Maria and Popovi are a mother and son set of collaborators who made some of the most coveted San Ildefonso Pueblo Pottery from New Mexico (as we call it), mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. I found a bit from Antiques Roadshow about them or their work. Think black on black:
Maria Popova meanwhile is a writer from Bulgaria based in Brooklyn with 400,000 social media followers, as in, she doesn’t need the plug from Plastic Alto.
Thanks to Nin Filip, I cribbed from her writing, heretofore uncredited, on Alain De Botton. Maria and Popovi signed their work on the bottom. And in a twist of fate — and boy do I crack myself up although I am quite careful around Pueblo Pottery, although come to think of it I did knock over my girlfriends monument to St. Francis — even though it looks like I posted three days ago and did not credit Brainpickings for the bit about De Botton — and worse yet I try to make it seem like something Nin said and not just unsurfaced — I am actually writing this elaborate credit line before I cut and paste the offending philosophy shards.
The photograph understands the longing to become a more polished and elegant version of oneself
Maria Martinez the San I potter, photo by Adombe of Santa Fe
Civil Disobedience in Thoreau’s sense is more like a combination of civic engagement and move-on.
I’ve been meaning to organize my thoughts about Our Palo Alto, and the workshop I attended last week, at the Elks Club. I was seated, via purportedly random processes, at a group of 7 that included insiders Steve Levy and Ray Bachetti, as well as announced-candidate for City Council Tom Dubois and staff person Elena Lee.
The overall context is my incredulity about the process: How is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 subsidy of the developers? Or, how is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 slush fund for the re-election of incumbents, especially commercial real estate lackeys Greg Scharff and Nancy Shepherd?
Elena Lee, who has been on staff for 7 years and worked for San Jose before that left me two items in need of follow up: 1) she seemed a little fuzzy on a document I saw or have on file called “California Avenue – Ventura Plan” — I asked whether this document is obsolete or just obscure, and her answer was unconvincing. 2) she made a vague reference to a court case coming out of Petaluma about the limits of zoning, and how the public sector is bounded by law. I am concerned that City Staff is being told that Democracy does not include the right of citizens to band together to fight special interests, and the real estate industry.
Let’s keep in mind that in Palo Alto itself the commercial real estate industry is a billion dollar industry; it’s largely privately-held so data is a little sketchy but a quick calculation would show commercial values here approaching $30 billion such that a 5 percent return on investment would describe a $1 billion in yearly activity; while not monolithic there are clusters of properties held by certain families and individuals, and they seem to communicate, correspond and organize, if they are not a RICO-enforceable racket outright. They are certainly better organized and have a greater incentive than the so-called Residentialists. If you consider that our civic budget is about $150 million, and maybe $10 of that is to regulate development, you can see why and how, at a basic level, the industry has so much momentum in recent years. And to the extent that staff seems to want to serve industry –at The Development Office — rather than regulate it on behalf of We The People, you could argue that this special interest is largely unregulated or out of control.
The Grand Jury Report of June 6, 2014, which is limited in scope to two deals and one developer, would support the idea that there is a compromise in the ability of the people -thru leadership, staff, elected Council and appointed Commissioners and Boards — to assert its will. How much of the apple bushel is corrupted by the rotten apple it is difficult to say, but we’d probably better ask. Be wary of bureaucrats too willingly offering you a nice yummy spoon of apple-sauce.
Meanwhile, I was struck by something Steve Levy set in our little exercise, in which we had about 90 minutes to pretend to be city planners and practice not standing up to these special interests. He muttered something about “property rights” having priority over rule of law, in reaction to something I said about whether it is time, beyond the commercial real estate rout, to enforce a moratorium on Monster Homes and tear-downs.
Likewise, Ray Bachetti, a former Stanford University vice provost who now lives in town, says he promotes “smart growth” or something but I seem to doubt he speaks on behalf of the little people who might benefit from below market housing and is more about helping or siding with developers who make money hand over fist even when they throw a bone to the middle class, as evidence, in certain ways, by the proposal to upzone a certain property on Maybell for the Palo Alto Housing Corporation.
My table also included two people, a husband and wife, who live in or near Barron Park and were involved in the referendum that became Measure D. I counted nine tables of seven or eight people each, and maybe ten staff and free-lancers working for the Our Palo Alto thingy (I called it a Dog and Pony show, below), or about 70 people all in — hardly a mandate. And I did wonder to what extent the proceedings were rigged so that the two or three “trusties” at each table were more about indoctrination than outreach or this being a dialogue.
I used the opportunity (and not just to bait Levy and Bachetti) to practice stumping for my proposal to try to zone the Fry’s Property as a park rather than more housing. Would a park in Ventura be a gentler way to gentrify that area, where average home values are about 60 percent of Palo Alto average? I flipped thru my Parks of Palo Alto booklet (produced by PAHA) to suggest that Greer Park could be a precedent for Ventura Park (and why not call it, working title Gary Fazzino Park?). Greer Park came about when the Palo Alto drive-in folded and the taxpayers reached out to keep the land a public amenity. So if Fry’s is falling victim to the disruptive nature of the internet (Ebay et al), why not move them downtown — perhaps to 456 University — and I bite my tongue saying this — and use that land for public benefit. As it stands the momentum is with the large South Bay developer getting their way to bring housing and the citizens nodding their consent. It would take quite an effort to not give this 400 pound gorilla what it wants.
But we can at least talk about it, right?
Meanwhile the four choices the Our Palo Alto workshop people were given were two types of growth and not much discussion to “doing nothing”. I said that even “doing nothing” takes a huge amount of effort to stand up to the industry, like standing in front of a tank. The fourth choice was a magic type of non-development that would use “green thinking” and hypothetical new technologies as rationalize to slow growth. I find that in 20 years as an environmentalist the “green-wash” forces have advanced a lot faster than green thought itself. (I founded my small concert company, Earthwise Productions, as a type of spin-off of Bay Area Action, where Peter Drekmeir cut his activist teeth).
A letter to an editor today suggested that a June, 2014 directive by Council, to include electronic vehicles charging in all multi-unit housing proposals, was some sort of special industry concession. I will have to think about that. I wasn’t at those meetings. But I did notice that the oversized and under parked building at Lytton and Alma, the so-called Lytton Gateway, has the insult to injury effect of having fewer street-parking than you would expect, partly due to locating the chargers on our not their property, and partly by their landscaping — between the street spaces. It’s like they are saying their building is too nice for mere mortals to park in front of it, or there is a quota on us.
I had also asked for an accounting and or pro forma about the $325,000 Our Palo Alto campaign, which I mistook for a private sector event at the first meeting. Too slick. Too much cheese –literally. No answer after more than a month. By the way, the Grand Jury report also faulted Palo Alto for its shabby response for request for information.
Maybe I have to send a more formal request to City Clerk Donna Grider for my request to be officially heard. I sent a response to someone, presumably on the public payrolls, who sent me mail, from “Ourpaloalto@cityofpaloalto dot org”. I also wonder about how it helps transparency for civil servants to operate behind pseudonyms. Curiously a particular city staffer, who I met at a meeting and then ran into in from of City Hall last week, who works on Our Palo Alto, it would seem, told me that I was not receiving info about subsequent events because someone had lost the sign-in sheet that my name and address were on. (If so, how would she know that?)
There are about 130 days until an election here and things are getting, in my humble opinion, curiouser and curiouser.
Another way to say it: sixty years after The Founding Fathers, writer scholar patriot Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay suggesting that then-current leadership should either step it up to the level of the Founding Fathers, or step aside and let a new group try this experiment called Democracy, and America. (The essay was called “Civil Disobedience” by the way, not by Thoreau but by his editor, although in today’s terms it is probably better called “Civic Engagement or Move-on”; it’s more about dissenters with enacting a type of constructive engagement with leadership than some type of gathering in the streets, as it was taught to me at Dartmouth College, back in the 1980s).
There’s a book by George Packer called “The Unwinding” that is quite recent and instructive here. By his model Democracy is something that we must attend to, or it will run down.
Gunn graduate George Packer, of the Palo Alto Stanford Packers writers clan
Stay tuned.
Our Palo Alto does not speak for me. It seems, among its faults, to beg the question that both high density housing AND commercial office space will continue and offers us a narrowly framed pseudo-choice of types of reactions. Further: is it debatable whether we even need to revise let alone amend the Comp Plan, or is that another orchestrated interpretation of what we the people have wanted and are working on? Likewise, the Downtown Cap is a promise we made to ourselves, why are they making it seem archaic, why give it mere lip-service? And I think there are many of us who would stand up for what is best for 60,000 current Palo Alto residents and risk a bureaucratic response from pseudo-governmental (and probably biased, or tainted) regional entities like ABAG, pushing for more housing.
As a liberal arts graduate, still liberating and continuing my studies even 30 years past the granting of my diploma, I think we need to question a lot of what is served up.
edit to add: one mitigating factor in my otherwise jeremiad little speech, and I can just here Steve Levy and his little mocking fake laugh — he actually did this aloud when I suggested to the table that Ventura could use a park — is that I ran into someone I met 40 years prior, at Hebrew School, Charlie Knox, a free-lance strategist for Our Palo Alto, who is a Paly grad and son of former City Manager Naftali Knox. I’d rather see a product of our system in full-time permanent position of authority here rather than some of the ringers brought in by City Manager Jim Keane who seem united by ideology rather than having effervescent merit. Or, if the special interests our that pervasively corrupting, at least if they corrode one of our own we know who to blame for it: ourselves.
edit to add: at 4:33 on Monday, June 30, 2014 I posted a 99 percent verbatim version of this under Steve Levy’s latest column, at Palo Alto Weekly and TS town square –comments board. I will check back to see how he edits or responds. Who knows, maybe he is right that “property rights” trump the will of the people, but I would have to have that broken down for me, and or wait for the courts to say it.
Posted by Mark Weiss, a resident of Barron Park,
0 minutes ago
Aha, it took me two weeks to figure out that when you say “TS” you mean “town square” — there are about six other uses of that TLA search-able.
Meanwhile, I’s been thinkin’:
‘ve been meaning to organize my thoughts about Our Palo Alto, and the workshop I attended last week, at the Elks Club. I was seated, via purportedly random processes, at a group of 7 that included insiders Steve Levy and Ray Bachetti, as well as announced-candidate for City Council Tom Dubois and staff person Elena Lee.
The overall context is my incredulity about the process: How is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 subsidy of the developers? Or, how is “Our Palo Alto” not a $325,000 slush fund for the re-election of incumbents, especially commercial real estate lackeys Greg Scharff and Nancy Shepherd?
Elena Lee, who has been on staff for 7 years and worked for San Jose before that left me two items in need of follow up: 1) she seemed a little fuzzy on a document I saw or have on file called “California Avenue – Ventura Plan” — I asked whether this document is obsolete or just obscure, and her answer was unconvincing. 2) she made a vague reference to a court case coming out of Petaluma about the limits of zoning, and how the public sector is bounded by law. I am concerned that City Staff is being told that Democracy does not include the right of citizens to band together to fight special interests, and the real estate industry.
Let’s keep in mind that in Palo Alto itself the commercial real estate industry is a billion dollar industry; it’s largely privately-held so data is a little sketchy but a quick calculation would show commercial values here approaching $30 billion such that a 5 percent return on investment would describe a $1 billion in yearly activity; while not monolithic there are clusters of properties held by certain families and individuals, and they seem to communicate, correspond and organize, if they are not a RICO-enforceable racket outright. They are certainly better organized and have a greater incentive than the so-called Residentialists. If you consider that our civic budget is about $150 million, and maybe $10 of that is to regulate development, you can see why and how, at a basic level, the industry has so much momentum in recent years. And to the extent that staff seems to want to serve industry –at The Development Office — rather than regulate it on behalf of We The People, you could argue that this special interest is largely unregulated or out of control.
The Grand Jury Report of June 6, 2014, which is limited in scope to two deals and one developer, would support the idea that there is a compromise in the ability of the people -thru leadership, staff, elected Council and appointed Commissioners and Boards — to assert its will. How much of the apple bushel is corrupted by the rotten apple it is difficult to say, but we’d probably better ask. Be wary of bureaucrats too willingly offering you a nice yummy spoon of apple-sauce.
Meanwhile, I was struck by something Steve Levy set in our little exercise, in which we had about 90 minutes to pretend to be city planners and practice not standing up to these special interests. He muttered something about “property rights” having priority over rule of law, in reaction to something I said about whether it is time, beyond the commercial real estate rout, to enforce a moratorium on Monster Homes and tear-downs.
Likewise, Ray Bachetti, a former Stanford University vice provost who now lives in town, says he promotes “smart growth” or something but I seem to doubt he speaks on behalf of the little people who might benefit from below market housing and is more about helping or siding with developers who make money hand over fist even when they throw a bone to the middle class, as evidence, in certain ways, by the proposal to upzone a certain property on Maybell for the Palo Alto Housing Corporation.
My table also included two people, a husband and wife, who live in or near Barron Park and were involved in the referendum that became Measure D. I counted nine tables of seven or eight people each, and maybe ten staff and free-lancers working for the Our Palo Alto thingy (I called it a Dog and Pony show, below), or about 70 people all in — hardly a mandate. And I did wonder to what extent the proceedings were rigged so that the two or three “trusties” at each table were more about indoctrination than outreach or this being a dialogue.
I used the opportunity (and not just to bait Levy and Bachetti) to practice stumping for my proposal to try to zone the Fry’s Property as a park rather than more housing. Would a park in Ventura be a gentler way to gentrify that area, where average home values are about 60 percent of Palo Alto average? I flipped thru my Parks of Palo Alto booklet (produced by PAHA) to suggest that Greer Park could be a precedent for Ventura Park (and why not call it, working title Gary Fazzino Park?). Greer Park came about when the Palo Alto drive-in folded and the taxpayers reached out to keep the land a public amenity. So if Fry’s is falling victim to the disruptive nature of the internet (Ebay et al), why not move them downtown — perhaps to 456 University — and I bite my tongue saying this — and use that land for public benefit. As it stands the momentum is with the large South Bay developer getting their way to bring housing and the citizens nodding their consent. It would take quite an effort to not give this 400 pound gorilla what it wants.
But we can at least talk about it, right?
Meanwhile the four choices the Our Palo Alto workshop people were given were two types of growth and not much discussion to “doing nothing”. I said that even “doing nothing” takes a huge amount of effort to stand up to the industry, like standing in front of a tank. The fourth choice was a magic type of non-development that would use “green thinking” and hypothetical new technologies as rationalize to slow growth. I find that in 20 years as an environmentalist the “green-wash” forces have advanced a lot faster than green thought itself. (I founded my small concert company, Earthwise Productions, as a type of spin-off of Bay Area Action, where Peter Drekmeir cut his activist teeth).
A letter to an editor today suggested that a June, 2014 directive by Council, to include electronic vehicles charging in all multi-unit housing proposals, was some sort of special industry concession. I will have to think about that. I wasn’t at those meetings. But I did notice that the oversized and under parked building at Lytton and Alma, the so-called Lytton Gateway, has the insult to injury effect of having fewer street-parking that you would expect, partly due to locating the chargers on our not their property, and partly by their landscaping — between the street spaces. It’s like they are saying their building is too nice for mere mortals to park in front of it, or there is a quota on us.
I had also asked for an accounting and or pro forma about the $325,000 Our Palo Alto campaign, which I mistook for a private sector event at the first meeting. Too slick. Too much cheese –literally. No answer after more than a month. By the way, the Grand Jury report also faulted Palo Alto for its shabby response for request for information.
Maybe I have to send a more formal request to City Clerk Donna Grider for my request to be officially heard. I sent a response to someone, presumably on the public payrolls, who sent me mail, from “Ourpaloalto@cityofpaloalto dot org”. I also wonder about how it helps transparency for civil servants to operate behind pseudonyms. Curiously a particular city staffer, who I met at a meeting and then ran into in from of City Hall last week, who works on Our Palo Alto, it would seem, told me that I was not receiving info about subsequent events because someone had lost the sign-in sheet that my name and address were on. (If so, how would she know that?)
There are about 130 days until an election here and things are getting, in my humble opinion, curiouser and curiouser.
Another way to say it: sixty years after The Founding Fathers, writer scholar patriot Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay suggesting that then-current leadership should either step it up to the level of the Founding Fathers, or step aside and let a new group try this experiment called Democracy, and America. (The essay was called “Civil Disobedience” by the way, not by Thoreau but by his editor, although in today’s terms it is probably better called “Civic Engagement or Move-on”; it’s more about dissenters with enacting a type of constructive engagement with leadership than some type of gathering in the streets, as it was taught to me at Dartmouth College, back in the 1980s).
There’s a book by George Packer called “The Unwinding” that is quite recent and instructive here. By his model Democracy is something that we must attend to, or it will run down.
Our Palo Alto does not speak for me. It seems, among its faults, to beg the question that both high density housing AND commercial office space will continue and offers us a narrowly framed pseudo-choice of types of reactions. Further: is it debatable whether we even need to revise let alone amend the Comp Plan, or is that another orchestrated interpretation of what we the people have wanted and are working on? Likewise, the Downtown Cap is a promise we made to ourselves, why are they making it seem archaic, why give it mere lip-service? And I think there are many of us who would stand up for what is best for 60,000 current Palo Alto residents and risk a bureaucratic response from pseudo-governmental (and probably biased, or tainted) regional entities like ABAG, pushing for more housing.
As a liberal arts graduate, still liberating and continuing my studies even 30 years past the granting of my diploma, I think we need to question a lot of what is served up.
edit to add: one mitigating factor in my otherwise jeremiad little speech, and I can just here Steve Levy and his little mocking fake laugh — he actually did this aloud when I suggested to the table that Ventura could use a park — is that I ran into someone I met 40 years prior, at Hebrew School, Charlie Knox, a free-lance strategist for Our Palo Alto, who is a Paly grad and son of former City Manager Naftali Knox. I’d rather see a product of our system in full-time permanent position of authority here rather than some of the ringers brought in by City Manager Jim Keane who seem united by ideology rather than having effervescent merit. Or, if the special interests our that pervasively corrupting, at least if they corrode one of our own we know who to blame for it: ourselves.
edit here as you see fit, answer that and stay fashionable, or do what you will:
Why would property rights trump the will of the people?
edit, more edits, always more edits: here is a link to a 2005 interview with Naphtali Knox, note the correct spelling, who started in civic life here in 1972 and was a chief planner if not City Manager. And I don’t think it nepotism to select for a generational continuity in civic service — Charlie described briefly a civic resume with stints in Telluride, Colorado and the East Bay. Similarly, I recall thinking at my Gunn 30th that I would trust my average classmate in leadership here relative to what we got or get. Sometimes I think a random process, like with jury duty, would better serve us than the Democracy for which we have settled, by which we have been saddled. There is a type of vacuum of inaction that the Machine — Ginsburg’s Moloch if you will — requires.
another: “answer that and stay fashionable” is the title of an AFI album, during the time they played Cubberley Community Center. I have a weird habit, being a former North Beach ad guy and SXSW concert promoter, of slipping rock and pop references into my dialogue, mainly to confuse people. When I am feeling inclusive I restrict such to 40-year-old Dyanisms: Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters, which to me means don’t send a gadget to do a job that requires heart.
or if you have 40 minutes for deep background, here apparently is the full-album, by AFI:
Hannah May Allison, the Palo Alto and Nashville singer-songwriter, plays Tuesday in Los Gatos, at the historic The Cats. It is a happy hour show, 6 to 9. If memory serves, there will be victuals.
Speaking of memory, I am working on explicating — the English major word for decoding — my notes from Hannah’s performance Sunday at the California Avenue farmer’s market, in Palo Alto:
What little girls made of shotgun Hard to think about something about summer might time pass us by We drove pass no trespass sign not going to jail cop car Kurban No one to send this letter to soldiers coming home Troubles of my own Packing it in baggage claim That girl in the red dress sweet sin Luke bryan news today Cant believe your really gone Southern sky there are stars in seven bridges Trailer for rent Cheaters only care until their bored Stay fm (that one’s easy — Fleetwood Mac, she played “Landslide” although one of her originals also reminded me very much of “Dreams”) rumors Sometimes people stay BEST THING (no reason for the all caps, I am just not very good with my Stupid Cell Phone — my handwriting is much worse) Talk in this small town I did was leave Cover we sang bob mage on hood my car (Bobby McGee) Landslide I getting older too
This might be a clue, or set of clues: Hannah May, and her parents Craig and Reena Allison, of Barron Park (Palo Alto, the country part of Palo Alto, you might say) were handing out free copies of her demo or EP, which included these four originals: “The Best Thing,” “Summer Nights,” “Empty Hearted” and “Stay”.
I watched the show from load-in (dad lugging most of the gear) past the part where she started repeating songs, the “Cop Car” cover, which I thought she played at two different tempos, the second time to my ear sounding deliberately like the strumming pattern and the chords from “Franklin’s Tower” — the Grateful Dead song (“roll away, the dew”) and I thought she would medley into it or at least allude to it. Cop car…roll away.. it kinda works for me, especially here in Billy Kreutzman’s hometown, and where Jerry met Bobby (and actually where Graham Lesh met Brody Jenkins…and by the way, I am the guy who if I didn’t introduce Papa Mali to Kreutzman, backstage at La Tortuga, did tell Malcolm in 2003 that he would remind Deadheads of Jerry AND hired him to play Art 21 on Alma at
Lamentable that there are no good 650 venues for Hannah May Allison
Lytton for a belated Jerry Garcia Tribute, and I apologize to Hannah for the egregious “plastic” digression).
Ok, I will go on record that even based in Nashville a Palo Alto-bred singer-songwriter could milk that Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter-Bobby Weir mojo for some 650 cred: do learn a couple GD covers and maybe, if the math pencils out, a Luke Bryan>Robert Hunter medley. And if you don’t know you should that if you like Fleetwood Mac then maybe Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Menlo-Atherton class of 1968 did indeed leave something hiding in the bushes for future artists to find, or y’all at least breathed the same air, more or less, give or take a couple decades. (Maybe we are all channeling some sacred Ohlone vibe…)
I did meet Hannah and her parents at this event, unlike last month at World Music Day where I got close enough to read the small print of her EP but did not stick around long enough to realize that they were giving them away. I had met Hannah during her senior year at Gunn, at the 2012 version of the street music event. Terry, my GF, Terry Acebo Davis the former Palo Alto Arts Commissioner eventually came along and met Rina and took a photo of Hannah that I will post here later, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.
The Allisons — Team Hannah May — recognized my name from my previous post. Surely this rising talent deserves better treatment from the music bards. It’s a mixed blessing, I admit, to be run thru the Plastic Alto filter.
I started to say this below: I’d be curious to hear Hannah’s reaction to three titles, that our precedent in certain ways, that happen to be in my glove-box that I was tempted to pass on, as a type of homework: Marcia Ball, Michelle Shocked, and Sasha Dobson.
I’m not sure how much of this to keep in confidence and how much is either fair game or “Fair Play”, but if you are wondering how a young lady from Palo Alto would go country and stake her claim in Nashville, at Belmont University, in a program apparently funded by Mike Curb, rather than Austin or Santa Barbera or something, Mom is from Oklahoma, and sang back-up with Garth Brooks, and also had or has a relative in country music by the name of Patsy Bale Cox.
As someone who ran a new bands / new artist showcase in the 1990s here, at Cubberley Community Center and has managed about a dozen small nationally-distributed recording artists, of course I am rooting for the girl next door gone to Music City. She’s already in the Country wing of the Palo Alto Rock and Roll Archive (which almost exists, in Steve Staiger’s office) along side: Steve Jenkins of Third Eye Blind (Gunn 1983), Tommy Jordan of Geggy Tah (Paly 1981), the drummer from Maroon 5 (Gunn), Alex Wong who writes and performs with Vienna Teng, The Donnas (Tory, Alison, Maya, Brett — all Paly ’97s, and their debut was at a Jordan talent show), Gregg Rolie a founding member of two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bands, Santana Band and Journey, who attended Cubberley for two years, some guy whose name I never remember from Pablo Cruise, Kreutzman, Jenny Scheinman (although she is more jazz than singer-songwriter), Chris Appelgren the former owner of Lookout Records and the bands PeeChees and TK, who attended Palo Alto schools one year, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Minor Threat and The Evens who attended Terman one year when his dad was a fellow at Stanford. (I think I also inducted Remi Wolf and Chloe of Remi and Chloe into the Jazz wing, see below).
Part of my motivation for Earthwise Productions is a sinking feeling that there is an imbalance and over-emphasis on computers such that there are missing creatives of Palo Alto, who get sucked into the hunt for the next big $19 Billion App. For the record: I would rather PAUSD has mandatory songwriting curriculum than computer coding.
My understanding is that Hannah May Allison, the Trisha Yearwood of Barron Park, is hereabouts for about a month before heading back to Nashville (for example, a Monday at Commodore Grille, and also, her junior year at Belmont) so keep your eyes and ears peeled for her, y’all.
And check back here to see how I explicate and unfold my notes above: It’s mainly the titles of five or six originals and four or five covers. Who knows, maybe in ten years some of her three word phrases will be part of the Americana lexicon.
edit to add: Have not made much progress separating my Luke Bryan references from Hannah’s actual lyrics, but I wanted to add, as sort of a preview for tomorrow’s pre-firecracker of a little show at The Cats, something about my history of that venue (and I will flat out declare that a feature of Plastic Alto is that when I am talking about Hannah May Allison I am also talking about myself, natch): 1) is that I recall, upon moving to California from South Side of Chicago, with my parents and sibs, back in 1968 that my parents told the story of getting lost and pulling over when they saw the mysterious Cats landmark – I presume it is the same mysterious stone markers where the current restaurant perseveres, on life number 5 or 6 of its proverbial nine lives; when you approach the venue, you have to veer off when you spot the cats lest you continue on towards Santa Cruz on Hwy 17; 2) in recent times, relatively speaking, I recall that the last time I was there was to scout Dean Markley, the famous string entrepreneur who does or did also have a duo project of acoustic music and would play The Cats; I recall getting invited to a big birthday party for him, maybe a surprise, his 50th or 60th — this is about 10 years ago, but could not attend; Markley started his music store in Santa Clara in 1971 although if you call his 408 number it now rings thru to Glendale, Arizona the new corporate headquarters. But — and here we are back to an actual Hannah May Allison detail –whilst fact-checking that part of my story, I learn-did (that’s the past tense of learn, with a voice suffix, like in Shakespeare’s iambic, plus a pseudo-Twain-like faux-country patois, I am really saying “learn-nid”, for “learned”) that the electric guitar side-person performance on her demo is by Larry Chung, who is — and I might have known this, if I were a better guitar student, and I am barely in the school at all — a Gryphon regular and even has product named for him. Thuslike:
Gryphon Larry Chung custom banjo set
Inspired by super duper musician (and Gryphon teacher) Larry Chung, we had our pals at GHS put together this custom set, as per Larry’s preferred gauges in stainless steel (9.5-10-13-20W-9.5)
I had noted, on first inspection, David Phillips name, as pedal steel, and recall him backing Steve Yerkey at the Cub in 1995, although that is probably the least of his credits. Craig Allison, besides lugging his daughter’s gear and tables and all, plays keys on the demo; he told me he was in a jazz combo as an undergrad, at Rice University and admires more trad style jazz like by the late George Shearing — although in my head, as a Austin-wanna-be, I was flashing to father-daughter combo of the Gimbles, who I spied partly and heard about in MoMo’s of, same-like what I heard of Warren Heard. (It’s not the worst ideas, when evaluating emerging talent to ask politely something about the bloodlines). Champ Heard? Will have to check back and edit that: I recall standing under a shrine, perhaps at The Continental on South Congress, someone telling me what I could not observe that the young buck on stage was kin to the dearly departed, on the wall. That’s actually Warren Hood, like the car Hannah and her song set on, above, not “Heard”, a fiddler son of legend by name of Champ Hood.
The other point about the demo – Free EP — is that Remy Felsch, who plays on it and appears with Hannah at shows, as a side-man, is a fellow Gunn grad and a current music student at the prestigious Berklee School of Music back east (alma mater of among other Bruce Cockburn, John Mayer and my friend and former client the jazz trumpeter Jack Walrath).
I found this amusing review of the Steve Yerkey cd, “confidence, man” on Sf’s Heyday Records, produced by Lee Townsend, the cd, (who is also Bill Frisell’s long-time manager and producer), by Parry Gettelman, formerly of the Orlando Sentinel and now apparently some kind of civil servant in Austin, that confirms my recollection of David Phillips, who plays on Hannah’s demo. Although he is plenty busy, I would think Lee Townsend might be an interesting producer for a future Hannah May Allison session. Lee Townsend who lives and works in Berkeley, but told me he comes to Palo Alto sometimes for his son’s soccer matches (or those of his daughter??), and I ran into him not so long ago at the memorial for Nathan Oliveira. And it’s also worth noting that Wayne Horvitz, of Seattle, who grew up in Los Altos, produced a Nashville-session for Bill Frisell called “Nashville”.
Regarding The Cats per se, it is a pulled pork and ribs place, for full meals if not for bar food — I would think, if the show is free, you should prepare to do as the locals do and eat something. They have a named oak fire tender, if that tells you something. They re-opening after wrestling with local government and grand-father clauses (as distinct from Santa Clauses, if you excuse the Marxism), in 2008 and their website has a menu form December 2011 which may be current. I would lump it in their with potentially fun little music dives like Rancho Nicasio of West Marin (owned by Huey Lewis’s manager, Bob Brown, whose son went to culinary school and runs the kitchen –we saw Jerry Hannan there recently), or Blue Rock Shoot of Saratoga, or Applejacks of La Honda, where Hershel Yatovitz was rumored to be sitting in recently — he of Chris Isaak and Paly 1982 notability. And all this, and nearly everything I do, begs the question: where is a good live music play in Palo Alto?
edita, frthur: for instance, and I looked this up, while we Palo Altans have a 20 minute drive to see Hannah May Allison in Los Gatos, ribbed or not, South Austinites have, among numerous choices, at The Continental Club, on South Congress, Toni Price and James McMurtry shows, I’m just sayin’. And if you notice a subtle comparison or tug of war or cutting contest between Austin Texas and Nashville, you are correct sir. I think of Nashville as beyond a genre a corporate culture distinct from New York and Los Angeles but if a lot of Earthwise Productions has been a comment on the industrialization of the spirit, in the form of creation, rehearsal and performance of music, my observation, from between 500 and 3,00 miles away, is that Nashville adds in many ways an extra layer of non-music, non-artist infrastructure. Be aware! Bakersfield, California is also, like Nashville, on my list of places to visit and check out the talent.
“Don’t Happen Twice” is a Kenny Chesney song Allison covers, the lyric is “we sang Bobby McGee on the hood of my car”. The song is by Curtis Lance and Thom McHugh, whereas “Me and Bobby McGee”, sung most famously by Janis Joplin, is by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster. The Keith Urban song, “Cop Car” meanwhile is by a trio of Nashville writers, Zach Crowell, Sam Hunt and Matt Jenkins, while my red herring suggestion “Franklin’s Tower” (which is actually F C A D and not C G) is by Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia and Billy Kreutzmann. Reading all this is not a very fitting preview of the Hannah May Allison show Tuesday in Los Gatos, nor, frankly, is writing it.
She performs an appropriate mix of things she has written and things she has heard. I looked it up to learn that Stevie Nicks was 27 when she wrote and recorded “Landslide” and the lyric “I’m getting older too” while Hannah is about 20. But she has grown considerably since her senior year at Gunn, it seems obvious. It will be fun to see where all this takes her, and us.
Danny Goldberg, manager, on Stevie Nicks his client, quoted in Times review of his book, “Bumping into Geniuses”, in 2008: “magnetic … compelling … an autodidactic mystic.”
Miranda Lambert song, “Gunpowder and Led”, song about what little girls made of and shotgun.
“Seven Bridges Road” is by Steve Young and I did not recall that it is probably most famously an Eagles song –with a five-part harmony — but is also done by Tracy Nelson and Joan Baez so I would wonder exactly where Hannah May picked it up from. I’m kinda giving up on my little game of sussing my notes to current songs on the country charts I don’t actually know and will have to just ask for the set list next time, excepting having to admit here that I think there is a lyric I heard “something about” that I highlighted here to make a strained allusion to the movie that stars Cameron Diaz and features Jonathan Richman.
Kristen Strom will appear at the Stanford Jazz series, performing a tribute to Stan Getz. It’s a matinee, 2 p.m. July 13 Sunday. Info here. The show is at Dink, with tickets ranging from $15 to $35, which actually seems a little pricey, especially for a matinee, featuring all local musicians. She’s playing for no cover at Rosewood Sand Hill — the famous “cougar bar” on or near Stanford campus, the following Saturday evening, from 7 to 11, and has several other area appearances, plus her teaching at Stanford and other camps, according to her website. (My ambivalence about Stanford Jazz is hard to conceal, huh?)
Part of the back story for the Strom gig is that Stan Getz had a residency at Stanford, an event which inspired the university developing a jazz program involving: Larry Grenadier, Jim Nadel, Joey Oliveira, Andy Geiger, Ted Gioia, Nathan Oliveira and more. Joey played a Getz tribute a few years back. Nathan made a portrait of a sax player at Smith-Andersen titled “The Man”, that I saw in a private collection.
There’s a story in the East Bay Express by Sam Levin about Ellen Seeling of Montclair Women’s Band complaining that there are few spots for women in the area’s jazz festivals, and she recommends blind auditions. Strom is quoted in that story, as is Jason Olaine, who is producing a Fillmore Jazz festival. Reminds me of Nat Hentoff in his 2010 book commenting on, and validating, Joan Bender who in 2001 protested about the lack of women in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
I think of Strom as a local musician, but am unsure of her Palo Alto ties. Provisionally I include her in my list of 500 Palo Alto jazz memes.
Here is Montclair band video(I remember seeing them in the East Bay, when Allison Miller was their guest artist):
Not to confuse matters, or deflect from the Kristen Strom hit, but here is Joan Bender, with Brian Gari and Michael Wolff somewhere back east playing “Chocolate Eyes”. I met Joan in IAJE in New York, and actually had a meeting with Wolff that same week, as a candidate to join his enterprise.
And while I am near the subject, the Palo Alto Twilight Series has finally been announced and includes Mads Tolling, a Danish-American violin player gaining material, August 16 at Mitchell Park. Back to Our Ms. Strom, her band includes Scott Sorkin, Jason Lewis and John Shifflett, — and Fred Harris, piano — plus in this case, for the Getz book, singer Jackie Ryan.
I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished Last Supper to completion. Leonardo completed his Last Supper over five hundred years ago, and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through a half-millennium’s worth of stresses in so short a time.
But the new non-Dionysiac spirit is most clearly apparent in the endings of the new dramas. At the end of the old tragedies there was a sense of metaphysical conciliation without which it is impossible to imagine our taking delight in tragedy; perhaps the conciliatory tones from another world echo most purely in Oedipus at Colonus. Now, once tragedy had lost the genius of music, tragedy in the strictest sense was dead: for where was that metaphysical consolation now to be found? Hence an earthly resolution for tragic dissonance was sought; the hero, having been adequately tormented by fate, won his well-earned reward in a stately marriage and tokens of divine honour. The hero had become a gladiator, granted freedom once he had been satisfactorily flayed and scarred. Metaphysical consolation had been ousted by the deus ex machina.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Sugimoto show at Fraenkel Gallery in SF, thru July 2 LAST DAYS
fraenkel gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Acts of God, to be presented May 1 – July 2, 2014. This exhibition is the first U.S. presentation of Sugimoto’s The Last Supper: Acts of God (1999/2012), a five-panel photograph, more than 24 feet in length. The artist first created this work in 1999, from a life-size wax reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, which he photographed at a museum in Izu, Japan. In 2012, while the work was stored in the artist’s basement, it was damaged by the storm surge and flooding that occurred when Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. Sugimoto chose to retain the dramatic marks, colorations and ripples that have changed the character of the photograph.
These are glamorous photographs of antique mathematical and mechanical models, which Hiroshi Sugimoto came across in Tokyo. The swooping, angled forms evoke Brancusi and Arp; Man Ray photographed some of these same models for similarly abstract purposes. Mr. Sugimoto’s aesthetic is, in various ways, a throwback to the machine art of their era, the 1920’s and 30’s, but it also engages 19th-century craftsmanship and empirical philosophy.
Three-quarter views shot from slightly below, these large photographs (size matters here) turn their practical subjects into big-screen cinematic presences, curvaceous and potent, lighted to emerge from the half-shadows as if for their close-ups. The nostalgia, entailing both form and content, is, like everything Mr. Sugimoto does, balanced by a taste for simplicity. MICHAEL KIMMELMAN (2005 in New York, Sonnabend)
I first read about Sugimoto Joe in New York Times, then called the Pulitzer Foundation via phone about it, then toured the facility (Ann Hamilton show, something with gloves), and took home two copies of the book)
I also saw a big Sugimoto show at the DeYoung in summer, 2007
The exhibition includes examples from the series that Sugimoto began in the mid-1970s, Dioramas andMovie Theaters, as well as images from Seascapes and Portraits, started in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The eight photographs in Portraits were taken in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London, and Sugimoto painstakingly “remade” them to look like the original paintings from which they were modeled, employing lighting techniques similar to those that the painters might have used. The show also presents Sea of Buddha, 1995; Sugimoto’s more recent Architecture series; and images from Conceptual Forms, a series on which he is currently working.
This is not a sugimoto caribbean sea image of 1980: this says 650 words but fewer than 100 are written by me, by my hand, the rest are written, it would seem, by god, as a new type of deus ex machina, god and machine. And this on a Friday. Night. Shabbat. We did not eat with ceremony but I did cook up some burgers on the grill, and corn and some sausages. Terry boiled some beets but we’ll have to save them for another day, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise.
In Nan Goldin’s work, it is, redemptively, one of its central themes. Goldin’s art is filled with a generous attentiveness towards the lives of its subjects. Although we might not be conscious of it at first, her photograph of a young and, as we discern, lesbian woman examining herself in the mirror is composed with utmost care. The device of reflection is key. In the room itself the woman is out of focus; we don’t see her directly, just the side of her face an and the blur or a hand. The accent is on the make-up she has just been using. It is in the mirror that we see her as she wants to be seen: striking and stylish, her hand suave and eloquent. The work of art functions like a kindly voice that says, “I see you as you hope to be seen, I see you as worthy of love.” The photograph understands the longing to become a more polished and elegant version of oneself. It sounds, of course, an entirely obvious wish; but for centuries, partly because there were no Goldins, it was anything but.
I met Nin Filip and two of his friends at Palo Alto Art Center, in Ehren Tool’s studio, recently.
He sent me this photo, typical of his current work.
photo by Nin Filip
It reminds me of my cousin in Los Angeles, the one who was bass player in a touring rock band, plus the fact that there are plenty pictures of me, some here but mostly unpublished of me holding a small black dog.
Nin Filip, who was born in Vietnam and is an MfA candidate at San Jose State mentions influence of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton . I remember seeing a Nan Goldin show in New York, perhaps at Matthew Marks Gallery, then trying to gift a box of her prints to my host, although I never heard back from her whether she appreciated the gesture. It was probably too much to go ahead and push-pin a Nan Goldin shot to the wall of that Brooklyn apartment.
I do not know if Nin Filip is a given name or a non de guerre. (edit to add: it’s a long story, and his story — history — but you could probably say its both, or that he is a Filipino of a sort).
edit to add: this is classic example of the way by perhaps over-educated and hyper-erudite little gray matter works, but as I clicked on the Nin Filip photo, hoping to resolve whether the black organic mass in the man’s arms is, like Frida, a Cocker Spaniel or merely a cat, I had to click on George Caleb Bingham’s 1845 painting, you can see for real in New York, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, which apparently was also once known as French Trader and his Half-Breed Son.
Is that your pussy showing or whatever floats your boat?
The wiki article says that it is commonly known now that the black animal is a bear cub and not a cat. (And not to confuse this work with the one held by the DeYoung in SF).
This is Frida:
edit to add, 3 days later: Terry and I hung out with Nin Filip at the Unity Church of Palo Alto, where Big Island roots legend Ledward K had a benefit event for his children’s welfare-oriented ngo — a very well-run event that featured a local collaborator named Fran Guidry of Walnut Creek, and an amazing raffle with a uke donated by Gryphon Stringed, among numerous other door prizes, and then ate at a local fave ethnic restaurant, which shall go uncredited, other than the appropriate fact that it features in its lobby gallery of dignitaries and celebrities posed with it’s founder and namesake. Terry showed Nin Palo Alto Studios. Nin also, at my direction, shot these two versions of what appears to be the 24 / 7 life-as-tailgate party of a football fan.
raiders by nin, south palo alto industrial area, summer 2014
He also snapped a photo of Palo Alto’s mosque, which sent my synapses scrambling for a connection between the two abodes, for those who worship, say, Otis Sistrunk and for those, well maybe it’s in poor taste to complete the thought. (Eric Cohen and I got a tour of the mosque, weeks back, and believe that the building was facilitated so to speak by former Palo Alto council member John Barton and insider/architect Tony Carrasco. (oddly enough, and this is miles away, I would think, from a discussion of Nin Filip photography vision, but in my attempt to fact-check John Barton’s role in the mosque the search-injun instead offered me the fact that the Grateful Dead, on December 18, 1965, played a show at the current site of the mosque, at what was called The Big Beat). My understanding is that Palo Alto’s mosque will be the spiritual base of a group of worshippers who originate in India, not the Middle East, not sure if that matters or what it means. And not sure how to segue from here to a book by a Swiss Jew named De Botton, that Nin says is gaining material in academia — he is an SJSU ACT MFA. Le book:
Nin says he is influenced by Dinh Q Le, who makes weaved sculpture out of collage of images, a lot like Plastic Alto
The esteemed pathologist and blogger Dr. Brian E. Moore of Springfield, Illinois, who was a drama major with honors, and documentary filmmaker at Dartmouth, gave me grief about having a category of post called “Plato’s Republic” when what I really mean is “policy” or “Towards Democracy”. Point well taken. (He said “I wish I had visited Plato’s Retreat”, which I gather is or was a place for swingers or Bohemians, which neither of us actually are, nor do we lament not being — I presume he was saying that in sourcing my reference “Plato’s Repubic” the search-Gods suggested “Plato’s Retreat” as being as relevant). Well, as it happens, and on my way towards bathing my shaggy dog, or doing my laundry, I did stumble upon, in a back issue of Art Forum, and ad for a gallery show by Clemens Weiss, and had meant to figure what that is. (I am slightly obsessed by anyone and everything that shares my name). So guess who does or did live at Plato’s Retreat, which was or is also known as Ansonia Hotel on Broadway: Clemens Weiss. He took the photo above, of First Avenue, New York. The hotel became a set of condos, it is worth noting. Since I track land use and the class struggle. In 1992 the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. By 2007, most of the rent-controlled tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and threw them together to recreate the grand apartments of the building’s glory days, with carefully restored Beaux-Arts details. And I admit I don’t think I’ve read “Plato’s Republic”, unless there were short passages of it assigned to either my philosophy or government survey courses as an undergrad. I do recall the profs suggesting that even our system sprang out of John Locke’s notion of “middle class liberalism”. I have been saying, speaking of books, that I found meaning in George Packer “The Unwinding” and hope more people would read that. I’m also hoping to start a dialogue based on Henry David Thoreau “Civil Disobedience” essay, which to me is more about getting close enough to leadership to elicit change than it is about taking it to the streets — the title of the excellent essay was chosen by an editor and is slightly misleading. (I guess I should double-check what you can glean quickly from the internet about the history of the term “civil disobedience” and whether Thoreau’s use was seminal to modern day dissent or just a red herring). If you are looking here for comment on Clemens Weiss, I apologize. If you are Clemens Weiss or his agent, I apologize. Or check back for edita.
edit to add: To clarify, Clemens Weiss may have lived in the Ansonia, the Broadway building that hosted Plato’s Retreat, a swingers club. That may or may not be distinct from saying Clemens Weiss lived at the club, or frequented the club (or freak-quented there). Babe Ruth also lived at the Ansonia, but probably not with Clemens Weiss. It is absolutely true however that the only reason I discovered and ever visited let alone shlepped for Anthology Film Archives is that in 2001 Brian Moore and I were looking for a shop, that was once near Second Avenue and Houston, because of a clipping he had saved from The New Yorker. edit to add, 2: It is also true that on April 16, 1986 while Brian Moore was screening his documentary film “Army Green” about the return of ROTC to Dartmouth, that the U.S. bombed Libya, allegedly in response to the April 6, 1986 bombing of a discotheque in Berlin, called the La Belle, in which 2 Marines were killed and 79 more Marines injured.
edita3: even oddlier, as I type this, this song is playing in the next room, a PBS doc on Broadway:
Clemens Weiss born in 1955 not in Berlin but Dusseldorf:
born 1955 düsseldorf/germany
1970 -73 studies in engineering
1973 -77 studies in philosophy, art and medicine
lives and works since 1987 in new york city
I watched nearly two sets by a very young band Thursday evening at Lytton Plaza. The event started around 6 and probably didn’t load out until 8 or 9. The band was a trio: vocalist, guitarist, hand-drummer. There were at least four videographers. I hung out long enough to learn a wee bit more about this ongoing project, and may write about it. As I told one of the moms, I’ve seen a lot of bands.
Jim Keene shot some footage of this event, happening by on his jog (unlike me, he is tethered to the web, even when recreating). I suggested he add this to his feed.
I once booked Blink 182 into the Cubberley Auditiorium, which is now the temporary Mitchell Park library (and I recall, as a freshman, and probably a virgin, going to a high school dance in that very room, years before that). Blink 182 were in their late twenties at the time, but sang songs about what is is like or might be like or was like for them being 15 or 16. When I was 14 and a rising freshman Andy Zenoff and I hitched a ride with Heather Blum, a junior or senior at Los Altos, to Day on the Green. We were teens or pre-teens trying to look or act like we were of age.
It’s interesting to me the varying roles of parents and children in these situations, apropos of rock and roll, which after all is about sex. And drugs.
Your mama don’t dance and your daddy don’t rock and roll.
Buddy Holly and the roller rink, as depicted by Gary Busey.
Parent bands, who play to raise money for the privatization of their children’s public schools.
School of Rock, Palo Alto, a franchise of not the Paul Green organization but something managed by Sterling Assets I think it was according to Wiki. I had just met earlier in the week Hansel Grant sitting two tables over at Coupa, and told him that in 2005 I tried to get Paul Green to work with me to turn Draper’s Music into a combination studio and school, but that my impetus was to save jobs or create jobs for working musicians, beyond doing something for kids per se.
Lytton Plaza, whose ban on amplifiers, during business hours, was pushed by a man whose firm stands to make millions, tens of millions or hundreds of millios, or already has on…wait for it…Go Daddy.
I worry — although it is none of my business — even if it takes a village — that the three 11 year olds working their way thru Green Day, White Stripes and Led Zeppelin — are doing it to please daddy and help daddy towards his next ten million to hundred million payout, however that actually works. Certainly that is more true than the sign that said that all the money collected that night by busking (people dropping a dollar into a bucket in front of the stage, near the fountain) would help poor starving artists or children in East Palo Alto.
How did you pay for your rock and roll lifestyle? Is it you or your parents in this income tax bracket?
Maybe I’m a cynic. Or maybe I will have an opportunity to amend and soften my views on this band, or phenomenon.
YOU need coolin’.
edit to add: spurring me on here, although I do feel like I am exercising some restraint here, is that I heard what to me at least is a lesser Weezer joint, almost a chestnut, on Live 105 this a.m. on my way to my Friday morning breakfast club, “Beverly Hills”. That is not in the repertoire of the above-referenced young band, a literal baby band, as far as I know. Here is, if not the lyrics, something of it’s meaning, according to Rivers Cuomo:
“I was at the opening of the new Hollywood Bowl and I flipped through the program and I saw a picture of Wilson Phillips. And for some reason I just thought how nice it would be to marry, like, an “established” celebrity and live in Beverly Hills and be part of that world. And it was a totally sincere desire. And then I wrote that song, Beverly Hills. For some reason, by the time it came out—and the video came out—it got twisted around into something that seemed sarcastic. But originally it wasn’t meant to be sarcastic at all.”
I also started to describe my frustration and cynicism here to Maya Ford, who from age 15 to 30 or so and counting perhaps is or was a rockstar, sitting on her parents’ porch, in Downtown North, sipping red wine and waiting for the power to come back on, if that is not a metaphor for something here. She flashed to The Strokes and the idea of whether class-origin works against authenticity in rock. (As in, can rich kids rock? What are they rebelling against? What if Marlon Brando in “the Wild Ones” had a trust fund, or a generation skipping trust? The one who said “What are you rebelling against, what have you got?). This doesn’t fit here at all but I’d kinda like to see Maya Ford doing a few Marlon Brando speeches as performance art, maybe to music, by her dj. Which reminds that the person who sold me my smartphone for the major label t-comm firm, is named Angelique Paramoure, or so she claims, and runs an open mic in San Jo Japantown that I wouldn’t mind checking out. Also I ran into Tommy Jordan (the Tah of Luaka Bop Geggy Tah) earlier in the week then invited him to play hand drums at Lytton Plaza and he called me back from the highways to take a rain check. Despite claiming, above, that I watched every pitch of Tim Lincecum’s 113-pitch masterpiece Wednesday, I did chase after a dude wearing a Luaka Bop jeans-jacket and give him props. This of all posts deserves not just an outro but a soundtrack so check back for my edita.
edit to add, a few minutes later, after, ironically enough, trading fathering and sonning stories with a dear friend via telephone: my favorite line, phrase or thought from a band bio — and I have a collection of about 500, plus files or clips on another 2,000 to 4,000 bands and artists — was written by Nick Traina, the teenage son of novelist Danielle Steele, for Link 80. The bio says: some people think we have soul doubt. Which is a pun on “sold out”. I had no idea who Nick from Link 80 actually was, until after he died. I doubt that this info will end up in the above-pictured band’s bio, unless it is much worse than it appears, my comment on the tip jar and the HedgeFund/IPO/ExitStrategy/Play: (this is from the website of one of the Dad’s company, and it is my assertion that the band is just one more asset for the firm, or each of the Dads’ three firms, to manage, thusly:
Such companies are also chronically overlooked by Wall Street. Wall Street coverage is positively correlated to a company’s market capitalization, leaving smaller-cap stocks with less coverage and greater opportunity for mispricing. “Closet indexing” by institutional investors increases the focus on the large cap stocks that make up substantial portions of popular benchmarks. Institutional investors often spend little effort researching micro-cap and small-cap opportunities because of their limited impact on major indices. This lack of coverage allows disciplined investors with in-house research capabilities such as {My second guess, the Guitarists’ Dad’s Firm, in Palo Alto on Uni; I thought the balding, aggressive Waspy dude was the VC, the videographer mentioned to me} to buy stocks that trade for less than their intrinsic value.
edit to add, two weeks and one sightem later: trumped by “Unlocking The Truth“, a Brooklyn-based group of 8th graders signed to Sony, on Warp Tour, played Coachella.
J.Poet in 48 hours (the Chron) has Blues Broads playing Freight and Salvage tonight.
I doubt I will make it, mostly because Terry works until 8.
I had been meaning to update my long Marcia Ball story about Rick Koster’s distinguishing between Ball, Angela Strehli and Tracey Nelson, something about which one is cheerleader versus student body president.
I actually just rang Bob Brown’s number to no avail — so to speak –seized by the notion of bringing the four-member group, or four-headed group to the 650.
Bob Brown is Huey Lewis’ manager and owns Rancho Nicasio, where Terry and I recently caught up with Jerry Hannan, and had some fine victuals. He is allegedly married to Strehli. It also says that Morty Wiggins an O.G. in the SF music scene is co-managing and booking the group.
I recall chatting with a Bob Brown lieutenant when they managed Box Set who would appear here.
There is a cluster of Blues Broads dates in July and then again in November, to maybe riff around. I’ve been getting ideas about being a promoter or manager again if not actually drawing any water. If Plastic Alto is a fictitious version of Palo Alto, all these ideas actually happen there. The other two members are named Sampson and Morrison. I assume you have to cluster the shows since some of them fly in, versus being Texas-imports like Strehli and Nelson.
edit to add: There’s also a Led Kaapana show in Palo Alto on Sunday. Rich Corny was tres kind enough to snap me and send me this info capture.
edit to adder: Here is part of the Koster reference, thanks to leading search-injun. It’s actually LuAnn Barton not Tracey Nelson he is discussing, with Strehli and Ball. Reasonable mistake. Quoteth:
girl of the Austin blues scene and Strehli its homecoming queen, then Marcia Ball was surely its student council president and head cheerleader.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 