I'm changing gears, as I put it in a Facebook update. I spent the past week in West Virginia, and now I'm in Seattle, where I'm going to spend a couple of days meeting with technology and newspaper people. I did end up doing some work while in West Virginia -- had one conference call where I was wondering if the harmony singing class behind me and the Cajun fiddler practicing on the plaza were coming through -- but it's all good. If I can maintain a good musical life and a good consulting job at the same time, then that's a good life.

West Virginia was great. The music was wonderful; the photo is of Courtney Granger, Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz leading a jam one night on the porch of Halliehurst. When I have more time I will post some audio and hopefully some video as well.

I'll be spending more time in West Virginia this summer; I decided this week that I will finally get around to attending the Clifftop Applachian String Band Festival and from there I will go back to Augusta for a week of old-time music and singing.

( West Virginia and Appalachia )

Great music tends to come from crossroads like New York City and New Orleans and Chicago. Appalachia has been a crossroads for cultures and people since before Europeans came to this country, and it's got the music to prove it. And it's a beautiful place. I love New York City, I am happy I'm from here and I'll never move away. But I look forward to returning to West Virginia next month.

I spent much of yesterday in the car (or, rather, cars -- more about that later) and listened to Michael Jackson's two great albums (Thriller and Off the Wall) several times each. I don't have any Jackson 5 on CD or on the iPod, but I've been playing those LPs this morning.

Jackson had descended so far into self-parody (and then all the way through it to a truly disturbing character, some sort of badly reanimated corpse that made you hope Sarah Michelle Gellar would show up with Mister Pointy) that it was easy to forget how damn great he was. He was a tremendous singer, he worked his ass off, he was smart enough to outwit Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono and get the Beatles catalog, and his great records are among the best pop music ever made.

Thriller is an almost-perfect album.* Nearly every song on it was a successful single, and even the non-megahits are great songs. It came out in 1982, which was the year I got my driver's license. My first car only had an AM radio and in those days, WABC and WNBC still played music, and half of what they were playing that fall probably came from that album. Along with the formerly whites-only MTV**, I was finally starting to escape the apartheid "rock" music I'd been brought up with, and that album was a revelation. Everyone liked it, regardless of color, regardless of whether they'd been hardcore "Disco Sucks" segregationists a few years earlier.

And sure, that album wouldn't have been what it was without master musicians like Greg Phillinganes and Rod Temperton and the towering genius of Quincy Jones. But it was unquestionably Jackson's album, and Jackson's genius that made it into the top-selling album in history. Jackson is much more entitled to his "King of Pop" title than Presley was to be called the "King of Rock and Roll."

It's all just sad. I feel like he is a great loss, but he's been a great loss for something like 20 years. I remember the long-awaited release of Bad in 1986, and how tremendously disappointing it was. Prince was at one of his heights, U2 and REM were doing great work, Public Enemy was getting started, and Bad was just ... bad. And he looked bad too. And then things went from Bad to worse and worse and then much worse.

He was an abused child, really, forced by a tyrannical father into an intense spotlight that distorted his whole life. His brothers certainly fared better, but he was the most sensitive of them all, and that's why he was so great, and why he fell so hard.

Driving home late last night, I was done with pop music and, scrolling through what happened to be on the iPod, played Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones, without even remembering the last song, "The Late Great Johnny Ace," which he wrote after John Lennon died.

Well, I really wasn't
Such a Johnny Ace fan
But I felt bad all the same
So I sent away for his photograph
And I wait until it came
It came all the way from Texas
With a sad and simple face
And they signed it on the bottom
From the Late Great Johnny Ace

*I say "nearly perfect" because of the insipid McCartney duet, "The Girl Is Mine," which sits in the middle of the first side like bird droppings on a barbecued steak. The two most glaring examples of wasted talent in pop music argue over "the girl" like New York State senators, engaging in dialog so painfully stilted it makes you want to hear the awful chorus again. And of course "the girl" has no name, nothing to say in the matter, and appears in a schoolboyish Jackson drawing on the LP's inner sleeve being tugged apart like a wishbone by the two superstars.

**Does anyone remember that for the first few years of its existence, MTV steadfastly refused to play videos by black artists? I remember David Bowie giving some bubblehead VJ a tongue-lashing during an interview about this, but it took Jackson's brilliant videos -- and threats from CBS -- to finally break the color barrier.

Tags: music

I'll be playing my original songs tonight at the wonderful Jalopy Theater in Red Hook. I'm starting early, around 7pm, and there will be an entire night of great music, all original songwriters who come out of the Brooklyn traditional music scene. Last night was spectacular and tonight might even be better. Come on down! Jalopy is at 315 Columbia Street, just north of the Battery Tunnel. Following that I'll probably head down to the jam at Sunny's.

Tags: gigs

Yes, I'm still here. No, I haven't fled to Dreamwidth or canceled my account or anything. But it has been an awful long time since I've posted, hasn't it? A month, in fact, since my last post with any real content. There are a number of reasons for my absence.

( Where I've Been )

Speaking of shows, you can catch me this weekend at a two-night festival of original work by musicians (like me) who come from the Brooklyn traditional/roots music scene, at the wonderful can't-say-enough-good-things-about-it Jalopy Theater and School Of Music. On Saturday night, I'll be doing a song circle with some great songwriters including my friend Doug Hatt. Friday night I'm going to start the night off playing for a square dance with Brooklyn's own Andy Mullen, who calls a great dance, and then I'll stay for the night. Both nights, I'll be on early (at 7) but will stay for the whole show. On Sunday afternoon I'll be playing at an informal jam for Summer Streets on Vanderbilt Avenue, near the corner of Prospect Place, and then heading over to the Pickin' Party.

Wow. rosefox said she wasn't moving her journal over here because the styles were ugly, and I said, "I don't really care about styles." That was before I'd seen them. Wow! When she meant butt-ugly, she meant BUTT-FRACKIN-UGLY.

Anyway, just testing cross-posting, really. Thanks very much, figmentj for the invite code. I'll let everyone know if I get some.

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Today was the Five Boro Bike Tour. It was not the most enjoyable ride I've ever had, and I did not finish. The rain wasn't the worst part. Neither were the three flats I got. The worst part, which other cyclists had told me about when they turned down my invitation to do this ride, was the traffic.

One of the single best things about riding a bike is never being stuck in traffic. You glide by lines of cars stopped at red lights. You can go around anything, take another route, and enjoy yourself while the cars seethe in traffic.

Not today. Today, we sat in traffic just like the cars who were being diverted for the ride. In some spots in fact the cars were moving more quickly than we were.

And you know what? It's better to be stuck in traffic in a car, where it's warm and dry and you have a comfortable seat and a radio. It really sucks on a bike, in the rain. I stuck it out through a bunch of jams, at the 59th Street Bridge, at the Pulaski, in Dumbo, but after standing for more than 15 minutes in the rain on the Gowanus, I was finished. I've spent enough time stuck in traffic waiting to get on the Verrazano Bridge in my life. All the good momentum I'd built up coming down the expressway from the BQE was gone, I was no longer ready to hit the bridge and finish up, just cold and tired and hungry. And I'd been on the bike for more than six hours.

I zipped off at the 65th St exit on the Belt, and then had to navigate my way through that very complex interchange alongside the cars coming off the highway, but after carrying the bike over a divider and pushing it up a hill, I got out of there and took the train home.

I'm glad I did it, I suppose. It was fun in spots, especially riding down the FDR and over the bridge, or through the BQE trench and around the turn onto the Gowanus. But it was interminable. My average speed was 8.6 MPH; I've only had a lower speed than that on rides where I was taking lots of photos or where I met friends and walked through the park with them. (The bike computer only counts time when you're in motion, so the time I spent fixing flats and standing still in traffic is not counted in the average.)

Oh yes. The flats. The first one was on 6th Avenue near Radio City. I've had mixed success fixing flats on my own, so I walked it up to the park, where the good folks from NYC Velo fixed it quickly, and then fixed it again when it went flat almost immediately. (Yes, the bike tech and I both went over the inside of the tire and the rim very carefully with our fingers and found nothing.) I got a third flat, on 125th St, a loud blowout near Lenox Avenue that everyone around me heard. That one I changed myself (successfully!) with some help from another rider. Thankfully the tire behaved itself after that.

I'm not sure I'll do this ride again. Obviously the rain dampened things a bit, and perhaps it would have been better to have tried to start at the front of the pack rather than relaxing and starting in the middle (and falling almost to the back after all the flat tires). But it's just too crowded and not terribly well managed, and I was very disappointed to find that you ride over the lower level of the Verrazano. That was the main attraction of the ride for me -- being able to ride over that bridge which is normally only open to cars. But on the lower level? Not so exciting.

Anyway. Some photos are up on Flickr. I'm happy to be home with some hot coffee, and I will certainly get to bed early tonight!

Tags: bike

"It's all the same! Pathetically the same!"

Philip Glass was not criticizing someone else's music, but discussing his own. He was sitting at a piano in the St. Ann's Warehouse performance space in Dumbo, wearing a rumpled suit, his glasses in his hand, leaning around the piano to face his interviewer, radio host Ira Glass. It was "Glass on Glass," a fundraising event in which the award-winning creator of "This American Life" interviewed his cousin, probably the most famous living classical composer.

( A completely fascinating evening )

In conclusion, the two performed Allen Ginsberg's stunning poem, "Wichita Vortex Sutra." He had originally performed it with Ginsberg at an anti-war rally, and later with Patti Smith. Ira said that in rehearsal, Philip had asked him not to try to sound like Allen Ginsberg, and he didn't. He sounded like Ira Glass, reading Ginsberg's haunting words:

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
          but not afraid
                    to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
                    because not only my lonesomeness
                                it's Ours, all over America

Tags: music

I've spent much of the last few days on the bike, which is a good thing because I'm riding in the Five Boro Bike Tour on Sunday. I'm helping my friend Fran with photos for the AIA Guide (we were in the Times last week, you may recall). We drove around and took some photos for the Bedford-Stuyvesant chapter on Friday, and then I did more on my bike Sunday and yesterday. It's such a beautiful neighborhood and mostly still intact, although I had a bad feeling when I got to St. Patrick's and saw that it is now St. Lucy and St. Patrick's, and sure enough, St. Lucy's is no more. There are a few modern abominations, but mostly beautiful parks, blocks of gorgeous brownstones, and other treasures. I even ended up photographing some of mary_wroth's old neighborhood.

Meanwhile, I have a show coming up this Friday. Mike Skliar and I did our first show together almost exactly 12 years ago, at the late and not-especially-lamented Orange Bear. It's been a few years since we've played together in New York City but we will be doing so this Friday night on the Upper West Side, playing a mixture of our originals, cover tunes and traditional songs. The show is at Cafe du Soleil on Broadway between 104th and 105th. Further details about that and other shows are are on my web site.

The last few days have been (in reverse order)...

17 miles on the bike.

A few interesting project possibilities.



A great house concert by Mayfly, a Vermont old-time duo I met last summer at Augusta. It was a great evening, and mary_wroth took some photos, and I think I will have more house concerts in the future.




A short but wonderful trip to Arizona, where my niece and I celebrated our birthdays a little early, and I got to spend a little time out in the desert enjoying spring.

And other good things. This Sunday, I will be back at the Greenwich Village Bistro, playing with Saboteur Tiger.

I'm mentioned in a New York Times article today, thanks to some consulting work I'm doing on the next edition of The AIA Guide To New York City, a book I own four copies of, one of each edition.

A friend of mine and musician in the local roots scene, Fran Leadon, is co-authoring the guide with Norval White, one of the deans of NYC architecture. I built them the content management system they're using to work on the text and the many accompanying photographs (You can read a bit more about that on my web site) and a few weeks ago I volunteered to drive the two of them around Brooklyn to see all the new buildings.

It was a testament on many levels to why I love New York City. Norval has an astounding memory, with a historical anecdote about almost any block in New York (at one point he took us a few blocks out of our way in Crown Heights to see a lovely little church tucked away on what seemed like just another residential block), and seeing the city with him is to see it entirely differently.

Beyond that, New York City makes for wonderful random connections, like meeting a world-famous architect by virtue of the fact that I play bluegrass with a guy who is an architecture professor, and I love it. Fran and I have actually been in the Times before, but via music rather than architecture. I guess it's a twist on the old cliché: talking about architecture can come from playing music.

Tags: nyc

I got stuck with a window seat on my flight yesterday, but it was a clear sunny day and I was on the right side of the plane so I got some great photos of Brooklyn as we left. The Verrazano is almost exactly the same age as me (I'm slightly younger). Next month I get to ride my bike over it as part of the Five Boro Bike Tour.

Tags: photos, travel

Am I missing something? I've been to Underhill, Vt. It's less than an hour from Burlington. Which has a gorgeous waterfront on Lake Champlain. Into which the St. Lawrence River flows. From the Atlantic Ocean. Vermont may qualify as "landlocked," depending how you define the word, but you most certainly can get there by boat, and Captain Phillips could very well own a boat where he lives.

Tags: stupidity

I woke up this morning to the news that the Navy had killed the the three Somali pirates, and rescued Captain Richard Phillips, and I gave a little internal cheer. As I continued with my online reading, I found quite a few people saying they were not so happy.

Many of them are making good points. The United States is directly responsible for the disaster in Somalia, having intervened in a civil war, pulled out after a helicopter was shot down, then helped destablize the Islamic government that was starting to pull the country together.

Beyond that, Phillips' plight received so much attention solely because he is an American citizen. It is hypocritical and bigoted to call for the pirates' heads after they kidnap an American, but to pay no attention when they kill or threaten to kill French, Taiwanese, Ukranians, and many others. Bloodthirsty jingoism like "Three dead pirates are only a start" is disgusting.

However. Is Richard Phillips, an innocent man doing his job -- a native, by the way, of rednoodlealien's hometown -- guilty of any of this? Do liberals who condemn collective punishment such as the Israeli policy of demolishing suicide bomber's houses and making their families homeless, support collective punishment like this? Do liberals who oppose the death penalty for people who really did murder someone, also believe that a random civilian should be executed, without due process, for the crimes of people he's never met, or for beliefs and attitudes he may not share?

That's callous and cruel nonsense, as callous and cruel as Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford letting their citizens suffer to make a political point. Richard Phillips, the human being with a wife and kids, who worked a difficult and dangerous job, did nothing to deserve to be held by thugs on a lifeboat for days and threatened with death.

You can't say the same about the thugs who were holding him, who did make individual decisions that led to their own deaths. They may not have chosen to be in their economic and social situation, but they certainly chose to take a hostage after they failed to take over the ship, and to threaten to kill him rather than surrendering or negotiating his release. And if you believe the Navy they may have been preparing to kill him when they were shot. Let's also remember that these pirates are not heroic Robin Hoods. They go back home with their money, buy Hummers and Escalades and automatic weapons, and terrorize the Somalis who have not chosen to become criminals.

The decision of whether or not to pull the trigger in this instance came down to this: Who deserves to live more? The innocent hostage, or the three thugs? Given the choice, which the thugs created, I support the Navy's decision. It's not pleasant, but I'm much happier this morning to read that the three of them were shot and killed, than that they had killed their hostage.

I hope this incident leads to a constructive set of policies to address the problem, as opposed to the raids on the pirate strongholds that some are calling for. Perhaps this will serve as the impetus to try to help Somalia rather than further damaging it. But let us please not confuse that issue with the plight of one Vermonter who suffered something none of us would ever want to endure.

Tags: politics

I don't hate my iPhone because I don't have one. I have a Treo. The PalmOS is showing its age, and it doesn't synchronize that well with the Mac, so I've been thinking about replacing it, and the iPhones are awfully beautiful. And all the cool kids have one. Maybe I should reconsider, even if it meant leaving Verizon, the only mobile service provider I haven't hated with a passion?

Last month I needed to replace my iPod, so I bought an iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone, but with all other functionality including wi-fi connectivity. It's lovely and I like it very much, but I am very glad it's not my phone. I like plenty of things about it, but I don't need to add to the iPhone gushing. Instead, I now have some solid answers for everyone who says they are shocked I haven't rushed out to buy an iPhone.

( Why I Would Hate an iPhone If I'd Bought One )

There is a new version of the Treo out, but it's only available on Sprint at the moment. When the time comes to replace my current phone, I will most likely buy a Blackberry.

Tags: stupidity, tech

And a lot of special guests. Bob Jones and Boo Reiners, otherwise known as the Plunk Brothers, had a CD release party at Jalopy last night. Their first set consisted entirely of songs from their brand new CD, Two Guitarists and a Microphone, which is not available online yet but hopefully will be soon. It's 40 minutes of wonderful guitar duets and harmony singing. Their live shows are a joy to watch and that spirit comes through on the recording.

In the second set they invited a series of guest stars up to play with them, including singer Jen Larson who frequently shares a stage with them, and also Trip Henderson, Ben Fraker, Elena Skye, the Sheriff of Good Times, and me. It was great fun and a great honor to play with them and a wonderful night overall.

Boo is a well-known country guitarist who's played with Opry stars and won Grammies, and along with his partner Elena Skye runs the Demolition String Band, a great NYC roots outfit. Bob was a founding member of the Wretched Refuse String Band and an original member of the Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra, and repairs/restores guitars for most of the East Coast's bluegrass/old-time musicians.

They play fairly often in Brooklyn, so keep an eye out for them.

Tags: music, photos

I have been stalking lessons from mary_wroth, it would seem. Last night I went to the Good Coffeehouse in Brooklyn to see my second Del Rey show this week. Del is not nearly as famous as she should be. You could pile every living blues guitarist you've ever heard of on one side of a balance scale, and put her on the other, and they'd all have to be scraped off the ceiling.

She's a complete master of traditional fingerstyle guitar, but takes it to all sorts of places that the originators of that style -- Blind Blake, Gary Davis, etc -- never dreamed of. Last night, along with clarinetist Craig Flury, she played hot 20s jazz, two calypso numbers, several mind-bending original tunes, and old tunes for which she wrote new lyrics because she thought the original words were stupid.

She's a virtuoso player, playing sophisticated jazz fingerings with all sorts of counterrhythms and moving bass lines, all at lightning speed, relaxed and smiling the whole time, or raising an eyebrow at her guitar as if it had considered talking back to her. Her lead playing is mostly beyond my comprehension; if I could play rhythm backing the way she does I'd be happy. Very happy.

Here she is doing a classic blues, and here she is doing a duet with Steve James, a ragtime tribute to many great guitarists including her hero Memphis Minnie.

She doesn't come out east that often, but if you live in the Northwest, she lives in Seattle and plays around that area frequently. I guarantee you'd enjoy the evening.

Tags: music, photos

Gothic Cabinet Craft, which built the new book/LP/CD cases I posted about a little while ago, were profiled today in the New York Times. It's a local business, founded in a store that still exists (the one I visited to design the bookcases) at Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street. The factory is in Maspeth, it's still family-owned, and employs hundreds of local craftsmen. It's wonderful to be able to support a local business like that with such satisfying results. I'll probably be buying more from them in the future.

Tags: nyc

I watched two classic 1970s New York City movies this week -- Taxi Driver and The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three. And I liked the latter a lot more than the former.

Pelham is by far the best Quentin Tarantino film ever made, and he was 11 years old when it came out. It's a classic thriller about the hijacking of a subway train -- identified by the location and time of its departure in the Bronx -- with a stellar cast and fantastic shots of early 1970s New York. Great scenes in Union Square and along Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue, and a car crash staged next to the cube on Astor Place, when there was a "Gourmet Treats" store where the Starbucks is now.

And of course, a lot of wonderful subway footage from the era when subway signs were not color-coded, and were hand-cranked. And the fare was 35 cents. The best line (of many contenders), from an irascible train dispatcher: "Screw the goddamn passengers! What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents -- to live forever?"

And one of the single best endings of any movie, ever. Oh! And a whiny egotistic mayor who is a dead ringer for Ed Koch, years before anyone had ever even heard of him.

Meanwhile, Taxi Driver is a disturbing film that's not much fun to watch. Aside from the nostalgia shots of the city, the part I enjoyed most was seeing Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster so young, long before they were superstars. The acting is superb, but they've all made much better movies and so has Scorcese. The writing and direction are heavy-handed, and I don't find the "grit" of 1970s New York all that romantic or interesting. These characters are nowhere near as compelling as Hoffman and Voight in Midnight Cowboy; they have no sweetness or innocence or depth. Overall you just want to take a shower after seeing it.

Tags: movies, subways

Bob Guida, the great blues guitarist and singer, a jovial and powerful presence in the Brooklyn music scene for decades, died last night. Shlomo Pestcoe posted the following announcement to the NY bluegrass and old-time list:

As some of you may have heard, Bob Guida passed away yesterday, Wednesday, March 11th. Bob had a heart attack as he was setting up his equipment to do a performance at a local library.

As per the Guida family's wishes, Bob's funeral and wake this weekend will be a small private familial function. Of course, there will be a larger memorial sometime in the near future. However, it's too early to discuss or organize such an event. Please understand that everyone is still very much in a state of shock and distraught over Bob's sudden passing.

Jim Garber and I are planning to set up a memorial site for Bob on Facebook asap. We'll let folks know when it's up.

All of our love and best wishes go out to Phylis Guida (Bob's widow) and the Guida family in their tragic loss.

Rest in peace, Bob. You are sorely missed by your many friends and loved ones.

"Bob loved performing and making people happy with his wonderful music and singing," Shlomo said in a Facebook posting. "It was Bob's fondest wish that when his time came, he would be able to take his leave of this world while on stage. And yesterday his wish was granted. He will be sorely missed."

Eli Smith interviewed Bob along with fellow Otis Brother Pat Conte last year. You can see video of the interview and follow a bunch of great links at the Down Home Radio site.

Tags: music

You may remember that one of my songs for February Album Writing Month was "The Subway Sings Somewhere, which combined field recordings of the NYC subway with harmonica and guitar and various loops and electronic treatments to create a song based on the musical tones made by the newer subway trains. Most people identify those tones as the opening notes of "Somewhere," from West Side Story.



The day I made the field recordings (on the way to Staten Island for my dad's birthday), I also shot some video, and today I finally got around to editing them into a video to go with the song. It includes (starting at the two-minute mark) a complete view of "Masstransiscope,” an animated piece by artist and filmmaker Bill Brand that can be seen on the Manhattan-bound BMT tracks between Dekalb Avenue and the Manhattan Bridge.

The abandoned subway station shown at the end is the Cortlandt Street stop on the R/W, one of the World Trade Center stops abandoned after 9/11. I used to get off the train there every day to go to work.

Tags: songs, subways