The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): A Hardly Strictly Followup

October 09, 2007

A Hardly Strictly Followup

Sunset behind the Star Stage on Sunday at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco.

That white-haired fellow on the right is Del McCoury, singing Richard Thompson's Vincent Back Lightning, just as he does in this video, except right there live in front of a few thousand people in Golden Gate Park's Lindley Meadow, deftly transporting the crowd and Thompson's song all the way to Kentucky by way of Bluegrass.

I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the festival this year. Many hundreds of thousands, I'm guessing. Most likely plenty attended all three days, as we did.

Earlier on Sunday I entertained the passing thought than John Langford would induce a heart attack in himself with all his vigorous prancing around the stage as the rest of the Mekons sang a chorus of "this is the end, this is the end," as shown here:

Jeff Tweedy played a remarkably long and engaging solo set to close the show on Friday night. Friday is the only day on which the Festival uses just the one stage. Saturday and Sunday's shows are spread out over five, and there's more good music than one ear can possibly entertain going on all at once all weekend long on those five stages.

Los Lobos played a sizzling set to close out Saturday's show on the Star Stage, preceded by my wife's favorite of the weekend, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, with Victor Wooten and Futureman himself, just like in the old days.

So what if we missed Jorma and the Austin Lounge Lizards and Steve Earl and Robert Earl Keen and Ricky Skaggs and Boz Skaggs, and David Grissman and Marley's Ghost and Gillian Welch and James McMurtry and The Flatlanders and Nick Lowe and the New Lost City Ramblers?

What the hey. We heard more than our fare share of good music anyhow.

Here's a picture of Warren Hellman, the originator of this million dollar bash, wrestling with his banjo, joined by Ron Thomason of the Dry Branch Fire Squad and the fine fiddler Heidi Clare.

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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