Joe Pass

A band was playing downstairs, and they decided to cover Duke Ellington's Satin Doll. They did a pretty credible job of it. Even the squawk-'o-matic player set aside his squeals and honks and tried some of that melody stuff. Here is Joe Pass, showing that he's pretty clear on both melody and harmony. Here is a link to the chords. Definitely try this at home.

Backstage Yiddish

Yiddish has for a loaned the English language words, phrases and attitudes in general and provided sharp working tools for performers in particular. A subset of Yinglish has been appropriated, meanings twisted a bit and set to work backstage.

Bubee - Form of address. Usually morphs into bubba as the tour move into the heartland, unless your from N.Y. Then it's bubbleh all the way.

Cuppah - overhead drapery on a set (excluding the teasers)

Kosher - A power hook-up that supplies correct grounding and phase or a hang that's been signed off on. Everything else is copacetic.

Farpotshket - Something that's been repaired so many times, so deep in duct tape, that it can't be fixed no more.

Kvetch - The singer

Potch - Percussive maintenance.

Tchotchke - Little specialty tools. i.e. fret files, coffin keys, projector alignment drivers..

Megillah - A shows hardware. "We got the megillah out of the truck and powered in two hours."

Pisher - New guy on an experienced crew.

Drek - The instruments.

They're plenty more, but most are used in the same sense everyone else does. Smuck, klutz, putz, farblondjet and so on.

Spelling reference: The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten (What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles?" ......"A Herring" (you can paint it green, nail it to the wall and the whistling part is added just to make the riddle hard).

Bald Eagle

Anthony attended the Riverside convocation of the Eagles this weekend. True to his word, he raffled off chances to shave his head, resulting in over one thousand dollars being raised for Locks of Love and the fight against Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Pride, S.F., "09

I wonder if the folks at Stonewall could guess that trying to keep their butts from being beaten in a jail cell would lead, forty years later, to a parade on Market street where you could shimmy in your tie-dyed undies while servicing a transnational clothing consortium?

All Right

The Celebrity Industry

Michael Jackson....1959 - 2009

A troubled individual , working for an industry that relentlessly magnified and encouraged his flaws. We enabled this celebrity circle **** with our attention and purchases. Now it's time to shed a crocodile tear, eulogize the last dollar out, and find the next trainwreck. A predictable jeremiad on my part, but jeez, the tragedy is that everyone involved agreed on the desired result beforehand.

Smile

Smile...Trompe l'oeil bronze...J. Seward Johnson jr

Located at 201 Spear (x Howard ), this is a life-sized piece placed in a small green space next to a terraced brick office building. It works well. ( better than the arachnid grotesquery on the next block.) Part of Johnson's man-in-the-street series, it fools you until you turn to it, then it's clever and soon it becomes a comfortable presence. Well maintained, and just the right feel for the site.

Savitri

Shawn Lane (1963- 2003)

Shawn Lane is often remembered as the shredder who didn't quite make it. The performance in this video suggests that he was doing just fine, thank-you, we simply hadn't caught up yet. Playing with Jonas Helborg and a group of Indian musicians, Lane employs a glissando style most often associated with sarod players, using both bar and finger bends for the gamakas, an early looper, and I suspect a compressor ( I hear a muted click on the pick attack ). Just to put whipped cream on the cherry pie, he quotes some standard jazz changes over the modal form.

Locks of Love

sids

Anthony's e-flier for a charity event.

The Blogosphere Delivers

Personal Notes: Yup...Billy Clinton did it. After reading how the continuous number line leads directly to gnosis in the American character, ( setting aside, of course, any mathematical thought after the development of Cartesian co-ordinates ) I found the proof that I knew was there.

Sure as the cows come home, Gov. Stanford's vacation package wasn't hypocrisy, dereliction of duty or misappropriation of funds. No Sir. The problem lies with the fallen ( that's us ) and the Machiavellian machinations of Billy Clinton in particular. ( try to say that one twice ) Hot damn...and written in a prose so dense that Derrida would have squirmed in admiration. It just don't get no better.

( yeah, I know what schadenfreude means, why do you ask? )

Cindee DeJohn

Happy Birthday Cindee.

How was school today?

How was school today ? is a project from the University of Aberdeen aimed at giving kids with severe mobility and communication problems a voice. I found the reference to it on Dorkbot, and between Googling and calling around I found more.

The main thrust of the project is to use sensors to record the subject's position (GPS), position of dumb objects (RFID), and something ( definitely toss the barcode idea ) for people's position. Software and speech synthesis then help the child construct a narrative of the day. The goal is building the child's communication resources.

I can't address the interface problems. There are so many kinds of gestural limitations that each unit might have to be programmed to order and reprogramed as things developed. Publishing a high level computer language designed for a medical tech to use might speed this aspect up. Perhaps the folks in robotics have something on their shelves that could be adapted. As for the natural language aspect, yikes. The PhDs are going to need one of those proverbial fourteen year olds.

Hardware looks to be off the shelf. RFIDs are coming down in price, much to privacy advocates' dismay. GPS, speech cards, wi-fi, and IR or sonic position sensors, are all on sale at your local computer megamart. Kid-proofing the electronics to medical standards might take some work, but heck, if they can adult-proof it......

What I'd like to focus on is the interaction between kids. A child who has difficulty making herself understood, especially at playtime, might be afforded some relief using block visuals. The program could catalog what's in the vicinity using RFIDs, and pop a picture on the screen. An icon set of the most-used requests and a simple way to generate new requests could behave like a toolbar. Gestural manipulation of the picture's position would convey intent. A communication card, complementing the speech card, could transmit the desktop and sound to any machine set to receive it. MIT's Media Lab might have something ready to go on that point.

One last idea. The narrative self is necessary, but a kid needs a private self too. I think being physically limited and thoroughly dependent would only increase this need. Perhaps an icon of a treasure chest on the screen, a place to tuck parts of the story that want to be saved, but aren't quite ready to be shared just yet.

Jpeg09 Pitches Product

The introduction of hi-def TV has generated some opportunities for the sales department. Pitching pimple crème or disaster du jour is problematic when the camera magnifies the script reader's all to human features into an exemplar of the problem your snake oil is said to solve. But, lemons to lemonade, there's a workaround.

1) A Smear Button: This application, activated from the home viewer's remote or the studio editor's desk, will be the digital equivalent of a soft focus lens. Make-up doesn't quite hide your talent's night out? Smear that datastream. Of course, advertisers will be offered a global override command. Don't want to mess with the carefully placed sparkle and digitally modeled dewy freshness as new product sweeps your audience off to their dreams.

2) Idolins: 3-D modeling tools can produce the perfect news reader. Fine-tuned by the latest polls for gender, ethnicity, delivery and so on, you can forget about those weekly checks, days off, and that dang diva temperament. Hawaiian, medium build, with a predilection for saris, just not selling like the old days? Click-click-click, and voilá tout, blonde, husky contralto, and a lascivious leer for the weatherman. Poignant pauses can be inserted when and where you want with interactions controlled for maximum return. Your script, profitably delivered, your way. No contracts, minimal maintenance, updates on the fly, and a legal blind spot ripe for exploitation. Now who do you think represents higher Q numbers with your sales demographic, Jpeg09 (above) or the overpriced employee yakking on your set right now?

b-b for Gov.

S.C. Governor Sanford took last week off to have an affair. You're no longer considered fit for national office without at least one tear-filled public confession. ( glycerin makes the best tears, it stays shiny under hot lights and doesn't leave metadata like Photoshop ) That his walkabout was noticed on the first or second day impressed me. Here in S.F., brylcreem-boy ( Mayor Gavin Newsom ) has been M.I.A. since he decided to run for the governorship of California last year, and nobody gives a darn. Our mayor, with the help of the Circus of Supervisors, took the self-congratulatory green bicycle of City government and peddled that sucker straight into a tree. Now he's touring the rubber chicken circuit, asking the swells ( gee, thanks for that posh introduction, Mr. Getty ) to provide him a new entitlement. Granted, we occasionally see a picture of b-b sitting at a desk looking sober for the camera, but thankfully he's just pretending to work. Posing for office is about the only skill he has.

Its Own Comment

Cupid's Bow

Cupid's Bow, Coated steel and fiberglass, by Claes Oldenburg and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Embarcadero, S.F.

Commissioned by Donald Fisher, the work was given to the city in 2002. Erected just shy of the bridge, south of the Ferry building, its size imposes itself in a view of the bay and bridge from one direction and on a nice mix of modern and older buildings on the other. If placed next to the Power Exchange, it might have been a clever statement, but at this location it's an out of scale monument to onanism. One wonders about the maintenance costs. It's a sixty foot span of tag-ready surfaces vs. sk8ters, sea fog, gimmies, and gulls, set off by lapsed landscaping. A gift with strings.

Need Coffee

Someone neglected to drink his coffee.

Mai Sets Things Straight

"The Chinese ideogram for crisis is made up of the characters for both danger and opportunity..."

..or so says a character in Howard Hendrix's Lightpaths. I've read the same thing in motavational bidness books and in New Age all-is-all chapbooks. Eager to try out my scholarship I ran it past Mai, a native Mandarin speaker on our support staff. Her response? "Where do you guys come up with this stuff ?...now let's get some coffee."

It turns out that wei and ji (left and right character respectively, simplified strokes), when joined, mean precarous incepent moment; crisis. Wei supplies the meaning of dangerous or precarious and ji can be danger or incipient moment in this context. Ji only becomes opportunity in conjunction with characters like hui (occasion). As noted in Pinyin.info, It's a language, not a pidgin. You can't just assign meanings for rhetorical convenience.

However, most Chinese folks of my acquaintance are rather practical people. Ancient Chinese wisdom....me ?...uhh...Sure, you got it.

Eggheads

On long term temporary display, Robert Arneson's Eggheads. To see them you walk behind the Vaillancourt Fountain at Justin Herman along the Embarcadero.

They're just the right size, and placed along a low-slung wall so people on break from work can sit by them in sun or shade as desired. Best of all, they provide a bit of comic relief to the tchotchke sales across from the Ferry building and the wall of graphics celebrating the weltanschauung du jour.

Summer is Here

- Summer Solstice: 05:45 UTC..... Pilobolus..... Lovin Spoonful

Why We Need Inspectors

why_we_need_inspectors

From an e-mail, forwarded by Anthony. Anyone who labors as an electrician, plumber, carpenter, etc, has seen work this makeshift. "But the ( ** ) said." Money saving ideas that will cost you a fortune. (scroll on right, size toggle top right)

Sheep Display Units

Coots with technology

The Future of Art

Award winning!! ( Dianne Ballesty ) Did I mention award winning? She's my Cousin you know. So much for E. Munch.

The Glimmerglass Opera

This picture was taken on my trip home. The Glimmerglass Opera house is within walking distance from the farm. ( about a mile and some change ) Usually listed as a Cooperstown attraction, it is in fact in Springfield, N.Y., thus avoiding some land-use issues. The new season is ready to go, tee shirts have been printed and tickets scalped. Not too shabby for a small farming community, and an opera company that started in our high school auditorium.

Terje Rypdal

Scott and I would listen to ECM Records when we worked together in Cape May, N.J.. Our recent conversation lead me to looking up Terje Rypdal and thus this post.

Vacation

I returned to San Francisco very early Thursday morning. A quick glance at the local newspapers reminded me how insular the city has become. Apparently, the conversation about the sexual metaphysics of a man reading poetry while sitting naked on a chair, is our latest offering to the art world. The board of Supervisors, along with Brylcreem-boy, are doing their clown-car shtick for the public while cutting deals for the back room. The drunken gimme contingent still wander the streets from the Daily City line to at least North Beach and the city still looks gorgeous seen at sun-up from the sixth street exit's overpass.

The fellow in the picture, Bufo Americanus, excaped the mower by the skin of his posterior, while I was helping my mother with the chores. He/she took this for a go-ahead to start trilling for love. It turns out there are a few potential mates back by the machine shed. Thankfully, there is life outside the city limits.

Revolt on Alpha C

Every science fiction fan worth his NaCl has read Grand Master Robert Silverberg. The Man in the Maze, Nightwings, you know the list. The most important book, Revolt on Alpha C (© '55, Tab), is the stealth member of his biblography. Ask any fan about their first and you'll get a YA from Heinlein or something similar. But press the point and you'll hear, "Oh yeah, I remember that one." Shipped under the radar on the Scholastic Book Services imprint, sold for a quarter right under the teachers' nose, this was the samizdat that snared our impressionable young minds.

...And after that first forbidden taste; Asimov, Tom Swift, Clarke, Star Trek, boxes of comics and paperbacks under the bed....

Punctured Pretentions

I found this on a blog usually considered to be quite conservative, In Medias Res. Turns out they have a taste for the silly, an eye for cliché, and a somewhat nasty sense of humor. Who'da thunk it.

The Massey Decision

Today SCOTUS decided HUGH M. CAPERTON, et al., PETITIONERS v. A. T. MASSEY COAL COMPANY, INC., et al., better known as the Massey case or colloquially as buying a judge. I generally agree with the decision, depending on where or if a bright line is drawn. Predictably, there are those who disagree.

On writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia Justice Scalia, dissenting: "The decision will have the opposite effect. What above all else is eroding public confidence in the Nation’s judicial system is the perception that litigation is just a game....."

Quite true. Almost anyone outside the legal profession, and more than a few inside, are pretty sure that them that got, get. Justice Scalia's remedy seems to be a circuitous variation of "trust us". We are asked to pretend that elected judges don't keep generous names in their rolodex in preparation for the next election. Meanwhile, money still talks, just not in quite so public a fashion.

Vacation

I'm leaving for Springfield, N.Y. today ( north of Cooperstown, on Lake Otsego ) Plans include a family wedding, friends, and catching-up on life outside of S.F. I'll try to post, but after all, it is a vacation.

Tales of the Beanworld

Tales of the Beanworld returns. Dark Horse Comics is reprinting the twenty one original issues ( 1985 to 1993 ), has published a Christmas ('08) special and is currently planning to print more original work. Larry Marder, the author, issues updates and teasers on his blog. BeanWeb provides interactives and Beanworld Wiki has the latest news. This is a good thing.

Duvet

This is the English band Bôa. An edited version of this song, Duvet, was the title song for Serial Experiments: Lain. Note the great solo at 2:01.

Front Desk

Gen, at the front desk, keeping mischief (ours) to a minimum.

Other Views

Scroll to view, size toggle in upper right of embed.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Magazines & Newspape development economy

Pop Universe

LINK for log scale map of the observable universe. (from XKCD)

Jim Hicks

Happy Birthday Jim

Blindsight

image © Peter Watts

Is your biology scholarship as up to date as you think? Is sentience a parasite on the basic bauplan? Is language a virus? Did William Burroughs' idolin, the ugly spirit, find a new home? Is the phrase, "it can't get any worse", just a shorthand way of asking for a world of pain? Read Peter Watt's Blindsight and enjoy psychosis as an adaptive survival strategy.

Lunch with Anthony

I had lunch with Anthony (Askew) today. He turned me on to something I should of known, but totally spaced. Since the broadcast switch to digital, a lot of hidden channels have come on line. For those TVs that have a scan function or auto scan, you need to engage it and let the TV find the new channels for you. I know their is a hundred channels and not a good show on, but you may as well have the access. Who knows, maybe one of the new ones will rerun The Prisoner or Stand Alone Complex......maybe.

Happy Donuts

I realize that May might not look Italian, but she makes the world's best double expresso. Of course, the shop being ten steps from my front door and open 24/7 is a good thing too.

1:10 Saturn V

This is a video (launch and recovery) of a 1:10 scale Saturn V rocket that Steve Eve made in his garage. Some folks know how to do homemade.

South of Market

I still see these signs in the feeder alleys South of Market (S.F.) I'm sure that a story goes along with them.

They be some buzz-words here

In some recent communiqués from B³ ( Bruce B. Brugman - publisher: S.F. Bay Guardian ) we are urged to celebrate. Be it your sexuality , heritage, or medical condition, go out and celebrate it. And what better way to celebrate than with your community. Again, be it the community of leather enthusiasts that prefer the Sybian or the community of jaded aesthetes for tushery. And remember, always be green.

I remember when community referred to a town. People, not necessarily like minded, living in the same area and establishing a commonwealth for themselves. ( roads, schools, help your neighbor in an emergency ) Not any more. Now community is a catch-all for niche interest, club, or shared predilection.

I also remember when we celebrated Christmas and birthdays. Celebrating yourself seems a bit lascivious and please don't scare the horses while you're doing it. If parsed literally, it's also a PC version of the Epimenides paradox . ( recursive self-reference )

Green was a color. Now it's also used as a noun or verb meaning buy this and Mother Gaia won't feel bad. The exhortations are usually printed using solvent-based ink on dead trees and driven to the distribution point by large diesel trucks. (you can see where I'm going here)

Language has to grow and evolve, so jeez Bruce, knock off with the newspeak and the mindless iteration of buzz-words. English contains a passel of words with very useful meanings. Know what you mean and learn how to say it.

Nico Vega

Nico Vega passed through a short time ago. They received a cover mention in Guitar Player, but got something of a cold sholder from the trustifarian hipster cadre. It seems they lacked the requsite conceptual irony. That's how it goes when you're working for a living.

Professional Qualifications

I started out the same way. Then along came the Beatles.......

Lanterns

Somebody forgot to take down their New Year decorations.