7/4

Good for you! Unpack any guitars yet?

Like a maniac, eh?

I have no idea. If they did Fender clean, I'd be happy. .

June 8, 2008 Film Old Stomping Grounds, Hallucinated By JOHN ANDERSON Ann Savage, center, in Guy Maddin's "My Wiinipeg." THE documentary form has been twisted in recent years, but few filmmakers have given it as many tortuous turns as Guy Maddin, the Canadian fantasist and director as pretzel maker, does in “My Winnipeg.” Like all of Mr. Maddin’s work, this hometown portrait — commissioned by the Documentary Channel in Canada — skates along an icy edge between dreams and lucidity, fact and fiction, cinema and psychotherapy. A baroque survey of his childhood, spent growing up over a hair salon (his memories, Mr. Maddin narrates, are redolent with “the smells of female vanity and desperation”), “Winnipeg” also marks a cosmic collision between man and mother. As played by the film noir legend Ann Savage (“Detour”), the director’s mom is imperious dictator and guiding gorgon. “My Winnipeg” must be approached with wariness. Likewise his claim that, this past Mother’s Day, he gave his mother a stroke. “I turned her into a pile of laundry,” he said, perhaps ruefully. “It was during a long car ride out to our summer beach cottage. I yelled at her, and she silently and slowly settled down, like a pile of unbagged laundry. I thought she was faking death or something, then I realized, about 90 minutes later, that she had, in fact, had a stroke. “It was a strange scene, that’s for sure.” Members of the film’s Black Tuesdays Hockey Club. Strange scenes abound in the films of Mr. Maddin, which are usually described as nostalgic, hallucinatory and/or weird. From the time his horror short “The Dead Father” appeared in the mid-’80s, followed by his feature “Tales From the Gimli Hospital,” this prairie poet has been acclaimed as one of the more original minds in contemporary cinema. His oeuvre includes the mock-gothic “Archangel,” “Careful” and “Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary,” a ballet take on the Bram Stoker tale, rich in the vocabulary of silent cinema. “There’s no point in exhuming ‘Twilight of the Ice Nymphs,’ ” the 52-year-old Mr. Maddin said by phone from Toronto, where he was visiting his daughter and infant granddaughter. “But I just couldn’t get myself into a trance. Somebody kept waking me up. I felt no love for the movie before, during or after. I felt like I was part of a sleep-deprivation experiment.” Dreams, and Freudian nightmare, have always been part of the Maddin experience. Whether or not Mrs. Maddin really suffered a stroke (“I think ‘stroke’ is a regular occurrence,” said Mr. Maddin’s editor, John Gurdebeke, chuckling), is unclear. “Luckily for me,” Mr. Maddin said of the unfortunate car ride, “she has no recollection of the day.” And she hasn’t seen the movie either. Part of the inspiration for making the film, Mr. Gurdebeke said, was Mr. Maddin’s custom of picking up his visitors at the Winnipeg airport and then regaling them with a tour of the city, replete with arcane facts and elaborate narration. But it didn’t translate. At first. Michael Burns, the Documentary Channel’s ex-programming director, who commissioned the film, “was listening to the narration and saying, ‘Where is that guy?’ ” Mr. Gurdebeke said, referring to Guide Maddin. “He was writing to a certain style. He was trying to find a style. I’m not sure he was that comfortable being the narrator. So there was a lot of stuff that didn’t survive.” Mr. Maddin credits Mr. Gurdebeke with goading him into being more personal than he might have been. “I always feel like I’m breaking at least one commandment, and perhaps some yet-to-be-written commandments, whenever I start Tourette-ishly blurting out things about myself in my movies,” he said. The blurting is framed by an elaborate conceit: in addition to an ornate portrait of Winnipeg itself, complete with hockey history, weather reports and the American Indian mythology of its fabled “Forks” (the convergence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers), the film is a Grand Guignol sitcom. Renting his family’s old apartment over the hair salon, Mr. Maddin cast actors as his siblings. His long-dead father is represented by a rug-covered mound in the living room. And his mother is Ms. Savage, although he claims in the film that the actress is really his mother. Ms. Savage (who was unavailable for an interview) is one of Mr. Maddin’s muses. Another is Isabella Rossellini, the model-actress and star of his “Saddest Music in the World” (2003), as the legless Lady Helen Port-Huntly, whose prosthetics are filled with lager. Mr. Maddin directed Ms. Rossellini’s film tribute to her father, Roberto, “My Dad Is 100 Years Old” (2005). “Guy and my father,” she said, referring to the neorealist giant, “are very different stylistically. But like my father Guy works with small budgets. He is adored by other filmmakers.” She added of her father, “He might not have had a huge audience, but he was very influential, and I think Guy is the same. “In a way they are freeing you,” she said. “Ultimately, when you go see a Guy Maddin film, you go home empowered. You can say what you want to say, the way you want to say it.” Mr. Maddin’s influence on anyone, particularly women, is something he plays down. “I’ve allowed myself, Tom Neal-style,” he said of Ms. Savage’s “Detour” co-star, “to be buffeted about by very strong women. And it’s my fault. From cradle till, I presume, grave.” Has he ever been psychoanalyzed? “I never have,” he said. “I almost feel it would ruin everything. I kind of like poking around in my own little cesspool and every now and then making a film. It’s therapeutic enough for me.”

MORTON FELDMAN: ‘THE VIOLA IN MY LIFE’ Marek Konstantynowicz, violist; Cikada Ensemble; Norwegian Radio Orchestra, conducted by Christian Eggen. ECM New Series 1798; CD. WHEN we consider Morton Feldman these days, we tend to think first of the gigantic works he wrote toward the end of his career: extraordinarily beautiful fixations on tiny events and barely perceptible shifts, stretched over static durations of an hour, 90 minutes, even five or six hours. Hearing one of these pieces is a life-changing epiphany, but none can be said to provide easy access for the curious newcomer. Such seekers are urged to consider a new ECM recording of four Feldman pieces collectively titled “The Viola in My Life.” These short, sublime works were composed from August 1970 to March 1971, when Feldman was turning from the indeterminate methods he had favored in the 1950s and ’60s to a conventional mode of notating pitches, dynamics and durations. Every subtle gradation in the cycle is deliberately paced and exactingly controlled. The viola — its dusky, introverted sound perfectly suited to Feldman’s ruminations — offers fragments of melody in the first two works, while a small ensemble rustles in the background like a light breeze through a window. The third piece, for viola and piano, is spare almost to the point of disintegration; in the fourth the viola plays its most sustained melodies, while a full orchestra heaves sighs of dreamy restlessness. Marek Konstantynowicz, a Polish violist with a background in avant-garde jazz, performs with supreme patience and supple strength. The players of the Cikada Ensemble and the conductor Christian Eggen are careful, sympathetic collaborators, and ECM’s resonant but detailed sound offers an ideal perspective. The sole caveat is that at 39 minutes, this is one Feldman recording that ends far too soon. STEVE SMITH NYT, June 8, 2008

Bo Diddley gets a rocking sendoff at Fla. funeral By BRENDAN FARRINGTON Associated Press Writer Bo Diddley's funeral rocked and rolled Saturday with as much energy as his music. For four hours, friends and relatives sang, danced and celebrated the life of the man who helped give birth to rock and roll with a signature beat that influenced Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and many others. As family members passed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's casket, a gospel band played his namesake song. Within moments, the crowd of several hundred began clapping in time and shouting, "Hey, Bo Diddley!" Diddley, 79, died of heart failure Monday at his home in nearby Archer. "In 1955 he used to keep the crowds rocking and rolling way before Elvis Presley," Diddley's grandson, Garry Mitchell, said before kicking his legs sideways, high up in the air, the way Diddley did onstage. Mourners cheered. "I'm just telling it the way it is," Mitchell said. Diddley, who was born Ellas Bates and became Ellas McDaniel when he took the last name of a cousin who raised him, was remembered for much more than his songs. Friends recounted his generosity, manifested in concerts for the homeless and work with youth groups and other charities; and the way he loved to talk to just about anybody he met. Gainesville Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan referred to one of his most famous hits as she told the crowd, "When the question is asked, 'Who do you love?', it's you, Bo." The funeral was followed by a tribute concert featuring his touring band and other musicians. Eric Burdon, leader of the rock group The Animals, attended the service, and flowers were sent from musicians including Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Petty, George Thorogood and others. Burdon, also a member of the Rock Hall, called Diddley a big influence. "I've been a fan of his since 16, 17 years of age. Probably one of the first records I ever owned," Burdon said, recalling that his attention was immediately grabbed when he saw an album cover with Diddley sitting on a scooter with a square guitar. Burdon said he saw Diddley play last year at a concert in Australia, and even though he could tell his health wasn't great, Diddley put tremendous energy into the show. He was known for his stage moves, which some presume influenced Presley. "He's always been jumping around and very aggressive; if he was onstage with the Stones, he was obviously putting Keith Richards in his place," Burdon said. In describing the "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm Diddley made famous, Burdon said, "I call it bone music, because it goes to your bone." But stories of another side of Diddley were told repeatedly at the funeral. A man who loved God and his family, who would always stop to talk in the grocery store and was always smiling. His brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes of Biloxi, Miss., said Diddley always asked how he could help and what he could give. "There was one thing he wouldn't give me. That's his hat," Haynes said, referring to the black hat the musician was also known for. But Haynes said his brother grew weary of life on the road. "'But this is what God gave me to feed my family,'" Haynes recalled Diddley saying. "'I have to keep doing it until God says it's enough.'" Diddley was born in McComb, Miss. He moved to rural Archer in the early 1980s and had a recording studio on his 76 acres. Mitchell joked that Diddley got up so early, he would tap the roosters on the shoulder to wake them up. And he always sang at breakfast. Diddley's friend Roosevelt Hutchinson described how the musician would wrap meat in several layers of tin foil, bury it and light a fire on top to cook it. Once the fire was lit, he would grab his guitar. "He just enjoyed playing that thing under those trees," Hutchinson said. But he enjoyed his family even more, friends said. He had four children, 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. "Please know this, because I know Diddley," the guitarist's business manager, Faith Fusillo, told his family. "As much as you loved him, he loved you more."

Gosh, that was exciting!

June 7, 2008 Music Review Modern Pieces, Classically Performed By STEVE SMITH, NYT Few pianists approach Philip Glass’s music with the level of devotion and insight that Bruce Brubaker brings to it, precisely the reason he gets so much expressivity out of it. On Wednesday night at the Stone, a small experimental-music space on the Lower East Side, Mr. Brubaker performed two of Mr. Glass’s major piano works as well as compositions by William Duckworth and Alvin Curran. In an introduction from the stage, Mr. Brubaker said that Mr. Glass’s “Mad Rush,” from 1979, conveys the perception of two speeds at once while driving, by alternating between forward and sidelong views. That observation works well enough for a piece in which blocks of slow and fast activity simply repeat in alternation. Mr. Brubaker played with a beautiful, even tone and shaped phrases with subtlety. Mr. Glass’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” from 1988, was inspired by a 1966 Allen Ginsberg poem of the same name about railroad trains crossing the Midwest, bearing missiles bound for Vietnam. The opening sequence is as plain-spoken as a gospel hymn. What follows, though technically as flat and objective as “Mad Rush,” suggests by turns Ginsberg’s “cushioned load of metal doom” and a train chugging along under a clear Kansas sky big as eternity. Mr. Duckworth’s “Time Curve Preludes,” composed in 1978 and 1979, have been cited as the starting point for post-Minimalism: music that takes its lead from the diatonic tonality and repetitive rhythms of Minimalism but deviates in matters of duration and style. What unites these 24 succinct pieces are the harmonic drones that ring and ripple quietly throughout each, created by placing metal weights on bass keys. But each prelude has its own profile. The five that Mr. Brubaker played — Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6 and 11, all from Book 1 — suggested the coruscating spirals of gamelan, Debussy’s luminous mystery, Ligeti’s prickly intensity and more. That this collection isn’t more widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s major piano works is puzzling; perhaps Mr. Brubaker’s assured advocacy will help redress that slight. Mr. Brubaker’s hands were a blur as he drummed chords in rapid alternation during Mr. Curran’s “Hope Street Tunnel Blues III” (1983), with one or another finger occasionally popping out to spear a note. To borrow Mr. Brubaker’s earlier automotive reference, this was like driving fast with the windows down, listening to the sound change according to the road’s surface and the proximity of other objects. After taking a moment to recover, Mr. Brubaker provided an encore: from 1988, Mr. Glass’s tranquil “Metamorphosis Two.”

Hey, congratulations everybody... .

June 7, 2008 He Still Loves New Orleans, and Now He’s Mad By JON PARELES Dr. John, still an ambassador for New Orleans although he has lived in New York since the 1980s, has a new album, “City That Care Forgot.” NEW ORLEANS — Mac Rebennack, the 67-year-old New Orleans pianist, guitarist and songwriter better known as Dr. John, carries the city’s lore in his fingers, his scratchy voice and his memory. He has lived in New York City and on Long Island since the 1980s, but when he revisits his birthplace it’s as if he never left. New Orleans culture, he said in his ever-surprising vocabulary, has “wacknosity” — things only New Orleanians do. In late April he was back in his old hometown, revisiting his past and present. He performed during the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, introducing some of the songs on the angry new album he released this week, “City That Care Forgot” (429 Records). (Dr. John is to perform in New York City on June 17 at the Highline Ballroom.) Three days later he was at the Ponderosa Stomp, which had persuaded him to revive songs he wrote back in the 1950s. Most were written for other people (like Ronnie and the Delinquents’ “Bad Neighborhood”), and he hadn’t performed them since. In the afternoons Dr. John was at the Music Shed, a recording studio in the Garden District, singing Randy Newman’s theme song for “The Princess and the Frog,” a Disney movie about old New Orleans due to be released next year. “They wanted his voice, which is not a bad idea if you’re going to do New Orleans,” said Mr. Newman, who was at the sessions. “He’s the real thing in every kind of way.” Mr. Newman has known Mr. Rebennack since the 1960s, when both men worked as Los Angeles studio musicians. “You don’t have to tell him much about music,” Mr. Newman said. “He knows where he is, wherever he is.” Through the years, Dr. John has carried New Orleans style worldwide: in his two-fisted barrelhouse piano, in his syncopated drawl, in the second-line funk rhythms of songs like his 1973 hit “Right Place Wrong Time” and in the psychedelic voodoo character he created when he became Dr. John the Night Tripper in the late 1960s. Before the recording sessions, Dr. John told some tales. On early tours, he said, the Night Tripper’s troupe included a nude dancer and a geek who bit the heads off chickens, drank their blood and tossed their bodies to his black snake. In one town the geek was charged with cruelty to animals. Defending himself in court, he declared, “Arrest Colonel Sanders!” Dr. John also had, it seemed, a story for every street corner in his hometown. He recalled the one where Gypsies ran a bujo scam, promising to cleanse supposedly cursed money and filching it instead. There was the saloon where the booze wiped off the bar was collected in a galvanized tin, dumped into milk bottles and sold to down-and-out drunks. There was the Circle Food Market, where, decades ago, Sister Gertrude Morgan, a gospel evangelist shaking six tambourines — on her hands, her feet and her dress — used to sing like James Brown to redeem sinners. The front yard of her home in the Ninth Ward, Dr. John recalled, was all four-leaf clovers. The streets he showed a visitor were less vibrant. They’re the New Orleans he sings about on “City That Care Forgot,” still deeply scarred nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina. “There’s hardly any part of this city that you’re not going to see something that’s still whacked,” he said. The van, driven by his road manager, rolled past a tent city of the homeless that has spread under the long overpass of Interstate 10. Crossing the Industrial Canal, Dr. John said, “As far as your eyes can see on this bridge, and the next bridge and the next bridge and the next bridge, you can see masses of destruction slid in between masses of not-so-destruction.” “How many of those people are scattered and splattered around the United States to this minute?” he asked. “How many people got back and had no way to rebuild?” As the van moved through the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward, he said: “I knew a million people here, and they got wiped. The first time I come out here, I couldn’t even find where blocks ended and started. There were 5 and 10 houses smashed together. You could smell dead people in them.” He released a mournful seven-song EP, “Sippiana Hericane” (429 Records), less than three months after Katrina. But he kept hearing more grim stories. “The more people I would talk to — everybody had an epic movie saga,” he said. “One guy got his grandma out of her house and came out and saw his grandfather’s body hanging from a tree. I’d be walking on Canal Street and I’d hear the stories. And I got to the point where I got to be scared of saying to someone, ‘How’d you do?’ I had to do something to get past that.” Gradually, sorrow turned to resentment and rage. “City That Care Forgot” flings indictments both local and global. “Short version is, we gettin’ mad,” Dr. John sings in “We Gettin’ There,” which gripes about contractors and insurance companies and goes on to tabulate greater costs: “Ask anybody if they know a friend that died from suicide/They gonna say ‘Yeah for a fact.’ ” In the title song, a steadfast slow groove with jabs of bluesy guitar from Eric Clapton, Dr. John sings, “Better get used to that fonky smell/Toxic mold under the fresh paint.” And in the gospel-flavored “Promises, Promises,” on which he shares vocals with Willie Nelson, he sings, “The road to the White House is paved with lies.” In New Orleans style, the bad news arrives with a backbeat. Dr. John and his band of New Orleans musicians, the Lower 911, come up with easy-rolling grooves: funk, blues, gospel, even a tinge of zydeco. Dr. John wrote five of the album’s 13 songs with Bobby Charles, the elusive South Louisiana figure who wrote “Walking to New Orleans” and “See You Later, Alligator” and whose hometown, Abbeville, La., was smashed by Hurricane Rita. Most of the album was recorded in a studio in Maurice, La., Dr. John said, “sitting on one of the most polluted bayous in the state of Louisiana.” Dr. John and his band made two albums in the same sessions: “City That Care Forgot” and a set of Mr. Charles’s songs sung by Shannon McNally. “Some cuts on me, some cuts on her — it kept the band from getting complacent,” he said. “It would shift the gears of the conversation.” One collaboration by Dr. John and Mr. Charles was “Black Gold,” which links oil greed to global warming and the war in Iraq. “Bobby hits your nerves good,” Dr. John said. “That’s one of his fortes: he can go straight for the jugular. I could give Bobby some words or a thought, and within an hour it’s finished.” When the van got back to the studio, Dr. John resumed his longtime role as an ambassador of New Orleans. The Jazz and Heritage Foundation — which runs the festival’s nonprofit cultural programs — and the state of Louisiana, in a project called Sync Up, had invited a delegation of film music supervisors to promote Louisiana music — songs, musicians and recording studios — to Hollywood. Dr. John posed for photos with them: the bearded potentate, carrying a carved staff and wearing amulets and Mardi Gras colors, paired with the sleek but clearly starstruck Californians. “Anything helps,” he said. “Everybody here is scuffling.”

He created some really beautiful images, too bad it has all that cultural baggage. .

June 6, 2008 For Jazz’s Avant-Garde, an Annual Gathering and a Little Competition By NATE CHINEN During his youth, the New Orleans tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan worked with some of the brightest lights of soul and R&B, like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. And that’s just for starters. “You name the genre, I’ve done it,” Mr. Jordan, 73, said this week from Baton Rouge, La., his temporary home since shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. “But when I was playing in all those other genres, I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing. I always was one of them who would search, and keep searching.” Next week Mr. Jordan will reap some recognition for his searching: a lifetime achievement honor at the Vision Festival, widely recognized as this country’s premier gathering for free jazz and improvised music. Now in its 13th year, the festival runs from Tuesday through June 15 at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a longtime nexus of experimentation and a site of much recent transition. With its devotion to the jazz avant-garde, the Vision Festival serves as a gravitational center, pulling musicians in from the margins. Not surprisingly it has often been cast as an eccentrically gritty rejoinder to the JVC Jazz Festival, which starts on June 15 this year. (In seasons past, David and Goliath have more directly overlapped.) This year the Vision Festival has its own competition, the New Languages Festival, being held a couple of blocks away at the Living Theater. Increasingly, though, the Vision Festival has developed a stand-alone reputation. Its programming, which mixes old-timers like Mr. Jordan with newer arrivals like the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, confirms the continuing vigor of experimental improvised music, a current of the New York underground through much of the last 50 years. Owing to the influence of Patricia Nicholson Parker, a founder and the chairwoman, who has a background in modern dance, the Vision Festival also presents related arts, including dance, poetry and, this year, two site-specific installations. The festival draws an audience impressive not only for its actual existence — hardly a given in this particular field — but also for its heterogeneity. One survey conducted at the event in 2006 found that nearly half the attendees lived outside the New York area. “People come from France, Japan, England, Germany,” said the bassist William Parker, Ms. Nicholson Parker’s husband. “There’s a following all over the world.” To some extent, this internationalism is echoed in the lineup, which this year includes the English tenor saxophonist Paul Dunmall and the French bassist Joëlle Léandre, influential figures on the European new-music scene. But there’s also something deeply local about the Vision Festival and its constituency, which reeled after the April 2007 closing of Tonic, an important performance space in the area. Last year’s edition of the festival was held down the street from that club’s shuttered site, and at times it conveyed the feeling of a wake. For avant-gardists and their supporters, the gentrification that squeezed out Tonic was a sharp spur to action. The guitarist Marc Ribot, whose part in a protest at the ill-fated club led to his arrest, brought much attention to the cause through word as well as deed. One of his arguments centered on the need for civic support in the face of market pressures. “It’s not a question of not having a space,” Mr. Ribot reiterated this week. “It’s a question of spaces that pay.” With precious few exceptions, the post-Tonic avant-garde landscape in the city involves smaller rooms in relatively more remote locations; tip jars are often the means of collection. “It’s not the end of the world,” Mr. Ribot said. “There are still great musicians in New York. But marginal differences over time can have big effects.” Last fall Ms. Nicholson Parker announced the formation of the advocacy group Rise Up Creative Music and Arts. Along with Mr. Parker, she articulated the organization’s goals at a town hall meeting in April. (Mr. Ribot was among those present, though he says he has not been directly involved with the group since.) “This music, all the really innovative music, has been marginalized and pushed aside,” Ms. Nicholson Parker said recently. “A lot of this is urban planning, or the lack thereof.” The most visible result of Rise Up Creative Music and Arts, so far, is the Vision/Rucma Series, held most weekends this year at the Living Theater on the Lower East Side. In addition to raising awareness for a cause, the series has supported the Vision Festival brand; after a brief hiatus, the series will resume on June 19 with a concert by the trumpeter Roy Campbell. Next week, meanwhile, the Living Theater serves as home to the New Languages Festival (newlanguages.org). Now in its fourth season, that event is musician-run and progressive-minded, like its more established counterpart. The alto saxophonist Jackson Moore, one of the founders of the upstart event, said the timing was an accident. But, he added in an e-mail message, “It’s a bit of cosmic good fortune that the Vision Festival and the New Languages Festival are down the street from each other.” He suggested that the adjacent festivals “might just reach a combined critical mass that will bring new listeners into the fold.” Self-sufficiency and an undercurrent of service are ideals evident in both festivals; Mr. Jordan, a self-starter throughout his career, is also being heralded for his important contribution to music education in New Orleans. In this sense the Vision Festival has been consistent: previous lifetime achievement honors went to the saxophonist Fred Anderson, the multireedist Sam Rivers and the trumpeter Bill Dixon. Each of these artists has been a social organizer, rallying his peers around a place and a cause. Of course each has also been a searcher. “I’ve been playing ‘out’ since the ’50s,” Mr. Jordan said, and laughed. “I was experimenting then, and I’m still experimenting. Maybe next week I’ll have something new.”

She purddy. .

Nothing but the best! .

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music to shower and shave to... .

Peter Brown wrote great psychedelic lyrics!

Opera gives classical singers such a bad rep. I've heard modern chamber music where the singing blows opera away...

This reminds me of a comment by a friend, he used it as a title of a tune: Opera, That Bloated Art Form. Never say that working in the Classical dept at the Princeton Record Exchange for years doesn't make you jaded.

Besides being an amazing vocalist and bassist, she's real purdy and has a lot of hair.

Pere Ubu .

Wow - those don't look like audio recording tape drives, they look like 9-track computer drives. Just like the ones they used to use on mainframe computers since the '50s-'60s. I have a portable, but they don't make tape any more. They make Kuiters look like he's standing on the set of Dr. Strangelove.