Quadroon on the Half Shell Drinking 7up

Hey, Jack, what are you doing? It’s almost Independence Day? Wildly digging a day off. Playing Iggy, Roy Head, Dylan’s new one (Jolene), the Shadows of Night, Little Brother Montgomery. Let see, taking a look at my blog to see what was good since last July..

Last July I just flew back from Cape Canaveral where I was in the Rocket Garden. Arms were tired. Took a picture of a family taking a picture in front of a Saturn rocket. On that trip I got to see JackKerouac’s Orlando home too. Thinking it’s time for a road trip now or soon. Might go to Prague in the fall for computer thing. Get to Kafka’s house. I’ve always wondered if he owned a fan or had an icebox. Apropos of expensing things: Saw a Patti Smith movie last night..she wangled a trip to Rome to Gregory Corso’s grave out of the thing. Gregory is buried at the foot of Shelly. Would like to go there before I join them.

You are so heavy! News is ever on my mind. Especially as it goes down the tubes. Here, Boston magazine has a reduced staff and replaced editor with one who is also editor of Philadelphia magazine! Actually that happened years ago..there really wasn’t money there to support a Boston magazine unless it could share costs with another. Back then, made for bland covers: Girl in swimsuit; Headline: Summer on ____[fill in blank with either “Cape” or “Jersey Shore”]. Fact is, on one level, we are just going back to a reasonable circulation for the magazine of this kind. Boston is down from 2005 high of 100,000 by 24%. But, yes, the sky is falling at the same time. I aggregated this year’s Moon Herald Traveller News posts in a handy a handy tag page.

What do we have for the sports fans? Found a couple of baseball ruminations. One about a dream I had of heaven and the old Yankee Stadium with monuments in centerfield - the other about a German-American industrialist who we would sit next to at Braves games in Milwaukee. Mr. Ladish was out of an old movie. Hot summer day yet he still came to game in a three-piece suit. French blue, but three piece. Also straw hat, and, dig this, spats. He sat there every game. He knew the players by name. And he could coerce Manager Fred Haney to have Johnnie Logan come my way. “Jackie is going to be a ballplayer,” Ladish would say.

These days I have a favorite baseball song. “Third-base, Dodger Stadium” by Ry Cooder. When I got to Chavez Ravinin 2005, I thought it too was heaven (although around the rim it was very desperate on Sunset), and I was later chagrined to learn the story behind the building of this ball field via this Ry song.

You kind of thrash about and just throw this stuff up right? That's right, voice in boldface. But there was some stuff I put more than a simple blog effort into over last 12 months. There was the Obama b-ball thing (plus research with Rich Mack, Jeff DeMark, Jim Haas and his pickup buddies – thanks all). The essay on Jack Kerouac’s CityCityCity falls in the category too. You can put that on my gravestone, the one at Gregory Corso's feet on the path Patti Smith trod.

Jack, you are putting us to sleep. I hear you. Well..got to get a life here. Go buy some dead cow. And lobsta.

I am thinking Bad Karma. You are talking to it. Did I tell you I started reading a bio on Joe McCarthy? Huh? You still there? Maybe I will just put some link lists up to finish this off. It shant consume my day off. No sir, buster. Make a hogie, flip over the Little Brother LP. Skip the prose linking stuff that Monster Google is said to love. Remember, the Moon is making a comeback. Have a nice summer! Audios!

Vids-Audios

Mystery Ice Station - What if Pulp and Serial art were great art? What would Bill B do?

Roll Cadillac Roll - I met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell you everything was allright.

Move on up a little higher - Time to ask a new president: "Would you take a call from Mahalia Jackson?"

Poems

Box of Glass Eyes - Day in the Museum
The Doctor is in Time - On Bessie Smith, for Edward Albee

Chronicles 45-60 - Daydreaming in church yet again

The Historical Record

Dark Hero of the Information Age - Norbert Weiner
Dark Hero of the Civil War - US Grant
Dark Hero of the Manhattan Project - Robert 'Oppy' Oppenheimer
Three Posts in November - When I thought I could write about economics

Lazing on this sunny afternoon

About ready to take a summer vacation. Will post a 'greatest hits' of the last 12 months. [Geez, just had a durn podcast blow up in my face [wouldn’t move from one machine to another - it was cool; it was called Experiment in Abstraction - it discussed hillbilly hipsters, the King, and the Kinks.

In the meanwhile, I will travel a bit, hike. Will fool around with Facebook. Might revive RJ-11 science blog for experimental purposes. Service-Oriented Software Architecture - if you didn’t know - is a big part of my time, and this is a good time to focus effort there - while, as I said, doing some vacating. Most key: Have an important electronic music history project that needs fruition. -Jack Vaughan

When Bob Moog met Raymond Scott

This week MoonTraveller Herald marks the orbit of the Moon of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which got there, what, aboutentered orbit around the moon the morning of June 23 after a four-and-a-half day journ 40 years after the first humanoids? In honor we run this YouTube clip ''Dedicatory Piece to the Crew and Passengers of the first Experimental Rocket Express to the Moon'' by Raymond Scott courtesy of the folks at SCLOGSE .

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On American Routes radio, there was a very interesting vignette about Raymond Scott, and enthralling related conversation with Bob Moog – maker of the Moog synthesizer.

Scott was a key composer behind some of the looniest Looney Tune music, and a force in electronic music. He had a stint as the orchestra leader for the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, but his very modern sounding music - he was entranced by the sound of the modern, much as one of his influences, Duke Ellington. What I did not know was how much he did in the domain of electronic music. Among other things, he invented the Clavivox. Hear it.

Scott’s family had a radio store of some kind. His brother talked him into music school, because of his great prodigy, but his first interest was engineering.

On the show, Moog described going to Scott’s house in one of the boroughs. It had an elaborate basement with rooms for woodworking, for metal work, for electronics work. All kinds of tools. Mad scientist stuff. Moog was young. His recollection is soldered.

Moog was there with his father. The Moogs went out to meet Scott to discuss building a Theremin variation that was a bit more like a traditional musical instrument in terms of human-machine interface. This Thereming variation led to the Clavivox, which I'd never heard of, but which I think most of us heard at some point [Think: "StarTrek".]

"The floors were spotless..there was nothing I could compare it with at that time." Moog ddsaid, echoing an oft heard Orphian paean. Scott had a way to get to the broad public - did Ford commercials! - but he also had a very protective, secretive [mad scientist] streak. For so many, his Looney Tune bits were an intro to so much. He had his issues…protective, as people involved with copyrights and patents could become. He fired Anita Day for scatting rather than singing the lyrics. "He saw musicians as mechanical devices to transfer his ideas into sound." says one intoner on the American Routes episode. His later days were about working with machines; but, in Bob Moog's take, it was about working with the future.

Related
http://raymondscott.com/Clavivox.html
American ROutes episode
http://www.raymondscott.com/moog.html
http://raymondscott.com/Clavivox.mp3