Sun RA Jazz Bandleader - Afro-Futurist Piano Synthesizer Player, Composer, Poet and the Leader of His Own Religion. PBS Documentary. "Do The Impossible"

During the 1950s and 1960s he was playing a style of jazz that no one else was. He owned his own record label - owned his own record press - and lived in the music studio he built with all of his band members. Somehow he made enough money touring and selling records to pay for everything he did and he did a lot. Over 200 records... and the Movie: "Space is the Place" 

He influenced George Clinton Parliament/Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone. I also see his Concepts in Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

The music sounds like soundtrack movie music from science fiction films... Forbidden Planet... Doctor Who... 2001... 

PBS documentary video:
"Sun Ra: Do The Impossible" 
https://www.pbs.org/video/sun-ra-do-the-impossible-pvumkf/
Discover the extraordinary life of poet, philosopher and music visionary Sun Ra. With his ever-evolving collective, the Sun Ra Arkestra, he self-produced more than 200 albums, stretching the boundaries of jazz.

Movie: "Space is the Place" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195/

I LOVE PBS - JAZZ - a Ken Burns Documentary - Everything about America's Music: JAZZ. - 14 Hours of Music!

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/jazz/#watch

Since I Donated Money to PBS, I get to Watch ANY SHOW AT ANY TIME! a Wonderful Benefit to My Life! 

Interactive: Roots of Jazz

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/jazz/roots-of-jazz

Explore the places where jazz music came of age and where the early sound of jazz would take root and spread.

Music 101

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/jazz/music-101

A Basic Primer to Key Musical Concepts... 

Before I saw this show I actually knew very little about jazz... I grew up on the Beatles And The Grateful Dead... My parents listened to Jazz but my total knowledge was a 10 record set put out by The Reader's Digest... So now... Not only have I heard the names of all the famous people but I've also heard their actual music... 

And many stories about their personal lives and how it influenced the music... For example: Dave Brubeck traveled to the country of Turkey and heard the local people playing in 9/8 time... And he said to himself... "I want to do that!" And that was the reason he got into odd time signatures... Including his biggest hit "Take Five" ... In 5/4 time... 

I must admit that the entire era called Bebop was really horrible. Pointless random honking... And it all sounds the same... Really annoying... One record had a Jackson Pollock painting on the cover... That's very appropriate... Because both art forms are a massive case of  "SO WHAT?"- At that time the rest of the world was listening to Folk Music, Country & Western, Elvis Presley and the Beatles... And not surprisingly, Jazz musicians found it difficult to find work because nobody wanted to hear them! All the kids were going to rock concerts and the old people were staying at home and watching TV. 

Here Are A Dozen of the Best Jazz Music Videos:

Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqhCQZaH4Vs

Chattanooga choo choo - Glenn Miller (1941)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFUI0qvweig

The Pennsylvania Station is downstairs from Madison Square Garden in New York City. I went to a Grateful Dead concert there and after the show thousands of people went down to the station where they have restaurants and souvenir shops and it's open 24 hours a day... After hanging out for an hour or two I got on the train... Humming this song... 

I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo - Glenn Miller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQQfK8Bqkw0

Rhapsody in Blue - George Gershwin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k

Dave Brubeck - Take Five 

(7 Minute long live version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT9Eh8wNMkw

It appears that the Bebop era influenced the Grateful Dead in their one song called drums/space... There's a lot of Banging on Drums and Random Noises from the guitars... It's quite amazing when you're really high on LSD... But after that is over... They play some standard rock and roll songs so that the kids can dance and shake their bones...

Andrews Sisters - Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8of3uhG1tCI

The Andrews Sisters - Rum and Coca Cola
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxL2uNr7bk

Duke Ellington - Take The A Train
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6mFGy4g_n8

Weather Report - Birdland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqashW66D7o

Hoagy Carmichael - The Darktown Strutter's Ball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4lrdawmUg8

Fats Waller - You're A Viper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm-L9uMxzQA

Cab Calloway - Minnie the Moocher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtSLYrTKrEw

Charlie Brown Christmas Dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1LUXQWzCno

WHITE CHRISTMAS:

Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QW65Amj0vM

Sing, sing, sing, Benny Goodman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCwI9o7Zu6g

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass "A Taste Of Honey" 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTzM6yn8hQg

Seventy - Six Trombones – André Rieu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgYyBwnCDPo

The Pink Panther Theme - Henry Mancini

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe_uqv5GNNw

Bridge on the River Kwai Theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83bmsluWHZc

Glenn Miller Orchestra In the Mood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAa12XKTb9U

<~~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~~>

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird - Live at Oakland Coliseum Stadium (1977)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fHzTO4cH0

okay... So rock music took over entirely... 

Grateful Dead Tech History - Podcast Interviews with the Electronics Engineers that Built Their Amazing Sound... Ned Lagin: Seastones - John Perry Barlow: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast: Long Strange Tech, Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adwn9z8a3U4

The Deadcast explores the Grateful Dead’s long-term cosmic entanglement with the California technology world & the architecture of the internet itself, featuring biomusic pioneer Ned Lagin, Dead Heads at the Stanford AI Lab & Apple, sonic heroes from Alembic & Meyer Sound, & more. Guests: Ned Lagin, Ron Wickersham, Susan Wickersham, Daniel Kottke, John Meyer, Helen Meyer, Paul Martin, Andy Moorer, Steve Silberman, Erik Davis, John Markoff

Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast: Long Strange Tech, Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERPs5YU11EQ

The Deadcast concludes its dive into the Grateful Dead’s entanglement with technology, exploring Jerry Garcia’s digital graphics obsession, how Dead Head online communities helped shape the emergent internet, lyricist John Perry Barlow’s manifestoes, & more. Guests: Paul Martin, Mary Eisenhart, David Gans, Steve Silberman, Bob Bralove, Dan English, Doug Oade, Christian Crumlish, Charlie Miller, John Markoff, Erik Davis, Michael Calore





https://www.dead.net/deadcast/bonus-nedcast-ned-lagin
A surprising and wide-ranging conversation with Ned Lagin, the pioneering jazz-trained electronic composer whose friendship with the Grateful Dead began when the band crowded into his M.I.T. dorm room to jam and would encompass contributions to American Beauty and Wake of the Flood, nearly 20 onstage appearances with the band between 1970 and 1975, and Lagin’s own Seastones project, released by Jerry Garcia’s Round Records, featuring contributions by Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, David Crosby, Grace Slick, and more.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in July of 1990 in response to a basic threat to speech and privacy.
https://www.eff.org/about/history

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

READ MORE at:

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independencGrateful Dead... My Story... American History... and Original Deadhead ART... Comic Tales & Poetry...


My Sugar Cube Painting...
like the cover of
"The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test"
by Tom Wolfe.

~~~~~~~~~~my Gr8ful story~~~~~~~~~

I first noticed the Grateful Dead in 1968 in English class at junior high school. Our teacher had put up posters on the wall of the classroom and we wrote essays about them. He was attempting to stimulate creative WRITING but more importantly, creative THINKING.

One was an American flag made out of swastikas and another was a solarized/negative photo of 5 hairy men standing in front of "LITTLE BOXES" type suburban tract homes.

Our English teacher stopped working for the school system that year and has never been heard of since. That has happened often to people that go to see the Dead... They change their lifestyle and start associating with a different set of people...



READ MORE: https://gvan42.blogspot.com/2017/06/grateful-deadhead-art-and-mystory.html

1967: The Summer of Love... San Francisco, Hippies, Flower Power, Peace, The Diggers, Haight Ashbury, LSD and the Grateful Dead. It certainly has been a Long Strange Trip. Congratulations to all those of us who have survived... One thing is for certain...

The culture of the United States was radically different After the 1960's...

The conformism of the 1950's was blown away when LSD became widely available. Owsley made the chemical and made it available at Acid Tests with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. He also gave it to the Beatles for their Magical Mystery Tour. The spirit lives on in a yearly camping trip called The Rainbow Gathering. It's like Woodstock but the performers are not paid and I'm in the Band.

READ MORE: https://gvan42.blogspot.com/2017/08/50th-anniversary-of-summer-of-love.html


American History: "The Thunder Machine" was a Giant Sheet Metal Sculpture that you Got Inside and Played like a Drum. Made by Ron Boise and used at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests.

Thunder Machine:
Their (with Joe Lysowski) best-known collaboration was a large “Thunder Machine”—big enough to enter, and covered in swirling psychedelic color—which produced a cacophony of tone and echo from the pounding, drumming, mumbling and shouting of those within and without. It was a favorite at the San Francisco Trips Festival and occasionally at Ken Kesey's Acid Trips—popular enough to require repeated repainting and re-welding:

Ken Kesey and the Thunder Machine

I have heard many people inquire lately about Kesey's THUNDER MACHINE > Here are some close ups, including a rare shot of the inside! I believe that Zane made mention that it was a "remake of the original" but I very well might have misinterpreted? I must thank Zane for graciously having us all over to the "art barn." posted by Fred Schrott






Drone Lightshow at the Dead and Company Concerts.
Amazing ART!










I stopped Going in 2015 but I'm glad there are concerts for
Young People to Enjoy...
LINK to My Experience at Levi Stadium Santa Clara.
https://gvan42.blogspot.com/2017/06/grateful-dead-rainmakers-santa-clara-6.html
The Grateful Dead Farewell Concert - Santa Clara 6-27 and
6-28 2015 - Photos and MyStory - A Rainbow Appeared over
the Concert... Many Felt It Was Jerry Garcia
Visiting from BEYOND...

Music so good it changes the weather. On 6/27 there was a
Rainbow over Levi Stadium and then it Rained. Just a very
light sprinkle, but we all felt it.

Music Video: The Ballad of Stormy D... a Protest Song about Trump's "Hush Money" Trial. Lyrics by Anonymous...

LINK: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo3ioiCGSxM

He sits in a room of broken lives, (Chords: E, A)

Haunted by schemes and cheated wives.

Old and cold and mad as hell

He can sit and glare but cannot yell.

He folds himself into a shrunken pose

Too old and feeble to stop the doze.

He hates the judge and he hates the case

And he hates the rules that keep him in his place.

The fat, frumpy golfer is a weak old man

With weird fake hair and a deep fake tan.

He's desperate and angry and doesn't sleep well.

So he rants in the hall like a clanging bell.

He just wants love and approval and power,

But his style is dishonest and toxic and sour.

The despots and strongmen play him the fool.

They laugh and point at the Helsinki tool.

He lusts for his daughter, his wife's not a fan

Of the dishonest and repugnant bully, baby man.

So he sits alone in the cold as they repeat his lies,

In his baggy blue suit and his long long ties.

Smaller and smaller the old man appears,

Powerless and silent, steeped in fears.

His money and title and self made fame

Are now a poison, a poison with his name.

INTRO: I Played an "E" Chord and then Slid my Fingers UP one Fret to Play an "F" chord with the three untouched strings remaining E,B & E... This Causes Anxiety in the Listener... then a brief NO CHORD and They are Relieved when I Play the "E" Chord Again... Resolved!

Note the Lighting: 

It Makes my Face Difficult for a Computer to 

Process in a Facial Recognition Program...

~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~

FREE Guitar Chart Shows Where the Notes are on the Piano and Guitar... Very Handy for Composition and Learning How to Play Songs. Plus: SOLARIND our Band

Print as Many Copies as You Like!

For Sale as a Postcard - Click Here

or...

16" X 12" POSTER!

SOLARWIND: Our Musical Group 

Analog Synthesizer Tips and Tricks. 

SOLARWIND… 
I was fascinated with playing electronic music and played with my friends (Ken, Mark and Leon) in Ken’s basement for 5 years on the weekends During the 1980's. I also had a setup in my living room and would invite guests. This was at the time of analog synths and the beginning of midi. My favorite instrument was the Korg Polysix… It had the ability to make those really astonishing outer space sounds… Modulated resonant filter sweeping… like Steve Miller, Edgar Winter or Doctor Who… The pitch of the note could be defined by the control voltage input on the rear panel… well, I had a Radio Shack “100 in One experimenters kit” and a bag of capacitors, resistors and light emitting diodes that I hooked up to generate an oscillating circuit… Absolutely no one else on the planet was making the noises that I made… similar, true, but my noises were unique… Since it was created using wires and SPRING CLIPS to connect the components, the resistance of each connection varied according to stress on the wires… for example: if I blew at the circuit, the music would change due to the pressure of the wind…

Much of the time when I played with my friends in the basement in Manassas, Virginia we had a home made laser lightshow going… My friend built this using an extremely slowly rotating mirror that had a little “house” built on it out of transparent “walls” and clear glue… The “house” was about 3/4 of an inch tall and caused interference patterns to be displayed on the ceiling… these took the appearance of galaxies or clouds that slowly changed. The speed was about One RPM. He had guests come over and bring their instruments… A trumpet player from the Redskins Football Team band was a memorable evening. In general, we played music that you would hear as a soundtrack for a motion picture… Incidental music or abstract jazz or “outer space whoosh whoosh”…..

I really got into samplers when I got a midi controlled 4 second monophonic machine. It could be controlled by the drum machine. My favorite sound was a pan pipe. I set up the sound so that the sampler could play it back very slowly giving a low pitch. It sounded as if a giant was blowing on a pan pipe 20 feet tall… I made a tape and gave it to my friend “Major” Tom (a Bowie fan). He was very happy with it because when it was played on the car stereo, it put his children to sleep… Unfortunately, also on that tape were some doppler effect noises and he panicked because he thought it was a police car siren. A moment of fear but it was quickly resolved by erasing that part from the tape…

Leon had a black box that allowed me to sing or talk into the synthesizer and the volume of my voice determined the sound of the synth… You can hear this particular technique on THE DOORS- STRANGE DAYS… Listen carefully and when Jim Morrison sings the words “Strange Days have found us…etc” there are squiggly noises that follow along with the vocals… (amplitude to control voltage converter, also pitch to control voltage)

One of my favorite synthesizer performances was when I took a battery powered analog synthesizer [SH-101] to the banks of the Potomac River in Alexandria, VA in the middle of the night and made "spaceship taking off" sounds...  I was right across the river from DARPA and my goal was to FREAK THEM OUT. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and they are most famous for inventing The Internet. They also invented Agent Orange and that was pure EVIL but... you can't win them all. I had battery powered speakers and I made a really loud noise... might have been audible at the Lincoln Memorial... The basic idea behind "Spaceship" sounds is to turn the resonance of a band pass filter all the way up. That causes a sine wave with the frequency determined by the center point of the filter. Analog synthesizers have a Modulator that changes that center point. The note selected on the keyboard also determines the pitch... You have probably heard this sound on the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations" oooh ooohhh oooh oh oh... Or Emerson, Lake and Palmer [the ending to "Lucky Man"]. Steve Miller... "Fly Like an Eagle"...

I also had a display of 18 strands of Christmas tree lights that would blink on and off… they were hung in the corner of the room with a mylar mirror on each wall… That provided enough light to be able to see the controls and keys on the keyboards… Each strand of lights would be either on or off and they all had different timing cycles… this made the whole display appear to experience waves of rainbow colors… The keyboards were all interconnected to allow waves of sound to evolve over time as the modulated filters ebbed with tidal forces…

Fun, but all those analog synths are hard to find anymore… they were replaced with digital ones that were cheaper to produce and more reliable… somehow there was a move towards realistic instrument sounds instead of outer space whoosh whoosh… too bad…

I remember Emerson, Lake and Palmer in concert at the Winterland in San Francisco… Keith jumped off the stage and wandered around the dance floor “zapping” people with a ribbon controller that was making “ray-gun” sounds… A good example of the ribbon controller was on “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys… the part that goes oooWWWWEEEwooowooo… ooooWWWWEEEwooowooo…

Another beautiful synth was bought used at a yard sale for 75 dollars. It was a minikorg and had been thru severe abuse on the road. This marvel is most famous as the lead voice on Kitaro records… the breathy flute sound that he uses to play melody parts… The theme to Silk Road, etc… This was a monophonic synth that had ring modulator effects and white noise… this also had a switch for setting the pitch to an extremely low tone… as if you were playing notes on a piano that were way off the end of the left hand… this machine allowed me to create what I called the “Dawn of Time” sound… A growling bass note that needed about 10 seconds to play… A ring modulator lets each key have its own vibrato rate… for example” “C” might have a wow wow wow sound that shanged every half a second while “C#” would have a wow wow wow that changed 42 times a second… “D would be 6 times a second etc… this tonal quality creates many of the more avant garde (or teeth gratingly irritating) sounds of extremely early synth recordings…

I also became fascinated by the possibilities of echo and computer controlled music. Lucky for me, instruments started being built with a MIDI interface… this caused older instruments to go on sale at extremely cheap prices…

The Roland microcomposer was 8 1/2 by 11 inches and had a microcomputer in it. I stored sequences of pitches and durations of notes using the tiny keyboard… really, really tiny… It was designed to drive two SH101 Roland synths and could play two notes simultaneously… what a breakthrough… from ONE NOTE at a time to two… By typing in a series of bass notes each with a duration of 1/8 of a bar… and then running it thru an echo box that had a time set to 3/16th of a bar… and setting the voltage controlled filter so that some notes were silent, some notes were muted and some notes were loud… I was able to trick the system into composing by itself a never repeating bassline that was fun to improvise over… the computer selected which notes to play and when… cosmic…
This worked well for music that is called MODAL… In that style, there are no chord changes at all… the performers select a handfull of notes as the scale and just go to it… the most famous modal piece is “The Old Washer Woman” and The theme performed by Edith Bunker on the television show “All in the Family”… The music is played entirely on the BLACK NOTES of the piano… I think they called it “Those Were The Days”… “Didn’t need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight, gee those old La Salles ran great… THOSE were the DAAAAAYYYYSSSS…. It is an extremely simple song. So simple that I was able to teach a computer to play in that style… Of course, my compositions were not at all like that whiny song… more robotoc and like German Technopop…

Music nonstop, technopop… Bleep, blonk… tchatchink…
I was fortunate to have read an article in the Washington Post about the upcoming Kraftwerk concert so I went out and bought the recommended album Autobahn and liked it… The basic style of music sounded interesting and so, I went to the beautiful Warner Theatre to see them. This was an elegant performance space that started out as an ART DECO theatre and then became a dance hall for rock music… oh how lucky we were… This was my first exposure to the technopop music and many of the people in the audience were Germans… I had no idea that such music was even possible. The tour was to promote their albums Computerworld and Man Machine… They had two fellows that beat with “knitting needles” on touch sensitive drum machines while the other two played keyboard synthesizers… The drummers were wild because every time a knitting needle contacted the machine, a loud percussive sound happened… not drum sounds but more like boink or ping or even pffffbtt… When they performed their song “pocket calculator” they walked to the front of the stage and had members of the audience play the notes… The lyrics state ” by pushing down a special key it plays a little melody” blink bonk…. katrronk…. Quite an effective piece of showmanship and audience participation… Then at the end of the show , all the people left the stage and let the computers play the song… for about ten minutes… wild dancing to actual robot performers… I was amazed… Their website has a toy on it that lets you play a drum machine… boing, boom, tchack, peng, zonk… http://www.kraftwerk.com/

Another performance was outside a Mickey Hart Concert at George Washington University. A few hours before the show a group of Deadheads formed a drum circle on the street. I brought a set of Chamber Chimes and made tinkley sounds in time to the beat. Usually a Chamber Chime player keeps the wooden bar horizontal but I held it vertical sometime to cause a more focused clank-clank... I did not have a ticket to the show so I walked over to the White House and Lafayette Park... amazing the tourists...

I took my acoustic guitar to Lafayette Park often. One song that got a good reaction from the crowd was "Deal" by the Grateful Dead. After I was finished singing a man complemented me on my song about a DEER. I also played outdoors at Wolf Trap and sang "Me an Bobby McGee" with all the La-di-ye-has sung correctly at the end of the song... At Merriweather Post Pavilion at the Grateful Dead Concerts. I had a 12 string and was sitting on top of my car strumming away when a passerby said that it was the most beautiful sound he had EVER HEARD... about 15 minutes earlier he had heard Jerry Garcia... I was honored. He was probably tripping on acid...

~~~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~~~


Lyrics to the song 'Global Economic Collapse' (bubble gum pop rock genre)

TEMPO=PEPPY. Chords: G, E, C

"The growth industry of the 90's...
will be subsistence farming...
when Reagan's rubber check bounces...
and global economic collapse...
rears its ugly head...
what will you do for food ?

OOOh, The winter gets cold...
when the arabs turn off the oil...
Your BMW will make a lovely planter...
growing beets in bucket seats...
open the sun roof wide...
scrounging in the city dump...
I seem to have lost my pride...

CHORUS:LET'S EAT RATS FOR LUNCH...
CHORUS: LETS EAT RATS FOR LUNCH...

~~~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~~~

We made a demo recording and had an agent in New York try to sell it to people making corporate videos… No sale, but it was fun trying… When we recorded the demo, I loaned a huge pile of my equipment to Leon and he set up a special studio in the basement of his grandpas home. His grandpa was a Retired General in the Army and had a mansion in McLean and another in Arizona. I never met the grandpa because were were not allowed to visit when he was in town nor were we allowed in many parts of the mansion due to breakable oriental antiques. These people live in a truly different world than us peasants.

~~~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~~~

In the 1990sI learned how to make rainbow spiral tie dye tshirts. I sold them out of my pizza driving car while I was working at Domino's. A person that ordered pizza was dying shirts in their garage and they explained how to twist up the shirt to create a spiral pattern. My finest creation was a bedsheet that had a rock band's logo on it. A local unknown band called "CandleOpera" had a logo formed out of three interlocking hearts. Two side by side with the pointy end down and one nestled between them pointing up. I used orange and red acrylic paint and dye to make a giant banner to be hung behind the band during performance. Then I dyed some unbleached muslin fabric and one of the girls cut it up to make dresses for the backup singers. The leader of the band wanted me to play keyboards but I declined... I guess I was too shy to be a rock star. They had one performance at a home in rural Maryland on the back porch. About a hundred people showed up and we got high in the backyard while the band played... then the police showed up and the party ended. While they played, they looked great! Years later I made a shirt for Victoria and It's one of her favorites.

~~~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~~~

and then SE Said:

It really pisses me off that every time anyone posts something about San Francisco, like a beautiful photo of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Painted Ladies Victorian houses, there are always a bunch of comments from people saying that San Francisco has been "ruined" by the Democrats. It is so untrue, and it infuriates me that so many ignorant people buy into this false narrative being pushed by the right-wing media. I'm sure that the majority of people making those comments have never even BEEN to San Francisco. They're always in some other state, and they clearly have no idea what they're talking about, but they spew these lies over and over again as if they're some expert on the subject.
ALL large cities in the USA have homeless issues right now. It makes no difference if the city is run by Democrats or Republicans. The issue has to do with skyrocketing rent and housing prices, and it's happening EVERYWHERE. It is RIDICULOUS for people to act like San Francisco is some third-world war zone while a city run by Republicans is all shiny and perfect. Even if that were true, I'd still choose a city where the leaders care about protecting people's individual rights. I wouldn't want to live in a city where politicians are trying to control women's bodies,or trying to restrict people's access to healthcare. I want to live in a place where women have bodily autonomy and poor people have a safety net.
But back to San Francisco, this constant blather about it being "ruined" is the biggest load of crap. I grew up 40 miles from San Francisco, so San Francisco has been a huge part of my life even though I've never actually lived in SF. I've spent a huge amount of time there ever since I was a child, and I have a lifetime of memories in San Francisco, and I still go there every chance I get. As far as I've seen, nothing about it has changed other than the homeless community has grown in recent years...but this is true of EVERY large city in the country! The homeless community in San Jose has grown, too. If you live in a big city somewhere else in the USA, I'm sure the homeless community in your city has grown as well. It's NOT unique to San Francisco. San Francisco has NOT been "ruined." If you ever get a chance to visit San Francisco, I promise you will be awed by the beauty of the City and the views of the bay and the ocean. I also love the energy of the City. It has an energy that San Jose has always lacked, which is one of the main reasons I've spent so much time in SF over the years. I'm drawn to its energy.
People see what they want to see. If all you want to see in SF is the homeless issue, that's too bad for you that you've chosen not to see the beauty or feel the energy. But if people are going to focus on the negatives, I really wish they would quit singling out San Francisco as if it's the only place with anything negative about it. Maybe talk about the homeless problem as a whole, like, talk about how we AS A COUNTRY can fix the homeless situation IN EVERY BIG CITY, rather than sitting there going "Ha ha ha, San Francisco has been ruined by the Democrats" while ignoring the fact that it's a problem EVERYWHERE, not just in one city.

and I Replied: 

San Francisco is a Gem. It has delights That are Simply Not Available in the Red Neck South... For Example: State of the Art Techno Dance Halls... The Exploratorium Museum, Golden Gate Park, Gay Rights, High Tech Jobs... Boat rides on the bay... French Bread (while walking around Fisherman's wharf) - and my brother's house...

The Climate is mild... Not so bad as to be in danger from wild fires, floods, tornadoes or hail... IMPORTANT! Being safe is Essential during Climate Change...

and one time at a Grateful Dead Concert the French Bread had LSD in the Center Square... I didn't find out until an Hour Later when I realized that I was Tripping... and I had not eaten any Acid... Some Guy I met asked "Do You Want to Break Bread, Brother?" and...

San Francisco French Bread

Our Church is in San Francico. UUSF. and It is so excellent that Ram Dass Chose to have his Funeral There... With Wavy Gravy as the Master of Ceremonies and Bob Weir & Joan Baez Singing a Song... They Broadcast the Service Every Sunday online... and My Brother often Goes in Person... It's interesting to see him in the crowd shot of the Congregation... https://www.uusf.org/

Meetings with Remarkable Men. A Friend Passed Away this Week and Now is a Good Time to remember Good Times We Had Together.

Ken III & Ken IV in a horse-drawn carriage

In the late 1970s I met Ken Coghill III when we both worked at Analytics Communication Systems, a defense contractor, in McLean, Virginia.

He had a hobby of building his own laser light show and inviting people over to his house to watch it while he played the record China by Vangelis...

He also owned a personal computer called an IMSAI 8080 with sound cards that he programmed to play classical music... This was a very early personal computer long before the TRS-80, Apple or IBM PC. The sound cards produced square waves at the same frequency as piano notes... Sadly, square waves are very horrible sounding and an irritating noise that made me want to just turn the damn thing off... However that was the state of the art of synthesizers at that time... And he seemed to like it because he spent thousands of hours programming that machine... 

I met him right about the time I got divorced from my first wife and I decided that I wanted a guitar... So I learned to play the guitar... And I wrote down the lyrics to my favorite songs in a notebook and would go sing them in public... Including at his house... Then I got an electric guitar... And I talked to Ken into buying a synthesizer so we could play music together... That turned out to be an amazing journey... Soon I bought a synthesizer and together we would play music in his basement for hours and hours and hours... These were analog synthesizers that could make many bizarre sounds... Mostly sounding like the soundtrack from science fiction movies like Forbidden Planet... But Ken was a big fan of synthesizer music... And now we were making it! While the laser light show projected swirling galaxies or clouds or whatever on the ceiling... 

He invited friends of his over to play music (or just listen) Most often Mark, Leon, Ford and Tom...

These Musical Jam sessions made his wife Charlotte happy because... "Here it is a Saturday night and I know where My husband and son are... Safe at home instead of out carousing with hookers!"

Charlotte was a daughter of the Confederacy and her grandfather carried the flag at the Battle of Bull Run. She's still owns the flag but it's on permanent loan to the museum in Manassas,  Virginia. One day she took me on a personalized tour of the battlefield... She was very knowledgeable... And pointed to important locations... Like... "Over there is where the Yankees ran away!" - The first battle of Manassas was quite an event because the people from Washington DC thought it would be amusing to go witness a battle... Then they found out that war is an astonishingly horrible event and went back to Washington DC very quickly... 

Charlotte also requested that we go to the Smithsonian Institute and see the Chippendale dollhouse... Not surprisingly, it was furnished with Chippendale furniture... 

We went to two rock concerts together... Blondie... Which was so damn loud that it ruined the concert... And Tangerine Dream at the beautiful Warner Theater in downtown DC... We were so close to the stage then when the smoke machine went off we were covered... And that kind of freaked me out because I was concerned about breathing... And carbon dioxide... That was especially excellent concert because I'd spent the whole day wandering around the National Art Gallery high on LSD... 

We also went to a fantastic movie theater called the Uptown which had a giant screen and a rock concert volume sound system... We saw The Wall, the Right Stuff and Koyaanisqatsi!

We traveled a couple of times... I like to drive and Ken would get us invitations to interesting places... We went to see a laserium show at a planetarium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania... And there were very few people in the audience... So after the show was over Ken introduced himself to the laserist and told him that Ken had built his own laser light show... And that interested The Professional so he let us play with the actual laserium machine... I found it too complex to operate because it had a bunch of knobs and none were labeled and none had any obvious purpose... But Ken was able to make it work... 

We also went to New York City to see the Museum of holography. This was a state-of-the-art show in the early 1980s when holography had just been invented... Ken was always good for Cutting Edge Technology...

We all went out to a very dark field in rural Virginia to look at a comet... Ken's friend Ford had a telescope that rotated 360 degrees once a day... Very handy to keep stars in focus... I've never been good at watching the stars because my vision is blurry... And it was especially blurry that night because I had smoked marijuana before driving... I was Safe for driving but bad for comet watching...

Ken worked as a purchasing agent when I first met him... And then later as a programmer at Tom's small computer company... And then finally he got a job with the County of Prince William as an Oracle SQL programmer... That is powerful but incomprehensible language... When I went to college for computer science that's the only class that I had to take twice... Because I just didn't get it!

One of Ken's friends owned a sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay. Four of us went sailing on a lovely sunny day... And then a storm came up... And it was actually dangerous... And the owner of the boat, while being rich enough to buy a boat, was incompetent as a captain... So the other guy who was sailing with us staged a mutiny and made the owner go below deck while he piloted the ship back to shore safely... This was all very exciting but I was scared... The boom swung wildly from one side to the other and it whacked Ken real hard and knocked his glasses into the water... No chance of recovery... 

After playing music in Ken's basement for years I bought a battery powered portable synthesizer and speaker system that I took to the banks of the Potomac in Virginia... Right across the water from the DARPA headquarters... So at night, I made crazy "spaceship taking off" type sounds... Just to freak out the government engineers... At DARPA... I imagine that they wondered "What is that? A UFO landing?"

Ken also introduced me to the book: Godel, Escher, Bach... A legendary manual exploring the possibilities of computer science and technology... Years later, when I worked at Radio Shack, I actually put together a system where a video camera filmed its output on a monitor... And that created Visual Echo tunnels... Because the camera was seeing what it was displaying... Zen Trippy!

Ken named our band Solar Wind

I did the painting in black light acrylics...

Ken III & Ken IV

The reason I'm sitting down while playing

is that I had two Morley Phasers

and I operated them with my feet... 

Mark mockingly asked me one time...

"Are you playing guitar

or driving a truck?"

and the reason my face is blurry

is the photo was taken in low light...

And I was nodding my head in time to the music...

Kids these names would call it head banging!

this has to be Mark's PAIA machine.

That he assembled from a kit

while he was stationed on the Aleutian Islands

with the United States Coast Guard.

IMSAI 8080 Computer

Ken playing the Synthesizers.

Amateur radio operator Ken

I had both of these KORG synthesizers... And the little one on top was used by Kitaro to do the Japanese flute sound on the the Silk Road theme... What's really cool is that my friend Ken had a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland Juno 60... So when we played together each of us sounded different... And I could tell who was playing What notes... When the other guy came over with a KORG Mono-Poly I couldn't tell what he was doing and what I was doing...

GREAT BOOKS: F Scott Fitzgerald Was "The Kerouac" of the Roaring Twenties... His Books were the Ones That "Everybody" Read: They Told of the Newfound Freedom of the Flappers... "Tender is the Night" ... "The Great Gatsby" ...

Real Name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald - His Cousin Wrote the Star Spangled Banner... 

F Scott Fitzgerald and Wife, Zelda

Just to Be Clear: Jack Kerouac Wrote the Book "On the Road" that was Popular With Young People in the 1950s... Especially the Beatniks... 

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I'm spending a lot of time reading since we have a vast library here... 

and Tender Is the Night is totally Different Than Anything I've ever Read... 

It was Published in 1934 during the darkest days of the depression... 

It's all about the lifestyles of the rich and famous... an 18 year old movie star woman and a Married middle aged psychiatrist flirt on the French Riviera during the Roaring Twenties...

It's a form of "Wealth Porn" - Something poor people could read as escapism... 

and to make it even more bizarre: It's an autobiography - kind of... 

one thing I have noticed is the greatest authors have disastrous lives... 

Edgar Allen Poe and Lewis Carroll with their Opium and Alcohol Addictions...  

Phillip K Dick and his Amphetamine Troubles... that certainly caused his paranoid view of the world... at one point he was working full time at his wife's jewelry  making business AND Writing all night on his books!   That left ZERO time for sleep... and eventually it killed him... 

and then I just found out that Hemingway committed suicide... I wonder why?  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Idaho_and_suicide 

OK... I Found Out. He Had Electroshock Therapy and It burned his brain so he couldn't write anymore... so his life had become pointless... a word of warning... never have Electroshock Therapy...   

I've been to his house on Key West and It looked great! It had a rope bridge to his studio over the garage... and NO ONE ELSE could walk across that bridge... so if someone wanted to talk to him they stood on the ground and shouted up to the doorway... if it was open... 

Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age

https://www.amazon.com/Tender-Night-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/068480154X  

LINKS To Content on This Blog! 

 Arrest Trump * Legalize Marijuana * 

Ecology * Psychedelic Art * Virtual Journey *

Anti-War Protests * Arcata * Eureka * Chico

and... There is a SEARCH BOX in the Upper Left Hand Corner of this Blog. Type ANY SUBJECT!

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Great Books! Read 'em before the Fascist GOP Bans 'em.

~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~

The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey,

1984 by George Orwell,

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marks,

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe,

The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand,

One Flew Over The Coo Coo's Nest by Ken Kesey,

My Problem Child by Dr Albert Hofmann,

Remember, Be Here Now by Ram Dass,

Still Here by Ram Dass,

The Psychedelic Experience by Dr Timothy Leary and Dr Richard Alpert,

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence by Robert Pirsig,

America's Bogus Wars by Gregory Vanderlaan,

Island by Aldous Huxley,

Foundation by Isaac Asimov,

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein,

You are not the Target by Laura Huxley,

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley,

The Time Machine by HG Wells,

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne,

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll,

Thru the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll,

The Wizard of OZ by Frank Baum,

Tom Sawyer - Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain,

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe (and Everything else he wrote),

The Call of Cthulu by HP Lovecraft,

The Teachings of don Juan by Carlos Castaneda,

The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz,

The Art of the Failed Deal by don Trump,

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay,

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

2001 by Arthur C. Clarke,

Dune by Frank Herbert,

The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle,

The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien,

The Hobbit by J R R Tolkien,

The Violet Overgrow by Gregory Vanderlaan,

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card,

The Bible by Various Authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,

Ezekiel, Enoch, Peter, Paul and Mary),

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov,

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov,

Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley,

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda,

Alcoholics Anonymous by Bill W.

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