I've got my eye on a new banjo

All the therapies I've been taking for my back have drawn me to a single conclusion. The root of all my troubles is the long neck banjo.

This one is a Vega, from the 20's. It's regular size and lightweight. My friend tells me though that I shouldn't want a banjo from the twenties. He compares it to buying golf clubs from the 20's. Who'd want golf clubs from the 20's? Now I'm confused.

A Few More

Courtesy of Coach House's Coffee Room. Tanya Chapman, Jonathan Garfinkel, Michelle Girouard, Carl Wilson, Eliza-Jane Scott.

More photos

Quill and Quire posted some images of the banjoree. My sister's in there, among the writer-types.

Including the manjo, which I've grown fond of, finally.

banjoree!

gascan banjo

Banjo On Your Knees

Zoilus plays

GORGASM sings in Spanish.
All photos by Victoria Wallace.

I probably should have advertised this on this site. But I do have the impression that most of the surfers who come here are from everywhere in the world except Toronto.
Me, Ann Marie MacDonald, Carl Wilson, Gorgasm (left and right).
More photos here, here and here.

When does a harp sound like a banjo

When it's Joanna Newsom playing, that's when.

Although Owen Pallett plucks a violin to replicate her sound...

Yes, yes, ys.

New Coat Cover

Banjonistas! I have returned from the city of Calgary with a new Coat cover! This play about a dead man in a coat has been improved by the fact that it now pays tribute to the mystical city of Prague.

Cash Gospel

I know Johnny Cash never liked the banjo, and when he recorded God's A Gonna Cut You Down, it was closer to Moby's version than to Odetta's, but I'd hang out with him anyway. I'd put away the banjo and groove with the rest of the movie stars.

Let's Do That Again

I have the bad habit of burying the links I want you to hit among a whole load of whimsical ones. Take the last post for instance. This guy's site was what I really wanted you to see. Old Man Luedecke.

He's doing that rare thing: making a bit of a splash with a solo clawhammer banjo.

He's been featured on two recent podcasts from CBC Radio Three. #59, and the most recent, #90, the East Coast Music Awards 2007. I'd like to permalink these, but I don't know how to circumvent the main site to get to it. CBC Radio 3 is defeating me.

(btw the thing about my incessant linking is mostly just that I like the green colour that words become when I turn them into links.)

More Than Ever

image from here.

From the MySpace Universe:

Hi! I'm a gigantic fan of yours and I was wondering if you knew where I might find some karaoke tracks of any of your songs?

Karaoke is still the new folk.

(In case you're wondering, I got to that page via this page. You can wander around forever in there. I even have friends in there...)

Milkypop

Buy a button for a dollar.

Such Wit!

...most jubilant disc since Born in the U.S.A. and more fun than a tribute to Pete Seeger has any right to be. Jonathan Ringen

A popular singer pays his respects, and the Rolling Stone critic takes the opportunity to take a shot at the octogenarian who's getting the tribute. Is that classy or what?

I think what.

Runner's Thyroid

This really belongs here. But I don't put images there.

The Gift of the Coat

BTW

I'm going to Calgary with the tall man. Next week. To work on a play. About a man and a coat.

Image is from here.

Foot on the Hunt

Since we're putting things back in the jar again, here's something. I had a dream awhile back that I drew a picture of a foot hunting a rabbit-like creature and sent it to a highly-regarded local painter.

So I woke up and got right down to it. Struggled with the Mac Appleworks Drawing Program and got it done. She told me she felt sorry for the foot-creature.

It was creepy though. When I tried to use the drawing as my desktop image, it appeared in several overlapping versions of itself. Don't know how that happened.

"Hey Banjo! Where's the Bass?"

Just around noon today I was walking down Harbord Street, past Central Tech (on my way to make a very important delivery and to have a very important meeting, because when I feel excited about such deliveries and such meetings, I like to walk to them in order to draw out the experience, because I have so little that's exciting in my life...) when I thought I heard the above question called from one of the kids hanging out on the large front lawn of the school.

Did I imagine it? I turned and looked, and a group of guys were looking back at me, or maybe then again they weren't.

Seemed crazy, but I really thought I heard it.

"Hey Banjo, where's the Bass?"

I thought: Could it be true? Am I Banjo Banjar? Is that my name? I've been told it has a nice ring to it, anyway. Maybe I should claim it. Even if I am a semi-amateur. But there's no shame in that. So's Pete Seeger. At least according so some other banjo players out there.

Speaking of Seeger, in the above linked video (which is well worth watching) he reminds me somehow of my friend Ami. Maybe it's the stretch.

(And thanks Carl, for sending me that link.)

But the point is, the call from the kid across the schoolyard could only have been a reference to this. Or else it was nothing. But could that have possibly been what he was shouting about? Or was the wind playing funny tricks on my ears?

That's James Thomson on Bass. Which I suppose answers who, if not where. And the video was shot by Katerina Cizek. And my voice is a bit shaky, so I don't know what to think of it. But hello again, kiddies. I'm Banjo Banjar, and this is my blog.

My Pride and Joy

This. Connected to something else which is even prider and joyer. It might not look like much, has no archives and especially no dates. (They could be writing from 1927.) But if you revisit it, it will pay attention to you.

The symbol at the bottom is Cuneiform for 'water' fyi.

Thanks Veda, for the link that revived this blog.

Banjo Genome

image from here

From this. It blows my mind (and I'm pretending to be this guy a bit this morning:

The presence of a body plan in the genome, whether of a fly, a whale, or a human, was unexpected by embryologists. Previously, most of them did not think that development of embryos was controlled by genes; they had assumed that the different parts of developing embryos were determined by physical interaction between neighboring cells and that there was no overall division of the embryo according to a genetic plan. Experiments had shown, for example, that removing developing wing tissue from one part of an embryo and implanting it elsewhere still gave rise to a wing, although an abnormal one. Scientists attributed the abnormality to the effects of the neighboring cells in the embryo. This was wrong. In fact it was caused by the disruption of the body plan.



and this:

Hox genes, as Carroll explains, are in fact one of many kinds of genes that direct embryo development by a mechanism of switches. One example that is not a Hox gene is the gene that controls the development of the eye in fruit flies. If this gene (called Pax 6) is damaged when it mutates, the fly fails to develop eyes. We now know from the experiments described in Carroll's book that the Pax 6 gene is also found in butterflies, mice, and humans. Indeed, Pax 6 genes are interchangeable. The Pax 6 gene from a fly will turn on genes that make eyes in mice, and the Pax 6 gene from a mouse will turn on genes that make eyes in flies.

It had long been assumed that eyes had evolved independently in different species. The structures of mammalian eyes and insect eyes are very different and it would seem most unlikely that they had followed a similar evolutionary path. Mammalian eyes, for example, have a single lens that focuses an image on the retina. Insects have eyes with many tube-like structures, each tube having its own lens and retina. Yet the discovery of the Pax 6 gene gives us reason to believe that the evolution of the eye in all the animals followed related, and to some extent common, paths, though we cannot completely exclude the possibility that each kind of eye evolved following completely independent pathways.

That means we have a lot more in common with frogs and fish (and banjos?) than previously thought.

What's going on here?

I barely pay attention to this banjo blog, but it seems to have a small but loyal following, day after day. Who are you people? Maybe it's 15 different people every day, or maybe it's the same, I can't tell. But who are you?

Change of Scene

I've decided not to muck up this Banjo Banjar blog anymore. The Tutankhamen illustration replacing Dock Boggs in the upper right corner was bad enough but there's nothing I can really do about that. I've decided to keep the site otherwise pristine and purely banjo'd, and invite you dear readers to head on over to a brand new and currently active blog - a blog on the subject of memorizing the lines for Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. If you think that's not a good enough reason for a blog, well... Antony has a lot of lines. Some of them are really good too. And others are strangely bad. And the blog will cover related obsessions as well...

It goes by the name of shkspearshkspar.blogspot.com, it's here and the Tutankhamen image suits it much better