Finally back home after a solid week of traveling, beginning with Fran and Leigh's lovely wedding in Florida and continuing with a week of work meetings in Seattle, which was colder than Florida but warmer than here. One of my colleagues who'd lived there for years took me over to the Olympic Sculpture Park, a miniature Storm King Mountain right on the waterfront, and I took a walk over the unimpressive Experience Music Project / SF Museum. The most impressive thing at the museum was the handwritten manuscript of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Yes, that's right. He wrote all three of those murder-weapon-sized novels with a fountain pen.

On the flight home, I lucked into a remake of The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 (first time I've ever taken JetBlue and clearly I have been missing something). As I've written before, the original is one of the great NYC films of all time and far outclasses its many later imitations, including every film Quentin Tarantino has ever made.

So I was not necessarily optmistic about the remake but it was quite enjoyable. Denzel Washington and John Travolta have great chemistry together, maybe even better than Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau in the original. Combining the characters of the cop (Matthau) and the original dispatcher (played by Tom Pedi) was a bit unrealistic, and avoided the shock of Caz Dolowicz's death. But it also focused on the magnificent dynamic between Washington and Travolta. And James Gandolfini ("I left my Rudy Giuliani suit at home") was superb as Mayor Bloomberg.

As a lifelong New Yorker and transit buff, however, I couldn't help but notice the vast numbers of completely unnecessary factual errors in the film. The original was fiction, but based rather firmly in reality. The remake is almost complete nonsense, starting with the very opening scene, where train dispatcher Garber switches an R train to the Q tracks at 34th so he can send it to Queens on the F line. A minor point? Yes. But why put that level of detail into the film if you're just going to get ridiculously wrong? Anyone who's ever even been in that station knows those tracks aren't even on the same level.

( A Comedy Of Errors )

But it was great fun. I think my favorite line was this exchange between Travolta and Washington:

"We all owe god a death. We're all going to the same place."

"Where's that? Jersey?"

Tags: photos, travel

This got me into a little trouble yesterday, as it made me very late for a breakfast meeting, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. On my way up the Pulaski Bridge (which connects Brooklyn and Queens) I heard a loud horn blowing, saw the gates going down, and realized I was going to see the bridge open for the first time.

It took a long time. The bridge took about five minutes to open fully, then the ship going underneath -- some sort of square barge thing with four enormous vertical pipes sticking up from it -- moved through very slowly, and then the bridge slowly closed, and (not visible in the video) jiggled back and forth in slow motion, one side raising, the facing side lowering, until the two sides were properly meshed together and the bridge closed.

So I spent a good 20 minutes watching this, along with a few dozen other morning commuters, pedestrians and bicyclists, and learned a little bit about (one small sample of) the Williamsburg/Greenpoint community. Most of the people waiting were what I'd describe as "hipsters" -- white, younger than me, dressed in fashionable clothes -- or people whose first language was not English. I made a humorous remark at one point, and felt like a fool because no one even responded. Then I realized that everyone standing within earshot either had earbuds in their ears, or likely didn't speak English well enough to understand what I'd said and why it was funny. For the entire period, everyone pretty much stood there in silence.

I didn't feel old, but I did feel bad for all these people who were so militantly resistant to a pretty wonderful opportunity for a NYC community moment.

Tags: nyc, photos

I had a couple of very productive days in Seattle and San Jose, and then yesterday drove up to San Francisco. Even though I've been coming out to the West Coast pretty frequently the last few months, I haven't been back to this city for some years. I love it; I could live here. And I don't say that often.

I'm staying in the financial district, next door to the TransAmerica building, ironically on the site of a saloon in a novel I've been reading that concludes during the start of the Gold Rush. I wandered around North Beach yesterday, eating a sorbet in the other Washington Square, buying books at City Lights and browsing used record stores, and then, even though it's touristy, I had dinner at the Stinking Rose. Where, as they say, "We season our garlic with food." A colleague introduced me to the joys of Dungeness crabs. They're a large species named after a city in Washington, generally found only on the west coast. And they are very good to eat. Especially with garlic. And very messy. They bring you a bib before you start and hot towels and half a lemon when you're done.

Then I sat outside at a cafe across the street from a whole line of strip joints and listened to the Chinese Music Orchestra, which included Chinese instruments but also a cello, a banjo, and a hammered dulcimer. I am writing this in my hotel room, looking straight at Coit Tower, and I'm leaving for the airport soon.

You can see more crappy cell phone photos here.

Tags: photos, travel

I'm staying tonight in a new hotel in Lancaster, PA, that was built around a couple of historic houses, one of which was apparently a station on the Underground Railroad. The houses are literally incorporated into the hotel and conference center in a very strange way; one house kinda just sits in the lobby of the hotel, and the other's basement is exposed through glass, where signage hints that there was a tunnel from the house to a local tavern that was used to hide African Americans on the run from slavery.

The houses are part of the Stevens and Smith Historic Site, and a $20 million "educational and interprative complex" is planned for the site, but so far, what they have is a couple of odd exhibits in an otherwise standard convention center.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I guess it's good they didn't tear these houses down, but it feels so casual and disrespectful and out of context. I am just picturing convention-goers exiting the "Freedom Hall" (I swear, that's the name of the conference room across from the Underground Railroad exhibit) after some mind-numbing keynote speech by a horrid motivational speaker or a big-shot in the eastern Pennsylvania widget industry. They've got their badges around their necks, they're checking their voice mail or looking through their goodie bags to see if there's at least a decent pen or something, and oh gee, look at that brick cistern terrified people used to hide in a few hundred years ago. Yeah, cool, is there going to be an open bar at WidgetCo's event tonight? (Or, in my case, gee, weird, let me take a couple of cell phone pictures and go back to the room to do email.)

To be fair, it's just opened and there is more work to be done. And this is a vast improvement over destroying it altogether as has been done too often to historic places like this. But, it's ... strange.

Tags: photos, travel

After a nice afternoon on Staten Island with my brother and some of his high school friends (aren't we all much more fun and much easier to get along with now than we were in high school?), I took the ferry back to Manhattan and rode the bike to the Saturday night bluegrass jam at the legendary Sunny's in Red Hook.

Sunny's is becoming a little too legendary, or at least the jam is. For the past year or so it has been attracting more and more onlookers, and with a lot of musicians out of town at Grey Fox this weekend, the ratio was about three spectators to every player. Three spectators all talking at the top of their lungs during the music, and applauding after every song as if we were performing and as if they'd been listening.

I enjoy an audience as much as the next attention-seeking showoff bluegrass musician, but if you can't hear the music, it's not any fun, it's just frustrating. I played a few of my breaks watching the guitarist's hands because I couldn't hear him playing.

I was tired, and had an uphill bike-ride home, so I left fairly early. Outside, a few of the audience members were also leaving, and one woman said to me, "Wait, you're the harmonica player. You're leaving? How come? You should play more!" I said that I was leaving because I couldn't really hear the other musicians. She said, "The hell with everyone else, you sounded great!"

Gee thanks. First of all, no I didn't. As I said, I played most of my breaks by guesswork and didn't play at all on songs I didn't already know. Second of all, that's not musical appreciation speaking, that's inebriation.

But most importantly, that's not why I play! Especially not at a jam. Music is all about "everyone else." It's about playing together as a community, learning new songs, sharing, and having fun. Not about being better than everyone else. Some musicians certainly approach it that way (they're the ones who practice alone in their rooms rather than going out to jams with "lesser" players) but most of us don't. There are some extraordinarily talented musicians at Sunny's almost every week, and most of them are embarrassed by the applause and annoyed by the noise.

And the music really suffers. Edith, a very talented local singer who is learning to play guitar and lead songs, wanted to sing a beautiful old modal tune. I played guitar for her on it because I know the song and had in fact just spent a week in West Virginia with the woman Edith learned it from. It didn't go well. Edith sang it beautifully, I managed to find the right harmony in that key, and (if I do say so myself) I did drive the rhythm well on the guitar. But she and I were the only people who knew it. The bass player, who really knows what he's doing, couldn't follow the song because he couldn't hear it well enough.

( What I'm talking about musically, if you're interested )
Anyway the point is that this song has a lot of tension in it, often because the melody wants a chord change, for instance, the happy "lift" to the IV chord (the one referred to in Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"). You most emphatically do not play that IV, especially not if Ginny is singing. (That's her in the blue shirt in the photo; she has a great laugh but a killer look if you do something dumb when she's singing.) You stay firmly on the I (which is major in this song) so that instead of a big happy chord change supporting a soaring melody, you have the melody trying to lift up against a resolute accompaniment that refuses to budge, and finally falling back down. And at the end, there is no resolving V chord to wrap things up, but a long-delayed VII chord.

It's amazing when done right. Ginny sings it strong, playing with the shading of the notes and working that tension up to a fever pitch. (You can hear an excerpt of her version on amazon.com. You can also buy it or better yet buy the whole album which is spectacular.)

Some bluegrass players happy this song up by playing those chord changes and turning it into a bit of a rock&roll song. So as far as the bass player could tell, we were just missing lots of chord changes. (And, since Edith and I had never played the song together before, I was in fact missing the only damn change that actually does happen in the song, because its timing is so delayed). As a result, he didn't really know what was going on, and all the tension that would have been created by Edith's singing just turned into uncertainty.

So, did I "sound great" on this song? I think I did. I had the guitar rhythm down well especially after spending a week watching the right hands of people like John Lilly and Courtney Granger. Edith sang it wonderfully. I did find the harmony eventually. But so what? I was out of sync with the bass player most of the time. I screwed up one person's break by missing the crucial chord change (and it is crucial -- it's the only release of that tension and when it finally shows up you should feel it in your bowels). No one really had fun on the song; we were too conscious of being out of step with each other. Edith apologized afterwards for god's sake.

I don't go to jams to "sound great." I go to jams to enjoy the great moments that happen with other musicians and to enjoy being with them and playing with them. If you come to watch a jam, be aware that you are not watching a concert. You're coming to a social gathering, and if you don't like what's going on there, go somewhere else. I'm not being mean. If you want to listen to music and sing along and suggest a song or even get up and lead one if you know the words, by all means please come to the back room at Sunny's on Saturday night and we'll be happy to see you. If you have a mandolin you haven't played in a while, bring it. I guarantee you'll find people who'll help you out with the chords and give you a break if you want one.

But if you want to yell and scream and laugh with your friends, well, that's what the front of the bar is for, where Francis plays old country and blues loud on the stereo and dogs roam free. The hell with sounding great. We're there to play music with each other.

Tags: music, photos

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

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

I spent Tuesday in Texas. We had crossed the state line from Louisiana the night before, stopped at San Antonio early in the morning, and by breakfast time we were in Del Rio, the "queen city of the Rio Grande." We spent the rest of the day rolling across ranch country, cactus flats and through small faded towns like Langtry, Sanderson, and Alpine.



It seemed like a minor-key kinda day. The vastness of the state is overwhelming; it's harsh and beautiful and unforgiving. Whatever you think of Texas politics and Texas culture, you cannot deny the power and the history of the state and the incredible fortitude of the people who created it. It has a bloody and brutal history, but so does this entire country; as always, Texas did it bigger and badder, but there's a little Texas in all of us.

Today's song is "Texas (Sun to Sun)." Before the advent of the eight-hour workday, agricultural workers who worked from sunrise to sunset were often said to work "sun to sun." The sun rose and set on the train today without us ever leaving the state.

( Texas (Sun to Sun) )

Tags: photos, songs, travel

I'll be leaving New Orleans on the Sunset Limited in a few hours, after a one-night stopover here. I haven't been here since 2005 and I have to say, it's pretty sad. I have always had mixed feelings about this town: As a musician I feel compelled to like it, but the loutish tourism, horrifying poverty and racism, and terrible crime rates aren't exactly attractive. Katrina seems to have destroyed a lot of small businesses that have been replaced by corporate chains and businesses desperate for tourist cash. Kinda like Ghouliani did to Times Square.

Unlike the other times I've been here -- my first trip was in 1988 with some college friends -- I couldn't even find any decent music in the French Quarter. Walter "Wolfman" Washington was playing out at the Maple Leaf, but with no car and not a lot of time (and 35-degree weather) I wasn't in the mood for that trip. I walked up and down Bourbon and Royal Streets and heard almost nothing but disco and club music, or dreadful rock-blues cover bands playing way too loud. There weren't even any street musicians, but perhaps it was too cold for them.

I finally happened on a Bourbon Street bar called Huge Ass Beers (I give them credit for at least not trying to be falsely authentic) with a couple of guys playing blues in the back. Nothing to write home about, and I didn't get their names, but they were having a good time and so were the other folks in the bar, mostly a hardcore band from San Diego and their girlfriends.

This morning I had coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, which is at least still there and intact, and walked around a little more. Even in the heart of the French Quarter there are a lot of boarded-up storefronts and for-rent signs. I'll be glad to get back on the train.

Tags: photos, travel

The old South Ferry station on the IRT is about to be replaced with a new, larger station, so yesterday I roped mary_wroth into a brief photo expedition to the old station.

I grew up in the public-transit wastelands of Staten Island, which even though it's part of New York City is the only county in a 50-mile radius without a direct rail link to Manhattan. So, South Ferry was the closest thing I had to a subway stop; after a bus ride of anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, and a half-hour ferry ride, I could head down the stairs to the cramped, curved platform, only big enough to fit the front half of a subway train, and take the the Seventh Avenue Local (that's what my dad and grandfather called it; when I first started riding the trains the standardized color scheme didn't exist yet and the number/letter system was used inconsistently) to magical places worlds away from my semi-suburban neighborhood.

It took me to 14th Street, where Baird Searles' Science Fiction Shop was located, and the main branch of Barnes and Noble (a bookstore heaven to a kid who only knew the Paperback Booksmith and Waldenbooks in the mall; this was several decades before the advent of the superstores) was just a short walk away. To 33rd Street, to go to the wargame/D&D heaven of the Compleat Strategist. To Christopher Street, for an afternoon rummaging through the bins at Second Coming and the Record Runner and other stores long gone and forgotten even by me. (And no, Bleecker Bob's, while still open, was never on the list -- it was an infamous clip joint where $3.99 albums sold for $25 and the staff was rude.)

The unusual aspects of the station -- the moving grates that covered the gap between the curved platform and the car door, the horrendous screech of the wheels as the train came into the curve -- were all things I associated firmly with The Subway. I learned to walk between cars very early so that I could walk up to the first five cars if I got on at the back of the train. None of this was strange to me, although most subway riders have probably never experienced them. The only other station with the moving grates and the curves is Union Square and I don't think any other platform in the system is too short for a full train. And there's really no reason to use the South Ferry station if you're not going to take the ferry.

It will be gone soon, replaced with a new station that's bigger and brighter and can fit a full train, and has a connection to the Whitehall Street BMT station. Anyone who uses the station regularly will be much happier with the new one, but I'll always be nostalgic for the old one. And oh so very glad that I don't have to use it anymore.

Tags: photos, subways

Thanks to the recent theft of my backpack, I needed to replace my point&shoot camera before my Arizona trip that starts this weekend. After doing a lot of research, I decided to go with an upgraded version of the camera that was stolen, which was a Canon PowerShot SD550. So I now own an SD880, which so far I'm very happy with.

( Pictures (of course) )

Tags: photos

We had a particularly good time at the Greenwich Village Bistro tonight, not least thanks to a bunch of tourists who stopped in, stayed for all three sets, danced and (I swear) did the wave. It was quite a contrast to Friday night, but both were great times. Saboteur Tiger (tonight's band) plays next on January 11, and I'm hoping Kate will do another gig just before Christmas.

Tags: gigs, photos

I did another ride out to the Rockaways, out across Jamaica Bay on Cross Bay Boulevard, with a two-stop detour on the A train since the last bridge to the Rockaways is still closed. I had planned to go further east and back around JFK but it started looking like rain so I headed back to Flatbush Avenue and home -- a total of 38 miles.

It was a nice ride, through the neighborhood of Broad Channel, which is almost a small town, halfway out on Jamaica Bay -- almost everyone has a boat in their backyard. And the train ride is pretty spectacular, riding across the bay with the seagulls flying alongside.

I think this is the last long ride I'll be doing before the Bike MS ride. If you haven't already (and thank you to everyone who did) there is still time to donate.

Lots of pictures on Flickr.

Tags: bike, photos

I tried the Bayonne bike ride again, and this time made it with no flats. I took the ferry over to Jersey City, rode down through Jersey City and Bayonne, over the Bayonne Bridge, through Staten Island to the ferry, with a stop for lunch with Mom and Dad, and then back home. The route map overstates the mileage (because there's no way to put a break in the route for the two ferry trips) on the one hand, but understates it on the other because I didn't put it all the backtracking (finding the entrance to the bridge was a challenge) and photo detours. Actual riding distance was 32.5 miles over three hours.

New Jersey is much maligned, in part, because the parts you see from New York City are marshes and industrial wasteland; driving into Elizabeth over the Goethals Bridge always reminded me of the Descent Into Mordor. But it's also beautiful -- the Kill Van Kull, the marshes, and an uncommon view of the Statue Of Liberty. Bayonne is also a nice old town with a real downtown and some charming old storefronts. And a Times Square completely free of tourists and chain stores.

And the Bayonne Bridge itself is beautiful, a very distinctive arch that has graced the covers of many Port Richmond High School yearbooks -- my high school is almost underneath the bridge -- with a separate walkway. I took a few nostalgia shots in Staten Island -- PRHS, Ralph's Ices, my old neighborhood park -- and then sat on the Brooklyn side of the Staten Island Ferry going home.

Tags: bike, photos

The gig yesterday at the Woodsmen's Festival was great fun. The day started off with a vicious thunderstorm and torrential rain, but cleared into a near-perfect day by the time we did the sound check at 9:30. I played with the Belles Trio, who were alternating sets with two other bands including some other friends of ours from the Philadelphia area, and it was just a great day of listening to and playing music outdoors in a pretty spot.

We had a decent-sized crowd, but nothing like the chock-full bleachers around the field where the competitions were happening. The chainsaw races were loud, but the timber-felling was truly impressive. Not only do these guys bring down a sizeable tree (actually a log stood on end) with frightening dispatch, most of them land it on a small peg -- it's not just about speed, but also about accuracy.

This area of Pennsylvania (we were in Potter County) once had the largest sawmill in the country, and almost all the trees in the area are less than a hundred years old since just about every tree was cut down back in the 19th century. There are tours to go see the very few old-growth trees left. Apparently one of the reasons old trees were preserved, in small groves of a dozen or so, was in case of fire. You needed to save enough logs to rebuild your house if it burned down.

I spent today driving down through Pennsylvania and Maryland to West Virginia, for Old-Time Week at the Augusta Heritage Festival. In other words, I'll be surrounded by fiddles and banjos for a week. Luckily, there's at least one other harmonica player here.

Time and connectivity allowing, I'm posting photos to Flickr.

Tags: gigs, photos, travel

Philipsburg was the western edge of our coverage area when I worked for the Centre Daily Times in State College. (I started that job almost exactly 20 years ago.) It's got a pretty, but faded, downtown, where I'm eating at The Little Restaurant.

I'm on my way to the Appalachian Thruway (which is now apparently an interstate, 99) which will take me down into West Virginia.

This is the first time I've had cell service since Friday evening.

Tags: photos, travel

I was completely charmed by this sign in the window of a former cell-phone store on Flatbush Avenue. (So nice for once to see one of those go away, rather than the good local bar and independent video store that have left or are soon to leave the same block.) The elaborate lettering, the wildly creative spelling, and the fact that he did the whole thing in black and red EXCEPT for the contact information, written in red only, and now faded almost to illegibility.

Tags: photos

I rode over the Brooklyn Bridge and met mary_wroth, her friend Jon, and his cousin, to see David Byrne's installation, Playing The Building, down at the old Battery Maritime Building. This is the beautiful old ferry terminal, just north of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, that was abandoned for decades and is now finally being restored. The new Governor's Island ferry (which allows BIKES!) now runs from there.

Byrne's installation is a lone organ sitting in the midst of a huge room, with wires running from the organ to every corner of the room. As you play keys on the organ, hammers hit pillars, air rushes through pipes, and motors vibrate the structure, and you are literally "playing the building."

I didn't actually play, since the line was long and it was more fun to wander around the room and be surrounded by the noises. Even on a sunny Friday afternoon, it's thoroughly spooky, especially since you enter and leave through the deserted entrance hall to one of the ferry slps.

It's a fascinating installation in a wonderful old building and I think I'll be going back.

More photos

Tags: nyc, photos

I rode down to Fulton Ferry this afternoon to check out the Telectroscope, a truly inspired art project with a whole Victorian-era steampunk back story: a long-lost tunnel to London, started in the 19th century, has finally been completed, and a viewing device installed so you can look through it and see people on the other side, under Tower Bridge alongside the Thames.

Perhaps it sounds silly; an overblown conceit surrounding something you could do with a couple of webcams. But it's not; there's something magical about the story, about the fixed location, about it being public, about looking into the "tunnel" and seeing strangers five thousand miles waving back at you. People make appointments to meet up, or use the handy whiteboards to write messages to each other.

On a Sunday afternoon, the line was too long to wait on, but perhaps I'll stop by on my next morning ride into Manhattan and see what the lunchtime crowds in London look like. (More photos below the cut.)

( Hello, London! )

Tags: brooklyn, photos