7/4

I don't even want to watch the trailer.

too many vowels.

It's subterranean. They're in the basement.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=19597

Fez!

http://www.artguitars.com/index.htm

May 17, 2006 Lew Anderson, 84, Clarabell the Clown and a Bandleader, Dies By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NYT Lew Anderson, whose considerable success as a musician, arranger and bandleader paled before the celebrity he achieved as Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody's sidekick on one of television's first children's shows, died on Sunday in Hawthorne, N.Y. He was 84, but always felt he was around 25, his son Christopher said. His father died of complications of prostate cancer, he added. "Well, his feet are big, his tummy's stout, but we could never do without," Buffalo Bob Smith and the Kids of the Peanut Gallery sang in appreciation of his character, in a baggy, striped costume, who communicated by honking a horn for yes and no, Harpo Marx style. Other times, Clarabell the Clown made his feelings known by spraying Buffalo Bob with seltzer, or playing a trick on him that everybody but Bob figured out immediately. Before there was Big Bird, Barney or SpongeBob, there was Howdy Doody and his friends in Doodyville. Baby boomers grew up with "The Howdy Doody Show," which began in December 1947 at a time when only 20,000 homes in the country had television sets. It was the first network weekday children's show, the first to last more than 1,000 episodes and NBC's first regularly scheduled show to be broadcast in color. When it ended on Sept. 24, 1960, after 2,243 episodes, it was Clarabell who had the show's last words. Since until then he had only honked, they were also his first words. The camera moved in for a close-up of Mr. Anderson, who had a visible tear in his eye. A drum roll grew louder and then died. With quivering lips, Clarabell whispered, "Goodbye, kids." When Lewis Burr Anderson was born on May 7, 1922, in Kirkman, Iowa, nobody envisioned he would become a clownish celebrity. He was not the first Clarabell: that was Bob Keeshan, later known as Captain Kangaroo. He was not even the second Clarabell. That was Bobby Nicholson, who went on to play J. Cornelius Cobb on the show. What seems certain is that Mr. Anderson was Clarabell for an overwhelming majority of "Howdy Doody" shows from 1954 to 1960. In the opinion of Buffalo Bob Smith, who originated and starred in the show, he was also by far the best, according to Mr. Smith's memoir. Mr. Anderson's father was a railroad telegrapher. He began playing his sister's clarinet when she tired of it, and soon had his own band. He attended junior college in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and Drake University in Des Moines. He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and started a band between battles in the Pacific theater. After leaving the service, toured the Midwest with bands, honing his talent for arranging and composing music. In the late 1940's, he joined the Honey Dreamers, a singing group that appeared on radio and early television shows like "The Ed Sullivan Show." The group appeared on a musical variety television show Mr. Smith produced for NBC. When the Clarabell part opened up on Mr. Smith's other show, "Howdy Doody," Mr. Smith and the other producers asked Mr. Anderson if he could juggle. "No." Dance? "No." Magic tricks? "No." What can you do? "Nothing." "Perfect, you start tomorrow," Mr. Smith said. At first, Mr. Anderson saw Clarabell simply as a job paying more than $400 a week. Then, he began to be mobbed at personal appearances, and his fame lasted decades after the last broadcast. Mr. Anderson later profited from writing advertising jingles, but live music remained his passion. He formed his All-American Big Band, expert musicians from recording studios and Broadway shows, playing a book of 300 songs, a quarter of which he wrote himself. The band plans to play its regular gig this Friday at the Birdland jazz club in Manhattan. In 1990 John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Anderson's band is not merely recalling the days of great swing bands; it is doing so with freshness, polish and originality." Mr. Anderson, who lived in South Salem, N.Y., is survived by his wife, Peggy; his sons Christopher, of Ridgefield, Conn., and Lewis Jr., of Providence, R.I.; and five grandchildren. In 1987 Mr. Smith recalled the day Clarabell said goodbye. Unlike the first broadcasts, which were live, it had been taped earlier. When it was broadcast, he watched it with his family. "I looked at my son and he was crying," Mr. Smith said. "I looked at my wife and she was crying. I went straight to the country club where I played golf and shot the worst round of my life."

Happy Birthday to Dewey!

That's another place they make tubes. I was thinkin' of Mexico.

I think so too. Folks on other boards seem to think that job training, equipment and the EPA would be a problem. Ship the equipment from the factory in Russia to here. Bring over people that want to work. Get the factory up to EPA standards. Seriously, if you're selling 170,000 tubes per month, and the entire music industry is freaking out about you going out of business, it seems like it would be worth it. I agree. Might drive up the cost of tubes.

I think so too. Folks on other boards seem to think that job training, equipment and the EPA would be a problem.

Same sort of thang from the Times: May 16, 2006 From Russia, With Dread By ANDREW E. KRAMER. NY Times SARATOV, Russia — Mike Matthews, a sound-effects designer and one-time promoter of Jimi Hendrix, bought an unusual Russian factory making vacuum tubes for guitar amplifiers. Now he has encountered a problem increasingly common here: someone is trying to steal his company. Sharp-elbowed personalities in Russia's business world are threatening this factory in a case that features accusations of bribery and dark hints of involvement by the agency that used to be the K.G.B. Though similar to hundreds of such disputes across Russia, this one is resonating around the world, particularly in circles of musicians and fans of high-end audio equipment. Russia is one of only three countries still making vacuum tubes for use in reproducing music, an aging technology that nonetheless "warms up" the sound of electronic music in audio equipment. "It's rock 'n' roll versus the mob," Mr. Matthews, 64, said in a telephone interview from New York, where he manages his business distributing the Russian vacuum tubes. "I will not give in to racketeers." Yet the hostile takeover under way here is not strictly mob-related. It is a dispute peculiar to a country where property rights — whether for large oil companies, car dealerships or this midsize factory — seem always open to renegotiation. It provides a view of the wobbly understanding of ownership that still prevails. In Russia's early transition days, amid the collapse of authority and resulting lawlessness, organized crime groups wielded great influence. Teams of armed thugs used to carry out takeovers, arriving at a businessman's door with little to back them up but the threat of violence, even murder. Indeed, contract murders reached a frequency of more than one a day in the mid-1990's. Later, law enforcement, from the tax police to special forces units, played a role in forcing transfers of property in the scramble for assets of the former Soviet state. In what became known as "masky shows," police officers, their faces often hidden behind ski masks, swarmed into a business to intimidate employees and force concessions from owners. The headquarters of the Yukos oil company, for example, were the scene of a series of high-profile masky shows. . Now, the trend in business crime in Russia is decidedly white-collar — with the faking of documents, hiring of lawyers or payoff of judges — but no less insidious, Mr. Matthews and other business owners say. In a puzzling case in Moscow in April, for example, thieves stole a shipping container with thousands of files on company registrations from the yard of a tax inspectorate office, using a crane and a flatbed truck. "It cannot be excluded that so-called independent raiders, those who seize others' businesses, showed an interest in the tax documents," an article in Gazeta reported. The article suggested the theft was a coup by corporate raiders who intended to use the papers much as identity thieves in the United States turn documents rifled from trash cans into profits through fraudulent credit card operations. In this type of crime, however, entire companies are at stake. The tax authorities act as a registrar for small businesses. With the files gone, ownership is anybody's guess, the newspaper reported. Another common tactic of the new takeover artists is faking sale agreements for company shares and then voting out the legitimate management. Tracking down the true owner can be impossible if the authorities have been bribed — or the original papers are mysteriously missing. The problem has become so pervasive among small and medium-size businesses that it has been discussed in the Parliament, where a committee on state security addressed the issue and cited more than 1,400 cases of fraudulent takeovers in 2005. Across Russia, the Interior Ministry has opened investigations into the theft of 346 enterprises. "Dozens of major deals for the purchase and sale of companies take place in Russia every month," Yuri Alekseyev, a chief ministry investigator, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. "The process is ever more frequently accompanied by gross violations of the law." "Those seizing enterprises are usually not interested in production, and just steal or sell the most liquid assets, in the first place real estate," he added. Foreigners are not immune. Recently, the Canadian owners of the Aerostar Hotel and the French owners of an auto dealership in Moscow were maneuvered out of their businesses. Here in Saratov, a river town on the rolling southern steppe, the battle began last autumn when Mr. Matthews received a letter with an offer. For $400,000, a company called Russian Business Estates, or R.B.E., would buy Mr. Matthews's 930-employee factory, called ExpoPul, with a turnover of $600,000 or so a month. Mr. Matthews quickly refused. Next, a letter arrived warning that the factory would have troubles with its electricity; in March, the power went off. Intruders then came and used jackhammers to raise dust that entered the factory's clean rooms. Strange young men in leather jackets loitered outside the factory gate. Mr. Matthews, a legend among guitarists as the inventor of the Big Muff guitar pedal, rallied makers of musical equipment who rely on tubes from Russia and promised a fight. R.B.E.'s director in Saratov, Vitaly V. Borin, said he wanted to buy Mr. Matthews's factory for the building it occupies and then sell it to an unidentified investor. He acknowledged that his company was pressuring Mr. Matthews, but he said it was using only legal tactics. If Mr. Matthews does not agree to sell, Mr. Borin said in an interview, the factory might run afoul of national security rules. "We have instructions of the F.S.B, where it is written in black and white that a military factory cannot exist beside a company with foreign capital," he said, referring to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B. Just near ExpoPul is a factory that makes electronic components for military hardware. "The F.S.B. hasn't gotten involved only because we haven't gotten them involved," he said. Writing a letter to Moscow would be all he needed to shut the factory, Mr. Borin said, as he pretended to write a letter on a napkin. For Mr. Matthews, more is at stake than property. In the hulking pile of brick wrapped in pipes and smokestacks that is the building, most of the employees are women. Dressed in blue robes and hair nets, they join together delicate bundles of wire, wafers of rare metal and glass bulbs with fingers trained by years of work. "No man would want to make a tube," Lyudmila V. Afanasieva, 54, said, nimbly sliding wires into a glass cylinder. She worked on the same tube model when it went into nuclear submarines that prowled off the coast of the United States. ExpoPul makes two-thirds of the world's vacuum tubes used for music. Outside the old Communist bloc, the technology nearly became extinct. Vacuum tubes are made on an industrial scale only in China, Russia and Slovakia. Tuned in to the music industry's needs, Mr. Matthews increased sales to 170,000 tubes a month in 2005, from 40,000 in 1999. The company has more than doubled its work force. It sells to Fender Musical Instruments, a maker of guitar amplifiers based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Japanese keyboard maker Korg. While most of the Soviet electronics industry has disappeared, rendered obsolete by Japanese makers and Silicon Valley, ExpoPul, which opened in 1953, is thriving. It is a rare example of a Soviet-era factory that became a success without painful reforms. Hidden in this provincial town, its 1950's vintage technology survived long enough to become a worldwide hit. If the tube factory dies, so will the future of a rock 'n' roll sound dating back half a century, the rich grumble of a guitar tube amplifier — think of Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" — that musicians say cannot be replicated with modern technology. "It's nice and sweet and just pleasing sounding," Peter Stroud, the guitarist for Sheryl Crow, said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. "It's a smooth, crunchy distortion that just sounds good. It just feels good to play on a tube amp." He added: "It would be a catastrophe for the music industry if something happened to that plant."

Good night. Sleep well.

Seriously though, I hope they sell gallon jugs.

Gotta web page for that product?

Ah...just saw that. And what kind of price is that? Funny, I surfing around yesterday looking for information on these guitars and suddenly you have one.

Obviously imports with a legendary name, but hey.... http://www.strombergguitars.com/JazzGuitars.htm

What they said.

Cloudy, 59 F. Bits of rain, but lots of clouds lately.

It's red!

This year's press release: Sun Ra Institute and WKCR-FM NYC present 'SUN RADIO OMNIVERSITY' - SUN RA ARRIVAL DAY CELEBRATION 32-HOUR RADIO MARATHON MONDAY, MAY 22nd at midnight to TUESDAY, MAY 23rd, 8:20 AM 89.9 FM NYC & WWW.WKCR.ORG streaming live across the galaxies The Sun Ra Institute and WKCR-FM are proud to announce the Sun Ra Arrival Day Celebration, a 32-hour radio marathon featuring work of the innovative and iconoclastic composer, bandleader, and keyboardist Sun Ra. Each segment of the festival will focus on a specific feature of Ra’s musical legacy: Standards and Ballads, The Swing Tradition, Solo Piano and Poetry, Late 1950’s and Early Rarities, Tone Science, Singers, and more. The Arrival Day Celebration will include exclusive recordings from WKCR’s archives as well as live special guest interviews with Marshall Allen, Director of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and Arkestra members of the past, present and future. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama on May 22, 1914, he was nicknamed Sonny from his youth. He later abandoned his birth name and took on the name and persona of Sun Ra (“Ra” being the name of the ancient Egyptian god of the Sun). He did not consider himself “born”; rather, he “arrived” on the planet, entering via Birmingham. >From the ‘50’s to the ‘90’s Sun Ra led a large ensemble with a fluid lineup under a variety of names: The Solar Myth Arkestra, The Intergalactic Space Research Arkestra, and many others. Sun Ra departed on Memorial Day – May 30, 1993. Sun Ra's prolific achievements on Planet Earth have been widely acclaimed and recorded in documentaries, books, and a feature film titled "Space is The Place". He founded his record label, El Saturn Records, in the 1950s, and proceeded to unleash nearly 200 fiercely individualistic and extremely diverse albums on an unsuspecting and largely unprepared public. He also recorded for a handful of major labels, and he attained widespread notoriety from his legendary concerts, radio, and television appearances. His interstellar musical, poetic, linguistic, and spiritual explorations are unparalleled in the history of modern music and culture. With The Arkestra, Sun Ra gave astonishing performances around the world for decades. He was always accompanied by stellar musicians in fantastic costumes, and a joyful atmosphere of mischievous space camaraderie was ever present. His music is most often regarded as 'Jazz', though it spans the full spectrum from Swing to Space, with ballads, show tunes, hard- and post-bop, exoticism, funk, energy music, and electronic hyperdrive. WKCR SUN RA ARRIVAL DAY CELEBRATION: PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE May 22nd, 2006 - 89.9 FM NYC & WWW.WKCR.ORG 12-5 AM Sun Ra Potpourri The broadcast will begin with a variety of great Sun Ra sounds to warm up this event. 5-8 AM Sun Ra Plays Standards and Ballads The Daybreak Express show will feature Sun Ra's performances of standards, ballads, and show tunes. 8-9:30 AM The Swing Tradition The Bird Flight slot will be an extension of the previous show, but this time focusing on the compositions of Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and others. Little known facts: Fletcher himself once gave up his own piano chair to Sun Ra. Sun Ra wrote charts that Coleman Hawkins had difficulty playing. Monk was impressed, too. 9:30 AM-Noon Solo Piano and Poetry Our morning Classical show will present Sun Ra's solo piano recordings, including an exclusive performance at WKCR in July 1977. This segment will also incorporate Sun Ra's extensive poetic works. Noon-5PM Omniversity: Late 1950's and Early Rarities Phil Schaap will shine the spotlight on Sun Ra's elemental work from the later 1950's. Following this segment, we will shift into a survey of the very earliest recordings of Sun Ra, arranging for singers and performing as a sideman. Phil will be joined by a panel of scholars and band members, presenting the rarest of Sun Ra sides. 5-8 PM Tone Science The synthesizer and abstract works of Sun Ra. Tune in for some of the most adventurous recordings of Sun Ra's career. This segment will include both solo synthesizer performances as well as those with an ensemble. 8 PM-1 AM From the Ark The evening segment is expected to be the highlight of the marathon. We will play live recordings and interviews, with visits from special guests and a focus on materials from WKCR's own “Arkives”, as well as a collection gathered by The Sun Ra Institute. We will take some time to honor the current living-and-breathing Sun Ra Arkestra, under the masterful direction of Marshall Allen, and celebrate Marshall’s 82nd birthday a few days early. Stay tuned for extra features in the works, including remote broadcast from the Sun Ra House in Philadelphia. 1-2 AM The Singers This hour will give a closer look at Sun Ra's work with vocalists, including his R&B and Doo-wop efforts. 2-5 AM Overnight Sun Ra 5-8:20 AM Daybreak Sun Ra Sun Ra will again be the focus of Transfigured Night and Daybreak Express. Here is another chance Travel the Spaceways with Sun Ra and The Arkestra. "Life Is Splendid" *** Dedicated to the preservation of Sun Ra's legacy ***

I've had it happen when I just post once.

That's Happy Shiva, destroyer of the world.

My first Sun Ra too! I feel pretty much the same way, the extreme high and low pitches are striking.