Today's Stories

October 24 / 26, 2008

Mike Whitney
Down for the Count

October 23, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
What Voter Fraud?

Todd Chretien
Why I'm Not Voting for Obama

John Ross
No Child Left Behind, Mexican-Style

Peter Morici
Strategies to End the Crisis

Mats Svensson
Short Film Clips at a Checkpoint

Marlene Martin
Don't Let Them Execute an Innocent Man

Robert Jensen /
Pat Youngblood
Looking Beyond the Election and Beyond Elections

Margaret Kimberley
Rightwing Obama Love

Deepak Tripathi
Post-Bush Scenarios

David Morris
Why Joe the Plumber is a Socialist (And You Are, Too)

Website of the Day
Voting While Black in North Carolina

October 22, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Kid Killers are Barbarians

Heather Gray
Raising Hell in the South: the Legacy of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

Jeff Birkenstein
McCain's Disdain for Spain

Ralph Nader
The Song Remains the Same: Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Election

DC Larson
The Growing of a Heartland Nader Raider

David Swanson
Colin Powell, Not Qualified for Government Service

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth

Larry Everest
9/11 and the Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

Robert Fantina
Anything to Win

Martha Rosenberg
The Financier's Playbook

Stephen Martin
Giving It Up to the Combine

Website of the Day
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces

October 21, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Wealth's Apostles

Paul Craig Roberts
How Inflation Works: Why I Can't Buy an Old Ferrari

Corey D. B. Walker
Empire and White Supremacy

Steve Breyman
How to "Win" in Afghanistan

Eric Toussaint
The Economic Crisis and Latin America: Time to Delink

Wajahat Ali
Boo Radley Comes Out to Play: the Emerging Muslim-American Electorate

Robert Weitzel
Wasting a Vote for Lincoln's Radical Ideal (Or Why I'm Voting for Nader)

Brendan Cooney
Palinoscopy: an Exploration of Why Liberals are So Obsessed with Sarah Palin

Dave Lindorff
Cuba's Oil Reserves: a Game-Changer?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing
When You're a Black Candidate There's No Such Thing as a Safe Lead

Patrick B. Barr
Socialist, Socialist, SOCIALIST!

Omar Barghouti
The Boycott and Palestinian Groups: Countering the Critics

Website of the Day
How to Dismantle a US War Plane (and Get Away With It)

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

Anthony DiMaggio
The Scandal That Never Was: ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Tariq Ali
Zardari Bans My Books

Uri Avnery
Is Akko Burning?

Bill Quigley
Hammered by the Swedes

Ben Rosenfeld
The Politics of St. Joe, Martyr to a Lie

David Michael Green
Payback's a Bitch: McCain on the Ash Heap

William S. Lind
The Afghanistan Advantage

Chris Genovali
Drill, Baby, Drill (Wink, Wink)

Stephen Martin
The Last Man in America

Howard Lisnoff
Bad News for War Resisters

David Yearsley
Organ Meat

Website of the Day
Our Brother is Sick: the Steve Ferguson Cancer Fund

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 16, 2008

Mike Whitney
The End of Friedmanite Economics: an Interview with Robert Pollin

Jonathan Cook
The Acre Riots

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Is Obama Playing to the Gallery? Or Has He Lost the Plot in South Asia?

Alan Maass
A Supreme Injustice: the Death Penalty Case of Troy Davis

Chuck O'Connell
Our Needs Do Not Fit on Their Ballots

Mary Lynn Cramer
Krugman's Prize: Iconoclast, Apologist or Propagandist?

P. Sainath
The Race May be Over, But Race Isn't

Andy Worthington
The Shrinking Case Against Binyam Mohamed: Justice Department Drops "Dirty Bomb Plot" Allegation

Peter Gelderloos
Enric Duran, the Good Thief?

Stephen Martin
The Nourishment of Idleness: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Douglas Valentine
Why I'm Voting for Obama

Website of the Day
The Mormon Worker

October 15, 2008

Steve Conn
The Real Story of Troopergate

William P. O'Connor
The Legend of John McCain

Robert Weissman
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks: Public Ownership, But No Public Control

Jonathan M. Feldman
Before the Second Wave of Crisis: an Alternative to the Triple Failure

Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Race in America: Is a Vote For Obama a Vote Against Racism?

Conn Hallinan
Targeting Unions in Colombia

Justin Podur
The Financial Economy and Real Economy

Karl Grossman
The New Nuclear Navy

Dave Lindorff
Is the Government Really Turning Socialist?

Eric Walberg
The Quiet Russian

Martha Rosenberg
Of Blood and Eggs

Uri Avnery
A Fairy Tale

Monica Benderman
No More

Website of the Day
Contractor Misconduct Database

Weekend Edition
October 24 / 26, 2008

In a Kitchen in Fresno....

The World's Weirdest Pipe Organ?

By MARK SCARAMELLA

If Musical Patriot David Yearsley can write about the Great Pipe Organs of the World on a hard-hitting political website like CounterPunch, then we think we should be able to write about the weird ones.

No, I'm not talking about the pizza joints with caliopes and grand pianos playable from the organ console suspended from the pizza joint's ceiling. No, I'm not talking about the professional organists who were so adept on the pedals that they could play two octaves of tibia pipes along one wall at the entrance of a pizza joint to entertainingly blow up the skirts of unsuspecting female patrons as they approached the order counter and then keep it up no matter which way the hapless victim tried to run, creating an impromptu oompah bass line.

And no, I'm not talking about delapidated old pipe organs in funeral homes, basements, concrete bunkers in backyards or even the few remaining old, abandoned silent movie theaters.

I'm talking about a very weird pipe organ I had the opportunity to play while in school in Fresno, California, in the mid-60s.

At the time, one of my many sidelines was as a piano tuner apprentice and semi-professional pianist/organist. When a friend invited me to visit his neighbor, a restorer of vintage band-organs (nickelodians on steroids), I couldn't turn him down. The band organ restorer, Mr. Hayes McLaren, was a gifted carpenter and amateur musician who bought old band organs and restored them for sale to collectors and the occasional traveling carnival or merry-go-round.

Band organs (aka fairground organs) go way back to before the turn of the last century. They are loud, colorful boxes of air-driven horns and percussion instruments powered by compressed air and a paper roll -- roughly similar to a player-piano -- which routes the air to the blaring instruments and the pneumatic sticks which robotically thwack away at the drums and cymbals -- especially the bass drum. When originally manufactured, band organs were used as the central musical accompaniments for merry-go-rounds and, in some cases, were coin-operated versions of what later became juke boxes.

But that's got very little to do with what may be the world's weirdest pipe organ.

Mr. McLaren, in turn, had a neighbor who, McLaren said, was building a pipe organ into his modest suburban tract house. When McLaren invited us over to the home of his friend, Fred, our curiosity was intense. How could you build a pipe organ "into" your house?

Upon arrival the jovial and portly Fred invited us into his kitchen where, squeezed between the clean white suburban fridge and stove was a large theater pipe organ console -- complete with three-manual keyboard and the sweeping curved array of colorful organ stops (with which the organist chooses the sounds the organ plays).

Why, we naturally asked, was the organ console in the kitchen?

Simple, Fred explained: It was the only room in the house with four entrances.

Behind each door to the kitchen was a room full of organ pipes, from small ranks of diapasons and tibias, to horns, strings (very thin pipes which sound a little like strings when blown), and even a room full of percussion instruments — all playable from the console. There were even a few octaves of -- I'm not kidding -- tuned sleigh bells. (Fortunately Fred had not been able to acquire the octave and a half of tuned timpani that a few theater pipe organs had back in the 20s, although he had tried.) The living room had several ranks of pipes, the dining room had several more ranks of pipes, the laundry room most of the trap section, and the second bathroom had a few more pipes.

The pipes and percussion instruments were air-driven by a big fan in Fred's basement with large air ducts coming up through the floor and into the chests which held the pipes and other pneumatic devices.

Each door to the kitchen had a specially clutched motorized opener that Fred had designed which allowed the organist to control the volume of the sound in the kitchen by opening and closing the kitchen doors with the four individual volume pedals in the organ console. As long as you were in the kitchen you could, more or less, get the full effect of an old-style classic theater pipe organ -- if you used a bit of imagination.

Fred compounded the weirdness by where he got his organ pipes. While the console and the trap section had been obtained from an old Fresno theater that gave it to him just for removing it from the theater, most of the pipes were scavenged from local funeral homes which were switching over from pipe organs to electronic organs. They were not well matched and hard to tune.

Fred wasn't a very good organist either. When Fred proudly played his clanky contraption it sounded something like a cross between an out-of-tune skating rink in Kansas and a marching band of rejects from Guy Lombardo's back-up orchestra who made up for their lack of skill with greater volume.

If you know what I mean.

In addition, the doors weren't very effective as volume control devices. When the doors were closed the sound coming from the pipes in the other room was somewhat muffled. But when the doors were opened just a crack, the volume increased quite noticeably. Fred admitted that the door-as-volume-control experiment had a few bugs that he wasn't quite sure how to iron out.

Another complication was that Fred's family -- his wife and two teenage sons -- lived in the house and more or less tolerated his odd hobby, trying as best they could to go on living in a house that had been taken over by Fred's organ obsession. To his credit, Fred, an master auto mechanic by trade, had figured out a way to design the kitchen door motor/clutches to be opened and closed by his wife and kids when necessary and then automatically return to their desired volume control position.

My friend and I each took our opportunities to try out a few of our favorite production numbers of the day on Fred's house organ. Let's just say that "Everything" wasn't "Coming Up Roses."

Nevertheless visiting Fred and his crazy musical contraption was an unforgettable experience. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the entire affair was the seeming nonchalance of Fred's family who seemed to think very little of their patriarch's eccentricity, living their lives around Fred's unignorable hobby almost as if he was a humble baseball card collector.

Mark Scaramella is the managing editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser. He can be reached at: themaj@pacific.net

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