Music

Hatshepsut and Destani Wolf

Chris Jefferies — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 00:35:00 GMT

Today, Aurora and I had a great day full of art and history (and food).

This morning we drove into the city and went to the New De Young museum (http://www.deyoungmuseum.org) to see the Hatshepsut exhibit. When we got there, the lines were long so we toured the sections of the museum on Art in America from colonial times through the twentieth century. We also browsed through the textiles.

Hatshepsut was an Egyptian queen who became a Pharaoh around 1473 BC when the Pyramids at Giza were already 1000 years old. The exibit had numerous artifacts from her reign. Read about her on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatshepsut

Before we left the city we stopped at the Zuni cafe and had a late lunch.

Later we went to the Berkeley Jazz School to see Destani Wolf, a friend of Elena's from Berkeley High school days. She performed 2 great sets with a Jazz Band. It's a small venue and it felt very intimate and with all her old friends there, it felt like we were hanging in her living room.

You can keep up with Destani at her MySpace site: www.myspace.com/destaniwolf

My Home Theater PC - HTPC

Chris Jefferies — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 01:13:00 GMT

Over the weekend, I put together a Home Theater PC (aka HTPC). Basically it is a PC that emulates a TiVo device where you can record your TV programs into a computer hard drive. Only More!

Mike Green sent a computer that he had retired (PIII-700Mhz, 70G HD, DVD Player) and I added a TV tuner card and video card with video output (to view on a TV) and made the conversion.

The main function is a Personal Video Recorder (PVR). Like a TiVo device, it can record TV programs, schedule recordings, or record all episodes of a TV series. There is a service called Zap2It Labs that offers a free download of the programs offered by our local Comcast cable service. See below for an image of the program guide. It also refreshes a 14 day listing every morning at 3am.

Additionally it can manage audio and video archives, allows you to set up and listen to Internet radio programs, and to play and rip DVDs. There are a number of plugins (more...) available which I will eventually figure out how to implement.

I started out by trying Media Center on the Windows Media Center Edition, but, try as I might to load driver after driver, it simply does not support the remote control that came with the PVR card I had (Hauppauge PVR-150). So I switched over to a free application called GBPVR. It works quite well and the images you see on in the PVR Gallery are from that application.

I have estimated that I will be able to keep about 6000 songs (our entire CD collection) and about 30 hours of video on the current hard disk, but I can expand that later. I'll also want to get a DVD burner to archive special videos.

Shows the TV Guide listing. Click to see more.

So far so good...

One O'Clock Boys at the Stork Club

Chris Jefferies — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 20:18:00 GMT

Last Tuesday, I sang backup harmonies with Jimmy and the One O'Clock Boys at the Stork Club in Oakland. We were the opening act for a group called Jug Free America. One of the One O'Clock Boys, Jacob Groopman, is a member of Jug Free America. The Stork Club was kind of a dive, but a few folks showed up and we had a good time.

You can see a few other images here.

The One O'Clock Boys are:

Jimmy Bruno - Guitar
Jacob Groopman - Mandolin
Adrian Bagale - Guitar
Rich Ferris - Stand up Bass
Chris Jefferies (honorary One O'Clock Boy) - Vocals & Percussion

I recorded our performance and you can find the tunes below. They are in MP3 format; about 6 to 7MB each. I recommend that you download each tune and then listen to them after they are saved locally.

The recordings were made with a Minidisc recorder with the automatic gain control set on. This unfortunately creates a pumping sound whenever the volume changes quickly so it is a reasonable overview of our performance; just not too clear sometimes.

It was fun...

Joni Mitchell

Chris Jefferies — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:36:00 GMT

Last night Aurora and I went to see Joni Mitchell. She’s was speaking at the Commonwealth Club a few blocks from where I work. The event was scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of Earth Day. We were surprised to see our friend, Nancy Carroll, atending with a friend of hers.

Instead of being a straight interview, it started out with Joni talking about her world view and how she thinks we, as humans, have gone wrong. At first, she seemed to be a little overwhelmed with the 'big ideas' and with the depth of the subject, but she had some notes to keep her on track and had apparently given considerable thought about what she wanted to say. Her first statement:

“To love nature in this time is to be in terrible pain.“

She described a poignant display of our world condition as seen on the side of the Hard Rock Cafe in Los Angeles where there is a ticker or continuous counter that shows the growing world population juxtaposed with the number of trees being cut down.

She thinks it all went wrong with Plato and western 'logic' or intellect and the focus on western justice which lacks sense. On a poster board, she drew a diagram with a large circle marking North, South, East, and West. These points represented:

North as intellect
South as feeling
East as clarity
West as sense

She thinks that we, in the west, have focused too much on intellect and clarity and have lost our ability to feel and sense. Because we seem to focus too much on intellect and clarity we are, as a result, working with 'half a deck'. What was needed, she said, is a balance and called this balance the “Apple mind“.

She draws her world view from various philosophies including Buddhism, Jungian theory, Nietzsche, and Native American culture.

Her talk was interlaced with anecdotes about her recording career, Larry Klein, and "Iron Eyes" Cody (who is known as the Tear Indian in the famous Earth Day ad from 1971). She was asked to read a letter, purported to be from Chief Seattle, which is included in the liner notes of her most recent album, The Beginning Of Survival.

Some other interesting things we learned about Joni:

She thinks of herself primarily as a painter
She started smoking when she was nine years old and would ride her bicycle out into the country and spend quite time, enjoying nature and her little bag of tobacco.
She was asked who she was interested in musically and she said responded without hesitation, “No one!“
She doesn't listen to music very much and has very esoteric tastes; needs a high level of originality... There was a term she used that I can't recall now. (Update 04.25.2005: Nancy Carroll has reminded me; Joni said she needed a “high degree of divinity and originality“ in the music she listens to.)

Some other interesting links:

Interview by Elvis Costello from the November 2005 Vanity Fair magazine:
http://www.jmdl.com/library/print.cfm?id=1182

Discussion, from ’97 about one of my favorite songs, Sweet Bird:
http://www.jmdl.com/th-sweetbird.cfm

They recorded the talk and I think you might be able to catch it at this location:
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/broadcast/index.html

I want my MTV… and my remote… and my iPod... and my TiVo

Chris Jefferies — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 01:14:00 GMT

Christine Rosen talks about what she calls Egocasting. It's a play on the concept of selective consumption of various media like what an iPod, or TiVo might provide. I'm clearly on the egocasting track and I like it, but she makes some good points against this attitude.

Excerpt:

“What is true of the television set is also true of its most important accessory, the device that forever altered our viewing habits, transformed television programming itself, and, more broadly, redefined our expectations of mastery over our everyday technologies: the remote control. The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.”

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/7/rosen.htm

John Miller in SF

Chris Jefferies — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 22:55:00 GMT

John Miller was in town for a few days; since Sunday; and he flew back to LA this evening. He was attending the VSLive technical conference at Moscone West. A few days before he came, he discovered a guitar from his parent's house which turned out to be a Gibson LG-0. He brought it along and here's a picture of it:

LG-0s aren't great guitars and they were made to bring the Gibson brand to those who wanted to have a 'Gibson' branded guitar. They were originally sold for about $85. My mom bought my Dad a Gibson LG-0 around 1963. We still have it and it is at our farm near Brenham, Texas.

MusicPlasma - incredible

Chris Jefferies — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 15:02:00 GMT

This is a fantastic view of the influence relationships between musicians: http://musicplasma.com/

Reminds me of a previous blog about Mark Lombardi: http://jumano.com/blogs/chris/archive/2004/01/23/580.aspx

Sky Camp

Chris Jefferies — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 00:22:00 GMT

The Ring Nebula

The Whirlpool Galaxy

Jimmy Bruno organized a group camp at a state park called Sugarloaf State Park. Aurora had to work on Saturday so I drove up to Sonoma valley by myself. Jimmy calls it Sky Camp because it's right next to the Furgeson Observatory (here are my notes on the wiki). Jimmy reserved it for a private viewing and it was a great time (until the fog rolled in about 11:30pm).

The evening started out by having the kids help with rolling the roof off of the big telescope. Then we gathered outside to watch an Iridium Flare. An Iridium Flare is the reflection of sunlight from a satellite of the Iridium communications project. Read more here. Later in the evening we watch the International Space Station as it moved from west to east and faded into the shade of the Earth's shadow.

Next we went into a meeting room and saw a slideshow about the moon which was presented by an observatory docent who had a refractor telescope and later gave a tour of the moon.

I went to another observatory in the facility and talked with 2 docents (David Cranford and Estelle?) who were using a Celestron 14 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain to take digital images into a computer using a CCD which was hooked up where an eyepiece would normally be. They were very enthusiastic about astronomy and answered all my questions. I would love to have a setup like that. The images above were taken while we were there and David was gracious enough to send them in an email.

Finally the fog rolled in, but the camp tents were really close to our campfire, so we had a low keyed sing along arounfd the fire. In the morning after coffee and breakfast we had a chance to play some mnore and that was fun.

On the way home, I stopped off at a garden museum called the “Corner Stone“.

Jumano Forums

Chris Jefferies — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 14:30:00 GMT

I've set up a web forum for discussion threads at: http://www.jumano.com/Forums

Please visit the forums and start up or join a discussion.

Lazy Boys ride again...

Chris Jefferies — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 15:33:00 GMT

... but too lazy to rehearse much. Actually there were two official and one unofficial rehearsals. I missed one of them.

Last night the Lazy Boys (Jimmy Bruno, Bob Reid, Michael Capella, John Kuntz, Hiram Bell, Brian Courtney, Chris Jefferies) played a six song set at the San Francisco Free Folk Festival.

In Us All
Two Turns From Nirvana
Guava Jam
Nutcracker (Hiram)
Matter of Time (Key of E)
Grace OF Angels (Key of A)
From the Heart (Key of A)

I made a recording, but I haven't had time to convert it to digital format for uploading. Maybe in a week or so I'll get the live versions online. For now, there are a few of them from past recordings.