Jazz Fest Special Edition.

I mentioned in the last post that I saw Sun Ra at Jazz Fest... his band was brilliant, and decisively odd looking, lots of long colorful robes, perhaps African, but African from outer space... and then at one point, Sun Ra walked onto the stage and sat down at the grand piano and started banging out this stuff that sounded like Duke Ellington had a child by Spike Jones and..., well, it was amazing! Stunning!

Sun Ra always said that he was from another planet, the planet Venus in fact. It wasn't hard to believe after seeing his "Arkestra" (his name for the 20 piece band) on the stage. After hearing a few of the numbers, and then hearing Sun Ra at the piano with the big band, I realized that the man knew more about the spaces between notes than anyone else, ever.

Sometimes, in music, just like in sculpture, it's the bits that you leave out that count...the spaces.

So here's a treat. A QuickTime sound file. Stars Fell On Alabama

It's fairly special song for me. I heard it that day live, but there's a story behind it...

When Bill and I owned the store on Burgundy Street (and lived across the street from it), there was this fabulously wealthy woman who lived next door, and although you might scarcely believe it, her name was Jera. She and her also wealthy husband, used to have this enormous mansion type house in Birrningham, AL. I mean, it was featured in "Architectual Digest"!. So they did all the big charity events there; they had a room on the first floor, just off of the foyer that accomodated a dozen large sofas, two grand pianos and 300 people! (I saw pictures!)

So, for one of these charity events, Joe Namath was the guest of honor. Of course, everyone wanted to see him and as he was moved through the room, he got more and more drunk. (He was apparently no stranger to drink at the time,,hehe). So by the time he got to the back of the room, his handelers wanted to get him out of the crowd. So Jera said, "Just bring him though the library!", and then they could go down the steps to the lawn. Which they did, but on the way out of the library door, Joe fell down, fell on Jera and broke her arm. Well, Joe was swept away by his handlers, and Jera was swept away to the hospital that her husband ran, and I suppose there was very little pain felt by either of them.

Of course, Jera was mortified (that's a southern lady thing..mortified!) that she wasn't at her big society function at the end to bid everybody goodby!

But that very morning there was this HUGE flower arrangement that arrived at her hospital bed side and it was from Joe Namath!

The card said, "Stars Fell On Alabama", signed Joe.

bwahahahaha! Jera thought there weren't enough roses in the arrangement. And, she would have liked a personal apology. Later, after a few martinis, she said, "well, hell, he was just a damn football player!. What! could I have expected!"

Think Jack and Karen from Will and Grace...

She was an amazing woman!

Jazz Fest!


Jazz Fest starts next Friday with hundreds of performances at the Fairgrounds during the day and several big concerts each night, Friday thru Sunday next week and Thursday thru Sunday the following week. In addition to that, every music club and some of the record and book stores have live music every day. It's an incredible two weeks for music! Some of the big name rock type acts appearing at the festival this year are Bonnie Raitt, Melissa Etheridge and Lenny Kravitz. (My sister and her lover will be here, so we will probably see our lez sister Melissa for sure...) The range of music is amazing; traditional Jazz, Blues and Cajun, wild Zydeco, big band, folk and gospel. Over half of the groups are from Louisiana and many from New Orleans; there's an incredible amount of local talent here. The Gospel Tent is a unique experience; while you would probably be able to see most of the local groups at one club or another during the year, you rarely see any of the gospel groups outside of a church. The tent really rocks! If you are thinking of that mush that gets played popularly every once and a while, well there's some of that, but a lot of the groups are hard driving, full out mesmerizing; there are arms waving, people yelling and shaking, there's some old woman next to you in a Sunday dress just stomping her feet and wailing, you can't help but get caught up in it. It's wonderful and a bit scary... I've found myself in tears there; I'm no fan of religion, but there is certainly a powerful force in play.

I usually pay no attention to the schedule, or maybe just pick one act that I really want to see and then just wander around and let it happen to me. I've never been disappointed with the time spent there and I've often been stunned, like the time I saw Sun Ra, (which was probably the most amazing musical performance I've ever seen.)
The full schedule can be seen at the Official Jazz Fest site, here. This is one of the things you should put on your list if you love music; it's a fabulous time!

The Yard.




O.K. So it ain't beautiful yet... A couple of weeks ago I cut down most of the huge (20 ft +) banana trees because they needed it and did some other trimming. I got exhausted and kind of just left everything. Yesterday, I started cleaning up by the back door and this morning I got this huge surge of energy and got out there with a saw and pruning shears a pitch fork and a rake. I moved a half a ton of debris into a corner spot behind some of the banana trees where most of it will rot away by the end of the summer and cut back a lot of the most active vines. (I say active; some of these vines grow a foot a day!) I had dreaded doing this so much, but once I got started, it went fairly quickly. After a hour of hard labor I could see some results and another hour of work should get the rest of the detritus out of the way. (I have to just stuff it in corners this year, can't afford to have someone haul it away and the city trash pick up will only take a lil bag or two a week. Like I said, most of it will rot in the frist two months.)

By mid summer, it'll be gorgeous! hehe.

AOL version 1.5!



I thought this might amuse some of you. I found this old mailer in my desk from AOL from 1992 when they were still just getting started. Notice the huge old floppy disk! I actually started with AOL the year before when they began beta testing of the initial DOS version of the software. It didn't run under Windows... (Windows existed then, but it really didn't do much, hardly anyone used it.), the AOL software used the GeoWorks environment, a very neat piece of software that at the time had Windows beat hands down for ease of use, cost and it's compact code. It was a graphical interface that actually ran on an XT computer and it was incredibly stable. Microsoft Windows eventually just swamped it; Gates had all the money he needed to promote Windows from his sale of DOS. (Which he bought from someone btw...)

Anyway, 11 years ago AOL was just the kewlist thing out there! I had used text based services like Compuserve and GEnie, but this was something else! When I signed on, there were somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand members and the fastest connection speed was 2400bps...that's 2.4k, hehe. Steve Case actually answered one of my e-mail questions! I left them around the time they hit 6 million members; when they decided it was more profitable to have 6 million frustrated customers rather than 600 thousand satisfied ones. Now they have over 35 million customers, so I guess some of them are happy, but I can't imagine why.

It pretty amazing to look at what's happened to the online community in just a little over a decade!

The last lunch served on the Titanic.



In one of the restaurants I worked in years ago, we used to do some items from this menu at lunch on every April 14. The chef, a lovely older gay man, always had great fun teaching the new waiters the name of the soup he'd selected from the menu; "Cockie Leekie". hehe.