Barghest

Barghest has not met more than once in the past six months, so I do believe that we might officially be considered “defunct,” at least for the foreseeable future. My apologies to all.

— Andrew

Ian, Paula, Andrew and I busked this afternoon in Old Town Pasadena for maybe an hour and a half. Between switching to the south side of Colorado Blvd, bandage issues, bathroom breaks, and running to refill the meter where my car was parked, it was a very eventful time. After we finished playing we went and got coffee and made fun of Anuna. Good times.

Paula and I also played there on the evenings of December 30th and 31rst, which was fun, because there were so many visitors in town for the big parade on New Year’s. A few Irish folk fans even came out of the woodwork and talked to us, so…yay.

Good night, everybody.

— Liz

Well, we’re about to head off to the Sebastopol Celtic Music Festival. Did I mention that mid-September has become one of my favorite times of the year? I honestly can’t wait to get there and just PLAY!

I think that, when I get home, I’m going to write a petition to UCLA’s facilities service to allow us to hold a once-a-week intermediate session on campus. How neat would that be?

Anyway, in preparation for Sebastopol, I’ve been playing the new octave mandolin pretty much nonstop. I’m going to try to ween myself off of the guitar and onto the Weber, as I like its sound more. I seem to be fixated on Yasunori Mitsuda’s reel-ification of his song “Balto”. It’s really quite addictive and the box really stands out on it. Too bad I’m horrible at the box. I’ve got it down on the octave mandolin and I’m considering transcribing it to ABC notation and posting it to The Session, but I’m not sure if people would kill me because it’s contemporary (and written specifically for a video game, to top it off). Oh well, I’ll just do it and see what happens.

Well, I should be packing right now, so I should probably start on that before it becomes 11 PM and I realize that my suitcase is empty.

— Ian

Hi, I’m Barghest’s squeaky flutist. Most of the stuff here will be band-related, I’m guessing. Well, that and silly inside jokes revolving around pirates and the ubiquity of larks.

— Liz

Ian, Liz, Paula, and Andrew busked the late evening away on a streetcorner outside of Tiffany’s. No photographs are available, so you’ll have to take our word that it was a very fun experience. We’ve improved a lot since our last Old Town Pasadena busking endeavour (11 March 2006). Soon we’ll hopefully have Sean down in Los Angeles to join us!

— Andrew

So, here is my obligatory first post. I think we’re going to be playing in Old Town tonight and that would be quite exciting!

— Ian

So I will introduce myself: I am Paula, one of Barghest’s fiddlers.  I enjoy reading and chocolatey coffee.  I will post about our busking sometimes, or our performances.

— Paula

The guys couldn’t come (that’s Andrew and Ian) so Liz and I busked by our lonesomes for an hour and a half or so. Vicky came, too, for moral support. We made nineteen dollars (just about, give or take a little). People were quite nice. At the middle, some people with a baby carriage with two little boys in it stopped and watched us a good while, and gave us four dollars. Then came a guy who insisted that we “stop standing around and play something.” We played him Morrison’s (again–Liz was getting right sick of it, she said) and he tapped the time. It was nice of him though to listen. Then we got two guys a little older than us perhaps, one of them requested “Danny Boy”. I tried to squeak it out for him, it rather worked more than it didn’t. He  asked to hold my fiddle. I let him, and gave him a few tips as far as I knew how. Another man came by also and told us he plays the congas (?IIRC). Before all of this we passed by an Old Town regular, a saxophonist from Trinidad and Tobago who wished us luck and said that historians can really do things, because Eric Williams, whom he knew, was one. I looked up Eric Williams later and I thought it was cool that his was the book, Capitalism and Slavery, that I had sorted through while working at my old job.

Did I miss anything? anyway it was mostly a fun night. I was really nervous sometimes and i know I played jittery sometimes, but the traffic (which occasionally was very loud) gave us some cover so that not all my squeakings projected, though to be sure this meant sometimes that none of our music projected.

Can’t wait till we can get Ian and Andrew and Sean with us too. Fun!

— Paula

We performed in the play O’Bruins, written by Annie Oakley of the UCLA club Erin Go Bragh.

— Andrew

Although I was a bit under the weather, we managed to net rather an impressive amount of monetary contributions on this chilly winter night in Old Town Pasadena.

— Andrew