7/4

the official story... .

The subway gives you almost door to door service. Take the N/R trane... It might give YOU door to door service, but not me (or kh1958 I suspect!) I will have to fly there first, of course. But thanks for the tip. Nothing smells quite like the New York Subway system in the summer. Chinatown is even better!

The subway gives you almost door to door service. Take the N/R trane... It might give YOU door to door service, but not me (or kh1958 I suspect!) I know...get off the subway and you're in Pismo Beach.

The subway gives you almost door to door service. Take the N/R trane... .

Reminds me of working in a Mazda parts warehouse when I was 24. .

uh oh... now the walls have eyes...

Under a different name. .

It upgraded its self and I didn't even notice... .

on the other hand

except none of his music sounds like Bitches Brew.

Yes, Dobell's booths had a very specialized line in grafitti. Two I remember are: "Roland Kirk has two mouths" and "Gladys Pringle:" (or some such name) "best white entertainer ever" plus London suburban phone number. Not the Gladys Pringle? Of the London Pringles?

Nothing to worry about, let's hear it for Night Lights!

Mr. Johnson is one of us.

Tony Oxley on WKCR. .

But defunkt is specific: Check out On The Corner by Miles. Get yer toes wet with just the album, go wild with with the box... There's the banjo and tuba to consider too.

Chauncey must be Clem's cousin. really? I'm shocked....

I've heard the first two sets and loved 'em. Too bad I can't make the journey in from Neu Jersey these days, I miss NYC. .

crap!

June 3, 2008 The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care) By DAN HURLEY, NYT There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus. What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.” “A lot of the social cognition we take for granted and learn through childhood, the ability to appreciate that someone else is being ironic or sarcastic or angry — the so-called theory of mind that allows us to get inside someone else’s head — is characteristically lost very early in the course of frontotemporal dementia,” said Dr. Bradley F. Boeve, a behavioral neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “It’s very disturbing for family members, but neurologists haven’t had good tools for measuring it,” he went on. “That’s why I found this study by Kate Rankin and her group so fascinating.” Dr. Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, used an innovative test developed in 2002, the Awareness of Social Inference Test, or Tasit. It incorporates videotaped examples of exchanges in which a person’s words seem straightforward enough on paper, but are delivered in a sarcastic style so ridiculously obvious to the able-brained that they seem lifted from a sitcom. “I was testing people’s ability to detect sarcasm based entirely on paralinguistic cues, the manner of expression,” Dr. Rankin said. In one videotaped exchange, a man walks into the room of a colleague named Ruth to tell her that he cannot take a class of hers that he had previously promised to take. “Don’t be silly, you shouldn’t feel bad about it,” she replies, hitting the kind of high and low registers of a voice usually reserved for talking to toddlers. “I know you’re busy — it probably wasn’t fair to expect you to squeeze it in,” she says, her lips curled in derision. Although people with mild Alzheimer’s disease perceived the sarcasm as well as anyone, it went over the heads of many of those with semantic dementia, a progressive brain disease in which people forget words and their meanings. “You would think that because they lose language, they would pay close attention to the paralinguistic elements of the communication,” Dr. Rankin said. To her surprise, though, the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests. “The right parahippocampal gyrus must be involved in detecting more than just visual context — it perceives social context as well,” Dr. Rankin said. The discovery fits with an increasingly nuanced view of the right hemisphere’s role, said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, an associate professor in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. “The left hemisphere does language in the narrow sense, understanding of individual words and sentences,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “But it’s now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal, puns and jokes, requires the right hemisphere.” Dr. Boeve, at the Mayo Clinic, said that beyond the curiosity factor of mapping the cognitive tasks of the brain’s ridges and furrows, the study offered hope that a test like Tasit could help in the diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia. “These people normally do perfectly well on traditional neuropsychological tests early in the course of their disease,” he said. “The family will say the person has changed dramatically, but even neurologists will often just shrug them off as having a midlife crisis.” Short of giving such a test, he said, the best way to diagnose such problems is by talking with family members about how the person has changed over time. After a presentation of her findings at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in April, Dr. Rankin was asked whether even those with intact brains might have differences in brain areas that explain how well they pick up on sarcasm. “We all have strengths and weaknesses in our cognitive abilities, including our ability to detect social cues,” she said. “There may be volume-based differences in certain regions that explain variations in all sorts of cognitive abilities.” So is it possible that Jon Stewart, who wields sarcasm like a machete on “The Daily Show,” has an unusually large right parahippocampal gyrus? “His is probably just normal,” Dr. Rankin said. “The right parahippocampal gyrus is involved in detecting sarcasm, not being sarcastic.” But, she quickly added, “I bet Jon Stewart has a huge right frontal lobe; that’s where the sense of humor is detected on M.R.I.” A spokesman for Mr. Stewart said he would have no comment — not that a big-shot television star like Jon Stewart would care about the size of his neuroanatomy.

That Milli Vanilli playlist.....yeah it's a guilty pleasure....but can't you just play the CD in the car when you have to hear them? But then you don't get to use the MP3 player. What's the point of having the MP3 player if you can't use it???

The price of real estate in NYC has been out of control for a while.

I haven't been to either of the Virgin stores in NYC for a few years...too expensive. .

June 17, 2008 Esbjorn Svensson, Leader of the Jazz Group E.S.T., Dies at 44 By BRUCE WEBER, NYT Esbjorn Svensson, a Swedish pianist and leader of the jazz trio E.S.T., one of Europe’s most popular ensembles, which was to appear in New York this Saturday as part of the J.V.C. Festival, died on June 14 in Stockholm. He was 44. Mr. Svensson was killed in a scuba diving accident in the Stockholm archipelago, said the manager of the trio, Burkhard Hopper. A composer of genre-bending music that drew widely on influences outside of jazz, especially niches of pop like funk and hip-hop, Mr. Svensson was a pop artist of sorts, melding lyrical melodies and electronic effects, classical grandeur and the propulsion of rock, a sumptuous piano sound and frenetic improvisation. His ensemble, the Esbjorn Svensson Trio, better known as E.S.T., was unsung in the United States in spite of being featured on the cover of Downbeat magazine. But it has a substantial following almost every place else with a jazz scene, especially in Europe, where the trio often packs mostly young people into large auditoriums usually reserved for rock bands and augments the music with light effects, fog machines and multimedia presentations. The trio’s Web site, EST-music.com, lists 11 previous albums, including the most recent, “E.S.T. Live in Hamburg,” and it has completed a 12th, “Leukocyte.” In 2002 the trio won the Guinness Jazz in Europe Award for the album “Strange Place for Snow.” Its anonymity in America was perhaps on the verge of bring broken. This week the trio — including the drummer Magnus Ostrom and bass player Dan Berglund — had been booked for a Saturday night show at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, home of the old Village Gate. “They were looking forward to making an impact in the States,” said Jason Olaine, artistic director of the J.V.C. festival. “They were really trying to make music that was engaging, not trying to take it out of its comfort zone, and to embrace people who wouldn’t necessarily classify themselves as jazz fans. They’re kind of like the Keith Jarrett Trio of Europe.” Esbjorn Svensson was born in Vasteras, about two hours northwest of Stockholm, on April 14, 1964. He studied music at Stockholm University, and in 1990, he and his childhood friend, Mr. Ostrom, formed their first trio. However, it was not until they were joined by Mr. Borglund that they met with recognition, which came with their first album, “When Everyone Has Gone,” in 1993. The group’s other notable albums include “E.S.T. Plays Monk,” “From Gagarin’s Point of View” and “Good Morning Susie Soho.” Mr. Svensson is survived by his wife, Eva; two children, Ruben and Noah; his parents; and several siblings.

Happy Jack wasn't old, but he was a man. He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man. The kids would all sing, he would take the wrong key, So they rode on his head in their furry donkey. The kids couldn't hurt Jack, They tried, tried, tried. They dropped things on his back, They lied, lied, lied, lied, lied. But they couldn't stop Jack, 'or the waters lapping, And they couldn't prevent Jack from being happy. But they couldn't stop Jack, 'or the waters lapping, And they couldn't prevent Jack from feeling happy. The kids couldn't hurt Jack, They tried, tried, tried. They dropped things on his back They lied, lied, lied, lied, lied. But they couldn't stop Jack, 'or the waters lapping. And they couldn't prevent Jack from being happy.

June 15, 2008, 10:22 pm Bonnaroo: Same Set, Different Sound By Jon Pareles, NYT I had seen Robert Plant and Alison Krauss performing their duets with T-Bone Burnett leading their Raising Sand Revue band in New York, at WaMu Theater, the night before I left for Bonnaroo. It was a memorable concert: hazy with smoke and reverb, full of mystery and melancholy. And I was curious to see how such eerie, pristine music would survive daylight, a standing audience and the bleary day-four Bonnaroo crowd. It did, by turning everything inside out. The set list was virtually the same, the effect entirely different. The “Raising Sand” album was conceived and partly recorded in nearby Nashville, representing Mr. Plant’s discovery of, as he bluntly put it, America’s white songwriters. And behind the grief and solitude in many of the songs, it turned out, was a core of tenacity. The band gave its dynamics a different order of magnitude: quieter at times, louder when they let loose, particularly Buddy Miller’s guitar solos. Where Mr. Plant and Ms. Krauss had sung gently and mournfully, they let their voices ring, with Ms. Krauss’s fiddle playing bit harder. The banjo-centered version of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” had the voices just teasing and the band crashing in, until Mr. Plant let loose a few phrases of the old arena wail, And Ms. Krauss’s aching version of “Trampled Rose,” so quiet and bereft in a New York theater, became a clear, keening mountain-music lament, with a sorrow as big as all outdoors.