XXXI. The Fact of a Door-frame Donnas-Momma moment

Posted on November 11, 2010 by markweiss86

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind

The Donnas on KZSU
Glenn Smith
Darren Raffaeli
Let’s Go Mano
Wednesday Night Live
Jon and Marjorie Ford
Adrienne Rich
William Blake
The Doors
“when the doors of perception are cleansed everything will appear as it is, infinite”
Paul Cohen continuum hypothesis
Steve Cohen’s poker reading list
Tory Castellano enrolled at Stanford
Cubberley Sessions
Eugene Robinson
Bart “the Recording Guy” Thurber
Jon Maguire
Jim Harrington
The Runaways
Nissan, Tide, Target
Ragady Anne 7-inch, songs about throwing a teddy bear off the bridge and making your own money
One of six bands from my series that went on to Gold or Platinum status including The Donnas, Cake, AFI, Stroke 9, Third Eye Blind and Blink 182.
Lookout Records home to Green Day
Atlantic Records home to Led Zeppelin
Gilman Street
Molly Neuman

The Donnas deserve a lot of credit for rocking the boat, bucking the trends, making records, making money, making lifestyles for themselves yet all the while keeping as a primary directive the fact that they are a group of friends there for each other more than for anyone else’s needs or expectations — I vividly recall that when the time for their hit came, at their professional debut, about 9:30 on a Friday at a defunct high school auditorium, they were no where to be found, not in the dressing room, not front of house, not in the house. I admit I recall a slight sinking feeling. But then I somehow looked up into the crowsnest of the proscenium theater and there they were, the four young members of Ragady Anne, knee to knee and nose to nose having a pow wow, getting away from it all for the moment. Of course they went on stage and practically started a riot; the audience mainly being 12- to 15-year old girls — their peers, a definite contrast to what soon followed in the way of The Donnas luring testosterone into their realm. There was something purer about their already considerable success then. Listening to the KZSU broadcast again years later, you can hear the complexity of their situation, and not just because they pretended to be two different groups, Ragady Anne versus their rivals The Donnas. They’ve handled the success and the disappointments in a way that has made their town proud, and I would think their parents as well. Maybe Palo Alto could honor them the way it recently made a proclamation for Jerry Garcia.

I will try to add links to relevant Donnas sites (and Ragady Anne) but for now all I have time for is to show Marjorie Ford, who is now practically my next door neighbor, doing her Adrienne Rich interpretation, if not channeling William Blake and Jim Morrison.

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XXX. The busker

Posted on November 11, 2010 by markweiss86

Emily Palen the new Karl Malden/Mike Douglas -- I wonder if she plays variations on Lalo Shifrin

I ran into Emily Palen busking at Union Square, right before Game 1 of the World Series. She said she was in the studio recently producing a solo record of mostly improvised music, but was not playing with Dawn Richardson’s Dolorata.

Wikipedia, by the way, has a good article on busking (although they somehow have re-labeled it “Street Performance” which riles my inner Sapir-Whorf and Hopi warrior!!), as well as one on “Busking: U.S. Case Law“.

Charlie Hunter says that he developed his chops while busking in Europe. Mary Lou Lord says she decided to be a musician because someone threw a $5 bill in the guitar case while she was merely watching someone else’s gear, in Boston subway — she could barely play.

Palo Alto has a street music event based on Fete De La Musique which I initially supported because I like the relationship between busking and the First Amendment.

Anyhow, good luck to Emily.

Edit to add, July 5, 2011: This was my thirtieth post; for a while I was using Roman Numerals to number them. I’m up to about 125 now. And I also have generally stopped footnoting my own posts under comments, and do occassionally “edit to add”. I wasn’t sure why this post is seen more often than others, but I was a little bemused to notice that someone found this link by typing “new york subways what happens there xxx” which I guess refers to prurient paranoia and not street musicians.

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XXIX. mbira mbizo and mbw

Posted on November 10, 2010 by markweiss86

my thumb, my mbira

Something had me reaching for my thumb piano, my mbira, which I picked up at the gift store of the University of Maine concert center gift shop while on tour with Front Porch Blues in 2002. It is made in Burkino Faso from a sardine can imported from Algeria. In many parts they call this thing an mbira — others call it a thumb piano.

Mbizo was the middle name of Johnny Mbizo Dyanni, the South African bass played who was in residence at Dartmouth College in 1970, with Don Cherry and Okey Temiz. I am pretty sure there is a biography of Dyanni under the title “Mbizo”.

MBW are my initials, for Mark Bennett Weiss (the street I lived on in South Side of Chicago the first four years of my life, Bennett and 91st I think).

 

 

 

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XXVII. Cool it, Dig, II

Posted on November 10, 2010 by markweiss86

cellphonephoto of Half Moon Bay beach, fall 2009

beach photo Half Moon Bay

Half Moon Bay

edit to add, October 30, 2011, a warm but lazy fall Indian summer day, probably are tons of people surfing — as opposed to surfing the internet and scanning NFL broadcasts; here is a random link to Mermen video, continuing the beach them albeit 20 miles north:

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XXVII. Tom Dent Cabin and Square

Posted on November 10, 2010 by markweiss86
Tom Dent from Tulane archives

Tom Dent from Tulane archives

The JazzFest people sent me an announcement about a lecture series at Congo Square, and I noticed it was named for Tom Dent. It made me verify that we were talking about a different Tom Dent that the man for whom a cabin is named for at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, near Occam Pond. Dartmouth’s Tom Dent was their soccer coach from 1924 to 1960, and founded their lacrosse team in 1926. He was also part of the Dartmouth Outing Club. His career overlapped with other legendary coaches like Harry Hillman (coached track for 40 years or so), Ozzie Cowles (basketball) and Jeff Tesro (baseball coach, ex- New York Yankee).

The jazzfest event is named for a jazz scholar and board member of the Jazz Heritage and Foundation, the foundation art of the festival.
http://www.jazzandheritage.org/what-we-do/tom-dent-congo-square-lecture-series

The only other Dartmouth-New Orleans-music connection I can think of right now is that my freshman roommate Teddy Conway (a rugby stalwart, English major, senior society member and now a Wall Street Managing Partner) told me that Harry Connick junior attended his high school, the prestigious Newman School, but transferred because he was bullied.

It also reminds me that I want to look into the MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner whose specialty is the anthropology of New Orleans. She is a professor at University of Chicago. Reminds me that on a plane I once met a female professor whose husband was in a jazz band in Chicago — he sent me his kit for review. Just as I momentarily imagined that the two Tom Dents were one and the same, I will have to find her card to eliminate the hope that she is the “Genius Grant” winner. The jazz band I believe is called Spyder.

Also, I had a running mental list of homophone celebrities, people with the same name but in different disciplines. For example, there is a Chip Hooper former tennis professional from here in Palo Alto, AND a Chip Hooper successful booking agent in the music scene (and maybe also a stalwart photographer). There is a Penelope Houston who wrote movie reviews (in Halliwell’s she’s excerpted, for example), AND the founder of The Avengers punk rock group. I was thinking it would make a good Errol Morris “Fast Cheap and Out of Control” type movie to profile a set of people with the same names and see where the polyrhythms of their creative output synch up or harmonize.
http://www.jazzandheritage.org/what-we-do/tom-dent-congo-square-lecture-series

Posted in ethniceities, film, jazz, media, music, sports, this blue marble | 4 Comments

XXVI: Cool It, Dig!

Posted on November 10, 2010 by markweiss86

two oak stacks by andy goldsworthy in New York's Storm King Art Center

When the trailer for Ondi Timoner’s new environmental-themed documentary film “Cool It” finished, at Landmark’s Guild in Menlo Park (before screening of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” the other night), I was the guy who exclaimed “DIG!”

The film is about Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish environmentalist who dissents from the left and right conventional views about what the fjernt is happening.

Reminds in tone of Astra Taylor’s “Examined Life,” which I saw in Austin and Berkeley last year.

To remind: I am Earthwise because Cathy White Eagle confused the project I was working at for Bay Area Earth Day At Stanford with my own name; but I was working on Earthday because I had been reading Jerry Mander and Helena Norberg-Hodge. Dig? (In a previous life, I had been helping an oil company convince you to “Turn your engine into a washing-machine.” People do! (But people doo, too).

On the same subject (at least by Plastic Alto standards), I recommend “Client 9” Alex Gibney’s film about the connection between the Wall Street “Too Big to Fail” crisis (do you recall, the thing about a trillion dollars of our money to help ultra-rich bankers and traders keep their beach houses and Picassos — I believe if my math brain serves at this early hour that a trillion dollars is 300 million times $3,300 each) and the selective prosecution of New York Governer Eliot Spitzer (who had sex with hookers, but before that served notice, first as state Attorney General, then as Governor, that he suspected some misdoings on Wall Street and acted in the public interest to try to rein in their greed — about two years before the eventual meltdown and bail out).

http://www.client9themovie.com/

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XXV. DoubleDoubleDutch

Posted on November 9, 2010 by markweiss86

Willem Brueker, Barney Wilen, Paul Termos, Benjamin Herman.

Instant Composers Pool:
http://www.icporchestra.com/musicians.htm

Ars Nova Workshop:

Home

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XXIV. The Whole Farrago

Posted on November 9, 2010 by markweiss86

by mezzanoti new york times

I added this as a footnote to “Mere Surmise Slur” about ethnicity and the Coen brothers:
“The Whole Farrago” — Perhaps this would fit better if the movie “Red” were about Indians and not aging spooks, but I was impressed by Anthony Lane’s mini-review in the recent New Yorker, specifically his use of the word “farrago” meaning “confused mixture or jumble.” (As in “Mary-Louise Parker, in the role of an innocent clerk caught up in the whole farrago,” is great) It made me think of the Coen’s break-through “Fargo” and how the title is probably also a pun (and not just a cold town in North Dakota). By the way, their “Burn After Reading” covers the same ground much better — funny DC in-crowd, with guns — and got there first. BTW2, my new word “farrago” could apply to the non-linear texture of this blog, I admit. “RED” in the case of the new film is an acronym for ex-CIA agent Bruce Willis being “retired, and extremely dangerous.”

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XXIII. Ornette not ordinary

Posted on November 9, 2010 by markweiss86

Since the title of this blog is a reference to jazz great Ornette Coleman and his white acrylic Grantham alto saxophone (i.e. a “plastic alto”), I should note that while traveling to SoCal for a brief business trip last weekend I was pleased to see a review of “THE OC’s” show at UCLA.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/11/live-jaza-review-ornette-coleman-at-royce-hall.html

“Ordinary? Hah!: In concert at UCLA, Ornette Coleman demonstrates once again why he’s like no one else. His fans include one Flea” by Chris Barton.

I have to say that being old school and “high touch” that I much prefer having, as I do here, the actual clipping or tear sheet with a beautiful picture of the dude (by Anne Cusack) than to conjure it up via the internet only.

My “Plastic Alto” seeks to comment on the topic of modernity more broadly than Ornette’s considerable if confounding effect on the jazz world; here in the former Santa Clara Valley there is so much talk about how the element silicon has transformed the world, with its elemental role in information technology. I wonder about the simultaneous effects of other developments culturally — think Civil Rights, the Beats, Hippies, Cahier du Cinema, steroid use in baseball, hip hop, the continuum hypothesis — and secondarily “plastics” per se, in the context of their joking use in Mike Nichols 1964 film “The Graduate”. Also, I am undeniably commenting on my home town of Palo Alto; I acknowledge that some call it “Shallow Alto” to denigrate its supposed materialism and decadence; “Plastic Alto” the term riffs on that debate or reference — think “Stepford Wifes” if you will — but tries to stay on the positive or at least ironic or quixotic or malleable or plastic or something cognizant of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or the red-shifting of the universe or Chaos Theory or The Butterfly Effect or Magritte’s “pipe” or Jung or Freud or Cage in the interim between performances of “4’32″” — I once entititled a jazz series “A Quantum Decoherence of Jazz” presaging this entry by ten years perhaps. Was I using Roger Penrose to sell Galactic? I also like to think of Todd Inoue’s glossing of Boots Riley’s use of the double entendre and threat “double click his icon.”

Maybe I would be better off just listening to Ornette. Or at least The Bad Plus. Either or.

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XXII. Strange, Passing Strange, with ‘bone

Posted on November 1, 2010 by markweiss86

three shows in brooklyn with the venerable The Negro Problem (featuring Stew and Heidi of “Passing Strange” Berkeley Rep fame) in Brooklyn and then four shows with Steve Lehman including one at SFJazz — that’s a big week — shame on you for not mentioning this in your column..
go giants.
go giants of jazz.
mark weiss

ps. did he take lessons from Mal Sharpe?
(i do)

(this thing might hang together slightly better if I mention that I once spoofed Shepard Fairey and Mal Sharpe by cajoling Rob Syrett to do a depiction of Mal Sharpe — the humorist, radio host and trombone musician — a la Fairey and his Andre the Giant Has A Posse campaign AND I had uploaded that image rather than this other Syrett masterpiece… for the sake of argument lets say creature on the right is me and creature on the left, the tall distinguished looking one is my trombone teacher Mal Sharpe)

— On Mon, 11/1/10, Garchik, Leah wrote:

From: Garchik, Leah
Subject: RE: swordfish trombone
To: “mark weiss”
Date: Monday, November 1, 2010, 4:03 PM

Thanks Mark. Jacob just played here last week in SFJAZZ, with Steve Lehmann octet. Very proud mom,

Leah Garchik
San Francisco Chronicle
—–Original Message—–
From: mark weiss [mailto:earwopa@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 4:00 PM
To: Garchik, Leah
Subject: swordfish trombone

Phillip Greenlief in NYC

you look too well preserved for anyone to guess you gave birth to a trombone…
mark weiss

and here is my post on wedge’s site:

This entry had me wondering the name of the female trombone player who collaborates with Jeff Parker in Isotope — Sara P. Smith — something common like that, Baker, Smith, whatever, and then somehow led me to discover that Leah Garchik, the Sf Chronicle gossip columnist, has a son Jacob Garchik who plays the bone.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-05-04/entertainment/17153172_1_lee-konitz-jazz-musicians-romance
And he plays with Dan Weiss no relation and Jacob Sacks who was the subject of a blog item I wrote about eavesdropping on a private twitter between Alexis Cuadrado and Matana Roberts — she somehow confused Jacob Sacks and Oliver Sacks — the famous neurologist — while Alexis was describing his brain. Ok?
And I also took the liberty of searchinjuning Jen Krupa, who now or then played with DIVA…the search “jen trombone” outed Mssr. Garchik…now I also wonder if Lyle Workman is the son of ex-Chronicle writer Bill Workman…(well, he is from San Jose…Workman interviewed me for the Chronicle Peninsula section in about 1996 about a speech I made at Palo Alto City Council (Fazzino, Simitian, maybe Kniss, et al) about saving the New Varsity Theater — he said his son was a musician).

I say “tis strange, passing strange” where others say the more typical “small workd”. its from othello…

also: the tall lolly pop thingees can be imagined to be shrines to John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Theolonious Monk, fur pillars of jazz*…

(my previously programmed BASEBALL THEMED blog entry was pre-empted by this little beaut)

Let Timmy smoke…I have had enough

at least according to Lemmy Feathers*

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