Secret Carrboro Ninja Patrol Turns One Years old

Today marks one year of anonymously patrolling the streets of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro (ChCa ™) reporting indy, folk, and alt. rock activity to the ninja master. I started this blog because I wanted to keep the party going. I'd see rumbling moving and awakening performances from local bands and the extent of my ability to explain it the next day was a mere, "take my word for it, it was a sweet show last night." To expose the real story I needed pictures, metaphors, descriptions, records, links, art, narrations, music, rhymes and reasons to radiate the heat that this local scene is generating on and all around the stage. I didn't want to just talk about it I wanted to scream about it. When somehow, unbelievably, the blogspot handle "Secret Carrboro Ninja Patrol" had not already been taken, I knew it was fate, I would blog about it.

suspension of reality

Troika Day 3 In Pictures
Troika Day 2 In Pictures
Troika Day 1 In Pictures
Reign Lee at Black Flower

It has been exactly one earth-year since my first entry re; MAX Indian at Local 506 and I can happily recount a few things I've learned;

I've learned that if you use a beat-to-shit ten year old first generation digital camera on its lowest resolution settings, you get pretty decent grungy looking rock and roll pictures, and if you leave it lying on the bar by accident, it'll still be there when you come back twenty minutes later.

I've learned that there is a hack along with a how-to-guide for every possible html related thing that Google doesn't want you to do with their blogger product. Ironically, to find the hacks just Google it. e.g. "replace header with an image in blogspot" ...even more irony in that this hack was posted on a blogspot account.

Most of all, I have been able to place a quantity upon the seemingly unknown energy that sparks across this town. After a year of immersing myself in the local music culture by taking in as many shows as I could, listening to as many bands as I could, observing venues promote, bands create, and fans react...I have learned that it is inspiration that is creating, maintaining, and building the current. Inspiration is viral and the triangle music culture's art first, originality in excess, genius is teaming with it.

Moving into the next twelve months of ninja-reporting, I am planning a couple of enhancements to the mission of promoting local music and all who are part of its culture. Hand in hand with their music is the wonderful art that is created by the local musicians. As a first enhancement I intend to mold and shape the pages of this blog into some sort of musician's art mall. T-shirts, concert posters, and even original works non music related will have a picture and a way to transact for it. Don't worry about the details, they don't exist, I just know that I want to do this. My second goal will be to ratchet up the content from one post per week (give or take) to several and this means I need more ninjas. That said, if you are a ninja and want to do some ninjaing, find me. --Carrboro Ninja