...more recent posts
"I invented lighting matches at concerts. Sorry, I did."
- Kim Fowley
Invasive emigrants displace natives in metro area. plants
For futrue reference: I'm thinking the next two Thursdays will be slightly more important (or is that boring?) than usual. I want to use this time to start explaining my thoughts on the new system (at least during the opening hours of the night.) I'm at the point of really needing some feedback, so please help if you are able. This week maybe Local again (nice to all sit around a table - we can go for dinner afterwards somewhere) and then on the 5/3 I'd like to host something at Rivington. Also this is my birthday, which I insist on celebrating in strict Hobbit fashion.
Also, the larger gathering is really taking shape now, so I'd like to throw out a tentative date of Saturday June 2nd. I won't consider silence a commitment to attend, but does anyone have any unavoidable conflicts with this date? Shaping up to be quite an interesting event.
Setting up Tom's archive led me to discover that this system was fairly broken. Apparently no one could access any individual days through the archive for any date in 2001. Accessing whole months at a time was still working. Did anyone tell me about this before? Please speak up. It's fixed now. I think I got everyone's page, but let me know if I missed someone.
Possible meteor shower tonight.
new media music for the masses (of executives)
Looks like it's Thursday again. How time flies. Anyone interested in keeping the streak of socializing alive? Maybe back to the Local? Anyone? Maybe it will be a small turnout due to the poor planning, in which case our options for venues will increase slightly. So let us know if you're on the bus or...
An effective, low-cost solution to combat mind-control.
Sandy Bull, a Master of Musical Fusion With Open Ears, Dies at 60
By JON PARELES 4/14/01 for NYT
"Sandy Bull, a guitarist, composer and improviser whose extended fantasias merged American
folk styles with jazz, classical and world music, died on Wednesday at his home in Franklin,
Tenn. He was 60.
The cause was cancer, said a friend, Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Mr. Bull came out of the folk revival of the 1950's and the early 60's. But while many of his
contemporaries were trying to recreate backwoods American styles, Mr. Bull turned his ear to
the wider world. During his career he performed not only on acoustic and electric guitars, but
also on electric bass, piano, banjo, oud, sarod and pedal steel guitar. His instincts, and his
fondness for the drone at the basis of many music styles, led him to what would later be
called fusion or world music.
Mr. Bull was born in New York City and grew up in Florida, living with his father after his
parents separated. He briefly studied drums and got his first guitar when he was 8. His
mother, Daphne Hellman, is a harpist whose repertory spans jazz and classical music, and he
began living with her in New York when he was 11.
He listened to Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger, and as a teenager he took banjo
lessons from Erik Darling of the Weavers.
By the late 1950's, Mr. Bull had begun a peripatetic career as a performer. In 1959 he played
on the streets in Paris, where he first heard Algerian music.
While studying music at Boston University in the late 1950's, he performed at Boston and
Cambridge clubs, sitting in with singers including Joan Baez. In New York in the early
1960's he worked around Greenwich Village at the Gaslight, Folk City and the Bitter End.
His music was constantly broadening. He heard Lebanese music in a friend's jewelry shop on
Macdougal Street in the Village and the Indian sarod on an album by Ravi Shankar and Ali
Akbar Khan.
Mr. Bull recorded his first album, "Fantasias," for Vanguard Records in 1962. It included
arrangements of classical pieces by Carl Orff and William Byrd, gospel and Appalachian
tunes and an extended piece based on Indian tunings; the band featured the drummer Billy
Higgins, who had been working with Ornette Coleman. Mr. Bull's next album, "Inventions,"
included Bach, Brazilian tunes and Chuck Berry's "Memphis." Mr. Bull also became a disc
jockey for a radio program called "Music of Man" on WNCN-FM in New York.
Mr. Bull moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963 and shared an apartment with Hamza
El Din, the Nubian oud master. In the late 1960's Mr. Bull spent time in London and in
Egypt, where he performed on Radio Cairo. But by the end of the 60's he had become
addicted to heroin, a habit he finally broke in 1974. He re- emerged playing oud at shows in
Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, and he studied sarod with Mr. Khan in 1976.
But from 1972 to 1987 he could not get a recording contract. "Some label people wanted me
to play the way I'd done on my first two albums," he said in an interview with Folk Roots
magazine. "But I was always trying to do something a little different, change, try different
approaches. I didn't want to repeat myself."
He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980's. His 1988 album, "Jukebox School of Music"
(ROM), included salsa-flavored tunes and programmed keyboard parts. His "Vehicles" in
1991 featured the Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng.
Mr. Bull moved to the Nashville area in 1992 and in 1996 started his own label, Timeless
Recording Society, which released "Steel Tears," the first album to feature his singing. He
had surgery for lung cancer in 1996. In 1998 Vanguard released a compilation album, "The
Vanguard Sessions." Mr. Bull had been working on an album of instrumentals, including
solos for oud, sarod and electric guitar and a piece with percussionists from the Tito Puente
Orchestra.
He is survived by his wife, Candy; a daughter, K. C.; two sons, Jesse and Jackson; a sister,
Daisy Paradis; a brother, Digger St. John; and his mother."
Golden door closed.
The new Ellis Island Records site opened yesterday, but I haven't been able to get in yet. May try changing my name to Vilsonsku.
How those internet rumors get started.
(I was looking for a quote from Sheridan, honest.)
Situationist International Anthology
SI primer
a west wing creators problems mushroom.
chinoiseries, chinoiseries, chinoiseries, chinoiseries, chinoiseries
In following Bill's billiken link I was not entirely suprised to find that one of my favorite childhood places, Seattle's Ye Olde Cruiosity Shop had a role in clarifying the origin of the good luck charm.
The site is a bit goofy on my browser because of all the Java but some may find it worth the poke around.
Especially you James Ensor fans, this is the sort of souvenir shop he lived and worked in.
favorite charity at this moment
i should be happy i get to go to French Guiana for two weeks but i cant help but think of how in some whys it will be a sad trip--taking a river (tourist) cruise to visit some indian tribes (they dont let you all the way into the deep interior), seeing first hand thier lost of ancient ways--maybe its because i finished "Tales of the Shaman's Apprentice" or that i spent much time in the early 80's partying in Venezuala just a few 100 miles away instead of seeing first hand one of the last holdout's of ???? (the first McDonald's arrived this year) well there is a Creole/Amerindian etc food fest in one town while i am there:>)
Seems to me like the posting frequency is going up a little bit around here. Remember, if you are signed in, and the new post tracking system is driving you nuts because you can't or don't want to keep up - you can turn it off for certain pages in your preferences (link on the left of the home page - and I'll add my standard disclaimer about the interface being horrible and also how much better it will be very soon.) Also, if you like the tracking, but just want to get caught up in a single swoop, just go to clear.php3 and it will zero all the counters for you.
I Live In Weird New Jersey.
The Origin of the Billiken
Zig-Zag Man
wow. how bout matt haughey on the cover of brills content. heres the blurb.
