by David Burn | Nov 2, 2005 | Music
On 21 July 2005, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission passed a resolution to name the amphitheater in McLaren Park “The Jerry Garcia Amphitheater”. The official naming ceremony took place last Saturday.
According to this first-hand report, Mayor Gavin Newson was on hand, tye-dyed sock and all. Some of The Grateful Dead guitarist’s artwork was also installed at San Francisco City Hall as part of an inaugural exhibit for a new gallery. The exhibit includes drawings from Garcia’s childhood and days as a student at The California School of the Arts.
You gotta love a city that embraces its artists so wholeheartedly.
by David Burn | Oct 30, 2005 | Architecture, Lowcountry
I learned today that a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece is located right under our noses here in Beaufort County. The “Stevens House” is owned today by Joel Silver, Hollywood’s top grossing producer, with films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and The Matrix under his belt. According to The Beaufort County Open Land Trust, Mr. Silver has meticulously completed the majority of Wright’s original plan, thus fulfilling Wright’s dream of making Auldbrass a great 20th century architectural treasure.
Here’s more on the plantation from a 2003 New York Times article:
Of Wright’s thousand-odd commissions in the United States, Auldbrass is his only one in the region, and his only Southern plantation. Wright had just completed Fallingwater, the critically acclaimed house perched over a waterfall in Mill Run, Pa., when C. Leigh Stevens, a wealthy Michigan industrial consultant, commissioned a Lowcountry retreat and gentleman’s farm in a swampy, 4,000-acre tract on the banks of the Combahee River, 20 miles upstream from the Atlantic. Wright conceived Auldbrass as a collection of one-story, slender buildings of polished cypress. His design called for a main house, a guest house and cabins, a caretaker’s residence, staff cabins, a barn, stables, kennels for dogs, a ”dining barge” floating in a pond on the property and an aviary, all unified by material and design: cypress walls canted inward at an 81-degree angle, copper roofs, doors with ornamental panes and hexagonal tables.
The monumentality of Wright’s plantation (as all large properties are referred to in the area, whether or not crops are planted) lies in its understatement. Dwarfed by old oaks, obscured by the stables and with a barely discernible front door, Wright’s dark, asymmetrical main house at Auldbrass is a rebuke of the prevailing Southern-plantation ideal — the becolumned brick pile (the most famous in South Carolina being the 1742 Drayton Hall) that rises emphatically out of the grass as the most potent expression of control and order a colonial planter could muster. Commissioned the same year that ”Gone With the Wind” had its premiere, modernist Auldbrass must have seemed as alien to its neighbors in the early 1940’s as Joel Silver does today.
The name Auldbrass is Wright’s modification of ”Old Brass,” the name (which is thought to refer to slaves beyond working age and of mixed African and Native American descent) given to the property in the mid-19th century. Wright’s logo for Auldbrass, a stylized arrow, was his nod to the iconography of the Yemassee Indians, who inhabited this area before the arrival of the British. The same arrow motif is cut from panels just under the eaves of the main house. After dusk, when light from inside the house illuminates the arrow design on these panels, the building has the look of a paper lantern.
by David Burn | Oct 29, 2005 | Music
From the Jerry Garcia Estate and Rhino Records comes a new two-CD set called Garcia Plays Dylan, which gathers some of Jerry’s finest performances (all but one never before released) of Dylan songs, with the Grateful Dead, the Garcia-Saunders Band, Legion of Mary and various configurations of the Jerry Garcia Band. A span of more than twenty years is covered, from 1973 to the penultimate Grateful Dead show at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1995. Whether tackling Dylan’s more acerbic and surreal material or his most poignant and personal works, Jerry inhabits these songs with effortless grace and makes them his own. Garcia Plays Dylan is a fitting tribute to Dylan’s art and an important addition to Garcia’s recorded legacy.
by David Burn | Oct 28, 2005 | Politics
Peggy Noonan, author and contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, is troubled that our nation may be damaged beyond repair.
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon.
Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding–the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.
Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.
You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.
Not all of course. There are a lot of people–I know them and so do you–trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives.
Maybe these thoughts go mostly unspoken in Noonan’s circle, but not in mine.
A friend told me the other day that he wants to get into yacht sales. My response was he’d be better off moving to Baja and learning how to fish for his dinner.
by David Burn | Oct 28, 2005 | Music
Tickets for the 17th annual Warren Haynes Christmas Jam will go on-sale through X-Mas Jam Ticketing on November 4 and through Ticketmaster and The Civic Center Box Office (no service charge) November 18. The annual concert, which benefits the Asheville Area Habitat For Humanity, will be held Dec. 17 at the Asheville Civic Center. This year the money donated will go toward building houses for new residents of Asheville who were displaced from The Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Katrina.
The initial list of Christmas Jam performers includes Trey Anastasio, Gov’t Mule, Electric Hot Tuna, Ray LaMontagne, John Medeski, Ivan Neville, John Scofield, Dave Schools and Patterson Hood & Jason Isbell from The Drive By Truckers. Many more additions will be added in the coming weeks.
by David Burn | Oct 27, 2005 | Politics
Can you say “not qualified”? The White House can’t.
A selection from the letter Harriet Miers sent to President Bush, withdrawing her name from consideration as a justice of the United States Supreme Court:
Repeatedly in the course of the process of confirmation for nominees for other positions, I have steadfastly maintained that the independence of the Executive Branch be preserved and its confidential documents and information not be released to further a confirmation process. I feel compelled to adhere to this position, especially related to my own nomination.
The Bushies have things to hide? This really is news.
by David Burn | Oct 26, 2005 | Digital culture
One of America’s funniest and most popular bloggers, Heather B. Armstrong, on her virgin 4-wheeler excursion.
The moment I straddled my legs over the pulsating black seat I could feel the spirits of my dead redneck ancestors crushing beer cans against their foreheads, ancestors who raced on the backs of giant boars.
by David Burn | Oct 23, 2005 | Lowcountry
We saw a bumper sticker on a minivan this morning while doing errands on Hilton Head Island. It said, “Slow Down: This Isn’t The Mainland.”
Robert H. Frank writing in Deadalus:
Studies have shown that the demands of commuting through heavy traffic often result in emotional and behavioral deficits upon arrival at home or work. Compared to drivers who commute through low-density traffic, those who commute through heavy traffic are more likely to report feelings of annoyance. And higher levels of commuting distance, time, and speed are significantly positively correlated with increased systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
The prolonged experience of commuting stress is also known to suppress immune function and shorten longevity. Even daily spells in traffic as brief as fifteen minutes have been linked to significant elevations of blood glucose and cholesterol, and to declines in blood coagulation time–all factors that are positively associated with cardiovascular disease. Commuting by automobile is also positively linked with the incidence of various cancers, especially cancer of the lung, possibly because of heavier exposure to exhaust fumes. The incidence of these and other illnesses rises with the length of commute, and is significantly lower among those who commute by bus or rail, and lower still among noncommuters.
I’m thankful for my short commute to and from work–a clear benefit to life in the Lowcountry. Although, it could be even better if there was a bike trail along 278. Greater Bluffton Pathways is working on it.
Thanks to The Practical Hippie for the pointer to the Frank article.
by David Burn | Oct 22, 2005 | Place
According to reports on CNN and on American Discovery Trail’s own site, Ken and Marcia Powers from Pleasanton, California, became the first hikers to complete a continuous backpack of the country’s first Atlantic-to-Pacific trail.
Ken and Marcia started their 4,900-mile trek from the Atlantic coast in Delaware’s Cape Henlopen State Park on February 27, and took only four rest days on the entire 231-day jaunt.
The Powers had previously completed hiking the “triple crown” (three of the country’s 2,000-mile-plus trails: the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest). But this is their longest and most impressive accomplishment yet.
These amazing retirees, both in their 50s, saw the wonders of our nation on foot, not in an RV. And as they followed the American Discovery Trail through 13 states, they experienced the best scenery the country has to offer and inspiring acts of generosity from their fellow citizens in this adventure of a lifetime.
They overcame deep snow in the East, a quicksand scare in Utah, close lightning strikes in the Midwest and blinding desert sandstorms in the West while averaging 22 miles a day and taking only four days off during the entire journey.
Joyce and Pete Cottrell, of Whitefield, New Hampshire, were the first to backpack the entire official route of the American Discovery Trail, but they hiked segments out of sequence over two calendar years, finishing in 2003.
The trail officially opened in 2000, 11 years after it was proposed by hiking enthusiasts as the first coast-to-coast footpath.
by David Burn | Oct 22, 2005 | Music
Thanks to Bluepear Radio for this retro poster and info on an important peer-to-peer gathering set to take place in Chicago on November 3rd.
A word from the conference sponsors:
In September 2003, members of the Recording Association of America filed the first wave of lawsuits against individual peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharers. Two years and 14,000 lawsuits later, both P2P file-sharing and file-sharing litigation continue unabated, and members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are now suing individual Internet users as well. It’s time to step back and consider where this litigation has been, where it’s going, and whether there is a better way.
For a highly learned read on the subject from the jamband point-of-view see, this article by Mark F. Schultz of Southern Illinois University School of Law. Here’s a taste from his abstract.
The social norms of the jamband community might be a mere curiosity but for the fact that they appear to be based on a deeply rooted human behavioral trait known as reciprocity. Reciprocity motivates people to repay the actions of others with like actions – value received with value given, kindness with kindness, cooperation with cooperation, and non-cooperation with retaliation. Under the right circumstances, reciprocity can foster and sustain pro-social, cooperative social norms. This Article examines the latest laboratory and theoretical research on reciprocity from behavioral and experimental economics and applies it to the social norms of the jamband community.
