Rob Reich is a Bay Area-based musician and composer who will play Sunday nearby in Mountain View at Rengstorff House which is an historic sight and community center near Shoreline Park and Amphitheatre (which simultaneously is hosting comebacks from the ten loudest heavy metal bands ever for twenty thousand underage drinkers, and their moms, but I digress).
I heard about this gig because the Palo Alto Weekly, in its blast and homepage, link the the show and series.
What we offer in public programming of the arts has shrunk considerably in the 18 years that I have run Earthwise Productions, a private entity that sometimes links up with the City for programming (back before the departures of Leon Kaplan, Suzanne Warren, Shia Geminder, Jackie Rose, Anne Mattolo, Richard James et al).
Rob Reich the accordion player not to be confused with Robert Reich of Berkeley, the labor writer and former Clinton administrator — although it might be interesting for the two Robert Reichs to team up to say, set to music the words and deeds of the International Workers of the World, although Wayne Horvitz, Paul Magid, Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb and Rinde Eckert already have something like that in their “Joe Hill” project.
Here’s a link to Rob’s site, and to the Mountain View venue.
Palo Alto does, in its Twilight Series, have a pretty good Rolling Stones cover band that I might take in.
I would not advocate driving to SF to crash Outside Lands, although it is true that the producers of Outside Lands were on a list of concert industry stalwarts that I submitted to the City of Palo Alto economic development guy, regarding 456 University Avenue, the former Varsity Theatre, which seems destined for office space.
If you like music you can bike to Cali Ave with your family Saturday at 6:30 and to Rengstorff Sunday afternoon and see Unauthorized Rolling Stones and Rob Reich and not feel bad about missing Outside Lands, dollar for dollar pound for pound. Although obviously I feel Palo Alto could do better; probably a third of the bands at Outside Lands could or would play The Varsity, one or two at a time, if the city leadership would work with landlord and concert industry to make it happen, which they basically only gave to the matter lip service (an Elvis Costello song) rather than, if you excuse the metaphor, an AC/DC song about commitment, to the hilt.
Rob Reich works with Tin Hat, a group I booked here, into Cubberley and into the Museum of American Heritage, pre-dating his involvement with them. I followed Tin Hat Trio since the days they were called Masopust; Rob Burger, who played Cubberley in 1996 with Will Bernard Trio, opening for Medeski Martin and Wood, gave me a demo tape of Masopust. (Reich, it seems, replaces Burger).
I have never met the man but would gladly hire him for my ongoing street music project, ICO-BOPA, the International Congress of Buskers of Palo Alto. Look for him, if you don’t make it Sunday.
One last thing: as the tiniest bone to a dog, if Varsity is lost, and Arrillaga project at 27 Uni goes through, maybe if you move Julia Morgan Center building (which hosts MacArthur Park restaurant) to Palo Alto golf course at the very least it could host a concert series like they do at Rengstorff House.
edit to add, 12 minutes later, or my “anemic recovery”: maybe Rob Reich Trio can hire Robert Reich to doodle on a white board on stage behind them, and show it on a big screen, the way Galactic hired David Ellis (“Doze and SKRM”) to paint on-stage, or Rupa hired Mona Caron. Or Nels Cline and Robert Wisdom.
edit to add, Thursday the 16th: there is also a Rob Reich at Stanford, teaching poli sci; Stanford’s Reich went to Yale while the accordion player went to Oberlin.
edit to add, five days after publication: maybe I missed this point or it wasn’t announced per se, but Tin Hat has a new cd to be released on August 28 on Brookyln’s New Amsterdam Records, “The Rain Is A Handsome Animal….” new works set to the poetry of e.e. cummings, and Rob Reich plays on all tracks plus has three writing credits. Also: John Schaefer of WNYC previewed a track from this set in May, along with nine other poetry-music fusions from various artists.
I chatted with a nice lady from Colby Posters in LA and would love to design and order some posters just for the heck of it. But it’s weird I am blogging about a hypothetical letterpress poster project.
“Accept the Good” is from Third Drawer of Australia, available at LACMA or on line. Printed by Colby.
I have in my Earthwise Productions storage space seasoning a stack of Asylum Street Spankers overruns from Colby, circa 1998.
The Spankers didn’t write this but as a title its succintness practically begs for a Colby letter press treatment, “Shave ’em dry”:
At the Gunn High of Palo Alto, Calif. Class of 1982 30th reunion, John Chovanec, the former all-league football and baseball star, gave me further comedic or psychic grist for the mill for the performance piece cum social sculpture I call the “Harbaugina Monologues”.
It seems that in summer of 1981 Chovanec and Jim Harbaugh were teammates on the local American Legion baseball team. John says that one day in the dugout there was some not atypical banter going on and it came out that although Harbaugh led his Vikings team to the CCS playoffs in months prior, and beat John’s team, his mine and our Titans, Chovanec picked off two Harbaugh passes, or so he said, or thought was true and therefore offered, somesuch verbalizing or utterance, natural, unrehearsed, slightly cheeky, like perhaps the chewing tobacco they might have also been mulling over and issuing, as man-boys, free and easy, in the summertime, wearing baggy flannel, back in the day.
Well in actuality, as he tells me some 31 years later, maybe one of those errant passes was thrown not by Harbaugh (who of course went on to be all Big Ten for Michigan, AFC Player of the Year for the Colts, NFC Coach of the Year 2011 for the Niners, et cetera, and or as I argue: ad nauseum: to become Harbarph) but by Paul Kraft.
So although it is now baseball season, back to his story, and they’re now temporarily teammates, the distinction between “picked off twice” or once was enough to get both players off their duffs and at each others’ throats, nose-to-nose, mega-rotay visor-to-visor such that, according to “Chevy”, the other Post 375s soon had to intervene. Chev may have been baiting Jim, of course, like Lester Hayes, but doesn’t say that.
Further, he says – and if I am giving him too much benefit of the doubt here let me admit that his nickname “Chevy” is also the same brand name of the famous manufacturer who employed both my pappy and my grand-pappy –from 1919 to 1988 the Weiss’s were professionally a Chevy clan, and I currently drive a Chevy Cruze, and I sold Chevy’s in the summer of 1984, to among others the great college football coach and player Bill Campbell, who had moved to town from Rochester to work for Apple; Campbell bought a maroon Celebrity — the rift continued all summer and into the next fall’s football season when, as Chovanec and Harbaugh and the other opposing Gunn-Paly co-captains met at midfield for the pre-game coin flip, Harbaugh greeted Chovanec with an icy stare and stony countenance. You see the famous dust-ups with Pete Carroll of USC (“what’s your deal?”) and Jim Schwartz of the Detroit Lions had precedents.
Chovanec knows considerably more football than I do – me, the second receiver for the league co-champion 1978 Terman Tigers flag footballers, although I did play basketball against Jim Harbaugh in fall winter of 1980-81 – and corrected me or at least begged to differ on part of my Harbaugina Monologue backstory and analysis; he says Harbaugh was perhaps “lucky” as a player but “damn good” as a coach whereas I say that he perhaps got to Stanford the year after the Cardinal laxed the admissions standards and or took over the Niners just in time for Singletary’s motivational tactics to kick in. And I will be proven correct on this one of these years.
As I augment and embellish the work-in-progress open mic performances of “The Harbaugina Monologues” with other people’s takes on the Harbaugh story and my little ditty, I am open to someday turning, to sing his praise. For instance, recent former Palo Alto Mayor Peter Drekmeier says, contradictory to the initial reports and genesis of my tale, that Harbaugh was inclusive of all his teammates and not exclusive nor alienating, by the end of his lackluster 6-6 second season. “Jim acknowledged everyone’s contribution; even that of kicker Drew Van Horne,” the former Mayor (and tight end, Paly class of 1983) said.
But the gist of the story is: Harbaugh came to Palo Alto in 1980, was a three-sport star for two seasons for Paly BUT, and it’s a crucial “but”, the biggest “but” this side of Montana, a Fat Albert “but”, a caveat the size of the Grand Canyon, Harbaugh played and won in such a way that he alienated his opposition certainly, and maybe his own guys. At least that’s the story coming out of South Palo Alto, since 1981, where we are not only sticking with but adding to it. He’s Harbarph, of “The Harbaugina Monologue” (except when there are minors present, who have never heard of Eve Ensler, when it is “The Harbaugh-Haters Monologue” or “The Harbaugh Monologue”).
Eric Cohen, another Gunn classmate at the reunion, suggested that I might read “Blind Side” by Michael Lewis. He said I might also study Spalding Gray, and or write out and rehearse these riffs. Eric, a SAG-AFTA actor, MFA with Paul McCarthy at UCLA and former Gunn hurdler, said he would consider reading “The Harbaugina Monologue” and portray me and my angst someday somewhere on stage, which would add a whole ‘nother side to the production and project. (And it’s not too far off-topic to mention that before “The Harbaugina Monologue” I had a project or a notion that Steve and Eric Cohen, “The Flying Cohen Brothers” comic strip heroes, should wrestle Eugene Robinson, of “Fight…”, like Andy Kaufman versus Antonio Inoki; not to digress but I also once tried to get Eugene Robinson to wrestle Keith Boykin, Eugene to play a black Pansy Jones — the Robert Ryan role — in “The Set Up” and, if this is not too plastic for “Plastic Alto” Austin Willacy to wrist-wrestle Gordy Quist from Band of Heathens; to come full circle, but not as far as Juan Marichal braining John Roseboro, I texted Eugene about could he train me to take a retaliatory punch some day from Jim Harbaugh?)
So far I’ve stood up four times at Philz open mic, and once at a karaoke truck at Eric Fanali’s Rockage event. I’ve described this project to potential confederates about 20 times and added their reactions to the mix. Actually point of fact, Quist, mentioned is a former Dartmouth starting linebacker turned songwriter and Texas rocker who, although probably never met Harbaugh but does certainly, as I try to do, bridge Monsters of Midway and Pirates of Penzance. And there’s of course the 1982 fake Campanile newspaper, the Palo Alto Crapanile which also explored the topic of Harbaugh.
For what it’s worth, if not too tangential, coaches I rank above “Our Boy Jim” include: Al Davis, Bill Walsh, Sam Wyche, George Seifert, John Ralston, John Madden, Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, Buddy Teevens by a Granite State mile and former Titan all-league quarterback, my classmate Chris Strausser, the offensive line coach for Boise State, who is allegedly taking a close look at Bellarmine senior to be tailback Aaron Chapman (son of another of our classmates, Andre Chapman, who was at the reunion and looked like he could still run a 4.9 forty).
Chovanec is a director at Apple. And I wonder if he’s met Campbell.
If it’s not too extraneous here I am also now recalling that Jim Yardley, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter and one-time Titan footballer says that he sacked Harbaugh twice that game. I wonder if those too probably involved Kraft not Harbaugh, who some recall was yanked for changing the coaches’ play-call from “hand it to Ford” so that he could pass.
This entire process and script falls somewhere between John McPhee’s “A Sense of Where You Are” and scraping something suspect off the bottom of your Saucony.
HTFBH. Outro: Rancid “Keep ‘em Separated”
edit to add: Bill Campbell captained the last Columbia Lions championship team, the year before Jim, John or I were born, in 1961, and then coached there; I corresponded with him briefly when he was at Intuit and I was a pr guy in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s; I approached him at the Old Pro about a year ago, about Ben Parks; Ben Parks who worked with Henry Ford, the NFL black pioneer; Henry Ford’s son Marc Ford is the guy Harbaugh was supposed to give the ball to, when he changed the plays; it all fits. All things are connected, as Jack Thompson, the Throwin’ Samoan would often say. Or was that John Zorn? (It was Chief Seattle).
edita 30 minutes later: Or as Greg Zlotnick said, in my 8th grade yearbook, about my penchant for reciting a certain comic’s routine in Drama Class: “George Carlin is funny; but you are not George Carlin”. And I truly regret that Ring Lardner is not here to do an Alibi Ike jobber on Our Boy Jim. “I had malaria that season so only hit .356”. I’m no Ring Lardner but at least can read him.
edita, three weeks after that: Drekmeier emailed me today with this link, to Harbaugh and his “tweets”. I wrote back to mention, sans link, about David Feldman and Harbaugh. Here is that link. I haven’t actually read the Chron piece, or calculated how it fits my project. An email conversation in today’s age is like dialogue from an Ionesco play: not sure which part of the conversation is actually being fully heard. I could easily add five minutes about Feldman to my 60 minute Harbaugh monologue but will save that for later. It occured to me that if someone like Feldman was slightly more neurotic, that his monologue about his ambivalence about his teammate would be much more compelling that mine, by a former rival. Splitting the difference, maybe someday Feldman would read The Harbaugina Monologue as a guest principal.
The scoreboard shows that about 300 people have viewed this blog this week and that about 80 different posts have been visited, of the 400-plus that exist. There have been about 20,000 views in the history of “Plastic Alto”.
From a pile of a couple thousand clippings and flat wads of data, which I transformed into three piles of semi-sorted clusters of information, I pulled Michiko Kakutani’s article on “Texts Without Contexts“. Fittingly, it comes in two separate tear sheets. The booklist above is his.
edita I mean hers. Colin McEnroe claims as a prank to be the actual New York Times Pulitzer prize winning critic, MK, but I know better, thanks to wiki. And that somehow brings me to my outro of the band, named after an Korean Olympic boxing champion, fitting since I am just moments away from watching and taping the 2012 Olympics opening ceremonies, Sun Kil Moon:
Terry and I went to Albany one Sunday afternoon to greet Santa Fe painter Mateo Romero but an added bonus of the event was meeting Albany painter Owen Smith, who happened to create the cover of The New Yorker the week before. Mateo and Owen are both featured at the library thanks to curator Ruth Belikove, pictured above with Smith. I had been reading about Owen Smith in the Chron.
Ornette Coleman’s website includes a cool feature. I would describe it as an electronic xylophone, or a MIDI idiophone that lets you sound from a selection of samples by clicking on about 60 little buttons, multicolored keys. The sounds are samples of various tones and notes, presumably culled from actual Ornette performances. Meanwhile, a longer composition (that I cannot immediately identify) plays on so that you are augmenting or obscuring the melody and story.
I don’t know how far off I am to say it is an indirectly struck idiophone, by the Hornbostel – Sachs classification (112?) (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_idiophones_by_Hornbostel-Sachs_number) or to say it’s a cool tool, like triggering samples on a midi. It seems very Ornette. (And therefore “Plastic Alto” although I admit it is a challenge to my Luddite nature; I think this is the fifth reference to “luddite” here; at this point it may only mean that I am refusing to buy a computer and am writing this on the time-share system at Palo Alto Main Library).
Rather than me trying harder to describe this, I invite you to click thru here to check it out yourself. If I find a better description of this toy I will edita a link. For instance, I wonder what Ethan Iverson thinks. (And I admit it is probably beneath him, less interesting that who wrote “Solar“).
I got to this relatively esoteric point because Dave Douglas mentioned on his site (actually his social media feed) that Lol Coxhill had died. And not sure how I got from, say, Ava Mendoza to Dave Douglas’ site other than that is how the internet uses us. And I admit I sort of confuse Lol Coxhill with Elton Dean, who also died not too long ago.
I have a blue spiral notebook in which I have written the names and dates, and scant other info, of about one thousand jazz musicians. I call it “1,001 Saxophone Nights”. I created it by merging citations from three reference books: All Music Guide to Jazz, Penguin Guide to Jazz and Rough Guide to Jazz. As of July, 2006, that list was 760 names; by July, 2008 I had augmented it to about 943 names, mostly by reading the reviews section of Downbeat. In recent years, sadly, my only updating has been to add in a year of death and sometimes clip and file therein an obituary from the New York Times.
When I followed Dave Douglas’ lead to read Lol Coxhill’s obituary by John L. Walters in the Guardian, I also learned of one of his mentors, Aubrey Frank.
It is also news to me that there is a Joan Mitchell tribute to buskers that many think is based on her meeting Lol Coxhill, “For Free.”
A funny moment and reality-check about this project is that I mentioned via phone to Larry Ochs that I was, thanks to him, adding Paul Termos (1952-2003) to my list, “between Joe Temperley and Frank Teschenmacher” and he said “Who are Temperley and Teschenmacher?” Maybe better would have been to say Termos, a Dutch player and composer covered by ROVA, was between John Tchicai and Lucky Thompson. Or, I admit, maybe it would be better if I knew more about 100 top players than merely the names of 1,001 players. (ok, 943 and quasi-counting).
My original thinking was that there could be developed a device that would let players sweeten their sound with sounds that called to mind or were culled from dozens of hundreds or all 1,001 of these guys (and gals), that you could dial in an effect that would let you hear how to make your sound more like your predessors or influences. I have had exactly one interesting conversation furthering this topic, with the artist and techie Eric Walzack, although by now I have forgotten (on some levels but not all) his useful input. I was thinking, perhaps bombastically, that I am suggesting the Turing Machine of jazz saxophone.
Somebody, (maybe Ian Mackaye) once sent an attachement via email with a dozen or so John Bonham drum beats; somebody probably already has made a database of 100 or so jazz saxophone tones, that even ears like mine could learn to distinguish; I have a set of about 50 flashcards on which I had taught myself to distinguish photos of jazz sax greats, even more trivially.
Here is a representative electronic sample of Lol Coxhill, as suggested by Bill Wells and David Peschek:
I met the brothers Cory and Eric Fraser jamming at a private function in Los Altos Hills and enjoyed their duo versions of Hendrix and Sinatra; they told me that in a former life they were signed to a major label deal in Spain playing as Cielo Ceniza.
Speaking of brother acts, Steve and Eric Cohen took me on a tour of Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass'” at LACMA. Here I am pretending to hold the rock for Eric while Steve steals his thunder.
Not exactly stealing Beckham’s thunder but I was pleased to see San Jose singer Jessica Johnson performing “Star Spangled Banner” at the San Jose Earthquakes Los Angeles Galaxy event. She plays tonight at Biscuits and Blues in SF, at Gilroy Garlic Festival on July 27 and San Jose Jazz Festival on August 11.
David Beckham, one of the most famous and successful and best-paid athletes of the 21st century, did lure me in to the local pitch recently. I live less than two miles from the stadium and cruised by on bike just about match time. Tickets were around $60 was my understanding but I budgeted $40 to see how I would do with “miracle tickets” and the gods. Oddly, a security guy (who I hope to never have to hire) walked me through a security gate, had me follow him into the tunnel, then took my sawbuck stealthily, like the old “statue of liberty play” or “fumble rooskie”. As someone who has put on about 150 ticketed events, I do make a study of how security is run at various venues but as far as I recall, this is only the second time I have snuck in so egregiously. (To be safe, I picked up a discarded stub when that opportunity presented itself, literally). The other time I recall sneaking into a venue is when the power went out at Slim’s and Mary Chapin Carpenter played by flashlight standing on the rear of club bar. I definitely got $20 out of my soccer experience and although I am unconvinced regarding Beckham’s legacy in the U.S. I dare see he has done more here than did Alan Birchenall.
Meanwhile I recall spending a fair amount of time chatting up the guy who was guarding Michael Heizer’s installation. His name is Thomas and he worked for a security contractor and had in fact studied art, although he didn’t seem very impressed by the piece. For whatever reason I shot his hands holding a scaled down version of the piece. Generally people seemed underwhelmed. I think of the Heizer as being mostly about the installation per se, the transport, and how that changed the environment even briefly as the piece slowly made its way to its repose. I was not familiar with Heizer before this, although in retrospect I recall something about his land art pieces, perhaps in a New York Times magazine story. Also, we had heard a similar story about installation of a very heavy Richard Serra at Oliver Ranch; and I put some time and energy in watching and pondering and talking up the installation of the Serra at Stanford — I saw it’s companion at LACMA, as well as work by Chris Burden, indigenous Oaxacans,
edit to add, November 6, an especially auspicious (election) day:
to keep my mind off the election results, I am re-reading Michael Kimmelman, “The Accidental Masterpiece: on the art of life and vice versa” and its passage on Michael Heizer, the chapter on minimalists “The Art of Pilgrimage” and hadn’t remembered apropos of “Elevated Mass” or is it “Levitated Mass” that Heizer was in Kimmelman. MK states that the artist’s father was an archeology professor, who wrote a book about ancients dragging boulders, so I affirm my position that for the LACMA piece, the installation is the piece, and what I saw is the residue of the piece (not unlike Kapoor “svayambh”), and I would suggest it is a tribute to his father. I texted Steve and Eric this a.m. thusly.
Also, tapping “kimmelman” and “heizer” into the searchers, yields this related article. see also, the olmecs, collosal heads et al. gives another meaning to what starts in vegas or outside vegas stays in vegas. there is also a related piece, Kimmelman/2005 tells us and the injuns confirm, in NYC, at IBM building.
I think I had a relative named Bookbinder so on that basis I search-injuned something listed in Metro called Zoe Boekbinder.
Ten seconds of research says “link to this”. Ok, well I am screening this on “mute” since my girlfriend is snoozing beside me and poochy is licking her feet in that inimitable spaniel way, but looks interesting enough:
The artist apparently is playing about an hour south west of here at Crepe Place which, again, underscores the point that Palo Alto needs a music venue. Maybe I should have reached out to Adam Bergeron regarding a team to get the lease of the Varsity (TLPW456); maybe I still can; coincidentally or not, it looks like Bergeron also now has a hand in the Balboa Theatre, something that came to pass probably after I had consulted by phone, text and email with Gary Meyer about the situation here. I took me about five more minutes to confirm my recollection that Bergeron cut his teeth in DC at Iota of Arlington. Upcoming shows that look worth checking: Maree Sioux, Kepi Ghoulie, Bart Davenport, Jessie Harris.
While I am at it I clipped the ad from Montalvo which listed shows by Nellie McKay (who I’ve never seen but famously kinda stalked), Richard Thompson, something pairing Tift Merrit and Simone Dinnerstein and Hugh Masekela (the last two not til April, 2013).
I thought I bought this cd merely because I liked the cover art but must have somehow known it or he was booked by Billions, was playing Lolapalooza in Chicago — where I was born — and is coming to Fox Theatre in September. Good people at Rasputin in South Mountain View had it on an endcap which also still slays me quite often: http://www.amazon.com/Tallest-Man-Earth-Ep/dp/B003XSSR60/ref=ntt_mus_dp_dpt_6
edita: and then jambase ten minutes ago tells me, as I am trying to log off, that they or it or he is going on tour, time being of essence and all that. 2) is from Sweden; 3) conjures Woody Guthrie who is turning 100, or what’s left of him is, rather; 4) also at Newport Folk. 5) originally I was going to snarkily post that a new restaurant in downtown Palo Alto is called Tacolicious and a blurb in local rag says they are hip and they name-check “the Shins”. When Taco Bell has a new burrito called “The Shins — burrito” then we are all completely f —–.
edit to add, taco not tall: the tiniest bit of research shows that Taco stand is in the Mission on Valencia so it may be cool. Terry and I were just at Puerto Allegre, where I liked the solo mariachi guitar singer guy and the art, a Frida Kahlo tribute curated by Bird Levy Strain of Polu Manu Productions. I ate not long ago at P.A. with Francisco Ferndandez of Ferocious Few, the famous defiant busker guy who I vow to bring to the 94304 soon enough; Leah Garchik had an item about some buskers in town from NOLA and I meant to ring her about Ferocious Few, who had their gear stolen. I will try the taco stand hereabouts soonenoughs.
I actually have no idea what this is but something tells me to paste it into “Plastic Alto”.
I found this via the new Peter Selz book; I noticed Exene Cervenka in the index, as a note. The author of the book got it from Norton Wisdom that Peter Selz learned a wee bit about punk from Bruce Conner and apparently went to a Banyan concert and was introduced maybe to Exene therein. Exene also paints, yes?
To not quite complete a circle, Ava Mendoza told me once that Nels would not give her a lesson but said they should hang some time (art?). Also, this digression had me on Dave Douglas’ site for a minute. Did you know that Dave has 4,000 or so likes on the leading social media format (that I boycott) and 5,000 or so followers on another (that I also boycott). Any hoo, here is a video, which we should all peruse later:
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 