from  our merch page (most are under $20, so basically that way is like getting a free shirt…)
2. Post a video or photo of someone wearing the shirt on blip.tv or similar site- follow the video embedded in this post to blip.tv for an example.   Tell us specifically which artist/show you want the tickets for in the comments below your video, so we know it qualifies.
   For an event to qualify, there must be a grüvr listings of tickets available for that event.  For example, grüvr does have tickets for the Kings of Leon Oct 10th show in Lexington KY as you can see here:  http://tickets.gruvr.com/?concert=Kings-Of-Leon-in-lexington-on-Oct-10-09
3. Then tell us @gruvr on Twitter about your post.

We will send you a code that can be applied to the purchase of grüvr tickets,  good for one use and will deduct up to $25 from purchase price for tickets for that specific event.  Limit one coupon per household /tshirt.  Offer good until Sept 1, 2009 or until discounts run out, whichever occurs first.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the grüvr blog.    Here are the topics we plan to be covering in the near future.

• Contests & Giveaways for concert tickets!
• What is gruvr.com and how did it come to be?
• New feature releases, design-oriented discussion
• Mapping and Geo-web technology and standards as relevant to this site
• SEO: how hyper-local geographic data poses challenges (and opportunities) for current search technology
• Observations on web-based promotion of live music
• News/opinion on the rapidly evolving state of the secondary ticket market
• Recent research in GIS, web technology, social media

… and lots more.

Although gruvr has been live on the web for a while now, I have avoided creating a blog. I’m not much of a blogger – more of a twitterer. I’ve feared the following scenarios:

• that I’d put too much time into the blog and not have enough time for site work
• that I’d put too little time into the blog and create something dull.
• that no matter how much or how little time I put in, few would follow it!

Here’s hoping none of that happens! So check in. Say hi.

Mark