Group Past Life

We just got home from seeing Stan play Shirley.

Here's the highlight show...

On our way through the byzantine labyrinth of dinning commons that create the largest landlocked cruise liner in the history of fusty New England restaurants I intercepted a spotting of Stan sitting down to a pre-gig meal with his wife Pietra and side-kick Rick Lee.

I knew I had to go back there and put in a plug for Jerry's YouTube debut and to praise the trajectories of the Desert Dreams tour that thundered into the most improbable place and time. I needed no cooperation from a single adult to pencil us in at table 27 in the Bull Run ballroom.

I didn't need a signature and the request for Crow Hollow didn't ring hollow but could not be accommodated for a lack of rehearsal space in the rolling desert thunder dream van. Stan did talk at some length from the rear view about the reminiscences of band life from Talking Wall of Voodoo Blues Part 1. He said that he gets reportings of great sadness and not the kind of feedback he was expecting for a sardonic look at a madcap pack of misfits. I admitted a certain whistlefulness from the indelible stamp of ambition, self-absorption, and heady social statements underwritten by the fleeting tonic of stardom-struck youth.

Then he said something quite haunting and in vivid parallel to the private universe of my own college band days. He said that he had formed the unit and that no other bandmate even knew how they got there and where they were going. He said that the alignment was star-like. Like any constellation those bodies keep moving even after the choicest formation begins to lose its shape. I'm paraphrasing of course but I found it eery how closely the metaphor shadowed our own band leader's orchestrations of assemblage.

Composites and Withdrawals

Jimm Erickson conceived of the Answer in the deepest sandboxes of his fertile artsy mind as yet unshaped by his supple, gifted and unformed 18 year-old artist muscles. Jimm even based many of his elaborate rationales for alternative rock world domination on the planetary pulls and arcs found in the astrological positions of the early eighties. All were stoked by the obvious realization that sixties artists were going to spend their catalog wealth on upstarts like us.

I remember it as clearly as the night sky. Somehow our demo tape to the major labels and the path it would pave was interconnected to the celebrity assassinations and manned space flight schedules of the period. I can remember it as clearly as the canonicals of Firesign Theater we would huddle to after a sweaty gestalt-laden session in one of the soundproof Hampshire rehearsal spaces. Actually those oblique audio collages were anything but clear. We laughed our heads off anyway.

Leave it to Stan to bring it all back into focus. The new album is due out this summer and I for one will treat it as a cohesive warping of flesh and time as well as anticipated musical event for folks with a fond history of that sort of thing -- not a series of downloads.

Group Past Life

We just got home from seeing Stan play Shirley.

Here's the highlight show...

On our way through the byzantine labyrinth of dinning commons that create the largest landlocked cruise liner in the history of fusty New England restaurants I intercepted a spotting of Stan sitting down to a pre-gig meal with his wife Pietra and side-kick Rick Lee.

I knew I had to go back there and put in a plug for Jerry's YouTube debut and to praise the trajectories of the Desert Dreams tour that thundered into the most improbable place and time. I needed no cooperation from a single adult to pencil us in at table 27 in the Bull Run ballroom.

I didn't need a signature and the request for Crow Hollow didn't ring hollow but could not be accommodated for a lack of rehearsal space in the rolling desert thunder dream van. Stan did talk at some length from the rear view about the reminiscences of band life from Talking Wall of Voodoo Blues Part 1. He said that he gets reportings of great sadness and not the kind of feedback he was expecting for a sardonic look at a madcap pack of misfits. I admitted a certain whistlefulness from the indelible stamp of ambition, self-absorption, and heady social statements underwritten by the fleeting tonic of stardom-struck youth.

Then he said something quite haunting and in vivid parallel to the private universe of my own college band days. He said that he had formed the unit and that no other bandmate even knew how they got there and where they were going. He said that the alignment was star-like. Like any constellation those bodies keep moving even after the choicest formation begins to lose its shape. I'm paraphrasing of course but I found it eery how closely the metaphor shadowed our own band leader's orchestrations of assemblage.

Composites and Withdrawals

Jimm Erickson conceived of the Answer in the deepest sandboxes of his fertile artsy mind as yet unshaped by his supple, gifted and unformed 18 year-old artist muscles. Jimm even based many of his elaborate rationales for alternative rock world domination on the planetary pulls and arcs found in the astrological positions of the early eighties. All were stoked by the obvious realization that sixties artists were going to spend their catalog wealth on upstarts like us.

I remember it as clearly as the night sky. Somehow our demo tape to the major labels and the path it would pave was interconnected to the celebrity assassinations and manned space flight schedules of the period. I can remember it as clearly as the canonicals of Firesign Theater we would huddle to after a sweaty gestalt-laden session in one of the soundproof Hampshire rehearsal spaces. Actually those oblique audio collages were anything but clear. We laughed our heads off anyway.

Leave it to Stan to bring it all back into focus. The new album is due out this summer and I for one will treat it as a cohesive warping of flesh and time as well as anticipated musical event for folks with a fond history of that sort of thing -- not a series of downloads.

Wordle Play in Pictures

One option for visual knowledge representation is an oft-tagged utility we've been using in a cloud-enabled intranet that we're now piloting called Wordle.

Wordle is not a substitute for plot-pointing social neurons like the one referenced by Valdis Krebs on a recent SIKM discussion. But it does create visual maps that could be applied to a community of practice wiki, job postings, or any other transactional undertaking worthy of tracking. The tool will generate a tag cloud for any RSS feed you throw at it. You can then re-stage the representation as a widget in your social media of choice.

For example our business pipeline contains a list of prospects. Each company's recent maneuvers generates a newsfeed which is then captured as a word picture.

Here's a work-in-progress posted today called "Budget Trouble."

This sequence is not automated. The cloud does not update -- lest fees, terms, conditions and enterprise edition headaches would surely ensue.

Bravo to the developer, Jonathan Feinberg.

Wordle Play in Pictures

One option for visual knowledge representation is an oft-tagged utility we've been using in a cloud-enabled intranet that we're now piloting called Wordle.

Wordle is not a substitute for plot-pointing social neurons like the one referenced by Valdis Krebs on a recent SIKM discussion. But it does create visual maps that could be applied to a community of practice wiki, job postings, or any other transactional undertaking worthy of tracking. The tool will generate a tag cloud for any RSS feed you throw at it. You can then re-stage the representation as a widget in your social media of choice.

For example our business pipeline contains a list of prospects. Each company's recent maneuvers generates a newsfeed which is then captured as a word picture.

Here's a work-in-progress posted today called "Budget Trouble."

This sequence is not automated. The cloud does not update -- lest fees, terms, conditions and enterprise edition headaches would surely ensue.

Bravo to the developer, Jonathan Feinberg.

Happy Terrence Patrick Day

Perhaps you have more than a soft spot but an actual web location for keeping up with your high school chums. Perhaps the spot is so soft that the dialog extends well past when our kids are in and out of high school. I have enjoyed the benefits of such a jury pool of peers over the past 11 years on email. Our discourse can also be expressed as sex, politics and religion only or all subjects taboo unless it's to acknowledge a passing birthday or cryptic allegorical reference to inbred jargonisms, non sequiturs, and in-jokes.

The discussions are testbeds for our own mental incubations. They are deliciously off-the-cuff but deliberative enough to weather the ribbing we'll get for indulging in over-reaches of faith or flaws in our sense-making. They are certainly more communally-based than any of the so-called mental social media outlets. Name the last time that a comment to a blog post led to an earnest debate or brokering of views? David Brooks is a heckuva columnist. But that doesn't make the pile-on to his latest op-ed post any more transparent or conducive to meaningful dissemination.

The occasion for praising our collective anti-social media of choice is the Saint Paddy's birthday greeting of Terrence P. Canade. In addition to getting and giving like the rest of us Bolishuckers, Canuck, as his name bestows, is the reigning king of reasonable. But he is also the group's top-ranking emissary, having logged more miles than the rest of us combined to attend reunions, weddings, and other excuses for get-togethers from Boston to Seattle.

The other aspect of Canuck worthy of public acclaim are the oratorical gifts that extend from his legal arguments to his Bolishuck dispatches. Here are a few from the past year:

* From the email thread Feeling his Oath: The story that is absorbing me lately: Paris 1919. We simply did not learn enough about how the resolution of WWI among a group of imperial prevailing powers created a world which continues to affect us today. We tend to think of our current middle eastern nations as ancient with a long history of controlling our access to energy. We are less than 100 years removed from creating many of those states and from enabling them to transform themselves from forgotten lands to the focus of world attention.

* From the email thread The Stretch: The themes of Underworld resonated with me - think about everything as future garbage, how will you decide what material possessions to maintain? Thereafter, I decided to part with baseball cards which did not trigger an immediate personal emotional response. Just look at them, you know. After, I realized that the notion that I was maintaining memorabilia for others - my progeny, historians, future civilizations - was deluded. If it does not matter to you here and now, there is little sense keeping it (a sense that I believe you share based upon your memorabilia sales efforts).

* From the email thread That Was a Bad Day at the Movies: When Jennifer Connelly pleads - please please please, Mr. Blint - that Klaatu has yet to speak with the world leaders, she takes Klaatu to John Cleese for whom the movie lays no foundation. As she enters Cleese's office, Connelly points to a Nobel prize - for what? who cares? - to establish Cleese. Cleese apparently is some kind of mathematician, but what has that to do with Klaatu's purpose? What are we supposed to change and how might all powerful Klaatu help us do that? Jesus, who apparently spoke only in parables, was clearer. Klaatu claims that we did not listen. I claim that he did not say.

I could go on letting Canuck go on. That's not to suggest that Canuck in any way grandstands or indulges his mastery of persuasion. His economy of expression is part of that persuasion.

To close, to those of us in possession of an increasing abundance of birthdays let me say that the leading prevention of future regret is to praise those we can still bask in the birthday presence of we're we're all here.

I raise my swollen cup of hen brew to you, Canuck.

Happy Terrence Patrick Day

Perhaps you have more than a soft spot but an actual web location for keeping up with your high school chums. Perhaps the spot is so soft that the dialog extends well past when our kids are in and out of high school. I have enjoyed the benefits of such a jury pool of peers over the past 11 years on email. Our discourse can also be expressed as sex, politics and religion only or all subjects taboo unless it's to acknowledge a passing birthday or cryptic allegorical reference to inbred jargonisms, non sequiturs, and in-jokes.

The discussions are testbeds for our own mental incubations. They are deliciously off-the-cuff but deliberative enough to weather the ribbing we'll get for indulging in over-reaches of faith or flaws in our sense-making. They are certainly more communally-based than any of the so-called mental social media outlets. Name the last time that a comment to a blog post led to an earnest debate or brokering of views? David Brooks is a heckuva columnist. But that doesn't make the pile-on to his latest op-ed post any more transparent or conducive to meaningful dissemination.

The occasion for praising our collective anti-social media of choice is the Saint Paddy's birthday greeting of Terrence P. Canade. In addition to getting and giving like the rest of us Bolishuckers, Canuck, as his name bestows, is the reigning king of reasonable. But he is also the group's top-ranking emissary, having logged more miles than the rest of us combined to attend reunions, weddings, and other excuses for get-togethers from Boston to Seattle.

The other aspect of Canuck worthy of public acclaim are the oratorical gifts that extend from his legal arguments to his Bolishuck dispatches. Here are a few from the past year:

* From the email thread Feeling his Oath: The story that is absorbing me lately: Paris 1919. We simply did not learn enough about how the resolution of WWI among a group of imperial prevailing powers created a world which continues to affect us today. We tend to think of our current middle eastern nations as ancient with a long history of controlling our access to energy. We are less than 100 years removed from creating many of those states and from enabling them to transform themselves from forgotten lands to the focus of world attention.

* From the email thread The Stretch: The themes of Underworld resonated with me - think about everything as future garbage, how will you decide what material possessions to maintain? Thereafter, I decided to part with baseball cards which did not trigger an immediate personal emotional response. Just look at them, you know. After, I realized that the notion that I was maintaining memorabilia for others - my progeny, historians, future civilizations - was deluded. If it does not matter to you here and now, there is little sense keeping it (a sense that I believe you share based upon your memorabilia sales efforts).

* From the email thread That Was a Bad Day at the Movies: When Jennifer Connelly pleads - please please please, Mr. Blint - that Klaatu has yet to speak with the world leaders, she takes Klaatu to John Cleese for whom the movie lays no foundation. As she enters Cleese's office, Connelly points to a Nobel prize - for what? who cares? - to establish Cleese. Cleese apparently is some kind of mathematician, but what has that to do with Klaatu's purpose? What are we supposed to change and how might all powerful Klaatu help us do that? Jesus, who apparently spoke only in parables, was clearer. Klaatu claims that we did not listen. I claim that he did not say.

I could go on letting Canuck go on. That's not to suggest that Canuck in any way grandstands or indulges his mastery of persuasion. His economy of expression is part of that persuasion.

To close, to those of us in possession of an increasing abundance of birthdays let me say that the leading prevention of future regret is to praise those we can still bask in the birthday presence of we're we're all here.

I raise my swollen cup of hen brew to you, Canuck.

Stan Plays Shirley

It's true. Some spams I don't toss.

Usually it's because I have a lotto-ticket-sized hope in my pocket. It's not about increasing my penis or reducing my mortgage debt but other worldly aspirations. In this case it's about the likelihood that a cult-hood hero with a decidedly regional west coast flavor would wonder back east. Stan Ridgway is wading into what Peter Gabriel once referred to as his 1982 fall tour through darkest America when he played Utica, NY.

Shirley is not a beauty or a parlor but a place that I pass 52 times per year on my way to seeing my son in Western Mass. The only time I dropped in was two bubble bursts ago when I first walked the Avon 3-day and some school children stepped outside to cheer our way through the town.

The improbability is furthered because my son's rock concert experience has never ventured beyond another regional flavor closer to home -- Haydenville, MA-based songwriter Ray Mason. Now I have never foisted my heroes on my son, let alone entire inheritances of mine he's more than happy to let lapse (Judaism and baseball for starters). But Stan's music snuck under his guard and came to settle in a similar, rewarding place. Now we'll get from email distance to actual sonics of a vibration-basking range.

Stan's last studio work Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs actually inspired Jerry's first video. As you'll see my son's rendition of Crow Hollow Blues takes the surrealism of the album title as literally as a blacktop fugitive can take it. He tried to email Stan with the news of its release but it blew up on its way to the big honcho gate-keeping tycoon that guards Stan's in-box. He'll have to send that release again when I have him this weekend.

Shirley beckons.

Stan Plays Shirley

It's true. Some spams I don't toss.

Usually it's because I have a lotto-ticket-sized hope in my pocket. It's not about increasing my penis or reducing my mortgage debt but other worldly aspirations. In this case it's about the likelihood that a cult-hood hero with a decidedly regional west coast flavor would wonder back east. Stan Ridgway is wading into what Peter Gabriel once referred to as his 1982 fall tour through darkest America when he played Utica, NY.

Shirley is not a beauty or a parlor but a place that I pass 52 times per year on my way to seeing my son in Western Mass. The only time I dropped in was two bubble bursts ago when I first walked the Avon 3-day and some school children stepped outside to cheer our way through the town.

The improbability is furthered because my son's rock concert experience has never ventured beyond another regional flavor closer to home -- Haydenville, MA-based songwriter Ray Mason. Now I have never foisted my heroes on my son, let alone entire inheritances of mine he's more than happy to let lapse (Judaism and baseball for starters). But Stan's music snuck under his guard and came to settle in a similar, rewarding place. Now we'll get from email distance to actual sonics of a vibration-basking range.

Stan's last studio work Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs actually inspired Jerry's first video. As you'll see my son's rendition of Crow Hollow Blues takes the surrealism of the album title as literally as a blacktop fugitive can take it. He tried to email Stan with the news of its release but it blew up on its way to the big honcho gate-keeping tycoon that guards Stan's in-box. He'll have to send that release again when I have him this weekend.

Shirley beckons.