Jane's Addiction

Jane's Addiction, Charlotte Verizon Amphitheater, June 12th, 2009

Jane's Addiction is an American alternative rock band formed in Los Angeles, California in 1985. The band's original line-up featured Perry Farrell (vocals), Dave Navarro (guitar), Eric Avery (bass) and Stephen Perkins (drums).

Dave Navarro and Perry Farrell  CC BY 2.0, Link

Jane's Addiction was one of the first bands to emerge from the early 1990s alternative rock movement and get some mainstream media attention, airplay, and commercial success. 

Their initial "farewell" tour was at the first Lollapalooza festival which was a showcase for alternative rock. Farrell claimed that the band became what he called the leaders of the "Alternative Nation".

The "Jane" in Jane's Addiction was an allusion to Farrell's housemate, Jane Bainter. In the book Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction, it is said that Jane was a college graduate with a good job but that she had a heroin addiction. The "whore" in the book's title comes from a girlfriend of Eric Avery who worked as a prostitute and supported the band financially in the early days. It is said that Navarro had considered calling the band "Jane's Heroin Experience" with the "experience" being an allusion to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The real Jane wasn't happy with her name being used at first. The band's song "Jane Says" addresses that. 

The band broke up in 1991, briefly reunited in 1997 and again in 2001 without Avery who declined to be involved. Then, in 2008, the band's "classic" line-up (with Avery) embarked on a world tour. Avery left again in early 2010 as the group began work on new material. The remaining members continued working and the band released its fourth studio album The Great Escape Artist in 2011. 

In 2016, Jane's Addiction was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Official Website
Jane's Addiction
Nothing's Shocking
Ritual De Lo Habitual
Strays
Kettle Whistle

Up From the Catacombs: Best of Jane's Addiction
Jane's Addiction- Live Voodoo DVD

Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction

 

Washington Commanders

What's in a name? A lot.

After 87 years as the Redskins and 2 years as the Washington Football Team, the franchise announced today that its new name would be the Commanders.

The Redskins name which has offended Native American Indian tribes for many decades has been the subject of discussions for years without any movement. But that changed in mid-2020 when a letter signed by 87 investors and shareholders with a total worth of $620 billion was sent to sponsors FedEx, PepsiCo and Nike, asking them to stop doing business with the team unless its name was changed. 

There had been some fan input and one popular name among fans, RedWolves, was dropped because of trademarks held by others. Other names under consideration included Presidents, Brigade, Redhogs, Football Team, Armada, and Defenders.

The renaming process itself took 18 months and two full NFL seasons. 

Their new Twitter account is @Commanders

Fare Well and Farewell

You have probably said "Farewell" to someone as they left for somewhere else. Maybe, they were heading to their home a few blocks away. Maybe, they were about to board a plane or boat for a more distant journey. 

The modern "farewell" originates in Middle English farewel, an expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel. The verb fare means to travel or journey. Wishing someone "Fare well!" was a kind of blessing to travel safely and well.

Today's "farewell" can often just mean "goodbye" but in its earliest usage (first evidence of the word dates back to 1325–75) it was used to wish someone the best on a significant journey ahead.

Fare thee well, sailor!

Fare Thee Well was a series of concerts with most of the surviving members
 of the Grateful Dead to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band.

The Left Banke

The Left Banke, 1965 in a photo from KRLA Beat, a newspaper published
for KRLA Radio in the mid-1960s., Public Domain, Link

The Left Banke was an American rock band formed in New York City in 1965. They are best known for their two songs "Walk Away Renée" and "Pretty Ballerina."

Due to keyboardist Michael Brown's classical background, they had a sound that was labeled by critics as "baroque rock," or "Bach rock." Not all their songs featured string arrangements and classical-sounding piano and harpsichord, but enough did that the labels stuck. Their vocal harmonies were reminiscent of the "British invasion" bands like the Beatles and the Zombies.

The original lineup was keyboards/composer Michael Brown, drummer/singer George Cameron, bass guitarist/singer Tom Finn, lead singer Steve Martin and drummer Warren David-Schierhorst. It was Brown's father, Harry Lookofsky, who got them into a recording studio. Harry was a well-known session violinist and ran a studio in New York. He ended up as their initial producer, manager and publisher.

"Left Bank" is the Anglicized version of the French Rive Gauche which is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. The river cuts the city into two parts and if you're looking downstream, the southern bank is to the left, and the northern bank (or Rive Droite) is to the right. The appeal to the band of the name Left Bank is its association with writers and artists, particularly after WWI. The area was known as the haunt of Colette, Djuna Barnes, Erik Satie, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Edith Wharton, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the "Lost Generation" of American expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. The Left Bank became a phrase associated with bohemianism, counterculture, and creativity. The band added an "e" which is not French. (The French form of bank is banque.)

"Walk Away Renee" was a huge hit in late 1966 and their second single, "Pretty Ballerina", (both written by Brown) charted in early 1967. They appeared on The Left Banke album Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina. Rolling Stone magazine put "Walk Away Renée" at number 220 in its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

The band went through personnel issues and broke up, reformed, and recorded with other members.  The songs recorded by various incarnations of the group in 1967 and 1968 were assembled into a second LP, The Left Banke Too, which was released in November 1968.

The single from the second album that is most like the original "baroque" sound of the first two singles is "Desiree."

The band's story gets complicated at this point. Here's a capsule summary. The band continued playing live in 1969, but without Steve Martin. They disband but Brown and Martin reunite in the studio to record another single as The Left Banke, "Myrah" b/w "Pedestal." Brown, Cameron, Finn and Martin reunite to record two songs for the movie Hot Parts but due to legal issues with the name "Love Songs in the Night" and "Two by Two" are released as being by Steve Martin solo recordings.

There are a number of odd one-off recordings, some of which have been collected on other albums or passed along bootleg style. One of those came out of a 1971 recording session at Bell Records with Les Fradkind. "I Could Make It Last Forever" (not written by any band members) was released on Fradkin's Goin' Back solo CD in 2006 and features Caro, Finn, Cameron and Brown and Brown's father, violinist Harry Lookofsky. 

Martin, Cameron and Finn reunited as The Left Banke in 1978 to record an album's worth of songs but an album was not released. One single, "Queen of Paradise" (b/w "And One Day"), was released in late 1978 with some airplay. The album was issued by Relix Records in 1986 under the title Strangers on a Train (Voices Calling in Europe) but gained little attention or sales.

For fans, several of Michael Brown's post-Banke bands are collectible. Those bands include Montage, Stories, and The Beckies.

The 1992 Mercury Records compilation, There's Gonna Be a Storm: The Complete Recordings 1966–1969 collected almost all of their recorded output from those years.

None of the band members are still alive.

For more details see the band's Wikipedia entry and check out the fine video history below.

COVID-19 variant names

SARS-CoV-2

As I write this, the omicron variant of the Covid (Sars-CoV-2) is peaking in the U.S., but no one believes it will be the last variant of this deadly disease. But why "omicron"? 

The World Health Organization (WHO) decided in May 2021 that its nomenclature for important strains in the Sars-CoV-2 variant classification would adopt Greek-letter names. WE use those letters to label hurricanes and tropical storms after we run out of the letters in our own English alphabet - which happened this past season. 

I found an article from the WHO titled "WHO announces simple, easy-to-say labels for SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Interest and Concern." But this naming is not so simple or easy to say.

The switch to Greek for names was to end associating place-of-origin names (“Wuhan virus,” “South African variant”) which was criticized as being xenophobic and racist. They didn't want to put the blame on a country or region.

The other place that some people learn the Greek alphabet is in the naming of fraternities and sororities. So many of us have learned some of the letters.

The letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega.

Wait - how did we jump from the delta variant all the way to omicron?

It turns out that when what we call the omicron variant appeared, the WHO had already used up 12 of the Greek alphabet’s letters. These “variants of interest” thankfully didn't develop enough to hit the general public and the media. Next should have been "Nu." You see a problem with that letter. How do we differentiate a "Nu variant" from a "new variant"?

That makes sense. So, next is "Xi."  Nope. That one looks like a common Chinese family name. I'm sure Chinese President Xi Jinping and many others are happy to not have a variant with their name. 

There is also the issue of pronunciation with the Greek letters. For example, "xi" is pronounced in Greek as "zy" (like xylophone) and it is usually transliterated in English as  "she." 

I would assume that the next variant would be "Pi" but I read something today that said next will be "Omega" which is the big "O" compared to small "o" omicron. That sounds ominous. And what happened to pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, and psi?

When the Delta variant hit hard last summer, Delta Air Lines was not very happy. I actually saw a witty tweet response from the airline's own chief health officer, Dr. Henry Ting: "We prefer to call it the B.1.617.2 variant since that is so much more simple to say and remember.”

Going back to when all this started, why was it COVID-19? The illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 was given the acronym COVID-19 by the WHO to represent "coronavirus disease 2019." The "19" for the year, not because it was the 19th version of it. This name was also chosen to avoid stigmatizing any populations, geography, or animal (like a bird or swine flu) associations that had occurred in the past and still happen occasionally.

SARS-CoV-2 is the acronym + abbreviation used to label “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” which was given in February 2020. This name was chosen because the virus is genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.

epiphanies

 

Epiphany (also known as Theophany in Eastern Christian traditions) is a Christian feast day that celebrates the revelation of God incarnate as Jesus Christ. In Western Christianity, the feast commemorates principally (but not solely) the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, and thus Jesus Christ's physical manifestation to the Gentiles. It is sometimes called Three Kings' Day, and in some traditions celebrated as Little Christmas. For Catholics, the Feast of Epiphany is celebrated on January 6. In the Greek New Testament manuscripts, epiphaneia refers also to Christ's second coming.

Though my family celebrated this holiday, the meaning that I am more likely to invoke during the year comes from my study of literature.

Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. 

James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero which was an early version of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself."

Epiphanies in common usage are any moments of revelation, oftentimes not literary or religious at all. "As he was reviewing his portfolio, he suddenly had an epiphany about investing."

The word "epiphany" descends from the ancient Greek ἐπῐφᾰ́νειᾰ (epipháneia), meaning a "manifestation or appearance." You can break it down into the Greek words "pha" (to shine), "phanein" (to show, to cause to shine), and "epiphanein" (to manifest, to bring to light).

The pre-Christian Greeks used the word to describe the visible manifestation of a god or goddess to mortal eyes, which is a form of theophany. Early Christians adopted the term to describe the manifestation of the newborn Jesus to the Magi.

android, automaton, gynoid, fembot

 

Actroid - by Gnsin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

An android is a humanoid robot or other artificial beings. Typically, they are made from a flesh-like material to resemble a real person. Though the word and idea come from science fiction in print and on screens, advances in robot technology now allow the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.

The word "android" has been used to refer to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, but the Greek prefix "andr-" refers to man in the masculine sense. The word has a long usage history.

• The OED has the earliest use (as "Androides") to Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia, in reference to an automaton that St. Albertus Magnus allegedly created.
• The late 1700s: androides are elaborate mechanical devices resembling humans performing human activities which were displayed in exhibit halls.
• "android" appears in US patents as early as 1863 in reference to miniature human-like toy automatons which are machines that do human actions and may or may not resemble a human. The word "automaton" is the Latinization of the Ancient Greek αὐτόματον, automaton, (neuter) meaning "acting of one's own will." The word was first used by Homer to describe automatic door opening, or automatic movement of wheeled tripods
• A distinction between mechanical robots and fleshy androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future stories (1940–1944).
• Karel Čapek's robots in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1921) introduced the word robot to the world. But "robot" has come to primarily refer to mechanical devices which also may look like humans or animals but can also be just a humanlike arm or hand that performs a task, such as assembling a vehicle. "Robotess" is the oldest female-specific term and was used by Rossum, though it was not used widely beyond his play.

The term "droid" was popularized by George Lucas in the original Star Wars film. Though it is simply an abridgment of "android", it has been used by Lucas and others to mean any robot, including distinctly non-human form machines like R2-D2. 

Another shortening, "andy", appears in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted to the screen as Blade Runner) and was a pejorative term for an android.

Newest in this line of terms is "gynoid" which actually is anything that resembles or pertains to the female human form. The term gynoid was first used by Isaac Asimov in a 1979 editorial, as a theoretical female equivalent of the word android.

But other terms have been used for feminine robots exist. The portmanteau "fembot" (feminine robot) was popularized by the television series The Bionic Woman in 1976 and used in the Austin Powers films and others to suggest a sexualized gynoid. 

An unfortunate, though not unexpected, progression in gynoids in fiction and now in actuality are that they are "eroticized." Sensitivity sensors in their breasts and genitals to facilitate sexual response comes from male desires for custom-made passive women and is compared to life-size sex dolls. 

The HBO series Westworld is a very updated version of the 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, about adult guests visiting an interactive amusement park containing lifelike androids. The androids and gynoids in the extended TV series are used for far greater violent and sexual pleasures than the original film. 

     

From Printing: ditto, mind your p's and q's, out of sorts

I am a big reader and I also love books and the bookmaking process. I came upon a book this past week called Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History. The printing press and the democratization of knowledge through books changed the world.

One of the things in this book that I liked is how some common words and phrases come from the process of making books.

Here are a few I've found. I'm sure I'll add some more in the future.

I have used the word "ditto" and heard it used. Going back to schools 50 years ago, you might have recalled what we called a ditto machine that teachers used to make copies of handouts. In printing, ditto is shorthand to mean to repeat something that’s already been said. Its origin is the Italian word detto, the past participle of “to say.” 

The word came into wider usage with that early 20th-century duplicating machine which was produced by DITTO, Inc. And their simple logo was a single set of quotation marks " which is still used to mean "ditto" or same as above.

An 18th-century type case, with tools for typesetting

A phrase that I don't hear as much today as I did as a child is to "mind your p's and q's." When I was in seventh grade, I took a printing class and we actually learned to set type and use a printing press. (Yes, I must be old!)  This phrase when said by a teacher or parent meant to be on your best behavior or to pay close attention. But if my print shop teacher had said it in the printing context it would apply to setting type. In that process, you put each letter in backward, so that when the inked type is pressed into paper, the mirror image reads the right way forward. That meant that compositors had to be especially careful when it came to letters that look like mirror images of each other. In older type cases, each letter was kept in a segregated section to be picked out by the compositor setting the type. The lowercase p’s and q’s were nastily put right next to each other. If the placement had been different, maybe the phrases that would have emerged would have been “mind your b’s and d’s.” 

Related to those type cases, the capital letters were usually on the top rows and so were referred to as uppercase letters. 

Also from this typesetting area is the phrase "out of sorts." In common usage, it means to be feeling a bit off, perhaps unwell, or just grumpy. For printers and typesetting compositors it meant you were literally out of sorts. A sort is an individually cast piece of type. If you run out of out of type in the middle of a job, it would certainly make you feel out of sorts figuratively and literaaly.

Blue Cheer

Dickie Peterson, Randy Holden, and Paul Whaley in 1968

Blue Cheer was an American psychedelic blues-rock band that initially performed and recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s in San Francisco. They were formed in 1966 by Dickie Peterson. He had been in a band, The Oxford Circle, with future Blue Cheer members Paul Whaley and Gary Lee Yoder. The band went through many personnel changes but eventually became a power-trio with bassist/singer Peterson, guitarist Leigh Stephens, and Whaley on drums.

They played in a psychedelic blues-rock style. They are also credited as being pioneers of heavy metal. Their cover of "Summertime Blues" is sometimes cited as the first in that genre. They are also considered by some to be early punk rockers, stoner rock, doom metal, experimental rock, and grunge. They were also widely considered to be the loudest band ever at the time when they emerged - loud to the point of pain for the audience. 

Their first hit was a cover version of Eddie Cochran's rockabilly "Summertime Blues" redone in a very hard rock version. It was on their debut album Vincebus Eruptum (1968). The single peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, their only such hit. The album peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 chart. In Canada, the single peaked at No. 3 on the RPM Magazine chart. 

The band's name comes from the "Blue Cheer" which was a 1960's nickname for a high-quality LSD. The drug was promoted by "LSD chemist" and former Grateful Dead patron, Owsley Stanley. 

Coincidentally, Cheer is a laundry detergent sold in the United States and Canada that was introduced in 1950. It had distinctive blue granules, which formerly gave it the nickname "Blue Cheer" though it was marketed primarily as just Cheer and still is sold. 

first album 1968

Vincebus Eruptum
The History of Blue Cheer: Good Times are So Hard to Find
What Doesn't Kill You
The Beast Is Back: The Megaforce Years
Outsideinside
Live in Japan
Blue Cheer

Kwanzaa

 

Kwanzaa is a holiday celebrating African-American culture that is held from December 26 to January 1. It is a modern-day holiday based on African harvest festival traditions from various parts of Africa, including West and Southeast Africa. 

American Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966 during the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles as a specifically African-American holiday. Karenga said his goal was to "give blacks an alternative to the existing holiday of Christmas and give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society."

Though it began as part of the 1960s "cultural revolution" and civil rights, it has become more of a family cultural celebration.

Karenga gave the origin of the name Kwanzaa as derived from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, meaning "first fruits". First fruits festivals exist in Southern Africa, celebrated in with the southern solstice, and Karenga was also inspired by an account he read of the Zulu festival Umkhosi Wokweshwama. He decided to spell the holiday's name with an additional "a" so that it would have a symbolic seven letters since the holiday would be 7 days in length and mark 7 principles.

Boxing Day

Today is Boxing Day, a holiday celebrated after Christmas Day, occurring on the second or third day of Christmastide.

As with a number of holidays, it originated as a holiday with good intentions. Originally, it was a day to give gifts to the poor. Unfortunately, Boxing Day is now primarily known as a shopping holiday. 

It originated in the United Kingdom and is celebrated in a number of countries that previously formed part of the British Empire. 

ENGLISH OAK AND IRON ALMS BOX. ROCHE ABBEY. CIRCA 1450

The origin of the name "Boxing Day" is not definitive, but the European tradition of giving money and other gifts to those in need dates back to the Middle Ages. One possibility is that it refers to alms box (poor box) placed in the narthex of Christian churches to collect donations for the poor. There was also a custom in the late Roman/early Christian era of placing alms boxes placed in churches for the Feast of Saint Stephen which is on December 26.

In the early 1800s in Britain, Boxing Day was expanded to be the first weekday after Christmas day and seen as a time to give service people (postmen, errand boys, servants etc.) a "Christmas box."

Boxing Day is the 27th if the 26th is Christmas Sunday. The attached bank holiday or public holiday may take place either on that day or one or two days later (if necessary to ensure it falls on a weekday). 

Boxing Day is not really marked in the U.S. but in Massachusetts it was declared in 1996 that every 26 December is Boxing Day, in response to the efforts of a coalition of British citizens to "transport the English tradition to the United States" though it is not an employee holiday.