Date of publication: May 16, 1999
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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(Pic: http://mfinley.com/mike.jpg )
THE MIDWAY FOLK FESTIVAL
(And the New Songwriters Contest)
The Twin City's Largest Gathering of Local Traditional Performers!
Plus: Exhibits and a Silent Auction
July 17 & 18,1999 * I to 9 PM * Midway Stadium, St. Paul
Appearing:
* Brian Boru Irish Pipe Bond
* Calliope House
* Clann na Cairde
* Ethnic Dance Theater Vocal Ensemble
* Dakota Dave Hull & Kari Larson
* Spider John Koerner
* Charlie Maguire with Gordy Abel & Lisa Fuglie
* Swallow the Earth
* Urban Renewal Bluegrass
* John Van Orman
* The Wild Goose Chase Cloggers & The Uncommon Loons
* plus many more to be announced!
Sponsored by Minnesota Folk Song & Dance
Co-sponsored by the St. Paul Saints
For additional information call 651/647-0722
Tickets:
Advance: Adults: Single day: $10 | Both Days: $17
Seniors/Children 12-18: One day: $5 | Both Days: $7
Under 12: Free
(Available by mail. Send clieck to Kaposia STAR, P.O. Box 40471, St. Paul, MN 55104)
At the Door: Adults: Daily: $15 | Seniors/Children 12-18: $6 | Children under 12: Free
ALSO Featuring- The New Songwriter Contest
A special songwriter's event!
FIRST PLACE WINNER -- $100
Plus: A quest spot at this year's festival
Booked for the 2000 Festival
If you are a songwriter and would like to participate...
call 651/695-1737 or drop us a note to the Minnesota Folk Song and Dance, P.O. Box 40471, St. Paul, MN 55104. Include your name, address and phone number, and information about entering will be mailed to you.
Our Mission
The mission of Minnesota Folk Song and Dance is to present, teach, and promote the folk music an dance of all people, and to introduce thhese folk arts to new audiences of all ages, cultures, and abilities.
Minnesota Folk Song & Dance
P.O. Box 40471
St. Paul, MN 55104
PHONE 651/647-0722
EMAIL info@mfinley.com
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Q. What's the difference between a bagpipe and an onion?
A. No one cries when you chop up a bagpipe.
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Q. What's the difference between a bagpipe and a trampoline?
A. You take off your shoes when you jump on a trampoline.
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Q. How can you tell a bagpiper with perfect pitch?
A. He can throw a set into the middle of a pond and not hit any of the
ducks.
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Q. How is playing a bagpipe like throwing a javelin blindfolded?
A. You don't have to be very good to get people's attention.
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Q. What's the difference between a lawn mower and a bagpipe?
A. You can tune the lawn mower.
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Q. If you were lost in the woods, who would you trust for directions: an
in-tune bagpipe player, an out-of-tune bagpipe player, or Santa Claus?
A. The out-of-tune bagpipe player. The other two indicate you have been
hallucinating.
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Q. How do you make a chain saw sound like a bagpipe?
A. Add vibrato.
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Q. What's the definition of a gentleman?
A. Someone who knows how to play the bagpipe and doesn't.
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Q. What's the difference between a dead snake in the road and dead
bagpiper
in the road?
A. Skid marks in front of the snake.
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Q. What's the difference between a dead bagpiper in the road and a dead
country singer in the road?
A. The country singer may have been on the way to a recording session.
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Q. What's the
range of a bagpipe?
A. Twenty yards if you have a good arm.
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Q. Why are bagpipers
fingers like lightning?
A. They rarely strike the same spot twice.
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Q. How can you tell
if a bagpipe is out of tune?
A. Someone is blowing into it.
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If you took all the bagpipers in the world and laid them end to end -- it would be a good idea. ------------------------------------------------------
Q. What do
you call ten bagpipes at the bottom of the ocean?
A. A good start.
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Q. Why do
bagpipers walk when they play? A. To get away from the sound.
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Q. What's the
definition of "optimism"
A. A bagpiper with a beeper.
+----------------------------------+
Did you hear the one about the
bagpiper who parked his car with the windows
open, forgetting that he had left his bagpipes in the back seat?
He rushed back as soon as he realized it, but it was too late -- someone
had already put another set of bagpipes in the car!
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Q. How do you get two bagpipes to play in perfect unison?
A. Shoot one.
"Lots of us find it a very helpful, human, sometimes humorous, always interesting, often surprising column that has no peer on the freelance market, And, yes, you can use that as a
testimonial if it helps."
"No one talks about the ups and downs of technology like Michael Finley. See his columns online at www.mfinley.com/. -- James S. Derk, Evansville (IN) Courier
"Editors want everything to fall into a neat little box, and your stuff
doesn't do that. You don't write merely about technology, you write about what technology means to us and how it has changed us. I like it." -- John Boxmeyer, St. Paul
![[IMAGE]](http://mfinley.com/gif/finley.gif)
I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.
I've had a new experience the past couple of months -- helping to plan an outdoor music festival.
It began backstage at a Peter Paul & Mary concert last September. I was writing something about Peter Yarrow, and he put me in touch with an old friend of his, Deb Martin, a fiddler and folk music promoter.
Deb is creating, from the ground up, a two-day stadium folk event which she hopes will be a fixture on the scene for years to come.
She invited both me and Peter to join her fledgling board of directors. Peter, with his credentials, I understand. But why me? My expertise is business and technology, not folk music. Indeed, what I do, and what folk music is, are near opposites on the scale of human impulses.
But I cheerfully signed on, and this week the board was given a tour of St. Paul's Midway Stadium, where our festival will be held July 17 and 18. [Editor: see attached NR for list of performers, or see http://mfinley.com/folk]
Afterward, we met over coffee to plot how to make the festival a success. That's when the rift between biztech and folk culture opened up.
I had created a modest website for the Midway Folk Festival, piggybacked (for now) on my own site (http://mfinley.com/folk). That was fine. But when I started thinking outloud about conventional biztech approaches to hype the festival, like using Diamondvision, or inviting a celebrity like Prince to sit in on a chain-gang song, I drew troubled stares.
Because there's the paradox at work.
Biztech is about connecting to the future, but folk music is largely about connecting to the past. And while most people who like folk music also do e-mail and web-surfing and word processing and the like, they may not like mixing the two worlds. It's OK for Bowie or Radiohead to dabble technology, but traditional musicians, in bluegrass or bagpipes or joujouka, do so at their own risk.
Remember how the acoustic folkies unplugged Bob Dylan when he plugged his electric band in at Newport in 1965? There is a fear that going modern will wreck something beautiful.
I saw these worlds collide before. I helped found a food coop in the 1970s that split down the middle over the issue of whether to sell white bread on its shelves. Purists said we owed it to the coop spirit to only sell food without preservatives and dyes. But the market-minded among us knew kids, and many working dads, prefer Wonder Bread in their lunch bags. Who was right? I don't know, but the issue killed the coop.
A few weekends ago it happened on a smaller scale. My wife Rachel has been singing a song or two with an Irish band called Calliope House that Deb Martin plays fiddle in. They were playing at Keenan's Tavern, a little place on St. Paul's West Seventh Street.
I mentioned to one of the musicians that if they were to work up a rave-up version of a sentimental warhorse like "Danny Boy," in addition to their usual ceili tunes, they'd sell a lot of beer, which would surely gladden the proprietor's heart.
The musician made a grimace of great aesthetic pain at the suggestion, as if the pipes, the pipes, were calling him to personally throw up. I felt like the proverbial nabob of philistinism.
Which I suppose I am. I admire purity, but I am not good at it, personally. I am new-fashioned enough to want to see things work. New enterprises, especially with the best of intentions, fail all the time. I would love to think up something that would put the brand-new Midway Folk Festival on the map.
Folk song is a curious thing. It has no capital compared to other musical forms, and few celebrities that stack up against a movie star or rock diva. It's signature is its modesty. Oftentimes ("One Meatball") it is not even especially articulate.
But I remember what Peter Yarrow said to me when I first spoke to him. Words are marvelous and powerful, he said, but they do not connect with people the way a song does. And the simpler the song, the nakeder it is, the less anyone has to gain from it, the more powerful the connection it makes.
He talked to me about going into big corporate campuses, pulling his guitar out of its case before phalanxes of market-hardened managers. But within a few strums of "If I Had a Hammer," tears are streaming down some of those faces.
That's what I'm hoping to remind people of, and I'll use new ways to say it. And I'm going to put it on my website. I'm going to send it through the e-mail. I'm going to FTP the love between the brothers and the sisters, all over this land!
Come to the Midway Folk Festival, July 17-18. The weather, I have been promised, will be fabulous.
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
|
America's Best-Loved Futurist(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.
I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But I am a few clients lighter right now than I need to be, and a bit of revenue never hurts. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike
Total tips, year
to date: $203.00 - MANY THANKS!
