Saturday, September 24, 2011
Sarah Vaughan Μy Funny Valentine live 1973
Oh,love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it.
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon....
-Yeats
Friday, September 23, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
MILES BEYOND: Electric Miles 3, Sets 1 and 2
Miles beyond Set 1
Themes from Miles Davis' electric period, 1970-1975, rendered by an ensemble of Dan Pearlman, tpt; Chris Jonas, sax; Dino JA Deane, custom laptop steel dulcimer; Ross Hamlin, guitar; Sean Buckley, guitar; Jeremy Bleich, bass; Robert Muller, Fender Rhodes electric piano; Dave Wayne, drums and percussion; Milton Villarrubia III, drums and percussion; percussion, arrangements and conducting by Peter Breslin.
This set features versions of Gemini, excerpted phrases from Funky Tonk and Inamorata, Honky Tonk, Yesternow and Willie Nelson.
Miles Beyond, Set Two
Themes from Miles Davis' electric period, 1970-1975, rendered by an ensemble of Dan Pearlman, tpt; Dino JA Deane, custom laptop steel dulcimer; Ross Hamlin, guitar; Sean Buckley, guitar; Jeremy Bleich, bass; Robert Muller, Fender Rhodes electric piano; Dave Wayne, drums and percussion; Milton Villarrubia III, drums and percussion; percussion, arrangements and conducting by Peter Breslin.
This set includes renditions of Recollections, Ife, Big Chief, Rated X, Orange Lady and U-Turnaround
Saturday, September 17th, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Santa Fe, NM. Fantastic mobile digital recording by Stephen Schmidt at Fly on the Wall productions.
Themes from Miles Davis' electric period, 1970-1975, rendered by an ensemble of Dan Pearlman, tpt; Chris Jonas, sax; Dino JA Deane, custom laptop steel dulcimer; Ross Hamlin, guitar; Sean Buckley, guitar; Jeremy Bleich, bass; Robert Muller, Fender Rhodes electric piano; Dave Wayne, drums and percussion; Milton Villarrubia III, drums and percussion; percussion, arrangements and conducting by Peter Breslin.
This set features versions of Gemini, excerpted phrases from Funky Tonk and Inamorata, Honky Tonk, Yesternow and Willie Nelson.
Miles Beyond, Set Two
Themes from Miles Davis' electric period, 1970-1975, rendered by an ensemble of Dan Pearlman, tpt; Dino JA Deane, custom laptop steel dulcimer; Ross Hamlin, guitar; Sean Buckley, guitar; Jeremy Bleich, bass; Robert Muller, Fender Rhodes electric piano; Dave Wayne, drums and percussion; Milton Villarrubia III, drums and percussion; percussion, arrangements and conducting by Peter Breslin.
This set includes renditions of Recollections, Ife, Big Chief, Rated X, Orange Lady and U-Turnaround
Saturday, September 17th, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Santa Fe, NM. Fantastic mobile digital recording by Stephen Schmidt at Fly on the Wall productions.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Miles Beyond: Electric Miles Project 3 with Slumgum opening!
Renditions and explorations of themes and compositions from Miles Davis' first electric period, 1970-1975. Funk, world, space, acid, thrash, psychedelic, trance jazz we're just now catching up with. With Ross Hamlin, guitar; Dino JA Deane, custom fretless lap steel dulcimer and percussion; Jeremy Bleich, bass; Robert Muller, keys; Dave Wayne, drums; Milton Villarrubia III, drums; Sean Buckley, guitar; Dan Pearlman, trumpet; Shawn Woodyard and Chris Jonas, winds. With arrangements by Peter Breslin.
Opening band: Slumglum! Following the release of their second
album, "Quardboard Flavored Fiber," Slumgum is garnering critical acclaim and a reputation for exhilarating live performances filled with unbridled imagination and explosive energy. “An outstanding risk-taking jazz quartet from Los Angeles” –(Gabe Meline, North Bay
Bohemian)
www.slumgum.com
Saturday, September 17 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Location
O'Shaughnessy Performance Space, Santa Fe University of Art and Design
Great Expectations from the last Electric Miles event, July 2010:
(not the greatest sound, but some fun....)
Opening band: Slumglum! Following the release of their second
album, "Quardboard Flavored Fiber," Slumgum is garnering critical acclaim and a reputation for exhilarating live performances filled with unbridled imagination and explosive energy. “An outstanding risk-taking jazz quartet from Los Angeles” –(Gabe Meline, North Bay
Bohemian)
www.slumgum.com
Saturday, September 17 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Location
O'Shaughnessy Performance Space, Santa Fe University of Art and Design
Great Expectations from the last Electric Miles event, July 2010:
(not the greatest sound, but some fun....)
Monday, September 12, 2011
Patti Smith Performs "My Blakean Year" - LIVE Shorts
"So I try to remember now, when I feel sorry for myself, to give a little thought to William Blake."
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Campeones del Mundo!
The streets of Tecate erupted into great celebration about a half hour after I arrived last July, on my way down through Baja. Turns out the under 17 Mexico boys soccer team won that division in the World Cup. Amazing, the amount of national pride and jubilation.
Monday, September 05, 2011
Bonkers for Navajoa
A locally abundant but geographically restricted endemic, Echinocereus bonkerae is a great form. A trip in April 2010 up to the hills just outside of Globe AZ, on the way up to the Salt River Canyon, provided some great visits with bonkerae, which also has a great name. It was not perfect timing on bonkerae flowers, which I wanted to see, but the Lewisia were flowering as well as a variety of other wildflowers.
Echinocereus bonkerae has been confusing to taxonomists since day one.
A short walk back into some rocky hills away from the highway revealed some interesting forms of Echinocereus coccineus-like plants. I wonder where Baker would place these. I think they are in the geographical ballpark for arizonicus, but I would have to ask him directly.
Some of the larger, more mounded Echinocereus at this same locale are probably just plain coccineus:
Love the Agave parryi and other flora up this way. It is also a very dark night sky area here, just south of the Salt River Canyon, as I found out once when I stopped at night and looked up.
I went on my way over through Snowflake Arizona, hoping to catch some very interesting claret-cup type Echinocereus in flower there. These seem to be an oddball population. I sent photos to Marc Baker and he was curious about them as well. Someday I would like to see where they fit in with other Arizona claret cups better. They partly remind me of Echinocereus toroweapensis and they also remind me of Echinocereus arizonicus nigrihorridispinus, but they are very far away from either of those and rather isolated.
The highlight of this trip was finally finding a plant of one of the most obscure cacti in the world, Navajoa peeblesianus. This is an incredibly cryptic plant that pulls down into the red sandy Navajoan Desert soil for most of the year and grows surrounded by rocks and pebbles. It combines this fierce camouflage with real rarity. It's close cousin, Navajoa peeblesianus ssp. fickeisenii, is more widely distributed throughout certain habitats below the Kaibab Plateau and near the Grand Canyon. Navajoa peeblesianus is only know from a few very small populations. I had GPS data from a German cactus friend of mine, but even with that data I had searched perhaps 5 times around Holbrook and had never found even one plant. I got very lucky this particular visit.
Here with almost completely covering pebbles removed:
The strange gravelly landscape with the cactus in the center. Can you see it?
Also found a very large, old and impressive Sclerocactus whipplei.
Love the spines on this plant.
This was really just a typical Arizona field trip. I didn't see a single flower I wanted to see, too early all around. But the compensation was spectacular.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Saturday, September 03, 2011
100% permission
A letter to a friend of mine this morning:
A caveat here: when I refer to "her" and "she" in this email, I am not
referring to the real person out there somewhere. I'm referring to
your story of her, your version of the her and the she. This is
*entirely about you*. Clear?
What if you had 100% permission to ask her whatever you wanted? Now
*that* would be a relationship worth having, IMO. She is managing you
in the interaction (not her fault!) because she sets you back on your
heels and gets you to thinking a lot about what to do next and how to
do it. There is a thin line (or a huge canyon) between you taking your
inventory in a growth way and you strategizing and ruminating and
perhaps even obsessing a little bit. I totally understand, by the way,
as we are dogs of a feather (haha) in this regard. Always "mind
reading" and trying to figure stuff out. But what if you had 100%
permission to be yourself? How would that look? Would she be able
to do that, give you that gift of complete acceptance? I want to have
people around me now who give me that utter freedom. If they don't
want to be around me exactly and precisely the way I am, what do they
want? Why spend time with me if I'm not the way they want a person
with whom they spend time to be? I am interrogating this like a
warrior these days.
I give you 100% permission to ask her anything you want and say
anything you think is true. Anything you are curious about. This is
you doing for yourself what you can do for yourself. Open honest
communication is what keeps me sober. If people aren't into it, then I
usually can't be bothered. For example, where I am now, I want to be
able to say to someone (if it's actually true!) "I would love to be
physically involved with you. I can't offer you a long term
commitment, but I'm attracted." Honest. No shenanigans. That is *only
where I am right now*, however, and I realize everyone is on a
different path and learning/growing differently. I do not intend this
letter to contain any musts.
It doesn't bug me that she said she was overly saturated
regarding recovery. It bugs me, in part, that she *blames you* for that! It
bugs me even more that she wants to set the terms of your
conversations. Nobody gets to do that with me anymore. If they can't
hang with my spiritual talk and my program and step talk then they can
hit the highway (unless I am consciously "working with others," in
which case my Higher Power is the one setting the terms anyway, not
them. That is, I don't want to lead with the chin or be an AA
Fundamentalist or whatever and "ruin a chance to be helpful," but I
can't manage that, that is in the Universer's hands. And friends need
to be WITH ME and me WITH THEM on this journey or they need to find
another person to resent! haha).
A caveat here: when I refer to "her" and "she" in this email, I am not
referring to the real person out there somewhere. I'm referring to
your story of her, your version of the her and the she. This is
*entirely about you*. Clear?
What if you had 100% permission to ask her whatever you wanted? Now
*that* would be a relationship worth having, IMO. She is managing you
in the interaction (not her fault!) because she sets you back on your
heels and gets you to thinking a lot about what to do next and how to
do it. There is a thin line (or a huge canyon) between you taking your
inventory in a growth way and you strategizing and ruminating and
perhaps even obsessing a little bit. I totally understand, by the way,
as we are dogs of a feather (haha) in this regard. Always "mind
reading" and trying to figure stuff out. But what if you had 100%
permission to be yourself? How would that look? Would she be able
to do that, give you that gift of complete acceptance? I want to have
people around me now who give me that utter freedom. If they don't
want to be around me exactly and precisely the way I am, what do they
want? Why spend time with me if I'm not the way they want a person
with whom they spend time to be? I am interrogating this like a
warrior these days.
I give you 100% permission to ask her anything you want and say
anything you think is true. Anything you are curious about. This is
you doing for yourself what you can do for yourself. Open honest
communication is what keeps me sober. If people aren't into it, then I
usually can't be bothered. For example, where I am now, I want to be
able to say to someone (if it's actually true!) "I would love to be
physically involved with you. I can't offer you a long term
commitment, but I'm attracted." Honest. No shenanigans. That is *only
where I am right now*, however, and I realize everyone is on a
different path and learning/growing differently. I do not intend this
letter to contain any musts.
It doesn't bug me that she said she was overly saturated
regarding recovery. It bugs me, in part, that she *blames you* for that! It
bugs me even more that she wants to set the terms of your
conversations. Nobody gets to do that with me anymore. If they can't
hang with my spiritual talk and my program and step talk then they can
hit the highway (unless I am consciously "working with others," in
which case my Higher Power is the one setting the terms anyway, not
them. That is, I don't want to lead with the chin or be an AA
Fundamentalist or whatever and "ruin a chance to be helpful," but I
can't manage that, that is in the Universer's hands. And friends need
to be WITH ME and me WITH THEM on this journey or they need to find
another person to resent! haha).
Benson in April
One the main motivations for a lot of my trips around Arizona and elsewhere the past few years has been my undying fascination with a very small, rare, often threatened, sometimes cryptic genus of cacti, Echinomastus. My Italian friend Bruno Magnani has a great website dedicated to these plants. The two of us wrote a couple of relatively exhaustive articles regarding the genus for Cactus & Co., the Italian's cactus society's journal, last year.
Recent revisions have folded Echinomastus into an expanded concept of the genus Sclerocactus. I respect this opinion and can definitely see the relationship, but I prefer to keep Echinomastus separate, mostly for geographic reasons. Regarding north/south distributions, Sclerocactus largely picks up where Echinomastus leaves off. The closest the two genera come to each other is probably in Death Valley, where a beautiful and delicate form of Echinomastus johnsonii grows not too far from a few dense populations of Sclerocactus polyancistrus.
Arizona is an Echinomastus hotspot. intertextus, erectocentrus, erectocentrus acunensis, johnsonii and arizonicus all occur within the state. Recent unpublished research by Marc Baker suggests a new taxonomy for most of the Arizona forms, making everything except intertextus a ssp. of erectocentrus, an east to west cline of increasing spine cover and a few other minor differences. I can definitely see this pattern (which roughly mimics the same east/west pattern of Sclerocactus ss), but I like to recognize detail and difference more simply, and I don't mind having a lot of names. I use subspecies and variety names here as species names, just for shorthand.
One of the population centers for the endangered Echinomastus erectocentrus (ss) is around Benson, AZ, along Interstate 10. A friend of mine says there is a population around Vail that is sympatric with intertextus, but I haven't visited there yet. Here are some photos from a trip I took in April 2010 down to the Benson area. There will be more photos from other Benson trips in the future also. I love southeast Arizona's habitat.
Hard to say for certain, but this could be a hybrid between versicolor (itself a hybrid?) and fulgida:
This could be Cylindropuntia X kelvinensis
I love the color of these Opuntia in this area, I guess violacea?
Big clump of one of my favorite geographical forms of Escobaria vivipara called 'bisbeeana':
Escobaria vivipara "bisbeeana' has great spines:
It is dry grasslands mixed with Sonoran Desert here, not sure what the technical term is, but like all transition zones, a lot of fun.
A pretty Opuntia macrorhiza, or maybe one of the colder weather forms of phaeacantha, either way a sure sign of some elevation gain and temperature drop:
Echinomastus erectocentrus in bud, near Benson.
Close up of buds:
I love the dramatic red spines of some forms of erectocentrus:
I was hoping to find plants in flower and was discouraged not to. But driving home, right along interstate 10, I noticed a great many in flower, whizzing by at 80 mph. Not the safest way to hunt cacti. There are a few incredibly dense populations of erectocentrus right along the highway, opportunistically taking advantage of the limestone road cuts. An example of habitat disruption actually leading to a strange rebound. Wish that would happen more often.
One of the repro strategies of erectocentrus and all Echinomastus (like Sclerocactus and Pediocactus) is a tendency to flower and set seed at a very young age.
Gives a sense of the density and robust health of these very small populations:
How odd to visit with these federally listed plants, on a high cliff right by the Interstate, with cars and trucks roaring by.
Recent revisions have folded Echinomastus into an expanded concept of the genus Sclerocactus. I respect this opinion and can definitely see the relationship, but I prefer to keep Echinomastus separate, mostly for geographic reasons. Regarding north/south distributions, Sclerocactus largely picks up where Echinomastus leaves off. The closest the two genera come to each other is probably in Death Valley, where a beautiful and delicate form of Echinomastus johnsonii grows not too far from a few dense populations of Sclerocactus polyancistrus.
Arizona is an Echinomastus hotspot. intertextus, erectocentrus, erectocentrus acunensis, johnsonii and arizonicus all occur within the state. Recent unpublished research by Marc Baker suggests a new taxonomy for most of the Arizona forms, making everything except intertextus a ssp. of erectocentrus, an east to west cline of increasing spine cover and a few other minor differences. I can definitely see this pattern (which roughly mimics the same east/west pattern of Sclerocactus ss), but I like to recognize detail and difference more simply, and I don't mind having a lot of names. I use subspecies and variety names here as species names, just for shorthand.
One of the population centers for the endangered Echinomastus erectocentrus (ss) is around Benson, AZ, along Interstate 10. A friend of mine says there is a population around Vail that is sympatric with intertextus, but I haven't visited there yet. Here are some photos from a trip I took in April 2010 down to the Benson area. There will be more photos from other Benson trips in the future also. I love southeast Arizona's habitat.
Hard to say for certain, but this could be a hybrid between versicolor (itself a hybrid?) and fulgida:
This could be Cylindropuntia X kelvinensis
I love the color of these Opuntia in this area, I guess violacea?
Big clump of one of my favorite geographical forms of Escobaria vivipara called 'bisbeeana':
Escobaria vivipara "bisbeeana' has great spines:
It is dry grasslands mixed with Sonoran Desert here, not sure what the technical term is, but like all transition zones, a lot of fun.
A pretty Opuntia macrorhiza, or maybe one of the colder weather forms of phaeacantha, either way a sure sign of some elevation gain and temperature drop:
Echinomastus erectocentrus in bud, near Benson.
Close up of buds:
I love the dramatic red spines of some forms of erectocentrus:
I was hoping to find plants in flower and was discouraged not to. But driving home, right along interstate 10, I noticed a great many in flower, whizzing by at 80 mph. Not the safest way to hunt cacti. There are a few incredibly dense populations of erectocentrus right along the highway, opportunistically taking advantage of the limestone road cuts. An example of habitat disruption actually leading to a strange rebound. Wish that would happen more often.
One of the repro strategies of erectocentrus and all Echinomastus (like Sclerocactus and Pediocactus) is a tendency to flower and set seed at a very young age.
Gives a sense of the density and robust health of these very small populations:
How odd to visit with these federally listed plants, on a high cliff right by the Interstate, with cars and trucks roaring by.
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