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tommy jonq — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:21:00 GMT

   GEMINI TIGER by tommy jonq

     a novel for the unhooked

             (click to read sample chapters)

PHOTOGRAPHY by tommy jonq

people places things

         40 DAYS

     a book by tommy jonq

             (click to read sample chapters)

POLITIQS by tommy jonq

laughter. tears. flibbertijibbets.

EPISODIC by tommy jonq

more* fun than a barrel of caribous!

*measure it!

JoBu by tommy jonq

tommy jonq — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:33:00 GMT

JoBu Hits the Road!
August 14, 2008

words and pictures by tommy jonq

Sensational beach party band JoBu are returning to Sidetracks this weekend to kick off the next stage of their career. Lead singer and guitarist Aaron van Voren graduated from SIUC this summer with a degree in Music Business, and he and the band are relocating to Champaign to be nearer the music business. Nightlife recently talked to Jobu between shows and moving vans.
    “Now that Aaron has finished school, music is a full-time job for all of us,” drummer Evan Ryan (Chicago College of Performing Arts, 2007) explains. “Based here in Champaign, we can continue the expansion of the band, writing and recording more songs, playing more festivals, gigging more venues.”
    Bassist Andrew Neel (SIU 2007, Music Business) handles the band’s bookings. “We just finished a 1500 mile, five-show run last week. So it definitely feels like a job now.”
    JoBu capped their week-long tour at the renowned Canopy Club in Urbana. “The crowd was fantastic, and the management are very supportive,” says Evan. Aaron adds, “It’s like our new home already. The great thing about this town is, our fans from Carbondale can meet our fans from Chicago, and they can meet our fans from St Louis.”
    “Everyone in Carbondale knows us already,” explains guitarist Matt Hines (SIU 2007, Music Business.) “Here, we have to push toward getting new fans. Every night, we’re out meeting new people, turning them onto our YouTube videos, selling our CD Stop Time.”
    Like the Partridge Family, Jobu will be living together in one house in Savoy. Like HUM, Champaign, and REO Speedwagon, Jobu plan to launch their breakout from the Champaign music scene. “We’re getting fan mail from Canada,” Andrew says. “We’ve hits on our MySpace (Jobujams) from all over the world.”
    Thanks to a partnership with CDBaby.com, Jobu’s music, including ring tones, is now available on iTunes, Amazon, and two dozen other outlets. Stop Time, their first full-length CD, was released at a party at Sidetracks in May to rave reviews. Featuring soulful lyrics and a Boston-meets-Sublime beach jamming sound, JoBu’s radio-friendly debut featured all-original songs.
    “We’re thrilled to be coming back to Sidetracks, to kick off the school year for everybody,” Evan declares. “Sidetracks is such an awesome venue.” The band will be selling and autographing CD’s, T-shirts, and possibly kisses at the show.
    JoBu will also be recording the show live, as well as a video. “We have enough new songs to record another CD already,” Evan assures us. “But we want to continue guaranteeing our fans nothing but story-driven, creative musical experiences, with no fillers.”
    After Sidetracks and the Strip Mines Music Festival at Shawnee Cave, it’s back on the road for Jobu. Evan says, “We’re looking forward to sharing our music with positive people everywhere. We’re taking that unique Carbondale Rocks feeling with us, bringing it to the whole world. And then we can come back and play Sunset Concerts.”

First appeared in Nightlife

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Defined Perception by tommy jonq

tommy jonq — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:01:00 GMT

Defined Perception Launch Their New CD
October 19, 2007

words and pictures by tommy jonq

Progressive jam rock combo Defined Perception, Carbondale’s answer to the stratosphere, will be releasing their first full-length studio CD at Hangar 9 Thursday, October 25. Nightlife recently had a sub-orbital talk with the Far-out Four: Jesse Payne (lead guitar,) Josh Beal (bass,) Paul Krajewski (percussion, SIUC 2006) and Steve Kaufman (keyboards, lead vocals.)
   What’s new on this CD?
   Paul: Our new CD is the product of our basically living together for two years. We could have made a reality TV show.
   Jesse: This CD has a lot of differences from our original three-song EP we put out in the beginning. Every one of us got ten times better this past year from all the touring. Our music has definitely evolved.
   Josh: These tracks are mostly from what you might call our most polished songs, even though we do improvise extensively on the album.
   Why improvise in the studio?
   Jesse: It gives this album a live feel, in spite of it being meticulously produced. We recorded this ourselves, in our own little studio, on our own little equipment. Paul engineered it himself.
   (Paul Krajewski graduated from SIUC’s College of Mass Communication and Media Arts in 2006 with a degree in Audio Production.)
   Your music is very complex. Are you classically trained?
   Paul: Members of Defined Perception possess various degrees of classical training that vary from “quite a bit”—Steve Kaufman, to “none”—me.
   Jesse: I got my first guitar when I was twelve. It was a half-size Flying Vee, for kids. I learned to play the first five Metallica albums note by note. Then I switched over to jazz, and anything that had at least one really good musician on it.
   Paul: Interestingly, each band member comes from a background of influence very different from the others.
   What kinds of influences?
   Paul: Like, a lot music I started listening to as a kid in the early 1990s. I was into the punk scene around Chicago in the early 90s. Bands like No Effects, Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys and the Ramones would be more Josh, I would say.
   Josh: There isn’t a style of music I don’t like. As a bass layer, I’ve always liked Matt Freeman of Rancid, Les Claypool, and Victor Wooten. I still like Rancid, The Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Arrested Development, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys. I lived with a diehard misfits fan for about two years. It kind rubbed off on me.
   Paul: In High School I got interested in a band called The String Cheese Incident. And Phish, of course.
   Steve: String Cheese has more of a bluegrass influence than we’ve got, but then they’ll launch into something more like a worked-out trancy techno kind of feeling. I also like The Grateful Dead. And early Jamiroquai. The stuff you hear on the The Weather Channel during the Local on the 8s on the The Weather Channel. That’s good music!
   Jesse: I didn’t like music when I was a kid. That sentimental junk my parents listened to. “I Want To Know What Love Is.” I didn’t listen to any of it. Then, I started skateboarding, getting into the Thrasher scene. And that meant Metallica. Suddenly, I started thinking about music all the time. I’d be on the school bus and I’d be thinking about music, but I didn’t know how to play it yet. I still do that, but every day. and now I know how to play what I hear in my head. It just comes right out.
   In that case, how do you classify your music? It’s more than just “jam rock.”
   Josh: It’s progressive, composed music, as much as it is improvised. It’s composed in a way that deliberately leaves room for improvisation. We sort of play Rock-and-Roll like jazz musicians.
   Paul: That’s how the name Defined Perception came about. It describes how we play. It’s an accumulation of everyone’s musical influences, how our perceptions of music have been defined.
   Josh: The name also means that when you come to see one of our shows, you may leave with your perception of us as a band defined according to what you heard that night.
   Paul: Onstage, the improvisation by each musician defines the perception of the base piece.
   Now, the most important question: If you could kidnap one tabloid celebrity—
   Josh: Pat Roberts!
   —and roll him up in a carpet, where would you drop him off?
   Steve: Hell!

First appeared in Nightlife

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Josh Plemon by tommy jonq

tommy jonq — Wed, 31 May 2006 23:47:00 GMT

Men In Black
May 2006

words and pictures by tommy jonq

Josh Plemon and the Lonesome Drifters will be releasing a new vinyl 12-inch in conjunction with a new vinyl 7-inch at Hangar 9 on June 9th. Nightlife recently talked to Plemon and the other Lonesome Drifters in their rehearsal studio.

   Why vinyl? “My thinking is, a lot of the records I love to listen to are on vinyl,” Josh says. “And to me, for the style of music that we play, it just sounds right on vinyl. Plus, the fans get a full-size album cover and every vinyl album comes with pictures and a CD version of the album, so everyone gets the best of both worlds. It’s always been a great experience for me to buy the records I’ve loved, and we want to give people that experience.”
   All of the songs on the album, plus the seven-inch “Bank Robber/Black Widow,” are Plemon originals except for a cover of a Misfits tune and a reworking of “Cigarettes, Whiskey, and Wild, Wild Women.” The music definitely falls on the Western end of the Country and Western Spectrum, reminiscent of Buck Owens, Ernest Tubb, and Johnny Cash. Freight train rhythms, silver-spur guitar licks, and honest, straight-ahead lyrics sung with honest, straight-ahead vocals. Plemon’s wife, Becky, sings backing vocals on “The End,” one of Josh’s favorites.
   Becky will also join Josh and Lonesome Drifters onstage at Hangar 9, and John Beck will be featured on fiddle. Fans will also get to hear additional new songs. Have these guys ever played behind chicken wire? “No, but that’s not a bad idea,” Josh says. “Maybe we’ll set some up for the show at Hangar 9.”
   “We have played in San Antonio,” lead guitarist Ryan Warner points out helpfully. “The club next door had all-male strippers.”
   Drummer Zach Kemp adds, “After the show, Josh went next door and made gas money home.”
   “Don’t print that,” Josh says with a wink. “I’m married.”
   Plemon lets the other members of the band do most of the talking, a lot of which consists of jokes about Plemon’s magazine-cover good looks. Showing them a proof of a poster he’s designed for the June 9th show at Hangar 9, Plemon explains, “I’ll put you guys in over here.” and points to an area behind a silhouette of himself.
   “Oh, no,” Zach jokes. “We wouldn’t want to ruin it!”
   When he does talk, Plemon mostly brags—about the other Lonesome Drifters. “Ryan (Warner, the lead guitarist) just got a job with the Air Force as a military historian attached to Scott Air Force Base. Way to go, Ryan!” Warner has a Master’s degree in Museum Studies from SIUC. “He also played Arena Football. He’s sort our bodyguard.”
   “I was turned down for sixty-eight jobs,” Warner says. “Sixty-nine turned out to be the magic number.” Warner hopes to continue playing with the Lonesome Drifters, commuting as necessary. Lonesome Drifters do come and go on occasion, however. Bassist Jim Rotramel will be joining the group for the first time at the Hangar release party. “We lost our bass player and Jim saw us open for Unknown Henson at Mugsy’s last November. I said, ‘You’ve got that upright bass. Why don’t you come to rehearsal and sit in with us?’ And he just fit right in,” Plemon says.
   What about groupies? “We’re definitely gathering fans,” Josh says. “We’re seeing more and more familiar faces at each show. And we try to do something special for them each night.”
   “We’re the most tattooed Country and Western band in Carbondale. That helps,” Zach jokes.
   “We’re getting around,” fiddle player John Beck says. “We’ve played in Illinois, Missouri, Texas, and Kentucky.”
   “And we’ve driven through Indiana,” Ryan says. “So that makes, what, five states altogether?”
   What does the future hold? “Right now, we plan to keep making music and showing people a good time,” Josh says with real modesty. “We’re tying to have as much fun as possible.” And then he adds, “Until we get rich.”

First appeared in Nightlife

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2006 Vagina Monologues by tommy jonq

tommy jonq — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:36:00 GMT

2006 V-Day Spotlights Comfort Women
February 27, 2006

words and pictures by tommy jonq

Between 1932 and 1945, thousands of Asian women were enslaved as prostitutes by the armed forces of the Empire of Japan, and Eve Ensler wants the current Japanese government to Say It! Known to Japanese soldiers during the Second World War as “Comfort Women,” the survivors, with worldwide popular support, are fighting the government of Japan for recognition, an official apology, and compensation. Say It, this year’s addition to Ensler’s global phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, joins that fight as part of the sixth annual V-Day, a worldwide campaign to end violence against women.
        The Vagina Monologues, including Say It, will be performed by nearly thirty women in the Furr Auditorium in Pulliam Hall on the SIUC campus March 3, 4 and 5 to benefit the Carbondale Women’s Center. “The Vagina Monologues is the closest thing to my heart,” says Patricia Pfeiffer, who recently completed her BA in Theater at SIUC. “I’ve been involved for five years now. I did it last year in Helsinki. We’re part of something that happens on hundreds of college campuses all over the world.” Pfeiffer feels that college students are the key to ending violence against women across the globe. “We want to get this story, the story of the Comfort Women, into the classrooms in Japan and around the world.”
    Other monologues, like Under the Burqua, set in the world of fundamentalist Islam, address violence against women in other societies around the world.
    Patricia Pfeiffer co-directs this year’s Vagina Monologues along with Andrea White and Stephanie Howell. “There is a set of monologues from which local acting companies can choose, and this set usually includes one spotlight piece,” explains Pfeiffer. “And this year’s spotlight is Say It, performed by Helen Allison and Nico of the Wood.” Helen and Nico portray two elderly Comfort Women, survivors of years of sexual slavery in Imperial Japanese Army brothels. “Their vaginas were literally numbered,” says Maureen Conway, a Theater student at SIUC and co-producer of this year’s Vagina Monologues. “To this day, the government of Japan has refused to officially acknowledge any wrongdoing, let alone apologize or make any amends.”
    The Vagina Monologues, including Say It and Under the Burqua, will be performed in the Furr Auditorium in SIUC’s Pulliam Hall March 3 and 4 at 7:30 pm, and March 5 at 2:00 pm. Tickets are on sale at the door, $10.00 for adults, $5.00 for students. Anyone wishing to volunteer to help with V-Day activities is invited to contact Maureen Conway at VdaySIUC@yahoo.com. “We’re still looking for sponsorships as well as volunteers,” says Conway. “We’d like to thank Coal Train, Black Fire and Giorgianna for performing at Vulvapalooza, and thank our sponsors and volunteers. We’re going to continue this campaign until violence against women stops.”

First appeared in Nightlife

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