Larry Swanson’s Blog

I believe that the Bartell drugstore here in the Medical Dental Building is the original one in that chain. In any case, it still employs a couple of cashiers who look like they may have been around back in the middle part of the 20th Century. Everyone there is friendly and helpful, but I find the two older ladies’ slow-paced service (not slow like a snooty upscale-store clerk, more like a waiter in a small Parisian bistro) endearing. It reminds me of when, not that long ago, people would drive 45 MPH (now it’s more like 65 MPH) past the Twin Teepees on Aurora or slow down as they drove by The Blob on lower Queen Anne. Every Tuesday morning I go into Bartell (I say Bartells in my head, the way old-time Seattle-ites say Nordstroms or Boeings) and buy the New York Times, and most Tuesdays Gail, the more youthful of the two, rings me up and always says, “Thanks a lot, dear.” I just love that.

The music in Lara McIntosh’s Sunday-morning Wassa Dance class has been really hot lately. This morning, though,Thierno Diop took it up a notch with some of the wildest djembe phrasing I’ve ever heard.

It was improv as always. I was playing a modified Soli Rapide sangban part on my dununba and kenkeni:

1 * * 2 * * 3 * * 4 * *
x . x . x x . x . x . x
D . . . K K . . . D . .

Caxambu was playing a goat-skin atabaque, Mohammed was playing what looked like some sort of kpanlogo drum, and Naby was playing Thierno’s bougarabous.

I’m not entirely sure what he was doing, but it sounded like Thierno was playing in roughly 4/4 time with a heavy sabar/mbalax flavor and emphasizing the sixteenth notes just before and after the beat. Whatever he was doing, it was some of the coolest damned drumming I’ve ever heard. I wish I’d had my minidisc recorder running. . .

A massage client the other day referred to the “disco nap,” a quick 40 winks after work and before you head out for the night. This got me thinking about other kinds of naps. There’s the “cat nap,” the “power nap,” the siesta - and that’s about all I have come up with so far. I know there must be others that I’m missing. If you can thinkof other kinds of naps please add a comment to this post and let me know.

I’ve decided to move all of my various blogs to one central location here at LarrySwanson.com.  Over the years, I’ve managed to write blog entries in at least three different places.  I’ll be migrating all of the old posts over to this WordPress blog over the next few weeks, so you will suddenly see a bunch of old entries here.

I’ll use 301 redirects to point the old entries to their new location (luckily there aren’t too many of them) and tidy everything up with the nifty categorization that WordPress lets you do.

Years ago, back when I was a college textbook rep, a professor told me that when new college campuses are built the designers don’t put in all the sidewalks right away. They wait to see where the students wear a path in the grass and then build them there. You can use this same idea when you build a big, database-driven web site. You create stable URLs for all of your site pages and then build rudimentary navigation and then see how your users actually navigate, or try to navigate, your site. Once you’ve got a feel for how folks actually want to use your site, then you can go back and tailor your navigation to their needs.

I’m trying this with my new massage education directory, Bodywork U. Sure, there’s probably a more elegant and proactive way to do this, but 1) users will always do what they want anyway, so why try to outguess them, and 2) I don’t have the budget to hire a hot-shot website navigation expert.

I have a regular client who is always very complimentary of my work. As she comes out of the treatment room she almost always exclaims “Fabulous!” or “Amazing!” or “Excellent!” or something similar. Today, as she was preparing to leave and I was glancing at my planner, I decided to start jotting down her comments in my calendar. So she comes out of the treatment room and says, “very good.” That’s it. No effusive adjectives. No exclamation points. Just, “very good.” That will teach me to get all proud and self-congratulatory. Needless to say, I have dropped the planned compliment-documentation project.

This actually gets at one of the things I like about this job. In the massage biz, there is no room for resting on your laurels or phoning in your work. You’ve got to be 100% present and 100% non-egotistical every day, every hour, every minute, or the mojo will get out of whack. How humbling.

I just love it that Yahoo! chose today, Valentine’s Day, to include Bodywork U in their directory. Links from big directories like Yahoo! are highly regarded by the search engines, so I’m very happy to have received this bit of link love today.

Two of the better world music acts I’ve ever seen were in town over the weekend. Both the Sweet Honey in the Rock show on Saturday night at the Paramount and the Hugh Masekela 9:30 show at Jazz Alley on Sunday night were very lightly attended. Where were you guys?

About half the seats at the Sweet Honey in the Rock show were empty, which really surprised me since they have a huge natural following here in Seattle and they were on their way to the Grammy Awards the next night.

As we waited in line in the garage to get into the Hugh Masekela show, the Jazz Alley folks apologized for the delay in getting us into the late show and promised that we’d get the same multi-encore show that the early crowd got. It didn’t turn out that way. Mr. Masekela was obviously put off by the numerous missed lighting and sound cues from the production booth (and you’ve got to wonder what he thought about the maybe-one-third-full house), and after about a75-minute set he and the whole band tromped off the stage never to be seen again. Don’t get me wrong, the show was great. His “Chissa All-Stars” included two great singers and a fabulous singer/violin player, and the band (keyboards, percussion, drums, 2 guitars, bass) totally rocked. Except for the lack of an encore, they were totally present for us.

I mentioned the light turnouts at these shows to a friend who has produced several Seattle world music events and he said that many of the local venues rely on word of mouth and their routine announcement channels, sometimes neglecting promo for individual acts. I did see a couple of small newspaper ads for each of these shows (which is how they ended up on my Seattle world music shows announcement page), but I’d love to figure out what happened here. Is interest in world music on the decline in Seattle? Were these shows inadequately promoted? Or is something else going on?

I played dununs with Naby’s band Lagni Sussu at Hidmo last night. It was a very fun gig, one of those nights where pretty much everyone in the place was up dancing.

As is often the case with Naby, it was a bit of a pick-up band, with Etienne Cakpo, Souleymane N’Daiye, and me (if you know these guys, you know that mentioning me in the same sentence is pretty much blasphemy; they’re real-deal, lifelong musicians, while I’m a dilettante late-comer) sitting in on percussion along with Eduard Souarez on drum kit and Mohammed Shaibu on guitar - and Naby on balafon and djembe, of course.

The highlight of the evening for me was having Sawe Imani come up and paste a dollar bill on my forehead and give me a big hug as I was playing. Sawe is one of my favorite dancers and dance teachers, and it means a lot to me that she appreciates my music. I started developing my chops several years ago playing for her Wednesday-night class at Spectrum, and I appreciate her patience (and that of Carold, Thaddeus, Ryan, and the other drummers) as I developed my drumming skills.

Naby is alway showing me cool dunun phrases. This one really seemed to get the dancers going (ballet style; D = dununba, K = kenkeni, actually a kenkeni/sangban flam):

1 * + * 2 * + * 3 * + * 4 * + *
D . D D . . K . . . . . . . K .

(If you can’t read this notation, drop me a note and I’ll explain it in more detail.)

The Fremont Noodle House Group celebrated its tenth anniversary today. About 20 folks showed up for the big event. Rishi comped us some appetizers. Karen presented me with a bowl filled with golden noodles. Liesbeth gave me a bar of her hand-crafted soap, a product that was developed with the help of the noodle group. I was dubbed the “Noodle Daddy” by Helene. I passed along “hello”s from Rahul and Griggs, and a number of other old-time noodlers showed up in person: Liesbeth, Lyle, Tim, Raven, Page. And we had a couple of new folks - Liesbeth’s friend Sandie and Liz’s boyfriend - as well as a number of current regulars: Greg, Paul, Matt, Roger, and Josh. It felt really great to be back on the other side of Fremont Ave., where it all started, and back in Rishi’s capable hands.

Rishi is now the co-manager of Jai Thai in Fremont. I’ve always like Jai Thai, but now that Rishi - who was our waiter back at the old Fremont Noodle House in the late ’90s - is back, it’s looking even better.