21 August 2011

Lorenz Hart was fluent in at least two languages, English and German, and he had a devilishly clever way with internal rhyme. Some of his lyrics are Blue Moon, I’ll Take Manhattan, Blue Skies, There’s A Small Hotel, Kalamazoo To Timbuktu, Little Girl Blue, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, and, let’s not forget that song without whcih no cabaret show would be complete, My Funny Valentine.

Anja Zebic took this photograph. Her work is diagonal, energetic and original.

Two Catalans, Manitas de Plata and Pablo Picasso.

This is a Misfit Photos version of Stefanie Keys. Misfit, you’re a great cameraperson.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

The markings on all cats probably go down into their skin, because i have long noted that the where the fur color changes on, say, a cat’s face is remarkably similar to the lines in our own human faces.

One of the most energetic and crisp players ever, Cannonball Adderley. I still play his tunes all the time. He managed to be profound and accessible at the same time, a very difficult trick to pull off.

Gene Ammons, giant ot the tenor saxophone, was a master of the ballad. he had a beautiful tone and he took his time.

I first became aware of Betty Carter on a Ray Charles album, and i still hear the tune Baby, It’s Cold Outside in coffeehouses. Betty has a voice like a trumpet. I have seen her in little tiny bars in New York and large concert halls. She’s that rare thing, an experimental singer, willing to take chances, a real artist.

The master, Erroll Garner. Does anyone have more fun than he does?

You need to know and understand 5,000 words and characters in Chinese before trying to have a normal conversation.

The Kodiak grizzly bear is the world’s largest meat eating animal living on land. The Kodiak can weigh up to five hundred pounds more than any other kind of bear.

Balboa Park, San Diego. i was trying to catch carp while posing. “Multitasking,” they call it now.

Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button.

Not sure where I first heard Charlie Christian. I was thunderstruck. Never heard anything like that before.

Etta James. Voice like a knife.

One of the most influential piano players ever. Earl Hines. He routinely played tenths in his left hand.

Never loan anyone anything that you wouldn’t just give them.

The Ouija board is named after the French and German for “yes,” oui, ja.

The taller a swimmer is, the less drag in the water… proportionately. This is why swimmers are tall… mostly.

T-Bone Walker was well known in San Antonio when I was 14. His music was everywhere.

Houston Person, a good man and a good sax player.

Louis Jordan is one of those musicians, like Chuck Berry, who transcend their time and place through humor and a kind of universal appeal.

Never buy a car you can’t push.

Frank Sinatra said that rock and roll was only played by “cretinous goons.” Not a bad name for a band. You know, sometimes I feel that way and I PLAY rock and roll. On the other hand, and I am sorry to say this sincerely, I always thought that Frank Sinatra was a middling singer. Not nearly up to the stature of such balladeers as Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and a man who could truly sing a ballad, James Brown. Sometime, just for the fun of it, listen to Frank Sinatra sing That’s Life and then listen to James Brown sing That’s Life. For anyone with ears, there is no comparison. Judge not that ye shall not be judged.

Lieutenant Sam Andrew and his three boys: Lee Andrew, Sam Andrew, Bill Andrew, Albany, Georgia, 1948.

Paul McCartney’s mother was a midwife.

The word “alligator”  comes from “el lagarto” which is Spanish for “the lizard.”

Sydney Bechet was a child prodigy. He played clarinet with all the main bands in New Orleans when he was 10 and 11. He went to Europe and found the soprano saxophone there. He had a big wide vibrato. In the late 1950s, when i was playing clarinet, Sydney Bechet had a hit with a beautiful tune, Petite Fleur. We played that tune in my first band.

My friend from Lille, France, Lucie Baratte.

Joe Turner had a loud voice. He didn’t need a microphone. He was a bartender and would sing from the bar with the band and he was loud enough. Six feet two, and over 300 pounds, this was Big Joe Turner from Kansas City.

To protect your eyes from strain, make sure the computer screen is just beyond arm’s length. This is a rule that I violate regularly.

Elise and some italian guy.

Bats are voracious insect eaters, devouring as many as six hundred bugs per hour for four to six hours a night. Bats are also important plant pollinators, particularly in the southwestern United States.

John Lee Hooker was an informing spirit of early Big Brother and the Holding Company. When I first heard Peter Albin play, he sounded like John Lee to me. I knew John Lee Hooker, not as well as I would have liked, but I knew him. Richie Kirch, a friend of mine and a fine guitar player, performed with John for years.

I love this photograph. There is something so archetypal about it. Dexter Gordon did the music in Round Midnight, remember? He always had a strong style. He acted in the film, and he was a good actor too.

King Oliver and Louis Armstrong used to play solos in thirds, solos that were so well thought out and executed. What a great band that was. Lil Hardin-Armstrong was the piano player and devil’s advocate. She talked Louis into leaving King Oliver and striking out on his own. Always follow the woman.

Chercher la femme.

You can’t always back out of what you drove forward into, but you can always drive forward out of what you backed into. This note is for Ben Nieves who drove us out of an impossible impasse in Rome. Truly expert and skilled driving.

Full of energy, aims to please, she’s a marvel, Stefanie Keys.

Mr. Clever. Cole Porter was an aristocrat. He never liked anyone to know that he actually worked at his craft. This is a very XVIIIth century outlook and he carried it off. Cole was born to privilege, wealthy, upper class, and as an adult he suffered a horrible horseback riding accident, which could be why you have his Yale Whiffenpoof song on the one hand, Let’s Do It, and then Beautiful Primitive Indian Girls on the other. Not to mention a song that I have always loved: Everytime We Say Goodbye. Cole Porter could write Don’t Fence Me In and Just One Of Those Things in the same afternoon. Fare Thee Well, Mr. Porter.

With Simone Bargelli in Città della Pieve.

There are almost no Buddhists in India, nor have there been for a thousand years.  Buddhism was founded in India about 2,500 years ago, but it was uprooted from that country between the seventh and twelfth centuries of the Common Era. There are many Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Japan and Indochina, but few in mother India. There’s a Buddhist in Nashville, Tennessee, quite close to me, actually, my brother, Dan Andrew.

C’era una volta un americano di nome Grant Jacobs, fotografo comico di grande talento.

Once upon a time there was an American named Grant Jacobs, funny photographer of great talent.

Look at these two, are they cool or what? Leon the Lion and Fats Waller. As much style as Fats had in his playing, and that’s saying a lot, he had that much style in his life too. “I mean your pedal extremities really are obnoxious.” Now, how many people do you know who could end a song with a sentence like that? And make it work? Fats Waller was a true artist, one of the greats.

Sonny Stitt. In the 1970s, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, i used to walk for miles with Sonny Stitt melodies in my head. i loved the man. Still do.

Big voice, BIG VOICE, LaVern, yes, that’s how she spelled it, Baker. Regal and very funky and loud at the same time. When i was in the back seat and loving and feeling and everything was real, that was LaVern Baker that we heard on the radio. She was an aristocratic princess and she wasn’t taking  any grief, guff, or garbage from anyone. This was a woman with a high IQ and she knew what to do. A pioneer of copyright battles too.

“Hangnail” has nothing to do with “hang,” but everything to do with “angst.” Middle English “ang-” = painful = Hangnail, a painful nail.

“Kangaroo” means “I don’t know” in the language of an Australian aboriginal tribe. Captain Cook approached natives of the Endeavor River Tribe (there’s a suspicious tribal name for you) to ask what that strange animal was, and the poor guy said, “Kangaroo,” “I don’t know.”  You ever wonder how many other things were named this way? What if someone approached you and asked, in her aboriginal language, “Hey, what is that?” (referring to, say, a bus) and all you could say is “I don’t know. What are you talking about? I don’t understand your language.” Then she would call that bus an “I don’t know” forever.

I DON’T KNOW.

A castrated rooster is called a capon. A castrated bull is called a steer. A castrated horse is called a gelding. Oh, yes, a castrated human is called a eunuch or a castrato, as they called them in the Catholic Church. A way of preserving that beautiful high voice. Contralto is the name of this vocal range. Many children were lost to us because of this bizarre Catholic custom, children of great talent and beauty. The Jews cut off a little tip of the penis’ foreskin, but… castration? i mean, come on. Isn’t that a rather drastic form of birth control? Even if it is in the service of high art?

Nat King Cole: One of the greatest jazz piano players ever. If he had never sung a word, Nat King Cole would still be a giant in the history of jazz, but he did sing… really so much better than anyone. He had a smooth delivery and a very sophisticated style. So far beyond anyone else who sang any of the same songs he did. That includes… so many people. Let’s just leave it at that.

The OTHER soprano sax player, John Coltrane. He and Sydney Bechet really came into their own when they switched to soprano sax. Monsieur Bechet did Petite Fleur and it sent his career off in a whole new direction. Same for Trane. He did My Favorite Things on the soprano saxophone and, all of a sudden, everyone’s grandmother could dig what he was doing. Here he is with his big boss tenor.

First time I heard Ray Charles, he sounded just like Charles Brown. Driftin’ Blues. Ray copied that exactly. He also copied Nat King Cole. And then he learned his own thing. Did he ever. The Great High Priest. The Great Ray Charles.

Can anyone sing a ballad better than Ray Charles? Listen to Just For A Thrill and then tell me someone who sang it better than that.

The more comfortable you make your subject, the better the portrait will be.

Robots in Japan pay union dues.

The Looney Tunes theme song is actually called “The Merry-Go-Round Is Broken Down.”

Art Tatum was good. He was almost too good. Baroque, Rococco. Ornate. Genius. Just stand back and listen.

One of the great blues players, Charlie Parker, from Kansas City, liked to play in E (C# for the alto). Most horn players eschew this key, not Charlie.

Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. Extravert and introvert. Louis had that big sound, even in the high notes, big, big, big. Miles was introspective, more careful. The two trumpet men of the twentieth century.

Good evening, madam. Shall i get you a cab?

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

__________________________________________________________

14 August 2011

Howard DeNike and Gordon Bowker. I went to school with these guys fifty years ago and am proud to have them as friends. They came to see us in Arlington, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle.

Sophia Ramos, la reina de la escena, the queen of the scene. Everybody loves Sophia, especially me.

Tom Finch came along to play guitar with us. This is his 42nd birthday. We had a good set in Arlington.

Skip Taylor and Larry Taylor in the lobby of our hotel in Arlington. They are not related, but Skip manages Canned Heat, Larry’s band.

Dale also from Canned Heat with his sweet wife. Dale is a great player as all of the Heat brothers are.

Even Harvey Mandel who has a huge appetite for a beautiful tone on the guitar.

We played these tunes in Arlington and it was so good to hear Sohpia sing them again.

Skip Taylor was in a good mood the whole weekend. i don’t think i’ve ever seen him so happy and loose.

Tom Finch in Edmonton, Alberta. The crowd was very enthusiastic.

With Tom Constanten. Elise and I used to play in a band with Tom, but now he’s playing with Jefferson Starship.

Never try to hop a train that is moving faster than three seconds per standard car length.

The Romans called coal the “best stone in Britain,” and they made beautiful jewelry from it. Roman priests honored Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, by burning coal in the perpetual fire at her shrine in Bath.

Cathys Richardson and Curtin.

Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Janis Joplin and Sam Andrew at a Stax/Volt Christmas party in Memphis.

Dr. Seuss pronounced his name so it would rhyme with “rejoice,” or to put it more correctly, he pronounced the “eu” in his name like the “eu” in Deutschland.

James Gurley, Harley Man.

The African elephant has ears shaped like Africa. The Indian elephant has ears shaped like India.

Camille with a nice smile, Mike Somavilla and Elise Piliwale.

Albert Brooks’ real name is Albert Einstein.

I went to high school on Okinawa, Japan, with these fine, interesting people.

Brian Auger, Peter Albin, Sam Andrew and Richie Kirch somewhere in Oregon.

Jerry Miller, Connie and Bob Mosely.

Janis Joplin and Peter Albin doing Combination of the Two.

Elise Piliwale with a Cockette in Seattle.

The Sam Andrew Band: Bill Laymon and Peter Tork. I wish i could remember the women’s names. There were 261 people in the Sam Andrew Band at one time or another. I’ve always wanted to throw a party for them somewhere like, say, The Waldorf Astoria.

Willie Dixon and Gerry Goffin wrote songs that you have heard all your life, songs that are so inevitable that it seems they wrote themselves.

Carmine Appice and Bobby Vega.

There are 350 varieties of shark, not counting loan, pool and lawyers.

There are more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in Canada.

Elise Piliwale and Jimi Hendrix.

James Gurley, Michel Bastian and Orion from Mister Gang, Moscow.

Chan Marshall, Cat Power. She sang Down On Me with us.

A real Chinese person doesn’t know what fortune cookies are. They were invented by an American, Charles Jung (Karl Jung!?), in 1918,

Les Dudek and Sam Andrew, Pennsylvania.

“I’ll tell you one thing about journalists, and this has nothing to do with you, baby, believe me. People like their blues singers to be drunk and miserable, and they like for their blues singers to die afterwards too.”   Janis Joplin.

Elise Piliwale, Joan Getz, Marlene Dupont.

Melissa Etheridge and Sam Andrew at The Maritime Music Hall, San Francisco.

A rule I have conspicuously ignored. So far so good.

Never plant three of the same shrub in a row. Always offset. That way, if one dies, it will be harder to notice.

Sounds like a fun night, doesn’t it? By my rule of inflation, that three dollars would be about thirty dollars today… still a good deal.

Len Fico, Sophia Ramos, Sam Andrew and Fito de la Parra.

The first Europeans came to North America to find gold, silver and a river passage to China. Instead they found trees, lots of them. You really have to go East and drive through the forests to understand how dense they are. The people in Jamestown, Virginia, had no gold to send home, so they sent trees instead, shiploads of timber.

Elise Piliwale on the upper west side, Manhattan, 2000.

One of Queen Victoria’s children gave her a bustle for Christmas that played God Save The Queen when she sat down.

Salvador Dalì once arrived at an art exhibition in a limousine filled with turnips.

Jeremy Bentham, an English savant who died in 1832, left everything to the London Hospital with a codicil providing for his body to be at the head of hospital board meetings. His bones were clothed and there was a wax mask for his face, so he attended the meetings for ninety-two years and you can still find him there.

Marty Balin, the one with the talent.

If you think that something is obvious and goes without saying, it might be best just to go ahead and say it anyway.

A close corollary to the above is that you tend to undervalue what is the most valuable in you, that is, something that seems obvious and simple to you may be the best contribution you can make. I have always noticed this in musicians and other artists. What they do best, they think “Oh, anyone can do that.” That’s because that is their gift and so they devalue it thinking that it is natural to everyone else, but it often is not natural at all to everyone. Speak up. Express yourself. Make the world a better place. Thank you for your contribution.

My sister Lillian and her children, Paul Bullis and Emily Bullis Rollins.

Long Island is far from the island of Hawaii, but these people got there.

Snooky in his natural habitat. N’Dea Davenport and Little Queenie. Rather interesting set of human emotions here, n’est-ce pas?

Hans Christian Anderson, author of many famous fairy tales, was “word blind.” Hmm, that’s an interesting way of putting it. Now we usually say “dyslexic.” Why, in my day they just plain said, “He’s a poor speller, really a poor speller.” I am a natural born speller. I always won all the contests. i don’t value spelling at all. it’s like being born left handed or green eyed to be born a good speller, especially in the English language, whose orthography is a nightmare for someone of a logical turn of mind. (Now, watch. Someone is going to write me and say, “But you just misspelled “radiolarian” or “comity.”) It’s the short little words like “the” that are most likely to trip us up, because in the proofreading stage, our eyes glide over this kind of word. Anyway, they are still finding spelling mistakes in Hans Christian Anderson, and i bet this bothers him a lot.

Elise and I sitting right in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Greg Rolle, Carlos Santana, Michael Carabello and Neal Schon.

The guitar that Janis gave me. The Nudie sticker is still there forty years and three months after it was supposed to fall off.

Paul Kantner, Don Wehr and Aynsley Dunbar.

The dress code for a gig that we did in the Midwest of all places: Hats were OK, but nothing else.

Talk soon!

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

__________________________________________________________

18 July 2011

On 15 February 1965, a few months before Peter Albin and I started Big Brother and the Holding Company, Raymond Kurzweil played an instrument on the television game show called I’ve Got A Secret. What was the instrument? That was what the panelists had to discover but they could not.

Raymond, a high school student, had developed a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. Everyone was more impressed by Raymond Kurzweil’s age than anything else. The person most impressed by what Kurzweil had done was Kurzweil himself, because he understood its implications.

Only humans can play music. A machine cannot create a work of art. Yet a machine had done just that. A computer built by a 17 year old had just taken the first step across the boundary between organic intelligence and artificial, created intelligence. Talk about a secret. No one could have guessed that one. Not even Steve Allen, the moderator of the show.

That was 46 years ago. Today, Ray Kurzweil thinks that computers will become more intelligent than humans in about 35 years. This will be a major evolutionary change for computers and for human beings.

Computer technology is evolving more right now in an hour than it did in its first entire 90 years from when Charles Babbage constructed his first “analytical engine” for the solving of computational and logical problems around 1900.

Computers are becoming faster faster. That is, their development rate is exponential instead of arithmetical. In two years, they develop four times as fast, and in four years they develop sixteen times as fast.

Yes, now computers can win at Jeopardy and chess and they can compose piano music and they have begun to drive our cars and tell us where to go, but this is the inception. This is the infancy of the computer.

When Ramond Kurzweil went on I’ve Got A Secret, the computer Univac was 25 feet by 50 feet in length, contained 5,600 tubes, 18,000 crytal diodes, and 300 relays.  It utilized serial circuitry, 2.25 MHz bit rate, and had an internal storage capacity of 1,000 words, or 12,000 characters.

Now your iPhone is more sophisticated than Univac and you can hold it in your hand. That’s an impressive rate of evolution and the computer is only getting started.

Computers design other computers and it won’t be long before a computer designs a computer that can not only perform analytical tasks but can evolve into an intuitive, emotional being capable of creating real art and solving philosophical and behavioral problems, or at least wrestling with them,  as well as we do.

Then what will happen? Copmputers will still compute and evolve faster faster and go somewhere we haven’t been and can’t even conceive, and will still build the next generation of computers. There seems to be no logical reason why this won’t happen, and also there seems to be no reason why we should fear such an eventuality.

Most of you probably don’t remember that in the 1950s people were afraid of computers. There was an apprehension that computers would take over, that they would dehumanize us. Has this happened? Everyone must answer this question for herself, but what I see in airports mainly is that EVERYONE has a computer, be it a laptop, an iPhone or some other device and no one is going to want to surrender that machine. People don’t fear computers now; they live inside them.

Computers will live inside of us. Computers are us. I can see the computer becoming smaller than a bacterium and then disappearing altogether from the physical realm and yet being far more powerful than that Univac or your present Mac. Or your present thousand Macs.

At this point the partition between organic and inorganic being will dissolve and a new species will appear. Do you find this unlikely or farfetched? What do you think the creeators of Univac would have made of Facebook with its algorhythms for facial recognition? A Facebook that we can receive with a device in the palm of our hand. Could they have predicted such an event?

This new species, this combination of computer and human is something that we cannot conceive, literally, as we are now. This is going to be the first major step in evolution since humanity evolved from the other primates and it is coming soon.

There is a word for this new break, this new step into the unknown, seemingly fantastical and yet quite logical. This word is the Singularity.

Raymond Kurzweil thinks about the Singularity. He has had quite a life in the last 46 years since Peter and I founded Big Brother. Probably his most mundane activity has been the invention and refinement of the synthesizers that bear his name. He  had a meeting in 1982 with Stevie Wonder and he asked Stevie what was the biggest problem with music synthesizers.

The musician replied that synthesizers sounded artificial and not like real instruments, so Kurzweil created a new generation of music synthesizers capable of imitating a number of instruments, and in tests musicians were unable to discern the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano.

Kurzweil created and sold a software company while he was still in college and he built a print to speech reading machine for people like Stevie Wonder who bought the first one. And he also developed a speech to print device for doctors.

Remember John Tuturro in The Quiz Show? He was the preternaturally intelligent fellow who was a slob from Queens and he not only bested Mark Van Doren, the smooth college professor, but he exposed the whole payola behind the television show.

Raymond Kurzweil is a bit like the Tuturro character, unassuming and sharply intelligent. There is a DVD about him, The Singularity Is Near, that also features Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz

Technological progress happens exponentially, not arithmetically. Moore’s Law (the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles every two years) is quite reliable and steady.

Kurzweil created his own measure for such progress. The amount of computing power that you can buy for $ 1,000 also doubles every two years, both over the past time since 1900, vacuum tubes, radio, television, and into the future.

It is, of course, the future rolling out of this formula that is most startling. The take off is a slow curve and then there is a vertical climb into regions completely unknown and yet completely understandable, if you accept past performance as any kind of guide.

The power of computers is increasing and the cost of that increase is decreasing… exponentially in both cases.

Kurzweil believes, and it seems to be only common sense given what is happening now, that in thirty or forty years, and that’s taking a conservative view of the matter, that computers will have human intelligence, intuition emotions, brilliance, all of it. And more than all of it. Maybe there are other aspects here that we only dimly perceive now, but that computers will reach in their evolution.

Around 2045, thinks Raymond Kurzweil, with the exponential increase in computer power and the exponential decrease in the cost of that power, computers will possess something like a billion times the thinking power of all humans.

There is a Singularity Institute For Artificial Intelligence in, where else?, San Francisco. One of the ideas that float around in such an environment is immortality. After all, if the computer can be in you, and it can, then you can be in the computer. All that you think, feel, experience will be in that “machine,” and there is no reason for all of that thinking and feeling to cease merely because your actual body does.

There are several Singularitists who are working on the physical causes of aging too, and that is a whole fascinating area in itself. People like Aubrey De Grey see aging as a damage that can be repaired.

This biological concern with aging is, to me, nowhere near as interesting as the possiblity of entering all of your whole self into the computer, or if you will, being recorded, and thus becoming immortal.

Kurzweil means “short while” in Yiddish and German. it’s a good name for someone who posits that the merging of humans and computers will happen sooner than we all think.

Is this merging something to be afraid of? Remember that people were afraid of the computers when i was a teenager. Now we all love them, most of us anyway. The same will be true of future developments. I am sure of this. People were afraid of the horseless carriage in 1890. Now they’re probably more afraid of the horse.

There are many, many religious, philosophical, ethical questions that arise here and they will need to be confronted rather soon. (And it’s quite possible that computers will be doing the confronting.)

There is a kind of quality check called The Turing Test, where a computer should be able to pass as a human to someone who could not see the machine or the person. Let’s say a computer passes this test.

Is that machine then a person? Or a parrot?

If you scan your whole being, your conscious self, into a computer, then do you have, say, an afterlife as some think we do now? What country are you from? Who is your lover? What about life insurance?

Is anyone in charge? Who, for example, deserves to be immortal? is there a guest list, a gatekeeper, or is everyone invited?

One exciting aspect of this is that other beings on other planets may have reached this point already and may be visiting us. Tales of ghosts and apparitions over the centuries may be stories of scanned souls from elsewhere. “God” may have entered a machine somewhere in the ether, and, being particularly “good,” she may have helped us at certain intervals in our own history.

And then the sulphuric Beelzebub may be such a cyborg also. We cannot discount the possibility of a cybernetic malevolence, given the Manichean good and evil that exists elsewhere in our experience.

Raymond Kurzweil sees no fundamental difference between soul and silicon. Colleagues who declare that he is underestimating the complexity of the human brain are, in his view, underestimating the exponentiality of computer evolution.

People who deny, say, the theory of evolution are very often unable to imagine how much time has passed since the earth began to cool.

Almost countless revolvings of the earth around the sun have occurred during our journey to be who we are.

Unbelievably numerous “experiments” have been made to decide which way all life has developed. Many failures, many successes, many wrong and right turns have been made and accepted or discarded along the way. Unthinkably long periods of time have allowed for rest and creation, success and elimination of bad choices along the way.

Inability to imagine how long past periods have lasted goes with inability to imagine how far into the future we are going to travel.

Big Brother and the Holding Company travel a lot. Five years ago, five years ago, we had no Geographical Positioning Systems, no cell phones, no texting. Other people had these things, but we didn’t have them. Now we use all of these when we are traveling to a degree impossible to imagine when Peter and I founded the band in 1965.

Peter used to bring big, bulky maps on the road and we would pore over them trying to decide which was the best route. This was fun and we also had an overview of the country that we do not have now when we hold an iPhone with a GPS app in our hand, but it is so much easier to get around now.

Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. It’s only a matter of time.

The cell phone is now a computer, unimaginable a very short time ago.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Change is the only unchangeable thing that we experience. Change is unchangeable. You can count on it.

The iPhone you have in your hand is one millionth the size of and one millionth the cost of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer that Raymond Kurzweil used at MIT when we were beginning to play as Big Brother and the Holding Company.

So, what if in forty years, the computer is one millionth the size, one millionth the cost and a thousand times more powerful than the iPhone today. Seems like a logical progression, right?

Use your imagination. Weld a new world.

This is an exciting time to be alive.

We are, as the cliché has ALWAYS gone, at the dawn of a completely new era, but this era seems to be more completely new than any other so far.

Well, something to think about anyway.

We are off to Tulsa, Bosnia and Italy. Of course I will be writing to you about that. See you soon.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

__________________________________________________________

17 July 2011

When James Gurley and i would “go guitaring” this is the first place we went. Don Wehr’s Music City.

Some answers in a multiple choice test will be about popular misconceptions. if you can identify the misconception, you can eliminate that answer.

Ramos, Jim Westbrook, Michael Narada Walden, Michael Carabello.

Don Aters took this photo of Janis Joplin.

Elise Piliwale and I put two sheds on our property. This one holds all of my paintings. I am Sam “Two Sheds” Andrew.

People who had bad adolescent acne:

Victoria Beckham, Dustin Hoffman, Jim Henson, Jack Nicholson, Janis Joplin, Mike Myers.

Minnesota Andrew people:

Anika Forland, Edie Andrew, Hakan Hall, Jason Andrew, Asher Borle, Alyssa Amundson, Harley Amundson, Bryan Anker. Are you getting a kind of Viking vibe with these names here?

Hartley Peavey, Don Wehr and Steve Miller.

Elise Piliwale, Sam Andrew, Tony Seldin.

Stanley (the Mouse) Miller signing a Big Brother poster.

Where my maternal great grandmother Myrtle Burgess started school.

The Circus Maximus in Rome could hold 250,000 people.

Janis snapping her fingers. (Photo: Don Aters)

A centimeter is about as long as the nail on your little finger is wide.

Art and Erin Homs, my brother Stephen’s daughter.

On a farm or ranch, always leave a gate the way you found it.

Bacteria, the tiniest free living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid contains as many as fifty million of them.

Neal Schon, Jim Westbrook, Narada Michael Walden.

Richie Kirch, raconteur excellent.

Owls are the only birds that can see the color blue.

Janis Joplin, Sam Andrew, Winterland, 1968.

Karate means “empty hand” just as karaoke means “empty orchestra.”

Jennifer Espinoza, Maryville, Tennessee.

Bill Andrew, Sam Andrew, 1950.

Nusi Dekker, singer/songwriter, Marin County, California, 2011.

Sly Stone and friend at Don Wehr Music City, San Francisco.

John Lennon’s first girlfriend was Thelma Pickles.

A criminal is a predatory person who is too poor to form a corporation.

You should have one litter box per cat plus one.

The modern monarch is a vermiform appendix. S/he has to be quiet and not call much attention to herself, or otherwise s/he will be removed.

One day there will only be four kings left: diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades.

They’re serious. it must be about money. Carlos even has his glasses on. And Don Wehr is doing the talking.

I didn’t know he was dead. I thought he was a Republican.

My mother’s family.

I always eat healthy food, but I really shouldn’t. Old people need all the preservatives they can get.

Jim Westbrook and Steve Smith.

Guns in school? Piece of cake. Now, guns in church. That’ll take some doing, but, if anyone can do it, we can. (We probably already are doing it.)

When I was young, the Dead were still alive.

Early explorers in the far north thought that the natives called themselves Huskemaws. The English who visited the region applied the abbreviated word “husky” to many things they found there, including the Husky dog. Eventually the people came to be known as Esquimaux, and later as Eskimos, but the older title, husky, clung to the native canine and came to denote sturdiness in general.

To travel is to discover an unsuspected pride in your own country.

Don Wehr and David Garibaldi. I like that handwriting.

Leon Russell and Jeff Westbrook.

I can play these two tunes:

I’m So Miserable Without You, It’s Almost Like Having You Here, and,

How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away.

I love that political advert she did in response to the McCain campaign’s trying to trivialize her. “Wrinkly old white guy.” She probably sunk him with that one line alone.

Every time she wags her tail, she knocks everything off the coffee table.

The great thing about narcissists is you never hear them talking about other people.

The Englishmen detest a siesta.   (Noël Coward)

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

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12 July 2011

We played in Maryville which is a little southwest of Knoxville in eastern Tennessee.This is Appalachia, the Smoky Mountains. Jennifer Espinoza and her mother Mary came from San Anonio, Texas, and it was a pleasure getting to know them.

The venue was The Shed where more than a few musicians have performed. Groups like The Marshall Tucker Band and Leon Russell. July. Hot. I was soaking after the set.

Jennifer Espinoza was our singer this last weekend, and after a somewhat shaky start, she did just fine. Singing our set is not easy no matter who the singer is, and then we don’t rehearse, so the new vocalist has to learn the whole songlist from a CD. We show up and do a sound check and away we go. Can you imagine how nerve wracking this would be? OK, now imagine that you’re eighteen years old. Would you be terrified? I salute this woman’s courage and talent.

Ben Nieves and I try to add a little arranging detail every time we play. it adds up.

We didn’t do Women Is Losers, but we did every other song on this list.

I went to Kubasaki High School in Okinawa, Japan, and we called ourselves The Dragons. The “dragon” here in Maryville has a different meaning. This is a stylized rendering of Thunder Road, the moonshiner highway of legend.

This skull was on a table in the green room at The Shed. It looks like an old friend that i have painted and drawn many times. We have a slightly larger version of this in our living room.

My friend Frank has an SSR, so to see this red one in Maryville was a treat. This is GMC’s version of a hot rod. They mixed and matched, putting one model’s body on another model’s chassis. Frank says the real drawback, though, is that they don’t make parts for these hybrids, so if you have an accident and need a new fender, you have to light a fire and fashion one for yourself.

The next day after playing at the Shed on Saturday, Ben drove us West and South to Dunlap in middle Tennessee near Chattanooga to an interesting place called The Mill, owned and operated by A.J. Jones, a polymath, who has been a composer, bass viol player, archaeologist, historian. A.J.’s place, The Mill, was a Confederate AND Union hospital in the Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant was here with some of his men.

A.J. showed me a few treasures that he had found in the walls of The Mill. This is from a book that had been wedged in there.

This is a Cherokee spearpoint that A.J. found near the house.

He also found the remains of a soldier and this ribbon was on the body.

Projectile points from around The Mill. I found one of these once at my grandfather’s place in Devine, Texas. A “Commanche arrowhead.”

A.J. found these too. This is what marbles looked like when Samuel Clemens was a boy.

It was perhaps even hotter in Dunlap than in Maryville, temperature around 95 in both places. Jennifer and I took this shot with Heather after our set. Jennifer learned to drive in Devine, Texas, a little town south of San Antonio. My mother learned to drive in the same little town, maybe 70, 80 years before Jennifer did.

Kylie the photographer, conscientious, amiable and helpful.

Goodbye and I’ll see you soon.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

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8 July 2011

Big Brother and the Holding Company are going to Maryville and Dunlap, Tennessee, this weekend with Jennifer Espinoza. Jennifer is from San Antonio, Texas, and she has a big voice. Four years ago when she was 14, she sang Piece of My Heart with us and she was a sensation. Now she’s all grown up and i hope we will do a lot of gigs together.

This is a portrait I did of Megan McCauley who recorded a song that I wrote, Shining Glory, and she did such a great version of it.

In an earlier writing, I mentioned that Louis Jordan and Chuck Berry were musicians who transcended their genre and time because of their humor, their narrative ability and their just plain great musicianship. Little did I know then that Chuck took the unforgettable, immortal guitar intro to Johnny B. Goode directly from Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like A Woman.” In Louis Jordan’s band, the whole horn section played the riff, but it’s definitely recognizable. Chuck took it and made it so beautiful on the guitar. Listen to Louis Jordan. He’s as much fun as Chuck Berry is. These are two people who make life worth living.

People at Intel say that microprocessor speed will douible every eighteen months for at least ten years, but i think they are being conservative. The computer will evolve faster than that and one day not too far off either, it will surpass us. Do you know the word “singularity?” Let’s just say for now that computers are evolving faster than we are. It’s only a matter of time, and probably not much time, before computers surpass humans in intelligence and even intuition. At some point, computers and humans will probably became one species.

Cage Okada’s contemporary Hokusai photograph.

Everyday People. Don Wehr and Sly Stone.

Erin Homs and Emily Bullis Rollins. They call me Uncle Sam.

Many people who keep a gun at home for safety are the same ones who refuse to wear a seat belt.

Women know less than men but they understand more.

Sam Andrew and Alex Call.

The lines at the bottom of The Statue of Liberty, composed in 1883 by New York City poet Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew, whose work was praised by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, were almost completely ignored by critics and public of the day. She wrote the lines for a literary auction and they expressed her belief in America as a refuge for the downtrodden. Sixteen years after her death from cancer in 1887, the sonnet’s final five lines were cast in bronze, and they cast a spell over us.

The distance between your fingertips when your arms are outstretched at shoulder level is equal to your height. The drawing called Vitruvian Man, attributed to Leonardo, but much older, dramatically illustrates many such proportions.

The Mission District meets Long Island. Don Wehr and Carmine Appice.

My mother’s parents.

Michael J. Fox. is a friend of mine. He’s a public defender in San Francisco. Good man.

Poison Ivy: Leaflets three, Let it be.

In Puritan times, to be born on a Sunday was interpreted as a sign of great sin.  Of course, everything was interpreted as a sign of great sin, so it really seemed like nothing was a sign of great sin, even a great sin. You know how that works?

Sam Andrew was on one side in the Civil War. Joseph Mann was on the other. What if they shot each other and both died? Think of all the worthy people who have died in wars, never to reach their potential, not to mention all of their issue who would otherwise never have existed. What a loss. We hear in each biography of a great person who barely escapes death at several junctures. Life is so tenuous, accidental, coincidental, arbitrary.

Don Wehr using his middle finger to tell Bill Graham something. Bill’s mouth is open, but it looks as if Don is holding his own here. No mean feat. And eating a popsicle at the same time? My hero. Go, Don, go.

Give in to temptation. Any old person will tell you that it’s things you didn’t do that you will regret.

Among the numerous examples of gloves discovered in norhtern parts of ancient Europe are “bag gloves,” sheaths of animal skin that reach to the elbow, and isn’t this a good idea that should be brought back?

The Happy Stone.

Churches welcome all denominations, but greatly prefer tens and twentys.

(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock (1954) Bill Haley and His Comets. Danny Cedrone was the guitarist on this and he played a solo on the tune that is still amazing. For this, he received $ 21. (It must be said that Danny had already played that solo on another tune, Rock This Joint, recorded in 1952, so, come on, did he really deserve that fat $ 21 paycheck? He was recycling. He was years ahead of his time. In every way.

Doh Wehr and Greg Errico.

Carlos Santana and Reese Marin at Don Wehr’s Music City, Columbus Avenue, San Francisco.

Whatever you believe in, I hope it makes you a better person to everyone in your life… including your cat and dog.

Aynsley Dunbar’s historic kit

Not patriotic, matriotic. Love your whole mother earth, not just one country on her surface.

Kate Russo playing a D chord. She could be, but probably is not, playing Down On Me.

Chad Quist with Sophia Ramos and another beautiful woman in red.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 1 1/100th of this canvas should be worth ten words, so what would they be?

Janis Joplin doing her famed snow angel ritual.

Elise Piliwale with The Theatre of Light.

Kathi McDonald looking pretty darned cute.

Chuck Jones and James Gurley, 1966.

Walk, Don’t Run was written by Johnny Smith, the jazz guitarist.

Albert Einstein couldn’t speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he was mentally retarded. Probably what was happening was that he had so many thoughts crowding in all the time, that he couldn’t choose one path for speech. This must happen to all of us at one time or another. David Peel and Lenny Kaye.

Elise Piliwale who was born in the same hospital as Barack Obama.

Greg Errico, Camen and Don Wehr.

In Germany in the XVIth century, the first pharmacopoeia was published and it listed hundreds of drugs and medicinal chemicals with explicit directions for preparing them. Drugs that had previously varied widely  in concentrations, and even in constituents, were now stringently defined by the text, which spawned versions in Switzerland, Italy and England. This was the beginning of the modern era in pharmacology.

High in Greece.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

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5 July 2011

South Bend, Indiana. and Naperville, Illinois.

I only realize now that South Bend, Indiana, reminded me of Booth Tarkington, a writer from the late 19th, early 20th century, who wrote stories and novels about his Indiana. Many of the homes and buildings that I saw there this last week dated from Tarkington’s time, solid, old structures seemingly impervious to the passing of time.

South Bend is the home of the University of Notre Dame and on our day off, I walked the six miles to and back from the school. This is the Main Building on campus. That dome is covered with paper thin gold leaf.

The building has five floors and the inside dome has this painting.

How much of a coincidence is this? in Warren, Ohio, last week Peter, Dave and I visited a museum of two brothers, the Packards, who built their motorcars in the late 19th century. In South Bend, Indiana, right down the street from our hotel, i walked by the home of Clement Studebaker, who with his brother Henry made  automobiles. Clement and Henry were blacksmiths and they made good carriages before they turned to car manufacture. So, two brothers in two separate towns. I visit them a week apart. They later become partners in the Studebaker/Packard enterprise. I mean, isn’t that a little Twilight Zonish? This is Clement’s house.

And this is a Studebaker. When this car came out in the 1950s, the styling was so different from other cars in the USA. The Studebaker looked Italian because an Italian designed it.

Tim Murphy, our agent, gave me this pass. This image is quickly becoming iconic.

Teressa Wilcox, a very creative woman, good singer and songwriter, lover of Ben Nieves, our guitar player.

Peter Albin with his Danelectro, Naperville, Illinois.

Dave Getz in the rent a car on the way to the hotel.

Too cool for school. Ben Nieves, whose name means “snows,” but sweats would have been more like it. Our hottest gig so far this year.

Jude Gold, Cathy Richardson, Sam Andrew. Cathy always does a good set. She and Ben are our Scream Team. Jude Gold is a fine guitar player and an editor for Guitar Player Magazine. He recently wrote a most interesting article on Guthrie Govan. Jude, who reminds me of Joel Hoekstra, says that he has been playing guitar “since the Carter Administration.” I told him that I have been playing since, er, well, the Truman Administration, and have had a band since the Eisenhower Administration, so there. Am I proud of that? No. All it takes is living awhile. Anyone can do it, although a great many have not done it.

All my life I have studied Japanese, and i know less of it now than ever before. I take a little children’s book on the road and read it in the car. Those six large characters across the top are called kanji (Chinese letters). The Japanese, with their highly inflected language, chose to write it with Chinese script, the letters of a completely different language (far more different than English and, say, Romanian). it would be like writing Latin (quite similar in structure, by the way, to Japanese) with pictographs. And now generations of Japanese children have to memorize these “letters,” really words. When a Japanese graduates from high school, s/he is expected to know 1,000 of these. To read a newspaper, you have to know, perhaps 1,500 – 3,000. A PhD in Japanese, now I’m guessing, would need to know 15,000 kanji. This is a feat of memory unparalleled in our culture. Why wonder about Japanese graphic skills? My study of this language led to my becoming a painter. The six big kanji, by the way, mean (left to right) pillar,  concentrate, wear, talk, short and coal. The kanji are like Latin or Greek roots in English. They are used in combination with other kanji to form completely different concepts. “Hydrography” is a word you can break down into “hydro-” water and “graphos” write. The same is true with these kanji. On the highway in Japan, you very often see the directive “chuu i” (Caution). The second kanji from the left. I have circled the combination on the very left under this character. Japanese is, BY FAR, the world’s most complicated major language, both as to grammar and to writing. As I say, I know less of it now than when I began to study it at age 15.

On the beginning of my walk to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, I came across this signpost. The main arteries, north and south, crossed here, a block from my hotel. Today the main north and south arteries, I am just guessing, are probably Interstates 35 and 80. I know that 35 runs through Austin, Texas, and goes on up into Minnesota, and 80, which must be a child of the Lincoln Highway, seems to run East West from New York to San Francisco.

This is one good guy, Donnie Baldwin. He plays drums with the Starship, but mainly he’s a decent human being. Always good to see Donnie.

Fito de la Parra from Canned Heat adjusting his drum set at a sound check. Fito, like Frida Kahlo, is Mexican/Austrian or Austrian/Mexican, so he’s having a whole war right inside himself. Both Fito and Frida are good human beings and I am encantado de conocer los dos. Very lucky and happy to know them both.

Ben Nieves, the fierce one, nailing it on Ball and Chain.

Harvey Mandel. checking his effects at the sound check. Harvey, the master of tone, always comes on with Big Brother and does his sound check while we do ours. Canned Heat are cannibals when it comes to sound checks. They all descend on the stage, serious and full of purpose, to make sure their sound is right.

Mariela, puertoriqueña, charming, amiga de Patrick Murphy.

We played this set in Naperville. Is it hard to read? One of these days, I am going to reduce it to letters. D  C  N  C  B  S  H  W  P  B. I bet we can read these. Or, semaphore flags, remember those? We did all right on these tunes. Ben and I played Summertime in C minor, you’re welcome, Cathy, and we did it almost as well. I have said before that these singers never realize that C minor is very different from G minor or A minor where Janis did these tunes. It’s an entirely different idea, and, god forbid, that we should depart from playing it perfectly in this imperfect universe. “Oh, so that’s what it is.” You bet, Cathy. That’s what it is.

Noah Murphy, probably trying to relax after a day of July 4th fireworks. For Noah, this is slowing down. It’s like visiting your grandparents, remember?

Patrick Murphy.

Sam Andrew, Ben Nieves, Tim Murphy.

Slick Aguilar plays guitar like a star. He’s hip, he’s flip, he’s aboard the Starship.

Such a strong face. This is Snorky, Michael Eisenberg. Competent, efficient, in proportion, matter of fact, he’s all right, Jack.

Tim Murphy, our exclusive agent.

Someone handed this to me in Ohio. I assume that it is real and redeemable. After all, this is the Midwaste, right? Everyone’s honest and clean. No hidden agenda here.

Ben told me to put this in my blog, so voilà.

How I learn Italian. Reading is the quickest way for me. I read what I can, and underline words I don’t know, then later look them up in the dictionary. This is how I learned to read English, so I figure it will work for other idioms. This is a rather amusing passage by the way.

Ahhh, if only ‘t were true. All access to a life of happiness and contentment?

Hey, where’d you go? I didn’t mean to go all psychedelic on you. C U soon.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

__________________________________________________________

3 July 2011

Backstage in Thailand: Sophia Ramos, Alan Sadd, Sam Andrew, Elise Piliwale, Eugene Skuratowicz.

The infinity character on the keyboard is called the lemniscate.

Sleeping bees.

It is wise to be ignorant of things not worth knowing.

If you have a new car, get the brakes checked once a year. With a more mature model, every six months.

At 151 West 34th Street and Broadway (Herald Square), New York, on 8 November 1902, Macy’s opened its new flagship store becoming “The World’s Largest Store.”

Stela Mandel and Fred Nocella, good artists.

This is the day we found Sopia Ramos who is standing all the way on the left. For some reason, the man who is kneeling center decided that he wanted a lot of women to do “Janis Joplin” songs for his Summer Stage series in Central Park 2003. So he assembled these fine singers and then put Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Kozmic Blues Band together to accompany them. The afternoon worked well and we met some wonderful people. Sophia came on, sang Ball and Chain, and stopped the show. i just couldn’t believe how good she was and I hired her for our next gig. Milini Khan, Chaka Khan’s daughter, is here, bent knees near center. Simone, Nina Simone’s daughter, is second from right. It was so much fun working with all these people, not to mention being reunited with some of the Kozmic Blues Band guys for the first time since 1970.

i was surprised when I started getting old. I thought it just happened to other people. I bet dying is like that too.

On a tombstone:

Invicem Res Bona Est Non Plus Dentharpagarum.

(On the other hand, the good news is no more dentistry.)

Margaret and Michael Joplin.

Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons. His mother was a sixteen year old beauty queen. His best friend growing up was Harper Lee, the fair haired tomboy, who would later write To Kill A Mockingbird.

How Susan Zelinsky keeps from being bored backstage.

Quizzify (to cause to look odd). If this word were stretched across two triple word scores in Scrabble, it would total 419 points, including the 50 point bonus and the double letter bonus for the z.

Sam Andrew, Lisa Battle, Kate Russo.

Bruce Conforth has on his Facebook page a list of events that the media are more or less ignoring. This is one of them:

Members of Congress continue to mention Christians as a threat to national security. For example, during a recent congressional hearing, U.S. Repreentative Sheila Jackson Lee warned that “Christian militants” might try to “bring down the country” and that such groups need to be investigated. Fanaticism and fundamentalism must be closely watched no matter what comforting and familial masks they may wear.

Human beings and the two toed sloth are the only land animals that typically mate face to face.

At 88, on Christmas day 1977, Charlie Chaplin died of “old age” at his estate in Switzerland overlooking Lake Geneva. March 1978, a Pole and a Bulgarian took Charlie’s coffin with him in it and demanded a ransom of $ 600,000. The Pole, who was the brains of the operation, stayed on the phone with Charlie’s widow Oona so long that police were able to trace his call, and the two geniuses were arrested. The Bulgarian was given a suspended sentence, and the mastermind of the kidnapping was jailed for four years.

I love this. The man with the theodolite, the deer, the banjo, the Martin guitar. This is the real Woodstock.

When a Senator dies, the governor of the state fills the vacancy by an appointment, but the Constitution (Article I, Section 2) requires that members of the House be chosen “by the People of the several states.”

Seals can sleep underwater and surface for air without even waking.

Pieter Brueghel did a painting (Childrens’ Games 1560) showing children of his time playing at spinning hoops, patting mud pies, tossing jacks, dressing dolls, teetering on stilts, shooting marbles and other activities. Many of these games were thousands of years old then. Hide and Seek, as I see from watcihing my cat play it, is older than humans.

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” President William Howard Taft said this in a speech in 1909, but this line has been credited to the revolutionary Robespierre (1758-1794), Napoleon, Josef Stalin, Richard Nixon, and several other rascals.

Guadagnava molto facendo divertire la gente, ma la sua più cospicua fonte di introiti era il gioco.

He earned a lot by making people have fun, but his most conspicuous entrée was card playing.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”    Franklin Delanlo Roosevelt, second inaugural address, 1937.

The Sam Andrew Band, Houston, Texas. Clayton Dyess (on the right) played with Dizzy Gillespie.

John Cipollina, maybe at The Santa Venitia Armory, 1967.

During conscription for World War II, there were nine documented cases of men with three testicles.

Calling card, 1860.

Julie Knight, Christopher Skura, Muir Woods, California.

A decibel (dB) is a logarithmic measure of sound intensity. Zero dB represents the quietest sound that a normal human can hear. A jet airliner 500 feet overhead is about 115 dB, and rock music? Maybe 110? It varies. In the right circumstances, even Lawrence Welk or Burt Bacharach or Barry Manilow, they could ALL be too loud. it’s all relative as we used to say in graduate school. Any music you don’t like is too loud. Isn’t that one of the defining characteristics? Mozart was too loud. Beethoven was definitely too loud. Wagner was agony. They were all too loud. I am proud to carry on this tradition.

Sam Andrew and Ike Turner, Ko Samui, Thailand.

Character is how you act when no one is looking.

Kate Russo and Josie.

Wilhelmina Andrew and Sam Andrew, one year.

Samantha at Aroma Café, 2011.

Rabia Yamazawa, 2011.

Elephants perform greeting ceremonies when a member of the group returns after a long time away. The welcoming animals spin around, like Deadheads, flap their ears and trumpet like Louis Armstrong.

In Egyptian texts, the name Kush alternates with that of Nubia to designate the region extending southward from Aswan to Khartoum. The name Nubia is from the ancient Egyptian word for gold, nub, which abounded there.

A syzygy occurs when three astronomical bodies are aligned. The “zygy” part is a “yoke,” actually the very same word, through Latin “jugum” as in “conjugal.” “Syzygy” is a “with yoking,” rather like the word “synergy,” which is a “with energy.”

At 23rd Street and Broadway, Booth’s Theatre, 8 November 1880, Sarah Bernhardt made her American début. Edwin Booth, America’s greatest tragedian, wanted the USA to hold its own dramatically. He bought a house at 16 Gramercy Park, had Stanford White remodel it, and then made it into The Players Club, a salon for the New York theatrical world. “Sic semper tyrannis!” Which Booth said that? And why?

Our manager Albert Grossman lived in Gramercy Park. He and Janis Joplin and I used to sit in his large bay window during the summer twilight and plan our futures.

Sam Andrew, Janis Joplin, James Gurley, 1968.

Ich mag das hier am liebsten!

(I like this one the best.)  Michaela oder Micaela, wie du willst.

E non preoccuparti se non hai l’aspetto del giovane fusto. A lei piacciono gli uomini maturi.

And don’t worry if you are not a hard body. She likes mature men.

The president can decide not to act on a bill, neither signing it nor formally vetoing it. If the president does not sign and return a bill within ten days of receiving it (not counting Sundays), the bill becomes law.

Lisa Mills and Sam Andrew at Aroma Café. June, 2011.

“Though I am in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.” Vincent van Gogh.

This is only one of the many beautiful things that van Gogh said and felt. His letters to his brother Theo are a testament to the human spirit. Vincent was such a good person, a remarkable man, who, if he had never painted at all, would still be one of the most interesting and passionately interested people who ever lived.

Male boars form harems.

Singers we love: Zelinsky, Christenson, Keating, Morris, Paige, Asher.

La crème de la crème de chez nous. The best of the best where we live.

Bis später, ja? Hasta luego.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

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