Do they even have the First Amendment in Canada?

Cheen Pitney’s gotten himself into the middle of a fascinating community dialogue about censorship in SL.  I don’t have time to write a lot, but here are a ton of links…

Cheen’s blog:

• Censored at Burning Life
• Who’d'a thunk it
• Wow look at all the avs

New World Notes:

• Lost that Burning Feeling?

Second Life Insider:

• Censorship at Burning Life.  Again.

Your 2nd Place:

• Burning Life: Censorship Issue

Phasing Grace:

• Please Sink the Censor Ship

Wrath Paine v. Second Life:

• Wrath Paine in: Show us your … Support!  (which has even more links)

Sadly, I’ve been too busy to get over to see Cheen’s piece – but his intention was to highlight a concept about excessive use of water.  Of course, his idea got hijacked and turned into a free speech thing.  So be it.  In the wild west world of SL art, any publicity is good publicity.

Cypress Rosewood’s Oyster Bay show

Cypress Rosewood filled the sim at Oyster Bay for an hour-plus of his ambient “space music”. What an impressive show – and showing by both Oyster Bay regulars and Cypress Rosewood’s considerable number of fans!

Isolde Flamand, Daedalus Young and I took a number of snapshots of the show. Here’s an Isolde photo of the stage, one that sets the scene nicely:

As you can see, Cypress took the Oyster Bay stage and made it his own – even with the purple fog-like particle emitter!

Click on these thumbnails for larger snaps from the three of us:

Daedalus, per usual, took advantage of the opportunity to take some very creative shots as Cypress went from flute to guitar to organ to everything in-between as he built layer upon layer of the ethereal mood:

And a couple more snaps after the fold…

August DeepSexyCool CultureBeats recap

What a fun evening….SL’s best DJ in Doubledown Tandino and 3 fantastic Oyster Bay artists in Cheen Pitney, Jazz Calhern and Finny Yates!  Thanks to the folks at Playboy for doing it right and supporting the arts in Second Life.  Here are a few snaps from the event, which was a collaboration by Doubledown’s Ravelong and Oyster Bay:

Doubledown deftly manning the beats, overlooked by Cheen’s Atlas…

It was a REALLY good crowd throughout the evening:

 

Finny wore the unicorn avatar that she used in her avatar morph display:

Oyster Bay artisan/merchant Jordan Morgenrote of Jordan’s jewelry lived it up too!

A few more snaps after the fold…

HIDDEN STARAX!: 6 pieces held over…

My real life circumstances have changed somewhat in the last three weeks, and this week featured three straight evenings of performance-related issues (Monday and Tuesday at the Playboy sim for Culturebeats, Wednesday at our Cypress Rosewood show) – so I literally have had no time to swap Hidden Starax! pieces like I should have last night. I just learned that I’ll be leaving town tomorrow night for the weekend in a celebration of the opening of the American college football season, so it’ll likely be Sunday night before I can get to the final display in the Hidden Starax! show.

Which is all for the best, as I didn’t even document the 6 pieces that made up this week’s exhibit. Let’s get to those…

First of the four eclectically-mixed pieces on the main sculpture platform is the Starax Statosky Elephant. It’s a reasonably simple piece for Starax, but he makes even the basic pieces look real good:

Marianne McCann takes a much better snapshot than I of this piece:

Next up, the Starax Unicorn. We featured his horse pieces toward the beginning of Hidden Starax!, and this is a nice bookend for the nearly two-month long show:

Marianne McCann uses the closeup to good effect:

Daedalus Young does it right, too, using the “midnight” lighting setting and extra light-prims for maximum effect…what incredible shininess! Are you sure Windlight hasn’t been released yet?

Check after the fold for another proof of Vig’s Theory of SL sculpture art…

Cypress Rosewood LIVE at Oyster Bay on Weds. night at 7PM SLT!

Talk  about fortunate….Oyster Bay is host to one of SL’s great musicians on Wednesday night!

CYPRESS ROSEWOOD in “real life” is TONY GERBER, a space music artist with over 20 recordings available and various music scores for documentary films, most recently the planetarium show, “Nine Planets and Counting.”  His group, Spacecraft has scored music for films including “Vanilla Sky” starring Tom Cruise. They have performed live concerts in planetariums around the United States.

Tony hosts a weekly radio show on Radio Free Nashville called “When Worlds Collide with Cypress Rosewood” which is simulcast in Second Life and features music and interviews with members of the Second Life arts and science community who discuss how the two worlds collide.

In Second Life CYPRESS has been a pioneer of live space and ambient music. He has performed over 40 concerts of his special brand of aural vibrations that can aid healing and relaxation. Cypress is also developing a Space Music Museum alongside working on many groundbreaking projects. He is also co-owner of the “Second Life Music” group and Harlem Cafe project.

http://cypressrosewood.com

http://spaceformusic.com

Culturebeats on Tuesday!

DJ Doubledown Tandino enjoyed the first DeepSexyCool CultureBeats show so much that he is gonna do it again!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) from 6-10PM SLT at the Playboy sim, visitors can groove with Second Life’s finest DJ and admire the works of the following SL artisans: Cheen Pitney, Finny Yates and Jazz Calhern. Amazing sculpture, photography and art to be seen on the beaches of the Playboy sim!

Plan on joining in the fun! Doubledown always makes DeepSexyCool a great time.

[UPDATE: I just learned that Brian Nicholas of The Dogglounge will be a guest DJ! If you haven't heard the music coming from the Dogglounge, you're in for a treat. Doubledown AND Brian Nicolas....wow. Too cool.  ]

MoShang Zhao recap: Party on the pier!

Isolde Flamand suggested that we try holding the MoShang Zhao show on the pier at Oyster Bay, and her sense was dead-on. What fun!

I rezzed a Madcow Cosmos dance platform, “Cancer’s Revenge” featuring a massive blue crab, for MoShang. Then I just moved a couple things around and we were good to go!

MoShang puts on such a great show. Lots of interacting with the crowd, fantastic beats and an “electronic wind instrument” that allows him to create just about any sound he wants!

Lots more after the fold…

HIDDEN STARAX!: David and Goliath, Kong!

As part of the inworld component of the Second Life Community Convention, Crescent Moon Museum owner Tayzia Abbatoir asked that Oyster Bay show some of Starax Statosky’s finest works during this period.  So we held out until now, bringing you two hallmark pieces, David and Goliath and Kong.

David and Goliath’s texturing makes photo renditions a little tough (and personal visits inworld to these masterpieces are always suggested), but I think these snapshots help offer a sense of this 328-prim construction:

Here’s Daedalus Young’s treatment of the piece:

And for some reason, the Vig Theory correlating the “coolness” of an SL sculpture to its ability to be sat upon really shines through with David and Goliath.  Check out those photos, as well as the Kong shots, after the fold:

MoShang on his music and Oyster Bay

I asked MoShang Zhao to offer up some comments about his music and the experience of playing at Oyster Bay in anticipation of Thursday night’s show.  Here’s what he had to say (edited to remove the third person reference):

I am a sound jeweler living in Taiwan.  I collect rough audio diamonds from the streets of Taiwan (be they overheard conversations, street-ads blared from the ubiquitous blue-trucks, street processions or funeral chants) and fuse them with traditional Chinese instruments and laid-back beats to create a unique blend of downtempo electronica that I like to call Chinese Chill.

With Oyster Bay, Morris Vig has created an environment that is incredibly supportive of the creative arts in SL. I love performing at Oyster Bay for the oppurtunity to be surrounded by the creativity of others, as well as to perform to an audience that appreciates the arts as much as Morris does.

Can’t wait for the show!

Daedalus on this week’s HIDDEN STARAX!

Daedalus Young offers his view of this week’s HIDDEN STARAX! pieces. I love his unique perspectives. First, Drowned:

And now, the rideable Pegasus. This may be my favorite shot of his from the whole show. There’s such a sense of fun and adventure in this photo:

HIDDEN STARAX! has been such a treat. Everyone seems to take in the show at a different level. Some enjoy filling up their inventories with the freebies, some come for the rare pieces….and some, like Daedalus, use the ever-changing nature of the show to stretch their SL photography skills. Whatever your reason, enjoy the experience!