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The Knuckledragger 3rd Memorial Slow Forum Post


Knuckledragger

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Strap in, this is gonna be a long walk.  As many HCers know, I worked in nightclubs for nearly 20 years and ran my own one man lighting company.  At one point I was hugely interested in nightclub and stage lighting.  There are many high end club light manufacturers, from Martin to Coemar to ...a company called "High End."  The best "luminaries" as they are called are made by an Italian outfit called Clay Paky.  Clay Paky fixtures are truly the Ferrari of lighting.  Ferrari as the company imagines itself to be, not as they actually are.  Clay Paky products fantastically expensive, physically massive, unimaginably heavy and consume gobs of power.  

20 years ago I went on eBay and searched for Clay Paky products.  It was about what I expected.  Huge pieces of kit that was greatly expensive even used, with "freight only" shipping options.  One guy was selling an official Clay Paky lighting tech vest for $20.  It has a massive Clay Paky logo on the back and a bunch of pockets for ...whatever.  I impulsively bought it.  I have never actually worn the vest because it's ...pretty stupid looking.  Even on stage where one is doing lighting, it looks idiotic.  Still, I kept it.  

For reasons unclear even to me, the Clay Paky vest made it with me to the Vineyard.  I found it while doing laundry earlier this week.  Amused, I did a search for Clay Paky on eBay, like it was 2003 all over again.  Not much has changed.  "Set of 4 moving heads + case for $5700 + $$$ shipping."  "Package of 8 Mini-B moving heads, $22,000 + freight shipping."  There are a few LED options now ("2 color changing LED floods, $7,500."  Unlike much of the club lighting industry, Clay Paky were slow to adopt LED technology.  LEDs aren't as bright and don't deliver as wide a range of colors as a 750W arc bulb does.  Climate change be damned.

One listing particularly caught my eye.  Most static and moving stage lights come in two styles: matte black finish and boring industrial grey.  The former is for nearly all applications and the latter is for stuffy corporate spaces.  Custom colors exist, but they're rare. 

Then there's these fucking things:

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It's the Clay Paky Sharpy: Trump Edition.

They'd fit in just fine here:

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Note Trump cheaped out and used standard black finish movers.

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Everyone knows the Go-Go's.  In 1980, when they were a (pop) punk band, they recorded a version of their future hit "We Got The Beat" with Paul Wexler at the helm and releasted it on Stiff Records (a label best known for ska, early punk and new wave.)  I remember hearing about the original version many decades ago.  It was only available on vinyl, the original 7" was rare and kind a spendy and we weren't in the Information Age yet.  Now of course we have the world at our fingertips (and the ocean at our door.)  A guy I know who does very fastidious vinyl rips gave me a FLAC copy on slsk.  Also it's on YouTube of course:

It ...kinda rocks.  I like the Go-Go's with rough edges.

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So I recently joined an invite-only group on Facebook.  Voluntarily.  This is akin to be agreeing to lights for a dubstep DJ ...in 2023.  The reason I did that is MV is populated with Facebook Boomers(tm) and it's the only way they know how to communicate, apparently.  The residents here are primarily fixated by what's going on in their back yard.  This is a trait true everywhere, but a much more ...focused one on islands.  This phenomenon is how we got UK rave culture 35 years ago, but I digress.  The big hullabloo on MV the last few weeks has been the plight of Leo the dog, who went missing.

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Leo had a number of article written about him in the MV Times newspaper and was the subject of much discussion in the MV "Islanders Talk" FB group.  I wasn't really paying attention to any of it (moving and the aftermath will put an impressive amount of stress on one's time) but I did see a followup post after the Leo found his way home:

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I made a joke about "that looks like Bark Flag to me" and ...exactly zero Facebook Boomers got it.  I shouldn't be surprised.  It's probably just as well I didn't follow by calling him the "Long Lost Dog of It."

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