Monday, October 31, 2005

Hey the radio thing is over and out. Have moved blog to http://www.moontravellerherald.blogspot.com. Cant say will be there that long. It has flaws of the technical order too. But it does not have the same flaws that tire me here. Hard to upload and synch. A site where question marks have replaced apostrophes going back three years. I voiced my complaints [on synch arch] to Radio HQ. But interaction is not human. Its mechanical mouse machine missives. Looking back on Radio Weblog: Some decent stuff. But scattered. Scattered notes in desk drawers was what I hoped to better. This is only slightly more neat. Got complaints from my readers about too much computer stuff. But what the hell else can I write about? So may fork into two sites in future. Good news is RSS and XML are here and the Web is ready to explode again. Short Google! Remember the words of Manny Ramierez: "I dont believe in no curses. You make your own destination." 8:45:48 PM    comment []

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Blistering attack on Open Sores  "My ambition, with producer Mary McGrath, is to thread the seeming chaos of the Web into a coherent skein of ideas and argument," says Lydon. "We want to launch the smartest, most wide-open, democratic conversation anyone's ever been invited to join, in any format. The Internet transition we're living through is a boundless opportunity. It extends the rim of the roundtable and the range of the give-and-take to the whole planet." Christopher Lydon is something of a Boston institution. He is relaunching his career with a radio show with the high concept of merging blogs and radio, not a bad idea.. but not easy to do. That's him talking above in ital.. and here's more "Open Source will be the first radio program truly fused to the Internet, and it will have a lively Web presence. We expect to create a community online that can take part in the production process before, during, and after the program, helping us to surface new views and new voices." The trouble with the Open Source show is that Lydon constantly has to bring in the blog concept. As if explaining the show concept. A story on DeLay, eg, has a blogger among guests, and when Lydon turns to him he says something like "So what's the word for the blogosphere on DeLay?" and the guy has to be cool, or course, and he says something like "I cant speak for the blogosphere." Last night Lydon: "Web, Dresden Dolls, what's it mean." Like McLaughlin seeking context.   Friday, Oct 7, 2005 John Tushcen died this summer   John Tushcen died this summer. When I got to Madison, he was the top poet. For my part, there was great envy. I thought he was like Joe Dallesandro, only articulate. When Jeff invited me to join in a Madison poetry bash {Paul and Jim joined in the music} in 1988, John was also on the bill, which made it great. Lotta Robitusson over the sidewalk curb since then. Now he is with John Berryman. JS Online: On Madison's longtime poet laureate http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/aug05/347027.asp John's Under Construction page http://members.aol.com/jjtuschen/poet.html The Capital Times chimes in http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=49786&;ntpid=1 Poeticvoices.com July 1999 Feature: John Tuschen http://www.poeticvoices.com/Features/9907Tuschen.htm MadPoetry John Tuschen pages http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/tuschenj.html- Thursday, Sep 29, 2005 Dylan on PBS   The whole family sat down and watched Dylan the American Master miniseries on PBS last night. As I suspect many of the Whole Sick Crew across America did too.  It was very fulsome, Lowell. I liked the considerable access to Dylan..and the characters he grew up with. Tony Glover, Paul Nelson, Al Ginsberg [mighta liked to have heard from Bobby Vee], Maria Muldar [the Jug Band footage was priceless], Liam Clancy and Dave Van Ronk... all of interest. Footage of influencers Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie eerie. Fun:Van Ronk desribes how Dylan took his version of House of the Rising Sun and kind of hurt his feelings..and how he couldnt play it anymore..and how gladly he chorttled when Eric Burton and the Amimals took it .. so that Dylan couldnt play it anymore.. The bits on the cold snowy Midwest resonated...and him listening to radio signals in the night. The influence of cabaret show biz on his style [by way of people he shared bills with] became more apparent as it did in Chronicles. It seems this is apt topic for Gangomine blog .. so how do you make that community thread stuff happen? PBS is giving helpful questions for wouldbe coffee klatchs -- Dylan began dissociating himself from fame at an early age. Do you think it helped or hurt him? How? What is your favorite Dylan song? Why do you find it appealing? If Dylan had come onto the music scene 10 years later, do you think he would have had the same impact? Why or why not? But that dont make it. I think maybe I will ask..do y0u remember a time when you saw Dylan perform? Actualy the PBS people are setting up a Flash map to absorb such stories. Maybe I will ask if and how Bob Dylan music/poetry changed your life. I remeber vividly Jim Cusuamno saying "I would have been a lawyer if I hadn't heard Dylan." Tuesday, Sep 27, 2005 When we were seven and a half up on Baltimore .. still we worried  So tony c. his comeback fails And rico’s disabled with migraines So fred lynn hasnt seen his mother in 12 years And pole’s face with his vision shattered   Pudge fisk is unlucky and          theyll call the spaceman insane if he ever stops winning Derron johnson smokes too much And tiant just throws the baseballs He dont know the politics   Like roger moret 4am in connecticut Before the biggest game in his life Like the yaz-razzer wants to beat his wife Our red sox are handicapped heroes Our red sox are no bigger than life Our faith in them is not undiluted Can we forget that they fall apart? O sportswriters with your documented breakfasts O fenway junk hawkers selling those pennants O kenmore square ratskellar  The trolley driver moans to think of the ball game crowd.     Looking for one thing and found another. Oddly while i was watching sox play orioles. A way back poem of red sox.. Many of these players now mostly forgotten. It’s what i saw new to town looking. Great faith. Great doubt. In dance. I submitted this to Belmont-Watertown Sun through a former roommate who was editor...but he kind of punked out at last and ran it as a letter to the editor to my great disappointment. The sox have been in first most of the season but the yankees overtook them this week. The old town cogitates again on fate. On buses. At the office microwave. With car radios in traffic. At the dark brown watering hole. Saturday, Sep 24, 2005 Entry for September 19, 2005   LA. Electricity was out. Walked at least five miles that day... just briefly during time was on bus. Up from my W Sunset motel to Echo Park. All the way to Staples Center. Was like old days, when I had no money but had time, was as then thinking about money, a penny for your thoughts. This is after flying cross country to cover Microsoft Professional Developers Conf. In evening on TV there was Perry Mason. Which was perfectly black and white, and confined drama as I would have it construed. But this cheap hotel is weird. Prostitute stares at my window for hours... just like out of the Twilight Zone. Is this where Sal Mineo died? I find out later; no. In San Diego for Tech Ed year before last I thought I’d ended up in the Hotel Lorraine. This life is getting too poor too poor just a little too poor to quote Detroit Junior. It is an insect life fixated on small matters. --*-- Saw the Dodgers. That was fun. Dodger Stadium was as I expected. Friendly confines. Kept score for a few inning, Herb, just so I had a feel for the context, and was primed for alertness to detail and progress. Saw – I am sure for first time live – a suicide squeeze. Was executed by Dodgers. Saw fielding and running of bases all from stellar vantage. They played the Colorado Rockies, with Korean Kim, formerly RedSox, pitching, ensuring action – but unfortunate for Dodgers, Rockies manager knew to pull him after four.  Sat very high but directly behind backstop. Shared row of seats with nice folks doing Sculley talk.   What is Sculley talk? Well, it is a style of baseball chatter. Very positive, very endearing. Encapsulating essentials. Vin Sculley is one guy who should not retire. He has no partner. And his banter is thus more pure. It’s him talking to you –talking you through the innings of the game.. and he covers the game – and all is fun and clean and good there in the game. So my bud down the way – and damn but I lost most notes – gave my program box score to a kid [well his mother for him] - bud grew up with this radio or TB chant – and this is him speaking... “It got away on him. “It’s a brand new game, 6-6. “A long noisy out – that’s all that was. “He ran a country mile for that one.   The old fellow sitting in my row gabbing a bit here and there like that with a young fellow – some kind of relative, because the alternate between wht the Indians and Red Sox are doing, the game at hand, and their shared blood relations’ doings ... is just talking Vince talk .. all of one cloth... and having a good time. This is the most fun I’ve had since first few times at Fenway, since old County Stadium, and since the day Jeff and I went to Wrigley. Anyway leaving .. palms hear the bullpen.. the scoreboard viewed from behind haloed. As I score a cab. The Dodgers lose [per Sculley] a “wild game”, maybe 8-7, their pitching appearing worse than the Rockies.     “It got away from him”  Happy kids, many in blue, many Mexicans, alive to the buzz, and attendance at the game.  --*--  Strange trip to be taking...on Sept 12.. just slightly less strange than travelling on Sept 11... with the memorials on CNN and headlines in USA .. and a nice verbal brickbat warning from Al Kaline Queda to coincide .. disconcerting  I recall the days of Wescon .. an electonics convention-exhibition from 20 years ago.. the feeling that there were endless possibilities in semiconductors.. and capacitaors, and thermistors, and heat sinks, and design automation tools... I was new to the business and had the boundless hope of the youngster on the rise... now at the press room at PDC, with tech writer and scifi writer Jerry Pournelle pontifacting loundly [more oudly than in press room at Comdex in 88] and endlessly.. and providing an objective correlative for my inner doo-dad cowboy... I am tired.  Robert Wise, director of my favorite Sci-film, The Day the earth Stood Still, died...I learned this poolside with LA Times at a Hollywood bar [at the Roosevelt Hotel] on Hollywood  Blvd..where I saw all the stars’ sidewalk images... Julie London, Scatman Crothers, Pola Negri...] And Gatemouth Brown, one of Slim’s favorites too, passed. There is stuff afoot in technology as always.. Rich clients from IBM and Microsoft are examples. Also of note: The Next or Semantic Web, as visible right now in blogs and RSS. Unfortunately, RSS is just like the early web was. You build it and hope they will come. Fair to say that, like the web, some will build and many wont come. Like email newsletters, RSS is a push medium. It's inflection point stuff. --*--   A poem courtesy of LA cabbie: Big town – everybody’s a machine Nobody has time for anyone.   --*--  http://searchvb.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid8_gci1123253,00.html Links to page with technical stuff I wrote on Microsoft PDC. Monday, Sep 19, 2005 10:11:59 PM    comment []

Saturday, June 04, 2005

The King of the Chicago Feedback Lately I've heard Elmore James anew. He could fix on a single note, but make it ring. Shame he died at 45, his heart exploded, with little mention. But he was in approach to music acutely aware somehow of a universal harmonics, a chord Elysium. And no one had it better. One extended chord that came up from Afrik to Greece by way of Hawaii and Mississippi. Circled the globe, Jack. No one dug more into the musical values of electric signals though they still be trying. Always felt: ''It was Elmore James invented musical electricity.'' But the one-note-ness of Elmore I'd kind of come to take for granted as a limitation. The note bloomed, expanded, of late. Who know why? There is a ringing wood chime at my neighbors where I park my car, and all of music can be spawned from it essential sound. Dust my Blues too is inevitable. Fleetwood Mac you know I've been listening too, I mean what they now call the Original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green. I was under-astounded when I first heard Fleetwood Mac in 1969 – that was because I'd already heard Elmore James. I dont think any group has more dedicatedly attached its star to one source artist. Now I love Fleetwood Mac, who were not too proud to do a dozen to two dozen Elmo songs on their first four or five records, Cream be damned. Listening to Peter Green, Mic Fleetwood, John McVie and friends –their stuff was hard to find -- set the table for my return to Elmore. [Too: I kind of rediscovered Elmore descendant Hound Dog Taylor again in years recent. And would footnote this discussion with the note that I did closely encounter disciple J.B. Hutto in the couple of years [circa 1978] before J.B. died.] Classical distortion, that is what Elmore found. That is an intrinsic quality of blues music, where the note is bent and beautifully hurts, and the blues approach to life. And electronics provided a means. Reading recently Jas Obrecht edited 'Rollin' and Tumblin': The Postwar Blues Guitarists,' [gift of Peter Bochner], I found it remarkable to learn that Elmore worked in his brother's Radio repair shop after getting out of the Navy. I can only guess that nonlinearity in amplitude response and non-uniform phase response caught his fancy. In harmonic electronic distortion, output tends to hold not only the fundamental frequency but integer multiplies thereof. The note that ripples like wavelets upon water. Call and response. Touch was key as well. But note: ELmore's select choice of slide implement was A METALLIC VACCUUM TUBE HEAT COVER SHEATHE! If you trace It Hurts Me Too from Tampa Red through Elmore James to Hound Dog Taylor you see the abstraction unwinding and the resonance abounding. With Elmore scholar Hound Dog, the hum of his overpowered amp became the fourth band member. Besides his cosmic control of feedback, Elmore had instrumental style. Plucked strings with bowing Hawaiian [sacred steel-like] chord shimmering - augmented intervals indefinite pitch, glide - portamento - sliding for purpose to blend notse - glissando... smooth in a gliding manner. I remember hearing ''Dust My Blues'' – one more riff on his epic trademark flagship ''Dust My Blues'' -- on the grey Kent 45 thanks to Norman, who would select my free 45 to accompany an LP I'd buy at Soulville Records next to the Rialto theatre on Main Street in Racine in 1967. I've put a lot of miles on, and seen many ramifications and enhancements and extrapolations. But I've come back to that chord. Click to enlarge Elmore   6:21:42 PM    comment []

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Memphis Minnie Memphis Minnie I listened to one snowy Sunday in January. So here is a poem writ, as the Minnie music unfolded. 9:33:27 PM    comment []

Monday, April 18, 2005

Atlantic slinks out of town The Atlantic Magazine announced it is moving to Washington. D.C., and this has sent a fiery javelin into the mufti camps of Boston arts and letters. Alex Beam, the best writer in town, lampooned the move by creating a few working analogies and stretching them. His ludicrous vignettes include Harvard moving to Nebraska. He's right. If the New York Times were to move to New Jersey, nay, [as the Gints did that], to Indiana, the effect could not be more telling. This is sure the end of the road of something just like the closing of Chess records -  or the move of Motown [or the Dodgers] to L.A. The Atlantic would be better off throwing in the towel, one feels. This place could be a center, certainly for politics, science, technology, and art. Beats anyplace I've been from these points of view. But Massachusetts has taken a lot as Texas has ascended. Boston was once the Hub of the Universe. No less, in its mind at least. It was the brains and [mostly Puritan] moral compass for America, as New York was really about commerce [well the kind of commerce where the money would break a sweat]. You probably heard the joke describing U.S. newspapers: The Washington Post is read by the people that run the country, the New York Times is read by the people who think they run the country. The Boston Globe is run by the people who used to run the country. Guess ustabe is better than never was. Boston defined American culture .. but now, maybe, it is most defined as a sports town.  And save haven for Senators red-nosed Kennedy and pouty Kerry. Anyway, today was Patriot's Day, a true state holiday. Unlike Evacuation Day, which is only Boston only.  Eat your heart out world, these are our days. On both, the boys of Mission Hill start early. I always like Harpers better than the Atlantic. But I got a feeling that its offices were there on the edge of the Public Garden. Still, those offices moved a while ago. Never got accepted by Atlantic. But once Jeff Hull asked for some of my poetry [Phantom jets flew constantly over the city], which he cut up and applied to his wilderbeast grey-black-and-white oil paintings, and those were hung in the Atlantic antechamber. Hail, Atlantic! 8:38:35 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Jack Vaughan.