7/4

The idea of the rule is to avoid threads like we had previously where we had a member starting a thread to ask another member to take off his avatar or the one starting a thread about himself asking people to insult him. As you might see, the rule is a problem. Not if we have a hot dog.

Not sure if I want the Organissimo coffee mug or the ........ I say go for the Best of Sonny & Cher. It's been remastered and it's a keeper!

Too bad I can't throw a piano...

I'd go with the Fender, but in that price range, they're all made in Mexico or the Far East...maybe even at the same factory. When you're asking about 3/4 size, you're referring to a very short scale neck, right?

Those are banjos, you knuckleheads!

off by an hour, I think it was OK earlier today. But then I didn't notice...

hey, let's see what happens...

Evidence? The thing is - and I know this will sound selfish and self-serving but so what - I'd rather not have people that sensitive even hanging around here. It's also a silly and incorrect statement: political commentary does not appear in every forum. Everyone is certainly more than welcome to hang out at the bar, toss some darts, and shoot the shit, but if you'e a teetotaler who doesn't like darts and bars... well maybe this isn't the place for you. In much the same way Jazz Corner isn't for me. I thought so too.

Evidence?

Let's put on a show!

Same here!

I like what you said and the way you said it Thanks...do I sound a little frustrated? It's insane how people want to take the quick path and don't take the time to get in touch with music. That's right - the instrument still needs to be set up. Maybe that's next, the computer controlled truss rod.

December 5, 2007 A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback By PETE WELLS, NY Times Lance Winters makes absinthe at the St. George Spirits distillery in Alameda, Calif. EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it? Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct. The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey. “I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product. “I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’” His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century. Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it? To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash. Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good. “Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter? “Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?” Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.” After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation. Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban. “They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.” That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland. I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were. The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly. With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away. St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate. While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it. One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message. Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet. “I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.” Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”

Oh baby please don't go. Oh baby please don't go.

and then there's the Eh?

Tell us about it. Count the ways...

I wish I could afford to go! I'm a big fan of all things Partch.

He Is Legend The Japan Society remounts Harry Partch's "total theater" by Andy Beta, Village Voice November 27th, 2007 6:18 PM Only the second staging ever: Delusion of the Fury's Partch, circa 1970 Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Iconoclast composer Harry Partch—in discussing his late masterwork, Delusion of the Fury—stated in his notes: "Words cannot proxy for the experience of knowing—of seeing and hearing." Indeed, had you not been in attendance for Fury's lone staging (in 1969), the experience of Partch's singular music would be but half-formed. Through the concerted efforts of the Japan Society, director-designer John Jesurun, composer and Partch expert Dean Drummond, choreographer Dawn Akemi Saito, and a cast of 24 musicians and 10 dancers, Delusion of the Fury's second staging will take place December 4, 6, 7, and 8 at the Japan Society. Needless to say, it's a once-in-a-lifetime concert. Fury was the culmination of Partch's five decades of composition, microtonal theory, instrument-building, theatrics, modern dance, and ancient chorale, a piece of "total theater" that incorporates Japanese Noh, Ethiopian folk tales, and mime into its 70-minute duration. Born in Oakland in 1901 (he died in 1974), Partch lived an iconic life: He met poet William Butler Yeats (setting his verse to viola), hoboed cross-country, chucked 12-tone Western intonation for one of his own creation (his most famous being a 43-tone scale), and turned snatches of Depression-era graffiti—as well as the Chinese poetry of Li Po—into musical compositions. Partch also created the first artist-run record label to release his music, and crafted instruments out of bamboo, Pyrex bowls, and artillery-shell casings, their presence as sculptures matched by the startling sounds that emanate from them. "I remember thinking that it sounded like nothing I ever heard before," Jesurun says about first encountering Partch's music. "I thought it was pretty out there." In the nearly 40 years since Fury premiered, it has remained far out there. Percussive, bewildering, salient even amid the 20th-century avant-garde, Partch's prickly music has stymied and entranced listeners for decades, yet far too often the visual and theatrical are excised from the experience. Even Drummond, who performed as a student in the original staging of Fury (and who now maintains Partch's instruments at Montclair State University), finds that the music retains its enigma, despite his intimacy with the material: "His theatrical intents, with how he incorporated the Japanese legend . . . are extremely mysterious, surreal, strange, and not really explained. I'm kind of curious." Running through rehearsals leading up to the premiere, Jesurun feels that he's still discovering nuances in Delusion of the Fury, too. "I've been struck by the continuing depth of the music. Physically, the vibration of it . . . there's a real power emanating from the music and the instruments. It continues to resonate. The more you're around Partch's music, the deeper you go. Right now, we're in the middle of the ocean." http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0748,beta,78457,11.html

Sorry, but you realize how many guitar players exist in this world that can't/don't tune without the help of a tuner ? That skill is being lost. Hello 2007. No kidding. Hello 2008. As if I never noticed how many musicians can't hear. "If you have ears, you've got to listen" - Capt. Beefheart

There are new ones too.

Well, this is certainly disappointing news. Hate to see it go. Please don't do it.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I'll bet you say that to all the boys.

If you can't tune your own fucking guitar, do everyone a favor and don't try to play one.