Les Jones

Nifty > DNA Lounge

You should read jwz's blog, his home page, and his DNA Lounge updates. jwz is Jamie Zawinski, one of Netscape and Mozilla's early programmers, who cashed in his Netscape stock and bought a club in San Francisco.

His blog has some of the cooler graphics on the net, like these 3D Escher models today. Watch the AVIs to see how they work.

jwz has rants like you wouldn't believe. He blogs about the club at the DNA Lounge. Check the most recent entry on one of the bands that played last week:

Photos of the God Module / Tesseract7 / Control Theory show are up now.

The first two were bands (live guitar, bass, and vocals, plus backing tracks.) Control Theory was ok (though I'm pretty tired of "cookie monster" industrial vocals) and I enjoyed Tesseract7 (who were more of a metal band.)

God Module was karaoke.

That "band" consisted of two guys and a girl, all of whom took turns singing. Their microphones were, in fact, turned on, but that's just about it. The girl's keyboard was not hooked into the sound system: it had a bunch of cables plugged in, but they didn't go anywhere. In fact, I don't think it was even powered on. She did spend the whole set pretending to play it, however.

The two guys took turns at the other keyboard. However, the only time any sound (besides the DAT) originated on that side of the stage was when the big guy was over there, which was roughly every third or fourth song. Any time you saw the other guy moving his hands... that's all he was doing, moving his hands. (I know this because I went up to the sound booth to check.)

God Module played here once before, and that time there were only two of them, and I'm pretty sure they didn't play a damned thing that time either (their only instrument had no power cord and no lights.)

How can you do that?

How can you get up on stage and lie to your fans' faces? How can you stand there and pretend to play a keyboard that you know full well is not even plugged in? How much contempt must you have for your audience to do that?

It makes me absolutely furious.

Which prompted hate mail. Here's his response:

I know some of you might be joining us late, so on a more general note, let me try and explain how this works.

Every now and then, when I say something bad about an event we've done here, I get some hate mail calling me "unprofessional." People seem to think that because I'm the owner of the club, I should never say anything negative; everything I say should be rainbows and unicorns. Well, sorry, that's not reality. This part of the web site is where I tell you about what's going on behind the scenes here at the club, and present my personal opinions about it. This is not a fucking press release; this is "the view of DNA from jwz." Yes, I also happen to be the owner; what of it? That's where I am, so that's the only perspective I have.

Many people seem to think that it's insane that I would say anything bad about events that happen here: don't I care about promoting the business? But, see, this is not a publicly traded company. There is no board of directors: my business card says "Benevolent Dictator." I spent a fortune building this venue from the ground up, and we operate it as, essentially, a charity. I receive no salary, and I haven't had a single dime of my investment repaid.

This club is a gift from me to the world.

That means that I don't have to blow sunshine up your ass.

Benevolent Dictator. That's what I want to be when I grow up.

Posted by lesjones