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Ueli Streck and the Light Workout

But the weather was lousy, so he went for a jog. He ran up and down a mountain near Interlaken three times – eighteen miles, and eight thousand vertical feet, in three hours and forty minutes. (“I enjoy it,” he said. “I feel my legs. I see nature.”) Then to cool down, he went to the gym and lifted weights for two hours. He explained, when I met him for coffee the next morning, that he was taking it easy: he was conserving energy for Nepal.

From The Manic Mountain – Ueli Streck and the dash on Everest
New Yorker – June 3, 2013

The concept that after that run he simply “feels his legs,” seems a bit crazy. I am certain I would be passed out after about mile ten, somewhere on the side of the road.

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2013 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival Official Pelican Café Awards

As is the case with years past, The Pelican Café gives out awards for the Best of Hardly Strictly. It is a great honor to have been chosen for this task.

BEST 87 YEAR OLD GUY SINGING A SONG

Ralph Stanley

Ralph can still belt it out and if you have not heard him sing, it is a truly American experience. Part Appalachia, part blues, part native Indian chants, it is a one of a kind thing. The Clinch Mountain Boys always deliver some solid traditional bluegrass.

BEST USE OF A SUS 4 CHORD FOR A REAL LONG DURATION

Alison Brown

Alison sounded great and as the sun came out full-blast and I applied my second batch of sunscreen, the sus 4 chords just keep coming. Everyone knows that hanging out on sus 4 chords in Bluegrass is just strange. It is like mixing your sour mash whiskey with Dr. Pepper. Better just to drink it straight.

COOLEST ROCK AND ROLL OLD FART

Richard Thompson

This guy played some heavy songs, with profound lyrics and delivered some totally out there guitar solos. I caught him later at the Rooster Stage playing a solo ballad. When the sound went out on his acoustic guitar, he did not skip a bit and borrowed yet another guitar and finished the last two verses.

BRAVEST ARTIST, GOING OUT ON A LIMB SINGING A STRANGE BALLAD, SINGING WITHOUT HIS GUITAR

Steve Earl

Speaking of singing ballads, Steve Earl at the Kate McGarrigle Tribute, sang one of Kate’s ballads, and pulled it off admirably. You could tell he was in unfamiliar waters, but rose to the occasion.

MOST SOULFUL SINGER WITH A GROOVIN’ BAND

Nicki Bluhm

Just a breath of fresh air, great voice and a solid band.

BEST HARMONICA PLAYING WHILE PLAYING STAND UP BASS

Chris Wood of the Wood Brothers

Not too many harp players in bluegrass. It is a strange misunderstanding. Anyway the Wood brothers are a very interesting band. Maybe next time Chris should put down the bass and grab the harp with two hands. This year, I started to get into this band and strange combinations. It is easy to forget that all this music is just three people. Excellent vocals.

BEST COOL BAND FROM EUROPE THAT I MISSED

First Aid Kit

Can’t be everywhere…

Prelude

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival always takes place the first weekend of October in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Because of the season, you either experience a weekend of warm temperatures and offshore winds, in other words “Indian Summer,” or the end of summer, and the usual foggy cold. This year it was warm. The surf lined up to be shoulder high glassy things, and the sky was so clear, on Saturday morning from the dunes of Ocean Beach you could see far off to the distance along the coast to the north, the bluffs of Point Reyes.

Some people say I like this festival because I am cheap. Sure, one look at my car and you get the idea that this is a person who probably rinses out the end of the ketchup bottle in the spaghetti sauce. It is true, I tend to gravitate towards the simple pleasures, being a free festival, things become simple when it comes to money. But to take on a festival with over 100 bands, you got to have a strategy even if your strategy is to have no strategy. This year, after much searching for comrades, it turned out I was flying solo. Strange, I was unable to drag anyone from my family, anyone from my extended family, and not even a single soul from my rock and roll jam band world. Plans. Travel. Prior engagements. Camping-surf trips. No problem. How can you possibly miss this thing!

The strategy was to be simple. Surf in the morning. Hit the festival all day. See as many bands as possible. Pack supplies. Water, refreshments and binoculars.

So, Saturday, I awake to a sort of paradise, and proceed with my HSB schedule all marked up, West, to the ocean and the Golden Gate Park. The following day, after jamming in some undisclosed location in the Mission with the Beauty Operators, I simply repeated the formula. By the time my honey showed up for the final show on Sunday, I had seen over 13 bands, many for the first time. The only problem was that there were at least 25 more that I missed. Next year, weather permitting, all Friday afternoon at the Porch Stage hearing some folksy stuff. All Saturday and Sunday checking out acts I know nothing about. The weirder the names, the better.

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Tom Hanks and How the Hero Pie Gets Divided

Some people are cowards. … I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they have got to make that choice.

Tom Hanks – Parade Magazine
September 22, 2013

UPDATE: November 18, 2023

You have to love the simplicity of this quote – villains, cowards and heroes. If only the world was really that simple. But then again, Mr. Hanks may be on to something. Just about every event or situation has these three characters. The person who steals the candy bar. The person who sees it all happen and refuses to say anything. The clerk who confronts the thief. Granted this is a shallow and silly example and it is obvious to make an example of our current political world where cowards abound. The Republican party has its share of villains and the cowards are everywhere afraid for their own skin. The problem is that the few heroes that exist are leaving the room but state their case in clear language.  The Liz Cheney’s and Adam Kinzinger’s  of the world may be heroic in their own way but unfortunately they are no longer in the room. No one is holding their breaths waiting for all the cowards to suddenly choose to be heroes and state the obvious. Now wouldn’t it be interesting if Tom Hanks ran for president. That would be a heroic choice!

UPDATE: November 13, 2024

Tom Hanks for president!

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – How Myths and Fiction Become Reality

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San Francisco Never Takes a Break at the Meters

People often think of San Francisco as a “Godless” town. This is entirely untrue. Even though people here is San Francisco live in a very free-wheeling manner, laying out in parks with little clothing on, smoking strange herbs at all times of the day, marrying people of the same sex, there is one thing for certain. During all holidays and even on Sunday’s you can hear people calling out the name “Jesus” and “Dear God” often. It usually happens when they are returning to their car and notice a familiar piece of paper in under their windshield wipers. When they read the contents of this paper, that is when religion overtakes them. Some times they call Jesus by just his first name. Often they include his surname. Sometimes they make reference to a little known figure in the bible, Asoles. At that point, San Franciscan’s will get in their cars with very pious looks on their faces and drive off as though there is work to be done.

Recently, on Labor Day no less, I was pulled into this religious fervor when I found a bill under my wiper. $85 for simply parking my car. Labor Day. A day when people are not suppose to work. Someone please tell those people in those funny little cars to go home and take a bath. In San Francisco, unless you want to run into this “problem,” if you drive a car and have to park it somewhere from time to time, stock up on rolls of quarters. It keeps the mojo intact.

For more information on how the San Francisco parking regulations never take a break, see https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/parking/holiday-enforcement

 

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Letter from Brother Ted

Recently, I volunteered to play an hour set at Fairmount Elementary. I pulled together some friends, came up with a band name, “Gus and Mission Creek Ramblers,” wrote down some songs and thought… no problem. But as all band leaders know, refined artists live complicated lives. Ted, the lead banjo player was in a tight spot. The day of the gig, I found this letter in my mail box.

Dear Gus and the Mission Creek Ramblers,

Thursday, 3am May 9th,

I know this is hard to believe but rules are rules. It was a dark and stormy night and we were making good time. We had made it over the mountain pass and were almost to the state line. We crossed the state line into Nevada on our way to Reno with no problems but it wasn’t till about 10 miles down the road when I saw the flashing red lights in my rear view mirror. I wasn’t going that fast but I pulled over. The first thing the officer asked me was if I had any illegal unregistered musical instruments in my possession. I said that I was unaware of any laws about registering instruments with authorities. He said “open the trunk sir” and at that moment I knew I was busted.

He saw my banjo case and asked for my banjo license. I told him I had none. So right away he handcuffed us, and booked us on transferring unregistered banjos across state lines. My trial is next week and bail is set for $10,000.

Laura the Mandolin player is with me too. She did not have a license as well. Things are not so bad though. They have us in a cell with this guy named Bernie Madoff and asked us to play as much as possible. The police said he liked the banjo music but Bernie seems like he is pretty irritated and I think he starting to go mad.

Anyway, don’t worry about us. We are getting 3 square meals a day. Wish us luck. Send bail if you can but I am going to fight this thing.

Truly,

Ted and Laura

Well we ended up doing the gig with just two people. Guitar and harmonica and a bunch of old tunes. Turned out fine. Ted and Laura did make it out of jail eventually.

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Kitaro Nishida Quote from McLaren Park

Thinking has its own laws. It functions of its own accord and does not follow our will. To merge with the act of thought – that is, to direct one’s attention to it – is voluntary, but I think perception is the same in this respect: we are able to see what we want to see by freely turning our attention towards it.

Kitaro Nishida

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The Semantics of HTML and Web Sites – Why Markup Matters

Creating websites for 13 years now, I have seen the evolution of websites from clunky table based layouts that were semantically just a bunch of noise to the current HTML5, semantically charged creations. Of course the leaders in Web Standards and semantic HTML have been people like Jeffery Zeldman and his disciples, great CSS exercise sites like Zen Garden and also the blog sites and open source world, probably most importantly WordPress. If you want to make a web site theme that then someone else can take and run with, the semantics of the markup have to be solid.

I am amazed at how understanding semantics in both web design and programming gets overlooked. I still know many web designers who do not understand what a heading tag is. They are often so lost in the fonts and backgrounds and images that they forget what is going on in the hierarchy of information. I have witnessed decent designers never realize that <h1>What a Killer Page</h1> is what is essential. This is not only for SEO but also for making the web site accessible on a variety of platforms. I still know amazing developers who can talk your ear off about Object Oriented Design Patterns who when they get to the HTML will code a heading tag as <div class=”main-header”> What a Killer Page</div>. I am not sure if this is because they just read stuff too quickly and never really read chapter one and think they know everything, or maybe they just don’t get it. Struggling with the margins of a <p> tag does not mean you should then use a few <br /> tags. Strange.

In HTML, if you take away things like the required html, body and title tags, the important semantic markup is pretty simple.

  • Headers h1,h2,h3,h4,h5
  • Paragraphs <p></p>
  • Lists <ul><li></li></ul>
  • Tables <table><tr><th></th></tr><tr><td></td></tr></table> (for tabular data)

That is really it! Markup such as divs and spans are not semantic. They are presentational! Putting things like navigational lists into divs is just wrong. The sooner one learns this basic distinction, the faster you will write cleaner, easier to maintain code.

In HTML5 the list of semantic markup grows longer. I will not enumerate them here but to me one of the main objectives of HTML5 is this semantic markup. <section></section>, <article><article>, <video></video>.

So there you have it. Just think. If you are just starting to write HTML, you got to avoid the 7 year era of table based layouts and nested tables seven layers deep just to keep you debugging for and hour all for the crappy browsers of the day.

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How to Create Your Own File-Based Image Galleries with php, ftp, Shadowbox and a Groovy File Structure

or perhaps titled:

I don’t trust anyone with my photos, not Flickr, not Google and especially not Mark Zuckerberg!

Requirements

  • Linux Hosting Account (php enabled)
  • ftp program for uploading files

Implementation

History
Many years ago, in the dark ages of web development, when I had a Windows hosting account, you know one of those $4.95 a month deals, and I wanted to post lovely photos of my kids and vacations, I would do it a state of the art way. I’d open Photoshop 7 and chose “Create Web Gallery.” I would then wrestle the various dialogue boxes into submission and create a Web Gallery. It worked. It looked cool. It used tables for layouts. I was a genius.

Last year I closed my Windows hosting account. Never use webhost4life. It is a terrible hosting company. As I was doing a lot of Word Press, I chose BlueHost. So far so good.

Now I could have just uploaded all my old Photoshop galleries to my new hosting account but this seemed lame. I did not want to use any Web 2.0 stuff, in other words startup companies just waiting to be bought out and make your life really complicated, but I did want to use ftp to upload files. So with a little php, notably scandir, I created a way to display all the photos in lovely paging galleries.  The first time a particular gallery is accessed, it creates a folder of thumbnails in that directory named ‘thumbs.’ This makes the pages load faster.  Larger versions of the images utilize Michael Jackson shadowbox, still one of my favorite lightboxes  There is no indexing for searching, or meta tags, but to be honest, I would never get around to entering this sort of data. Maybe in the next version, I will add this feature.

A few key elements (let us say features and recommendations) of “Paul’s Amazing php Photo Gallery” are

  • Name your folders like this 2012-08-New York. The folders will display by replacing the dashes with spaces and are ordered in descending order.
  • Process your images to 1200px wide. This way they will look great when large, but not so big it takes forever to see a gallery.
  • All gallery images have a lightbox large image version. Go shadowbox!

that’s it…
Enjoy!

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2012 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival Highlights

Last year I was in Tennessee at a wedding. This year I was able to check two days of the 2012 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco. Unlike past years, I did not have any known friends who were doing early morning squatting, marking out terrain, so I would be flying solo, moving between stages and looking for good listening and viewing spots. I caught Saturday and Sunday afternoon shows. Overall, it seemed like the festival was extremely well attended and each day I ran into people who traveled to San Francisco specifically for the festival. Met some nice people from San Diego, LA and Denver.

For me the best show was DOUG SAHM’S PHANTOM PLAYBOYS featuring: dave ALVIN, steve EARLE, delbert McCLINTON, boz SCAGGS, jimmie VAUGHAN… and whoever the cat drags in.… The rhythm section was right in the pocket and the band played a lot of different grooves. It all seemed effortless. The horn section was outstanding. The guitar solos outstanding pieces of R&B soul. For this show, I listened by a tree, stage right and it turned out to be a great spot. You could see the band the acoustics were good. This show had great sound.

A few interesting acts I caught were “The Cowboy Junkies” who I had never heard of feature a decent harp player. I enjoyed the brooding lead female singer who was very different from some of the earlier acts I heard. I also caught Patti Smith whose music I did not know, but whose name is well known. She brought a decent young rock and roll band and her music has this powerful, self-empowering message. Very nice.

So much music. So little time. Another fine year at the 2012 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Next year, I really got to make it for Friday night too.

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Toots Thielemans Solo on “Don’t Blame Me” – Jazz Harmonica Transcription

We all have all been listening to Toots and probably never knew it. Paul Simon records. Film scores like “Midnight Cowboy.” He basically put the modern, chromatic harmonica on the jazz and popular music map. I am presently on a personal project to transcribe a bunch of his solos. In this post, I present his solo on the album “Man Bites Harmonica” and the song “Don’t Blame Me.”

Of course, with these sorts of transcriptions it is best not to just read the take down. It is best to listen to the solo and get into it and transcribe it in your head. Perhaps the hardest thing is getting to know his phrasing. Toots has a very fluid way with his lines. It often seems like he is at a cocktail party – he sort of stumbles around the hors d’oeuvres, moseys towards the bar then says high to woman by the dessert table. His style is instantly identifiable. Do not be tempted into thinking his music is lightweight as he makes it all sound so easy. The guy knows his stuff and has serious chops.

Toots Thielemans Solo- Don’t Blame Me (pdf)

10 Toots Thielemans Chromatic Harmonica Solos – Transcribed and Analyzed

By Paul Lyons

TenForToots_tn

Now available at Lulu Press

An in-depth look at the style of one of the great improvisors of the last 50 years. Excellent for not only chromatic harmonica players, but jazz players of all instruments.

Table of Contents

Introduction – 3

Why Transcribe – 5

Don’t Blame Me – Man Bites Harmonica! (Riverside, 1958) – 6

Three In One – Man Bites Harmonica! (Riverside, 1958) – 11

Sno’ Peas – Bill Evans Affinity (Warner Bros., 1979) – 18

Blue in Green – Bill Evans Affinity (Warner Bros., 1979) – 20

Jesus’ Last Ballad – Bill Evans Affinity (Warner Bros., 1979) – 23

Only Trust Your Heart – Only Trust Your Heart (Concord Records, 1988) – 26

C To G Jam Blues – Footprints (Polygram Records, 1991) – 30

Felicia and Bianca – The Brasil Project (BMG, 1992) -36

Coisa Feita – The Brasil Project (1992, BMG) – 38

Everybody’s Talkin’, Midnight Cowboy: Original Motion Picture Score [Soundtrack] (1969) – 45

Conclusion – 48

References – 48

Etudes – 49 – 80