For the third year in a row, the Champaign City Council and the Champaign Park District foolishly have decided to throw a street festival in the middle of August. Normally, that sounds like a great idea, especially since this festival actually is about more than selling booze.

However, there's one slight problem with this annual event: it has coincided with the University of Illinois's move in day. The festival is held at the intersection of Main St. and Neil St. While Main St doesn't exactly live up to its name, Neil St. happens to be one of the busiest and most important streets in this town. However, starting at 8 am, one of the 3 main exits from the expressway and one of the busiest streets in Champaign will be absolutely useless and will stay that way until midnight.

And what exactly is the payoff for such a festival? Well here's footage from last year:



Yeah... Not that impressive at all.

I probably could start a whole separate blog about how the Champaign City council has no idea how to properly run downtown Champaign. This festival is a great example. Creating congestion not just downtown, but across all of Champaign, just goes to show a short-sided detachment from what else is going on in this town.

I don't want to live in this town long enough to run for a spot on the city council, but if I was going to live here for a considerable amount of time, I definitely would love to take a swing at fixing things here.

The Final Countdown

Well, I can't believe it's finally going to happen, but J Phlip is moving to San Fran, leaving me behind in a Midwest that sort of gets our style of house, but not exactly. We're performing one last time together in Champaign on Thursday August 23rd at Soma Ultralounge. Here's the truly awesome flyer that Jess designed:


If you're in Champaign, you owe it to yourself to come out and hear us play together one last time. I intend to be at my peak and to break out some goodies. I will be recording the set for those that might not be able to make it (shame on you).

I had intended to post our last set at Boltini as the song for this post, but I cannot find my jump drive that I recorded it on (not good). So instead, I am going to post up a solo set that I've been meaning to post for ages now. This is a set I recorded on Radioactivity (a radio show I used to host on WPGU now hosted by the Muffin Man, Lincoln Jones). Anyway, this set was recorded Mother's Day weekend (which explains the Jay West track near the end) and it was also graduation weekend, which explains the first song in the mix.

The set is all funky house music, mostly cause I hadn't recorded a funky house set for a while, and at the time, some of these cuts were extreme exclusives. By now, nearly all of the tunes should be released, except for Chris Grant's soon (hopefully) to be released "Slow Your Roll." If anything on there is not released and label owners want to throw a fit, well throw one. Pettiness in the funky house scene is a definite post for a later time.

The mix itself went pretty well (despite a mishap where I turned off one of the decks in the middle of a blend... you'll hear it fairly early in the mix, like the 3rd or 4th song). I had thought about re-recording it so it would be perfect, but there's something nice about throwing down live and unplanned.

Mertz - Live On Radioactivity (05.12.07)