Well, I certainly plan to be there. I can't promise to be loud, but I think I can say I'm amenable to being put on someone's shelf for a while, assuming I like the person. And the shelf.

Dispatching the husband. Wrap him up warm and send him home before dawn.

Wish I could hear you guys. It's been a while. Well, break a leg--preferably someone else's.

Sorry I shall be revelling in the flesh pots of Boston. That night, the SBOF specifically. Tell Lucy I said hi.

MKK

Nifty. I'd be there, had I a means of transportation. Alas, I am stuck in northernmost Westchester. Break a leg and all that.

There are enough Toroids breaking legs to send out such greetings, but would love to hear you. Only. . .am a bit far afield for that.

Jane

Well, I have no conflicts for once. If I'm not there, I'll be a ass, a idiot.

Our drummer sprained his ankle and can’t play, so enough with the “break a leg” comments already.
Am I terribly evil that that made me laugh? It's not like he needs his ankle to play drums, does he? *heartless*

Seriously, hope your drummer gets better soon, and the two of you stay intact!
Rock the house! May you have a good crowd.

I can see you've never played a drum set. The answer is, yes, you absolutely need your ankle in order to play drums.

I'll be there, drummer or no. One more work-till-after-7:00 evening and my head would explode, so I'm grateful for the reason to do otherwise.

Our drummer sprained his ankle and can’t play, so enough with the “break a leg” comments already.

That's just wrong, on so many levels! I hope there are no more mishaps and you guys knock 'em... perhaps I should be careful what I hope for!

The answer is, yes, you absolutely need your ankle in order to play drums.

You need both legs, but one arm is doable.

Sorry to miss this again, but I'm in Anaheim (yep, across the street from you know where) after retreat time at Big Sur. I guess I will have to wait for the world tour. Or at least a west coast appearance.

Well, even without the drummer, it was fun to finally hear Whisperado...or Whisperaduo, as I dubbed the drummerless version.

Also good to meet some of you folks in person (no that isn't a "you folks" comment).

John-the-Bassist introduced the band as "two-thirds of Whisperado." I wondered whether that made y'all Sperado? Or maybe Whirado? Or possibly just Whisper? Anyway, fun show. Thanks for the tunes.

Nice to meet you, too, Xopher.

Andrew: it can't have been Whisper; the cold Duke of Coffin Castle fed Whisper to his geese.

JamesG: I would like to have seen how they managed with a one-armed drummer -- but I suspect it involved lots of practice (and maybe a prosthetic). I've also heard of bands so loud the drummer uses both feet on ]bass[-drum pedals, so losing one wouldn't have been fatal -- but that doesn't sound like Patrick's style.

I can see you've never played a drum set.

Busted.

since i had never heard you -- with or without drummer -- it sounded fine to me.

but i can't remember everyone ELSE who was there. who else was there?

One of the odd things about getting old is you tend to do fewer things for the first time. But one of the things I did for the first time in 2004 was get behind a drumset and play a bit. Very very badly. As did my son (aged 4). Rather better because he wasn't trying to do timing or play particular drums or anything; he just hit stuff with abandon. Every couple of minutes he had to stop for a giggle. But he couldn't use his ankles on account of how they weren't anywhere near the pedals.

But one of the things I did for the first time in 2004 was get behind a drumset and play a bit.

While you're waiting for Experience Science Fiction to open, I'd recommend checking out the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle. A lot of it is traditional collection-based exhibits (Jimi Hendrex's guitar! A suit that Buddy Holly wore!), but the top floor has sets of gussied-up instruments, along with instructions on how to play. So the bass guitar, for example, has little flashing lights under the strings to show you where and when to press your fingers or strum. After a little auotmated lesson (which I think is actually smart enough to be listening to you and correcting mistakes), you play along with a recording of a band minus your track.

I'd never picked up a bass guitar before, but in five minutes I was playing the bass line to "Louie, Louie" along with the band. It was immensely fun. (I also played the drumset with Bob Marley, although I forget which song.)

The only drawback is there tends to be a very long line for these.

Patrick, sorry to have missed the show. Will Whisperado ever go on tour?

Oh, man. But I did say to break someone else's leg, din't I?

I'm sure it was swell, even without the percussion section.

This might not be the right thread, but I've heard all these things about the degenerate lifestyles of Rock musicians, Jazz musicians, and so forth, so:

New Tapes Say Bush May Have Smoked Marijuana

... "I wouldn't answer the marijuana question. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried," Bush purportedly says on the tape.

He added: "But you got to understand, I want to be president. I want to lead. I want to set -- Do you want your little kid say, 'Hey, Daddy, President Bush tried marijuana, I think I will?"'

In the tape, Bush mocks former Vice President Al Gore -- who fought him for the presidency in 2000 -- for admitting he smoked marijuana....

The audience: me, Xopher, Teresa, Andrew W and his partner, Michael W, and Sharyn. We were all terribly witty and funny. The band did just fine considering they were not only minus a drummer but Jon's mic kept giving him shocks and Patrick had to re-tune his guitar every song. Then we all (except Xopher) went and had dinner at the Second St. Deli. Great evening.

Lucy Huntzinger:

Wait, wait! In memory of Hunter S Thompson, put us in the picture by putting yourself in it more deeply. An example please of witty or funny; a song list, or at least description of some particular non-guitar-tuning high point; what's the menu at Second St. Deli, and how does it compare with Sarge's? Dang, wish I'd've been there. Thanks for sharing. Now back to the the wonderful world of rewrite, as carefully as F. M. Busby had his folks rebuild damaged spaceships. Plus a memory of song by John Raitt, whom my parents heard sing Oklahoma on Broadway. More than 50 years later, I hauled my wife and son to hear him belt it out passionately at local small venues from Hollywood to Brentwood.

The show was good & fun. I do, of course, wish that Mr. Drummer had been there. Not because the show was somehow unenjoyable on account of his absence, but because you sort of want to see people's work the way they intend for you to see it. But I presume Mr. Drummer will be back soon and that will give us all a chance to catch Whisperado the way they intend for us to catch them, so that difficulty is cleared up.

Oh, and just for the sake of Accuracy In Travel Directions... the actual name (and therefore location) of the deli is the Second Avenue Deli which is at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street. It's pricey but very good.

Michael Weholt:

Thank you. The deli looks slightly familar, fontwise in signage. My bias: the first 9 months of my life, before I could walk, mind you, were within walking distance of Zabar's. Changing coasts, I remember being at the first Dead concert after Pigpen died. Drummers have terrible luck; tend to blow up, y'know. Ringo, who legally changed his name to Ringo, being an odd exception. Here on the Left Coast, we have Canter's Deli, where LASFS used to meet in Bradbury days of yore, and where worked 2 buddy waiters, one Sherman Bloch [1924-1998] who rose to Sheriff of L.A. County, due to being the creep who testified against Lenny Bruce in Lenny's first LA bust, whom Lenny called "you undercover yid!" and his buddy, not named here for legal reasons, who rose to run the Sheriff's station in Altadena, whose career I had to force to an end (medical discharge) for First Amendment reasons. Deli politics. Department of Homeland Matzohballs. But I digress... And the "two-thirds of Whisperado" music was in what slipstream?

Avenue, Avenue, Avenue. Sorry. Everyone else was witty and funny. I was tired. Clearly.

Yes, I was sorry to miss the dinner, but I had to get back to Hoboken...to meet someone who, as it turned out, blew me off anyway. Life.

Just heard a joke that typifies the stereotypes about drummers on Schikele Mix (this is cleverly ambiguous but you'll find the right parse in two or three tries): What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend? Homeless!

"Daddy, I want to be a drummer when I grow up."

"You can do one or the other, son. Not both."

Two guys in tuxes have a glass of white wine, and one says "What kind of rosin do you prefer?"

Two guys in jeans drinking beer: "What kind of valve oil you buy?"

Two drunks lying in the gutter: "What kinda sticks ya use?"

Mind you, I am a drummer, and if anything drumming has helped KEEP my life from collapsing...so far.

Xopher: You're not trying to turn this into a musician joke thread, are you? I mean, I'm usually fairly circumspect about posting comments at Chez Nielsen Hayden, but I could easily dominate a musician joke thread.

Here's a joke that was considered extremely funny about 60 years ago: A jazz musician walks into a diner and orders a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie. After a few minutes, the waitress returns with the coffee and says, "Sir, the apple pie is gone." "Solid," he says. "I'll have two slices."

Here's a good joke, circa 1955: "Two musicians are on a break at the gig. They leave the nightclub and duck into a storefront doorway across the street, where they proceed to enjoy a marijuana cigarette. Suddenly, a cop car comes flying down the street, lights and sirens blaring, about 60 miles an hour. One musician takes a deep drag on the joint, and turns to other and says, "Man, I thought they'd never leave."

To short-circuit the diversion, may I recommend the Merton music-joke page.

Now that CHip has short-circuited by joke-diversion, seriously:

Hassenpfeffer
Musings, missives and miscellaneous meanderings
from Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer Edward Willett.

"...it seems your body just naturally wants to move to the beat."

"So there's definitely biology involved--but culture plays a role, too, as a study published in the January issue of Psychological Science shows."

"Erin E. Hannon of Cornell Univesity and Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto had 50 North American college students and 17 first- or second-generation Bulgarian and Macedonian immigrants listen to four folkdance tunes from Serbia and Bulgaria. Two of the songs had a simple meter (2 + 2 + 2 + 2), while two had a complex meter (2 + 2 + 3). Then the study participants listened to versions of the same tunes altered so that the ones with simple meters had complex meters, and the ones with complex meters had simple meters."

"The researchers found North Americans noticed when the simple rhythms became complex, but couldn't recognize the change from complex to simple, while the immigrants could tell the difference in both cases."

"The same experiment performed with 64 six- and seven-month-old infants revealed that, like the immigrants, the infants recognized the change in meters from simple to complex and vice versa, looking at or away from the speakers as the change occurred."

"This seems to indicate we are born with the ability to process complex rhythms, but in North America we lose it, probably because the music that bombards us constantly mostly has simple meters. This mirrors the way we lose our early ability to process different word sounds and speech patterns and become focused on the sounds and patterns that are most common and meaningful in our own culture...."

This seems to indicate we are born with the ability to process complex rhythms, but in North America we lose it, probably because the music that bombards us constantly mostly has simple meters.

Hmmm... that doesn't sound quite right. I'm not entirely sure, for example, that the regular duple and triple meters of western music are necessarily simple. I think they are extremely familiar to western people, but that's not the same as simple.

Western music, for example, takes the idea of rhythmic subdivisions much further than most musical traditions. A duration can be divided in two iteratively until -- well, until you run out of ink or room on the page. We take eight notes or 16th notes for granted, and call them simple. To a non-westerner, though, the durations in western music might be described as multiples of 1/2^3 or 1/2^4 beats(assuming a half note has the beat). Try representing the dotted-eight/sixteenth hemiolas underlying 70s funk music as multiples of inverted powers of two. Not so simple now, is it?

And anyone well-versed in either western or Bulgarian rhythms would be as perplexed as I was when I tried to transcribe some Native American pow-wow music. The base is a simple, unstressed beat, with a single-line melody over the top, but the relationship melody and the beat is non-hierarchical. A single melodic phrase might extend over hundreds of pulses, and the relationship between the melody and the pulses might not line up again for several iterations, if at all. And yet, children raised on the pow-wow circuit have no problem singing and drumming along.

So, I'd say that children are born with an innate capacity for human rhythm, but they favor the rhythms of their culture over time, and lose the ability to distinguish other rhythmic cultures. Of course, you can learn them with effort.

(It's a bit like phonetics, isn't it?)

Lucy Huntzinger:

"Avenue, Avenue, Avenue"

"In any event, the club was so far downtown that in the blink of an eye the West Side could suddenly and surprisingly become the East Side. Or rather, and more accurately, the West Side could become the South Side, for it was here at the tip of the island that West Street looped around Battery Park to become South Street."

"'It's all very confusing,' Connie explained, 'but not as confusing as the borough of Brooklyn.'"

Downtown: A Novel
Ed McBain
William Morrow, 1989
p.274

HP:

"So, I'd say that children are born with an innate capacity for human rhythm, but they favor the rhythms of their culture over time, and lose the ability to distinguish other rhythmic cultures. Of course, you can learn them with effort. (It's a bit like phonetics, isn't it?)"

Well said! Yes, that's what developmental linguists observe, with babies having an innate capacity to recognize all human phonemes, but eventually lose the ability to distinguish differences between phonemes that are not applicable to the language(s) they hear in their environment.

OTOH, "Western music, for example, takes the idea of rhythmic subdivisions much further than most musical traditions" gives short shrift to classical Indian music, which includes in rhythm training mathematically designed sequences a millennium or more old which run through every rhythmic permutation in a set, neatly and optimally overlapping. Buddha taps his feet to the music, enlightened. But I omit the equations on necklaces, unlabelled necklaces, Lyndon words, De Bruijn sequences. Not that most drummers in the West know this stuff. The Wrath of Ali Akhbar Khan.

"The list of musicians who have written fantasy or SF or horror is not a long one: Mick Farren, Nick Cave, Greg Kihn, Steve Cash. (Try naming others as a parlor game.)"

Ports of Hell, by Johnny Strike: reviewed by Paul Di Filippo

JvP: I thought Paul knews better than that; he's either ignoring generations of great writers or restricting "musician" to "rocker". Outside of that classification there are (off the top of my head) Kushner, Biggle, and Sturgeon (see "Die, Maestro! Die!"...). Now name a couple of rockers who wrote SF music.

Chip, while I'm pretty that you know all this and are being ironic, the list of rockers who've written SF music is, to turn a phrase, not a short one.

Donald Fagen's "IGY" is SF without stretching at all. So is Blue Oyster Cult's "ETI." Elton's "Rocket Man" puts me in mind of Malzberg in his less bitter mode. Quite a bit of Hawkwind has SF themes, though considering that Mike Moorcock was in the group, that's not much of a surprise. (Moorcock also played on Robert Calvert's "Lucky Leif and the Longships," which is a concept album of pop music from an alternate universe where the Norse settled North America.) Eurythmics did "Sexcrime," partially in Newspeak, for the most recent film version of 1984, though it was cut from the release. Bowie, of course. Alan Parsons (even if you count "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" as fantasy). Warren Zevon. Thomas Dolby.

Mike -- you even left out the two cases I considered obvious enough to be ironic about: Brian May ("Year of '39" etc., although I forget whether he was the one who got Freas to adapt an old ASF cover for a Queen album) and Paul Kantner (Hugo nomination for Blows Against the Empire)

And Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" is a pretty much straightforwardly SF narrative.

Steely Dan's "King of the World" is post-apocalyptic sf. What about Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Peter Schilling's sequel/reworking, "Major Tom (I'm Coming Home)"? (I admit, I had to look up Peter Schilling's name.)

To gloss on John M. Ford's comment, Warren Zevon's album Transverse City is almost entirely science-fictional (and in particular, cyberpunk). (Although the lyric "After the war in Paraguay/ Back in 1999" now establishes it as alternate history cyberpunk.) Who else would use as a line in a rock song "2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzene"?

"Although the lyric "After the war in Paraguay/ Back in 1999" now establishes it as alternate history cyberpunk."

Not to take this too seriously, but the fact that an SF story's premise has been superannuated doesn't make the story into "alternate history." SF isn't futurology.

Not to take this too seriously, but the fact that an SF story's premise has been superannuated doesn't make the story into "alternate history." SF isn't futurology.

Yeah, I was going for hipster irony. I'm very sorry.

But this makes me wonder what's the oldest sf song we can identify. This isn't particularly old, but Zager & Evans "In the Year 2525" (reached #1 in 1969) is particularly far future sf (it gets up to the year 9595, in which we wonder if man will still be alive).

Probably no one outside Boston would remember this band, but Scruffy the Cat did a song called "Moons of Jupiter," which did achieve some sort of immortality by being the background music in an episode of "Futurama."

John M. Ford, CHip, Alex Cohen, Patrick:

You guys ROCK!

I await the podcasting of Science Fiction Rock & Roll. All SF, all the time...

I think I'll avoid mentioning Science Fiction Opera, except to note that Hayden wrote one.

Actually, I think most crossovers between SF and rock have been pretty dire, and I'm talking both about songs with nominally SF subject matter and genre fiction about rock music.

JVP, I think you mean Haydn.

genre fiction about rock music

I loved Spinrad's Little Heroes and George R. R. Martin's sadly overlooked Armageddon Rag. Then there's the whole weird Moorcock Jerry Cornelius thing; I'm pretty sure he was a rock musician in one if his incarnations.

In support of part of the above assertion, I would remark that the presence of SF iconography on pajamas does not make the pajamas a work of SF. The same goes for a lot of songs that wind up listed as "science fictional" in discussions of this sort.

I'm actually very liberal about what I consider SF within the world of narratives--not for me moshefederine hairsplitting over proper sciencefictionality versus mere fantasy or "magic realism." But prose fiction and songs are different things, often overlapping in nominal content but fundamentally different in how they work.

In general, I think nominal content (Look! A spaceship! A sword!) is the least interesting way to talk about genres and forms, and certainly the least productive of useful insights.

Alex Cohen:

I love those two novels! And GRRM has justifiably complained that Armageddon Rag is neglected, which frustrates him, as an ex-Executive Producer on TV who one would think could get Someone in Hollywood to get a clue.

Patrick:

As usual, you are correct on all points.

Your acute "remark that the presence of SF iconography on pajamas does not make the pajamas a work of SF" parallels the longest-running significant debate on the genre of Science Fiction Poetry, with Susan Haden Elgin taking a more restrictive narrative-based position, and I a fuzzy-headed inclusive stance.

Haden. Haydn. "The Man in the Moon." Not to be confused with his dialogue:

SWEETER THAN ROSES

The first whimsy-headed wretch of this lunatic family that we observed, was a merry fellow in a straw cap, confined for the noble sin of drinking.

Then clapping his hand upon his head he swore by his crown of moonshine that he would battle all the stars in the skies but he would have some gin. In this interim came a gentleman with a red face to stare at him.

"No wonder," said his Aerial Majesty, "that claret is so scarce, look there's a rogue carries more in his nose than I, that am Prince of the
Air, have had in my belly for a twelvemonth."

"If you are the Prince of the Air," said I, "why don't you command the Man in the Moon to give you some?"

To which he replied, "The Man in the Moon's a sorry rascal; I sent to him for a dozen bottles but t'other day, and he swore by his bush, his cellar had been dry this six months.

But I'll be even with the rogue. I expect a cloud laden with claret to be sent me by the Sun every day, and if a spoonful of lees would save
him from choking, the old drunkard should not have a drop."

juliannebaird.camden.rutgers.edu/CLMDialogue.htm

Let's not revive that old debate about whether or not to reawaken the Nebula Award for Best Pajamas.

My favorite science fiction songwriter - in the sense of genuine SF narrative - would be David Bowie. "Five Years" and "The Supermen" in particular are nice little stories.

JVP, I think you mean Haydn.

Didn't you hear about that great music-publishing couple, Carla and Joseph Nielsen-Haydn?

And nobody mentioned Klaatu, whose song "The Little Neutrino" is the only one I know of written from the point of view of a fundamental particle, and whose album Hope is narratively scientifictional...pretty loosely so, but there's a story there.

And JvP, if they had an award for Best Pajamas, the nominating committee would probably have some jerk on it who asserts that "women can't wear pajamas," and who when pressed will claim first that if women wear them, they aren't really pajamas, then that his statement is true despite counterexamples ("the few women who do wear pajamas are non-significant statistical outliers"); then demand that everyone define pajamas in a way that includes all pajamas exactly and excludes all things that are NOT pajamas - insisting that if they can't, then he's automatically right; then accuse everyone of attacking him because he's a Christian; then just deny having said any such thing, even though the text is right there in front of God and everybody; then have a sock puppet say that he didn't really mean that women can't wear pajamas; then come back as himself and...

It goes on for pages; it really is the most appalling stuff.

Alex Cohen (re oldest SF song): Blows Against the Empire is also from 1969; it could older or newer by a few months than "2525" (which I recall as a summer release). "The House at Pooneil Corner" (~1968) slips from prophecy to post-holocaust narrative ("From here to heaven is a scar ... all the idiots have left."); "Wooden Ships" (also Summer/Fall 1969) is mostly images rather than narrative but was mostly believed at the time to be post-atomic-war.

I can't think of anything older that I'd label SF even if I wanted to stretch Patrick's frame; "Telstar" (~1963) was music for an existing satellite, not a narrative of the future. OTOH, I am hardly an encyclopedia of 60's music.