7/4

1971 Gibson ES345 walnut.

Gibson ES150 Charlie Christian. I always wanted to try one.

Maybe I should scan it and stick it in a pdf file. .

I have that book! .

bah.

I think so!

. So how's that elbow doin'? .

March 29, 2008 Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More By DENNIS OVERBYE, NY Times More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe. Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure. The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature. But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead. The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants. According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16. Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom? In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway. James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said. “There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6. “Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said. But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.” In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.” Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again. “The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January. This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000. Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration. Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said. Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire. The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc. The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous? According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate. As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth. But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.” Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear. As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said. Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

March 29, 2008 Music Review | Pocket Concertos Reaching the Final Turn in 3 Years of Bumpy Road By ALLAN KOZINN, NYTimes Even by the adventurous standards of the Miller Theater, the Pocket Concertos series that it started in 2006 came with built-in land mines. The plan was to present the premieres of a dozen newly commissioned concertos in three annual installments, and mishaps weren’t long in coming. At the first concert, a piano concerto by Ichizo Okashiro, “The Starry Night,” proved too difficult to prepare in the available time and was postponed. It turned up in the finale, on Thursday evening. But a cello concerto by Marc-André Dalbavie was put off until next season, when it will be part of a Composer Portrait. “The Starry Night,” as it happened, seemed no more complicated than the other works on the program, John Zorn’s manic flute and percussion work, “The Prophetic Mysteries of Angels, Witches and Demons,” and Laura Elise Schwendinger’s violin concerto, “Chiaroscuro Azzurro.” And all three received energetic, polished performances, with solo playing that showed the spirit of flashy 19th-century virtuosity to be alive and well. Mr. Zorn’s work, which opened the concert, married that virtuosity to an idiosyncratic, modern zaniness. The solo line, given a fiery reading by Tara Helen O’Connor, is intricate and tuneful, its soaring melodies occasionally punctuated by bursts of multiphonics, almost as a reminder of the score’s contemporary bona fides. Not that a reminder was necessary. The accompaniment mixed traditional percussive thwacks with sound effects of all kinds — pouring, swirling and blowing bubbles in water; tramping on gravel; crinkling magnetic recording tape; scratching a 78-r.p.m. record; dueling with umbrellas — performed by the percussionists William Winant and Alex Lipowski. Ikue Mori supplied electronic effects from a computer. If the work had one shortcoming, it was that the manic cartoonishness of the percussion scoring often distracted attention from the musically meatier solo line. Ms. Schwendinger’s work also lives in (at least) two worlds. The violin writing, played with equal measures of energy and velvety richness by Jennifer Koh, is sometimes assertive and rhythmically sharp-edged, but those moments virtually always resolve into a sweetly singing line. The grittier orchestral writing offsets that sweetness without overwhelming it. This is a work that seems likely to blossom with repeated listening. Mr. Okashiro’s “Starry Night” was inspired partly by the van Gogh painting, and it does a surprisingly good job of evoking it. Both the orchestral fabric and the piano line are dark and mildly dissonant, with the combination of piano and pitched percussion yielding occasional glimmers of light. The pianist Christopher Taylor’s solo playing, assured and colorful, deftly balanced tension and delicacy. The superb players of the International Contemporary Ensemble performed in the Okashiro and Schwendinger works, with Jayce Ogren conducting.

. You guys crack me up... .

. Happy Birthday! .

March 28, 2008 Music Review | Laurie Anderson The State of the United States, in a Chamber-Rock Stew By ALLAN KOZINN, NYTimes From the beginning of her career Laurie Anderson has cast an analytical eye over American culture and politics and turned her observations into cutting musical works that straddle the line between art song and stand-up comedy. Her most durable essay on the subject is the 1983 multimedia work “United States I-IV,” a work that came to mind often during her performance of her newest piece, “Homeland,” at Zankel Hall on Wednesday evening. “Homeland” is essentially a 100-minute update, a new volume to put alongside “United States” (as will be physically possible when Nonesuch releases the work on CD.) Ms. Anderson performs in her signature style: alternately singing and speaking, sometimes with electronic processing on her voice (making her sound like a man, for example, or giving her voice a choral halo), and playing the electric violin and keyboards. Her spare ensemble is a hybrid chamber group and rock band, with Peter Scherer, a keyboardist; Skuli Sverrisson, a bass guitarist; and Okkyung Lee, a cellist. “Homeland” deals partly with the loss of freedom in a security state and partly with the Iraq war and contemporary war in general. Ms. Anderson evokes images of a young woman with a “baby face” enlisting in the United States Army as a way to pay for her education, and young Palestinians wearing suicide vests, observing that war today is “a kid’s war,” another “children’s crusade,” with no restrictions: “anyone can join.” A song with echoes of a 1950s ballad style, updated by way of early, parodistic Frank Zappa and a dash of electronica, examines a sort of Rumsfeldian cynicism, represented by the assertion that our problems are so complex that only experts can deal with them. Ms. Anderson transforms that idea into a close relative: that problems are only problems when experts say they are. Torture? No problem. Invading a country and causing chaos and civil war? No problem. Experts, she tells us, are people who carry malpractice insurance because their solutions often become the problem. But the work isn’t all war protest. Ms. Anderson also looks at the vacuity of the consumer culture, skewered here in a song that describes billboards with underwear advertisements, with “huge people in their underwear, their heads two stories high.” They are, she intones, “The Underwear Gods.” Another song tackles empty relationships: “I pretend that you love me, you pretend that you care.” Musically “Homeland” explores few places Ms. Anderson hasn’t visited before. All the songs are slow, and although a few offer arresting electronic drum patterns, most roll out an ambient haze on which Ms. Anderson projects her verbal snapshots. The occasional neo-Romantic violin and cello duets between Ms. Anderson and Ms. Lee were highlights, moments when Ms. Anderson set aside comment and turned, however briefly, to pure composition. But pure composition isn’t really what she does, or what her audience wants from her. Here it was an attractive bonus.

March 28, 2008 Into the Classical Arena, in the Spirit of a Jam Band By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, NYTimes SAVANNAH, Ga. — In the DVD accompanying "Orchestralli," a CD featuring the rock drummer Stewart Copeland's works for film, orchestra and ballet, he jokingly says he gravitated toward film because "it's a more civilized life than rock" and "because every drummer has this urge to prove he is an actual musician." Mr. Copeland is among a number of rock musicians, including Paul McCartney and Sting, who have ventured into the classical arena. On Wednesday at the Trustees Theater in Savannah, Ga., the pianist Sebastian Knauer and the superb violinist Daniel Hope joined Mr. Copeland for the world premiere of his "Celeste," which was commissioned by the Savannah Music Festival. The program, called "An Evening With Stewart Copeland," also featured concert arrangements of his works, performed by an ensemble introduced as Savannah Orchestralli. Mr. Copeland, who has little formal training in theory or composition, said in an interview before the premiere of "Celeste" that he struggled with the violin part, which he wrote using a mandolin. The work, dedicated to his youngest daughter, sounded more like a spirited jam session than a formally notated classical piece. After a declaratory concertolike opening followed by a jazzy melody, Mr. Hope's wildly energetic fiddling intertwined with the syncopations of Mr. Copeland's drumming, with a few lively rhythmic exchanges between the three musicians unfolding throughout. Mr. Hope, who enjoys genre-bending projects, is the associate artistic director of the festival. His collaboration with Mr. Copeland reflects the spirit of the more than two-week event, with an eclectic lineup of jazz, fado, gospel, blues and performances by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Emerson String Quartet and the Beaux Arts Trio. Mr. Hope is a member of that trio, which presented the premiere of a work by the jazz pianist Uri Caine during the 2005 festival. Computer software enables any musician with a good ear to compose. Mr. McCartney and Mr. Copeland have at times depended on classically trained assistants, similar to the way politicians rely on speechwriters to finesse their ideas into fluid prose. Mr. Copeland, who is midway through a reunion tour with the Police, has written many film scores including soundtracks for Francis Ford Coppola's "Rumble Fish." His classical works include ballet and orchestral scores and "Holy Blood and Crescent Moon," a commission by the Cleveland Opera that received mixed reviews after its 1989 premiere. On Wednesday, the program also included the slinky, feline "Grace," honoring another daughter, a musical excerpt from "Rumble Fish" and an orchestral work called "Stalin's Sultry Serenade." A highlight was "The Gene Pool," a virtuosic, kaleidoscopic, hard-driving percussion work written for Ensemble Bash, a British percussion group. The most successful crossover projects are created by musicians well versed in their adopted musical language. Other collaborations create the impression that you are watching actors dressed in costumes that don't quite fit, as when classically trained performers attempt jazz. Mr. Copeland's new trio sounded as if it was teetering on the edge of several musical worlds without quite making a definitive statement in any. But he and Mr. Hope were clearly having a blast, and the audience shared in the fun, giving the enthusiastic performance the night's loudest ovation.

Cool. There was a local band here in NJ that used to play the Chicken every week. One week Kenwood subed for the drummer and I didn't know who he was. mid '80's...

. sco backstage talking gear and hanging out with the japanese cameracrew and playing "since you asked" from time on my hands. .

. John Scofield - My Ideal (Acoustic Solo Guitar) .

They do: The Moonshine Show Sundays, 10am-12pm Bluegrass and old-time music programming first appeared on WKCR in 1966. The Moonshine Show, hosted by Matt Winters, continues this long standing tradition, presenting the hill country string music of the Mid-South via classic recordings and frequent live in-studio performances. The full spectrum of this living art form is covered each Sunday morning. The Tennessee Border Show Sundays, 12pm-2pm Comprising one half of WKCR's country programming, The Tennessee Border Show focuses on the masters of country music from the latter-half of the twentieth century. The show is also not afraid to delve back into country music forefathers, like Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. Over the years, the show has established itself as a source for information about 'real' country music, where elsewhere, commercial country has had the effect of erasing the real music from the record. Honky Tonkin' Tuesdays, 10pm-11:30pm Whereas The Tennessee Border Show focuses on country music from the latter-half of the twentieth century, Honky Tonkin' is dedicated to the country music of the 1940's and 1950's. One might think that this would limit the show to 78-era recordings, but just this year, a new Honky Tonkin' tradition was born with the premier of the WKCR Radio Jamboree. Occurring the third Tuesday of every month, the WKCR Radio Jamboree has a house band, Sheriff Uncle Bob and the Goodtimers, as well as a new act each month in an attempt to recreate the feeling of live radio in the classic country years of the late 1940's.

IHM doesn't seem to be a very busy place.

Maybe I'll stop by and say hello, Newark is about 10 miles from here. Don't know what else I could say... .

'KCR serves an education purpose most of the time. .

A Morty fest would be great! .

They did have an Evan Parker festival in '94 or '95. .

I think it's about time WKCR had a month long free jazz festival. .

.

I'll see ya over there, I have a bit of reading to do once I land. .