Belltown Bent

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine

Hard to say if he would've been out 'til quarter to three, but there's no doubt that I'd still love him if Jimi Hendrix had made sixty-four. Born November 27, 1942, today would have been that day.

Back in 1969, long before I'd heard of Belltown, or become quite so Bent, I was already very familiar with Seattle's favorite son. I took this picture of Jimi at the third of three shows he did at the Waikiki Shell in Honolulu, on June 1st of that year.

I went to the first show on Friday. He stopped playing after about 30 minutes or so because of a bad hum in his amp - some sort of electrical problem. I don't remember much about Saturday's show, but I'm pretty sure I was there. The third show, a make-good for Friday's buzz-out, was one of those nights. A big moon coming up over the Diamond Head crater, gates open to all comers, Jimi in all his glory, and I had my very first SLR and a cheap telephoto lens.

I thought today would be a good day to break out this old image and remember an extraordinary man who left us too soon. And, as Paul McCartney (the other left-handed cultural icon born in '42 - he turned 64 last June) suggested in his song*, we'll open a bottle of wine and remember Jimi on his birthday. Luckily, like Paul, we got older too.

*While this song, like most Beatles songs, is credited to Lennon and McCartney, When I'm Sixty-Four  was one of the first songs McCartney wrote, while he and John were still the Quarrymen.

Mountains, murmurations, and Mortimer

This flock of European starlings flying by the Bent one recent stormy dusk, might also be referred to as a "murmuration", should you have a particularly poetic or literary bent inclination. My friend, the County Clerk, told me so, and more. But he didn't tell me why.

It seems these birds have considerable vocalizing prowess. They don't have a particularly tuneful song of their own. But they manage to enhance their own clicking and shrieking with the songs of other birds, or, well, Belltown car alarms. Clever.

But folks had observed this hundreds of years before these birds shared the horizon with the Olympic Mountains, or any horizon on this continent, for that matter. In 1784, about the time he was writing his Piano Concerto in G major, K 453,  Mozart purchased a starling for a pet. Much to his pleasure, the bird learned to sing the Concerto's theme, although it has been said it tended to sharpen all the G naturals.

Nearly 200 years earlier, Shakespeare (who often cast birds in his plays) wrote a bit part for a starling in Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3 in which hot-headed Hotspur, forbidden by Henry to speak of Mortimer, threatens to train a starling to repeatedly murmur nothing but the man's name just to torque the King. And that, folks, is all he needed to write.

Three hundred years, and countless thousands of performances of the play, later,  it's 1890 in New York City's Central Park. An eccentric drug manufacturer and Shakespeare fan, Eugene Schieffelin, on a mission to introduce every old world bird the bard ever mentioned into the United States, releases 60 imported European starlings. The birds, unnaturally (and ironically) enough, took up residence in the eaves of the Museum of Natural History. The "murmuration" quickly outgrew the building, the park, and the state. They crossed the Mississippi by 1928, reached the west coast by 1942, and by the mid-80's some 200,000,000 starlings occupied every state but Hawaii.

This proliferation, some would say invasion, has caused many to mutter, much less murmur, some pretty nasty things about starlings. Farmers in particular, although I doubt they share Henry's disdain of Mortimer. I kind of like them, but I'm just a bent Belltowner watching them fly by the mountains. You can decide, or not, for yourself.

Learn more: Wikipedia | Humane Society | Cornell Lab of Orinthology | National Geographic | Starling Talk | Christian Science Monitor

Heaven Down Here

If you've followed The Bent for a year or more, or scanned through Musicians in Performance, you know how I feel about Tuck & Patti. A year ago I wrote about Tuck, the guitarist, but it was Patti who provided the context. In Tuck's words,

"When we are playing together, I play almost exclusively for Patti. It is as if nothing else exists. I have come to the conclusion that by doing so, I am properly playing for God and for the audience."

The result, for the audience, is transcendent. We are no longer in a night club, no longer watching a performance. We are with this man and woman, seeing into their hearts, feeling our own, basking in the glow of the love they share with each other, with God, and with us. They bring it to us.

"Heaven Down Here"

This morning my friend Hank, The County Clerk, wrote a warm remembrance for his friend Wendell Burgess. Wendell was a gardener. Or as he preferred to be called, a "yardener." Hank is also a man of the dirt. He hopes, for his friend's sake, folks "yarden" in heaven. Certainly, Wendell's seeds, humor, advice, and wisdom have already been cultivated in Hank's garden, and they will continue to bloom in Hank's heart, and garden, wherever he may plant them. Wendell may be "yardening" in heaven, but, like Tuck & Patti, he's already brought some heaven down here.

Tuck & Patti return to Seattle November 14-16 - a little bit of heaven at the end of an alley. Share their love.

The good, the bad, and the nefarious

Their music tests the boundaries and cross-overs between multiple genre. It is dramatic, virtuosic, inventive, and edgy. It is, in a word, good.

The Bad Plus throw out convention and breathe fire into next week's Jazz Alley calendar, with startling original material mixed amongst their acclaimed reconstructed covers of classic and contemporary rock. Definitely hot.

Also hot, these days, is the topic of Digital Rights Management (DRM). There are a number of blogs discussing the pros and cons of the technology. The most nefarious scheme I've heard of was created by Sony BMG. They embedded a DRM application in some CD's, including (ironically) TBP's Suspicious Activity? that used malware techniques to install and cloak itself in PC system software, sometimes resulting in system crashes and data loss. Mark Russinovich of SystemInternals helped break the story and expose Sony last year. The Bad Plus, to their credit, are good guys and had no prior knowledge of Sony's foul play. Sony later settled with their violated customers. You've got until December 31st to claim your pittance compensation if you  got smacked by one of those bad CDs.

More images: The Bad Plus live at Bumbershoot 2004

It's geese

Canada geese, actually, but their Post-Intelligencer fly-by leaves no doubt they're passing through hometown (Belltown) airspace. Urban airspace. Passing, as in "flying from spot to spot", not as in "migrating."

This gaggle on the go was about to settle into some sweet Myrtle Edwards Park sod, so nicely stretching along hundreds of yards of Elliott Bay. Maybe not as curvaceous and cultivated as the golf courses many geese prefer, but a very nice place to hang, we collectively agree.

It's a long and interesting story (and natural-history writer David B. Williams has already done a great job telling it) which, made short, goes something like this: until 1968 Canada geese didn't nest west of the Cascades, they just flew by. Over-hunting and habitat loss contributed to declining populations across the country. Concerned biologists launched Operation Mother Goose to save dam threatened eggs and introduce the gooslings to less threatened habitat. Seattle's shoreline, acre by precious acre, transitioned from tall trees and dense undergrowth to yards, parks, and of course, golf courses. A handful of goose generations later, "Mother's" geese knew yards, parks, and golf courses aren't very threatening.

The story goes south from there, unlike the geese. Too many birds, too much poop, perceived health threats, and, eventually, euthanasia. Yes, around the turn of the century - this century - each summer (when they molt and can't fly) thousands of geese were rounded up and gassed. Fortunately, from this Bent perspective, reason returned in 2004 when PAWS and the Humane Society worked with City officials and citizen volunteers to launch the Seattle Goose Program and place a moratorium on "lethal removal" through 2006.

I hope these efforts prove successful and are continued into the future. The geese are alright by me. I'm happy to watch where I put my feet if it means I can watch these wonderful Branta Canadensis fly through the neighborhood.

Learn more: canadageese.org | Canada Goose Hall of Shame