Diet tip
In an effort to curb my eating habits, I’ve rigged my kitchen to play jimi Hendrix playing “all along the watchtower” when I enter the room. Not sure how this will change things.
RIP Earl Scruggs: The Story Of ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’
More than any other work, Earl Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” established the banjo as the star instrument in bluegrass music. That song is still perhaps best known as the accompanying theme for a pair of roving gangsters in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde.” A bright and quick tune written by a quiet North Carolina country musician that introduced American bluegrass to new audiences around the world.
Earl Scruggs is probably the best-known banjo picker in the world. And even people who don’t know his name know was is called the Scruggs style of playing when they hear it, a crackling, syncopated style in which the player uses the thumb and two fingers fitted with plastic and metal picks to play chords, melody and cascading rolls of notes.
Scruggs recalls that a crisp finger picking style with thumb and forefinger or a thumb and two fingers—similar to classical guitar playing—was the most common way to play the five-string banjo in his western North Carolina hometown. Scruggs remembers when he was four years old going to his uncle’s home and hearing a blind banjo picker named Mack Woolbright.
“He’d sit in the rocking chair, and he’d pick some and it was just amazing,” Scruggs recalls. “I couldn’t imagine—he was the first, what I call a good banjo player.”
Scruggs was hooked. His father—who had recently died—had owned a banjo, and Earl started to play it even before he was big enough to hold it. He started with just the thumb and forefinger, but one day when he was about 10 years old, something new happened.
“Well, my brother and I had been into a fuss with each other,” he remembers, “and I’d gone into a room by myself, and I had the banjo in there. And I was, I guess, pouting. And all of a sudden, I realized I was picking with three fingers. And that excited me to no end. I was playing a tune called ‘Reuben.’ I had the banjo run down in D tuning, playing that. I went running out of the room and there was my brother—so sudden—I came out saying, `I got it. I got it. I got it.’” (Paul Brown / The NPR 100 Most Important American Music Works of the 20th Century)
Photo: Tom Pich/National Endowment for the Arts
“Tra-la-la, going to the deli to buy some donuts, tra-la-la, hope there are no animal paparazzi along the way, tra-la-la, can’t wait to eat me some donuts and maybe a slushie, tra-la-la, I love donuts and slushies, tra-la-la, it’s such a beautiful day today, look at the green grass, tra-la-la, going downhill makes it easier on the hooves, tra-la-la, I love San Diego in springtime, tra-la-la, donuts and slushies here I come, HEY YOU DON’T TAKE MY PICTURE, I’M GALLOPIN’ HERE!!!”
Never changing but always different.
What is it about customization that becomes a requirement, almost a burden to always be changing to show the novelty of something different. Every app I get has at least a hundred different skins that can be plugged-in, attached, and downloaded to give your user experience a new, sparkling, different look from one hour to another every sparkling hour of your waking life. I can appreciate wanting to be different and of all people I am definitely exercising my snowflake muscles of individuality but it gets ridiculous at a point. I think it would show some merit if one were required to carve there own profile out of wood as it were. You can have a cool colorful flowery background on your bookface page but only if you KNOW how to do it yourself. If you can’t master the craft then you don’t get to wear the cool outfit. So yeah…
Anish Kapoor’s famous Cloudgate, in Millennium Park, Chicago, now has an equally mesmerising choreographed light show, Luminous Field, by Luftwerk, enhancing the experience of the work furthermore.
