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I was just at one of the local New Orleans farmers’ markets, to be specific the Mid-City Green Market that’s every Thursday in Mid-City. I’m trying to buy local more often, and support small farmers… those that have survived anyway after the assaults of agri-business and large supermarkets.

I was a little early and everyone was still setting up their tents and putting out their crates, baskets and baked goods in the brutal heat.

Having just come back from Western North Carolina, where I consumed some delicious peaches from the farmer’s market there, I went to the peach stand first and bought some peaches. The lady told me they were from Alabama, which seemed reasonable enough. I remember getting peaches from her before, and she telling me they drove in from Alabama.

Next I went to look for tomatoes, and there was a couple of guys—looked like a father and son team—putting out a remarkable assortment of vegetables. Tomatoes, corn, squash, cucumbers, peppers—a variety of vegetables that all looked beautiful, where most other vendors usually just had one or two varieties of produce. I had been under the impression from these markets in the past that either not too much grew in Louisiana, or that it was difficult to produce many varieties for small farmers, but these guys looked to have diversity and quantity, and from a superficial glance, quality. Maybe they had some really magic soil on their farm?

They asked what I needed and I said tomatoes, so they pulled some crates out and started filling the table.

“Where are these from?” I asked. “They grown in Louisiana?”

“Folsom,” the older guy replied.

“Good. I’ll take a handful.”

“Get him a bag,” the older guy said to the kid, who looked to be about fourteen.

The kid pulled out a plastic grocery store bag, and I started looking at the tomatoes. They all looked good, but something was amiss. None of them looked bad, and none of them looked great. It was like looking at produce at the grocery store, and I started to wonder if these were hothouse tomatoes. The best tomatoes I’d had usually were less evenly colored, even less red in parts. I was about to ask, wondering if they had their own private hothouse on the farm, when my question was answered by a tomato.

Or rather a sticker on the tomato.

“Vine Grown in Arkansas” it read, complete with a supermarket PLU code.

It took me about 5 seconds to calculate the (un)likelihood that a supermarket sticker accidentally stuck itself to a farm-grown tomato, or that a tomato from a passing grocery store truck had bounced out on the highway and into their pick-up.

The kid came back over to see if I had made my selection.

“This one says it was grown in Arkansas,” I mentioned.

The kid snatched the tomato from me and looked at it, then quickly turned around and peeled off the sticker with his back to me as if I couldn’t see him and put it back in the crates. He then turned back towards me as if nothing had happened and his removing the evidence had returned the tomato to its farm-grown local status. Heck, it might have even been organic at that point!

He then nonchalantly (sort of) turned over a few more tomatoes to make sure the whole batch wasn’t spoiled then casually sauntered over to the older guy, who was unloading more crates at the truck. He looked back and I pretended to be still selecting tomatoes, then I looked up and I saw him whispering briefly to the older guy.

“Goddamn son of a bitch!” the older guy exclaimed under his breath but probably not at all as quietly as he wanted to. I suspect it was the kid’s job, or maybe his brother or sister’s, to remove the stickers after the dad bought them at Sam’s Club, and that the dad had told them repeatedly how important it was to remove all the stickers.

The whole thing, especially their reaction to my finding the sticker, was like a couple of small time crooks that got busted for heisting the March of Dimes jar, and I don’t want to make too much of it, but at the same time, I do want to support local farmers and the local economy, and if I can’t do this at the farmers’ market, then Wal-mart has already won.

In retrospect, I should have taken a photo with my iPhone, but I was too flabbergasted to think. There’s a part of me that thinks, maybe these guys are hard on their luck in this economy and they are just doing what it takes to get by. But at the same time, one of the main reasons we’re in this situation is people have put all their eggs in one basket (so to speak), and in the food world, we can break the cycle by buying local and breaking the chain with global food conglomorates who will ship you blueberries from Chile when they are growing in your neighbor’s yard, consuming more oil in transportation, working against diversification, encouraging large-scale use of pesticides, and many other reasons. I’ve seen the trailer for Food, Inc. and it looks like it will blow a lot of minds…

OK, here’s the song from the Mid-City Ice Cream Truck that’s been driving us bonkers.

Name that tune! (please!)

midcity-ice-cream-truck-song

this is a simple west-african/carribbean sounding blues riff on the 12-string acoustic that seemed to suit the lovely spring weather we were having in new orleans a recent saturday afternoon.

listen also for: the sound of a distant train and christy petting marlowe.

The Guild is tuned to open G, I believe.

Ice cream trucks all over use different songs, but the one in the areas of New Orleans where I work and live (Mid-city and Carrollton) has a tune I haven’t been able to figure out, nor have any of my friends. It’s not “Turkey In the Straw” or “The Duff Beer Song” (“Duff Beer for me, Duff Beer for you”…) but it’s close. Anyway, I’ve finally got it recorded, at least a block down, so mostly you hear some birds chirping.

New Orleans ice cream truck song (3.1MB mp3; 2:17)

EDIT: this is but one of several ice cream trucks songs I’ve been trying to figure out but NOT the one we were hearing every day at the office, so expect a part two as soon as I get it recorded.

Just discovered this: Electronic Music from the Middle Eastern Avant-Garde (1959-2001).

I liked the Darius Dolat-Shahi one in particular; reminds me of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Terry Riley, and Raymond Scott, with the eastern sound of the stringed instrument the setar, reminiscent of Greek rebetika.

On the other hand the spoken word (LAY-LA! A WOMAN! ) in the Halim El-Dabh bit are kind of hard to digest.

Recently developed Super 8 film of Backporch Revolution mascot Sophia, as a kitten, filmed by Alec on Super 8 with Dan R throwing the ball. This was taken on Tinkerbell Road, Chapel Hill, 1993. Sophie later learned to fetch sticks(!), but later refused to remember.

This reference site has just about anything you can imagine you’d need, from note names and frequencies, to a chord finder, to a BPM calculator, and much more:

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/Calculations03.htm

I found it when I was looking for the frequency range of a standard 88 note piano, and the MIDI notes that corresponded for a simple MAX patch I was working on. So far, it just plays random piano quarter notes in a minor scale, you pick the root key and the octave span and tempo. I was thinking I could make a robot that does a good Terry Riley impression a la Rainbow in Curved Air.

http://www.rebetiko.org

This was not a “song”, at least insofar as I did not rehearse for it other than to check my equipment that morning. (This will very apparent to you after listening to any portion this.) But it was noizefest, so there ya go.

Sign by Ray Bong, who through the miracle of the internet knew about my other life as an Apple developer and a certain pissy email that I got from the CEO-emeritus Steve Jobs. I don’t really think that makes me his “enemy”, but it was good stagecraft, and was probably the most interesting part of the set.

So here’s the recording of what turned out to be my first completely solo set ever, clocking in around 12 minutes, and titled thanks to Ray Bong. You can hear him shout out at the very end!

#11 “Enemy of Steve Jobs” (Noizefest NOLA 2009) (17.6MB mp3, 12:49)

Thanks to Phil of Slobodan for letting me use his amp (that’s his feet in the picture above). Setup was 6 string electric through overdrive, looper (Boomerang), then echo (Memory Man) into the amp. Most of the noise is the Memory Man delay loopback.

Of course guitars can’t really do themselves in, but it looked like my late 80’s Rickenbacker 330 12-string had done just that when i opened the case on Friday to find this:

After getting over the initial shock, i realized that it was the “R” tailpiece that had broken, presumably during a hurricane evacuation or just being in storage in hot weather. But this guitar had been halfway around the world with me since around 1991, and I had never had this happen before.

Rickenbacker will replace the “R” provided that I send them the old one and buy the replacement as well. It’s a pretty old guitar, so I suppose that’s reasonable, but the replacement part is $100 which is not cheap.

No real answers as to why it happened either, but looking on the Rickenbacker boards it seems that there was some problem with the models of this era and hopefully fixed now. The extra tension on the 12-strings (versus a 6-string) is obviously a factor, as it doesn’t happen on 6-strings. And when the person at Ric customer service asked me about what kind of strings I had on it — I had Pyramids — he seemed to believe that these strings had a higher tension rating which may have contributed to the crack.

I’ve had this guitar for nearly 20 years and only ever had one issue with it — when a piece of later-discovered cat fur was blocking the jack preventing me from playing “Fearless” at a Halloween show where we performed as 1972 Pink Floyd — and excepting some screws that went rusty, have not had any reason to question the quality of their manufacturing process. It’s been a great guitar, and hopefully will be again soon, but I am really going to have to consider using different strings, or storing it differently, or something. Hopefully the replacement tailpiece will be of stronger stuff!