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By Eric Berg

The lineup at this year’s Santa Cruz Blues Festival is one of the strongest in years thanks to a well balanced array of killer supporting acts – the real reason to get your butt down to Aptos Park this Memorial Day Weekend. Like these five:

Carolyn Wonderland – Saturday, May 25th

Opening Saturday’s blues fest is Austin guitarist and singer, Carolyn Wonderland, a true virtuoso on lap steel and slide guitar. No stranger to the Central Coast, Wonderland has been driving around this country with her band for a couple of decades  performing some amazing gigs on what seems like a endless tour. With six solo cds to her credit and countless appearances on other albums, Wonderland is not to be pigeonholed. Musically, she is a little bit of everything – blues, country, cajun, soul, a little jazz and sometimes  a few canciones en español.  Wonderland also plays  accordion, mandolin, keyboards, trumpet and lately, she’s been doing a bit of scat singing.

Jimmie Vaughn and the Tilt-a Whirl Band featuring Lou Ann Barton – Saturday, May 25th  

Another Austin guitarslinger, Jimmie Vaughn ( yes, he is Stevie Ray’s older brother) is not to be missed as he is the real deal live when freed from the confines of studio recording.  Sharing the stage is Vaughn’s longtime singing partner, Lou Anne Barton, from back in the day when both were founding members of The Fabulous Thunderbirds. The two of the are a blues vocal match made in heaven, with Barton being the more aggressive,  backed by Vaughn’s lyrical guitar playing and the tight knit rhythm section of the Tilt-a-Whirl Band. Vaughn is also a legend in car circles as a collector and designer of classic custom built 50′s cars.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – Sunday, May 26th

Watch out for this pint sized stick of soul and R&B dynamite!  Sharon Jones used to be a prison guard and takes no guff from those from those in the crowd still sitting on their butts once she jumps out on stage fired up by horn section of the tighter than hell Dap-Kings. Jones and crew will get you up and jumping and begging for more. Be forewarned: Jones has been regularly observed singling out an audience member or two, inviting the them up on the stage for a dance lesson in soul grindin’, peppered with some of her expert “love” advice. Don’t say no to Miss Jones.

The James Hunter Six – Sunday, May 26th 

“Blue Eyed Soul” may not be the best description of British singer and guitarist James Hunter, even if his voice does hint of Jackie Wilson. Hunter is far from retro. His songwriting has very unique modern R&B feel to it punctuated by short, tasty bursts of his guitar stretched out by the band’s knockout saxophone and keyboard players. Hot on the heels of his best album to date -  ‘Minute By Minute”, Hunter and his longtime band have been working with Dap-King Records producer Bosco Mann who has tightened the group up considerably and added more focus. At one time, singer Van Morrison supposedly said that Hunter has one of the greatest soul voices “that no one’s ever heard of”.  One of these days, everyone will have, but right now Hunter’s smokin’ hot and so is his band.

The California Honey Drops – Sunday, May 26th

Oakland’s CA Honey Drops is another one of those bands that are much better live than their three studio recordings hint and they are the perfect jump start for Sunday’s show. Voted the Bay Area’s “Best Soul/R&B band”, this five piece band led by front man, and trumpeter, Lech Wierzynski (yes – he was born in Poland) mixes it up with their own blend of old and new R&B, New Orleans Jazz, blues,  gospel and some of their own brassy material marked with a sense of humor and Wierzynski’s clever lyrics. The Drops just released a brand new studio album “Like You Mean It” and performed some of the songs live at Streetlight Records in  Santa Cruz this past Record Store Day, April 21st.

The 21st Annual Santa Cruz Blues Festival – Saturday May 25th & Sunday May 26th – 11 am-7 pm – Aptos Park in Aptos Village

For complete Blues Festival info -  http://www.santacruzbluesfestival.com

Courtesy of Cabrillo Music Festival

Courtesy of Cabrillo  Music Festival

By Joe Truskot | KUSP

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music welcomes to its 2013 stages the music of living composers: some familiar, some new.

Kevin Puts returns with the world premiere of his Flute Concerto performed by London Symphony Orchestra principle flutist Adam Walker; the Kronos Quartet joins the Festival Orchestra for “It Got Dark” by Thomas Newman; Anna Clyne’s “Night Ferry” explores in music the mind of the manic-depressive; Philip Glass offers the US premiere of his Tenth Symphony; Enrico Chapela’s “Magnetar” presents a concerto for electric cello, plus the world premiere of “Noise Gate” by Sean Friar.

Music director Marin Alsop leads the way through the vast new world of today’s orchestral music. Be part of the experience at the performances and on KUSP Tuesdays and Fridays in August.

Mel Brooks catching up on the present in between takes of History Of The World: Part I. (Photo by Pamela Barkentin Blackburn.)

The one and only Mel Brooks is amidst a gigantic media splash this week – starting with:

On KUSP
1: Interview with Jeesie Thorn on Bullseye Sunday, May 19, 8 p.m.

2. Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Monday, May 20, 6 p.m.

ON KQED/PBS
3. Mel Brooks: Make a Noise,  American Masters Monday, May 20, 9 p.m.

 
 
Jessie Thorn write about Mel Brooks:

It’s hard to imagine what American comedy would look like without Mel Brooks. With a sharp eye for parody, a seemingly infinite supply of gags, and enough destruction of the fourth wall to make a postmodern novelist blush, his work has set the tone for countless comedy TV shows and films. It’s hard to imagine SNL‘s relentless TV parodies without Your Show Of Shows(which Brooks wrote for alongside Sid Caesar back in the 50s), The Simpsons without his filmography full of sly pop-culture references, or the careers of Airplane! creators Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker without Brooks’ shameless love of (self-admittedly) awful jokes.

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Holy S—. A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr. Photo: courtesy of NPR

By NPR Staff

If you said the “s” word in the ninth century, you probably wouldn’t have shocked or offended anyone. Back then, the “s” word was just the everyday word that was used to refer to excrement. That’s one of many surprising, foul-mouthed facts Melissa Mohr reveals in her new book, Holy S- – -: A Brief History of Swearing.

Though the curse words themselves change over time, the category remains constant — we always have a set of words that are off-limits. “We need some category of swear words,” Mohr says. “[These] words really fulfill a function that people have found necessary for thousands of years.”

Mohr joins NPR’s David Greene to talk about curses through the ages and how the words that offend us reveal a lot about society and its values.

Click Here For Interview Highlights.

Also related:  Geoffrey Nunberg on  “Ascent of the A Word” – in a 2012 interview by Robert Pollie, on KUSP’s 7th Avenue Project.

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(Listen to an interview with Peter Sagal, above) By J.D. Hillard | KUSP News

Peter Sagal

As Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me has grown to an enormous listenership, its host has become one of the more prominent people you never see. In the attached interview, Peter Sagal discusses revealing himself in the cinecast of the show and the new PBS documentary Constitution USA. Also he responds to criticism from breitbart.com and newbusters over his comparison of the Constitution to Tinkerbell. And he opens up about his hopes to bring Wait Wait to Santa Cruz.

A segment from the Constitution USA program:

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These robotic flies, which were built in a Harvard lab, can flap their wings independently of each other and fly around while tethered to a power and control wire. Photo: courtesy of Kevin Ma, Pakpong Chirarattananon/AAAS/Science

by GEOFF BRUMFIEL

A smartphone can tell you where to get a cup of coffee, but it can’t go get the coffee for you. Engineers would like to build little machines that can do stuff. They would be useful for a lot more than coffee, if we could figure out how to make them work.

But the rules of mechanics change at small scales. Friction becomes dominant; turbulence can upend a small airplane.

“Gears and rotors and belts and pistons and all of the things that work really well at large scales, they just don’t work at small scales,” says Michael Dickinson, a zoologist at the University of Washington. One solution: insects.

To watch a video of these Flybots in action click here

Dickinson, who studies flies, says that insects are the ultimate micromachines: They’ve got acute sensors, superfast reflexes and lots of little moving parts. “Insects just excel at small,” he says. “They really do small well.”

This week, two groups of engineers have unveiled two new machines that rip off insects. The first, published in the journal Nature, is a miniature camera. It looks just like a bug’s compound eye, and works like one too. John Rogers, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed the dime-sized camera by staring deep into the eyes of a bark beetle.

An insect’s eye lets it see really well because each of its light-sensitive cells has a dedicated lens. This miniature camera, which mimics an insect eye, is made from an array of microlenses arranged on a stretchable sheet that can be inflated like a balloon to a hemispherical shape. Photo: courtesy of University of Illinois and Beckman Institute

“It’s just this amazing rainbow of colors and this amazing hemispherical shape in what is otherwise kind of an ugly beetle insect,” he says. “And it only gets more interesting when you start to think about the details.”

An insect’s compound eye sees really well because each of its light-sensitive cells has its own dedicated lens. That means insect eyes have a huge field of view, are highly sensitive to motion, and keep everything in focus automatically. Copying that design lets Rogers’ camera do things no other camera can, like view things over very wide angles without distortion. Rogers thinks his new camera could be used in hard-to-reach places. It could look inside the human body, for example, or be used for surveillance.

The second piece of insect imitation is published in the journal Science. Robert Wood at Harvard University has spent years trying to make miniature flying robots that could go do stuff in the world. Wood’s flying robot copies real flies.

“If you just look at the aerial agility that flies have, it’s quite astounding,” Wood says. So it makes sense to try to replicate it.

The team built their robot by cutting flat pieces of different materials and sticking them together. Then they got the pieces to fold up into a robot. It took a while to get the little flybot working, Wood says.

“We would inevitably fly them and crash them, and fly them and crash them, and they would break,” he says. Now the flies are able to stay aloft as long as 10 minutes or so (although they’re still tethered by a cable for power and control).

Super-eyed fly robots could be used for all sorts of things. Individually, they might search through rubble of a collapsed building. A swarm of them might be used to help pollinate crops. With onboard batteries and microprocessors, they could network together to extend their reach and increase their intelligence.

Both projects still have a ways to go before they can really venture out on their own. In the meantime, zoologist Dickinson says that insects will continue to inspire engineers. And they should.

“It’s been the age of insects for about 400 million years,” Dickinson says. “So I think it’s very appropriate to spend some of our energy trying to figure out how they work and sort of see the world from their perspective.”

For article & comments visit NPR.org

For a video of these flybots in action click here

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Above, listen to the April 29th Fresh Air interview.

Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron is featured today on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I’ts well worth mentioning (and listening to) KUSP’s Robert Pollie’s interview with Maron on The 7th Avenue Project, early in 2011.

At that time, Robert wrote about Maron:

.. Marc Maron was at a low point in his life in late 2009 when he took up a new sideline: interviewing fellow comedians in a podcast he calls ’What the Fuck.’ Marc’s funny, raw and often revelatory heart-to-hearts with the likes of Louie C.K., Judd Apatow, Carlos Mencia, Robin Williams, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman and many others have made WTF one of the most listened-to podcasts on the web—and won him glowing write-ups in ’Rolling Stone’ and the ‘NY Times’.

From Fresh Air today:

… Now Maron has parlayed the success of his podcast into Maron, a television show based on his life; it debuts May 3 on the IFC Channel. And he has a memoir, Attempting Normal, in which he says he wishes his imagination was fueled by something other than panic and dread — though he says not to worry too much about that observation.

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Cover art for David Bowie’s ‘The Next Day’

It’s been a good ten years since David Bowie purposely removed himself from the public eye and disappeared back into the real world and went incognito. At age 66 the singer has surprised us all by roaring back to life out of nowhere with a superb new album “The Next Day”, the title song of which Bowie acknowledges his past but he’s telling you, despite the priest’s last rites,  he’s very much alive rocking in the present with an eye on the future: “…Here I am/Not quite dying/My body left to rot in a hollow tree/Its branches throwing shadows/On the gallows for me/And the next day/And the next/And another day”.

In 2004, Bowie suffered a massive heart attack and underwent major surgery followed by a lengthy recovery and self imposed vanishing act. Like a lot of musicians and artists now experiencing their senior years, Bowie has also gone down the road of introspection on “The Next Day” with many lyrical references to his past recordings, morality and what lies ahead. The jacket art, which Bowie had a hand in, pretty much spells it out with the album title on Post-It that’s stuck smack in the middle of a crossed out “Heroes” cover from 30 years ago. He’s no longer the young leather jacketed Bowie tipping his hand but a very present 66 yr Bowie who’s staring straight at you on the inside of the gate fold cover. There’s also a black mirror so you can look at yourself.

Joined by his longtime producer and musician cohort, Tony Visconti and a cast of top notch musicians including guitarist, Earl Slick, Bowie has crafted some of the finest songs of his 25 album career. All 14 tracks on “The Next Day” can proudly stand on their own, but it will take multiple listenings to appreciate and comprehend what’s going on here. Bowie’s writing has never been sharper. There are the expected couple of Bowie ballads, plenty of honking sax and soaring and crunching guitars that won’t disappoint.

That Bowie could disappear for ten years and then pop up out of nowhere with this master stroke of an album, is simply remarkable. “The Next Day” may hark back to elements of  mid-career Bowie albums       “Heroes”, “Lodger”, “Heathen” and “Reality”, it’s very much in the present and leaves a lasting, powerfully forward moving impression. - Eric Berg

From Democracy Now! |  The historic trial against former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity came to an abrupt end Thursday when an appeals court suspended the trial before a criminal court was scheduled to reach a verdict. Ríos Montt on was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Thursday’s decision is seen as a major blow to indigenous victims.

Investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported last night Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina. Ríos Montt was the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Nairn flew to Guatemala last week after he was called to testify in Ríos Montt’s trial. He was listed by the court as a “qualified witness” and was tentatively scheduled to testify on Monday. But at the last minute, Nairn was kept off the stand “in order,” he was told, “to avoid a confrontation” with the president, General Pérez Molina, and for fear that if he took the stand, military elements might respond with violence. In the 1980s, Nairn extensively documented broad army responsibility for the massacres and was prepared to present evidence that personally implicated Pérez Molina, who was field commander during the very Mayan Ixil region massacres for which the ex-dictator, Ríos Montt, had been charged with genocide.

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Steven Pinker says our perception of how violent we are as a species is skewed. Photo: Robert Leslie/TED

Steven Pinker questions the statement: The Twentieth Century was the most violent in history.

He charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given events in Darfur and Syria, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.

How? Good government. We act on violent impulses less often.

From last week’s episode of the Ted Radio Hour, which airs Friday nights at 7 on 88.9 KUSP and streams live at kusp.org