BIRD & BECKETT BOOKS

Jah! Rastafari!

here lie the true roots of Bird & Beckett’s Big Bash 2012…

Jack Ruby High Power
Keystone Berkeley, 2119 University Avenue
Berkeley, California
1st August 1982

Featuring: Lui Lepke, Bobby Culture, Lee Van Cleef

Operator – Fat Jaw

Owner – Jack Ruby

“Here is a real exclusive, courtesy of White Squall, of the mighty Jack Ruby Hi Fi live and direct in California. This is a really crisp recording of an event held at Keystone Berkeley that was maybe put on to showcase how the authentic Jamaican sound systems operate. The owner Jack Ruby is heard introducing his deejays to the audience and radio listeners, and one of the sounds regular deejays Lui Lepke is heard stepping out over some “Pre-release” Mighty Diamonds tracks. His report of the death of “Walter Rodney” is delivered over the Diamonds recut of “Declaration Of Rights” and when Fat Jaw spins some new Dennis Brown he tells how a recent “Dance A Keep Ina Ochi”. Bobby Culture has made the journey too and he gets down to business riding Freddie McGregor’s massive “Big Ship” changing it to “Big Sound Ina Foreign”. Like Lui, he’s got a lot of lyrics to flash and he educates the crowd about how to keep a dance in “Master Blaster”. Jack Ruby in fine style!”
http://www.whocorkthedance.com/USAspecial.html

This sound system dance concert was second of two trailblazing shows (the first took place at the historic Fillmore Auditorium the preceding day) put on by San Francisco’s Carnaval Productions — Jack Ruby’s only West Coast shows ever, unless I’m mistaken… 

Carnaval was a concert promotion partnership between Patricia Peyton and Eric Whittington which during its early 1980s heyday produced a run of nightclub shows, primarily at Cesar’s Latin Palace and the Club Elegante in the Mission District, that featured the likes of Fua Dia Congo, Batucaje, Pete Escovedo and other great groups from the fertile Bay Area world music scene at the time.

For the two High Power shows, famed producer Jack Ruby, out of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, flew in direct from Jamaica to San Francisco with his djs, production crew, and twelve huge speaker columns, each painted with symbols of the zodiac.  After the shows here, the sound system moved on to do shows in NYC and Orange, New Jersey that remain legendary, trucking 2/3 of the sound system cross-country— all that would fit in the biggest truck they could obtain.

Click on the poster above to read more on Jack Ruby and Jack Ruby Hi Fi — where the marvelous folks at the “Who Cork the Dance” website include a mention of the Jack Ruby Hi Power 1982 West Coast swing for the Carnaval Productions shows, noting that “In 1982 the sound embarked on a full scale tour of the USA with an entourage of 11 including Jack, Fat Jaw, Bobby Culture, Nicodemus, Lui Lepki and Brimstone. They played dates on the East Coast, in New York and New Jersey, and they even crossed to the West Coast playing in California and showcasing an authentic sound system there for perhaps the very first time.”

A prototype of the poster shown above is reproduced at the WCTD “Jack Ruby” link  — an early version of the poster we used, mocked up when we were still anticipating that the great Yellowman was going to be making his debut US appearance as part of this tour.  Other djs who might have made it included Brigadier Jerry and Sister Nancy, but ultimately we had the terrific Bobby Culture, Louie Lepke and the youngster Lee Van Cleef, and nobody went home unhappy with that!  Nicodemus, mentioned in the linked post, didn’t appear in the West Coast shows.

Saturday, May 17, 2012 - 2-6 pm
A Benefit for Bird & Beckett Books
at the Miraloma Clubhouse, SF

spotlighting the immense talent
from San Francisco’s own
Ruth Asawa School of the Arts

including latin jazz ensemble
“New Arrival”
and poet Jules Cunningham

tickets just $10 each - raffle - good food! 
proceeds benefit the bookshop

call 415-586-3733 or email birdbeckett@yahoo.com
for more info and to reserve your ticket

Don’t forget to read!

womenreading:

Marilyn Monroe

Elise Beneke, and cow, in Glen Canyon - 1909

Regarding this photo, the late Valborg C. (“Val”) Tietz–a wonderfully civic minded woman long considered the informal mayor of Glen Park–notes that:

     ”The lady pictured was my mother-in-law: Elise Beneke, who later married Alexander William Tietz in 1910. Her husband Alexander Tietz was crushed by 2 railroad cars at the Santa Fe yards in 1920, where he worked. He was taken out beyond the ‘Three-mile Limit’ where he was found. There never was anyone charged with throwing the wrong switch. The family was paid $9000 for his death by the Santa Fe R. R.

    “She never re-married, and lived with her son Wilhelm or ‘Bill,’ who was my husband.  We married in 1955. She lived with us for 25 years, and died at age 86 in 1976.

    “This picture was taken of her in the Glen Canyon, where there was a dairy for years. The cows were quite tame, as you can see. The Good Brothers owned the dairy.”

Elise and Alexander Tietz lived in the little cottage at 657 Chenery that adjoins Bird & Beckett Books.  That cottage was the first residential structure in Glen Park, built in 1872 by a dairyman, William Tietz (presumably Alexander’s father and Elise’s father in law).  Torr Tietz–Bill and Val’s son–lives there still, and also leases the adjacent building at 653 Chenery to the bookshop.

Val and Bill, while living with his mother in the little cottage, raised their two sons, Torr and Forrest, there.  Elise died in 1976 when the boys were in their early 20s.  Val and Bill lived on in the cottage until first Bill’s death in the 1990s, and then Val’s in 2004.  Their son Torr resides there now–and he and his brother Forrest share stewardship of the two adjacent properties extending up Chenery Street:  the bookshop’s building (designed and built in the mid-1970s to house the Glen Park Branch Library by Bill–who worked as an architect for San Francisco’s Dept. of Health and Human Services) and the modern apartment building next door that houses a preschool on its ground floor.

The library had long enjoyed Val and Bill’s beneficence as landlords until its more expansive space was finally opened on Diamond Street in 2007.  It had moved from storefront to storefront around Glen Park until Val and Bill decided that it needed a more permanent home, so they took the family’s old warehouse on the site down to its foundation and built the structure that sits there now–still a bastion of books as it had been for the 30 years that it housed the library at below-market rates.  Torr and Forrest have taken to heart their parents’ sense of obligation to benefit their community, by renting these spaces to businesses that serve more than strictly a commercial function–hence their choice to rent to a bookshop and a preschool!

Welcome, neighbors… but watch where you park that thing!

http://glenparkassociation.org/2012/04/26/district-8-expands-southeast-of-bernal-cut/

Still from Satyajit Ray’s 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) — Sharmila Tagore as Aparna.
The film screens Tuesday, March 20, at 7 pm in Bird & Beckett’s festival of Bengali films at the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco.  http://www.birdbeckett.com

from the 1983 National Film Awards brochure

Nagmoti, directed Gautam Chattopadhyay, screens Sunday, March 18th at 8:15 pm

at Bird & Beckett’s “Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood”
film festival of Bengali films at the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco

from the 1983 National Film Awards brochure

New Theatres logo from the golden age of Tollywood.

http://www.upperstall.com/blogs/boorback/new-theatres-a-cinematic-equivalence-of-literature/