The fine gents at Dead in 60 Years have put together a nice taste of last Saturday night’s Catacomb Party on the Fulton Mall. It was organized by promoter Religious Appeal and local band Fierce Creatures, who used the event as its album release party. The video is a bit long, but if I may, I’ll implore you to stick around for the second half of the video, which is an epic sing-along of Fierce Creatures’ best-known song “Satan is a Vampire.” It was the show closer — and a great one at that.
Starring (in order): Anthony Taylor of Nothing To Do, Nicole Giordano-Ashjian of Street Scene, Roque Rodriguez and Bryan Harley of See Saw Seen, Cindy Wathen and David Kennedy of Blend, Roger and Bo of Who Eats Brunch, Alisa Manjarrez of A La Carte and a certain mayorly lady you might recognize.
Much like YouTube, anybody can upload content to Gotta Love Fresno. Unlike YouTube, the folks behind Gotta Love Fresno invested in our local Internet community, commissioning new, original shows from some faces you’re probably familiar with. (Because it needs to be said: Kudos to Comcast to shelling out some money and getting behind some proven voices, instead of just recycling content.)
Gotta Love Fresno has three clip-style shows that’ll have new episodes weekly:
If you’re familiar with the Dead in 60 Years blog/podcast/video crew, then you already know they’re a crazy bunch of Fresno explorers bent on doing outrageous things because, as the name suggest, they’ll be dead in 60 years.
One such outrageous local activity is their Robo Run — which challenges both their physical and intestinal endurance. The second annual event happens Monday. It’s a city-wide relay race built around Robertito’s locations. Each leg of the race ends at a Robertito’s location, where runners have to eat an entire burrito. I caught up with three of Di60 guys: Daniel, Brendan and Greg (l-r in the video) to ask them seven questions.
Once again, The Beehive is honored to host the semi-regular Swedies, the only semi-legitimate awards covering the Swede Fest.
Swede Fest — the homegrown festival dedicated to low-budget movie remaking — held its eighth event on Saturday, a standing-room-only affair at Full Circle Brewing Co. Swede Fest 8 represented a new height for the festival in terms of attendance, entrants and all around hype. Swedes came from around the Valley, and around the world — France, Australia and New York.
Picking winners for Swede Fest 8 was also the toughest of all the festivals I’ve attended. But below you’ll find what impressed me. You can watch all the films for yourself at swedefest.com, then come argue with me. Oh, one note, for obvious reasons, I’m not considering “The Avengers: Sweded” for any awards. It’s already conquered the Internet. It can live without a Swedie.
To all the rest of the winners: Take a screenshot of this post and make it your desktop image at work, then tell all your co-workers you won a Swedie, then spend the next 10 minutes attempting to explain what the heck that is. Congrats!
ORIGINAL POST: A trip around Fresno for some local happenings this evening:
LEON RUSSELL: Music legend Leon Russell — who has played with members of both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, that’s a pretty good test of “legendary”, don’tcha think? — is at Fulton 55 tonight. Russell is a recent Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and he should probably be in the beard hall of fame too. Tickets and info here.
BASIA: Genre-defying pop singer Basia headlines Tower Theatre tonight. Her style, according to her bio, “combin[es] the rhythms and styles of Latin music, the sound of classic American soul and R&B, and the polish of ’50s and ’60s jazz.” So yeah, all over the place. Show at 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $45.50 & $55.50.
The Fresno interwebs patted itself on the back last night at the second annual Frebby Awards, held at Fulton 55.
I’m proud to say that I was among the winners for my work here on The Beehive, so thanks to everybody who reads all my “information.” As a whole, the Fresno blogosphere was well represented among the winners. Here’s the list:
There’s a long list of honorable mentions you can see at The Daily Dues. Congrats to everyone.
Now that all that award stuff is out of the way, I need to say something about the videos. They were great — my favorite part of the Frebbys. The wonderful intro video (see above) was made by Windsong Productions and stars Frebby host Zara Arboleda of CBS 47. Each category had an intro video, created by folks like Dumb Drum and Dead in 60 Years — and those were quite entertaining. Some of them are below for your enjoyment.
This year’s Frebby Awards are Thursday night at Fulton 55, and seven local web-centric companies, services or people are going to walk away with 20-pound statues anointing them as online “standard-setters.”
Who will win? You have to wait until Thursday night’s ceremony — tickets cost $15 and are available here if you want to watch with your own eyes.
For now you can peruse which entries, out of the 60-some-odd submitted, that Frebby judges decided were the best. These 20 scored the highest across all seven categories and are essentially the “finalists.”
Watch the new episode of Dumb Drum’s “Cross Streets” — everybody’s favorite ongoing local web series. This one takes us to Cedar and Shields. (Warning: Language NSFW)
Nominate your favorites from the Fresno internet community for a Frebby Award. Nominations close on Friday and there’s a whole long list of categories in which you can profess your love for your favorite Fresno-based app, website, web campaign, blog, etc. Should you need more convincing, watch this Freb-nom video. Oh, and this one too.
Listen to me ramble on and on with the guys from Dead in 60 Years on their recent podcast — for reals, it’s like an hour and a half. It’s also a very profane and probably offensive podcast, so it also gets a NSFW warning.
Hang out with the Fresno Twitter community at Fresno Tweetup Goes Wild 2 (aka #wildfresno) on Saturday at Chaffee Zoo. If you’re not on the list yet, RSVP on Twitter right this second with @fresnozoo or @fresnobeehive. That way you can get on the list for special $5 tickets, watch Fierce Creatures and try to wrestle prizes away from me.
Vote for your top six performers in the Big Fresno Fair’s Local Performer Contest. Of the 25 acts still in the running, the top six vote-getters will earn a chance to play at the fair’s local talent showcase. Watch videos and vote here.
They’ll be interviewing comics and making videos like they do — adding a much-needed web component to the local comic scene. (Wouldn’t it be cool if our scene had videos like The Laugh Factory does?)
In other Heroes of Comedy news: You might recall I wrote recently about Heroes attempting a six-nights-per-week comedy schedule. Host/organizer Minch said that went well and Heroes will be doing more of it soon.
For now these Tuesday open mics are the only weekly gigs, but others at scattered into the weekly schedule. Later this week, for instance, Heroes is hosting a roast of local comic/radio personality Rick Roddam, who is moving away soon.
ELSEWHERE: It’s another of Kiss Country’s$5 summer concerts at Woodward Park. This time, it features Summer Sweeney, Bradley Gaskin and Edens Edge. A word to the wise: With this concert series, you never know when you’re going to be seeing the next Taylor Swift or Lady Antebellum. Both, in fact, have played it before they blew up. Read this feature story from Sunday’s paper for more on the $5 concert series’ history for catching rising stars. Tonight’s show starts at 6:45 p.m. Tickets cost $5 — plus parking at the park.
1. RHYME WITH DAS RACIST
Oddball hip-hop group Das Racist is at Audie’s Olympic tonight, combining that Internet-era humor we all love so much, a gluttony of pop culture references and actual dope beats and rhymes. These dudes are selling out much bigger venues in much bigger cities, so let’s hope Fresno shows up. More on Das Racist here. Opening is Populus, who showed off his shtick at Pecha Kucha the other night and won over the crowd.
