tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58503634183171942752024-03-04T22:28:19.919-08:00Sealed Tuna SandwichGreg Sandell's BlogGreg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.comBlogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-86014832893076816032023-11-07T18:32:00.047-08:002023-11-13T10:56:14.622-08:00Milton Stern: Beloved Teacher, Piano Virtuoso, Friend<h3 style="text-align: center;">Milton Stern: March 6, 1929 - September 29, 2023</h3><div style="text-align: center;">Memoir by Greg Sandell</div><div style="text-align: center;">November 7, 2023</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>for Adam, Diana and Oliver</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-6c313452-7fff-0bd5-e86e-f69b8b6d03f5"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"Why don't you try Dr. Stern's class? He's good with young people."</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj74nZz89jPPy9MdUoWAs2Y8xzcaacI1NiciM_5QJa-Ry8YK1FrGidB23ShtX6Ls_lxrewjbFtG7Nrx7kiqOH08o7S1EVia5XTM0ZOkr_G8YZhOpSTa_xLtS83HhhxP0BGAZVUgWp2fAAmJCE4KH6GNFVJIYjKUtN7GPTlcyORryyIU9gAcYUnC5n_H4kQJ/s800/06%20El%20Patron%20restaurant.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj74nZz89jPPy9MdUoWAs2Y8xzcaacI1NiciM_5QJa-Ry8YK1FrGidB23ShtX6Ls_lxrewjbFtG7Nrx7kiqOH08o7S1EVia5XTM0ZOkr_G8YZhOpSTa_xLtS83HhhxP0BGAZVUgWp2fAAmJCE4KH6GNFVJIYjKUtN7GPTlcyORryyIU9gAcYUnC5n_H4kQJ/s320/06%20El%20Patron%20restaurant.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">El Patron restaurant, Altadena.</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br />This was spoken to me by Henry Jackson, professor of piano at Cal State University Los Angeles, who resembled Cheswick from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He'd just listened to me struggle through Chopin's <i>Revolutionary Etude</i>. He probably didn't know what to make of me: I didn't resemble a typical classical piano student. I had long hair halfway down my back tied in a ponytail, torn jeans and a Pignose t-shirt.</span><p></p><div><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-416950f1-7fff-6b3c-2ccb-d57a495268dd"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When I showed up at Milton Stern's master class, I saw a man with a silky, partly unbuttoned shirt, a gold necklace in his chest hair, gold rings with opals, sporty glasses, a mustache, a rich tan…basically, a 70's swinger. And a New York accent.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But he made me feel welcome, invited me to play my etude, and had this to say when I was done: "I'm disappointed in you."</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"I’m disappointed, not so much over </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">how</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> you <i><b>played</b></i>, but for what you </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">aren't</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> doing with those wonderful hands of yours."</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He wanted me to scoot the piano bench much farther away from the piano because of my long arms. "You're what we call in Yiddish a </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">lang lokshn</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">…a long noodle." Then, addressing the girls, "You need to sit where your bikini underwear meets the edge of the bench," producing giggles. "Look," he said, sitting his butt all the way back on the piano bench. He picked up a score and started leafing through it. "I'm on the toilet, reading my magazine, hum, hum.. (the girl next to me made silent convulsing laughter in her hands) …oh! I dropped it!" The "magazine" fell to the floor. "Let me pick that up…oof, ugh!" and he made a display of not being able to pivot from where he's sitting to reach it. "I can’t reach sitting this far back. Sitting on the edge of the bench gives you the degree of freedom to transfer your weight to the different parts of the keys."</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIcODIzUUAijS85SYn0h-cziVaYvIP2ZH1U2YN6Mna3z6yzbWvlbk3I9sHNQD56rsTAK30oZgCzRa3SBfv0YORIxF9U2BL04RTyD7cvR8iL_sREkwku19tvLkJuG1JmxbL39guTtWVb6XuGbcX2NUjVSpu7pmniIgOJ6NbQQuLksv3HBjGx1Lu4Pa5bdmL/s800/02%20kravitz.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="644" data-original-width="800" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIcODIzUUAijS85SYn0h-cziVaYvIP2ZH1U2YN6Mna3z6yzbWvlbk3I9sHNQD56rsTAK30oZgCzRa3SBfv0YORIxF9U2BL04RTyD7cvR8iL_sREkwku19tvLkJuG1JmxbL39guTtWVb6XuGbcX2NUjVSpu7pmniIgOJ6NbQQuLksv3HBjGx1Lu4Pa5bdmL/s320/02%20kravitz.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Greg Sandell. At Ellen Kravitz home, ca 1978</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He then taught the rest of the Stern piano doctrine, passed down to him from the teachings of Isabella Vangerova and Josef and Rosina Lhévinne: use the weight of the forearm, the wrist as a shock absorber, position your hand in a high arch, straight fingers from the knuckle, and strike the key like a hammer from the knuckle down, cushioning it with the pad of your fingertip.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He demonstrated for us what playing with weight could accomplish. He played us Ravel's virtuoso piece </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Alborada del gracioso, </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">bringing</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">such power and savagery to the recap that the whole grand piano, suspended on its wheeled piano dolly, oscillated up and down. Another was Liszt's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Sonetto del Petrarca 104</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, with its alternating passages of thunderous chords and soft, delicate virtuoso flourishes. Everyone who has heard him play </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">104</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> has never forgotten it.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When some of the other students gave impressive performances of virtuoso piece like Prokofiev <i>3rd Sonata</i>, the Beethoven <i>"Tempest" Sonata</i>, and the Chopin <i>Scherzo in C# Minor</i>, I began to wonder what I was doing there. These kids had to have started at a much younger age than me, driven by a parent to practice for hours a day. But he believed in me, I began to take private lessons with him, and I gained one of the greatest mentors and friends a person could have.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxwtScqngtTKmKtU5OyPbfKMG_iny74uRfrxqspmsoFBc7cAoQRaddqsJ6le_gN0NvG2MgLG0wlR28G6UHQSlcKLtZYnkm9HGt2ubwBvpebbf8Warl57AyYP2JgYMcS0AEPedkoJJ-cBTK5HOShuR1w8EI9RfMa-sdmvKSVfDQX-7HcJokp7fdYUa31Fkb/s800/03%20andrew-opus1.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="646" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxwtScqngtTKmKtU5OyPbfKMG_iny74uRfrxqspmsoFBc7cAoQRaddqsJ6le_gN0NvG2MgLG0wlR28G6UHQSlcKLtZYnkm9HGt2ubwBvpebbf8Warl57AyYP2JgYMcS0AEPedkoJJ-cBTK5HOShuR1w8EI9RfMa-sdmvKSVfDQX-7HcJokp7fdYUa31Fkb/s320/03%20andrew-opus1.jpg" width="258" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Andrew Levin and Opus 1 at<br />Cal State LA. For a performance of<br />Mozart Piano Concerto Piano Concerto <br />No. 17 in G major, KV. 453</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He taught brilliantly because he cared about his students and wanted to nurture their souls through self-discovery. He was a great egalitarian. Whether you came from Pasadena blue blood or the east LA barrio, he didn't see class. He looked for your goodness or helped you find it. If you were a closed book to him, he’d extend you credit that you had beauty inside, soon to be revealed. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I'd run into him in the halls of the Music Department when I was on a practice break, wearing his leather jacket and carrying his small valise that he called his Ditty Bag, leaving for home. "Walk with me, hero," he said, and we took the stairs to the parking lot. We'd chat a bit about our last lesson before I returned to the practice rooms, or he'd give me a lift to my apartment in his Datsun 280Z. He'd tell me of professors who were his friends, and it was through those conversations that I came to take Art History with Arlene Quint, Yoga with Pat White and Balkan line dancing with Dan Brown. Then he'd drive up to his house in the Altadena hills where I imagined he carried on some kind of extraordinary life.</span></p><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6W4tuD0qJZVZWWAdRaV_k3PdGYOwV2gFqVMgUv9abd7hVVoxDHIQaQ3FmW1qoizXOvCiOjOTj-omCWfur_4xnHBGgu0BBQ4mlRetZPslkJaiH14kJWd5-afufcl2LAO7jaUha3HVQNqZ32QO6XxSMAK-by4MBinnRUJJFLSh3H8LSj4ntZ5Ap20ORi6wx/s800/04%20andrewGregMiltonPool1.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="800" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6W4tuD0qJZVZWWAdRaV_k3PdGYOwV2gFqVMgUv9abd7hVVoxDHIQaQ3FmW1qoizXOvCiOjOTj-omCWfur_4xnHBGgu0BBQ4mlRetZPslkJaiH14kJWd5-afufcl2LAO7jaUha3HVQNqZ32QO6XxSMAK-by4MBinnRUJJFLSh3H8LSj4ntZ5Ap20ORi6wx/s320/04%20andrewGregMiltonPool1.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Greg Sandell and Andrew Levin.<br />Stern home, Altadena</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In fact, his house was full of a very particular kind of art and books. Posters of Seattle productions of Wagner’s Ring. There were two four-foot-high, rough-hewn sculptures showing athletes in great states of exertion, muscles bulging. One was a pair of wrestlers, another engaged in an Olympic feat, launching an iron ball attached to a cord. Books of erotic art by Aubrey Beardsley, decadent novels by Wilde and Huysmans. An upright piano decorated with brass fittings and plates had a candlestick mounted on either side of the player. He showed me a trap door in the ceiling containing a small space surrounded in white shag where he said he went to retreat and find peace. He described his plan for building a slide that would run from his upstairs bedroom sun deck into the pool below, for him and his girlfriend to go straight from love making to a dunk in the pool.</span></div><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The words </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">sensual</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">sensuality</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> seemed to permeate much of his conversation. Yes, some of it was straight up about sex, but there was a bigger picture: his belief that the most human experience possible was to experience life through sensations, whether physical, mental, literary, or musical. This was not the kind of message you typically got from a piano teacher. Most of them taught you to transmit only what was written on the page and nothing about yourself. As a musician who himself was taught by some of the great turn of the century romantic pianists, Milton Stern devoted himself to teaching students how to use their own living being to bring Chopin or Beethoven's humanity from the page, through their feelings, and out to the listener to hear.<br /></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-SF7W5XWpF74ymLvPmYWh2G8Wljkt_afBw9RQj1dDPP2jfPAaZVG5cnxv3Z_6CGu9svlmMsGh65lbjiau2znzaxCeEdSDcqACyyEq6dktu7tAmZVlRLX0TAurli928iwIp7sJEXXP4AIZVDfCBq0nj80wG3W90uHUfj4KgaIijM2yAlaLaWU1nHcKgh9C/s800/04a%20miltonShirtless.png" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="447" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-SF7W5XWpF74ymLvPmYWh2G8Wljkt_afBw9RQj1dDPP2jfPAaZVG5cnxv3Z_6CGu9svlmMsGh65lbjiau2znzaxCeEdSDcqACyyEq6dktu7tAmZVlRLX0TAurli928iwIp7sJEXXP4AIZVDfCBq0nj80wG3W90uHUfj4KgaIijM2yAlaLaWU1nHcKgh9C/s320/04a%20miltonShirtless.png" width="179" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Family photo</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Milton identified to an uncanny degree with the psychological state of students in their late teens. Perhaps he remembered the struggle of his own adolescence all too well: sex is on your mind, and, being not much older than a child, you crave entertainment and laughter. "Grab their hearts, and their minds will follow," was a favorite phrase of his.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Sensuality could be savage, as he showed in Ravel's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Alborada del gracioso</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, or even painful,</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> as he would show in Renaissance paintings of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. Where I saw him to have an oddly melancholy look, Stern relished it as an expression of pain combined with exquisite pleasure. Or he'd urge you to listen and experience the orgasmic-sounding passages of Wagner's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Tristan</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> or </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Die Walküre</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, Mahler's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Symphony No 2</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> or Charles Griffes’ </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Pleasure Dome of Kubla Kahn</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">To express these things as a pianist, you needed strong piano fundamentals. One thing he talked about was the </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Long Line</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, the ability to shape a melody like a singer or violinist. He could play a melody with gradations of color and dynamics that made your playing sound black-and-white and cardboard. But if you watched his hand…with the silk sleeve, tan and the opal-encrusted rings…it would do a kind of ballet that was an analogue of the sound he attained. You could almost get his sound by imitating his hand. The movement was so innate for him that when you watched him learn a new piece or sight-read, you'd see that his “stage 1” was figuring out the motion of his hand. Memorizing the notes and fingering took a back seat. Most of us do the opposite. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><i>Long Line</i>, like the ability to "swing" in jazz, is a gift, and one that came naturally to him. He could be appalled when you clunked down on a note at the end of a phrase that was supposed to taper away. He'd compare it to a beautiful woman with flawlessly applied makeup, grotesquely ruined by a tiny lipstick smear. To him, clunking that note made about as much sense as holding down the pedal through several changes of harmony…who does that? To this day, I still work at finding the <i>Long Line</i>. One might not have the gift, but one can learn it.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_gcyRKCs7sImDOdCAsW1pi7dX8uatp528c1OfZG3E8y1F9PqRwBXR5mFlBEMb4VFnaAPqvu_QJuKIguiBQKlmAFZi4MzUucW0cf9-OlkTgUi5Tmu6ZeMXn932H4DjUgnqJ0yojf0wS7XJszXGdtVnjPPWEKsHSt08rQx4RXwKMDuMIqhFHa797BmznO_T/s800/05%20houston.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="787" data-original-width="800" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_gcyRKCs7sImDOdCAsW1pi7dX8uatp528c1OfZG3E8y1F9PqRwBXR5mFlBEMb4VFnaAPqvu_QJuKIguiBQKlmAFZi4MzUucW0cf9-OlkTgUi5Tmu6ZeMXn932H4DjUgnqJ0yojf0wS7XJszXGdtVnjPPWEKsHSt08rQx4RXwKMDuMIqhFHa797BmznO_T/s320/05%20houston.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Andrew Levin in Houston, for a performance<br />of Bortkiewicz Piano Concerto No 1</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A lesson with Milton was seldom boring. People who walked by his studio, which happened to be a highly trafficked area near the Music Department administrative office, would sometimes be treated to unusual sounds. When he was coaching you to solve a problem, and you were trying and retrying to get it right, he resembled a frenzied theater director, shouting louder and louder in between your attempts, “No! … More legato! …Yuck, wrong notes! …Too slow! …Flutter the pedal!” and finally yelling in your face "</span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">THANK YOU!!" </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">with mock passive-agressiveness, when you at last got it right. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He'd share interesting secrets of transcendent virtuoso technique. He'd show you how to strike a big chord "with a glancing blow", so as to ring the piano like a giant bell, loud and powerful, but not harsh. Chords could be made to sparkle by arpeggiating them from the top very fast, with no one the wiser. An octaves passage with large leaps could be helped with the technique he called "blind octaves."</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl8GenI1L7PHPIBlVQ_ci4d4nNRCmdKAQqPEKZVqgidJSHbG-W1rg3mpH4d-u8P11QGNUdao2Y3r7kp99eQ1QNO85V0yqm_ms3NDVw42EwFpTksf4CB7htg4aAnHC-sQm5x970g8E4zV8wMwDIIdyVcyC34RLYpArl2ec3h5FlTlH5iYCjZMJdWErOeSID/s800/01%20-withPaulVanNess.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="795" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl8GenI1L7PHPIBlVQ_ci4d4nNRCmdKAQqPEKZVqgidJSHbG-W1rg3mpH4d-u8P11QGNUdao2Y3r7kp99eQ1QNO85V0yqm_ms3NDVw42EwFpTksf4CB7htg4aAnHC-sQm5x970g8E4zV8wMwDIIdyVcyC34RLYpArl2ec3h5FlTlH5iYCjZMJdWErOeSID/s320/01%20-withPaulVanNess.JPG" width="318" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Greg Sandell and Paul Van Ness.<br />Cal State LA, ca. 1980</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br />More than anything else, it was his humor was that grabbed our hearts. He had the knack of a Victor Borge to entertain at the piano. If a student made an excuse, he'd run to the piano and played a melancholy song…we heard it dozens of times without knowing what it was…smiling ear to ear, his eyebrows going up and down like Groucho Marx. He cracked himself up with that each time. Eventually I found out it was "Nobody Knows the Troubles I Seen."</span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br />He told the story of his friend at Oberlin who botched the lightning-bolt opening of Chopin's <i>Sonata No 3 in B minor</i> landing on a a very off-key F-natural instead of the written F-sharp. "He never recovered."</span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He'd demonstrate how to get a gentle touch, by negative example. He'd start the left hand of Chopin's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">C minor Nocturne</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and create</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> a romantic and elegant atmosphere. While keeping a detached, refined demeanor, he would rain down unforgiving sledgehammer blows for the melody. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There was Beethoven's <i>Sonata in G</i>, Op 31 No 1, which has unique syncopations between left and right hands in the first movement. He'd play it, as written, joking, "the poor guy can't keep his hands together!" </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He would play the 3rd variation of the 2nd movement of Beethoven's <i>Sonata in C minor</i> op 111 and we laughed over how Beethoven had anticipated boogie-woogie by a century or more.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Some of his salty humor came from his days in the Air Force. One expression was a warning to be careful, or "you'll be screwed, blued, and tattooed." Another piece of advice was to be wary of venturing more information than you need to. With Rabbinical eyebrows and </span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">a Brooklyn/</span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Yiddish</span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> accent, he said, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"Nobody's pulling your tongue out of your mouth to tell the truth." </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCac5etoP8zh6JjE0OrRMbjjxCFA0XKIxbzX7TwLpYegCbrrZ8DKoDunrXABGOIzYvPoIHRx_TDDpYeqzf-cASwpNqmTyzuphNxxcrhkJcLGIeapelRnDNnzdUwiRHpcrpyUVqDbDQgpGWmRaFmEaJDghb6ooAaLif3QUGj0qEdM7JAFKnwn2Xf1Xq3WUn/s800/07%202018-08-16_with_Patrick.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="601" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCac5etoP8zh6JjE0OrRMbjjxCFA0XKIxbzX7TwLpYegCbrrZ8DKoDunrXABGOIzYvPoIHRx_TDDpYeqzf-cASwpNqmTyzuphNxxcrhkJcLGIeapelRnDNnzdUwiRHpcrpyUVqDbDQgpGWmRaFmEaJDghb6ooAaLif3QUGj0qEdM7JAFKnwn2Xf1Xq3WUn/s320/07%202018-08-16_with_Patrick.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Greg Sandell and Patrick Lindley.<br />Stern home, Altadena.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">If you were preparing a sensual, emotional piece for a recital, he'd smile and tell you, "there won't be a dry pair of pants in the house." He'd describe a fast, savage piece as "balls out". He had a variation on this if a piece was even faster and more savage</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. Then it would be "balls flying in all sorts of directions."<br /></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He spoke of composers like they were pals at the golf course: </span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"Dickie Wagner," </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"John Brahms," and "Dickie Strauss." He told us that as a young man Brahms played piano in brothels and was adored by the girls (supposedly).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When he had to endure an emotionless performance, it was "death warmed over." When students came to him with impressive levels of technique already, but who were taught it to the exclusion of feelings, they were "fingerbusters." On the other hand, a </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">fingerbuster</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> could also be the description of a difficult piece. "Beethoven's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Waldstein</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, that's a real fingerbuster." </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Cj69Mvcbr6ZJlbrr7GsGMWxD0G7AqH-8UvSJLvO8HKHNejGSZuSYp2JWjSCVt5JyPQ-LgJpQO2qBvjawQZ2H7FoBneDENyyhT-M7JiNLsiNlP9E49S0VdNP0lC4m8eAmiUv5fGXLE9fJCl9S4VTSxlCTQ8cFmTP4XIUjm4GVvQBtFVf4YHUkP5mJzR2F/s800/08%202020-03-07miltonBirthday_02.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Cj69Mvcbr6ZJlbrr7GsGMWxD0G7AqH-8UvSJLvO8HKHNejGSZuSYp2JWjSCVt5JyPQ-LgJpQO2qBvjawQZ2H7FoBneDENyyhT-M7JiNLsiNlP9E49S0VdNP0lC4m8eAmiUv5fGXLE9fJCl9S4VTSxlCTQ8cFmTP4XIUjm4GVvQBtFVf4YHUkP5mJzR2F/s320/08%202020-03-07miltonBirthday_02.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with David Lowenkron, 93rd Birthday<br />party. Stern home, Altadena</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br />One the qualities that I especially loved was his questing, exploratory nature. He was searching for anything that might hold the key to a world of insight and understanding. He was always sharing a discovery he made with me, perhaps a book he found life-changing, or a obscure painter with an unusual style. </span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He was excited by the possibilities for personal transformation that psychotherapy could bring, both as a patient and as a lay practitioner to people he thought he could help. He was open to making piano study a personal journey as well, and brought compassion and empathy to turmoils experienced by his young adult students. You could turn to him in a crisis and he'd welcome it.</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">For a time he took up a mission to make a cross-disciplinary synthesis of Music and Sports Medicine. For piano works of virtuoso difficulty, the risks of tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome through overexertion were just as "athletic" a concern as avoiding and recovering from a football knee injury. He had noticed that problems often started with tension in the thumb, and he coined the phrase "the thumb is the key to the wrist." For years he had drummed into his students’ minds to be wary of practicing too long without break, or playing through pain, else they'd experience an "injury." Not all pianists he spoke to were receptive to using that word.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As a confirmed Romanticist, avant garde and contemporary music were not his cup of tea, but he had had his encounters with it. As a student at Oberlin, he once played Bartok's <i>Piano Sonata</i> at a party, "and I cleared the room." For a time he studied with Eduard Steuermann who was assistant to Arnold Schoenberg and premiered many of his pieces. At Cal State LA he was asked by faculty composer Byong-Kon Kim to perform one of his pieces. It was emotionally opaque to him at first; so he got creative and found his own way to give it life. Despite the extreme liberties he had taken with the score, Professor Kim was overjoyed with the performance and asked him to record it later.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He wasn't beyond a little modification to the great literature either. Sometimes this scandalized me, like recommending that I hold the pedal through a passage marked staccato, or adding a crescendo where none was indicated. But I knew where it was coming from: with his breadth of knowledge of the piano literature, he understood composers' musical language, their soul. A slight deviation from the score was a small price to pay when, in the end, the audience's emotional experience was what the composer intended. I still play one of the climaxes of Liszt's </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Sonetto del Petrarca 104</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> the way he advocated, modifying which of the notes fall on the downbeat.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvxFZtn4LECPT3P8S9yVX2f2GYnKXZG6ZrtD13xWwDQmznRWznK74sTowiILQc0Zo9ukCc6Evu5J5LJ0gZ2BA3qSSes541B2X-iNmxT_cVWWsZBrymGd9Ulxy4BbynbwL7uSwmYB6SQ_YN8aJHd4aPl24T396ru113kvZKO4eciPC216qY28q1MdBSX9Ce/s800/09%20hand.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvxFZtn4LECPT3P8S9yVX2f2GYnKXZG6ZrtD13xWwDQmznRWznK74sTowiILQc0Zo9ukCc6Evu5J5LJ0gZ2BA3qSSes541B2X-iNmxT_cVWWsZBrymGd9Ulxy4BbynbwL7uSwmYB6SQ_YN8aJHd4aPl24T396ru113kvZKO4eciPC216qY28q1MdBSX9Ce/s320/09%20hand.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Demonstrating a melody</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As effusive as he could be socially, at lessons his assessment of your progress could be peculiarly cautious. I must have come to a dozen lessons, proud that I had just memorized a new piece or improved greatly upon it, only to hear once again, "it's really coming along." After playing a Rachmaninoff Etude Tableau for him, he said one word: "remarkable." But if you really made progress, or broke through, he’d let you know. Once I was rewarded with, “Finally, there’s the pianist I knew you had inside you!” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I'm driving my car up Lake Ave in Pasadena to reach his Altadena house for what must be the 30th time. I had moved away years ago but I'd visit him every time I was in town. Later, when I returned to California and resumed studies with him in his late 80's, and clocked even more trips up that hill, I had a sad reflection. Will one day be my last trip up Lake?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In his 90's, he could still give an inspired lesson, despite failing eyesight, lack of mobility, and vulnerability to fatigue. He had urged me to take lessons weekly again, saying that it was the only way to accelerate my improvement. He was right, I got better, I broke through some barriers. But more to the point, he simply thrived on teaching. Many times I picked up the phone and heard his plaintive voice ask, "when are you coming for a lesson?"</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">At the last lesson I took with him, he was weak, his voice gravelly. But as I was leaving, he summoned the strength to say: "I want you to know I'm very impressed and proud of how much progress you've made. And I'm not just saying that you know, I really do mean it." </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizTMj2SGICEjdvEI2tFaeOrDTgISJJK4hfn0DZL6BMNfJYVuLutA5vZ_WV1vtEzp2xhRBoZpE9X6a9qE5abcw5L8H9icTdX7vqihSs0WcIHpIwVprjMs_BbGA7pRb0LffmyArOlmrVktiN9GI2uzMpGmRo2u50_W4aQa7l-28PomhTngQsjW5q2enyE16k/s800/10%20%20Lake%20Street.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizTMj2SGICEjdvEI2tFaeOrDTgISJJK4hfn0DZL6BMNfJYVuLutA5vZ_WV1vtEzp2xhRBoZpE9X6a9qE5abcw5L8H9icTdX7vqihSs0WcIHpIwVprjMs_BbGA7pRb0LffmyArOlmrVktiN9GI2uzMpGmRo2u50_W4aQa7l-28PomhTngQsjW5q2enyE16k/s320/10%20%20Lake%20Street.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Carol Ann and Greg Sandell.<br />Lake Street, Pasadena</td></tr></tbody></table><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Two weeks later I visited him again to listen to some music together on my iPhone and Bluetooth speaker. I brought him Rachmaninoff songs and piano pieces by Medtner and Bortkiewicz. During <i>Spring Torrents</i>, </span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">the Rachmaninoff song </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I'd heard him perform long ago with singer Lu Elrod, I saw him pull one of his funny faces, the one that says "stop it, the sensuality's killing me!" </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Two weeks later, we lost him. Rest in Peace, hero.</span></p><div><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div></span><span><a name='more'></a></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">© Greg Sandell 2023</div></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">greg.sandell@gmail.com</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-23131896345068629382020-01-06T23:37:00.000-08:002020-01-06T23:37:02.012-08:00Tony Sandell "Music Minus One's" three Zappa tracksMy beloved brother Tony has been drumming for 45+ years, and has been an ardent Frank Zappa fan for about as long. Besides being an ace drummer, he has, shall we say, "drummer's perfect pitch": whatever the drummer is doing in any track he listens to, goes straight to his muscle memory and stays there.<br />
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Just after New Year's Day he graced a few of us by playing his electronic drumset to three Frank Zappa tracks. Here is <i>Florentine Pogen</i> from <b>One Size Fits All</b> (1975)<br />
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Here is the medley <i>Oh No - Orange County Lumber Truck -Trouble Every Day</i> from <b>Roxy and Elsewhere</b> (1974)</div>
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And finally, <i>St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast</i> from <b>Apostrophe'</b> (1974). He rather modestly pointed out, "I'm barely ready to play this one."<br />
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<br />Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-43203906265610470322019-12-04T00:22:00.000-08:002019-12-04T16:54:05.998-08:00Zappa in Memorium<style type="text/css">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frank Vincent Zappa, December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993</td></tr>
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Because I did one of those "Album Challenges" on Facebook last week, where I visited musical influences from long ago, I feel the need to observe the anniversary of Frank Zappa's passing on Dec 4, 1993, at the age of 52.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Besides, it comes up every year on my iPhone's calendar. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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I often wonder how Zappa will be regarded in the future.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There have been other mysterious or hard-to-pigeonnhole composer/musicians of the past.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Renaissance motet composer Carlo Gesualdo wrote impossibly dissonant music for his time and is said to have murdered his wife.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> What could they have thought of him in his time? </span>Erik Satie, who wrote piano pieces that are at first acquaintance imbecilic, are uniquely transcendent.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>John Cage, told by Arnold Schoenberg that his poor instinct for harmony would be a barrier to success, devoted himself to bashing his head against and ultimately through that wall.</div>
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As much of a Frank fanboy I am, I don't have a prediction of the future's appreciation of him.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I can't claim to understand his catalogue, not the whole of it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I saw Zappa perform live when I was barely 14.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> (I reviewed it from recollection <a href="https://gregsandell.blogspot.com/2018/03/remembering-frank-zappa-and-mothers-in.html">here</a>.) </span>Later, at 20, It was hard for me to stomach when he dished out new kinds of gross-out humor, transparently juvenile to me, for the next crop of 14-year-olds.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I also didn't care for how his later writing increasingly incorporated 90's pop trends (at one point there was entirely too much reggae in everything), and his bands were less and less made up of oddball personalities and disparate geniuses from all corners of the musical universe, and more and more of technicians who memorized the notes and collected a paycheck.</div>
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But he could write amazing orchestra works with hints of Webern and Stravinsky (<b>200 Motels</b>), while still including the rude saxophone honk here or there and the punctuation of a broken cymbal crash at the end.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He used the occasion of a near-death concert accident in London...only 6 months after I saw him perform...to change directions from rock to composing, producing and playing from the wheelchair two fantastic jazz albums (<b>Waka/Jawaka</b> and <b>The Grand Wazoo</b>).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As early as 1967 he made electronic and tape-edited music (<b>Lumpy Gravy</b>) that today's computer-assisted electronica artists can only dream of creating.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>His credentials as a rocker and guitarist are unquestioned, but his ability to create long-form rock-ensemble pieces like <i>Little House I Used to Live In</i>, <i>Billy the Mountain</i>, and the four-song medley from <b>Apostrophe'</b> (with the infamous <i>Yellow Snow</i> beginning) has no comparison with any other rocker.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He could keep you alternately surprised, smiling, or toe-tapping by hopping from dead-on imitations of broadway musicals to feel-good pop anthems, rock headbangers, abstruse jazz counterpoint or the theme from the Johnny Carson show with an ingenuity equalled only by Spike Jones in the 1940's.</div>
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Students at Pomona College once perfectly executed the sight gag of placing ZAPPA along side WAGNER, MOZART and BRAHMS on the frieze of stately and highfalutin' Bridges Auditorium.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While I hold Frank Zappa as dearly as the composers of <i>Parsifal</i>, the <i>Rite of Spring</i> and <i>Concerto for Orchestra</i>, I don't try to place him among them.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It's not a fit, and I don't need there to be one.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The conception of what Frank Zappa "was" is in a future we cannot yet fathom. </div>
<br />Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-74080712943142657182019-11-11T13:19:00.001-08:002019-11-12T23:39:53.903-08:00Santa Cecilia Orchestra: El amor brujo and Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Flamenco dancer María Bermúdez performing El Amor Brujo</td></tr>
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If one needed evidence for why Symphonic Music is the crown jewel of performing arts and worthy of the expense, then you needed only be at yesterday's concert of the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, conducted by Sonia Marie de Leon at Occidental College in Los Angeles to get all the evidence you need.<br />
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Maestra de Leon took on the challenging Symphony No. 4 ("Italian") by Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, whose mastery of orchestration warrants more attention, used the full forces of orchestral color and challenging, fast passagework for strings in this work, and which the SCO executed handily, and flawlessly. The dimensionality of Mendelssohn's writing, the play of timbres, blocks of sounds coming from different spatial locations, that can go unappreciated in a recorded performance, were scrumptiously on display in the wonderful acoustics of Occidental's Thorne Hall. The echo of the room, as well as the spatial distance between players, gave the scurrying violin work in the first movement the sound of multiple lines in harmony with each other, even though the parts are written with no <i>divisi</i>. Another wonderful moment occurred just before the recapitulation where the strings were busily working out a subsidiary theme in a crowded, murky texture, and the main theme appeared out of this sounding like a Cathedral rising out of the sea. Passages where the French Horns had prominent, exposed material---a risk even for top flight orchestras---were executed flawlessly and with gusto by SCO's high calibre players. The Occidental audience reacted to end of movement 1 with joyful, unrestrained applause, and a standing ovation at the end of the work.<br />
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The entire second half was occupied by an inspired concert staging of Manuel de Falla's ballet <i>El amor brujo</i> that should command the attention of the entire Los Angeles community as a landmark event in Performing Arts. Guest Flamenco dancer, actress and singer María Bermúdez performed the written vocal parts accompanied by Flamenco dancing, danced as well to the instrumental orchestra movements, and again during added interludes by two performers from her critically acclaimed <i>Sonidos Gitanos and Chicana Gypsy Project</i>. Her singing, as well as the singing of Pele de los Reyes (of the group <i>Navajita Plateá)</i>, was not of the concert-hall opera-singer variety, but the full-throated, husky and passionate style of Moorish-influenced Spanish gypsies. Yet she commanded the stage like a Maria Callas, and with her head high and looking into the infinite distance, she filled the far corners of the auditorium with her voice. (If there was any amplified support to her singing, it was transparent to the audience.) In the <i>Danza ritual del fuego</i> (Ritual Fire Dance) she multiplied her stature by two with brilliant, furious twirling and draping of her magnificent red shawl, the timed falling of the fabric perfectly in sync with the rhythms of the orchestra. It commanded from the audience a lengthy standing ovation of its own, despite being only an inner movement. The two added musicians, with virtuoso flamenco guitarist Andres Vadin (wearing a splendid black leather suit) helped complete the imagery, along with Ms. Bermúdez' beautiful costume, that a Barcelona Gypsy tavern had been lifted from Spain and placed on a Los Angeles stage. Despite the fact that the interspersed movements from the <i>Gypsy Project</i> were creative additions by Maestra de Leon and the SCO, they mingled flawlessly with De Falla's 1915 score, and in doing so gave modern testimony to the veracity of De Falla's sources of inspiration. Also notable were the solo contribution of first chair cellist Cathy Biagini, and the piano textures from performer Bryan Pezzone.<br />
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The concert also included "Dance of the Furies" from Gluck's <i>Orfeo ed Euridice</i>. Heard from the foyer due to my late arrival to the concert, I detected the same mastery of performance that I heard in the "Italian" Symphony when I was seated.<br />
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It seems like the growth of the SCO, and its companion institution the Santa Cecilia Arts and Learning Center has no end in sight. The concerts keep getting better and better, with the Thorne Hall venue at Occidental supplying first rate support (sound engineering, ushering, lighting) commensurate with the professional calibre of their performing.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sonia Marie de Leon with supporters after the concert</td></tr>
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<br />Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-55634234253329038012018-11-21T14:02:00.003-08:002018-11-28T16:39:26.050-08:00My Trip Through the Milky Way<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I've been on a science spree lately.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A little over a year ago the National Geographic channel was showing a multi-episode series dramatizing the life and achievements of Alfred Einstein. Using clever stories and images, the show did an impressive job bringing you a few steps closer to understanding hard-to-get-your-head around things, like Einstein's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation">Time Dilation</a>. So I could really grasp it, though I embarked on an exploration of a few dozen YouTube videos on Time Dilation. I finally understood it and why it happens. Coolest of all is the fascinating proof of Time Dilation <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment">occurring on a human scale</a> (i.e. not interstellar).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">But that's for another blog post. Since my Einstein fetish, I've moved onto curiosity about the Milky Way Galaxy. It started with the question that most people ask about the Milky Way: <i>"How can I see the Milky Way in the sky if I am in the Milky Way?"</i> led me to learning the answers to a multitude of other questions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So here's how I'd explain the Milky Way to a friend. Hopefully my explanation is not too marred by my very thin amount of scientific knowledge, and hopefully I didn't rely on bad sources, but if anyone spots anything, please feel free to tell me about it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> How can we see a galaxy that we are in?</span></h2>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI8VAXKdtaqJnKZnqcqxeGO2jInnfIyjz2VLU8UeXJDCcf1qW3E8DecSE16O9NYphe4vGT_rncsZb3w49sv6Iq8wdQ6eKBMUzJWosl0saoZR7uHzt8hW5XKrMBtp-Ll0DKYI-4zL0ehpSB/s1600/artistConception.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI8VAXKdtaqJnKZnqcqxeGO2jInnfIyjz2VLU8UeXJDCcf1qW3E8DecSE16O9NYphe4vGT_rncsZb3w49sv6Iq8wdQ6eKBMUzJWosl0saoZR7uHzt8hW5XKrMBtp-Ll0DKYI-4zL0ehpSB/s400/artistConception.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Artist's conception of the Milky Way (<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_Galaxy.jpg" style="text-align: left;">source</a><span style="text-align: left;">)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span color:="" font-family:="" ms="" quot="" sans-serif="" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;" trebuchet="">Okay, you can't. There are no photos of our galaxy. The pics you see that show a spiral galaxy, and are labelled "Milky Way", are digital artistry, projections based on what other galaxies look like, and based on the clever measurements and inferences scientists can make. Or, if it really is a photo, then it is a real pic of another galaxy. "NGC 6744" is a spiral galaxy popularly used to show us what our own galaxy looks like. Or you may be seeing a real photo, not of the Milky Way's entire spiral galaxy, but parts of the Milky Way stitched together from views in the sky. See examples of these below.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEkW9luG2WxCHtxgOeoTLRsbxG0gF3XVYJTz4VaOeaGgEpOc3eyHLabhOn59gftsbmBR1X8cfzZCfhjYe1phjW3l0uWUExksqJkLlL7wA5kkHgU3McPG_410Nm0x7ZLM9KTQWaGfpNOod1/s1600/NGC_6744.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEkW9luG2WxCHtxgOeoTLRsbxG0gF3XVYJTz4VaOeaGgEpOc3eyHLabhOn59gftsbmBR1X8cfzZCfhjYe1phjW3l0uWUExksqJkLlL7wA5kkHgU3McPG_410Nm0x7ZLM9KTQWaGfpNOod1/s400/NGC_6744.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Photo of Galaxy NGC 6744, having a spiral structure similar to the Milky Way's. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6744#/media/File:NGC_6744_GALEX_WikiSky.jpg">source</a>)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYKw2cI0QYgnu-aMwQ26tC29lqRjoJaNY6D0HIFLnyQcpfS-Pokiyh0iiUdYZSlHYL1aeTJaBu8L6rPzucN9leB5lpWMhYk7ghKr5VZI9DSFSGUKdYtZtHIMVRBGAXzWeKYvGDyVq3nbZC/s1600/AxelMellingerStitched.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="147" data-original-width="654" height="140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYKw2cI0QYgnu-aMwQ26tC29lqRjoJaNY6D0HIFLnyQcpfS-Pokiyh0iiUdYZSlHYL1aeTJaBu8L6rPzucN9leB5lpWMhYk7ghKr5VZI9DSFSGUKdYtZtHIMVRBGAXzWeKYvGDyVq3nbZC/s640/AxelMellingerStitched.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Composite of many sky images of the Milky Way taken at different times and locations, by Axel Mellinger. (<a href="http://www.milkywaysky.com/mwpan_old.html">source</a>)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Spiral Arms</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The way to talk about where things are located in the Milky Way is by referencing the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The schematic below wonderfully depicts what we need to know:</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lO0M8QLeHJX6R7Kr2Ilq44CL2DDJCrQBzitJ-nRNkcwCiIVKTbVD6FjLwc2Sl18lrFKijSJUtjkKgXjVDLVFMg1lxVpChrLz3QobXbNauVIUXEYmod3SjA_YSxWqPcqNcmwask7P8X5L/s1600/diagram.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1110" data-original-width="1280" height="555" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lO0M8QLeHJX6R7Kr2Ilq44CL2DDJCrQBzitJ-nRNkcwCiIVKTbVD6FjLwc2Sl18lrFKijSJUtjkKgXjVDLVFMg1lxVpChrLz3QobXbNauVIUXEYmod3SjA_YSxWqPcqNcmwask7P8X5L/s640/diagram.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way">source</a>)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There's the Norma and Cygnus arms, Sagittarius, Scutum-Crux, and Perseus. We (our solar system) reside in this dip-shit little afterthought of an arm called the "Orion Spur"! It's closer to the edge of the Milky Way than the center, about 2/3 of the way out from the supermassive black hole "Saggitarius-A" at the galactic center.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"Far" is actually close</span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You've see those fantastic Hubble images, often of spectacular dust clouds (such as the so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation">"Pillars of Creation"</a>)? You probably know that they are impossibly far away and impossibly huge.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> But w</span>here in the universe are they, in our galaxy, or another? </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To put it another way, how far away are such things, on the Milky Way scale? I'm sorry to tell you that they are barely off of our front porch in our Orion Spur!</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Yes, these things whose distance from us that are beyond comprehension, whose light we see comprise photons that were emitted thousands of years ago...are right here in our "neighborhood". </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Pillars of Creation are a "mere" 7,000 light years away from us, putting them not only in our Milky Way, but still comfortably in our little neighborhood of the Orion spur (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Arm">10,000 light years in length</a>). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Those wonderful Exoplanets we're learning about, the ones possibly hosting life, but whose citizens we have no hope of ever meeting, or vice-versa? You guessed it: in the Orion Spur.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For comparison, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">the center of our galaxy, super massive black hole Saggitarius-A, is 25,640 light years away. The total width of the Milky Way is around 100,000 light years. So, the rest of the universe? Forget about it. The Milky Way alone is just one of trillions of galaxies.</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Feeling small, punk?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Answering the Big Question</span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Finally there was my big question, the one that took several videos and articles for me to understand: when you see one of those photos taken in deep country, away from city lights, and there's a big, beautiful arc of colorful galactic soup that is the Milky Way...how can something that we are IN be something we can point to?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The answer was very cool to me. It starts with describing the shape of the galaxy; it's a disk (not a sphere). Better yet, to borrow <a href="https://www.quora.com/When-we-see-the-Milky-Way-in-the-night-sky-what-section-of-the-galaxy-are-we-actually-looking-at/answer/Dave-Fuller-19">Dave Fuller's illustration</a>, it's more like a deep dish pizza: a disk, but one with significant height. Consider the pizza for a minute: looking at it from the top, our solar system would be a tiny fleck of pepper located 2/3 from the center. But the fleck is not on the surface, we are inside the pizza. Let's say the pizza is 1" high, and we are right in the middle, 1/2" down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Look at the Sun in the Spiral Arms diagram above. Which side of it are we on? Well, that depends on the calendar. When we are facing out, we are looking out towards part of the Perseus arm only, so we see what is around us in our Orion spur, and what is in the Perseus arm. That's all. That is when there is very little to see in the sky, not the source of many spectacular photos. During the times we are facing in, we are seeing the superimposition of our Orion spur, Saggitarius arm, the Scutum Centaurus arm, the Norma arm, and the galactic center...and then back through the arms in reverse order again. That's a lot of layers of lasagna, and what produces the really pretty photos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Okay, back to our location inside the pizza. Let's look around. Turning around 360 degrees, looking straight ahead, we see cheese everywhere. And there's more or less of that cheese, depending on whether we're facing inward or outward. But we can look in other directions too: upwards or downwards, past either the top or crust of the pizza, to whatever is above or below the Milky Way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Now the mindblower: when you look at the vertical stripe of the MW in the sky, that is you looking straight ahead through the pizza, looking at cheese, cheese, everywhere. To the one side of the stripe is your "out and above" view from the pizza, and the other side of the strip is your "out and below" view from the pizza!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That's it, that's the awesome discovery.</span></div>
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Where are the Constellations?</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I've got another disappointment for you. Almost all those constellations we know and love, and the stars that comprise them, that are so impossibly far away, are once again...in our shitty little Orion Spur! With a <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-many-of-the-constellations-and-other-visible-stars-in-the-Orion-arm-of-the-Milky-Way-Galaxy">few exceptions</a>, we don't see any points of light (stars, other galaxies, nebulae, etc.) that aren't in the Orion Spur.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"But wait," you ask: You told us that the stuff to the left and right of the visible Milky Way band is us "looking out" beyond our galaxy...yet our favorite constellations are spread all over the night sky. So don't those constellations have to exist outside the Milky Way, inside some other galaxy? No.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I made that mistake too at first. What I forgot is that our Orion Spur surrounds us in every direction. When you're "looking out" you are still looking through the surroundings of the Orion Spur first, before you see the things that are "out there".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Will Voyager Take a Picture of the Milky Way?</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The farthest human-made objects from earth are the two Voyager spacecraft launched between 1979 and 1980, and they keep going and going at 35,000 mph away from our solar system. Will they leave the Milky Way, and in theory, be able to photograph the Milky Way?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I wish I could have answered, "yeah, got a sec?" Because in 40,000 years, we'll at least get the first fly-by of a star other than our Sun: the star <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_445">Gliese 445</a>, about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri#/media/File:Near-stars-past-future-en.svg">4 light years away from earth</a>. And that is, you guessed it, still in the Orion Spur. In fact, at it's narrowest, the Orion Spur is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Arm">3,500 light years</a>, so Voyager will remain in the 'hood for at least 35 million more years. After that, then?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As an object, bombarded by cosmic rays and high energy charged particles, Voyager could last another <a href="https://www.quora.com/Will-Voyager-ever-decay-or-will-it-travel-for-billions-of-years-into-black-space">100 million years</a> before dissipating into dust, so we've got that going for us. We do have a problem with power supply though; eventually, in fact, as soon as 2025, its onboard <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power">Plutonium-238 powerplant</a> will cease to provide the power it would need for photos and communications. But in theory, could Voyager someday be positioned to take that picture?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Unfortunately no, it won't leave the Milky Way, ever. Voyager was supplied with the necessary rocket fuel to leave the sun's orbit; no extra fuel to achieve an escape velocity from the Milky Way, which itself is a gravitational/orbital system. It will <a href="https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/voyager-40-years-nasa-interstellar-space-science/">stay in Milky Way orbit</a> forever, and like our sun, complete its circle around Saggitarius-A once every <a href="https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question18.html">230 million years</a>.</span><br />
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-38189502354559196482018-03-03T18:04:00.000-08:002018-03-05T11:47:01.549-08:00Remembering Frank Zappa and The Mothers in 1971<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-E8DqVPisa99L3YIrIfB5398ia_rx73uUTBczUGgu-lSgQK2rRjBxgA2Iu9SQo0jEn8qkHjPX2dLBbSOp7C16ayO6CszJJaR8lrhTxsHsXXWypKf6Ed3mmoSYm0jihWCQkx5DqcIIhimS/s1600/Frank_Zappa_Mothers_of_Invention_1971.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-E8DqVPisa99L3YIrIfB5398ia_rx73uUTBczUGgu-lSgQK2rRjBxgA2Iu9SQo0jEn8qkHjPX2dLBbSOp7C16ayO6CszJJaR8lrhTxsHsXXWypKf6Ed3mmoSYm0jihWCQkx5DqcIIhimS/s1600/Frank_Zappa_Mothers_of_Invention_1971.JPG" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKMZ0MMrSH2CRs5yXqXP87f1pSUaz0ZgXy37Xq_x_RZ7wUNi6YgYExGOWLWDswir0tjld9Z2H0I_ZDL4eF2VzqHsfrTckyGyhs8776V7-Zbsf0LKi3ktpDS1BZB8RGIKxvwfTMAR9CJ9Bv/s1600/Bridges+poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="493" data-original-width="330" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKMZ0MMrSH2CRs5yXqXP87f1pSUaz0ZgXy37Xq_x_RZ7wUNi6YgYExGOWLWDswir0tjld9Z2H0I_ZDL4eF2VzqHsfrTckyGyhs8776V7-Zbsf0LKi3ktpDS1BZB8RGIKxvwfTMAR9CJ9Bv/s320/Bridges+poster.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">May 18, 1971 was the date of a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at Bridges Auditorium in Claremont, CA. I was a few weeks shy of 14, it was my first concert, and a life-changer. And I had front-row seats, right under Frank's nose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Mothers at this time were the band of the albums </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillmore_East_%E2%80%93_June_1971">Fillmore East – June 1971</a>, </span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Another_Band_from_L.A.">Just Another Band from L.A.</a>; and to a lesser degree, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunga%27s_Revenge">Chunga's Revenge</a> and </span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/200_Motels_(soundtrack)">200 Motels (soundtrack)</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I distinctly remember the lineup including: Zappa, Mark Volman </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">&</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Howard Kaylan (vocal), Ian Underwood (keyboards and sax), Aynsley dunbar (drums), Jim Pons (bass) and another keyboardist whom I assume was </span></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Bob Harris</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">(in the photo above, behind Frank's left)</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">. I vaguely recall seeing Don Preston, but I'm not sure about that. There is a setlist of songs that were played at </span><a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/frank-zappa/1971/bridges-auditorium-claremont-ca-1bd01978.html" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; text-align: center;">setlist.fm</a><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">, much of which seems accurate to me.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I don't recall enough of the concert to provide a continuous narrative, but have strong recollections of specific moments, many of which have been added to by my bother Tony and our friend Brent Tannehill. Here they are. You'll need to know the albums I named above to follow all the references.</span></span><br />
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Zappa Himself</h4>
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<li><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He was wearing bright "Easter colors," possibly pink pants and a yellow shirt</span></li>
<li style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">At concert opening, he introduced singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan as formerly of The Turtles, which drew expressions of surprise from the audience (including me). Mark and Howie smiled appreciatively at their intro.</li>
<li style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Zappa spent the concert on the far right side of the stage (stage left). For the long stretches when he wasn’t playing, he leant casually against the proscenium arch and watched the theatrics approvingly, with much mirth and smiles</li>
<li style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Visually, Zappa was an arresting site to anyone who first saw him for the first time in a photo. Up close and in person, the effect was even stronger. The blackness of his hair, the razor sharp nose, the emaciated body, the greasy mediterranean looks, were all very striking</li>
<li style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">His constant smoking was a surprise to me. It seemed to me like a very "bar band" thing that was uncommensurate with progressive Rock and Roll. He wedged his cigarette between the nut and the tuning pegs of his guitar, and played while the thing burned away</li>
<li style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">His guitar was the SG with silver tailpiece he was known for during the period (and which Dweezil has been playing a likeness of in his Zappa Plays Zappa concerts). His amp gear included <a href="https://orangeamps.com/">Orange Amps</a>, and of course he used the wah-wah a lot.</li>
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From “the Groupie Routine”</span></span></h4>
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<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan were generally very visually entertaining, and good actors</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">Mark Volman had his shirt off to portray the pregnant groupie. It was really out of my experience to see a portly fellow display himself that way. </li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Mark Volman </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">&</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Howard Kaylan were generally being pretty lewd with each other, e.g. Howie rubbing Mark’s rubbing his belly lasciviously. That kind of homoerotic-tinged acting was pretty out there for me. </span></li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">The <i>“number one with a bullet”</i> thing over and over really made us laugh</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">The crazy noise distortion <i>“I can’t STAND it!”</i> part had great visuals from Zappa, he "fucked his amp with the guitar" <i>a la</i> Jimi Hendrix, with crazy legs dancing</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">As Jim Pons played the slow two-note riff that happens through much of the routine, he would just rock his weight from left to right feet in a slow rhythm. Looked like a wedding band guy playing "a casual"</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">My reaction to the bit about the <i>“enchilada wrapped with pickle sauce shoved up and down in between the donkey's legs until he can't stand it no more”</i>...let's just say it was a kind of sexual fetishism I had no frame of reference for. And all the more so because they repeated it many times, making me wish they'd stop. Remember, I was 13.</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">I remember the bits about <i>’Bwana Dik’</i>, which were really funny</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">"The Mudshark dance," consisted of Mark and Howie, putting their hands together in a fish-shape and making a swimming motion, often between their legs</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">The climax where they performed “Happy Together” was a surprise that created a lot of laughter</li>
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From “Billy the Mountain”</span></span></h4>
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<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">Frank announced that this was the first-ever performance</li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">Jim Pons doing his George Putnam imitation had us in stitches. </li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">I remember “Studebaker Hoch” being the main character</li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Memorable Aynsley Dunbar moment: coming from behind his drums to do <i>“THE STUDEBAKER HOCH DANCING LESSON </i></span><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">&</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> COSMIC PRAYER FOR GUIDANCE featuring Aynsley Dunbar... Twirlie, twirlie, twirlie…"</span></i></li>
<li style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; text-align: left;">And he played the hell out of drums, including the 8-measure solo from the Fillmore album. His drums moved around a lot from the force of his playing, and he kept on having to drag his bassdrum back towards him. His energy was a big mover in that band. And a very photogenic guy to boot.</li>
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Other things</span></span></h4>
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<li style="text-align: left;">Ian Underwood was pretty hidden behind the keyboards the majority of the time. He seemed to crave no spotlight whatsoever or was concerned with showmanship. Mostly you'd only see him when he "whipped out" his alto saxophone and played it high and sideways over the keyboards. </li>
<li style="text-align: left;">The playing of Peaches en Regalia, with Aynsley Dunbar's note-perfect intro, got us all very excited</li>
<li style="text-align: left;">The crowd demanded an encore, but we got the feeling that Zappa hated encores, so instead of a song, they quickly did the <i>“left hand from the heart-ah, right hand from the heart-ah”</i> routine that eventually was part of Billy the Mountain.</li>
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Our Bootleg Tape Debacle</span></span></h4>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A recording of the concert might exist to this day were it not for teenage foolishness and naiveté. Tony smuggled in a small tape recorder for the concert; he remembers it being cassette, I remember it being a tiny reel-to-reel. (You have to understand that affordable consumer-level recorders still were very rare in 1971, and the cassette medium too.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">At the end, proud of his accomplishment, Tony (15 years old) <i><b>played</b></i> the recording <b><i>as we walked</i></b> to the car. We took a circuitous route that brought us behind the auditorium, where we could see Frank, along with band members, women, and roadies leaning against a truck. I remember seeing the glow of one of his Winstons. This motivated Tony to show "how cool he was" by making it even more audible to those around us, including Frank and party. Next thing you know, Herb Cohen (we're pretty sure) makes a beeline towards us, and demands the tape. To try to make it smart a little less, he offered $5 for it. When we handed it over, rapidly unspooled it and threw it high up into some eucalyptus trees where we could never get to it, and walked back to the truck.</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Well, however tragic, let's just call that a concert memory we'll never forget!</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Thanks to Murray Gilkeson for the concert poster.</i></span></span></div>
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<br />Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-22595235990583427362018-02-17T22:51:00.001-08:002018-02-25T22:12:41.654-08:00Get To Know Jelly Roll Morton<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJDM0GUD1TLX_B3QAgvX6x3GfEOoR-cnH3xo28kwXSoDtqp7J50_yOvmC1G8iNd4B222cj2DKVXNIk0_sqEo11orKfrkmMWUBNwo5tGaJiRU1h6y1wSRjzBOaqf0U_GuSy8-MyO_iQN2oS/s1600/jmr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="261" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJDM0GUD1TLX_B3QAgvX6x3GfEOoR-cnH3xo28kwXSoDtqp7J50_yOvmC1G8iNd4B222cj2DKVXNIk0_sqEo11orKfrkmMWUBNwo5tGaJiRU1h6y1wSRjzBOaqf0U_GuSy8-MyO_iQN2oS/s400/jmr.jpg" width="290" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A frequent activity of my obsessive, music-loving nature is to pick a musician I don't know much about, and then dig deep, and try to listen to everything they ever recorded.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jelly_Roll_Morton">Jelly Roll Morton</a>: an important figure in the early history of jazz, very active in the middle 1920's. The other day I ran across some graphic novel work of R. Crumb's where he portrayed JRM's own description of the <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o9J2amHbqX4A_t8ZBXWClONGK2RVJpY1/view">downfall of his career through
voodoo</a>. That made me decide to take the plunge on JRM's music. JRM was a bit of a 'factory' of endless hits, hours of similar sounding piano rags and New Orleans ensemble pieces. But I found these great high points.</span><br />
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Beale Street
Blues</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One of his fun-time songs for New Orleans style combo, with crazy trombone glissandi, funny clarinets, everything.</span>
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><b><span style="font-size: large;">Wild Man Blues</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">One trick of JRM's that brings a smile to my face is in one of his slow pieces when the tempo suddenly goes quadruple-time for a measure or two. It reminds me of an early Saturday Night Live episode where Steve Martin and Gilda Radner did a suave ballroom dance with occasional moments of frenetic feet movement and insane jazz hands.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b style="background-color: white;">The Chant</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Some wild early jazz, with a degree of frenetic that sounds like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. My brother Tony, a drummer, gets a kick out of the many choked cymbals. Also features another early jazz oddity, a saxophone with a very clicky attack sound.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Grandpa's Spells</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">More early jazz fun hi-jinx.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><b><span style="font-size: large;">Someday
Sweetheart</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A funny kind of sentimental 1926 pop, featuring a sad basset-hound of a melody, played by the mournful tones of the viola and bass clarinet.</span>
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>If Someone Would
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> Another broad, comic portrayal of basset-hound like sadness.</span>
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>King
Porter
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Possibly his most famous number. Like Scott Joplin's rags, but with its own kind of vibrancy.</span>
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Billy Goat
Stomp</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A novelty song featuring a bleating goat, goofy and fun.</span>
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Freakish</span></b> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The title is descriptive of what must been very "progressive sounding" in JRM's time.</span>
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<td><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Oil
Well</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A musical portrayal of the good life that you'd have if you had an oil well in the 1920's. Featuring that notorious stereotype of "society music", the broad-vibrato sax and clarinet.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I hope you enjoy JRM as much as I do.</span>
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-31238539801957442302018-02-12T21:07:00.001-08:002018-02-13T15:13:43.943-08:00Review of Apple's HomePod<div style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbyqsqPLGvbl5bBVa8VqCTotTNb153eZ-LU_bjdxPgb83PSaT_BKdAN-b32uu4eHR1kYBGcY04e3-w0t_16FJCDClhqgxYnuqjt7CXT9AcrYgUlpDg32D_-PjL2eeYXNtDmXAey1wO7pIn/s1600/apple-homepod-3D-model_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbyqsqPLGvbl5bBVa8VqCTotTNb153eZ-LU_bjdxPgb83PSaT_BKdAN-b32uu4eHR1kYBGcY04e3-w0t_16FJCDClhqgxYnuqjt7CXT9AcrYgUlpDg32D_-PjL2eeYXNtDmXAey1wO7pIn/s320/apple-homepod-3D-model_0.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">When you try the new HomePod at the Apple Store, you're only allowed to do generic things with it because the floor model is configured to disallow a connection from your iPhone. This product costs $349, by the way. But you can always try it out by buying one and returning it in the 14-day period. Apple is there to help!</span><br />
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Admittedly I'm not exactly the target consumer Apple has in mind or the HomePod. I don't wish I had an Alexa-like device around the house. I never became a fan of using Siri commands on my iPhone. I don't need Apple Music to be the source of music I listen to, and I already know that my eclectic music tastes are not well catered to by Apple Music's holdings.</span><br />
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">But Apple always makes smart products, right? When Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, he described it as a phone, an iPod, and an internet browser in one device. Apple could have bait-and-switched us by providing some poor excuse for a phone, short on features and long on predictability. No, Apple gave us a phone that was all they things we expect from a phone, plus more, with creative twists, and they changed the world. So I should expect HomePod to charm the pants off of me and do a better job than some of the devices I already have around the house, like bluetooth speakers, and serve up my music with interactive voice commands. I was quite intrigued by the potential for great sound by the extraordinary audio hardware inside: seven beamforming tweeters and a high-excursion woofer.</span><br />
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">So yes, it does fill the role of a bluetooth speaker. I can play the songs that are physically on my iPhone from the Music app. The quality is very good, it does fill the room with sound nicely. But those charming, unexpected features that can change my life? They aren't there. In fact, HomePod is astonishingly not good at all the things you'd like it to be.</span><br />
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">But I'll play nice, and start by listing what HomePad <b>IS</b> good at.</span><br />
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<ol>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Deep bass response. When plugged in, it emits a low tone you can feel in your tummy, almost.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">You select HomePod as your audio device the way you would with any bluetooth speaker or Apple TV.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri understands how to pause a song and advance it. It takes request to get louder or softer.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">It understands a <i><b>few</b></i> conventional Siri commands to interact with iCloud and your iPhone to accomplish some tasks. It will send a text, it will create a reminder. </span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri seems to know something about the genres of my music. I asked Siri to play some Irish music. She gave a vague reply about "playing all songs" but she actually did proceed to play Irish songs and fiddle tunes from my iPhone. This is a mystery since Siri was unaware of my songs' genre tags (see below).</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">If you can get Siri to understand you, it will play a song by name that you physically have on your iPhone.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri hears you over the music it is playing for you. It doesn't have to stop your music to take a command.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri knows about the podcasts on your iPhone, and play podcasts that are on your list.</span></li>
</ol>
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">But here's the $349 bad news.</span><br />
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<ol>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Except for the two things I mentioned above, HomePod does not act as an extension of your iPhone, with Siri as your assistant. It does not connect with your Contacts, Calendar, Notes or Phone over iCloud. You don't ask Siri to write an email, set a meeting, look up a contact, ask who you are, or set the name of your spouse or work address. Siri will tell you, "I'm sorry, I can't do that."</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri has been endowed with no special intelligence when it comes to your music. She's not combing through your music collection and priming herself to recognize the artists, titles, genres and playlists you're likely to be asking about. </span>You'd think that because I have McCoy Tyner's "Contemplation" physically on my iPhone, you think she'd be primed to play it on request. Nope, Siri couldn't help me when I said "Hey Siri, play Contemplation by McCoy Tyner." </li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">In fact, Siri is just as bad as ever at correctly hearing your words at all, in spite of the purported Adaptive Audio and the six microphone array. She still regularizes all your unusual words to something more common, and completely gets wrong what you're asking. Your motivation to speak naturally with Siri drops like a rock.</span></li>
<li>Siri has no knowledge of my playlists, so I couldn't ask her to play my Thelonious Monk playlist. And: "Hey Siri, add this song to my Christmas playlist" gets the response, "Hmm, I couldn't find a playlist with that name."</li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri has no knowledge of genres tagged on my iPhone's songs. I have several hundred songs tagged with a genre of jazz, but not according to Siri: "Sorry, you don't have any jazz music."</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Siri will try to do things and follow it with an "uh-oh". I asked to her create a note, and she said she did it, but it was not to be found on my iPhone. She cheerfully agreed to rate my current song with two stars, and then said "something went wrong."</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">There is a lag between the actions you take on your iPhone's music player and when you hear them on HomePod. Pausing, resuming play and scrubbing all have a response lag that you do not experience with today's bluetooth speakers.</span></li>
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">A few interesting or odd things:</span></div>
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<ol>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">HomePod is heavy like a brick. I'm not sure why the subwoofer would need a heavy magnet; new metals from rare earth minerals, like Neodymium, have made much lighter speakers possible.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">HomePod is battery-less and plugs into the wall. It's not meant to be a totable device like your current bluetooth speakers.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">HomePod has a clever (or strange) relationship with the connection to your iPhone. I started a song playing from my iPhone. Then I disabled both BlueTooth and Wi-Fi from the settings on my iPhone. The song did not cease playing, even after a long time. In fact, the iPhone was no longer even the source of the sound; the controls were in paused state. If I pressed play, it would play independently of the HomePod through its own speakers. It appears that the HomePod is buffering audio, and making a seamless handoff to Apple Music.</span></li>
<li><span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">There is a 'Home' app on your iPhone which is your gateway to the HomePod, but you can't really do anything more than use it to disconnect from HomePad.</span></li>
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">So I don't know why you'd want a HomePod. Apple seems to have made a product that's meant for asking very generic things with simple words, and a gateway to the mainstream music to be found in Apple Music. My advice? Stick with your bluetooth speakers, and the for better quality, pay more. </span></div>
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<span ms="" sans-serif="" trebuchet="">Here's a sorry list of the many things I tried to get Siri to do with my HomePod.</span></div>
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<th>Context</th><th>Command Attempted</th><th>Siri's Response</th>
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<tr><td>My iPhone has song "Four By Five" by McCoy Tyner</td><td>Hey Siri, play Four By Five.</td><td>Sorry, you don't have a song called Four.</td></tr>
<tr><td>I have music by the Finnish musician Maria Kalaniemi on my iPhone.</td><td>Hey Siri, play some Maria Kalaniemi.</td><td>Sorry, you don't have any Maria Callas.</td></tr>
<tr><td>My iPhone has song "Passion Dance" by McCoy Tyner</td><td>Hey Siri, play Passion Dance.</td><td>Sorry, you don't have any dance music.</td></tr>
<tr><td>My iPhone has lots of music tagged with the jazz, rock and classical genres.</td><td>Hey Siri, play some jazz|rock|classical.</td><td>Sorry, you don't have any jazz|rock|classical music.</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, who is the president of the United States?</td><td>(Siri gives me a description of the United States.)</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, do you have access to my iCloud Account?</td><td>This is about you, not me.</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, how can I get access to my contacts?</td><td>I can't get the answer to that on HomePod.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Carol Sandell's mobile number is in my Contacts.</td><td>Hey Siri, call Carol Sandell mobile.</td><td>I'm sorry, I can't help you make calls on HomePod.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Milton Stern is in my Contacts.</td><td>Hey Siri, find Milton Stern.</td><td>I can't locate people here. Sorry about that!</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, what time is Seinfeld on?</td><td>(Siri gives me a list of movies with Seinfeld in the title.)</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, what time is Seinfeld on TV?</td><td>I can't give you information about TV shows. Sorry about that.</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, what is my name?</td><td>I don't know your name but you sound like a human being to me. I'm a big fan!</td></tr>
<tr><td>I have an Andrew in my Contacts.</td><td>Hey Siri, send an email to Andrew.</td><td>I wish I could. But I can't help with emails here.</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td>Hey Siri, what appointments do I have tomorrow?</td><td>I wish I could, but I can't access your Calendar here.</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-7585319573366040982018-02-12T12:45:00.001-08:002018-02-12T21:23:55.625-08:00Santa Cecilia Orchestra plays Beethoven & Handel, Feb 11, 2018<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7iwimNBK5iiC22pb0quiFhsEuiO2ki8KpohE8M3JC2TexJTWEka2eouKy6T_1kTv9JJH8esgs4kC93Wu8YFCy0d-rTGhozVXQ-kH9NGvL_ew4Rk1a5D9cn5z44BVm0bwUFMtxyNrR4ORg/s1600/santaCeciliaOrch.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="1600" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7iwimNBK5iiC22pb0quiFhsEuiO2ki8KpohE8M3JC2TexJTWEka2eouKy6T_1kTv9JJH8esgs4kC93Wu8YFCy0d-rTGhozVXQ-kH9NGvL_ew4Rk1a5D9cn5z44BVm0bwUFMtxyNrR4ORg/s640/santaCeciliaOrch.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sonia Marie De León de Vega conducted the <a href="http://scorchestra.org/">Santa Cecilia Orchestra</a> Sunday in a splendid program at Occidental College's Thorne Hall: Beethoven's Egmont Overture and 7th Symphony, and Handel's Water Music Suite. The playing was flawless, the phrasing and dynamic control magnificent, and we had superb sonics sitting in the fourth row.<br /><br />I enjoyed Beethoven's orchestration to a greater degree than ever before, because each timbral element came from a definite spatial location. In my mind, with my eyes closed, I likened the music to a 3-D cutaway automobile with multiple levels of x-ray detail, which would "light up" here and there, revealing the whole auto by the sum of its parts. I guess it was a 50's car because certain of the elements would be the fins, others the chrome.<br /><br />The string writing in Egmont was particularly wonderful and lush. Who can beat Beethoven at brilliant string writing? I am amazed how he can create effects with strings alone, e.g. certain material behave and sound like "brass parts". And the Santa Cecilia orchestra projected that wonderfully.<br /><br />The 7th Symphony never ceases to amaze me. Those interior movements are friggin' long!! In fact, the scherzo made me laugh. It's really a scherzo with an atrophied trio that swallows the whole movement. He manages a recap of the scherzo, but it's so pro-forma and brief!<br /><br />We got a nice, meaty bass sound all concert long because we were seated on "house left", and the "stage left" cellos were pointed right at us. At second desk there was a young (college age) cellist who was really emoting with her face and mannerisms all the enjoyment she was getting from the music. I'd hate to kill youthful joy, but the optics weren't great, because at first chair was a player with a controlled expression, but who could play the HELL out of her instrument. Afterwards, backstage, I told her: "you were a machine!" (which she enjoyed hearing).<br /><br />Maestro De León de Vega said that this concert was managed with only two rehearsals. I don't know how you do that! There were so many demands of phrasing, style and tapered diminuendo/ritards in the Handel. And so much of the Beethoven effects are like "stunts" that you have to coordinate perfectly, or it's just slop. How would you find time to rehearse each one of those moments? Apart from one French horn clam, the whole concert was flawless. But no matter how it was achieved, Ms. De León de Vega showed that she is a magnificent interpreter of the music.</span>Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-85817333466451886902017-12-19T01:00:00.003-08:002017-12-22T14:43:26.878-08:00Mahavishnu Returns - Royce Hall, UCLA, 2017<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Suppose its </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">January 1969 in </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">London and you're on your lunch break from your job in Saville Row. You hear rock music being played from a roof, and there's a commotion on the street: most have figured out that it must be the Beatles playing on the roof of the Apple Corp headquarters at 3 Saville Row. You follow some others to up to an adjoining rooftop, and you are there to watch the final Beatles concert. History had already recorded the last audience to hear a Beatles concert: August 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. But you cheated fate. Now </span><u style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">you're</u><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> the last audience.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I too, have cheated fate. I, and about 1800 other people, saw the last concert of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It wasn't in the 70's, or the 80's. It was a couple of weeks ago at Royce Hall, UCLA (Dec 9,2017). Because John McLaughlin put together an American tour called "Meeting of The Spirits" which was his first revisiting of the compositions of The Mahavishnu Orchestra in over 40 years, and Royce Hall was the final performance of the tour. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Think it extreme to characterize these as two supreme events in history? I'll go farther than that, I call both the Beatles and the Mahavishnu Orchestra <i>supernatural</i>. The surviving Beatles feel that today: it's other-worldy to them, they can hardly believe they were part of it. They were vessels of something bigger than themselves or any individual humans. And although The Mahavishnu Orchestra didn't enjoy the same scale of fame, they too are supernatural. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Mahavishnu, of course, refers to John McLaughlin himself, the name given by his spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy. He too conveyed an out-of-body sense of proportion, in the evening's concert notes, referring to Mahavishnu in the third person:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>The music of Mahavishnu is part of my personal and musical history, and as such it is inseparable from me. To return to these pieces with the experience I've had for the past 45 years, is very exciting. To play the music of Mahavishnu is not for the faint-hearted. In fact, among the only people I know who have succeeded in interpreting Mahavishnu music are my two all-time favorite guitarists: Jimmy Herring and Jeff Beck.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">You have to wonder at what path took McLaughlin to choose this tour. By 1976, McLaughlin moved on from Mahavishnu to a rich career of other kinds of musical fusion: Shakti, trio albums with Paco de Lucia and Al Dimeola, The John McLaughlin Trio, The One Truth Band, The Fourth Dimension and numerous solo projects. Songs from the albums <i>Birds of Fire</i> and <i>The Inner Mounting Flame</i> have not appeared in his repetoire for 45 years. Some 15 years ago he said in an interview:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>So many people come to me to ask me to play the music of Mahavishnu again. I'm so flattered, but I tell them quite honestly, I'm a man in my 60's now, it doesn't fit. </i>(paraphrased)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Yet here he comes in 2017, as a way of showing gratitude to the audiences who helped make Mahavishnu what it is, he makes a farewell US tour at age 75 featuring the songs <i>Bird of Fire, Miles Beyond, Meeting of The Spirits, The Dance of Maya, A Lotus on Irish Streams, Dawn, Trilogy: The Sunlit Path, Vital Transformation</i>, <i>Sanctuary,</i> <i>Earth Ship</i> and <i>Eternity's Breath part 1</i>. If Steve Jobs was the embodiment of the phrase, "The Greatest Second Act in History", then John McLaughlin has just nailed "Going out at your peak." The virtuosity, brilliance and excitement seemed to exceed that of the original 70's concerts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Photos show that other venues on the tour were of smaller, night-club-sized proportions, so with Royce Hall we were treated to a wonderfully vast space for the grandeur of McLaughlin's music. Although I didn't make a careful inspection, the sound all seemed to be directly from the stage: no bone-crushing house sound to wear you out prematurely, no elevation of everything to mind-numbing equal prominence. Also, the presentation was gratifyingly hands-off: no booming impressario's voice preceded them, the ovation that greeted them as they walked onstage was the only introduction they needed. The sight of McLaughlin, relaxed, fit and smartly dressed as usual, with his new blue custom Paul Reed Smith double neck slung over his neck, his virtuosity and musicianship still peaking, etching <i>The Dance of Maya's</i> colossal cathedrals of sound on </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">the canvas of Royce Hall's wide stage and high ceilings, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">was a sight and sound to remember forever.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Over the years I have learned to play several of McLaughin's Mahavishnu compositions, read the published scores, make my own transcriptions from recordings, and play them in bands, and because of that I thought that I had managed to take a bit of the mystery out of those Godly performances from the 70's; I see now that I was wrong. Any band worthy of playing with McLaughlin is in possession of rhythm is so profound and uncanny, it is light years beyond what any melodic or rhythmic notation can capture. These cats don't even have to look at each other to keep a fast 11/4 in time across countless syncopations and polymetric fills. Their rhythm transcends a time signature label; although you can count off the 11, it doesn't put you in their metric realm. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">My jaw spent a lot of time gaping wide that night, my eyes in large OMG circles. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The tour was actually two existing bands, each with a set of their own, and a merging of the two for a closing Mahavishnu set. First up were <i>Jimmy Herring and the Invisible Whip</i>: Jimmy Herring guitar; Matt Slocum, B3 and Clavinet; Jason Crosby, Rhodes piano and violin; Kevin Scott, bass; and Jeff Sipe, drums. Next was <i>John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension</i>: John McLaughlin, guitar; Gary Husband, keyboards and drums; Etienne M'Bappé, bass; and Ranjit Barot, drums and Konnakol (Indian scat singing).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jimmy Herring's band opened with an improv based on a composition titled---yes---<i>John McLaughlin</i> (a Miles Davis riff from <i>Bitches Brew</i>, 1968). Low key, but with a delicious, swampy fusion feel. The highlight of Herring's set was more in the contributions of his sidemen than the numbers they played. Crosby's Rhodes playing and soloing was exciting and memorable. Slocum played wonderfully as well, although he tended to play softly and one had to strain to hear the beauty of the B3 tone. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Kevin Scott on bass was a very capable fusion jazz bass player, but on the heavy-metal end of the spectrum: he added too much bombast and eliminated what subtlety might have been in the songs. I also didn’t sense that he was a very harmonic-thinking player; there were times he kept riffing on the root over chord changes. Herring's guitar was virtuosic but unmemorable. All the players would, however, show a new side in the Mahavishnu set to come.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension was every bit as beautiful and amazing as their albums </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Live At Ronnie Scott's</i> (2017), </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Now Here This</i> (2012), and <i>To The One</i> (2010) have shown. They also played the compositions, and showed the brilliance of, many other McLaughlin projects of the last few decades: the recordings of the John McLaughlin Trio (</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Que Allegia</i>, 1992; </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Live at The Royal Festival Hall</i>, 1989; and </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>Belo Horizonte</i>, 1981) and some of his more amazing solo projects: <i>Floating Point</i>, 2008; <i>Industrial Zen</i>, 2006; and <i>The Promise</i>, 1995. Gary Husband is a musician who can amaze not only with his keyboards and synth playing, but with fusion jazz drumming as well---how often do you see that? M'Bappé's bass seemed a little subdued, musically and visually. With black gloves on each hand, and moving very little he seemed a little distant from the band, like he was in a plexiglass booth. But the intersection of the band's virtuosity with McLaughlin's compositional genius elicited standing ovations for two different numbers in their set. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The combined 9-piece band brilliantly covered all the Mahavishnu ensemble requirements and made a dream recipe for reincarnating the sound. Slocum's B3 brought the requisite sound of for songs like <i>The Inner Mounting Flame</i>'s <i>Meeting of the Spirits</i>, although again, disappointingly low in the mix. However he used a Clavinet to great effect, with a wah-wah when funk was needed, or straight to give a sharp tonal edge to the melodies and solos. Crosby, switching full-time to violin for this set, attempted no imitation of Jerry Goodman, but brought the string timbre which is so essential to Mahavishnu's sound, and gave beautiful, if not electrifying solos. Similarly, Husband stayed put on keyboards, and gave many touches of synth that evoked some of the genius of Jan Hammer's playing. Two drumsets, with some exciting </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Konnakol interludes, created the immensity needed to call to memory Billy Cobham's power and virtuosity. Two bass players are a tricky feat for any band to accomplish, yet Scott and </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">M'Bappé</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> did so brilliantly by spelling each other on the more improvised material, and playing in unison on the head parts of the songs. Several members contributed singing for numbers such as <i>Eternity's Breath Part 1</i>. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Herron’s less memorable contribution in the first set became God-like here with his screaming sustain, brilliant speed and articulation that filled the shoes of Hammer and Goodman as McLaughlin's melodic counterpart. And </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">McLaughlin himself again showed that technically he is still peaking at age 75, handily equal to the challenge of Mahavishnu's machine-gun-fire virtuosity, and </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">layering his old compositions with the patina of his 45 years of stylistic evolution, such as his Miles-like inflections on the whammy bar</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Also, novel twists in </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A Lotus On Irish Streams</i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> heretofore unknown from existing recordings showed the composer-as-performer ever evolving his material. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The concert drew a fascinating crowd. People-watching in the lobby beforehand, I saw many with guitarist DNA etched in their faces, some of whom I suspect are well known session cats or performers in LA and Hollywood. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Seated to my left was a woman who brought her six-year old daughter. </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Taking their final bows, the band's body language seemed to say “that’s it, we don’t play encores, thank you very much, goodbye.” But this sold-out Saturday night L.A. audience would not take no for an answer, so the ovation continued unabated until they returned, for two more Mahavishnu encores.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There was a sense of unbelievability to the evening. My friend and I kept exchanging wide-eyed OMG glances with each other as the evening would delve into yet another masterwork from the Mahavishnu canon (such as the lesser-played <i>Trilogy-Sunlit Path</i> and <i>Earth Ship</i>). I realized there could be no phone call, no social media post, photograph or video that could convey what this evening felt like. Just being in the same room as </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John McLaughlin held his hand on his heart, his face overcome with emotion, and clasping his hands in thanks to the waving arms of the standing ovation just inches from him, felt other worldly in a way that cannot be described or forgotten.</span></div>
Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-47926051254772800442017-08-25T21:27:00.000-07:002017-09-18T17:12:24.206-07:00Remembering Waves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Electric Jazz Orchestra</h2>
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Waves was a band I played in from 1974-76. Before I tell you anything else, I think the music best speaks for itself, so take a listen to this sampler of excerpts and watch the slideshow of old photos!<br />
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Let me set the stage first of where this band was coming from, because it wasn't a rock band or traditional jazz ensemble. Our goal was to do something very original, or at least similar to what the leading artist/composers of our time were doing. We were striving for something insanely great, like how the Beatles sounded to us in our pre-teens, or how great classical music moved us.<br />
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That period of the seventies was a fantasic time musically. We liked <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_rock">progressive rock</a>, "jazz-rock", funk, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_fusion">jazz fusion</a>. The fact that it got rare or no play on the radio made it all the better to us. We didn't equate artistic value with its earning power. <br />
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Earning money playing music was a nice idea in principle, but that had several problems. One, to get gigs at bars, dances and weddings, you'd have to play hit radio music (99% of which was the opposite of "insanely great"). Two, you'd be spending your creativity channelling other musicians' energy rather than your own. Three, even if you worked for years to get a nice safe niche as a gigging musician, you'd be earning a barely above the poverty line income at best. Four, as your uncle might advise you at Thanksgiving, the way a musician earns a living is through teaching. Right: get taught by your high school band director, take four years of college, and then become him...not quite what we signed up for.<br />
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Instead, many of us took the "bohemian displaced labor" path: finding the highest paying part-time job that afforded the most free time to devote to music. We were in our late teens and early twenties. We figured that marriage, kids, a home, etc. were all several years down the road, and our musical energy was not something you could bookmark and pick up again later as a hobby. A Seize-the-Day kind of thing. We had hopes we could pole vault over all that earn-your-dues stuff, get discovered, and join the greats like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavishnu_Orchestra">Mahavishnu Orchestra</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Forever">Return to Forever</a> with their big label recording contracts and concert tours. Naive? Sure. But better than the alternative. <br />
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So you've got a lot of like-minded, talented musicians of a similar age together, where did the music come from? Jon Rothe, the guitarist and leader of the band, composed many songs, and others composed a song now and then. But regardless of the source, it wasn't the "solitary genius" model of composing. It wasn't like Gustav Mahler composing a whole symphony from start to finish in his summer cottage and passing out the parts at Vienna Philharmonic rehearsals for the fall concert season. A Waves composition was built from contributions of the players and the unique experiences each had with the music we loved.<br />
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For example, Jon might come to us with guitar riff or chord sequence where we could hear echoes of say, a Mahavishnu song. The drummer not only had the instinct for the song effect, but through technique and study, could create effects similar to those drummer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Cobham">Billy Cobham</a> played. As the bass player, I might add a different element. Instead of mechanically covering the roots of Jon's chords, I'd invent a melodic bass line that crossed the bar lines of his phrasing, reminiscent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Squire">Chris Squire</a>'s bass lines with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_(band)">Yes</a>, or Paul McCartney's playing on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Each of those contributions would in turn create new directions, which created even more, and compositions grew as a kind of chain reaction of ideas.<br />
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To be the "electric jazz orchestra" we called ourselves, we needed to recruit strings and winds players, which are different creatures than guitarists and drummers. If they were any good, they probably got that way in school music programs: orchestra, marching and concert band, stage band, etc., and it was that repertoire that was in their ears more so than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Report">Weather Report'</a>s. Jon was, as now, a fantastic teacher, and spent hours with everyone helping them bridge the gap. A violinist who, to say the least, would never have played blues in a garage band or know how to improvise a solo, got taught and encouraged. If they wanted to try their hand at writing a song, and they had the ability to write parts, and the gumption to get the band to realize their vision, their song would go on the next concert.<br />
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One of the musical techniques we liked the most (along with everyone else in progressive rock and fusion jazz at the time) was odd time signatures: 5 or 7 beats to the bar, or even 11 and 13. We regarded them as having magical powers that represented nothing less than the arrival of the future in music, similar to the way <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg">Schoenberg</a> believed in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique">12-tone system</a>. We also allowed ourselves the smug satisfaction that we were exploding the heads of musicians who weren't ready for that future.<br />
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We got gigs at colleges, benefits, art fairs and summer festivals. Once we even played for the mental ward of a hospital, and that's not even the whole story. We brought in our equipment, which included carrying our upright piano up a fire escape, did a sound check, and went to lunch. When we came back from lunch, we were informed that inbetween the time we left and returned, the building had become condemned! Somehow the gig happened anyway, and it was a gas. Some of the patients on the ward danced to us, in very much a "dance like noone's watching" kind of way.<br />
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Another funny memory is the period of time where we rehearsed in a gas station. Gas stations around that time were converting from service optional to self-serve only, and you'd pay (on the honor system!) a cashier sitting behind bulletproof glass. Jon had the cashier's job at such a station that previously had been a gas plus repair shop. Seeing an opportunity, the two now empty repair bays became our acoustically cavernous rehearsal space. We played our jazz fusion while the ghosts of Camaro oil changes and Pinto brake jobs swirled around us. That spot remains a working gas station to this day, on Holt Avenue in Pomona where it intersects with the 71 (Corona) freeway.<br />
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For the program we handed out at our 11/15/74 La Verne concert, we asked our alto saxophonist Dave Hindson, a gifted cartoonist, to draw some cover art. I remember Dave at a rehearsal with a little notebook, taking a look at each one of us and writing something down. When he came back with the art, we died laughing. Besides the hilarious likenesses, he had noted incredible specifics, like my boots and zippered shirt, Marc Hellman's tendency to face to the side and the muffling in his twin bass drums, Lori DeLong's manner of holding her flute when she wasn't playing, and Jon's intense concentration as he channelled the guitar Gods in one of his solos.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtRsZkAuNy6e0eMOU85aEo3fjzxYaL7tY40IzLCChSCIEn703jSMFzrYnAs014qEgCJqJn5yIXAr7Xynsr-c0gEbY6knsqpU4P1l008lr4VEtWsUTlWz2IZZw3xvJJF5WtuD_zTt6SgkYv/s1600/hindsonCartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="471" data-original-width="800" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtRsZkAuNy6e0eMOU85aEo3fjzxYaL7tY40IzLCChSCIEn703jSMFzrYnAs014qEgCJqJn5yIXAr7Xynsr-c0gEbY6knsqpU4P1l008lr4VEtWsUTlWz2IZZw3xvJJF5WtuD_zTt6SgkYv/s400/hindsonCartoon.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dave Hindson's cartoon for our November 15, 1974 concert at La Fetra Lecture Hall at La Verne University. Greg Sandell, Dion Sorell, Marc Hellman, Jon Rothe, Lori DeLong, Dave Hindson.</td></tr>
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Our concerts had some marketing elements to them as well. We had great posters and fliers, all of which can be seen in the video. The arrangement of equipment and players on the stage was conceived with the flow and symmetry of Greek architecture. Flutes and strings would each be on their own riser, which I refer to now as "peanut galleries." Drums, bass and keyboards would be arranged as the "back of the house," and two spots up front would be for lead instruments like guitar or sax, whose space was articulated by a beautiful oriental rug. Jon, who has a gift for concert logistics (including begging and borrowing cool instruments like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimoog">Minimoogs</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_organ">Hammond organs</a>, tympani and gongs), would even recruit roadies for efficient setup and teardown.<br />
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The Songs of Waves</h3>
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Waves' songs made up for their lack of vocals by having interesting titles and origins. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1OKkQes5bQ">The Backroads Regatta of Inyo County</a> was about an experience Jon had at scout camp where a jeep raced a dump truck. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yYV94r1iwM">The Serpent of Aquaadit</a> was about Nixon and Watergate, and the title of my 12-tone composition <i>Pissing Contest</i> derived from a quote from Nixon himself on a Watergate tape. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHFKvahSzxk">James Monroe</a> by Dion was a tribute to a beloved high school teacher. My song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQWXt5IYml4">Jesse's Pig</a> was about our JCT 605 bandmate Jesse Moreno's '73 Dodge Charger which could guzzle a can of oil in a week. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwShlLIUjlA">P Jug</a> is a song about the path of kidney effluent from origin to collection through a bunch of looped tygon tubing. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJv0siK2QLo">Cheap Incense and Warm Beer</a> was about a disappointing date night. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILxX3CeaIXY">Empty Tranquility on the Road to San Francisco</a> was a contemplation on relationship difficulties. Dion's beautiful <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCdd9dLSKbo">The Dance of Death</a> was about martial arts. Jon's epic piece <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hddEnbxUdUc">Notes on J.H.G.</a> was musico-biographico tribute to his close friend and mentor John Harry Gingrich. And <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBNIFcpQb0U">Johnny and Joel</a> was about Gingrich's sons whom Jon sometimes babysat. Another song was inspired by a commercial that ran on one of L.A.'s second-tier TV stations for the moving van company Bekins, in which an un-telegenic octogenarian named Betty Rains would flatly deliver her endorsement, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY--xQLc5A">I Like Bekins Work Very Much</a>. I wrote a solemn chorale for piano that captured my feelings of walking around Pomona College in the rain, imaginatively titled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyVHL4GJ38">Pomona College</a>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWAF4gPO48k">Ballad for a Mahayana Buddhist</a> was about beatnik writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac">Jack Kerouac</a>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBNIFcpQb0U">New Voyage</a> captured in its lyrics the direction Waves took with its new strings and flutes orchestral configuration. A melody I wrote, <i>Miles Davis Would Not Be Impressed</i> was inspired by a photo of the great taciturn trumpet player, and it worked its way into <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N5rwzBjhF4">Metamorphosis</a> as my bass solo.</div>
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And although it wasn't in Waves' repertoire, it must be mentioned that Jon once titled a piece <i>San Andreas Ain't Yo Fault</i>.</div>
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The History of Waves</h3>
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I'd played previously with Jon in a band called Junction 605 (aka JCT 605), a horn band that wrote some original songs and covered numbers by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(band)">Chicago</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Power">Tower of Power</a>. By March 1974 it was broken up for the usual reasons bands do...increased work or school demands, people leaving for college, parents or sweethearts applying pressure. But Jon got offered a one-night gig at La Verne College (as it was known back then) for March 20, so he put together an ad hoc band with four JCT 605 players, and hotshot kid cellist Dion Sorrell. Out of that gig came the first iteration of Waves: Jon, me, Dion, Marc Hellman on drums and Karen Daughs on sax and flute, and Dan Ashby on trumpet. We played one gig around June in this configuration at La Verne College. Here's a picture from our early rehearsals (minus Dan):<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJnL0uUBoSVDh3HjPQ344qVntvPXGJak4NOnuiEgiIQWSldZmFPgHUhv2JmZkVV8Yj9P1yBejKwdVU5m6mCgQfNbEHOGR-kFTtJ6TdJQBIzNurMUPEB_rKYJE_VqhCfSe8rwlzsvKy8XB6/s1600/garage_03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="794" data-original-width="800" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJnL0uUBoSVDh3HjPQ344qVntvPXGJak4NOnuiEgiIQWSldZmFPgHUhv2JmZkVV8Yj9P1yBejKwdVU5m6mCgQfNbEHOGR-kFTtJ6TdJQBIzNurMUPEB_rKYJE_VqhCfSe8rwlzsvKy8XB6/s320/garage_03.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Standing: Marc Hellman, Greg Sandell, Karen Daughs, Jon Rothe. Above: Dion Sorrell. In Glendora, May 24, 1974. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkTGWb9f2oEWz9sXMz3F4nwuFWpm2FoaGp35Q4hP7gBXovqpx94072OyoK66igGI1T6CdwaYjQJfwroZeqUvaE_24KKziBco7gH9leGA1ClNsUsWcUgvyTjPVrz3yMbUuaIiiwJK9L2AfI/s1600/garage_06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkTGWb9f2oEWz9sXMz3F4nwuFWpm2FoaGp35Q4hP7gBXovqpx94072OyoK66igGI1T6CdwaYjQJfwroZeqUvaE_24KKziBco7gH9leGA1ClNsUsWcUgvyTjPVrz3yMbUuaIiiwJK9L2AfI/s320/garage_06.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marc Hellman, Greg Sandell, Karen Daughs, Dion Sorrell, Jon Rothe. In Glendora, May 24, 1974.</td></tr>
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In the next iteration, both horn players were replaced with alto sax player Dave Hindson. Dave had an admiration for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Desmond">Paul Desmond</a>, the smooth, golden-toned alto sax player who played with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Brubeck">Dave Brubeck</a>. While the fit with some of our rock-flavored fusion material was a little interesting, our more melodic material and slower ballads shone with incredible beauty under Dave. Meanwhile, Dion Sorrell had been developing more and more as one of Waves' front men, showing an ability to take electrifying solos, play some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Clarke">Stanley Clarke</a> like sounds on the bass, and write some unique compositions (two of which can be heard on the video).<br />
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It's still 1974. We did a big benefit concert for Amnesty International at La Verne College on August 2. The following weekend we played at the L.A. County fair on August 9, and an hour before the gig, watched Nixon's resignation speech on a small TV we brought with us. For a concert in a La Verne College lecture hall on November 15, we added flutist Lori De Long (photos below).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPhHD079SEPW6Kj9fCxvnO7q0_8ayMrB6sM5IQy8tZnpOHnEwo2d0Bz4ZgEc9N4DRAzNHkhuWui9RUn19KW8J8QTEQzPCIqnImJlYeO_M1vrDNF-p4JUuWVt0Uy5hb7V93vYFONboiyfFM/s1600/amnesty02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="800" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPhHD079SEPW6Kj9fCxvnO7q0_8ayMrB6sM5IQy8tZnpOHnEwo2d0Bz4ZgEc9N4DRAzNHkhuWui9RUn19KW8J8QTEQzPCIqnImJlYeO_M1vrDNF-p4JUuWVt0Uy5hb7V93vYFONboiyfFM/s320/amnesty02.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dave Hindson, Jimmy Dunn (roadie), Greg Sandell, Marc Hellman, Jon Rothe, Dion Sorrell (out of shot). At Founders Auditorium, La Verne University, benefit for Amnesty International, August 2, 1974. You can hear this concert <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-fgn41B69yGARbP62JevmyqumSczop0">here</a>.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgxaievG79s3Wi2aCZsZAAqopvf1c8no7TSlfXlqCsWM8xirPztKBEN4hhDgV1sMHMw0FJCXEqNeb0q23KgfLLdbzBC7LU8UmEq9I5UAI9jWIRJjAr461ZIf8U-i1r_2ga821K13UsgxpS/s1600/laFetra06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="935" data-original-width="1226" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgxaievG79s3Wi2aCZsZAAqopvf1c8no7TSlfXlqCsWM8xirPztKBEN4hhDgV1sMHMw0FJCXEqNeb0q23KgfLLdbzBC7LU8UmEq9I5UAI9jWIRJjAr461ZIf8U-i1r_2ga821K13UsgxpS/s400/laFetra06.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Greg Sandell, Dion Sorrell, Marc Hellman, Jon Rothe, Lori DeLong, Dave Hindson. At La Fetra Lecture Hall, La Verne University, November 15, 1974. You can hear this concert <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-fgn41B69ybPwjtfC2Oq_786Ajgiz_d">here</a>.</td></tr>
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1975 was "dark" for Waves, possibly related to it being my senior year in high school. In 1976 we started taking a new direction that let us adopt the "electric jazz orchestra" moniker. The Mahavishnu Orchestra released the album <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_the_Emerald_Beyond">Visions of the Emerald Beyond</a> which featured a female singer and orchestra, and that inspired us to start adding voice and lyrics to our music. So we added Liz Hangan as our singer, and Barbara Belmont (flute) and Andrew Levin (viola) as our mini orchestra. Martin Maudal replaced Marc Hellman on the drums. We played two gigs at Pitzer College, on February 20 in a dorm lounge and then at the Kohoutek Festival on April 17. After that we added more to our 'orchestra': Linda Jones and Claire Ann Sabino on flutes, Jenny Black and Lorene Ivory on violin. We played with that 11-piece ensemble on May 8 at La Verne College's drama venue, Dailey Theatre, June 10 at Glendora High School (which can be heard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-fgn41B69wR2O98Kfyf_uc9ybe-5cau">here</a>), and July 26 at Memorial Park in Claremont (with Laurie Smith trading for Linda Jones at flute). There was also a concert at the L.A. County Fair on September 24 about which all I can remember is Jon had a gold-top Les Paul stolen when a roadie guarding the equipment looked the other way.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOEjmR6-xdsthOdudOcDxrZWoTaXnhhiD46h7Ra6Ck_xf3TtkneaAgQZh_sFaOXR5-0LB-9Ttf8DIu_skW43yCezsboAbB673BaNpgT2riWmDC_lY3mdXCDNYzM-3WUhwLWXiCxpqzX9pq/s1600/daileyTheatre1975_20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="895" data-original-width="1600" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOEjmR6-xdsthOdudOcDxrZWoTaXnhhiD46h7Ra6Ck_xf3TtkneaAgQZh_sFaOXR5-0LB-9Ttf8DIu_skW43yCezsboAbB673BaNpgT2riWmDC_lY3mdXCDNYzM-3WUhwLWXiCxpqzX9pq/s400/daileyTheatre1975_20.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Liz Hangan, Dion Sorrell, Barbara Belmont, Claire Ann Sabino, Linda Jones, Jon Rothe, Greg Sandell, Martin Maudal, Andrew Levin, Jenny Black and Lorene Ivory. At Dailey Theatre, La Verne University, May 8, 1976</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsSlRhWJ5j75JN8ETO91vawPNXQyyA2sXV4yJNyXqlJAh3dRl8Ph8StF7k56_UMKMaEBXLedcVCxYc-5PPNJn4rPXvHTU87Qg2LHGjXJ5RgBP4YDfRl9SdAAo9id-spD-S96mMIkdhufei/s1600/pitzer04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="790" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsSlRhWJ5j75JN8ETO91vawPNXQyyA2sXV4yJNyXqlJAh3dRl8Ph8StF7k56_UMKMaEBXLedcVCxYc-5PPNJn4rPXvHTU87Qg2LHGjXJ5RgBP4YDfRl9SdAAo9id-spD-S96mMIkdhufei/s320/pitzer04.jpg" width="316" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Levin, Liz Hangan (blocked), Barbara Belmont and Martin Maudal (cut off). At Pitzer College, Feb 26, 1976. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFTzCXBv19hYb33yaED_q7uMadDPgErodzxPc58c23bsII2XOm8zYsCq_F9hAKsw6syJfNkGwPj_5cgxDdDBxN3TRq8G8NbEBc1Ikb_8ocjQ7et7H3dfI4NB97zTtVmt1VfhQoHBIgxT0V/s1600/memorialParkPanoramic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="1169" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFTzCXBv19hYb33yaED_q7uMadDPgErodzxPc58c23bsII2XOm8zYsCq_F9hAKsw6syJfNkGwPj_5cgxDdDBxN3TRq8G8NbEBc1Ikb_8ocjQ7et7H3dfI4NB97zTtVmt1VfhQoHBIgxT0V/s640/memorialParkPanoramic.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claire Ann Sandino, Laurie Smith, Barbara Belmont, Liz Hangan, Dion Sorrell, Andrew Levin, Martin Maudal, Jon Rothe, Greg Sandell, Lorene Ivory (hidden by music stand), Jenny Black. At Memorial Park, Claremont, CA, July 26, 1976. You can hear this concert <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-fgn41B69yOBIo9fFy4K6bZexFWPALf">here</a>.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTNlmxOy6gmIClmEOtWPegjytjabJH5zy1hu2mRqHBq-juyQ6dggLPAzcCBtvT9ejslFr6i9e74rbAWpxKvYLkRDIvND7b4mRk1kC348UTWijZZ9cV4-n5P3zKuvFhOvPJNoPbpwXrWaJG/s1600/wavesPoster06.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="800" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTNlmxOy6gmIClmEOtWPegjytjabJH5zy1hu2mRqHBq-juyQ6dggLPAzcCBtvT9ejslFr6i9e74rbAWpxKvYLkRDIvND7b4mRk1kC348UTWijZZ9cV4-n5P3zKuvFhOvPJNoPbpwXrWaJG/s320/wavesPoster06.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Poster from September 24, 1976 concert.</div>
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Two more concerts in 1976 still featured an orchestra configuration but with a few personnel changes. Dion Sorrell departed, and new singer Catherine Robinson took Liz Hangan's place. Barbara Belmont was moved to a front role on the stage, and in Claire Ann Sabino's place, two flutes were added, Karen Weinberger, and Anónima Desconocida. The string section grew to four with the addition of Kim Sigona on cello, and Martin Maudal was joined by drummer Tony Sandell, turning Waves into a percussion powerhouse. We gave a concert at the Griswolds Art Fair on a beautiful sun-kissed day on November 7, and Dailey Theatre again on December 18. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYGfzrxKAwfExPPiP4Q4VXgq9HMbRAMBCl5IPRndIdql_nOT-za5QmP7ezhz_G3EFwDQsJJwc97V8_7drzhRIq1LlJQssOU8zMPG_gHmcOsH7nEFZAz68XDl6K9jssCRPYtxWabHrUk5uy/s1600/griswolds_09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="797" data-original-width="800" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYGfzrxKAwfExPPiP4Q4VXgq9HMbRAMBCl5IPRndIdql_nOT-za5QmP7ezhz_G3EFwDQsJJwc97V8_7drzhRIq1LlJQssOU8zMPG_gHmcOsH7nEFZAz68XDl6K9jssCRPYtxWabHrUk5uy/s320/griswolds_09.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Martin Maudal (out of view), Jon Rothe, Greg Sandell, Lorene Ivory, Karen Weinberger, Jenny Black, Laurie Smith, Andrew Levin, Anónima Desconocida, Kim Sigona. The Griswolds Art Fair, Claremont, CA, November 7, 1976. You can hear this concert <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-fgn41B69z7z5zVOZgcvJRXQP9CQ8MA">here</a>.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-sP_O6R0SlALWLhr_o3TSnXY_bpGER1FFLbRtS0z8xaSVVP2UN6RdV96OPAWC41L9ZfVp-aPJnRyO_dgd7G_4SRyGQL2IHwPMypzgOsBEIvTZK7LWUSx3at_waIO-K78V-OA3v9Pkgjq6/s1600/griswolds_08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="615" data-original-width="616" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-sP_O6R0SlALWLhr_o3TSnXY_bpGER1FFLbRtS0z8xaSVVP2UN6RdV96OPAWC41L9ZfVp-aPJnRyO_dgd7G_4SRyGQL2IHwPMypzgOsBEIvTZK7LWUSx3at_waIO-K78V-OA3v9Pkgjq6/s320/griswolds_08.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barbara Belmont, Tony Sandell (behind on drums), Greg Sandell, Catherine Robinson, Martin Maudal (hidden, on drums), Jon Rothe. <span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> The Griswolds Art Fair, Claremont, CA,</span>November 7, 1976.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglVWEKU9r3bnHex2O8f-tyuM8Y29ulk5Ap1Jlz-_tRhwP1jPxiTvTs8KqlYMzDD0AlSs7D1WWnzOHgkC4_H_JvGv-ElTWuXHYLpIb5qNFTDXNV13SzD9oeQI1-hXylXiOZr7DcFaJnSwd2/s1600/wavesPoster03.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1118" data-original-width="890" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglVWEKU9r3bnHex2O8f-tyuM8Y29ulk5Ap1Jlz-_tRhwP1jPxiTvTs8KqlYMzDD0AlSs7D1WWnzOHgkC4_H_JvGv-ElTWuXHYLpIb5qNFTDXNV13SzD9oeQI1-hXylXiOZr7DcFaJnSwd2/s320/wavesPoster03.JPG" width="254" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poster for December 18, 1976 concert.</td></tr>
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In 1976 I had a kind of one-foot-in, one-foot-out status in Waves, as my classical piano studies at Cal State Los Angeles were getting the lion's share of my musical attention, and the geographical distance took its toll. Waves went on to do some gigs without me, with bassists Mark Silva or Victor Patron and guitarists Michael Ferruchi up through 1978, at the Boiler Room in Claremont June 8-11, 1976, the LA County Fair on September 16, 1978, and at the White House club in Hermosa Beach. By 1979 Waves had split and Jon started a new orchestra-like venture called Appollonicon.</div>
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<h3>
In Conclusion</h3>
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I've had fun doing the archeological work that it took to gather all the old recordings from cassette tapes (some of which required repairs with magnifying glass and scotch tape). Thank God we held onto them and the audio survived reasonably well, and now it's up on YouTube. Thanks to the late Bob Mathieson who was often the one who made sure a tape machine was running, the mike properly placed, and the levels well set. Thanks also to Jon Rothe for his many photos, tapes and facts, and for Barbara Belmont's eidetic memory for the who's, what's and when's of 40 years ago, and for her description of <i>P Jug</i>. Thanks to Andrew Levin for remembering the hospital mental ward gig.</div>
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There's so much good music here, it's a shame our labor of love did not receive the audience and distribution it deserved at the time. Maybe someday someone will take notice that Waves was emblematic of an extremely rich period of progressive rock and fusion jazz music.</div>
Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-59958686592620939452017-08-04T00:56:00.001-07:002017-08-04T00:56:09.438-07:00Remembering "Fool's Gold"In the mid 80's I moved to Ithaca, NY, home of Cornell University and Ithaca College. I didn't move for school; I just thought Ithaca would be a cool place to live. I played music, worked as a research assistant, put hours in at the Food Co-op, made friends, took walks in the rural surroundings, danced, ate vegetarian, and had lots of fun.<br />
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I was at a New England-style contradance when I saw <b>Fool's Gold</b> providing the music. They were interleaving Klezmer with celtic fiddle tunes and other traditional repertoire, and the audience was going nuts! I walked right up and asked if they needed a pianist. One rehearsal, and I was in!<br />
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So we were: Eric Pallant, clarinet; Paul Viscuso, accordion; Betsy Gamble and Willow Soltow Crane, fiddles; Ted Crane on percussion and calling; and me on piano.<br />
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A lot of the Klezmer energy came from Eric. First, he knew the Klezmer tradition: traditional songs by Sholom Secunda, The Barry Sisters, and energetic new instrumental tunes by Mike Bell. Second, he could make his clarinet wail like a banshee and quack like a duck. <br />
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Paul had a knack for composing and finding soulful, beautiful tunes with multi-part melodies that made for some wonderful romantic waltzes. He was also a titan of the keyboard accordion, and could make the dancers really move with his rhythm. He was the band's leader, too, and he did it with just two words: NEXT!! (for changing tunes) and OUT!! (for ending the dance set).<br />
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Betsy Gamble had incredible traditional fiddle chops, and Willow no slouch either, and together they worked out many double-fiddle arrangements that brought a lot grit to the songs with the rosin on their bows.<br />
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Ted called the dances, and added some rhythmic drive with his percussion. He played the bones, and, to make our Contradance-Klezmer fusion all the more absurd, played the Irish <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Bodhrán</span><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">. </b><br />
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Fool's Gold had a great tonal palette. Fiddle, clarinet, and accordion makes for a magical, sensual timbral quality when you play them on a melody, or in harmonies. <br />
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Something I love about Klezmer is that you almost can't exaggerate the craziness. One thing I used to do on the piano is an upward glissando from the lowest bass notes right before nailing the root on the downbeat. It makes a funny, growling, sweeping sound. In a lot of music I'll save such an effect for one key moment, because a little bit can go a long way. Not in Klezmer! You can do it over and over, and the music just gets funner and funnier.<br />
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Once we played at the annual Ithaca Festival. During one of our Klezmer numbers, the crowd spontaneously formed an Isreali-style circle dance. I love New York. <br />
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Life in Ithaca NY doesn't stay still much, because many people are on the move. People are in town for a few years for school, and then move on. In 1987, some of us were moving on to teaching jobs, others moving away for grad school elsewhere. So we gathered at Andy Ruina's house on Teeter Road and recorded using his wonderful baby grand piano with great growling bass notes. We did it in a short time, with no overdubs, and very few takes. If there was a blemish here or there, or one or two songs were maybe not quite ready for prime time, we laid them down anyway and put them out there. It reflected the spontaneous nature of Ithaca, our youth, and the joy of living in the moment.<br />
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I have just put all the tracks of our cassette (and later CD) "Contras From the Old Country" up on YouTube. The playlist of the full album is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-fgn41B69z9rIJuTDdO7-qzhmrXj3Q6">here</a>. Enjoy!Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-68130322276186705772017-06-29T15:12:00.002-07:002017-06-29T15:12:37.802-07:00New Roxy & Elsewhere video!<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxy_%26_Elsewhere">Roxy And Elsewhere </a>(1974) is held by many Frank Zappa fans to be his single best album, so it was a seismic event when the video of the live performance became available in the form of the Blu-Ray release <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Roxy-Movie-Blu-ray-Frank-Zappa/dp/B014RDS6RO">Roxy the Movie</a>.<br />
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Now new video from the same performance, but absent from the Blu-Ray release, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fczopWn9rIY">has come out on YouTube</a>. I don't know why they were excluded, but it could be due to the more "adult content" nature of two of the three songs, which in this 21 minute clip, are:<br />
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<ol>
<li><i>Pygmy Twilight</i>, featuring the erotic antics of Pamela Miller, a long term Zappa family friend and actress in Zappa projects. If you thought the "Brenda the Harlot" segment in Roxy the Movie (during the Be-Bop Tango of the Old Jazzmen's Church) was spicy, that's nothing compared to this. As a release, it leaves something to be desired because Ms. Miller's caresses interfered a fair amount with Napoleon Murphy Brock's singing.</li>
<li><i>Oh No</i>, a standalone version without being followed by <i>The Orange County Lumber Truck</i> as it often was. </li>
<li><i>Dickie's Such an Asshole.</i> Performed as an encore, with minor 'audience participation' at the end. It's a shame this Zappa song is lesser-known, as it's a good one. </li>
</ol>
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<br />Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-71446289767253879952017-06-26T20:14:00.001-07:002017-06-26T20:14:59.066-07:00"Don't Die" Twin Peaks s03e06 Spoiler SummaryWhat could be more Lynch-ian that doubling down on frustrating your audience?<br />
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Kyle McLachlan's acting talents are still being spent on the nearly-a-zombie "Dougie" character. The needle has moved just so slightly in that we learn he's an Idiot Savant at accounting fraud. Though a series of lines, doodles and drawings of ladders, he was able to show his boss something actionable in some case files. <br />
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I suspect that Lynch is going to finesse this all in the end, and here is my theory: Agent Cooper is actually sentient inside Dougie. He's stuck inside there just like he was stuck in the red room, the intermediary limbo dimension, and the glass cube. Like prisoners of war who find ways to communicate through taps and scratches, Coop has found a way to manifest crude actions through Dougie. When Coop finally comes out we'll learn he's been solving crimes and tying together the loose pieces of this season's numerous plots.<br />
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And Lynch is still introducing them. We have a semi-midget hit man who kills with an ice-pick, a psycho organized crime boss, and a disgruntled underling of same who runs over a child in his truck, and the return of the trailer park manager from "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me."<br />
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And so I'll solider on, hoping for better in episode 7.Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-59715353475277502112017-06-12T15:01:00.001-07:002017-06-12T15:01:28.990-07:00Twin Peaks s03e05 Spoiler RecapThe title of this episode is "Vegas, Baby."<div>
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Not the best episode so far. The dangerous-Agent-Cooper-in-jail story line has moved along an inch or two, when Cooper uses his one phone call to somehow (with touch tones alone) hack into the jail's alarm system. We see the incapacitated-Agent-Cooper-as-Dougie at work (he's in Life Insurance), but it all seems for comic effect; story line barely moved at all.</div>
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Most of the rest of the episode is devoted to short vignettes introducing new characters with new threads, which we know from Lynch' Twin Peaks work in general (especially season 2), might be relevant, or might be false leads. For some reason Lynch likes producing that kind of fatigue in his audience.</div>
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Specifically: we meet a young couple who is sponging off of Shelly, who still works at the Double R Diner ("NOW, Shelly"...<b>that</b> Shelly), a misogynist/drug dealer who hangs out at the Bang! Bang! bar, and a military career gal who's going to get the "Area 52" branch of the military involved in the ongoing murder investigation in South Dakota.</div>
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There is one bright spot in the Dougie story. Although he has a long way to go to recovery, the incapacitated-Agent-Cooper-as-Dougie shows momentary sparks of recognition. Every now and then someone says a word or phrase that strikes a chord in Dougie's FBI self, such as "case file": he stops, repeats the word, and seems to think about it. The best one is the effect the word "coffee" has on him, that really gets a rise! He actually gets his hands on a cup of Starbucks and suckles it likes it's a baby bottle containing life itself.</div>
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The brightest spot in the episode is our learning of what Dr. Lawrence Jacoby has been doing with himself. We've seen him receiving a shipment of standard hardware store shovels via UPS. Later, he painstakingly spraypainted them gold. And now we see that he hosts, under the name "Dr. Amp", a periodic video/podcast show about conspiracy theories, the evils of government, and the poisoning of our environment by multinational corporations. He's got a great audience: Nadine, the eye-patched wife of Big Ed Hurley watches. And Jerry Horne, the ne'er-do-well younger brother of Northern Lodge owner Benjamin Horne, tokes up while listening. </div>
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And how does Dr. Amp fund his show? He offers his audience a solution: they have to "dig themselves out of the shit." He even shows himself shoveling himself out of a waist-deep pit of brown muck, with what else but his $29.99 Gold Shit-Digging Shovel, available by mail, Order Now! By God, Lynch still has the comedy touch.</div>
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-70259944142493116382017-06-11T19:29:00.003-07:002017-06-11T23:14:16.562-07:00Twin Peaks s03e04 Spoiler Recap<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">There's a Lynch humor piece in this episode. You don't laugh at it. It's only funny in the way some SNL skits are badly acted but hilarious in their premise.</span><br />
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Back in Twin Peaks, the sheriff's station still has klutzy, whiny-voiced Lucy working the front desk, and hapless (and useless as ever), deputy Andy Brennan, sporting an absurdly high cowlick, along with a middle-aged paunch. Not being terribly good actors, and lacking their youthful charm of the 90's, their return hasn't been particularly delightful. The new element, though, is that they have a son named Wally Brando. In fact, in this episode they are just receiving the news that Wally Brando (always mentioned by full name) has just arrived in town. You see, Wally Brando is a soul of the road. He rides his motorcycle hither and yon following his heart on an ongoing discovery of the American spirit. Lucy and Andy are proud of him for it the same way that the parents would be for an olympic medal or Nobel prize winner.</div>
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Joke 1 is that Wally Brando is decked out in a perfect replica of Marlon Brando's biker from The Wild One (1953), and joke 2 is that he's played by Michael Cera. Joke 3, the cruelest of all, is that Lynch graces us with a five minute (feels like twenty) soliloquy by Wally Brando, motionless, with Andy and Lucy looking on admiringly from his side, a seriously-delivered but cliché- and pablum-laden discourse on the truth and goodness of the great American highway.</div>
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Like I say, noone's laughing yet it's funny as hell. Michael Cera doesn't even ride the motorcycle, just sits on it. </div>
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The rest of the episode is similarly light in flavor, compared to the macabre dimension-travelling of the previous. Agent Cooper's earthly persona is still mentally incapacitated, and having replaced the Cooper lookalike "Dougie", he is still assumed to be Dougie by those around him. He pretty much just bumbles around like Peter Seller's Chance the gardener from Being There.</div>
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The dangerous hood Cooper character is now in jail, having been found with firearms and drugs in his wrecked car. This turns out to be the Cooper that the FBI locates, not Dougie. They have an interview with him, in which the jailed Cooper does a very leaden impression of the real Agent Dale Cooper, with obviously rehearsed lines, which fools the FBI not one bit. In the meantime, we're given a major reveal about who this Cooper is (although it's been pretty strongly hinted). It's Bob. </div>
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<i style="font-size: 12.8px;">He is Bob! Eager for fun. He wears a smile. Everybody run. </i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 12.8px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">- One-Armed Man, Season 1 </span><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Somewhere back in Twin Peaks history there was a scene where Cooper stared in a mirror and suddenly thrust his forehead right into the glass. In the cracked, bloodied mirror, his reflection is Bob. We also see the two of them together in the red room, laughing maniacally together like satanic frat brothers. So the conclusion is that Bob took over Cooper's body, trapped Cooper's real identity in the Red Room, and has been running amok for the last 25 years. Something's doesn't line up, though; Bob isn't inhabiting a being for evil (such as killing one's own Prom Queen daughter), he's more of a hit man for organized crime.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Andy Brennan, Wally Brando and Lucy Brennan</span></div>
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-41817791520589665132017-06-11T19:24:00.000-07:002017-06-11T20:38:21.073-07:00Twin Peaks s03e03 Spoiler Recap<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
In episode 3, there are actually three Kyle McLachlan characters. Dale Cooper, FBI agent wearing his familiar black suit, is trapped in the other-worldly red room. #2 is the hard boiled criminal character, also referred to as Cooper, and involved in FBI work. Number three is a kind of duncey character named Dougie who lives in Las Vegas and sees prostitutes, but we've only seen him just lately, and briefly.</div>
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The entire episode (1 hour) is dedicated to showing the movement of characters in and out of their dimensions, and how they swap bodies. We know from other films that Lynch loves to move the camera into other worlds. The camera will follow the sound coming from a telephone earpiece, and go right through the holes in into the electronics. Or the camera will travel through walls to show the spaces inbetween rooms, with dust, drywall matter, and rodents.</div>
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So here Lynch seems to have put quite a lot of thought into the experience of being in a strange dimension. The black-suited Cooper leaves the red room and enters into a creepy limbo. There is a woman with missing eyes who can't speak, in a room with a strange steampunk apparatus in a wall panel, and a metal door somebody is heavily pounding on from the outside. They climb up a ladder, open a hatch and climb out onto a platform suspended in outer space, very much like <i>Le Petit Prince</i> standing on one of those little planets, but more terrifying. The woman falls of the platform and presumably falls for eternity. Eventually Cooper climbs back down, and a woman in red by a fireplace advises that he must go NOW. Cooper ends up passing through the steampunk apparatus, painfully...and leaving behind his shoes.</div>
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The other Cooper, and Dougie, back on earth, experience extreme vomiting. Dougie shrinks to nothing and black-suited Cooper comes out of a wall socket in the form of a black gas, eventually appearing in solid form laying on the floor. His faculties haven't recovered, and he is a Rain Man-style imbecile. He ends up in a casino, and starting with a $5 bill, wins enormous payouts from every slot machine he tries. He eventually gets picked up by the authorities, and he's reported to FBI headquarters where Gordon Cole, the hard-of-hearing senior FBI guy played by David Lynch himself, celebrates the news of Cooper's final return.</div>
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The tough-guy Cooper ends up in a car wreck, and we don't see what's become of him physically.</div>
Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-36762115794550652592017-06-11T19:20:00.003-07:002017-06-11T20:14:36.498-07:00Twin Peaks returns! Season 3, episodes 1-2 spoiler recap<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">I just finished episode 1 of the new TP, which is two hours of David Lynch amazingness. It's real "Holy Fuck" stuff. However it is not a return to the goofy fun of the original TP. In fact, of the many story lines, few have any evident connection to the Laura Palmer story. The short bits that have original cast members are sometimes weak and perfunctory, as though DL is using a TP season three as a thinly veiled opportunity for doing new work that interests him more. But in other ways not so much...too soon to judge. In sum, this is very possibly one of DL's great works and deserves to be taken seriously. But it's also true that if you're not up for a lot disturbing horror material (masterfully done), TP season 3 may not be for you.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">I'll say this about the "Dale Cooper" in this episode. He's not just a linear extrapolation of the quirky, one dimensional FBI man of years ago. He's more the product of someone who has had dramatic life changes and choices over the course of 25 years, i.e. like real life. And in keeping with Kyle McLachlan's acting weight, he is carrying a lot of the film.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Log Lady appears to have been filmed "in time" before the actor's demise, but her illness is evident in her scenes.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Some actresses with girlish charm in their twenties keep it on into their fifties, but Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer) doesn't seem to be one of them. She and Dale Cooper are in dream sequences in the red room once again, but they don't work as well.</span><br />
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So the thing about Dale Cooper (or whoever Kyle M. is supposed to be...not clear)<br />
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is he's now a real "heavy", a very dangerous guy, who has various shady thugs people working for him and "gun moll" style girlfriends, all of whom are under constant threat and intimidation by him. Picture below. He wears a leather jacket, long hair, speaks in a low-pitched gruff voice, his scenes are all in seedy hotels and restaurants and rustic lodges, and has a bit of a southern air to him, ...someone joked that it's "Twin Peaks meets Duck Dynasty." So he seems like a criminal, but at the end of episode one he gets on a computer and logs into an FBI portal, so he must actually be in some kind of deep cover.</div>
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Log Lady is sad to watch, as you can see from the pic below, she really was very ill when they shot her scenes. She's holding the log in that pic. She is instructing "Hawk" (Sheriff Truman's spiritual American Indian deputy) with clues (i.e. what her log is telling her) about where to find things, over the phone.</div>
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Anyone of our age group has gotta detest the actor who plays James Hurley's ability to defy age! 23 yrs old then, 50 now, he looks like a hipster single guy in his 30's.</div>
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One more thing, there are lots of clips from the original season 1 series, and the very opening clip is original footage of Laura Palmer in the red room saying "I'll see you again in 25 years." Yes, that really happened!</div>
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They also re-enact, in their current characters, a famous bit of Red Room dialog from season 1:</div>
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<i>Cooper: "Are you Laura Palmer?"</i></div>
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<i>Laura: "If I feel like I know her, but... (in agony) sometimes my arms bend back."</i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Dale Cooper, the heavy</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBudXkvXF0TEu8pt3TS4AEqyH4lDgQ2TsdMMhUrVupCXFhCzYqQVr2hyphenhyphentvbuTBlgM9Qsnt1mwL_gcRRHjvllH1Nwm-sP-_QMNb3sio_P2wmomCHlXKXO9SL6CiQcbszmnhRmaB6jIoti3x/s1600/loglady.w710.h473+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: right;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="710" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBudXkvXF0TEu8pt3TS4AEqyH4lDgQ2TsdMMhUrVupCXFhCzYqQVr2hyphenhyphentvbuTBlgM9Qsnt1mwL_gcRRHjvllH1Nwm-sP-_QMNb3sio_P2wmomCHlXKXO9SL6CiQcbszmnhRmaB6jIoti3x/s320/loglady.w710.h473+%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Log Lady, passing on clues from her Log to Deputy Hawk</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Log Lady as we knew and loved</span></div>
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James Hurley, defying age</div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> Deputy Hawk</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Laura Palmer</span></div>
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-18084145225096240392017-02-23T09:41:00.000-08:002017-02-23T16:57:05.108-08:00The Washing Machine<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
I recently started collecting Boogie Woogie tracks off of YouTube and learned some interesting stuff along the way.</div>
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I started out thinking about BW as being some early form of rock and got excited about finding songs from 1930's and earlier that had BW traits, thinking they were extraordinary gems. Then I found out (see Wikipedia for this) that BW goes back to even before the twenties, and indeed, is as old as jazz itself.</div>
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Next I learned that BW became kind of a cultural virus around 1947, and virtually everyone was recording at least one BW song. Almost every song from that period has 'Boogie' in the title, usually "XXX's Boogie". All the hitmakers of the day have BW songs, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, etc. Check out YouTube and you'll find scores of BW playlists.</div>
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But it gets more interesting than that. BW began in east Texas logging camps and developed organically with the expansion of railroad. Ground zero was (is) Marshall, TX, where they celebrate that heritage to this day. BW style in Marshall remained unchanged, but at each train stop (logging camp) the style became more evolved. You could estimate the distance from Marshall by how evolved the BW style sounded in the bar you were in. BW pianists spent their years traveling from camp to camp on the RR. And to state the obvious, sonically, BW reflected the sound of the engines and clatter of trains.</div>
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Pinning down the beginning of rock is nigh impossible. For some odd reason there are people who want to say that Ike Turner's 'Rocket 88' is the first rock song, apparently due more to its popularity than its innovation. Infectious dance beat and riotous swing? Hell, the very earliest BW of the 20's has that. Sexual suggestivity? BW lyrics sometimes exhort the women to shake their asses. Did BW walking basslines get replaced with something else? Nope, early rock by Elvis still has standard BW basslines. Electric guitars? Now you're talking. I would say that the earliest BW having an electric guitar is a good candidate for pioneer rock. That brings Western Swing (Bob Wills, Spade Cooley) into the fold.</div>
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The most insightful statement I've ever heard about the origins of Rock was by Robbie Robertson of The Band, in the film The Last Waltz. It's country...it's Louisiana gumbo and Cajun...it's blues...all of it. It's genesis was in religious revival meetings and county fairs, where late into the night after the community leaders had gone home, you'd have musicians throwing these styles all together in unorthodox ways, and doing crazy stage antics (e.g. Chuck Berry's duck walk).</div>
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Something I love in the earliest rock is a particular sonic quality in the rhythm section that I call the Washing Machine. The recipe seems to be double bass (acoustic), piano and drums with brush sticks. When they're playing really tight, the three fuse into a single rhythm-machine timbre. A wacky, anthropomorphized Washing Machine drawn by R. Crumb comes to mind. You hear it on a lot of early Elvis tracks.</div>
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Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-80061419715127852412009-05-15T16:03:00.000-07:002009-05-15T14:04:10.533-07:00Solving Character Set Problems: ASCII, ISO-8859, WinLatin1 and UTF-8<span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Character Sets and Feeds</span> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">I work for a company which receives huge incoming text feeds from our clients, which we filter, transform and massage to go out to the major search engines. Much of the work of cleaning incoming feeds consists of replacing undesirable characters (e.g. fancy foreign characters and symbols) that come from the client. For search engines we have to provide the l</span><span style="font-size:100%;">owest common denominator of character type, plain ASCII. There are many ways these "bad" characters creep into incoming feeds. Some are mainstream ISO 8859 or UTF-8 characters that are accepted by most display systems, but are still undesirable for search engines. Less likely but still possible are errors caused by the use of a legacy non-printing control character</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. By far the most common offender comes from violation of ISO 8859 conventions that have come into practice, known as "Extended Ascii" (o</span><span style="font-size:100%;">f which Microsoft's WinLatin1 table is the most notorious offender). This page explains the major character set types, along with a little history, and the problems that they cause to feeds.</span></p> <h3>7-bit Ascii (ISO 646)</h3> <p>The original ASCII table, a 128-value (7-bit) character set is formally known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_646" title="Wikipedia page on ISO 646" rel="nofollow">ISO 646</a>. In fact it remains the only real "Ascii table" (more on this later). This portion has survived unchanged as the beginning portion of all major character sets (even the ones tampered with by Microsoft).</p> <p>Below is the printable portion of ISO 646, characters 32 through 127 (the end of the table).<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu2MuEo_5g6sqqfWU5n6qXCuF1gAhc1Rr5bJQFySRE_ki6iS1GYOGPDkzmDQa5qy2EhX7ruY0-Q9Hkf04iBoeZ0wmqxqsbmwhtKHXh-eKQl2PC0ivwAT2LMDEEvMWeXlUpbtMbUgmrtUVL/s1600-h/sevenBitAsciiPrintable.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 350px; height: 515px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu2MuEo_5g6sqqfWU5n6qXCuF1gAhc1Rr5bJQFySRE_ki6iS1GYOGPDkzmDQa5qy2EhX7ruY0-Q9Hkf04iBoeZ0wmqxqsbmwhtKHXh-eKQl2PC0ivwAT2LMDEEvMWeXlUpbtMbUgmrtUVL/s400/sevenBitAsciiPrintable.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318325794463451186" border="0" /></a></p><p>Below is the non-visible characters section of ISO 646, the first 32 characters of the table. Note that only a handful are in modern use; the rest are historic relics.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0PCy5HtNCoOyUYB-4vzXKuiG5bm-THsfBXVtBKpSAD1Eg9ehHMsu2LSvsVIhOGhcMnkpFM5KMaSSwZdpQyVT4Nho918ggkVg8h3zdls-O-ETpgIJ8fdbPpx2kZk0gV9Edg1DR8ZltEKS6/s1600-h/nonPrintableAsciiHex00to31.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 275px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0PCy5HtNCoOyUYB-4vzXKuiG5bm-THsfBXVtBKpSAD1Eg9ehHMsu2LSvsVIhOGhcMnkpFM5KMaSSwZdpQyVT4Nho918ggkVg8h3zdls-O-ETpgIJ8fdbPpx2kZk0gV9Edg1DR8ZltEKS6/s400/nonPrintableAsciiHex00to31.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318329131292245362" border="0" /></a></p> <table class="infoMacro"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/images/icons/emoticons/information.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></td><td>In feeds from our clients, mistaken input of legacy control characters is rare, although recently one client reported seeing 0x1D ("Group separator GS Left Arrow") in a feed.
<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-8bitCharacterTablesandISO8859"></a>8-bit Character Tables and ISO 8859</h3> <p>Ascii remains to this day, strictly speaking, a 7-bit table of 128 characters and no more. However, since in modern times characters are rendered with 8-bit bytes, people have wanted to take advantage of what is available on their machine in the area of that top bit. Folklore, common practice, and whatever happens to be on the machine one is using, has mislead many into thinking some universal 8-bit ascii table exists. But in reality the 8th bit portion has been a playground for whatever people wanted it to be.</p> <p>To answer this havoc, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859" title="Wikipedia page on ISO 8859" rel="nofollow">ISO 8859</a> defined a variety of 8-bit character tables cover most of the world's needs. For every ISO 8859 table, the 7-bit portion is ISO 646 Ascii. The best-known of the ISO 8859 tables, at least among the English speaking and Western European world, is ISO 8859-1, also known as "Latin 1." To some people, this is "the" Ascii table. The eight bit portion is shown below.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW7sNTDjsY8CDsvJKj9xotaOYjUsGMsQlz3qc_qdR5xnRDlutMuW-Z4riDyBmI0SPKhQpSGCEr14Re-GwSKumb-HZ87zlGb2HC4kcMOtRz53JyyeKG42HTURGMvXSWNQ4EHDdvwsGOs4Yu/s1600-h/ISO-8859-Latin1_better.jpg">
<br /></a></p> <p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw7LN6KS_eOIamACEjnJDoaBq3WuR1aK_V9vgBI1QnkBlaolS6rqikw2h2xY1Aa7Kamdl55w4NzJd8ZXaW8ExePeX6BLLWnNsXh38wTI_ZVp5Qf_GCaPUCz5hVU4jOIJNgeVGCuGSywywu/s1600-h/ISO-8859-Latin1_better.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 307px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw7LN6KS_eOIamACEjnJDoaBq3WuR1aK_V9vgBI1QnkBlaolS6rqikw2h2xY1Aa7Kamdl55w4NzJd8ZXaW8ExePeX6BLLWnNsXh38wTI_ZVp5Qf_GCaPUCz5hVU4jOIJNgeVGCuGSywywu/s400/ISO-8859-Latin1_better.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336157814572374082" border="0" /></a></p> <p>Note that there is an unused portion (greyed out) of the table between characters 128 and 159. Take special note of this; as you'll see below this special area becomes a huge area of controversy (Extended Ascii). </p><p>Other ascii tables in the ISO 8859 collection include Baltic, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Turkish character sets, allowing each country to adopt the appropriate table, and software manufacturers to write compliant products. (You can see the various ISO 8859 tables <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/iso.mspx" title="Links to several ISO 8859 tables" rel="nofollow">here</a>.) </p><div class="panelMacro"><table class="infoMacro"><colgroup><col width="24"><col></colgroup><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/images/icons/emoticons/information.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></td><td>At my company, a feed using ISO 8859 8-bit characters will need to be cleaned before going out to search engines. If they are ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) characters, the mapping to a substitute character is well-known and easily fixed. We do this with Perl scripts and a simple mapping table. Another possible problem would be if we had a client that is using some ISO-8859 table <span style="font-style: italic;">other</span> than Latin1 (for instance, a client from Scandinavia might use the Baltic table, ISO 8859-4). In that case we would have to create a new mapping table. Worse yet, files cannot identify themselves as being any particular ISO-8859 subversion, so if a client doesn't announce the table they are using, we would only find that out by seeing unusual errors. For example, seeing frequent use of a copyright symbol © in unexpected places would be a clue that some non Latin1 ISO-8859 table was in use.</td></tr></tbody></table></div>
<br />It's not clear why ISO 8859 prohibited this area. In one table I saw, each of the codes were described as being a control character of some sort.<h3>'Extended Ascii' and Windows 1252</h3>Microsoft couldn't resist using that empty area of the ISO-8859 tables, so they went and created their own 'extended version' of the ISO 8859 table set; you can see them all <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/WinCP.mspx" title="Links to Microsoft's ISO 8859 extensions" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Their version of ISO 8859's Latin-1 table goes under the name WinLatin1 or <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1252.mspx" title="Microsoft's most commonly used Ascii table" rel="nofollow">Windows 1252</a>. The 8th-bit portion of this table is shown below, with the characters Microsoft inserted into ISO 8859's empty area marked in yellow.
<br /><h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-'ExtendedAscii'andWindows1252"></a></h3> <h3><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6Alc-INDe4WlGe43jrBjl4xrihiWJlyIkHQGeyNEtvEAesFeA5abpf_j_NGDbC1zaKAQ9z3G3PNWUFs-l_jWN0zvbDDnB6gOd6Qrs-wGHSM3E8lMDN71nMspMjs98mlOeQxGWRdTT6jt/s1600-h/windows1252_better.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 326px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6Alc-INDe4WlGe43jrBjl4xrihiWJlyIkHQGeyNEtvEAesFeA5abpf_j_NGDbC1zaKAQ9z3G3PNWUFs-l_jWN0zvbDDnB6gOd6Qrs-wGHSM3E8lMDN71nMspMjs98mlOeQxGWRdTT6jt/s400/windows1252_better.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336155026418169138" border="0" /></a></h3> <p> Due to the popularity of the Microsoft Office family of software products, WinLatin1 has achieved an unfortunate hegemony in the computer world. In the competition for the elusive "8-bit Ascii" table, WinLatin1 is ISO 8859-1's chief competitor. However, a sizable portion of the computer world (Macs and Unix flavored s</p> <p>ystems) have settled on the real ISO 8859 standard, so problems occur when people paste, email or otherwise transmit text made from a Microsoft product to be displayed on a Unix or Mac box. When you see question marks or 'ascii garbage' in a file when you're not expecting it, you have probably been WinLatin1-rolled.</p> <p>The term "Extended Ascii" has become the name to describe the format of any file which contains a mixture of ISO 8859 plus characters in the forbidden zone of bytes 128-159.</p> <p>So what did Microsoft do with that precious block of 32 characters it stole from ISO 8859? Four characters comprise the notorious MS-Word 'smart quotes' (single and double: ', ', " and "). On the other hand they were remarkably prescient in including the Euro currency symbol (€) years before the currency was adopted. There are a number of punctuation and editorial marks or symbols, such as daggers († and ‡), ellipses (...), the list bullet (•) and several others that perhaps are used in European languages (ˆ, ‹, ›, and „). Many choices are totally inscrutable, however. Why define the comma-lookalike "‚"? Of what use can the few foreign alphabetical characters of Œ, œ (used in old German and old Romance languages), Ÿ (used in Greek transcription and rarely in French), Š, š, Ž and ž (Estonian, Finnish and Czech characters) be?</p> <div class="panelMacro"><table class="infoMacro"><colgroup><col width="24"><col></colgroup><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/images/icons/emoticons/information.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></td><td>Use of the "forbidden zone" of ISO 8859 accounts for most of the cleanup tasks in clean scripts at my company. The trademark sign (™) is a favorite of many of our clients, since it is unavailable in ISO 8859-1. The list bullet and daggers are also occasionally found in feeds. Most likely the source of these characters is from client use of Windows Office software. </td></tr></tbody></table></div> <h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-UCS/UnicodeISO10646"></a>UCS/Unicode - ISO 10646</h3> <p>The next evolutionary step after ISO 8859 is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Character_Set" title="Wikipedia page on UCS" rel="nofollow">UCS</a> (Universal Character Set, ISO 10646). It dispenses with the approach of multiple table sets for individual languages in favor of a single giant table of all possible characters. Its table size of 2^31 (2,147,483,648) characters encompasses the character sets of virtually all the languages of the world. It goes by the more common name of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode" title="Wikipedia page on Unicode" rel="nofollow">Unicode</a>, after the name of the <a href="http://www.unicode.org/" title="Home page of the Unicode Consortium" rel="nofollow">consortium</a> that merged with UCS.</p> <p>The first 256 characters of Unicode are completely backward compatible to ISO-8859-1. Unicode's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Latin_unicode_block" title="Wikipedia page of Unicode sequence 0 to 127" rel="nofollow">first 128 characters</a> are classic ISO 646 7-bit Ascii set, while <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin-1_Supplement_unicode_block" title="Wikipedia page showing Unicode characters 128 to 255" rel="nofollow">Unicode characters 128-255</a> is the top half of ISO-8859-1 Latin1.</p> <h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-FileFormatsvs.ByteSequences"></a>File Formats vs. Byte Sequences</h3> <p>With a character set of Unicode's size, single byte sequences with a maximum numberic range of 0-255 can obviously no longer be the only way in which a file stores text. UCS has spawned two different byte-sequence conventions, UCS-2 and UCS-4. UCS-2 files have two byte characters, and UCS-4 files have 4-byte characters.</p> <h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-UTF8"></a>UTF-8</h3> <p> </p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" title="Wikipedia page on UTF-8" rel="nofollow">UTF-8</a> is a byte-based sequence convention for representing Unicode. It can have 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, 5- or 6-byte long characters, changing when and where it needs to. It is an efficient solution for English and other Western European languages that spend much of their time in the first 128, one-byte wide unicode characters. In fact, English UTF-8 files will often consist of nothing but one-byte sequences, no different than an Ascii file. Because of this UTF-8 is nicely backwards compatible to ASCII, meaning a file can be UTF-8 but still work on older systems that support ISO-8859 or earlier standards. Even when a UTF-8 file does use larger width Unicode characters, it is still a "one octet encoding unit" (single byte) encoding standard, as opposed to UCS-2 and UCS-4 which are two- and four-octet encoding unit standards. </p><div class="panelMacro"><table class="infoMacro"><colgroup><col width="24"><col></colgroup><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/images/icons/emoticons/information.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></td><td>UTF-8 should always be spelled as shown. Referring to UTF-8 as utf-8, utf8, UTF8, etc. is considered bad form.</td></tr></tbody></table></div>
<br />Unlike UCS-2 and UCS-4, which represent the higher order values of Unicode directly in binary with 16-bit and 32-bit data units, UTF-8 remains a "one octet encoding unit" (single byte). How does it represent Unicode values higher than 255? It encodes them with byte sequences of variable length. The values for these encoding bytes all lie within the range 128-255, perhaps not coincidentally the high bit portion of the 8-bit byte. In UTF-8, none of the values in the 128-255 range represent an actual character. This range is broken down to sub-ranges of bytes which are designated as "signifiers" for the beginning of 2-, 3-, 4-, 5- or 6-byte sequences. See the table below. Bytes in the red region, hexadecimal C2 through DF, are used to announce the beginning of a two-byte sequence; bytes in the blue region a three-byte sequence; and so on, to the orange region for 6-byte sequences. The characters in the purple region are the data values that can follow the signifiers. By using just these values, the complete set of Unicode characters that comprise two or more b yte s can be constructed.
<br /><h3><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnhuyBYGc1cMwbYghax0Ry2ZkReoOzmlZg5KOHrYucq_k2QOyRJ-lyFerUtJKHLJSTIOQLNFoZgQC2mm1SMEkQietWESsytnogC4hfn2PJzmgKVP6u3-we53hJkjMlOZCgM1fSDEKZPUm3/s1600-h/UTF-8c.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 164px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnhuyBYGc1cMwbYghax0Ry2ZkReoOzmlZg5KOHrYucq_k2QOyRJ-lyFerUtJKHLJSTIOQLNFoZgQC2mm1SMEkQietWESsytnogC4hfn2PJzmgKVP6u3-we53hJkjMlOZCgM1fSDEKZPUm3/s400/UTF-8c.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318331167547727170" border="0" /></a></h3> The greyed out areas are prohibited values in UTF-8 (although there is an exception that will be discussed later). <p>For single byte characters, UTF-8 simply uses the first 128 Unicode characters, the ones that correspond exactly to classic Ascii 7-bit ISO 646. No special signifier announces a single byte sequence.</p> <p>An easier way to understand the multi-byte signifier approach is by looking at the bit patterns in their binary values, as shown below. Two-byte sequences can be announced with with any byte having 110 as the top three bits; three-byte sequences can be announced with any byte having 1110 as the top four bits; and so on.</p><h3><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvuvu1xGWf9xCQk2X-a-Hu2IykGe80hyphenhyphenGLrQxlzNngaWtqx8ECTE7yvF_gUnTxcETfMfqhdUXH0abylM-gEAJWIelnviMr26McfIpcx6-cwKPqbR_lEzXZjG70_Sy_qTjzMvphXqlHUXg/s1600-h/UTF-8_binarya.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 97px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvuvu1xGWf9xCQk2X-a-Hu2IykGe80hyphenhyphenGLrQxlzNngaWtqx8ECTE7yvF_gUnTxcETfMfqhdUXH0abylM-gEAJWIelnviMr26McfIpcx6-cwKPqbR_lEzXZjG70_Sy_qTjzMvphXqlHUXg/s400/UTF-8_binarya.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318332239096942898" border="0" /></a></h3><table class="infoMacro"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/images/icons/emoticons/information.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></td><td>Cleaning a file of any UTF-8 multibyte sequences is complicated by the fact that you have to "look ahead" in the byte stream to determine whether a byte is the start of a multibyte UTF-8 sequence, or an isolated ISO 8859 character. When a UTF-8 sequence is found, the n-byte sequence must be replaced with a single ascii character (if the appropriate substitute is known), or simply removed (if no substitute is known). In practice, our clients use a very small repertoire of symbols that are easily replaced (trademark, registered, bullet, etc.).</td></tr></tbody></table>If one wanted to to extract the Unicode sequence numbers that fall in the above 255 range from a UTF-8 file, reverse computation would be required, since the Unicode sequence numbers above 255 are encoded. <h1><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-Examples"></a>Examples</h1> <h6><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-"></a></h6> <h4><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-WorkingUTF8Sequences"></a>Working UTF-8 Sequences</h4> <p>Copyright symbol: <span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><b>0xC2</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0xA9</b></span></p> <p>Not-equals sign: <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE2</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x89 0xA0 </b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>(Unicode char</em></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>U+2262)</em></span></p> <p>Korean text: <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xED</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x95 0x9C</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xEA</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0xB5 0xAD</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xEC</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x96 0xB4 </b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>(Unicode chars</em></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>U+D55C U+AD6D U+C5B4)</em></span></p> <p>Japanese text: <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE6</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x97 0xA5</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE6</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x9C 0xAC</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE8</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0xAA 0x9E </b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>(Unicode chars</em></span> <em>U+65E5 U+672C U+8A9E)</em>
<br /></p> <h4><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-WorkingISO88521(Latin1)Sequences"></a>Working ISO 8852-1 (Latin1) Sequences</h4> <p> 0x31 0x32 0x33 0xE6 0xD8 0xC6 <em>(1,2,3, æ, Ø, Æ)</em>
<br /></p> <h4><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-MangledSequences"></a>Mangled Sequences</h4> <p>0x31 0x32 0x33 0x99 (1,2,3, winlatin1 trademark)</p> <p>0x31 0x32 0x33 0xE6 0xD8 0xC6 (1,2,3, three Latin1 chars, one winlatin1 char)</p> <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE6</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x97 0xA5</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE6</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0x9C 0xAC</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b>0xE8</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><b>0xAA 0x9E</b></span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>0xE6 0xE8 0x31</b></span> <em>(UTF-8 Japanese text followed by misused signifiers)</em>
<br /></p> <h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-HowDoYouDetectaFile'sEncoding?"></a>How Do You Detect a File's Encoding?</h3> <p> None of the character tables discussed so far (with a possible exception of UTF-8, discussed below) have any convention for a self-identifying start block or header. It has to be done based on some sort of pattern. In Unix, the 'file' utility (or 'type' on some versions of *nix) is a pretty good tool for identifying the character table type. Here's the pattern that 'file' seems to use:</p> <table class="confluenceTable"><tbody> <tr> <th class="confluenceTh"> When: </th> <th class="confluenceTh"> Unix 'file' Reports: </th> </tr> <tr> <td class="confluenceTd"> All characters are 7 bit </td> <td class="confluenceTd"> "ASCII text" </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="confluenceTd"> ISO 8859 8-bit characters (with or without 7-bit ascii mixed in) </td> <td class="confluenceTd"> "ISO-8859 text" </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="confluenceTd"> Any use of bytes in the ISO-8859 forbidden range (0x80-0x9F) which aren't part of valid UTF-8 sequences </td> <td class="confluenceTd"> "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text". (This is how WinLatin1 files will be identified.) </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="confluenceTd"> Consistent correct use of multi-byte UTF-8 sequences </td> <td class="confluenceTd"> "UTF-8 Unicode text" </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>How 'file' handles some edge cases:</p> <table class="confluenceTable"><tbody> <tr> <th class="confluenceTh"> When: </th> <th class="confluenceTh"> Unix 'file' Reports: </th> </tr> <tr> <td class="confluenceTd"> All 7-bit, but containing odd combinations of control characters from the 0x00 to 0x1F range </td> <td class="confluenceTd"> "Data" </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="confluenceTd"> Correct UTF-8 code mixed with any 8-bit ISO 8859 characters, forbidden or non forbidden </td> <td class="confluenceTd"> "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text" </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>What 'file' cannot do is read your intentions. It makes the simplest judgment call it can. For example:</p> <ol><li>A file of all 7-bit characters is always "ASCII text"...never mind that you think of the file as being UTF-8 or ISO 8859 compliant (both of which are also true).</li><li>ISO 8859 detection is based only on byte values alone, not syntactic patterns; it can't tell whether you want it rendered as Latin1, Baltic, or Cyrillic, etc.). It reports ISO 8859, not ISO 8859-1, or ISO-8859-2, etc. This would take some fairly elaborate dictionary lookups from multiple languages to accomplish.</li><li>Any UTF-8 multi-byte sequence not containing bytes 0x80 to 0x9F is hypothetically correct ISO 8859. Because these are syntactically rare, 'file' choses to identify this at UTF-8 (assuming everything else about the file is UTF-8 compliant). It cannot read your mind that you intended a series of weird ISO 8859 characters. For example you might want the sequence 0xB5 0xAD to read µ (micro sign, soft hyphen) in Latin1, but since it is a valid UTF-8 sequence (≠, not equals), 'file' will report it as "UTF-8 Unicode text" if everything else about the file is consistent with UTF-8.</li></ol> <p>Regarding the potential for confusion between ISO 8859 and UTF-8, this is what others have to say:</p> <ol><li>"the probability that a string of characters in any other encoding appears as valid UTF-8 is low, diminishing with increasing string length" (<a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629" title="The UTF-8 RFC page" rel="nofollow">UTF-8 RFC</a>).</li><li>"The chance of a random sequence of bytes being valid UTF-8 and not pure ASCII <em>[sic]</em> is 3.9% for a two-byte sequence, 0.41% for a three-byte sequence and 0.026% for a four-byte sequence." (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Rationale_behind_UTF-8.27s_design" title="Wikipedia UTF-8 page" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia UTF-8 page</a>) (see )</li></ol> <p>If you're dealing with a page you suspect is not rendering with the correct ISO 8859 subtable, both Firefox and Safari give you the option to change the interpretation. In Safari, check the View menu, Text Encoding. In Firefox, check the View menu, Character Encoding.</p> <h3><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-BOM: AUTF8FileFormat?"></a>BOM: A UTF-8 File Format?</h3> <p>There is a convention called the "Byte Order Mark" (aka BOM) which (hypothetically) can be used to self-identify a UTF-8 file. This consists of beginning a file with the sequence 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF. Both Unix 'file' and 'vi' seem to be pretty good at interpreting it. When a file is pure 7-bit ASCII, but preceded by the BOM, it forces 'file' to report it as "UTF-8 Unicode text". An interesting edge case: if a file containing ISO 8859 8-bit characters that cannot be interpreted as UTF-8 multi-byte sequences is preceded by the BOM, neither Unix 'file' or 'vi' can be fooled: 'file' will report the three BOM characters as "ISO-8859 text", and 'vi' will display the BOM characters (as ).</p> <p>Othan than BOM, refrain from ever calling ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859 or WinLatin1 a "file format." None have a standardized header or starting block They are more properly called "byte sequence conventions."</p> <h1><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-UnicodeHTMLEntities"></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Unicode HTML Entities</span></h1> <p> The entire corpus of Unicode is hypothetically available to browsers. For example the Unicode characters of Japanese that were mentioned earlier, <em>U+65E5 U+672C U+8A9E,</em> should successfully render on your browser when I put &#x65E5 ; &#x672C ; &#x8A9E ; in the HTML. Here it goes:<em> </em> 日 本 語. These work for me on Firefox. In practice, I believe that no browsers are 100% capable of correctly rendering the entire 2^31 Unicode character set via HTML entities.</p> <p>Question: does the presence of the foreign characters you see above effectively make this page Unicode or UTF-8 format? No. The characters I used to make them were merely ampersand, pound, x, and digits, all 7-it ASCII characters. HTML Entities are merely instructions to browsers what to do with the characters. </p><div class="panelMacro"><table class="infoMacro"><colgroup><col width="24"><col></colgroup><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/images/icons/emoticons/information.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></td><td>Do we want to use HTML Entities in the cleaned feeds we send to search engines? Do we want to figure out the intent of various WinLatin1 manglings and UTF-8 sequences that come from client feeds and turn them into HTML entities that will render safely on a browser? This is a subject still open to question. Our YSSP search engines can handle them, while our Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE's) do not. Currently we are leaning towards aiming for the lowest common denominator, 7-bit ASCII for all search engines.</td></tr></tbody></table></div>WinLatin1's tragic legacy has, unfortunately, been immortalized in HTML entities. HTML entities 128 through 159 will render as their corresponding WinLatin1 characters in many browsers. (Since Unicode entries 128-159 are prohibited, HTML entities are departing from their Unicode basis in this area.) However, you should not consider this reliable; the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html" title="W3C Recommendations of HTML Entities" rel="nofollow">W3C HTML 4 recommendations</a> exclude these codes from their list. <h1><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-HTMLPageEncoding"></a><span style="font-size:130%;">HTML Page Encoding</span></h1> <p> Can an HTML file be in actual UTF-8 format? "Yes we can." If it contains UTF-8 byte sequences, it gets interpreted by your browser as UTF-8. Here are two nice examples of "UTF-8 Test pages" out there that are just full of exotic Unicode in UTF-8 encoding: <a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Emgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt" title="Markus Khun's page of sample UTF-8 text" rel="nofollow">Markus Khun's sample file</a>, and <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html" title="Frank da Cruz's UTF-8 Sampler" rel="nofollow">Frank da Cruz's UTF-8 Sampler</a>. (How well your browser shows the page depends on how good the browser is. For me, Firefox and Safari got most of it, but IE6 failed on large numbers of the characters.)</p> <p>After you look at one of these pages, try viewing source. What do you see? If your source viewer is UTF-8 capable, you'll see, well, the UTF-8 characters. Surprised? Expected to see the numeric bytes, did you? If you want to see the numeric value of a character under the cursor in vi, press <b>ga</b>. For UTF-8 characters higher than 8 bits you will see large values like 0xFFDD. Or if you want to get really deep into the binary encoding of a file, you could get a binary editor. On Unix, try 'od', or better yet, 'bvi' (you have to <a href="http://bvi.sourceforge.net/download.html" title="BVI binary editor download page" rel="nofollow">download it</a>).</p> <p>When an HTML page puts this in the block, what does it do? </p><div class="code panel" style="border-width: 1px;"><div class="codeContent panelContent"> <pre class="code-java"><meta equiv="<span" class="code-quote">"Content-Type" content=<span class="code-quote">"text/html; charset=UTF-8"</span> />
<br /></pre> </div></div>For those most part, it simply communicates intent: a tip to the consuming client what to do with the page. It doesn't change the way the bytes go down the wire, or the way your HTML is stored locally on your disk. It's still just bytes. In practice, you can even leave the declaration out and even though the file is chock full of UTF-8 binary sequences, a good browser figures it out anyway. (Note that Frank da Cruz's file above had no meta direction at all.)
<br /><p>How do you compose (i.e. edit and save) an HTML file in UTF-8? Well, if you're using all 7-bit ascii characters you're fine, that's still valid UTF-8. But really we mean UTF-8 with higher level Unicode characters. Well, unless you want to enter the binary directly, you'll need a special editor for that; vi, textpad, etc. won't do it for you. Try <a href="http://www.letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=utf-8+editor" title="Search Google for a UTF-8 editor" rel="nofollow">Google</a>.</p> <h2><a name="CharacterSetIssuesAffectingFeeds-UTF8andXML"></a><span style="font-size:130%;">UTF-8 and XML</span></h2> <p>XML is UTF-8 by default; the following declaration is actually redundant: </p><div class="code panel" style="border-width: 1px;"><div class="codeContent panelContent"> <pre class="code-java"> "1.0" encoding=<span class="code-quote">"UTF-8"</span>?>
<br /></pre> </div></div> You'd have to override it with a different value for the encoding attribute to make it non UTF-8. Like the HTML meta tag content charset setting mentioned above, the encoding declaration is essentially a tip to the consumer of the XML what to expect.
<br /><h1><span style="font-size:130%;">Some Fun Historical Facts</span></h1> <p><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/download/attachments/1747159414/bobBemer.jpg" align="absmiddle" border="0" /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer" title="Wikipedia page on Bob Bemer" rel="nofollow">Bob Bemer</a> (1920-2004) is said to be the "father of ASCII". His Ford Explorer's vanity plate read 'ASCII' surrounded by a plate holder reading "Yes! I'm the Father of". </p> <p>Wikipedia has a picture of one of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASCII_Code_Chart-Quick_ref_card.jpg" title="Early ASCII table on Wikipedia" rel="nofollow">earliest published ASCII tables</a>, from 1968.</p> <p><img src="http://confluence.icrossing.com/download/attachments/1747159414/kenThompson.jpg" align="absmiddle" border="0" /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson" title="Wikipedia page on Ken Thompson" rel="nofollow">Ken Thompson</a>, the Unix pioneer, invented UTF-8. "It was born during the evening hours of 1992-09-02 in a New Jersey diner, where he designed it in the presence of Rob Pike on a placemat" (<a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Emgk25/unicode.html#history" title="Story of UTF-8's creation" rel="nofollow">source</a>). You can also read the <a href="http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html" title="original AT&T UTF-8 Tech Report" rel="nofollow">original AT&T UTF-8 Tech Report</a>. </p>
<br />Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-36933273381390813202009-05-10T22:28:00.000-07:002017-07-24T22:52:10.682-07:00You on a Diet: book reviewDuring my various attempts to get in good shape over the years I've wasted my share of money on various diet & exercise books that try to tell you what exercise you should do, what muscles they benefit, what foods you should eat and why, and recipes that will make it more enjoyable. Big surprise, lack of willpower has tanked many of my efforts to stay on any kind of healthy eating program. But I really don't think that willpower is the whole story for me or other dieters. What about our ingrained habits of using food for reward, food to fix a poor mood, hedonistic eating, addiction to various kinds of foods (like my favorite, the Sticky Pecan Roll from Au Bon Pan)?<br />
<br />
One diet approach that I thought took a step forward in talking about the psychology of diet was the Low-Carb diet (or "Atkins" in its most popular form). It talks about the role that carbs have in making us feel full, and thereby feel good. But I think you could do a lot better. I want to know the mechanics behind appetite, satisfaction and digestion: what actually occurs in the body to make you want to eat huge portions of your favorite foods, what happens as that urge becomes satisfied, and how you can use that knowledge to change your behavior.<br />
<br />
I discovered the book <span style="font-weight: bold;">You On a </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Diet</span> while standing in line at a Jamba Juice one day. Using entertaining illustrations, it nails exactly what I was looking for. Some of the points in makes on the mechanics of body chemistry, food and appetite include:<a href="http://a7.vox.com/6a00fae8bdc6bd000b00fad68b6a6f0005-500pi" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"></a><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">The lower gut contains 95% of the body's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">serotonin</span></a>, which suggests that eating is self-medicating.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Our caveman ancestors were more fit than us because the stresses of survival kept them lean. Stress, like fight-or-flight stress, means that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPY">Peptide NPY</a> is inhibited and you don't feel like eating. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">When fat makes the liver work extra hard, it prevents glucose from getting to our cells, and produces hunger. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Fiber is good for diet because it slows "the transit of food across the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ileocecal_valve">ileocecal valve</a>, keeping your stomach fuller for longer." (p. 68)</span></li>
</ul>
The book identifies these foods that make you feel full, or suppresses appetite in some way:<br />
<ul>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Nuts</span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Cinnamon</span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Whole Grains</span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Fiber</span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Red Peppers </span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Smell of grapefruit (p. 88)</span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Brightly-colored food</span></li>
<li style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Mint breath strips (p. 239)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Fiber supplements (e.g. 1 tbsp <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyllium_seed_husks">Psyllium Husks</a> with a glass of water)</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Other eating strategies the book recommends revolve around easing the process of digestion. When the intestines are breaking down food, separating the good nutrients (to go into the bloodstream) from the bad nutrients (to be el</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">iminated), a natural process of inflammation occurs. The intestines do their job well when that inflammation is kept to a healthy level. Bad foods increase the inflammation, and the separation of good vs. bad is impaired. Inflammation-fighting foods include:</span><br />
<ul>
<li> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactobacillus_rhamnosus">Lactobaccillus CG</a>, a healthy bacteria found in yogurt </li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Omega-3 fatty acids, such as Fish oil, walnuts</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Green tea</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Beer (hops)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Tumeric</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Jojoba beans (available in supplements)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Soybeans (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflavone">isoflavins</a>)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignan">Lignans</a>, such as Flaxseed oil, rye bread</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphenol">Polyphenols</a>, such as tea, coffee, fruit, vegetables</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucosinolate">Glucosinulates</a>, such as broccoli, kale, cauliflower</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://www.carnosol.com/">Carnosol</a>, found in Rosemary</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol">Resveratrol</a>, found in red grapes, juice and wine</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Dark Cacao</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quercetin">Quercetin</a>, as found in cabbage, spinich, garlic, capers, apples, tea, red onion, red grapes, citrus fruit, tomato, broccoli, leafy green vegetables, cherry, raspberry, and lingonberry</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioxidant">Antioxidants</a>, as in vegetables and fruits (especially bananas), Vitamin E, Vegetable oils, Tea, coffee, soy, fruit, olive oil, chocolate, cinnamon, oregano and red wine </span></li>
</ul>
The book covers some interesting facts on the mechanics of exercise and weight loss:<br />
<ul>
<li>Weight loss improves cholesterol by a factor of three. For example, a 7% weight loss leads to a 20% improvement in cholesterol levels. (p. 120)</li>
<li>The beneficial effect of exercise in producing weight loss is greater than the detrimental effect of eating in producing weight gain. So even if you're getting in only a little exercise each day, the effect is significant. (pp. 141-142)</li>
<li>Without exercise, we lose 5% of our muscle mass every 10 years after the age of 35. If you don't exercise (rebuild muscle) every 10 years, you need to eat 120-420 fewer calories a day to maintain your current weight. (p. 142)</li>
<li>Focus on reducing the size of your belly, not weight loss. Exercise not only reduced fat but bulks up muscles, which can result in a net loss of zero. </li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The material on "good fats" vs. "bad fats" is helpful:</span><span style="font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bad Fats</span> are the ones that stay solid at room temperature: animal fat, butter, stick margarine & lard. Food manufacturers push these because they have a long shelf life. </li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Good Fats</span> are the ones that are liquid at room temperature are the good, omega-3 and -6 fats: olive, vegetable, sesame & canola oil, fish oil, flaxseed, avocados, nuts (especially walnuts). Nutrients that fight bad fats are: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niacin">niacin</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantothenic_acid">vitamin B5</a></li>
</ul>
Everyone know that whole grains are good for you, although we use the term so frequently it's helpful to review what this actually means. In a whole grain, "the grain still has all three of its original elements: the outer shell or gran, which contains fiber and B vitamins; the germ, which contains phytochemicals and B vitamins; and the endosperm which contains carbohydrates and protein." (p. 256) "'Refined' grains means only endosperm is enclosed." (p. 257)<span style="font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; line-height: 47.25px;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 100%; line-height: 47.25px;">Here's a fun subject the book covers: what gives you gas?</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span>It's important because it's a byproduct of the way you eat and what you are forcing digestion to do for you:<span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Gas is a normal result of the intestinal inflammation during digestion, as good nutrients go to the bloodstream and bad nutrients to to the lower intestines (and produce gas). So bad gas can be attributed to too much bad foods in your diet. Also, when inflammation is too high, some bad nutrients get into the bloodstream, leading to cholesterol. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Sulfur-rich foods such as eggs, meat, beer, beans and cauliflower make gas smell worse</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Drinking cola means swallowing more air, which means more gas</span></li>
</ul>
Other interesting things I found in the book:<span style="font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; line-height: 47.25px;"><br /></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">No evidence yet shows that artificial sweeteners are unhealthy (p. 97)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">It's the fat around our waist that gets us into trouble. Fat in other parts of your body cause relatively little harm to your health or eating chemistry. (p. 102) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Alcholic drinks fight bad fats (p. 123)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">The liver is the heaviest organ in the body (p. 77)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">Your deoderant can make you gain weight, if it contains aluminum or polychlorobiphenols (p. 92)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 100%;">The more brightly colored the food, the better it is for you (p. 95) </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: 100%;">So I can give a strong recommendation for <span style="font-weight: bold;">You On a Diet</span> if want to learn alot about </span>the mechanics behind appetite, satisfaction and digestion.Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-89030214523765875632009-04-12T10:17:00.000-07:002009-04-12T13:34:19.053-07:00iCrossing is hiring a Java developer in ChicagoMy employer, iCrossing, has opened a search for a new member for the Merchantize team. Here's the description. To apply for the position, visit http://www.iCrossing.com/careers, select U.S. Career Offerings, Jobs by Location, then Jobs in Chicago, IL.<br /><h2 class="entry-title"><a class="entry-title-link" target="_blank" href="http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/eng/1116525212.html">Java Software Engineer (Open Source / Web Analytics / ETL)</a></h2>JOB DESCRIPTION<br /><br />We’re a people business.<br /><br />People are the heart and soul of our company, working every day to make our clients’ marketing programs successful.<br /><br />At iCrossing, we combine experienced talent with world-class technologies to efficiently create marketing programs that truly perform. With more than 620 professionals in 15 offices in the U.S. and Europe, we are equipped to service the digital marketing needs of large enterprises and growing companies alike.<br /><br />We’re seeking the talented, the experienced and the exceptional to give our clients the most creative and successful solutions for an ever-changing industry. When we find them, we offer a dynamic working environment, competitive compensation, the opportunity to work on exciting client programs, and occasional bagels.<br />We are seeking a highly motivated and technically proficient JEE Software Engineer / Software Developer to work on our industry leading and mission critical Paid Media Management (Search Engine Marketing, bid management) product.<br /><br /><br /><br />Features of the position:<br />• Work on a high-visibility, high performance product that supports iCrossing’s industry leading SEM practice in a growing and fast moving industry.<br />• Work closely with all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL) and their APIs.<br />• Work in a fast moving and forward thinking development environment that is constantly researching and rapidly implementing the latest technologies.<br />• Research and participate in the advancement and implementation of open source frameworks and architectures such as SOA/ESB, MapReduce, Grid and Cloud computing, and others.<br />• Work with an experienced Agile Software Development team in a highly collaborative environment.<br />• Modern Java Enterprise open source based product stack, Java 6, Spring, Hibernate 3, Webworks/Struts 2, JMS, JUnit, MySQL and more.<br />• Learn current software development best practices (continuous integration, build automation, test driven development, pair programming, agile estimating and planning, etc)<br />• Apple MacBook Pro, 24” widescreen monitor, IntelliJ or Eclipse.<br />• A casual, fun, and creative work environment<br />Major Job Responsibilities / Accountabilities:<br />• Write test driven quality code.<br />• Work closely with your dev team.<br />• Follow and encourage development best practices.<br />• Develop knowledge of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) principles and techniques.<br /><br />Skills/Requirements:<br />Required Technologies (At least one or more of the following)<br />• Spring<br />• Hibernate<br />• SQL scripts<br />• Shell Scripting<br />• Webwork (Struts 2.0)<br />• Linux / Unix admin<br />• Junit (required) or TDD (preferred)<br />• Grid Computing (GridGain preferred)<br /><br />Bonus Technologies (Preferred any of these)<br />• MySQL (especially advanced knowledge of replication, storage engines, backup and recovery)<br />• PERL<br />• Data warehousing design concepts, ETL<br />• Mondrian OLTP<br />• JMS<br />• Amazon EC2 / S3 / AWS<br /><br />Knowledge / Skills / Abilities:<br />• BS in Computer Science or equivalent level of experience<br />• Understanding and/or appreciation for Agile software development methodologies.<br />• 1+ yrs of professional development experience.<br />• Familiarity with source control using Subversion<br />• Familiarity with IDE tools such as Eclipse or IntelliJ<br />• Must possess effective interpersonal and communication skills and ability to work successfully in a team environment.<br />• Good organizational and time-management skills.<br /><br />Do Not Apply if you:<br />• Do not know Java<br />• Have no interest in Agile, TDD or Unit testing<br />• Are close-minded and don’t want to learn new technologies.<br />• Are more comfortable working on the same technology you did last year.<br /><br />*ICROSSING IS NOT ACCEPTING RESUMES FROM STAFFING AGENCY PARTNERS AT THIS TIME. THANK YOU.Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-76406842691099544832009-03-27T23:38:00.000-07:002009-03-28T22:06:07.885-07:00Hacking a Linksys NSLU2<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6mOcONvc3TI9uE8z4RD31zTWIBc4MHfa1IDBFRTP-tcHH15vOIh7_OLUOMvLB_KcZZnPN-oFxbTvILXav5vXfbLfUkWAUHLqQ8fiIf92LhQbgPR4DJvyXmxoNsL0pRVAgeSp7HBS8JUAk/s1600-h/hero23.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 229px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6mOcONvc3TI9uE8z4RD31zTWIBc4MHfa1IDBFRTP-tcHH15vOIh7_OLUOMvLB_KcZZnPN-oFxbTvILXav5vXfbLfUkWAUHLqQ8fiIf92LhQbgPR4DJvyXmxoNsL0pRVAgeSp7HBS8JUAk/s400/hero23.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318053970359726434" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I bought a <a href="http://www.linksysbycisco.com/US/en/products/NSLU2">Linksys NSLU2</a> a while back, which is a low cost (about $99) appliance for turning two USB disk drives into a Network Attached Share (NAS) system. This lets me set up file storage centrally located on my LAN (as opposed to attaching it to one computer on the LAN and setting up a share).<br /><br />What's inside is a small Linux computer mounted on a single circuitboard. And that's where the fun comes in. As the device's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2">Wikipedia page</a> points out, since the internal Linux is licensed with a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License" title="GNU General Public License">GNU General Public License</a>, Linksys was required to release their source code. This has enabled third parties to develop firmware upgrades to the device. One popular upgrade is the <a href="http://www.nslu2-linux.org/">Unlung SlugOS</a>, which among various things, enables the device to accept telnet connections.<br /><br />Here is my n<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-egf6f7wy8qt4ghn3xcpkhqj6b5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 249px; height: 187px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-egf6f7wy8qt4ghn3xcpkhqj6b5.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>etwork cabinet at home. From left is my DSL modem, a 360 GB USB disk drive, the NSLU2, and my Linksys WRT54G Wireless router. If you know this router, you can see by the size that the NSLU2 is not much bigger than a deck of cards.<br /><br />Like a router, an NSLU2 hooked up to your LAN will have its own web administration page, which is reachable by http://192.168.1.77.<br /><br />Upgrading to the Unslung firmware went exactly as <a href="http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/InstallUnslungFirmware">the directions</a> described it. After restarting, the NSLU2's admin page had a few additions, as you can see in the screen grab below. It added an unslung logo on the upper left, and a "Manage Telnet" link on the right. Once I enabled telnet I was able to log in and get a prompt by telnetting to 192.168.1.77.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-es4bwja6mjdrt482j2b7hapxn7.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 576px; height: 314px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-es4bwja6mjdrt482j2b7hapxn7.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />A short tour of what is inside the box is shown in the telnet session below. There's cool stuff inside! A nice handful of basic unix commands, the web server that serves up the admin site (above), and even a wget command (which I demonstrate by getting the yahoo.com homepage HTML.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-cnuqs718pgujw228eqi28e9434.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 602px; height: 868px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-cnuqs718pgujw228eqi28e9434.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>The next thing I wanted to do is to "de-underclock" the device. The CPU is 266 mHz but for unknown reasons, Linksys clocked it down by half with a tiny little resistor. Here's the board:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn7P-83_HAfmztrYMAXmg3tPxL_4c57IeRc9r0QCqvVCmpBb5T7Ib6hH4kvTCCtnRfOjrgr0sgzupUuAPMZU3lb7Oh_B1fbRMMYotmIeQRICTHAQ2yMFBPPXd92naa5lTMmtQeBv_6JOsF/s1600-h/3-motherboard-with-serial.png+%28PNG+Image,+1068x887+pixels%29+-+Scaled+%2882%25%29.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 332px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn7P-83_HAfmztrYMAXmg3tPxL_4c57IeRc9r0QCqvVCmpBb5T7Ib6hH4kvTCCtnRfOjrgr0sgzupUuAPMZU3lb7Oh_B1fbRMMYotmIeQRICTHAQ2yMFBPPXd92naa5lTMmtQeBv_6JOsF/s400/3-motherboard-with-serial.png+%28PNG+Image,+1068x887+pixels%29+-+Scaled+%2882%25%29.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318086918449064050" border="0" /></a>Simply removing the resis<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-teu3ft1tdhy7sckwjxf942a32m.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 219px; height: 294px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-teu3ft1tdhy7sckwjxf942a32m.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>tor clocks it up to 266 mHz. Following the <a href="http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/OverClockTheSlug">helpful instructions</a> on the Unslung site, I geared myself up with some needle nose pliers, a static wrist guard and gloves, a magnifying glass and a geeky miner's light (see pic at left). All I had to do was get a grip on that tiny, tiny resistor (about 1/4 the size of a grain of rice)...and I crunched it! After all, I wasn't going to need it again.<br /><br />When I put the card back inside the case, reconnected it and restarted it...it worked! And I got the proof the the clock speed doubled in my telnet session:<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-g1fx7c6gtdg1k85uw655qa614d.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 398px; height: 114px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090328-g1fx7c6gtdg1k85uw655qa614d.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />Whoa, it says it is 2.22 mHz short of 266 Hz, I wonder why? Such are the mysteries of computer hardware.Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-37462402917995217732009-03-17T12:56:00.000-07:002009-03-17T13:24:49.768-07:00Apple iPhone OS 3.0 Announcement summaryHere are highlights of what was announced for the iPhone OS 3.0 release early this afternoon from Apple:<ul><li><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090317-qaqq1xce9r955gni8cdgfb5kn2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 133px; height: 117px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090317-qaqq1xce9r955gni8cdgfb5kn2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Cut and paste: it was worth the wait, the touch interaction to do this looks very cool (see picture at right). Works across applications and does undo.</li><li>Multimedia messaging: you can attach a picture to a text message</li><li>Ability to choose a group of photos and send them in a single email</li><li>Push email notification</li><li>Landscape mode text entry (so what)</li><li>Turn-by-turn GPS navigation.</li><li>Available in the summer. That's as detailed as it gets. No doubt will be linked to the new iPhone model coming out in July.</li><li>Virtually all of the new features will work with the original, pre-3G iPhone (exceptions: multimedia messaging and stereo bluetooth)</li><li>Peer-to-peer linkups between individual iPhones for games, file sharing, etc. This exists now with things like AirSharing and Holdem, but those companies probably ro<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090317-exu1cu1t1hm3tqy1634csxaj96.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 149px; height: 123px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090317-exu1cu1t1hm3tqy1634csxaj96.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>lled their own; now it's part of the API</li><li>API support for applications that connect to external devices. Demonstrations with medical devices were given (see pic at right). Medical applications of new technology are always a big win in corporate presentations; the real news here is that this will open up remoting of all sorts of sophisticated devices for music, video, information systems, anything you can imagine.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.skitch.com/20090317-8pnxa9ieca9x75mabfh6jgh2ne.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 183px; height: 110px;" src="http://img.skitch.com/20090317-8pnxa9ieca9x75mabfh6jgh2ne.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></li><li>Ability to search in your emails on the server side, and search in your calendar items</li><li>Search your iPhone contents with Spotlight (well-known to Mac users)<br /></li><li>The Sims 3 will run on the iPhone (see pic at right)</li></ul>Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850363418317194275.post-48091613901796695372009-03-16T19:12:00.000-07:002009-03-16T20:50:39.499-07:00iPhone SDK Presentation at CJUG 2/17/09Our local Java User's Group chapter, <a href="http://www.cjug.org/">CJUG</a> recently hosted a presentation by <a href="http://www.sptci.com/rakesh/">Rakesh Vidyadharan</a> titled <a href="http://sptci.com/products/articles/iPhoneSDK.pdf">iPhone SDK: Java Developers Perspective</a> (link to PDF). It wasn't so much an immersion in iPhone development per se, but an introduction to development in Objective C.<br /><br />Some of the things I found interesting:<br /><br /><ul><li>The SDK requires an Intel-based Mac</li><li>The MVC approach is pretty much baked into the framework. Not everyone likes that.</li><li>Development with an emulator is a breeze, but pushing an app to a real iPhone is time consuming</li><li>Getting apps considered for inclusion in the app store is well-documented, but a convoluted process</li></ul>Some things about Objective C:<br /><ul><li>Very similar to TCL scripting</li><li>Weak typing and dynamically-bound variables like javascript, ruby and php</li><li>There's no namespaces or packages, which means every class has to have a complete unique name. To group variables, developers adopt precursors, like CUreader, CUwriter, CUcreator, etc. And the language has several precursors reserved for the language core. For example, you can't define any classes or variables beginning with NS, IB, or UI.<br /></li><li>Parameter names are part of the signature of a method. For example, foo(first_name: "Greg", last_name: "Sandell")</li><li>The code is visibly very different from Java, or even C and C++. Many lines start with a plus or minus sign.<br /></li></ul>Object-Oriented characteristics of Objective C:<br /><ul><li>Much less a "real" Objected Oriented language than C++</li><li>Objects don't automatically inherit a base Object as in java. You have to explicitly extend NSObject</li><li>Objects automatically have setters and getters, like ruby</li><li>Like C, you completely manage your own memory. OsX since Tiger has a garbage collector, but Objective C doesn't use it</li><li>Memory is managed by a incremental counting approach called refcount. Each alloc increments refcount, each release decrements it</li><li>Dealloc is like finalize in java<br /></li><li>Messaging is a big part of the language. For example, methods are invoked via messages.</li></ul>Greg Sandellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00540596303006299243noreply@blogger.com0