Then another band played. They were fine. They had a good, close-knit overall sound, and really nice vocals from the singer.
So later, on the way to the toilets, I bumped into the singer, and said to her “You have a lovely voice, really. Not only that, but it was brave to do the final part of that Joni Mitchell song, Big Yellow Taxi, and hit the notes perfectly, right at the end.”
And she asked me “Who are you?”
I said “I’m the Dad of the rhythm section of The Monkey Sessions band.”
Anyway, later on, after The Monkey Sessions had played their second set, she came over to our table, and said “Where do you live?”
So I said “Windsor Place, Portobello”
And she said “I thought so. My aunt lives in Lee Crescent, which backs off Windsor Place. We used to hear your son practising drums, loud. I recognise him from the drumming style he played in that last set!”
So I said “I’m awfully sorry if he played too loud when practising, but we used to close the wood shutters, and put a mattress up against the windows as well. Even though, in the heat of the summer, the sweat would drip off him.”
And she said “It was no problem. The lad is good. I used to listen to him and enjoy it. Sometimes after I’d been playing my guitar in the garden.”
I said “No! I used to hear you play somewhere over the wall. Were you really the songbird in the morning? Was that you? That sound, I enjoyed it so much. It was innocent and lovely.”
Here’s a song from The Monkey Sessions second set. Once again, the lighting in the room wasn’t good.
The Monkey Sessions is the band that Shaun plays bass in. Here they are at the Three Monkeys Bar. The lighting wasn’t great!
The band that played after the Monkey Sessions were very funny, very drunk and not without talent. They were called the Stoned Holy Rollers. Their manager spoke to me while they were playing, and assured me that they will become big in 2013.
There’s a lot happening in the world of scholarly journal publishing just now, and I find it all fascinating. Traditional subscription models, Open Access journals, hybrid journals, gold and green models for Open Access, the Finch Report and subsequent response and discussions, etc.
Then there’s what’s happening on the Liblicense listserv. Prof Stevan Harnad has sunk his teeth into the Social Sciences Directory (SSD) and the fact that the University of Nottingham has taken up an institutional membership with it.
Prof Harnad doesn’t seem to like the fact that the editors of SSD are a former publisher and a librarian (rather than researchers), or that this start-up publication has only published five papers so far.
Sandy Thatcher has joined the discussion. He seems concerned that there may only be about 100 reviewers for the journal, and he doesn’t like the phrase ‘registered reviewers’ which was used by Dan Scott, the SSD Contact.
I don’t know whether the SSD will prove to be a success in the long term or not, but their institutional membership business model is certainly an interesting idea, and well done the University of Nottingham for testing the waters. SSD has a presence on Facebook and Twitter and is a member of OASPA, and their website is impressiveley clear and well organised.
I wish I could say the same thing about the Penn State University Press journals website (according to this page, Sandy Thatcher was Director, Penn State University Press, 1989-2009 – which is the only reason I’m using Penn State University Press as an example here, rather than some of the other publishers I’ve mentioned in the past). When you click on a ‘learn more’ page, e.g. this one, or this one, or this one, and then click on the links to ‘Our journals are available electronically through JSTOR‘, all you currently get is:
The link from The Edgar Allan Poe Review to “and Project MUSE” goes to a Johns Hopkins University Press page, where The Edgar Allan Poe Review is not listed (this is because The Edgar Allan Poe Review is a forthcoming title, I eventually realised). And I can’t find, as stated, any way to “Sign up for eTOCs” to some of the journals from the links provided – this is also probably because several of them are forthcoming titles.
Brownies are very popular, particularly in America.
I was hitching south, out of Portland in 1980, when Oregon Jim stopped and gave me a ride. It was an interesting ride, and far better than the previous lift I’d caught half an hour previously, when a man in a two-seater stopped for me. That driver seemed slightly manic, but I crammed my rucksack into the back of the car and we set off, south towards California. After ten minutes he did a U-turn and stopped to pick up two other hitchers.
I looked round at the two-seater, my big pack jammed in the small space in the rear of the vehicle, and then up at the two new hitchers, a lad and a girl who also had packs, and thought, “I think it’s time for me to get out”. So I did.
I crossed the highway and started hitching south once more, but unfortunately I started to get toothache. A car eventually stopped, and gave me a lift all the way to Sacramento. The driver’s name was Jim, and we had some very good conversations. Since then I’ve kept in touch with Jim, and in 2009 he and his wife came to the UK. They joined a group of us on a trip to Skye.
Jim (above, to the right) tries to land a mini-frisbee on the target.
Because most of my friends seem to have the name ‘Jim’, we called him Oregon Jim, and when referring to both Jim and his wife Pattie, we therefore called them the Oregons.
Oregon Jim has a secret recipe for brownies, and today we received a Christmas package from him – a tin of brownies! They are exceptionally good, and I am limiting distribution to the family to one per day.
We went through to Glasgow to volunteer for a Glasgow University School of Psychology experiment. It involved getting our faces scanned in 3D. These 3D images are then added to a database and used for various experiments.
It was very strange seeing myself in 3D. The School is always on the lookout for volunteers for various experiments.
During my formative years in the 1960s I lived through a short period in time when anything at all seemed possible. It was round about 1969 – a very good year before it eventually turned sour. To paraphrase Ray Manzarek and also Joni Mitchell, we were stardust and golden, and we were the precursors of that time to come when the races, nations and religions of the earth will blend together to sing, dance and have great copulations.
What a fantastic frame of mind!
Well, that time to come is not now, because although some race divisions have disappeared, in their place are more religious conflicts, and as mentioned in one of my past posts about politics, there are also some who would create more political divisions even within the United Kingdom. That’s a great shame – in my mind we should instead be working towards getting rid of nationalism. Here’s a question for you, and before you look at the link, see if you know who wrote: “As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance.”
Hmm. I rest my case, for a few seconds, so you can think about that one.
Of course, many things have changed in the world since those words above were written, but the principles remain the same. One can understand how some people might feel their group identity is being challenged due to the rapid growth of new methods of mass communication and its results, but that does not mean there is a need for even more political division and strife. Those same communication systems can also be used to express shared experience and culture, and enable it to grow.
Someone contacted me a few months ago about my post on the myths of the Clearances. It was a very nice email from a historian. Among other things, she wrote, “I was thrilled to find your blog post of 10 January: ‘Perpetuating some myths of the Highland Clearances’. About the time that you posted this, I was being attacked with brutality that might almost compare to Patrick Sellars’s on a web site that claims to be for ‘serious historians’ of Scotland for having the gall to say many of the same things you do in your post.”
Her experience is, unfortunately, only too common. Nationalists too often let their passion get the better of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with passion, in itself, but not when it leads to aggression. I expect that we’ll see a lot more of this sort of thing over the coming months leading up to the Referendum. Yesterday, a newspaper reported a rise in anti-English racism in Scotland.
Nationalism was thankfully not a mainstay of the hippy era, back in the 1960s, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Music definitely was a mainstay, though.
One of my heroes, Ken Kesey, even used it to diffuse some gathering tension once when he went on stage during a large political rally that was in danger of breaking out into violence. He played hawonka-wonka-wonka on a guitar, and sang “Home, home on the range” and everyone gradually calmed down. Thirty years later, I was so fortunate to see him and Ken Babbs on stage in Edinburgh, at the Queens Hall.
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to see various other bands who started out during that era and I’ve written about some of them on this blog, for example Canned Heat, but there’s also been Little Feat, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Brian Wilson, and others.
I’ve read a few books about bands from that era, as well. Mostly they are tales of various kinds of excess, designed to titillate as much as inform.
I came across this book as a result of watching a YouTube video of poet Stephen Kalinich being interviewed by Harvey Kubernik. That video is well-worth watching, and shows Kalinich as the gentle man he is who is not phased by the rather harsh questioning and direction of Kubernik. Kalinich is also featured on this video, where at 4:20 he’s a little overcome by the emotion of the occasion of dedicating the Beach Boys Historical Monument in Hawthorne. By the way, Kalinich tweets as @starcries and we follow each other.
Checking out the interviewer lead me to Canyon of Dreams.
Canyon of Dreams, which is about the legendary creative community based in and around Laurel Canyon in California may be a fascinating book, but it’s not the easiest of reads due to the number of name-drops. On every page and just about every paragraph, you have to focus your mind on those who are mentioned, and fit them in to your own musical recollections. The book is none the worse for this, though, and in fact it’s an essential part of the work, but it does require a lot of concentration.
Numerous bands, and their members, are detailed, and I was amazed to see how many of them are featured in my own music collection. Laurel Canyon housed a very creative community, comparable to, and surpassing, those of Greenwich Village and Montmartre in previous eras.
This is a very valuable book for it’s reflections and connections, and I’m enjoying reading it. I’m taking my time, though.
It’s essentially a guided journey through the Canyon and its residents, its jazz and hipster beginnings, its players, its movie-people, its hangers-on, its connections, its creative people, its actions and hangouts, its bad boys, its cars, bars and clubs, its session players and the nearby recording studios.
I’ve been reading Lois on the Loose, by Lois Pryce, and thought that I’d try out the scanning facilities on the new kit with respect to this book. But first of all, there’s a website, where you can see background information about the book, which tells of Pryce’s trip by motorbike from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America – a journey of about 20,000 miles. An enjoyable read, and I realise from looking at the website that we also have her other book, Red Tape & White Knuckles, which I will read shortly. This photo is from her website.
Lois on the Loose
My new printer scanned the cover of her book adequately, once I’d figured out that there were several sizes to choose from (the previous scanner seemed to do this automatically).
Lindsey on Darth
Above is one of my old slides that I scanned, using the Ion Slides 2PC. It seems OK, although I had to adjust various settings – decrease the contrast, decrease the saturation, etc. It shows Lindsey on our 125 Suzuki Trail Bike, somewhere near Zomba – the ‘jinglamoto’, as a motorbike is known in Chichewa, which we named Darth the Black Streak. It wasn’t as big as Lois’ Yamaha XT225, but it was fine for getting about the bush. In those days, in Malawi, it was illegal for women to wear trousers, hence Lindsey is wearing a skirt, even though she’s on a motorbike.
Kalimbuka
The scanner didn’t work as well for the slide shown above, or maybe I didn’t find the best adjustments to make. There’s a lot of contrast in the original, which shows Lindsey in the back garden of our first house, in Kalimbuka, with Doviko in the background, hanging up the washing.
The last thing I want is more computer kit, but that’s what I had to get when my Epson Stylus Photo RX620 Series printer went wrong the other day, and the boy in the repair shop said it would cost more than £200 to fix. It only cost £199 to buy. I did consider paying the repair cost just to avoid adding to landfill and having to spend a day buying and installing new kit, but if it had then gone wrong again in the near future I would have blown a fuse.
So I spent hours buying and setting up a new Canon printer/scanner.
New printer
It produces good quality prints, and is not too difficult to use, but it took me some time to figure out which directory it copies scans to.
The advantage of the Epson was that it could also copy 35mm slides, a feature which more recent copiers don’t seem to have. So I then had to get an Ion Slides 2PC copyer.
Slide copier
I haven’t tried it out yet. There’s only so much kit setting-up that one can take in a single day. I’m getting as bad a Fat Mac, who can’t even work the batteries for his camera without getting annoyed.