Sunday, February 25, 2007

Is this the Beatles without the Specter's "wall of sound" and the pistol on mixer?

I was just listening to WFUV last week David Bromberg I think was playing live from there the Bennet studios. He's some guitar player, I first heard of him in Buffalo, NY with some Philly Folk Festival fans and an ex-Yippie. Theye were Grateful Dead fans too and we got to see them again at the Watkins Glen Music Festival with the Allman Brothers and the The Band. Thanks, is this the remade "digital" Beatles I've heard about? Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice" is free over at Rolling Stone #1 to listen into on Rhapsody. I used to listen to them with John and Terry on the 45rpm "Attica State" in Patchogue years ago, where the LI Music Hall of Fame is held. >>>http://www.bennettstudios.com/mysterytracks/ A studio in NJ did these tracks. David Bromberg promo from Bennett Studies on WFUV recently..."Try Me One More Time" (worked w/ the free VLC player).When I was at the university in Buffalo, NY 1973-1975 I was in a smaller "college" of residential education in the "Visual and Performing Arts" of which there were other colleges (history "Vico College", math, nursing, women's studies, radical thought, etc.) that were to be anchored in the new campus just opening in Amherst, NY once touted as America's safest place to live. At the time there was also a subway proposed, since built, that was to connect to the North Campus, and New York State's Law School, however, that subway extension wasn't built out to the filled swamp built using a construction method used in Mexico City, on deep pilings, used in lower Manhattan too, driven by steam pile drivers. As the "initial occupency" many of the students were stranded without connection to the local mall and stores without vehicles, most of the buses ran to the "Main Campus" on Main Street in Buffalo, a division that's still apparent there over 1 million residents in the suburb and 1 million in the city. I once studied a "West Side Highway" proposed there for Applied Anthropology, which the subway was seen as the alternative to. The first dorm, the "Governors Residence" named after the four quads named for former governors of New York State, was built by the famous architectural firm I.M. Pei, an important Chinese-American. Classes "in residence" (later the now dissolved classic "Cleveland Quartet" would live in residence) run by the college, College B, one of the first there in residential education, and overseen by R. Oliver Gibson, Ph.D., a Nova Scotian, and chairperson of Educational Administration, future administrators of schools, would use the dorm lounge spaces to hold seminars and faculty would visit to hold classes. At first started on the Main Street campus in the Schoelkopf dorm, one class for example was a historian discussing his research and soon to be published book, "Sex in the White House" a history of how it has or had been presented in the press and by the various occupants of the White House. Later Eric Bentley, who taught theater for many years at Columbia University and a translator of Bertolt Brecht's plays and author of "Life of the Drama" might speak in a "Seminar in the Arts". Or the Buffalo Philharmonic tympani player, or an architect, etc. One held by writer and critic Leslie Fiedler required I critique an article about the Rolling Stones made film, "Altamont" about the free concert held in California that resulted in the death of a youth beaten I heard recently with cue sticks when he apparently was thought to have pulled a pistol to fire at the Rolling Stones perfoming onstage. The "Hells Angels" had been hired to handle concert security. I think it was in Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (1972) maybe. George Lucas worked as a camera operator on "Gimme Shelter". Martin Scorcese worked on "Woodstock". Another satellite of the college was the "Oakstone Farm" run by a Stanford University philosophy graduate, Jonathan Ketchum, where students worked as "barter" for room and board and studied philosophy such as phenomenology. I think he was over some administration snafu was suing the university over "academic freedom" when it said he could not teach without the credentials which someone at Stanford University mis-mailed. Another satellite of "College B" was the "American Contemporary Theater" (A.C.T.) run by Joseph Dunne and his wife, held experimental theater performances in Buffalo, NY. I recall T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" set in one performed in one there. It was all on hold as the new campus was years behind in opening due to many problems of labor, funding and construction. The Law School opened a couple of weeks after the semester started for example as the things like granite curbs had to be installed and the road paved. The huge facility Ellicott Complex, designed by Davis, Brody and now Young, is a series of buildings all connected on a second story terrace, where buses ran under it and other shops are at ground level. It was thought the space could be used without having to leave it for vehicular transportation to classes. I hope it worked out for the better I almost stepped into a fifth floor elevator shaft when it stopped ascending to the eighth floor for whatever reason, a floor I ended up on. It also snowed 23" in 24 hours. The point was they had a few times a "Magical Mystery Tour" on Saturday, rent a school bus pay a fee and they would surprize the students with a destination, i.e., the Ontario Science Center and dining in Chinatown in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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