This is the audio for a 9'40" video-version of a presentation I gave to my AACA group. 'AACA' stands for Al-Anon Adult Children of Alcoholics.

The video is available on my YouTube page: http://youtube.com/watch?v=cKeel484IMk

My mom was an alcoholic from when I was born, and my dad was a wife-beater and a weekend-drunk.

I made the video to share the four roles adult children of abuse tend to take on, and to publicise the 13 characteristics that most of us tend to have.

It's released under a Creative Commons 'Non-Commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike' license. So please feel free to download it and hand it on to people who might need to know they're not alone.

Here are the details of the musicians whose work I've been privileged to include on the video. It's all licensed under the same Creative Commons license I use, and I'm deeply grateful for that...

o 'Schyzophrénie extatique de l'autochtone' by arnoldsrecords.
Download from http://www.jamendo.com/

o 'Lazy Sunday Morning', 'The Lonesome Death of Jonas Grumby', 'Shunned', 'Timestream Station' by Derek R Audette.
Download from http://DerekAudette.OttawaArts.Com

o 'Punk-o-Tronika' by MAIS.
Download from http://www.jamendo.com/

o 'Trip I - c'est l'heure' by Miscere.
Download from http://www.jamendo.com/

Most of the photos that didn't come out of the family album are from stock.xchng at http://www.sxc.hu

(I'm afraid I don't recall the photographers. None of them require attribution in their Creative Commons licensing, so I simply saved them. I regret that. I'd prefer to acknowledge them. If you recognise any of the pics, please lemme know, and I'll pop the names in here.)

I apologise in advance for the poor microphone quality. I've done my best to clean up the audio, and the music certainly does aid in that process. But the mic problems were entirely my own... I had the input volume up way too high, so I was unaware that I was saturating the mic. Dammit.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Garr Reynolds for his site on effective presenting -- PRESENTATION ZEN. http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/

I can only hope that this presentation of mine reflects some of the insights I've learned from Garr.

Please let me know what you feel about this viddie.

Blue skies
love
Roy

This is one of my favourite performance poems.

I wrote it many years ago as part of the libretto for a Flamenco ballet that a work colleague of mine composed and choreographed. He asked me to put a story together. So I wrote a bunch of poems for it.

The musical backing here has absolutely nothing to do with the original Flamenco backing. This one is a mashup of a piece of Creative Commons licensed free music that I found on the web. I've been reluctant to put the piece online cos I lost the original music file, and I simply cannot recall who composed it, nor where I downloaded it from.

If you recognise the backing track, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know, so I can credit the muso.

All of the voice-work in this performance is by me. I laid a basic track down, then sliced and diced the music around that. Then I did several more vocal takes, which I assembled around those elements.

For some bizarre reason, I imported the music file in mono (it was my first project in Logic HitKit, so I guess I didn't really know what I was doing). Which has led me to keeping the entire mix mono. But it still works for me.

This piece is released under a Creative Commons 'Share-Alike, Attribution, Non-Commercial' license. This means you're free to download it, give it to your buddies, mix and match it, as long as you're not making money from it, and you attach my name to it as the originator. Enjoy!

I built the track in Logic HitKit, on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc, using the microphone supplied with the HitKit (it was one of those Dorling Kindersley educational packs -- book, microphone, software; a very cheap way to get a professional piece of music creation software!). Disclosure: I do not get ANYTHING from Toshiba or Logic for mentioning their products. I mention them cos I like to let people know how things are made. I'm an open source kinda guy.