News

As you may have noticed, the Blogthing has been on temporary hiatus as we get to the home stretch of the three-day workweek holiday season. Back soon.

In the meantime, please enjoy this extremely entertaining and seasonal video. They say it's been floating around for a while, but it's new to me. Maybe it's new to you, too.

Via Digg .

Top Tens 2007

This week in the Hum we looked at favorite records of the year from various sources. Since it was for the print edition where space is tight, I kept the lists to a Top 5. I put the word out via KHSU deejay Gus Mozart that I was looking for more lists. Those are presented below. But first some addendums to the column...

The Redwood Jazz Alliance folks sent a list of 10, which as I understand was based on lists of several members of the group's central committee. The paper just has their Top 5 (with commentary) - here's the complete list:

Subject: And the picks are in...

T1) Chris Potter 10, "Song for Anyone" (Sunnyside)
T1) Chris Potter Underground, "Follow the Red Line: Live at the Village Vanguard" (Sunnyside)
2) Maria Schneider Orchestra, "Sky Blue" (Artist Share)
3) Enrico Rava Quartet, "The Words and the Days" (ECM)
4) Michael Brecker, "Pilgrimage" (Heads Up)
5) Trio M (Myra Melford-Mark Dresser-Matt Wilson), "Big Picture" (Cryptogramophone)
T6) Dave Douglas & Keystone, "Moonshine" (Greenleaf)
T6) Dave Douglas Quintet, Live at the Jazz Standard (Greenleaf)
7) Kenny Werner, "Lawn Chair Society" (Blue Note)
8) Joshua Redman Trio, "Back East" (Nonesuch)
9) David Binney & Edward Simon Oceanos (Criss Cross)
10) Carla Bley, "The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu" (Watt/ECM)

You'll find a list from Metro owner Gini Noggle in the Hum. She also sent lists from a couple of her employees:

Metro's manager Rebbecca Caya chose five women's discs:
1. The Story - Brandi Carlile - She is an alt-country-rock lyrical goddess, a voice like no other. Challenging lyrics. Raw, powerful guitar-work that complements her arrangements perfectly.
2. Little Voice - Sarah Bareilles - Local girl makes it big with her first major label release that doesn't disappoint. Poppy R&B with jazzy , catchy tunes and heartfelt lyrics, expertly performed and arranged.
3. Over the Hills - Lucy Kaplansky - Beautiful folk-country album with meaningful lyrics about life, love and death.
4. The Awakening - Melissa Etheridge
5. Djin Djin - Angelique Kidjo - Awesome, funky, danceable beats, great vocals and instrumentation. She also does a wonderful cover of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."

Chris Grossman, aka DJ Itchie Fingaz
Manager, The Metro (spins regularly at Sidelines and other local clubs)
1. Budos Band - "II"
2. Various artists - "The Rough Guide to Latin Jazz"
3. Lily Allen - "Alright, Still..."
4. Greyboy Allstars - "What Happened to Television?"
5. Peter Bjorn and John - "Writer's Block"

And here are a few from KHSU 90.5 FM :

Subject: Top Ten Songs of '07

Heard you were looking for our top ten cuts from the year , so here are mine: (These may not all have been released this year, but I played them for the first time and they are all pretty new)...

1. Hey Fela - The New Mastersounds "102%"
2. Ma Gee - Calypso King & The Soul Investigators
3. Bongo Fury - Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra "Music & Rhythm"
4. Mas O Menos - The Budos Band "Budos Band II"
5. Share The Sea - Will Bernard "Party Hats"
6. Deck Shoes - Greyboy Allstars "What Happened To TV?"
7. Rawville - The Bamboos "Rawville"
8. Electric Worm - Beastie Boys "The Mix Up"
9. Gorillafaceugmopotomus - Papa Grows Funk "Mr Patterson's Hat"
10. South Coastin - Quantic Soul Orchestra "Stampede"

These are in no particular order, just ones I remember especially liking that were new this year. Have a great holiday...
Bud Culbertson "Giant Steps" KHSU - Thursday: 8:30-10:00 pm

Hi Bob,
i never have participated in your end-of-year album lists thingy before.
Saw a post from Gus Mozart on the KHSU listserve about it...so thought I'd send something. Use it or not... it was fun to compile the list.

My list includes 3 re-issues in 2007 and two from 2006 that i did not hear til '07.
These aren't in any order of preference. And I have not necessarily played from all of these on my show...but most of them I have.

Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)/An Other Cup (released in Nov. 2006)
Bruce Cockburn/Life Short Call Now (also 2006)
Martin Sexton/Seeds
Patti Smith/Twelve
Nick Lowe/At My Age
Paul McCartney/Memory Almost Full
Josh Rouse/Country Mouse City House
Laurie Anderson/Big Science (remastered)
The Pretenders/Learning to Crawl (remastered)
Electric Light Orchestra/Out of the Blue (remastered)

Thanks!

"Your Saving" Grace (on KHSU Saturdays 5-7 p.m.)

Subject: Top Ten for 2007... Dan Wargo ... khsu ...

Here are my top Tens... Daniel Wargo

'The Hayride' khsu-fm, Sundays at 5:00PM
1.'Amarillo' ,Emmy Lou Harris
2.'Samuel Hall, Tex Ritter
3.'Texas Bluebonnets', Laurie Lewis
4.'Crossing Muddy Waters',John Hiatt
5.'Choctaw Hayride' , Allison Krauss and Union Station
6.'Bluesberry Hill', Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
7.'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry' Hank Williams
8.'Ghost Riders In The Sky' Mary Mc Caslin
9.'Bill Monroe Fiddle Tune Medley' The Mando Boys
10.'Bear Creek Blues' John Prine

Top Ten for 'The Stone Age' khsu-fm, 12 midnight (when Wed, turns into Thursday...)
1.'Tomorrow Never Knows', The Beatles
2.'The Fool', Quicksilver Messenger Service
3.'Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine', Country Joe and The Fish
4. 'Twentieth Century Fox, The Doors
5.'Old Brown Shoe', The Beatles
6.'I'm A Man', The Spencer Davis Group
7.' Hungry Freaks Daddy ' The Mothers of Invention'
8.'Song For Our Ancestors' The Steve Miller Band
9. 'Searching For Madge/ Fighting For Madge' Fleetwood Mac
10.'Strawberry Fields Forever', The Beatles

More opinions:

Subject: Best Reggae album of the year

Bob you forgot to mention in your column that Tarrus Riley's "Parables" is hands down the best reggae album of the year!

It's about 100 times better than the over-hyped and somewhat boring "Mind Control" by Stephen Marley which will probably win the Grammy. The main difference being that Tarrus is a much better song writer than Stephen, who is basically just a singer and producer.

Matt Lang

And finally, a note from Mike Dronkers of KHUM , who turned me on to The Hype Machine MP3 blog aggregator this year:
Hey Bob-

Glad you like the Hype Machine.

Tools for 2008, accept no substitutes.

RSS.

www.skreemr.com : Totally useful mp3 search engine. Bigger and uglier than the Hype Machine.

somevelvetblog.blogspot.com : If KEXP was 2007 and KCRW was 2006, WXPN is 2008. SVB is their Music Director's semi-personal music blog. Vetted with precision and quality, not hipster hucksterism. Please don't tell it's curator about the level of DJ-on-DJ theft that I am perpetrating. I have written him a letter explaining the situation.

www.wfmu.org : NYC's hippest public radio station's blog. If WXPN is 2008, WFMU is orange. I listen to WFMU for fun more than any other station. Totally useless unless you want to know about duck-duck-goose leagues in Brooklyn or a history of Converse All-Stars . Where the cool kids hang.

~~~

Well, call me cool - I'm a long time fan of the WFMU web presence, particularly the MP3 section of Beware of the Blog ...

Ready to make your own list? Add it in the comments! And don't forget, you can find most of the CDs above at your favorite local independent music store.

The EPA has denied California the right to enact its own greenhouse gas emissions regulations for automobiles. EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson said: "The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution -- not a confusing patchwork of state rules -- to reduce America's climate footprint from vehicles." But calling it a "patchwork" is misleading since at present, there are only two options for other states when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions standards: stick with the EPA's or copy California's.

Yesterday, the European Union came out with its final proposals for cleaning up the continent's cars. This from The Economist:

At present Europe’s cars emit an average of about 160 grams of CO2 per kilometre (g/km). There has been some reduction since carmakers were last threatened with legislation a decade ago, but progress has been painfully slow—about 1.5% a year rather than the 3% needed to meet the voluntary target of 140g/km by 2008 that the industry agreed to a few years ago. The commission is therefore insisting that by 2012, the fleet-average emissions from new cars sold in the EU must not exceed 130g/km, with another 10g/km reduction coming from other sources, such as low rolling-resistance tyres, more efficient air-conditioning and greater use of biofuels.

Mercedes-Benz and BMW aren't taking the news very well.

The Guardian (London) has a piece on ethical living in which the paper exposes carbon myths. For example:

Myth 4 Hybrid cars are the way forward

There is nothing wrong with hybrid petrol/electric cars. But they are an extraordinarily expensive way of avoiding emissions. The Toyota Prius may be lovely, but its emissions are no better than the latest generation of small diesels, which cost little more than half the price. Buy a small car instead and spend the savings on insulating your walls. It will have far more effect. Worried about the effect on your status of driving a small car? Buy an electric vehicle and people will simply think of you as eccentric.

Also from The Guardian and related to air quality is news that cannabis smokers are exposed to more toxic chemicals in each puff than cigarette smokers. If you're wondering who partook in testing the weed, the answer is no one. Scientists set up machines to"smoke" the plants and collect the fumes.

In tests, directly inhaled cannabis smoke contained 20 times more ammonia than cigarette smoke, five times more hydrogen cyanide and five times the concentration of nitrogen oxides, which affect circulation and the immune system.

And in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom is trying to make the Bay Area a more livable place. He's not cleaning up the air -- rather, he's proposed charging big stores a fee when they sell sugar-sweet soda.

SF Weekly reporter John Geluardi, who once toiled alongside yours truly at a newspaper too unspeakable to name, has an awesome story this week about a big push to unionize several major Bay Area newspapers that were recently acquired by Sith Lord Dean Singleton (right).

The national Newspaper Guild is funding a $500,000 organizing campaign, which Hall has wryly dubbed "One Big BANG: A One-Guild Universe." This at once evokes the 19th-century trade unionists' One Big Union concept and pokes fun at the East Bay branch of the Bay Area News Group (that's right, BANG for short), a cluster of 11 newspapers of which the Contra Costa Times is part.

Newspaper unions across the country are closely watching how the One Big BANG campaign plays out, because its success or failure could signal a critical turning point for organized labor in a newspaper industry wracked by dwindling readership, declining revenues, and decimated newsrooms.
Darth Singleton's dominion also includes several local properties, including the Times-Standard , the Humboldt Beacon , the Redwood Times and the Tri-City Weekly .

How about it, y'all?

Peter Daniel Collins' (aka "Manifest") music video, "Life of Grindin'"

Peter Daniel Collins, 35, the local rapper known as "Manifest," was sentenced on Tuesday to the 11 months he already served in prison for stealing $198,000 in cash from the Cher-Ae-Heights Casino in Trinidad on Nov. 1, 2006, according to the SF Chronicle . Collins' girlfriend, Emily Katherine Weitzel, 22, of Marysville, Wash., and Daniel Ivan Porter, 37, of McKinleyvile, were sentenced in November. Porter was sentenced Nov. 30 to 30 months, and Weitzel was ordered Nov. 9 to serve a year and a day.

If you'll recall, it was the Journal's own Bob Doran who connected the dots about Peter Daniel Collins' nom de guerre in January of 2007.

Some letters to the editor are too long to print. And some people include long URLs in the text of their letters. Those long URLs are pretty much impossible to reproduce on paper, and useless besides. Even if we could print them, no one's going to type a 40-character string of more or less random alphanumeric characters into their browser to check someone's reference.

Our annual "Top Ten Stories of The Year" issue just hit the streets. It includes an abbreviated version of a long, URL-laden letter from Douglas Jackson of Bayside. It references the Kyoto Protocol anniversary package that we published earlier in the month (in cooperation with the good folks at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies ). Since Jackson's letter takes issue with the thesis of the package and offers an alternate view of global warming, we wanted to publish it in full here.

Read it after the jump.

Editor:

Well, in defiance of being labeled as a member of the "radical earplugging lunatic fringe" in denial "that we're messing up the world in a potentially cataclysmic fashion," I'll be a brave soul and step forward to state for the record that human activities have minimal impact on the world's weather patterns ("Town Dandy," Dec. 6). But first I must state for the record that physical facts and truths are not gained by scientific consensus. By consensus Galileo's theory of falling objects was agreed upon, however only when astronaut Dave Scott on the Apollo 15 mission simultaneously dropped a feather and a hammer in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere and both hit the moon's surface at the same time did we have concslusive proof of Galileo's theory. Consensus does not evoke scientific fact.

The very fact that your article makes a preemptive, ad hominem attack on anyone questioning the validity of CO2 causing global warming shows just how Kafkaesque the environment has become not only in society in general, but appalingly so in the scientific community as well. Dr. Richard Linzden, the Afred P. Sloane professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT speaks of this dillema in his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 entitled "The Climate of Fear."

OK so with that off my chest what is the single most significant factor responsible for climate change? Well, Dr. McCrone was right all along. The Sun. Proof? Here are two links to the cyclical sunspot activity that has been monitored since the 1600's:

Please note the sunspot activity on the second link indicates a peak in sunspot activity in 1998-1999. I remember the summer of 1998 quite clearly as a summer with virtually zero fog along the North Coast. The broccoli farmers were all complaining at the Arcata Farmer's Market in August that their broccoli crop failed due to the lack of fog.

And here is another link to a credible scientific organization debunking the CO2 myth. By the way, the originator of the link, the Science and Environmental Policy Project was founded in 1990 by atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer on the premise that sound, credible science must form the basis for health and environmental decisions. Gee, what a concept.

Since I don't get the luxury of Hank I'll merely conclude by stating plate tectonics are moving faster than any purported rise in sea levels. We are currently at an ebb state of solar activity. It was 32 degrees this morning. Ice storms in the midwest? I believe we should start relating our weather to the weather of the sun and not a molecule that at sea level makes up at most 0.7 percent of the atmosphere. By the way, why is it CO2 is not trapping the radiation off the earth on these clear mornings of late as the so-called theory claims? Because it cannot. Al please bring your hot air to Northern California. I can no longer afford to turn on my heater this winter; and it's not even mid December.

Douglas Jackson
Bayside

The local all-ages music scene just can't catch a break, or if they do, it's the wrong kind. Earlier this year you had The Placebo shut down amid permitting hassles at the West 3rd St. warehouse. Then Out of the Sun in Fortuna suffered a similar fate. The reopening of The Vista as an all-ages venue was a breath of fresh (sea) air, but I guess it wasn't mean to be, as evidenced by this missive from the club's booking agent, Jon Fussell:

Due to a series of horrible events that transpired last Saturday (i.e. someone throwing a bottle through the window, breaking and/or carving the restaurant tables, tagging the bathrooms, kids getting caught drinking outside by the police and someone stealing my microphones and stands and yet again breaking my P.A., etc.), The Vista will no longer be all-ages. I tried my best, but the management is not budging on this and to be honest I can't really blame them. - Jon Fussell

As noted in last week's Hum , there were three shows at the Vista over the weekend. It looks like the trouble did not come from the anarcho-punk crowd on Thursday night but from the headbangers who came Saturday.

The New Yorker 's "Winter Fiction" issue was just published; it contains a couple of eye-opening pieces by and about one of Humboldt County's most notable writers of fiction: Raymond Carver.

In an unsigned essay , the magazine reveals that what we have come to think of as Carver's ultra-sparse style was actually the work of his editor, Gordon Lish, who slashed the troubled, alcoholic writer mercilessly throughout most of Carver's career:

In the years after the publication of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," Carver wrote a series of stories dwelling on alcoholism and wrecked marriages. They were eventually published under a title recommended by Lish: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." According to the professors William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, who, with the coöperation of Tess Gallagher, have been doing scholarly work on Carver, Lish mailed Carver an edited manuscript in the spring of 1980 containing sixteen of the seventeen stories that eventually appeared in the book. Lish had cut the original manuscript by forty per cent, eliminating what he saw as false lyricism and sentiment. Then, while Carver and Gallagher were attending a writers’ conference, Lish edited the manuscript yet again, had it retyped, and sent the pages back to Syracuse, where Carver was now living and teaching.

Carver apparently acknowledged that the success of his early collections was at least partly due to Lish's swordsmanship, but later he rebelled.

Now Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, is attempting to bring out original versions of the stories that appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . The New Yorker publishes Carver's draft of the title story , which he called "Beginners."

Our food writer Joseph Byrd, who moonlights as a music instructor at College of the Redwoods, sends along notice of the following seasonal recording made by a friend, Seattle-based vibraphonist Tom Collier.

Notes Joseph:

Ed Macan, himself an excellent vibes player, says it was done with four mallets in one pass, no overdub. So now go listen to it again in amazement.

audio player

Usually it so happens that my Sunday Mendo-Humboldt runs are timed absolutely perfectly, radio-wise. From Willits to about Bell Springs, I catch the tail end of "La Hora Mixteca" , the coolest program on the coolest public radio network in the USA. The program is jam-packed with boppin' chilenitas , heartfelt cross-border shout-outs and hosts who speak just a bit too fast for me, which is a welcome challenge. It doesn't even matter if they switch to Mixtec. Just let the sounds wash over you.

As 88.5 begins to fade, just south of Benbow, it becomes time to switch up to KMUD for the rotating Sunday afternoon talk show. Seems like I usually get the hippie economists, which is just fine with me. The idea of slightly paranoid hillfolk -- just slightly -- who also religiously read the Wall Street Journal is, to me, aesthetically appealing. I always learn something. But today it was Bud Rogers' show, which is either called "The Edge of the Herd" or "The Edge of the Heard." I met Bud when he ran for supervisor a few years back, but I don't think I've ever heard his show before.

People, it was frickin' awesome.

The idea, apparently, is that Bud and a couple of his lefty cronies get together around the old pickle barrel, and they chat about this and that and all the problems in the world and how we can make it a better place. In between, Bud plays some of his own songs about hope and redemption. The sincerity of the whole enterprise is strangely overwhelming.

I was running late today, so I only caught the last bit of the show. Dennis Huber was the guest. Education seemed to be the theme. One caller wondered why the hell we don't provide our schools with all the materials they need to teach kids with hands-on experience. That's the way they learn! But that would cost a lot of money. Where would the money come from? Maybe the kids could sell the things they made in school! How would that work? You'd have to get a non-profit to be in charge of it.

The next caller said, hey, that's what Waldorf Schools do -- hands-on learning. Why is there no Waldorf School in SoHum? Bud said that he had never taught in a Waldorf School, but they seemed like maybe they were a good idea.

And that brought us right up to this five-minute clip, which was just so amazing that it spun my head around and left me giddy. Seriously, it was like dropping X for the first time.

audio player