. . . . Booker T tribute and then some
Saturday, November 14, 2026
James Rigby - LAKOTA SIOUX TUNED DGDGBD
Back to the Music!
LAKOTA SIOUX - BY JAMES RIGBY
TUNED DGDGBD
SONGS FROM THE WATCH - A Compilation of 25 Original Guitar Fingerpicking Pieces in Open Tunings, Taken from 7 Albums, Written over the last 6 years by James Rigby
CLICK ON BLUE LINKS BELOW TO SAMPLE 8 ALBUMS
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SONGS FROM THE WATCH
Dangerous Minds: ANISH KAPOOR: There's a Man in Chicago ‘Bean’!
Man in Bean: The most bizarre urban legend of Chicago
Credit: Dangerous Minds / Pixabay
The official name for one of the newest Chicago landmarks is Cloud Gate, but let’s be real here, it’s The Bean, isn’t it?
Anish Kapoor may have intended to create something that, when looked at during the right moment of the right kind of day, looks like a piece of the sky drifted into the middle of Chicago, but when it was unveiled in 2006, people were not happy with it. Which makes a certain degree of sense: Chicagoans are protective of their city, and such a strange-shaped thing that seems like nothing more than a pretentious selfie spot probably was a tough sell at first.
However, that’s the thing about things that look weird. They eventually just become a part of the furniture and, just like everything else in Chicago, get defended like one of their own. It’s only something that someone who knows their Portage Park from their Lincoln Square can take the piss out of. Yet since 2025, it’s been the centre of a quite frankly baffling piece of performance art. One that began on, of all things, the site of Lollapalooza that year.
To anyone who saw it out of the corner of their eye, it would have looked like a protest campaign the likes of which the festival hasn’t seen since its heyday at the forefront of 1990s alternative culture. A group of serious-looking young people marching around the festival site with placards and megaphones. It’d get your attention, and then you’d realise they were talking not only about a popular Chicago tourist trap… But the young person apparently trapped inside it?
If you went up to talk to them, they’d tell you all about the information they’ve been supposedly fed that during the work’s construction, Kapoor had stolen a baby and snuck it inside the sculpture, where it has been living since 2004. The Man in Bean movement, as they called themselves, were calling upon the alderman of Chicago’s 42nd Ward, Brendan Reilly, to admit to the ruse and release the trapped person, who by now was past 20. So they said.
This is clearly a joke, but like all jokes of this kind, it spread. The Lollapalooza starting point was a cunning idea that meant that there was a captive audience waiting to post about such a bizarre conspiracy theory on social media. The social media platforms made for the movement exploded in popularity, creating a community of people who were all dedicated to treating this surreal idea as true. People would then one-up each other with stunts until finally, someone got it in their head to actually contact Reilly.
I should say that thousands of people got the idea to contact him because suddenly, his Chicago office was inundated with demands to release the man in the bean. Reilly tried to take this in good grace and said that he couldn’t because there was no man in the bean. Chicago mayor JB Pritzker tried to get in on the joke by refusing to confirm or deny whether someone was in the sculpture. This obviously made things worse because now, the community had a new rallying cry.
Big Bean was trying to silence them. They were on the right track.
This culminated in 2026 when a new wrinkle to the story was found. “Intel” gathered by “higher-ups” within the conspiracy said that there was a trap door in the bottom of the piece and that if it could only be moved a couple of inches, then the trap door could be accessed and “life-saving supplies” could be dropped off for the state’s resident. Life-saving supplies like, of course, “a single pickle”.
250 people ended up descending on The Bean on November 8th but were unable to budge it. That said, I may be lying to you. You never know who could be in Big Bean’s pocket.
The End of the "Man In Bean” Conspiracy
Powder Blue
Keith Richards on the Great Blues Masters | Don’s Tunes
Keith Richards: I found out is that all of the great players are basically such gentlemen. B.B. King and Muddy Waters, both straight up guys. They've got nothing to fear. They always encourage. They're always concerned about other people. They're never self centered. When I look back and think, "Shit, I played with those guys," that's enough. I don't want no money. I mean, thanks for the money, but to have Muddy Waters say to you, "Hey, show me that lick you did..." Everybody's a perennial teenager when it comes to stuff like that.
I don't think you could ever do the blues too many times, quite honestly. It's one of the most fascinating forms of music I know, and I listen to a lot of styles. It's such a honed-down form. It travels well. It can pick up on what's happening and be a viable vehicle for songwriting. It's probably the most important thing that America has ever given to the world. From Leadbelly to B.B. King to Buddy Guy and all the stops in between, it's just such an amazingly flexible form.
The Stones brought two opening acts on the 1969 tour, B.B. King and Ike and Tina Turner. “When we played Baltimore,” said King, “there was a white lady that came up with her children and she said, ‘You’re B.B. King.’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She said, ‘Have you ever made any records?’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She said, ‘Well, my kids and I like what you did. Can you tell me where I can get one?’ I mean, she wasn’t joshing me at all, she was serious. And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve been making records since ’49.’”
Photo: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and B.B. King Backstage, Chicago, IL, 1969 by Glen Craig
Roots of British Folk songs continued . . . . . . . .
bit of a too maudlin a start? Here’s some authentic British Folk music . . . . . . . .!!!
The Cordwanglers Daughter!
[K. Williams Esq.,]
Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat (Live in Dublin 2003)
The algorithm threw dear Glen Hansard covering this partially but here is the master at work in Glenn’s home town wonder if he saw him . . . I suspect he did . . . I lifelong obsession like mine own
Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat (Official Live in Dublin 2013)
Leonard Cohen on meditation . . . . .
Cohen on Buddhist Meditation
Most of the world remembers him as a poet, songwriter, and that unmistakable voice singing about love, longing, desire, loss, God, and the innumerable ways human beings manage to break one another’s hearts.But for a period of his life, Leonard Cohen was also simply Jikan — his Zen name, commonly translated as The Silent One.In the 1990s, at the height of a remarkable artistic career, Cohen withdrew for several years to Mount Baldy Zen Center, located at Mount San Antonio—commonly known as Mount Baldy—in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California, roughly 50 miles east of Los Angeles. He sat zazen. He rose before dawn. He cooked, cleaned, shoveled snow, and served his longtime teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Zen monk.What is especially interesting about Cohen is that he never needed Zen to turn him into someone else.He remained deeply connected to Judaism and resisted easy religious labels. Speaking about his life at the monastery, Cohen once said, “I never think of myself as a Buddhist, but I like the actual study that people are engaged in here.” He compared that study to learning a musical instrument.Perhaps that is one reason Zen seemed so naturally at home in his work.Cohen understood contradiction: the sacred and the profane, beauty and decay, desire and renunciation, suffering and gratitude. He rarely tried to tidy these things up or pretend that one side could permanently defeat the other.One of his most familiar observations begins, “There is a crack in everything.”Zen might recognize something there.Practice does not necessarily repair the world until there are no cracks left. It asks us to see clearly what is here. To stop demanding that life become something other than life before we are willing to inhabit it completely.And perhaps this is why Cohen remains such an interesting figure for practitioners. He didn’t disappear into the monastery forever. Eventually, he came back down the mountain. He returned to poetry, recording, touring, relationships, aging, and all the complications of ordinary human existence. Two Arrows Zen
Sturgill Simpson performs “Ripple” with Jerry Garcia for the Grateful Dead | Nostalgia Vibes
Sturgill Simpson performs “Ripple” with Jerry Garcia for the Grateful Dead
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall, you fall alone
If you should stand, then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way, I would take you home
But if you fall, you fall alone
If you should stand, then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way, I would take you home
Bobby and Eric having fun down at the Crossroads . . . . .
𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐑𝐎𝐀𝐃𝐒 | 𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐂 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐎𝐍 & 𝐁𝐎𝐁 𝐃𝐘𝐋𝐀𝐍
"Benefit for the Crossroads Centre – 1999 Originally written by Robert Johnson (1936) as Cross Road Blues. Two legends, one stage, and a shared love for music."
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