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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 26, 2024 21:39:04 GMT -5
Brother John called it last Thursday and just changed the pronouns (and the disapproving parent to Ma). Worked just fine. Great song.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 25, 2024 12:49:06 GMT -5
There's a phrase that English teachers use for a particular kind of student essay: "word salad."
Allow me to suggest "lick salad."
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 23, 2024 17:48:49 GMT -5
I first heard that line in a Johnny Carson routine about Carmine's All You Can Eat Buffet in New Jersey. "Carmine says that's all you can eat."
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 22, 2024 10:32:11 GMT -5
Somewhere in my library is an album of Regondi concertina pieces--not played by this guy--and the 19th-century parlor-music character is pretty clear. I wonder how tricky the fingering is on pieces like this--though at least the English concertina doesn't require changing bellows directions to sound different notes.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 21, 2024 18:12:39 GMT -5
Just that particular location or the whole chain? I've often eaten at one or another when in need of a decent quick lunch when on my own in the Cities.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 21, 2024 12:03:57 GMT -5
I recall that Bensusan also questioned why I had my guitar (my old Guild D-40) capoed at the second fret. At the time, the guitar was probably in need of a neck reset, and in any case I thought it sounded better tuned down a step and then capoed up to concert pitch. I don't recall Pierre's response, except that it probably wasn't all that sympathetic.
I don't usually get the benefit of a workshop on the spot--the technical parts especially just don't stick, and in any case I'm terrible at practicing. But it's always interesting to watch a great player up close and to observe teaching technique (one of my actual professional skillsets), and often enough something will sit in the mental basement and emerge into the daylight years or decades later and work its way into my playing. I think the slinky "Anji" might be one of those items.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 21, 2024 11:35:42 GMT -5
Bensusan was a major inspiration for ambitious fingerstyle players in the 1970 and 80s--one of the reasons a lot of players took up DADGAD, Celtic style/repertory, and Lowdens. Maybe a bit less influential than John Renbourn in the States, but still a force. One of my earliest workshop memories is of a Bensusan session--at the start, he had everyone come up front and play a tune. I attempted "Anji," probably the most challenging piece I knew at the time, and I pretty much mimicked the Jansch version. Pierre said, "Why do you not play eet like zeese"? and proceeded to play it at a slower and very slinky tempo. My answer would have been, "Because I only know one way to play it." And 30-plus years on, I can almost manage the kind of transformation he wrought on the tune. Almost.
(And as much as I love the music, I never did manage to learn the material from his early albums, published in his first book. DADGAD just makes my head hurt.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 19, 2024 19:55:03 GMT -5
Or find some different guys.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 18, 2024 19:04:53 GMT -5
Charlie made some really nice guitars. I have John's personal Hoffman parlor on loan while he has my Marin (which has its tonal hooks deep into him). I suppose he will eventually bring this new-old Hoffman along eventually and we can have a reunion duet.
Played with him last night at Bo Diddley's--a bit of a St. Paddy's celebration session (though John's surname is Hanson and he grew up in Montana), so I brought the 6-string banjo as well as a guitar. It wasn't all Irish--we also had a bass player and a fiddle/mando player friend, and we got as far afield as "San Francisco Bay Blues" and "A Day in the Life of a Fool" (aka "Manha de Carnaval"), which John has taken a liking to singing.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 16, 2024 14:29:21 GMT -5
The Folk Society's Approximately St. Patrick's Day concert was a Quebec-Irish trio, Grosse Isle, and they played two first-rate sets to a full house. Nice people, too--traveling with the younger pair's two kids (11 and 13, I think). They're playing tonight at the Cedar before heading to Iowa for a St. Patrick's Day concert (Cafe Paradiso in Fairfield) and a residency in Davenport (Quad Cities Visiting Artists Series, 4/18-23). Worth a drive to hear them.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 16, 2024 10:54:47 GMT -5
My daughter told me that 77 is the new 65. I think I would prefer it be the new 50. Thursday was Nancy's birthday, yesterday was our anniversary, today my birthday, and tomorrow a grandson's second birthday. A lot crammed into a short time. At least it's not Christmas as well. Though tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. BTW, 79 is the old 78, which is the old 77, so you have something to look forward to. Twice. Enjoy the ride. It's not as bad as they say.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 14, 2024 17:11:40 GMT -5
Doc, check your irony detector--I think it needs new batteries.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 14, 2024 9:43:06 GMT -5
March adieu about noting.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 20:21:50 GMT -5
John: MAGA is a self-lumping social group*. And while "evil" is not a descriptor I'm comfortable with, I'm not afraid of "pathological" or "delusional" as a characterization of a movement that cheers when its leader says untrue or childishly nasty (to use one of of his favorite adjectives) things loudly and repeatedly.
I don't see any glaring problems with my description of the evolution of the culture that produced MAGA, or of the forces that feed its resentments.
* And they certainly are a group--they have hats and tee-shirts and bumper stickers and chants and all the rest of the things that make for collective identity. They're not the only self-identified sociopolitical group (all god's children got a tee-shirt), but you can pick 'em out of a crowd even when they're not the entire crowd themselves.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 12:49:15 GMT -5
Silly Ole--the winning number was obviously 6-7/8.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 12:45:50 GMT -5
Some people say Richard J Daley gave us John Kennedy. But was Kennedy a tool of the Daly machine? Was Truman a tool of the Pendergast outfit? FWIW (and as I think I have mentioned before), one of my great-grandfathers was a bagman for the New York State GOP--he'd come back home with a satchel full of cash, which was distributed to prospective voters from the back porch of his Canajoharie house. Or so my father told me that his father-in-law told him.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 11:22:26 GMT -5
From what I see with my own lying eyes as well as through the reporting of a range of outlets, there is emphatically not "nothing left to elect Trump." Instead, there is a substantial (if not solely sufficient) portion of the electorate absolutely and immovably attached to him personally and to his vision of the world. Then there are the opportunists, political and otherwise, who see advantage in remaining allied with him. And, thanks to a range of economic and social disruptions and unrelated matters (Gaza, for one) there are those who might move in Trump's direction or (almost as effective) refuse to vote for Biden. Trump has always won via leverage, and that redistribution of political-social-economic interests might well prove effective enough to get him back in office. At which point we will enjoy the reign of King Stork.
I don't know how many legs the GOP/conservative stool had (even after Renn's pretty thoughtful explanation), but the MAGA platform--and the way it is promoted by Trump and his allies--had me thinking of Germany in the early 1930s. I'm not sure that it can't happen here, but "not sure" is enough to contribute to five-in-the-morning worry sessions.
As for the "how did we wind up here?" question: The roots of MAGA in my lifetime start with McCarthyism and run through the John Birch Society to Tea Party movement. And on the professional-politics side, MAGA is intertwined with the dirty-tricks/propaganda techniques developed and polished by the likes of Lee Atwater and the scorched-earth political strategies of Newt Gingrich. A third strand to the braid is the backing money controlled by right-wing individuals (e.g., the Kochs, Richard Scaife, Robert Mercer), who leverage their influence by direct contribution or the creation of think tanks and policy foundations--or, in the case of the Murdochs and the Smiths (Sinclair Broadcast Group), entire news-media operations.
Now, there's nothing new about dirty tricks, rabble-rousing, bloody-shirt-waving, or plutocrats throwing their weighty money around in the political environment--nor is the GOP the only party in American history to have behaved badly (insert obligatory pointing at Chicago, Kansas City, and Tammany Hall). Nevertheless, there is a point at which quantity becomes quality (none of the three classic American corruption machines controlled the whole nation), and there is also a point at which the combined effects of media, money, political opportunism, and civic culture (AKA the culture wars) do indeed amount to a threat to our mostly-stable, kinda-democratic, not-too-dysfunctional system of governance.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 12, 2024 19:38:32 GMT -5
There was a time when we might have considered moving after retirement--the requirements included a liveable city, four seasons, not too hot, near a university and good health-care services. Then it turned out that we were already living there. C still has some wistful thoughts about, say, Portland (where her nieces live), but I remind her that by the time she's fully retired, I'll be 80 and she'll be 79-10/12 and that moving a house filled with books, music, guitars, and associated impedimenta is not a project for the officially elderly. It was hard enough 48 years ago, when all our worldly goods fit into a single 18-foot box truck--and that damn near killed me.
Besides, I like Minnesota.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 11, 2024 20:42:57 GMT -5
Evan, bureaucracy is as old as city-based civilization--it's a kind of division of labor and any social organization bigger than a village is going to invent some version of it, almost certainly organized along hierarchical lines, with a rulebook, and rules are generated from the top down*. I don't know where Orwell comes into this--his nightmare was the totalitarian authoritarian system, not the health department or the vehicle-licensing department.
* I'm not excluding ecclesiastical organizations, either. The Catholic Church has an impressive bureaucratic machine.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 11, 2024 17:29:25 GMT -5
Just wondering where the lines are for "authoritarian" in matters of general health and welfare. In public health matters, for example, is it authoritarian to close a restaurant or food-processing facility that is producing tainted food? To require vaccinations for highly-contagious diseases in schools? (I'm thinking of the smallpox vaccination I needed to be admitted to public school in 1949.) To forbid the release of toxins into waterways?
At what point should details of public health and safety require specific legislative action and language? What happens when a novel threat appears or is recognized? Do we wait for the legislatures to write them into the regulations?
I understand skepticism about and impatience with bureaucracy, but the "unelected" part is central to the deal. (And just because a decision-maker is elected doesn't mean he can't be bought, bullied, or bullshitted. Bullshat?)
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