To continue yesterday’s train of thought concerning internet fixation, “turn on, tune in, drop out”, the famous phrase coined by Tomothy Leary in the 1960’s might now be “link up, download, pop up”. People might start thinking about staying in touch instead of getting on line, but anyway who am I to question the benefits of the technology I’m using at this very moment?
I’m in Lisbon Portugal right now, a fantastic place especially at this time of year. I got here just in time for the festivities of the patron Santo Antonio, what a party!!
Here’s something typically Portuguese: I went into a café just now to have an after lunch Ginja (a liquor made with a cherry of some sort), and saw this sign: “We are obliged to enforce the smoking prohibition”. Isn’t that a nice way to say “NO SMOKING”? Roundabout yes, but very polite. “NICHT RAUCHEN”!!
Cruising the world on Google Earth the other day, I found the actual house where I was born. This is no ordinary house; we’re talking about a very large 3 story early 1900s neo-colonial farmhouse. It was our family house and sat on 40 acres of land just 35 miles Northwest of Manhattan, our closest neighbor an 18 hole golfcourse, now Fairway Park, the actual golfcourse having been relocated by a couple of miles and renamed “New York Country Club”. I used to get my mother to make lemonade so I could hawk it to the golfers at the 8th. hole which bordered our apple grove. I also used to try and steal golfballs if they were hit close enough. Our other neighbor was a missile site, muscles permanently flexed with cold war fixation, just waiting for those nasty commies to try something funny so we could let loose with the ballistic toys we’d been polishing and fondling for just such an occasion.
This is not to say we were millionaires at all, in fact when my father decided to emigrate and try his hand in Europe, the whole caboodle went for US$70.000, quite a bit in those days (1958), but still no fortune. I was 8 years old at the time and I remember the auctioneer who came to sell all the furniture and whatnot. Seeing as how I had so much prior experience, he hired me to sell lemonade but then slipped off without paying me. This was my first job and should have served as a warning to what the world held in store for those ho don’t watch their step, but I paid no heed and and entered the music business anyway...
So I decided it might be fun to try and find out some more about the house, like who lived in it now, maybe get some cool pictures, an update on the history in the past 50 years? By the looks of the Google earth aerial shot I would say it’s now some sort of a private clinic or a club house or something, definitely not a single family home, I imagine the heating bill alone would be enough to support a jazz musician for a whole year.
In spite of my offerings: original 1950’s aerial photographs I posess, and other little tidbits of information and snapshots, my pleas for information and 21st century photographs were completely ignored by the present neighbors. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that they must be afraid of terrorists. I could be a mad bomber or something angling for information which I could later use to blow myself up in the middle of their golfcourse or something. That would completely ruin an otherwise perfect afternoon for someone working on their handicap...
Used to be commies, now it’s muslims, Spring Valley lives in fear.... By a Spring Valley blog I recently saw, I understand that at one point there was some concern about the growing jewish population.
Must rush off, my last day in Lisbon, have to go see the sunset...
segunda-feira, 14 de junho de 2010
Lisbon 2010
To continue yesterday’s train of thought concerning internet fixation, “turn on, tune in, drop out”, the famous phrase coined by Tomothy Leary in the 1960’s might now be “link up, download, pop up”. People might start thinking about staying in touch instead of getting on line, but anyway who am I to question the benefits of the technology I’m using at this very moment?
I’m in Lisbon Portugal right now, a fantastic place especially at this time of year. I got here just in time for the festivities of the patron Santo Antonio, what a party!!
Here’s something typically Portuguese: I went into a café just now to have an after lunch Ginja (a liquor made with a cherry of some sort), and saw this sign: “We are obliged to enforce the smoking prohibition”. Isn’t that a nice way to say “NO SMOKING”? Roundabout yes, but very polite. “NICHT RAUCHEN”!!
Cruising the world on Google Earth the other day, I found the actual house where I was born. This is no ordinary house; we’re talking about a very large 3 story early 1900s neo-colonial farmhouse. It was our family house and sat on 40 acres of land just 35 miles Northwest of Manhattan, our closest neighbor an 18 hole golfcourse, now Fairway Park, the actual golfcourse having been relocated by a couple of miles and renamed “New York Country Club”. I used to get my mother to make lemonade so I could hawk it to the golfers at the 8th. hole which bordered our apple grove. I also used to try and steal golfballs if they were hit close enough. Our other neighbor was a missile site, muscles permanently flexed with cold war fixation, just waiting for those nasty commies to try something funny so we could let loose with the ballistic toys we’d been polishing and fondling for just such an occasion.
This is not to say we were millionaires at all, in fact when my father decided to emigrate and try his hand in Europe, the whole caboodle went for US$70.000, quite a bit in those days (1958), but still no fortune. I was 8 years old at the time and I remember the auctioneer who came to sell all the furniture and whatnot. Seeing as how I had so much prior experience, he hired me to sell lemonade but then slipped off without paying me. This was my first job and should have served as a warning to what the world held in store for those ho don’t watch their step, but I paid no heed and and entered the music business anyway...
So I decided it might be fun to try and find out some more about the house, like who lived in it now, maybe get some cool pictures, an update on the history in the past 50 years? By the looks of the Google earth aerial shot I would say it’s now some sort of a private clinic or a club house or something, definitely not a single family home, I imagine the heating bill alone would be enough to support a jazz musician for a whole year.
In spite of my offerings: original 1950’s aerial photographs I posess, and other little tidbits of information and snapshots, my pleas for information and 21st century photographs were completely ignored by the present neighbors. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that they must be afraid of terrorists. I could be a mad bomber or something angling for information which I could later use to blow myself up in the middle of their golfcourse or something. That would completely ruin an otherwise perfect afternoon for someone working on their handicap...
Used to be commies, now it’s muslims, Spring Valley lives in fear.... By a Spring Valley blog I recently saw, I understand that at one point there was some concern about the growing jewish population.
Must rush off, my last day in Lisbon, have to go see the sunset...
I’m in Lisbon Portugal right now, a fantastic place especially at this time of year. I got here just in time for the festivities of the patron Santo Antonio, what a party!!
Here’s something typically Portuguese: I went into a café just now to have an after lunch Ginja (a liquor made with a cherry of some sort), and saw this sign: “We are obliged to enforce the smoking prohibition”. Isn’t that a nice way to say “NO SMOKING”? Roundabout yes, but very polite. “NICHT RAUCHEN”!!
Cruising the world on Google Earth the other day, I found the actual house where I was born. This is no ordinary house; we’re talking about a very large 3 story early 1900s neo-colonial farmhouse. It was our family house and sat on 40 acres of land just 35 miles Northwest of Manhattan, our closest neighbor an 18 hole golfcourse, now Fairway Park, the actual golfcourse having been relocated by a couple of miles and renamed “New York Country Club”. I used to get my mother to make lemonade so I could hawk it to the golfers at the 8th. hole which bordered our apple grove. I also used to try and steal golfballs if they were hit close enough. Our other neighbor was a missile site, muscles permanently flexed with cold war fixation, just waiting for those nasty commies to try something funny so we could let loose with the ballistic toys we’d been polishing and fondling for just such an occasion.
This is not to say we were millionaires at all, in fact when my father decided to emigrate and try his hand in Europe, the whole caboodle went for US$70.000, quite a bit in those days (1958), but still no fortune. I was 8 years old at the time and I remember the auctioneer who came to sell all the furniture and whatnot. Seeing as how I had so much prior experience, he hired me to sell lemonade but then slipped off without paying me. This was my first job and should have served as a warning to what the world held in store for those ho don’t watch their step, but I paid no heed and and entered the music business anyway...
So I decided it might be fun to try and find out some more about the house, like who lived in it now, maybe get some cool pictures, an update on the history in the past 50 years? By the looks of the Google earth aerial shot I would say it’s now some sort of a private clinic or a club house or something, definitely not a single family home, I imagine the heating bill alone would be enough to support a jazz musician for a whole year.
In spite of my offerings: original 1950’s aerial photographs I posess, and other little tidbits of information and snapshots, my pleas for information and 21st century photographs were completely ignored by the present neighbors. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that they must be afraid of terrorists. I could be a mad bomber or something angling for information which I could later use to blow myself up in the middle of their golfcourse or something. That would completely ruin an otherwise perfect afternoon for someone working on their handicap...
Used to be commies, now it’s muslims, Spring Valley lives in fear.... By a Spring Valley blog I recently saw, I understand that at one point there was some concern about the growing jewish population.
Must rush off, my last day in Lisbon, have to go see the sunset...
domingo, 13 de junho de 2010
I’ve been told to write a blog. Why? I’m not quite sure about that yet, but I’ve been told that since I’ve always led an “out of the ordinary” life, I may eventually have hoards of avid readers filling up the concert halls which often prove difficult to fill despite my “out of the ordinary” musical skills and “artistic excellence”. I’m a musician, I play Double Bass, go on and google me. Of course the thought has crossed my mind that being so “out of the ordinary” might not be such an easy pitch, but the fact remains that I just don’t think I am so “out of the ordinary” anyway. In the ‘80s some enthusiastic travel guide journalist labeled me as “the exotic american musician who runs a Jazz bar in Búzios”. I certainly don’t consider myself to be exotic either, although living in Búzios could have been considered such, in those days a sleepy seaside village a few hours from Rio de Janeiro.
My name, Bruce Henri, was given to me exactly 60 years ago in New York. The family name Leitman, was attached pro forma at the same time, but on the Brazilian music scene where I have hummed, strummed, pulled, picked, and plucked for the past 45 years, I am known by my given names. I’ve been around, travelled around, lived around and slept around more places and people than I can possibly remember, but I’m sure some details will gradually slip back into my conscience if I just keep up writing, if I really get into this blog thing....
I didn’t leave home, but home left me at the age of 17, everyone just sort of trickled away to different parts of the globe untill I found myself sitting in an empty apartment in Copacabana, Tet Offensive having just changed the dynamics of the war in Viet Nam, and Uncle Sam’s draft officers itching to stamp and ship me off, classified as prime beef “in absentia” without their ever having laid eyes on me. I could have been a psychopath or a paraplegic for all they knew, but I guess that’s just the way they ran things, innocent until proven guilty, but it struck me as stupid anyway, and I wasn’t going to take part of it, so I stayed in Rio de Janeiro. I didn’t really feel any obligation to the USA at the time, certainly not to the point of risking death or permanent disability fighting a war, a lack of conviction certainly strengthened by the fact that I was dragged off to live in Europe at the age of 8 and not been back in ten years anyway... Those ten became 17 in the blink of an eye...
I’m now writing from the lounge at Madrid’s Barajas airport (Spain), on my way to Lisbon, Portugal. I’ve been on the road in Europe for a month now, stage manager for “Rock in Rio”, a biennial mega Rock and Roll event which, in spite of the name, happens not in Brazil, but on this other side of the equator and Atlantic. Next year it will be held in Rio de Janeiro and rumour has it that Poland will also be contemplated in 2011. Lights, sound, and technical coordenation for big shows like this are jobs I hugely enjoy and so I regularly accept work, in spite of the fact that neither music nor art are necessarily primordial factors in the shows themselves. Fact is, I don’t even watch half of the acts on stage, although I take the opportunity to observe people and situations closely, developing my own anthropological theories. Backstage is a great place for voyeurism. One little piece of insight that came to me observing the backstage scene last week is how technology has changed the very essence of backstage behaviour. It used to be really cool and fun to hang out, smoke joints and occasionally do some other drugs, and “shoot the bull”, communicate human beung to human being sort of thing, face to face. Nowadays it’s all facebook to facebook, a bunch of nerds with their faces stuck in laptops, ipads, and iphones, off in their own little virtual realities, absolutely no interaction within 3 feet. I remember in São Paulo last year I was called in to be “production rep.”, a job that basically involves ironing out all the little problems that arise, for an REM show. Total panic because the lead singer Michael Stipe couldn’t get an internet connection in the dressing room. So while I was coordinating the 100 metre over the rooftop and under the basement cable run which proved necessary to solve the BIIIG problem, it occured to me it used to be so much easier to meet the needs of stardom, a runner over to the dealer, some good smoke, and voilá!! Did you know that Miley Cyrus’s mother is really cool?
My name, Bruce Henri, was given to me exactly 60 years ago in New York. The family name Leitman, was attached pro forma at the same time, but on the Brazilian music scene where I have hummed, strummed, pulled, picked, and plucked for the past 45 years, I am known by my given names. I’ve been around, travelled around, lived around and slept around more places and people than I can possibly remember, but I’m sure some details will gradually slip back into my conscience if I just keep up writing, if I really get into this blog thing....
I didn’t leave home, but home left me at the age of 17, everyone just sort of trickled away to different parts of the globe untill I found myself sitting in an empty apartment in Copacabana, Tet Offensive having just changed the dynamics of the war in Viet Nam, and Uncle Sam’s draft officers itching to stamp and ship me off, classified as prime beef “in absentia” without their ever having laid eyes on me. I could have been a psychopath or a paraplegic for all they knew, but I guess that’s just the way they ran things, innocent until proven guilty, but it struck me as stupid anyway, and I wasn’t going to take part of it, so I stayed in Rio de Janeiro. I didn’t really feel any obligation to the USA at the time, certainly not to the point of risking death or permanent disability fighting a war, a lack of conviction certainly strengthened by the fact that I was dragged off to live in Europe at the age of 8 and not been back in ten years anyway... Those ten became 17 in the blink of an eye...
I’m now writing from the lounge at Madrid’s Barajas airport (Spain), on my way to Lisbon, Portugal. I’ve been on the road in Europe for a month now, stage manager for “Rock in Rio”, a biennial mega Rock and Roll event which, in spite of the name, happens not in Brazil, but on this other side of the equator and Atlantic. Next year it will be held in Rio de Janeiro and rumour has it that Poland will also be contemplated in 2011. Lights, sound, and technical coordenation for big shows like this are jobs I hugely enjoy and so I regularly accept work, in spite of the fact that neither music nor art are necessarily primordial factors in the shows themselves. Fact is, I don’t even watch half of the acts on stage, although I take the opportunity to observe people and situations closely, developing my own anthropological theories. Backstage is a great place for voyeurism. One little piece of insight that came to me observing the backstage scene last week is how technology has changed the very essence of backstage behaviour. It used to be really cool and fun to hang out, smoke joints and occasionally do some other drugs, and “shoot the bull”, communicate human beung to human being sort of thing, face to face. Nowadays it’s all facebook to facebook, a bunch of nerds with their faces stuck in laptops, ipads, and iphones, off in their own little virtual realities, absolutely no interaction within 3 feet. I remember in São Paulo last year I was called in to be “production rep.”, a job that basically involves ironing out all the little problems that arise, for an REM show. Total panic because the lead singer Michael Stipe couldn’t get an internet connection in the dressing room. So while I was coordinating the 100 metre over the rooftop and under the basement cable run which proved necessary to solve the BIIIG problem, it occured to me it used to be so much easier to meet the needs of stardom, a runner over to the dealer, some good smoke, and voilá!! Did you know that Miley Cyrus’s mother is really cool?
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