GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Friday 29 February 2008

Leap Day Posting

Woo Hoo! In the six years I've had this weblog, I've never done a February 29th posting before. An indication of my mental state, though, is that I dutifully checked in the GIGO Table of Contents, examining the end of February for each of the five earlier years, before realizing that there was only one to check.

In other incomplete stories, the Pinnacles trip was great, and led to making some connections with some of the other music-makers at the big G. And Ben and I hiked Uvas County Park, saw a bunch of waterfalls, flowing well.
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Sunday 1 April 2007

My parents around 1965

A few days ago, I linked to Dick Oakes' Aman Folk Ensemble pages. They include links to a couple of photo galleries, but most of the photos are low resolution shots of groups of dancers, so I didn't really inspect them in much detail. So imagine my delight when I noticed the bottom of page 4 of Tony Shay's photos — a close-up of my parents, singing together.

Strikes me as being somewhat like a nice metaphor for their 58 years together! (Note: the date of this posting date is completely coincidental. No fooling.)
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Friday 30 March 2007

Scammon, Aman, Kolo, Progenitorivox

On Monday, my nephew Benjamin, his mother Mary, and I went to Monterey, to listen to my mother (Dr Landauer) talk about Captain Charles Scammon. It was the third installment of a series of talks about California History.

Here's the brochure they put up about it:

It was a very interesting and informative talk, about a very different time. She put together slides (mostly old photos and drawings, many by Scammon himself) for the talk, but her facility has no projector. But it does have a big screen connected to a DVD player. So I scanned the images (and snagged one from the Internet), sent them to Mary, who then had them put onto a DVD ($10 at Bay Photo, though I think she managed to get a heck of a discount), and we just brought the DVD. I hope to make those images available when I get a bit of time to do so.

Phil Anast, a long-time friend of my Mom's, was at the talk, along with his wife -- they live in Pacific Grove. Phil's association with my parents dates from the 1960's, when they were all involved in some Balkan and Eastern European folk singing and folk dancing, mostly with the UCLA-based Aman Folk Ensemble.

The six of us went out to dinner together, at El Torito on Cannery Row; we got a windowside table with nice views of the sea lions, otters, dolphins, pelicans, seagulls and other denizens of the Monterey Bay. It was nice reminiscing about the Balkan music and dancing that my brothers and I grew up with, Rastko and the skateboard, Branko Krsmanovich, Kolo, and some of the other touring Yugoslavian dance troupes that visited us when I was young. Fun old times.

The next day, I did a web search for Aman, and found a very nicely done set of pages about Aman and its history:

And also the somewhat related group "Westwind":

http://www.westwind-folk.org/mission.html

My mom said that she's in some of the photos linked from the Aman pages.

Some of the names seem so familiar ... Tony Shay, Ruth Garber, Vince Evanchuk ... Blasts from a long time past!

Phil also mentioned the Tamburitzans, and some of their members that he and my mom knew way back when.

All in all, a very enjoyable afternoon and evening.

To add to my auto-musico-biography: my parents' participation in Aman and related activities means that all those exotic rhythms and harmonies are part of the music I grew up listening to. Many of the songs from that region are in 5, 7, or 11 beats per measure, instead of the boring old 2, 3, 4 or 6 that almost all western music is based on.

Almost forgot to mention -- saw the Austin Lounge Lizards at the Kuumbwa on Saturday night. Great show, but now I need some Progenitorivox.
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Monday 19 March 2007

Eric Clapton in San Jose

Saw Eric Clapton last night at the HP Pavilion. Great show! It's probably been at least ten or twelve years since I've been to an arena-sized show, and it was great to see how much the technology has improved. Clapton was great, as was Derek Trucks. The sound was awesome -- last few large concerts I had seen, in the early 1990's, left me wishing that I had brought earplugs.

More later; just tidbits for now:

At encore time, instead of lighters, people hold up their cell phone screens now.
Doyle Bramhall II plays left-handed, but plays a right-hand model of guitar. Our seat were such that we saw the backs of the big screens on which the live video was playing -- so everything on there was mirror-reversed.
The video work was pretty amazing -- split screen with guitar close-ups and long shots sharing the screen, but not just split in half or quarters.
Lots of geezers in the audience. Deb and I, in our early fifties, felt like we were among the younger attendees.
The pair of backup singers had one move. On the slow songs, they just did that move reeeaaaalllly slowwwwwwwwly.
Clapton sure has written a bunch of good songs.
Robert Cray was opener -- he's a decent guitarist too, with a very nice voice for a blues guy.

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Monday 19 February 2007

Resurrecting my "songs I know" file

I consider myself lucky to be able to say that I've lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains since 1981. One of the drawbacks to that location is the likelihood that you'll have a long commute. I've commuted from here to Santa Clara, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Mountain View, Cupertino, and now Milpitas.

For much of that time, that commute has meant spending most of an hour each way driving, twice a day except for the days I could work at home. Rather than just listening to the radio all the time, sometimes I just sing. (In 1986, I made up my own set of lyrics to Jackson Brown's "Fountain of Sorrow", changing it to "Mountain of Laundry".)

I suspect that I know all the words to approximately 100 songs that I like. I wrote up a list of them, a file containing the names of the songs, and printed it out and kept it in the car's glove box, so I could pull it out sometimes to remind myself to sing something I hadn't sung in a long time.

Unfortunately, I no longer have that printout, and the file itself seems to have vanished from all of my disks at home.

So, I'm starting to re-create it, and figured that if I post it, then it might remain un-lost due to archive.org. The songs are dominated by singer-songwriters, mostly from the 1970's and 1990's.

So here's the first seed:

david wilcox
cheryl wheeler
steeleye span
eagles
cliff eberhardt
pierce pettis
richard shindell
jackson brown
Dar Williams
benny goodman
makaha sons of ni`ihau
dennis pavao
paul simon
harry chapin
CS&N
austin lounge lizards
cole porter
peter paul & mary
eric bogle

kathy mattea,
(jon vezner)

warren zevon/ linda ronstadt

karla bonoff (way pre-bryndle)

robert palmer
grateful dead

jack traylor

danny O'keeffe

john dowland
michael praetorious

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Monday 10 July 2006

Rob and the Texas4000, More Puppies, and a touristy weekend

My long July 4th weekend was hectic: drove up to Grass Valley to pick up Henrike, saw a fun "American Music" performance by the Music in the Mountains orchestra, and returned on Tuesday.

Then I turned around and drove back up to San Mateo, to meet my brother Tim, his wife Jorja, and their son Robert. Rob is 21 and is in the middle of the Coastal route of the Texas 4000 bicycle ride, raising money and awareness for the fight against cancer, while riding bicycles from Austin to Anchorage. Monday was the ride from Carmel to San Francisco (passing within ten miles of my home), and he had a day off in S.F. on Tuesday. It was great to see them, and to see how much Rob is enjoying the event -- surely something he'll remember vividly for the rest of his life.

Tomorrow, they get a day off, in Redwood National Park.

The reason that Deb and I had to be in G.V. and miss Rob's ride-by: last Thursday, Henrike had three puppies. All males; the biggest one is a Blenheim, and the others are tri-color like Henny, though little brown appears on them yet.

Tim and Jo were in the area here for the rest of the week; we got together on Saturday to see some of the Santa Cruz tourist attractions -- rode the Roaring Camp steam train up into the redwoods, took the short stroll among Henry Cowell Park's old-growth grove, drove a bit up into UCSC, and spent some time out at Natural Bridges State Park. Fun day — I don't make a point of going and seeing those places as often as I'd like to.
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Tuesday 30 May 2006

Herons, Tanager, Snake, Bearfoot, Austin Lounge Lizards

Fun weekend. Photos on the Mac, may be on the web by the end of the week. Saw a Western Tanager, a snake, three great blue herons, many excellent musicians both on stage and in jam sessions, and a whole bunch of hippies.
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