Sam’s Place

So I went ahead & set up a MySpace music site using the Tyler recordings. It’s a mess right now, can’t even post a blog message there for some reason, but it’s a start.

The Tyler project was Dennis & me from the Sarnos plus a number of other people who I’ve lost track of. Let’s see how many I can find. There was Tod Preuss on drums, formerly of A Subtle Plague (did those guys move back to Germany or something?). He went on The Sarnos last mini-tour up the West Coast, then recorded for the Tyler project. I googled his name & saw other recording projects of his but no website for him. MySpace lists someone w/ his name, around the right age, in Everett WA, but it’s just a shell account w/ no other info.

Adam Cohen/ Adam Elk, ex-Mommyhead — he produced about 1/2 the songs, played instruments, sang, etc. I viewed him as Mr Music but he seems to have quit when the ’90s rolled over. I know he moved to LA, then back to Brooklyn, & I googled that he recorded a couple of songs w/ ex-Mommyhead Michael Holt (who lives in Toronto) in 2004, but that’s it.

Jeff Palmer produced the songs Adam didn’t & he played coconuts or something on the song “Acoustic Coconuts and Moonbeams.” Jeff’s been in more bands than anyone else & now plays w/ Radar Bros., & records w/ Greg Freeman (who we recorded w/) as Checksum.

Jen Clapp sang on some of the Tyler songs, including her angelic bridge on the song I’m calling “Open the Dirge,” available on my MySpace page. Her husband, ex-Mommyhead, Dan Fisherman is drumming w/ her now, & they live back East, instead of a block from me, where they used to lived. That means that all of the Mommyheads have left San Francisco.

Alice Bierhorst sang w/ Jen, & she’s in New York now too, & I see she’s still playing music w/ Jen & Michael Holt.

Jeff Krebs sang on a few songs, & played Middle Eastern banjo on one. He also was my co-worker & helped get me my job at Red & White Fleet many years ago. He moved to Michigan, plays solo & w/ the band Bourbon Sprawl. In the ’80s he was in SF band The Easy Hoes, w/ that guy from Everclear, & w/ Kim Rohrbach, who later played in the band Four Eyes w/ members of Red House Painters but who appears to be no longer performing music, but who is still in SF, & is known in Noe Valley for her Real Foods organizing drive. (I used to work there too.)

Raul Navarrette played trombone, & I see he’s playing latin music in NY now (w/ no website).

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Also, The Colonial West

and Norad 9/11 over at the Antiwar.com blog.

I pruned back the book list at Progress Daily. The Internet is already too full of stuff.

I finally checked out MySpace, & I found an ex-Sarno: Don, now playing w/ Borg9. And Pat Thomas; he doesn’t have The Sarnos on his resume but he did play drums once or twice for us circa 1990. Jeff Palmer, not an ex-Sarno but an ex-roommate of The Sarnos, & he engineered/produced/played on some of the songs on our unreleased final recording (recorded at John Vanderslice’s). I’m thinking maybe I should be over there.

I read an excellent article about Bob Dylan by Louis Menand, “Bob on Bob“:

… Nothing that Dylan did to get from Hibbing to “Blonde on Blonde” was scandalous, or even eccentric. He happened to come of musical age at a moment when rock and roll was moribund—Frankie Avalon stuff, songs for high-school sock hops. If you were serious, you played folk songs. And to become a folkie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe, anyway: it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers. One of the folk-music veterans when Dylan came on the scene was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a singer with a cowboy twang who had once hoboed around with Guthrie himself. Ramblin’ Jack was the stage name of one Elliot Adnopoz, a Jewish kid from Flatbush whose father was a prominent surgeon. Cambridge was another center of the folk revival—it’s where Baez got her start, in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square. (She was a B.U. dropout.) There was a bluegrass group in that scene, composed mostly of college students, who called themselves the Charles River Valley Boys. Artifice was the price of authenticity. …

He liked Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” and Frank Sinatra singing “Ebb Tide.” He loved “Stardust” and “Moon River.” He didn’t “come out of” any tradition. He was a magpie. The biggest inspiration for his songwriting was a Kurt Weill song, “Pirate Jenny,” from “The Threepenny Opera.” He heard it when he was waiting to meet his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who was working on a production of the play on Christopher Street. (“The Threepenny Opera” was followed by an anthology production called “Brecht on Brecht,” which may have been the inspiration for the title of “Blonde on Blonde.”) …

Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, “Escaping the Delta,” points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,” Chuck Berry said, “it would be Nat Cole.” …

Click here for Dylan’s MySpace page. And here’s a poem:

Mr. Dylan
How would you define folk music?
As a constitutional re-play of mass production
Would you call your songs “folk songs”?
No
Are protest songs “folk songs”?
I guess
If they’re a constitutional re-play of mass production
Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message?
With a what?
A subtle or obvious message?
Uh
I don’t really prefer those kinds of songs at all
“Message”
You mean like
What songs with a message?
Well, like “Eve of Destruction” and things like that
Do I prefer that to what?
I don’t know
But your songs are supposed to have a subtle message
Subtle message?
Well, they’re supposed to
Where’d you hear that?

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Also, Design

For the 1st time, gene therapy has been shown to work on cancer (”Immune no longer“) but, The Economist cautions:

This sort of therapy requires that every patient be treated with his own, unique medicine. Commercialising such a therapy depends on the degree to which this process can be simplified and automated.

Still, with Moore’s Law & Carlson’s Curve, it’s just a matter of time.

And, finally! (”A meaty question“): “Meat grown in vats, rather than in the form of animals, could soon be on the menu. It might even be healthier and better for you.”

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Also, IQ & Income

So, getting back to the 80s, that X song counterpoised the trendy, technology-adopting Brits with the Minutemen, Flesheaters, D.O.A., Big Boys and Black Flag — American bass, guitar, and drums reactionaries. The 80s was a Cambrian explosion of back-to-basic bands — punk, ska, rockabilly, even heavy metal (influenced by the NWOBHM), all masking the rise of the machine. Hiphop & electronic dance music, of course, but also the ultimate expression of the lessons of the 80s counter-revolution, 1991’s Nevermind by Nirvana, produced by Butch Vig, who led rock music into the Pro Tools nation. Recording technology changed from a medium that replayed actual musical events to one that enhanced those events to one that created events that never occurred. With click-tracks, sampling, and computer editing, music became more and more mathematically precise & listeners’ expectations ratcheted up. Now music is ubiquitous and mechanical — cell phone rings, call-waiting, video game & video music, ipods earplugs, & tasteful shoppers’ Muzak. The most sensible choice is to turn it all off and sit quietly — maybe read a book.

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More antiwar letters: http://www.antiwar.com/letters/?articleid=9620

And investor overconfidence: http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/29/overconfidence/

So we went to a childbirth prep class, & the doula (when did that become a word in English?) asked the class how many were planning a “natural” childbirth, & no-one raised her/his hand. The doula said that that would make her cry, & went on to “encourage” childbirth sans epidermal anesthesia by showing disturbing videos of it, including the birth of a premie covered in monkey fur. A few thoughts on so-called natural childbirth:

- What’s Going on in There? says that, while plenty of American women give birth without epidermals, so few have completely drug-free births that there’re no reliable statistics.

- People are unnatural. Our stomachs, for example, are designed to digest meat processed with heating technology. Our heads are freakishly large and blunt-shaped. I haven’t researched this, but it seems likely that since other mammals have smaller and more streamlined heads, their baby vs birth canal ratio is smaller, & thus their childbirth pain is less. From that point of view, lessening human childbirth pain with drugs returns humans to the natural world’s norm.

- Epidermals today are a lot “lighter” than a few decades ago. Moms can now feel the contractions, just not the pain.

- Alot of the childbirth exercises involved squatting. Do cultures that use hole-in-floor squat toilets, no chairs, etc. have less painful pregnancies?

The doula said that women in many other countries don’t experience childbirth as painful, since they aren’t as afraid of it, due to cultural differences; for example women in poor countries haven’t watched movies that portray childbirth as being painful. But women in most rich countries do use painkillers during birth, & childbirth in poor countries is much more dangerous. Why would women where childbirth is safe be afraid of it, while women where it’s not be unafraid? And as for pregnancy pain being a modern phenomenon, what about pre-modern (to say the least) Eve and, “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”?

Essentially, what the doula did was un-empower the couples in the class & encouraged us to feel that we need — surprise! — a doula. I’m not saying that this was the doula’s overt aim, just that self-interest is powerful — that’s why judges recuse themselves, and why we shouldn’t elect a military industry CEO to a position where he can start wars.

From Annalee Newitz’s ”Snakes in Vain“: