Big ups for Lisa Brown’s ‘vagina’

Posted on June 25, 2012 by markweiss86

SCHAUER/BROWN FOR MICHIGAN 2014

I am here to offer big ups to Michigan representative Lisa Brown for her “vagina.” Brown_072606_110I heard this on NPR. A politician in the midwest got in trouble for saying something to the effect of “thank you for your interest in my vagina”. They were talking about health care, women’s health, birth control or some such. The commentator on NPR his name was Nunnberg or something; they said his up and coming issue is called “Ascent of the A-word”.

http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-A-Word-Assholism-First-Sixty/dp/1610391756

The story also referenced the Yalies who don’t know their heads from their Aesops’s when it comes to PC language and hazing; “no means yes, yes means something we cannot mention, even in plastic alto land.” A nuisance about language.

The reporter also mentioned a Rachel Gerstein which reminds me that I know a Gerstein (but not in the biblical sense, only the platonic sense, or as if I was Bill Clinton and she was my intern; well, that’s not true either, Gerstein wore the pants in our relationship. We were 19; ok, she was Bill and I was Hillary or something. I digress. I forget the details).

Somewhere in here, apropos of politics, as I am an advocate for, as prophylactic protection against bad government and lack of abstinance when it comes to the huge erections of the developers, of our Sesquicentennial, the Palo Alto at 150 or Palo Alto@150, which is coming very slowly and really drawing it out for 2042 or so, the previous NPR “piece” — can I say “piece” here? — it was quite a piece — was about Richard Adler, who wrote both “Pajama Game” which I’ve never seen, nor had I heard “Hernando’s Hideaway” or what not until ten minutes ago, but I did catch “Damn Yankees” recently on dvd and noticed not “You Gotta Have Heart” which I immediately started re-writing in my head for residentialist local propaganda interests, like Le Levy, as “You Gotta Have Parking” that is if you are going to build office space for the next big IPO here you gotta have parking for your dudes, so they don’t leave their Ford Ficus in front of our house University North on streetcleaning days.  I mean to suss out the Adler Chicago Sesquicential songs. I noticed and mentioned previously that “Damn Yankees” is the source for a Woody Allen joke about someone yelling “slide” in a private moment and not meaning baseball.

I wrote to Leah Garchik not too long ago about how the society columnist for local rag mentined Eve Ensler at Castilleja but couldn’t bring herself to.. she would not mention Ensler’s most famous thingy…”The Harbougina Monologues”. Ensler has a new piece at Berkeley Rep.

I was going to write not about Lisa Brown, the “strong voice for Oakland, Mich. County”  but Tig Notaro who is written up in the Times today; I know because I invested $2.50 into the thing. The headline is “You Will Not Believe How Long This Takes” by Jason Zinoman and has to do with her constantly revising a work of progress about her stalking Taylor Dayne. I’m gonna not just link to it or cut it out and stick it in my stack of 1,000 other things to read and file but use it as actual inspiration for improving my Jim Harbaugh monologue (the one I so cleverly alluded to above, which is influenced by Ensler “The Vagina Monologues”). I was losing hope on my Harbaugh hater trick. Although I did run it by at least two known talent entities, Joe Sib and Rinde Eckert.

Not to digress –although I live for digressions — hopefully more like Leonard Bloom nine days late than your average loony talking into his invisible cellphone on the street — but I met the artist Owen Smith and had noticed him a few weeks back regarding his literary referencing public transit murals — people reading either Dashiell Hammett or Jack London in transit, and the characters and scenarios creep charmingly off the pages and into the picture; I mentioned to Owen Smith that Rinde Eckert is doing a new work (his new thingy) based on “Call of the Wild” — maybe little interloper that I am

edit to add, nine minutes later — Due to the vagaries – -can I say “vagaries” here? — of the system at the Palo Alto public libraries, I got logged off mid-sentence. Anyways, maybe Rinde can hire Owen to do backdrops the way SF Opera apparently has had Jun Kaneko put his touch on their magic flute.  He at least gave them head, as I described above.

Rachel Gerstein may or may not have been namechecked by Geoffrey Nunberg in his piece. Rachel is a former Palo Altan — post-doc work at Stanford, works at UMass — and is smart and feministic so would probably have a lot to add to the discussion of Lisa Brown’s “vagina” or Nunberg or Plastic Alto. Her sister was my classmate at Dartmouth; we met freshman fall at Daily D, briefly dated, were platonic friends for ten or more years thereafter and I last saw her at my 25th reunion in June 2o11, Charlotte Gerstein. Another Gerstein sib works or worked “long time” for Joe Lieberman.

Way off topic but I noticed that the name “Fay Zenoff” popped up in my “dashboard” here at wordpress. I had not written about Fay Zenoff but someone seeking to read about her or perhaps Fay herself wandered out of bonds here; I had written about seeing Queen in 1976 or so with Andy Zenoff AND about having a former client named Lisa Fay Beatty and semi-omniscent search-injun wrongly put the idea in my head that I should venture that former pre-teen kid sister of my best friend from 7th and 8th grades is now divorced mother of two with an MBA living and Marin and running healing heart seminars, and looking curiously or alluringly like her mother Nancy or Nisha Zenoff did, when the Zenoffs first moved to Callado Lane in Atherton with that big black pool and tennis court. So little Fay now has offspring older than we were back then.

I was going to also write about someone I have never met, the venture capitalist (with 17,000 social media followers, to my 20,000 total readers here so far at Plastic Alto) by name of Hornik, who’s teenager rented out GAMH and hired some regional bands for a benefit event called It Gets Indie. I noticed in his blog that he claims to sit on Splunk Board or something with Nick Sturiale and says he has known Nick for more than a decade. Nick Sturiale my Gunn classmate and former Los Altos Hills Senior Little League Expos teammate who hated the clarinet such that he would put off practicing until 15 minutes before you and he were due to go to the movies or Old Mill Mall; “ear training” for him at the time meant his mom dragging him by ears back to his bedroom to practice while chum or chums sat in the next room staring at the ceiling or flipping thru magazines. The same charming search-injuns have another Nick Sturiale as music director for a burlesque act in Frisco circa 1930’s; Nick’s brother Grant Sturiale is a Broadway music honcho meanwhiles. The promoting prowess of Hornik the junior reminds of Danny Scher who was said to hustle paid gigs at pizza parlor for a combo of jazz musicians including himself when they were in 8th grade, according to my dentist here. Danny Scher who also got Thelonious Monk to play at Paly, and got Journey to play the Tri-School Formal when his kid brother was a sophomore.

Revising big ups to Lisa Brown, Rachel Gerstein, Geoff Nunberg, Nick Sturiale, Fay Zenoff, Andy Zenoff, the Hornik’s whom I have never met, Eve Ensler, Tig Notaro and my nemesis Jim Harbaugh, who will, mark my words, someday quit pro football not for care racing but to play handdrums in a world music group, not unlike the Kyle McLachan Mayor character in “Portlandia”.

Or as the late George Carlin would say: Lisa, you cannot even say “teats” unless your on at 5 in the morning and your guest is a cow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgZZ82tp5es

edit to add, later that same library visit: I wanted to add the link to the actual Times story that re-routed my day — and I had 20 items on a to do list — before I re-routed again to discuss the V-word. This. But then I also clicked thru to youtube were 32,000 of us have heard the Tig Notaro actual riff on Taylor Dayne, which takes about 12 minutes in this format. Ok, I think this changes my life in general and in particular about my work in progress monologue on Jim Harbaugh, the football coach. Accepting the fact that is is real standup, joke, laughs, jokes, building, et cetera, and mine is a post-modern experimental piece where I perform it differently each time, improvising and ask the audience not to laugh for at least two hours after leaving. I will have to read a little deeper into the times piece. Did I mention that the online version has a title referencing “repetition” whereas the print version I bought for two-and-a-half zuzim references duration over repetition? Or maybe I should re-mouth the Harbaugh piece about how I keep bumping into him and offering the same but mundane sincere compliment? Like, “Excuse me, I just wanted to say I like your speaking voice — have you considered voiceover work? Aren’t you from Paly?”

In my to-do list I had promised myself that indeed, whether I stick with the improv thing or not, I will someday, maybe today or this week, write an actual 20,000 words or so on Harbaugh. Also, I envision the punch-line or the payoff as the audience all yelling out in unison – with a neon scoreboard cuing them — HIKE THE FUCKING BALL, HARBAUGH. That is, if I can say “gerund obscene” here, or at the Philz open mics.

It’s hard.

Or if you want to go deeper into Lisa Brown’s “vagina” problem you can climb onto the Huffington Post.

This is like a drum solo that doesn’t know when to quit but I am recalling that the day I visited Don Lucoff in his Philly area home office I took the bus from Center City, got there early and scored a copy of Richard Alder’s biography from the local library surplus sale — although at the time I didn’t know the song, “Heart” or “You Gotta Have Heart” which I guess also gave us title of baseball in Japan book “You gotta have wa”.

And from the Wesleyan sight about Rinde Eckert’s upcoming workshop there and his new piece The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy:

Rinde Eckert, a celebrated playwright, is currently in residency at Wesleyan as part of the Creative Campus Initiative in conjunction with the Theater Department. Eckert is developing a new play that will be performed with Wesleyan students on November 15-17, 2012. The project is currently titled The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy – a man raised by wolves finds himself toward the end of his life at the top of the food chain, powerful and erudite, but longing for a return to the wilderness of the wolf he once was. How does one recover one’s original, less conditioned or acculturated self? What is gained in the effort? What is lost in translation? When one’s axiomatic habits of mind cease to be useful, how does one circumvent them, reinvent oneself as less neurotic, more the author of ones actions than the prisoner of one’s fears and unconscious longings? Does the epistemology of the animal offer us a nonlinguistic model of any practical use to our quest for an authentic present? Our language gets us in deep trouble and elevates us at the same time. Should I be howling now?

Right arrow into not Ginzburg but Smith: see especially, for currency, number 6 of pieces 8.

edit to add, almost two years later: the internal infernal WordPress feature recommended that neophyte “Plastic Alto” readers check this post out, after reading something about Archers of Loaf and the Foothill College’s teachers flawed memoir of my role in her class, but what I noticed is that it does not or I did not note a “category” so I log on here to check the boxes (!) “sex” (meaning feminism) and “Plato’s Republic” (meaning government or policy), but I also notice Tig Notaro and fact that she appeared at Stanford a few weeks ago but I saw the flyer too late and am losing a step. I had pretty much abandoned the Harbaugh tribute excepting fact that Ann Killion had a rant claiming “his act has worn thin” which I wanted to note and respond to, plus the fact that Steve Cohen and I sat within spitting distance of Jim Harbaugh at Stanford-Utah basketball game and that Our Boy Jim was there with his four-year-old daughter from his second and current marriage and had trained her to wave a pom-pon non-stop     until start of fourth quarter and that visiting high school girls basketball teams wanted to pose with him en masse. Weird (and I probably should not comment, and had refrained until just now, and bury this, sort of. There is also something about Harbaugh doing push-ups at Marine World in Vallejo Six Flags with a female walrus, that a couple electronic news outlets recast. Big ups for Six Flags) -30-

edita  againa: an earlier version of this from the addition of today, March 18, 2014, or two years after the original post, used the word “long-time” but then I felt bad about it and deleted it. I read thru numerous entries on the leading search engine to see if a subset of readers would chose the wrong reference and connotation and let it ride so to speak but even though only two people had possibly seen this in the couple hours since I published, I decided to delete. I briefly thought of an entry just on the various uses that come up; there’s about five songs, including one from the band Boston. Also, it definitely occurs to me that this is the roughest topic I’ve written and to the extent that I for example loosely advised the parent or parents of a young female artist, I would not have wanted to read this first about my work. In general, I side with Representative Brown and admire her courage, even if I am sort of making fun of her. Maybe I was exposed to early to George Carlin and his use of double entendre, something about his “thrust” for decency.

edita, for the very last time: ok, if someone is actually reading this super-closely, he or she may be confused about saying I had deleted a term “long-time” because a subset of hypothetical readers might project onto my usage an unfortunate potential connotation; the term does appear in the original post about a Joe Lieberman staffer I once met — I deleted it from a version of this apropos of the football player.

edit to add, two years, two months later, campaign 2014: as fate would have it, I wandered into a Old Palo Alto fundraiser for Democrat Mark Schauer, who is leading according to polls in his effort to become the next governor of Michigan, and the tie-in here is that he chose Lisa Brown as his running mate (for Lt. Governor). Meanwhile I am running for Palo Alto City Council (and met Mark while waiting my turn, at a panel of environmentalists — I had walked 1.4 miles there but arrived two hours early and something sent me towards Schauer, as strange as that sounds. I asked a couple questions, based on Reich and Packer, and actually left wanting to work for Mark Schauer in Michigan should he prevail while I falter (or not make as much dramatic progress as I have since 2009, to increase at this rate). I am hoping to break away from Palo Alto to catch up to Schauer and Perkins (his treasurer, also on this junket) in Detroit and maybe Ann Arbor, in October. We also have a plan for me to write a white paper on luring artists to Detroit, or arts funding as stimulus spending. More to come. Mark reminds me of Buddy Teevans, the Dartmouth coach and former QB. Mark went to A College in Michigan, with advanced degrees from Western Michagan and MSU Sparta. I sent the previous version of above to him, but truthfully, maybe I could have crafted a tighter version. Michael Moore (“Roger and Me”) did a benefit for him.

Dahlia Lithwick oozes some rather pungent prose about the need to regulate the use of the word “vagina”: v

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Burden of truth

Posted on June 24, 2012 by markweiss86

One of these days I will post an essay about the following texts (based on the “60 Minutes” coverage of item A):

Greg Mortensen Four Cups of Tea
Helena Norberg Hodge Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
Marlo Morgan Mutant Message Down Under
David Shields Reality Hunger
Dao Strom Chickens, sex worker
John Steinbeck Tortilla Flats
John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath
Shields on Daniel Dafoe

Travels with Charley

Cf: Mateo Romero “Red Man’s Burden”
Bhi Bhiman Kimchee Line w. Adam Johnson of Stanford on Charlie Rose
Steve and Eric Cohen 25 Years of Fox I kissed everybody on that show. I kissed a lot of people.
I kissed Ally McBeal by Steve Cohen (with Eric Cohen)

edit to add, July 13: San Jose Metro has a piece on an out of print 1960s memoir by William Craddock. Calls to mind both my advocacy of the late Alden Van Buskirk and my ongoing dialogue with Foothill instructor Dr. Jordana Finnegan.

Also on my reading list — if that is what this is, albeit fictitious — is Jennifer Egan’s “goon squad” book which is indebted to Jason Schlichter’s memoir about Semisonic. And my neighbor Jon Ford, the erudite rock star daddy, says that Egan dated Steve Jobs.

Lastly, for now, I visited the Steinbeck Center in Salinas and procured and am ingesting “In Dubious Battle”. Amazon has about 49 mostly very positive reviews for this work, compared to about 700 for “Grapes of Wrath” and 1,200 for “Of Mice and Men”.

 

edita: speaking of burden of the awful truth, it took me 18 months locked in a mental prison to realize I had mis-identified Adam Johnson as “Greg Anderson” — actually have still not released poor protagonist from the torture chamber of the first 60 pages or so.

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‘Your music can change the world’: Rosemond Jolissaint pka T-Rosemond

Posted on June 22, 2012 by markweiss86

I met Rosemond Jolissaint the performer known as T-Rosemond at Fete De La Musique in Palo Alto last Sunday. He happened to be scheduled at 456 University, in front of the historic and beloved former Varsity Theatre, a site upon which I have kept a keen eye (the theatre was converted to a chain book store in 1995; when the store left in August, many people started talking about the prospects for music and film returning to The Varsity).

I was so impressed with Rosemond’s set at the street fair that I invited him to return to the same site 72 hours later for Solstice.

What I didn’t realize until having a burrito with him directly before his hit is what an amazing story he is.

Rosemond is famous in his country Haiti. He won a contest at age 16 that is their version of “American Idol”. He is from the provincial countryside and won the contest with a song he wrote himself about the plight of the common man in Haiti. Or so he says: most of his songs are in Creole.

An American, a freshly minted Stanford-trained activist, met  Rosemond in Haiti a few years later and sponsored his journey to the U.S., to further his music career here and raise consciousness and maybe funds for his country. He is 21 now, says he has a music visa, and was living in Palo Alto but now is staying with friends in the North Bay. The gigs have been somewhat infrequent, by my reckoning, especially for someone with his prodigious talent and such a compelling back-story. I could envision him gaining some momentum with more frequent shows and then landing a record deal on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe, Cumbancha (Rupa Marya, Andy Palacio) or Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records. He also conjures up: “Once”, “Crocodile Dundee”, Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and Corey Harris’s MacArthur Funded reggae project. Could he do a Creole adaptation of Green Day’s “American Idiot” show?

I find the story quite compelling and am researching how viable his quest is and how I might help. (I made only a token relief effort so far, by texting a small donation to Wyclef’s Yele fund, right after the earthquake).

I definitely feel Rosemond made a tangible contribution to our community with his shows Sunday and Wednesday.

I counted about 200 people passing by during his 90 minute set, as the beautiful solstice sky slowly darkened.

About 12 people dropped money in his box. Two bought cds, for $10 each. Workers from two different restaurants nearby first popped their heads out and then came by during their breaks. I explained his performance to some passerys-by. Some asked about the Haitian flag he clipped to the chain-link gate in front of the Varsity courtyard.

A frat-type young dude did not break stride but said “Keep it up, bro!”.

A young Latina woman said “I don’t understand what he says, but I like it.”

He played six or seven originals in rotation plus covers by Bob Marley (“Redemption”) and Tracy Chapman (“Talking ‘Bout a Revolution”).

On our way to my car we ran across a young man named Isaiah Perkary, 19, who said this was his first time busking. Rosemond and Isiah jammed together nicely on guitar and violin and exchanged contact info.

When I dropped Rosemond at the station I said to him “Your music can change the world”.

Rosemond’s revolution sounds like a whisper but with time it could roar like the Lion of Judah. Stay tuned.

T-Rosemond in front of the historic Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto

Isaiah Perkary, 19, home-schooled in EPA, attends Biola College, plays tennis and could fit in with a group of Haitians with his fiddle

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Shiver me timbres: my Norah jones gives me goosebumps

Posted on June 18, 2012 by markweiss86

Norah Jones did have a pirate song on her last cd, which I dutifully procured, not just to count how many Bay Area jazz stalwarts were still in her camp. So as I thought about this new cd, “little broken hearts” (2012, Blue Note) the pirate pun precipitated. The cover art evokes a cult film called Mudhoney (which is also a band).

I played about a minute of each track, during my 12 minute commute from apartment to girlfriend’s house, to feed the cocker (named Frida, you already know if you are TLPW456 and P.A.). Like most things these days, it reminds me of David Shields. Shields says plot is dead it’s all about voice. On “LBH”, it is all about trendy production styles from Danger Mouse and his buds. Also, Norah wrote all the songs, which is just as well. Reminds me of review of Alanis at Shoreline and daily music beat writer trotted out the line about she could sing the phone book and people would still like. Here they did the Richard Julian / Jessie Harris thing to Sasha Dobson, for reasonable results (Norah Jones without Norah per se) and now we have Norah’s name and voice (and writing — no Harris here) but none of her music. Eli Wolf is still there, as A & R; Eli Wolf who I met outside a Liberty Ellman hit, who I stopped — we both waiting for cabs — because he had a Ropeadope windbreaker on.

I feel qualified to comment knowingly on Norah Jones — and have indeed bought all the cds so far — even in snarky cryptic shorthand and ramblings because I was in the Charlie Hunter extended jazz family when all of us were among the first 5,000 people (out of the eventual 20 million) to feel her. And because I called on Liberty Ellman in his Brooklyn flat, where he had her gold record on his wall, unless that was in his office, I forget. (Oddly, someone told me recently that there was a rumor that Liberty and Norah are cousins; weird).

This is almost as weird segue but while we are on topic of discussing an artist by only mentioning her producer, it reminds me that when I saw Jenny Scheinman in Springfield, IL (BACKSTAGE, COLLEGE RADIO SHOW, 2009) she said go ahead and send her a white paper on producers for her upcoming; I was gonna run the gamut from Brian Eno to various pressings of Tucker Martine wanna-be’s. This was b.b. –before blog — so the thing never got past mental ruminations while water ran down the shower drain. Number 7 seems like a hit. Oh, sita; mis-spoke; Norah did not write all these her selfishly; Brian Burton co-wrote 12 tracks. Danger, danger, will rob in sun, not secretly.

Although you don’t see it here, I was noting on one of the late night shows that Norah was playing guitar not keys. Reminds me that when I was Henry Butler’s manager, and he was on the Billy Taylor show, his assistant told me that they fished for Norah to be on the same broadcast (who settled for: HB, Jason Moran, Freddie Cole and that guy whose name escapes me but plays with his mother, Bill Charlap, plus Andrew Hill – – WOW; Bettina Owens, the booker).

(and don’t get me wrong, namaste, I root for Norah Jones; BUY THE CD, Y’ALL; on pirate songs, I like the Norah but the highwater mark, not Jimmy Buffett, but Rupa Marya; and I forget how I was going to tie in, so here it is gratuitously — plasticly alto alotment — “Sita Sings the Blues” I recommend for collaborator. Wishful thin queen.

And when I mention only “track 7” I must be thinking (or, really, I’m a chubby Jap) about the old joke which search-Injuns here to a Phish forum:

A man is sent to prison for the first time. At night, the lights in the cell block are turned off, and his cellmate goes over to the bars and yells, “Number twelve!” The whole cell block breaks out laughing. A few minutes later, somebody else in the cell block yells, “Number four!” Again, the whole cell block breaks out laughing.

The new guy asks his cellmate what’s going on. “Well,” says the older prisoner, “we’ve all been in this here prison for so long, we all know the same jokes. So we just yell out the number instead of saying the whole joke.”

So the new guy walks up to the bars and yells, “Number six!” There was dead silence in the cell block. He asks the older prisoner, “What’s wrong? Why didn’t I get any laughs?”

“Well,” said the older man, “sometimes it’s not the joke, but how you tell it.” Or: plot is dead. 

edit to add: I miss-spoke. It is track #9 that is the hit. It is slightly more uptempo, traditional structure, a road song, “far/car”; plus the whole Beatles thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynjYnKkXhbU&feature=related

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I.C.O.B.O.P.A declared for Wednesday, June 20 (solstice)

Posted on June 18, 2012 by markweiss86

Earthwise Productions 18th Anniversary show and Plastic Alto blog present I.C.O.B.O.P.A, the International Congress of Buskers of Palo Alto, “eye see oh be oh pea, hey!”, Wednesday, June 20, 2012 in Palo Alto, California. Street musicians from all over will converge and play music  between 5 and 10 p.m. on University Avenue, Lytton Plaza, Cogswell Plaza, Johnson Park and Martin Luther King Plaza / City Hall / Clear Story. For more info, see “Plastic Alto” the blog or call Mark at (650) 305 – 0701.

-30-

just added: Haitian-American troubadour T-Rosemond has been confirmed to play ICOBOPA; he will perform at 8 sharp at 456 University Avenue in Palo Alto (in front of the historic and beloved former Varsity Theatre; across from the Apple store). The “T” before his name is French for “small” – makes me wonder if T-Pain is also from Haiti or something. T-Rosemond, I call him “Rosemond”, is no smaller than Tommy Jordan or Martin Sexton. When I met him I brought up Trombone Shorty (Troy Andrews), who started small and is not bigger than his trumpet and trombone laid end to end. I am expecting three current or former Mayors of Palo Alto to catch at least part of T-Rosemond’s set; I modified 18 of my famous but underutilized TLPW456 flyers to include info on this event. Not sure what I will do about the other four or five sites I hinted might have music; might have to punt the “congress” part of ICOBOPA for the next run through. So this is International Busker of Palo Alto singular. Not that I don’t have more than 60 potential street musicians in my cell phone alone, and numerous more in various other data-piles, if and when the revolutionary gunpowder-fuse is ignited. But for now come down to Uni Ave and try the yogurt or Vietnamese food, and T-Rosemond. We don’t have a permit or road-blocks but we do have it on good authority that the sun will stick around til almost 9.

edit to add, Wednesday, June 20 1 p.m.: it is “Day of Show” and I am doing a variation of my “Day of Show” ritual: walking around town with flyers, making a couple phone calls to people I’d like to see turn up, rhapsodizing about how to dress the stage; I ran into Lin or Lynn the widow of St. Michael’s Alley founder Vernon Gates and she nearly had me calling on the actual owner of the Varsity to suggest he open the chain-link Gates. I thought of running a much longer “Day of Show” post, at the expense of the legwork. Woke to a motto: Vox Clamantis est ICOBOPA. I still may add acts from 5 to 7, or move the venue, or just make it a point to hand out flyers from 5 to 7 and noodle on my mbira, at the site, blurring line between organizer, blogger and participant even further. Muddy waterer. Found an omen in Glen Hansard at Tiny Desk.

edit to add, the next day: ICOBOPA was a huge success and featured T-Rosemond, Dave Hydie, Michael Akatiff, Isiah Pekary and Mark Weiss. Mayor Sid Espinosa texted that his meetings were running too late but that he loves live music. Dan and Sunny Dykwell waved from their passing convertible. More to come.

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Ed Ward rockpaper scissorhands

Posted on June 14, 2012 by markweiss86

I met Ed Ward waiting in line at SXSW in 2009, my most recent visit there, although that was three years ago.
I just read his essay on Jim Dine, while also scanning Heat-Thunder, NPR Lena Dunham, HBO “Girls” for/by/with/vs Lena Dunham, and this all started with flipping thru Jimmy Fallon trying to get to Norah Jones — I am curious how the audience that got free Ice T cds will also feign the same enthusiasm for Norah.

I have been carrying the new Norah in my backpack for more than a week, without having spun it.

I remember meeting Norah in Berkeley when there were only 12 of us uber-insiders there to check it.

Ed’s comments on Jim Dine reassured me regarding my long digression into Claes Oldenburg.

Also, it reminded me that the “yellow head” I saw in front of SF Opera is Jun Kaneko, who studied with Peter Voulkos. (and yes that is deeper than fact Brett Anderson and Scrote have a sideproject called Stripminers or Mindstrippers.

I was going to write about baseball and “perfect” or “perf” as Lena says. Zito lost his perfect game after one pitch –which is pretty freaking zen if you think about it — then at one point, although I stepped into the lobby to take a call and say hi to Crazy Crab, my spiritual advisor — threw 12 straight balls and then grooved a grand slam. But the Giants got a nice hand for a 5-4 double-play that almost could have been a triple play. I yelled “belt one” a pitch or two before Brandon Belt hit a splash hit.

Crazy Crab my spiritual advisor, and me, at the Giants’ game, photo by total stranger

There are nuggets of gold even in a giant field of dirt; even the fool’s gold is a gift.

But the best play of the day: I swear the guy I bought my ticket from gave $20 of it to a homeless guy, while I was at the ATM.

Ward would say this is a list more than having any insights.

I was the nerd who sat thru the 15 second demo by large telecom to get a free “Bob” cousy, but also chatted up another clerk who says she does media for RoVA and was a film theory major at UCB; I put this Brakhage on the big screen at her booth (and I got more out of roaming the halls for 20 minutes pre-game then actually watching the game: the smells, the looks, the types of people, the buzz; I cannot sit still, moveable feast and all that: hence the blog-style.

Trying to write too carefully or lucidly on the internet still seems to be like writing deep thoughts on the wall of a public toilet stall. So list, list, list.

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Congrats to Phil Hellmuth Palo Alto poker champ

Posted on June 14, 2012 by markweiss86

edit to add, two days and two views later:

a

When I called my friend Steve Cohen in LA to spread the news on Matt Cain’s perfect game, he said “not only that, but Phil Hellmuth won his record-setting twelfth bracelet — championship — at the World Series of Poker championships.”

b

We have had an ongoing conversation about poker. Steve is my poker rabbi. I don’t know if there is a Swedish word for “rabbi” — teacher, in my lazy lay use here — of the smorgasborg of interests that Steve and I discuss, in this case, for poker he is my rabbi.

c

I recognized Hellmuth at a little cafe I frequent; the giveaway was an autographed copy of his book on their shelf, plus overhearing a young clerk tell her customers that their families are friends back in Wisconsin. The first time I saw him I syruptitiously shot him sitting across from me, eating his oatmeal. Steve said that his social media posts had him busy on a book. One of the next times I saw him there I had the audacity to stop him entering his car and had him sign a photo of Steve and I that I explained would be a gift to Steve, who I described as a poker player. He didn’t seem to mind the intrusion — I waited until he had finished his meal to breach him — but on the other hand, he did not ask about my interests. Fair enough.

d

The Palo Alto Weekly had a cover story, in 2006, which I may have skimmed at the time. But now I think about tipping Keith Peters of the Weekly the news of the Hellmuth bracelets but  opt –as you see here — for the self-glory of the local excloo,; dear reader can r.m.a.i at Las Vegas Sun, ESPN and others.

e

Gennady Sheyner’s 2009 column mention of Phil Hellmuth noted his personalized license plate 9POKER9 and said that references his nine bracelets, whereas Steve Cohen opined that it may also reference the experts’ point that Hellmuth won the final hand at his first championship with a relatively weak pair of 9s. Hellmuth and a pair of nines beats a full house or a stadium full of fishes with better hands. Bet on Hellmuth with a pair of nines over an Arrillaga Stadium full of lesser players with hand-fulls of Hapsburgs — does that work? I am not yet “all in” for poker lingo, other than knowing not to say “read ’em and weep.”

f

Steve Cohen cautioned me about bothching the distinction between “odds” and probability. I was going to ask him the probability of a fan catching a perfect game. The  order or ordinality is something like 22 out of 100,000 games; the odds are greater than 5,000 to one against. Steve Cohen accepted my trivial point that the odds of Zito throwing a perf (Lena Dunham reference) were better Thursday afternoon — 22 out of 100,000 — than they were for Cain Wednesday night — 21 out of 99,990 or so.

g

He “took” my line about Barry Zito’s game being “perfectly imperfect” — because his first pitch resulted in a hit — rather than swinging at it with an assault on my logic or use of the language. I guess I was trying to redeem myself for misusing “odds”.

h

Is it only in my brain that I flash to pulling “Objects at rest stay at rest? ” out of my seat at Paul Cohen’s dining room table a few years back when the great professor, problem-cracker and dad interrupted some little speech of mine to make me clarify whether I knew a Venn diagram from a manhole, or like.

i

Meanwhile but hopefully not too meanly — you judge, dear reader — I noted in conversation with Steve (Paul’s son, one of three) that Hellmuth has two boys who were graduated from Paly and then younger son flew to Vegas to see his dad conquer and actually award the bracelet. I speculated about life at home with a poker star — as possible sitcom fodder: would dad ever bluff sonny boy out of the last breakfast biscuit? “House of Cards” is already a Mamet play, in three ways, and might equally apply to Marsh McCall’s childhood, in that at least two of the professor’s sons grew up to be comedy writers.

j

Way off topic, Steve Cohen gushed about “Pranks” by V.Vale’s Re/Search publication; I said that I had permission from V. Vale to start a thread called “Beyond the Vale” and that I could also start a running tribute to my friend Steve, working title — and I allowing myself less than a minute to rock this — and I am literally going to stare at second hand of my wristrocket before picking up — complete sweep — “Tao of Steve is Taken” came after :05 — I give up, “Stone Cold Cohen Question Mark”.

k

Mayor Yiaway Yeh has used ping pong as the focal point for a community building initiative. Maybe he should switch to poker. I already in my little gray mattererer, my matted gray matterer, wrote the headline for the satire: “Palo Alto Announces Poker Initiative: we bluff so much from the dias, might as well formalize or milk this for further penetration; I did think about a milisecond — a semi-thought? — about game theory and the upcoming council race: is it better to announce early and scare off future competition or wait until just under the wire, and know your actual odds, on the basis of number of competitors? You could bluff a run by merely submitting the 25 signitures needed to qualify for ballot, then withdraw. Not sure penalty for, in essence, folding.

l

There is also a New York Times link that states in a chess column that there is a U.S. chess player as accomplished in his field as Hellmuth but is lesser known, perhaps unjustly. I may or may not link to it because the Times is now counting my views and limiting me for 10 per month versus 99 cents per month.

m

A lot of these things are dependent on how big is your chip pile. Again, drifting in a less than charming way, but what about a movie about the great and now deceased Chips Reese?

Hellmuth for Mayor.

edit to add, 100 words later:

in graph 3 or c, “tell” for “giveaway”

also, in 3 or c, “smorgasbord” is proper smelling. I was going to make some lame joke about Smorgas Borg as a lesser known cousin of the tennis champ. Cannot quit link up “smorgas” meaning open-faced sandwich to fact that in poker you need a closed face, or, literally, “poker face”. Was intrigued by the red herring (but not fluke or lutefisk) that someone has augmented wiki, like ginger icing on a strawberry cake, that In American Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremonies, the Chuppah is often preceded by a smorgasbord, which can be very lavish and can include foods from many cuisines, such as meat carving tables and sushi. There is also a Julbord, at Christmas, that I read as “Ju-bord” and I found a wee bit salty, or would have, or am I just riffing on an rifling thru Woody Allen who thought he heard Tony Roberts call him “D’you?” Although Christ himself was Orthodox, so jul away, y’all, who are actually secretly Danish. I brought my parents a plate of Danish from Peet’s and my Mom later was watching on DVD “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” — while I should have been watching Matt Cain, which is where we came in — and I noticed that the famous (to me) line “slide, slide” from a Woody Allen play is stolen in the Lou Brock, Maury Wills but really Billy Hamilton sense or like at a smogasbord merely helping yourself, from “Take Me Out”. Further off base, in foul territory, climbing into the stands like the Earthquakes goalie, and then shimmying up the light pole, Marilyn Monroe, or her avatar, is at Stanford Theatre, two nights only. The odds of all baseball games now featuring an amazing overpowering and not yet spoiled big righthander notching 27 in a row with 14 ks would be like, at least in or on Plastic Alto, the Stanford Theatre deciding to show nothing but “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” every night, or five times daily merely because they can.

p

I am going to do my 10 minute further installment of “Harbaugina Monologue” at Philz on Forest today, tea minus 3.5 hours and counting, and will do it as a laptop act in that I will read from my screen, or from Terry’s MacBook, my Bhi Bhiman riff which I call “Bho Bhoman a tribute to Bhi Bhiman meet the Harbaugina Monologue” the only footballish part is that Jim Yardly covers Sri Lanka and sacked Jim Harbaugh in 1980 AND Bhiman has a “hater” song about God, Satan and Kobie Bryant. As David Shields says, when I am writing about Phil Hellmuth or Lena Dunham — who I am resisting titling about under “Curb Your (Sounds Like a Mouthwash)” — that I am actually writing about myself. Or Yardley. Or Harbaugh. Or as Lennon said I am you and he are we and we are  all in.

in graph 16 or p, it’s from “Come Together” and its “I know you you know me” not “I am you….” Oddly, if that is not redundant here, as I booted up lyrics to “Come Together” here at Coupa, the house system came on with “I should have know better with a girl like you…” and I started blushing and tapping my “muth” button. Diegetic versus non-diegetic, and all that. Quirky.

in graph 17 or Q, that is the actual song title, “I Should Have Known Better” if I was not so lazy, or lay, I could suss out actual authors of those songs. I am 3:1 for on Lennon for “Come” but would only offer 5:1 against that its McCartney for “Should” (I mean 66 versus 20 percent in probability, or how sure I feel). If you grant me (in the Sturiale sense, even) another 75 words on the Fab Four — and this is for Marsh — I could add here, even obscurely and inscrutably — Jes Yu, her sister goes to same cafe — “Aint She Sweet” covered in 1961 in Germany but too expensive for “Bunheads” who according to Clint Bennett (Gunn alum, ex-Sweet Virginia), a music editor, they used friends of the producer. 71 words

as referenced in lines 7-8, graph 3, and he would call me not ja-zz but  ja-ckel for my unpredictability, here is the Hellmuth book, you too can buy, BUT DO NOT STEAL STORE COPY AT — CAFE, out in paper in 2005, with 21 reviews, although it appears to be an abridged version of a previous title:

t

also in 3 I mean surreptitiously which is from Latin surripere to snatch secretly — exactly! — and is number 344 on the charts of commonly-ckekced words at Merriam-Webster’s site. Snatch secretly, my photo of PH, as opposed to PH himself Hellmuth winning his bracelet on tv, in front of a crowd, inviting his son to witness and all that. Like pulling sword from stone, he, them.

u

in graph 20 or t, in my head I heard “let the boy try” which is actually a direct quote from 1981 “Excalibur” but I only know it from Phil Cousineau’s seminar on myth from UC Extension circa 1991. I bet Phil Hellmuth junior, by genetics and breakfast table Danish-tussles could beat, if not Arrillaga Stadium but the typical crowd at Arrillaga Burgess Park gym with a pair of 9s.

v

in graph 5 or e, the Weekly mention was in 2009; may not have been GS. Also, while finding my way back to that cite, I found on a poker website attributed to Phil Hellmuth something about he had a 7Poker7 plate before 9Poker9 and it does more directly reference the bracelets not the hands. See also “intentional phallacy” and something I wrote about Stanford law and baseball nut Bill Gould license plate referencing either Yaz and William OR how many wins the Sox got in the regular season the year they won the Series as a wild card team, you do the math. And somewhere above I was thinking “crooked numbers” as baseball vernacular for a big inning, and how it fits for the wrong reasons in that indeed a 3 was once made with three strokes, an 8 with eight, if you think of it as two squares on top of each other, et cetera. Forget where was I.

w

and: this is a little bit too plastic alto, beyond the vale and not stone cold cohen enough, but I have to mention that it was 1975 that Bob Watson scored the one-millionth run for Major League Baseball, apropos of if the numbers are 22 perfect game in 100,000 games. By 1975 therefore, if you figure 4 runs per game, for instance, they were up to 250,000 games. Is it 30 teams now X 160 games over two, per season, times 130, minus the expansions. Try 150 times 15 times 100 and you get, what 300,000? Watson wiki.

x

edit to add, or to finish, a cup of coffee later: when I sent this to the Cohens, I noted that the computer had preserved the fact that I first mis-typed “Phil” as “Phi”; it’s in the slug. In terms of the distinction between odds and probabilities above, there is also ratio, such as the Golden Ratio, sometimes denoted by…wait for it…phi. See this.

y

edit to add, again, and really, truly, finally, because I have to go home, feed the cocker and take a nap if I am going to actually appear at Philz open mic for “Harbaugh Meets Bhiman”, but I am really caught napping, picked off second base, while texting or contemplating my navel, for going sloppily from “order (of magnitude)” to “ordinality” especially if Cohen –any of them — actually read this. “Cardinality” might be closer than “ordinality” but I am just bluffing and easily called. I did find a site on the size of the set as 15,000 to 30,000, close enough to what I wrote, although they also calculated the on-base percentage times 27. I am not going to revise only add from the comments from the STC crowd-source.

z

enough already: so far readers of Plastic Alto are roughly 10 times more likely to be at the Bhi Bhiman post than this one, 49 to 4.

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Dualing Ian Brennans redux: do you wanna touch vs canyon jam

Posted on June 8, 2012 by markweiss86

 

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Dualing Ian Brennans

Posted on June 8, 2012 by markweiss86

Ian Brennan is awesome. He produced a Fugazi with Sleater-Kinney free show in Mission Dolores; he a couple times took SF musicians to tour New York and Philly. He did a lot of shows in the worlds coolest laundromat, Brain Wash. And he sent me an Ian MacKaye show, as The Evens.

I was psyched to notice this tape of him accepting a Grammy award as producer of the Tinariwen cd, on Anti. But because I am a total dork I am inviting people to view it while simultaneously (at least for two minutes) also listening to another Ian Brennan, who works on “Glee” which we actually watch, or my girlfriend does and I generally ignore it until a good song comes on.

(Hit play bars for both videos and adjust for sound per preference)

 

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Song of the day: Kimchi Line by Bho Bhoman

Posted on June 8, 2012 by markweiss86

In the above video, one minute somebody “bootlegged” — as distinct from “quarterback draw”; I used to scream “Quarterback draw!” a few too many times when Steve Young wore red and gold and I sat on the twenty — from “Family Guy” a Muhammad Ali avatar asks a Bho Dhiman character to play “Hurricane” from the 1975 Sony release, “Derise” I mean “Desire” — sincerely. Meanwhile, time waits for no man, munching on Frito-Lay and spinach. Feel me?

Not that I am saying Bho Bhoman is the next Bhi Dhiman, only that I grabbed that cd rather randomly from the stacks here at Palo Alto public library as I was sitting down to write about Bhi, I mean Bho. My friend Star Teachout laughed when I shoutout to her; I always talk like this, headphones or not. (I actually practice writing like this).

Not that I am not saying that Bhi Bhiman is the next Bob Dylan, either.

I also checked out who are Steph and Lauren of GreenRadio960; no clue. Steph laughs and says she is hungry; fair enough.

Also there is a 24-year-old woman in Portland, I think her name is Alexandra no Alana Kansaku-Sarmiento who does a passable cover and it’s one heck of a tribute, anybody doing our stuff is great — although they can spit in the whole and tune again on that whole publishing per spin thingy — although she thinks my name is Bobo-Mon like I’m from Jamaica hanging with Beenie Man or Papa Mali or somesuch nonesuch or from Missouri. I come from Sri Lanka, with a banjo on my serendip-knee. Do you speaka my language?

I was named Bho “be, ache, owe” after our president Barack Hussein Obama. My given name is Weiss, as in “he knows” or “he knows Bho” and Mark as in “how deep is your river?” Sam Clemens and yes, I am from (gerund obscene) Missouri.

I think the actual Bho Bhoman spent a year at Paly High, where he first met his loyal girl friday Katie Ross. Jeremy Lin at the time was in sixth grade at St. Somebody to Love.

The original title of this delightful mix of sliced radish, scallion, cucumber, cabbage, this slice o’ Americana, this weird new word America salad, was “God is a Titans Fan, Satan Likes the Vikings” but I decided to folk it. FOCUS. More music, less sports.

I think the WFUV performance is slightly superior I will outro with that.

What I was gonna say is something about being written up by Robert Christgau is like shooting over Dirk on a Friday night at Madison Square Garden. In fact I did text Katie Ross during the height of BhiBhimania to suggest he write about Jeremy. In fact I am pretty sure I called the mighty Stew (“the muddy stew”) to hip him or hip check him about Bhi. At the time I actually thought Bhi looked like Malcolm X. This was before there was blog. 2008. And speaking of Stew The Stanford Years I was psyched for Aleta Hayes and Chocolate Heads in inaugural season at Bing, March 8, 2013, but I digress. Someday we will be beyond war, beyond hate and beyond food, but until that time use what you can and let the uncanned fester like yesterdays chopped salad left out in the rain.

I said also to Katie that Bhi was promising enough that even though you could not predict how far he would go or how fast that following his story and aiding it you could get a pretty good take on how the elephant feel, the tail, the trunk, the sidewalls. With Redeye Distribution, Shore Fire media and Mike Leahy of Concerted Efforts — who books also Josh Ritter, who happened to have the early show at Joe’s Pub the same night that Stew had the later show, I met he and Darius that night, and probably talked to Leahy about Stew in that period, I probably have a paper trial on that if I suss through the dregs of my email files,– Bhi is definitely on that path, the ensuing three or so years has empirically put out.

I also said to Katie — assuming that is her same number — via text that I was going to send notice of this to Jim Yardley, who wrote about Sri Lanka per say, not just the Sri Lankan Guthrie. But the Times already covered Bhi so that’s hardly Yardley news.

This is way off topic, but I thought I saw “Clint Bennett” in the credits of “Bunheads” and then realized all he has done in Hollywood since leaving the Bay Area in 2000. Clint is a Gunn grad and played the Cub in about 1997; very hot August night, we wanted to leave the doors open to cool but had to keep shutting them to avoid noise complaints. People are wondering about that cover of “Ain’t She Sweet?” Also: Jim Croce, Squeeze, good stuff. He is a music editor more than supervisor but he also gets 2 cents for every sale of a Train album thanks to a one-fifth writing credit for track number 11.

I also recently texted Ian Mackaye: Is that a Fugazi license in an (national brand) chainsaw spot, instrumental guitar riff? Or copy cat? The possibility had me sussing out Tom Waits and Bette Midler material.

I’m on the kimchee line
I’m on the kimchee line
I’m on the kimchee line
And it’s cabbage time (radish, scallion, cucumber)
____
Well I went up on the mountain
To see if I could fly
Went down to the sea, Lord
And the sea was dry

So I picked a pick of pepper
From the leader’s tree
Got some prawn and oyster
For the vitamin E
____
Well there ain’t no use boy
In trying to jump that fence
They got guns on the greenside
You ain’t making no sense

So i climbed up on a ladder
To see what I could see
While the leaders getting’ fatter
I feel my stomach bleed
____
Well I gave up on my hopes
Of ever breakin’ these ropes
To the leaders jubilation
I still love my mighty nation

Before I tell you where I sit, man
I’d like to tell you where I stand
I got a niece and daughter
In a freer land

Oh, yeah, also, as a pure crate-digging or Repertoire exercise this did have me spinning Hank Williams Jr “Hole in my Bucket” which includes a mountain and the lack of a girl, compared I guess to the niece and daughter below. In some ways A in Portland is niece and daughter to B in SF:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEi2bDMKJRw

I was thinking of appearing at today’s open mic at Philz as “A Bhi Bhiman tribute called Bho Bhoman” and somehow tieing it back in to Harbaugh and “The Harbaugina Monologue”. Maybe I can just read this post, peck on my mbira, which is actually a sardine can from Burkina Faso re-tooled as a thumb-piano in Algeria I think it is, or vice versa, and butcher holler the hooks from “Kimchee Line” and “International Hater (God is a Warriors Fan, Satan Likes the Lakers”) although they are same chords in my versions and also sound like “Midnight Special”. We shall see. Also, I like the David Shields line about “autobio” that says that even as we write about Bho Bhoman, Bhi Bhiman, Jim Harbaugh and Jim Yardley, we are really writing about ourselves.

This is utterly gratuitous but I was also thinking about the time Jim Yardley and I went to the East-West Shrine game at Stanford specifically to see “Famous Amos” Lawrence. Be careful what you wish for or what you call yourself, or what they call you. (Just don’t call me late for the kimchee).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KOCNWlmqqI&feature=watch_response

edit to add:  Meanwhile, Yardley writes about mango trade in Mumbai, but the little map helpfully shows Sri Lanka as well. Speaking of kimchee, did anybody else notice that when Jon Caramanica of the Times wrote about Bhi in February, the review directly above was Kellie Pickler?

I am absconding this from the library, but you can get yours at leading online store (for Bhi Bhiman “Bhiman” click thru to Redeye, above, first reference):

http://www.amazon.com/Desire-Bob-Dylan/dp/B00000255X

edit to add: I caught Adam Johnson on Charlie Rose. He has a book of fiction about North Korea. He is, if you believe what you can find on the internet, part Native American and a Stanford professor. Someone should send Johnson “Bhiman” and Bhiman the Johnson book. He also has a short story about the Palo Alto police hiring a teenage sniper to suppress disgruntled Silicon Valley workers — cf Bhiman’s “Guttersnipe” — and is or was a Stegner fellow. Did I mention Wallace Stegner was my neighbor?

The other thing I noticed is that Bhi Bhiman “Bhiman” two copies at Rasputin in Mountain View (near Cost Plus), but filed in “Spoken Word” next to Jello Biafra and

oh lord don’t let me be misunderstood or miss-filed

Charles Bukowski audio recordings. Should I just take it upon myself to move them to indie or rock or folk, tell the store manager, or report this to Katie Ross, the p.m.?

It’s not too late to order this, and I did write to Adam Johnson about Bhi, and eventually met Adam as well:

 

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