The Results Are In!

In the great 2008 Flaw Freebie Concert Ticket Contest, you were asked to send a suck-up letter to suckingup@murphysflawband.com, in which extra points would be given for mentioning the astonishingly good-looking banjo player.

FIRST PLACE (1 ticket)
Donn Cunningham, Pasadena, CA:

Uh...

Hmm...

Well uh...

Let's see...

Nevermind, I'll pay the $20.

See you there.

SECOND PLACE (2 tickets)
Bob S. Hill Jr., Utica IN:

As Murphy Flaw's ONLY Hoosier Groupie - if not its only groupie east of Mendocino - I think it would be swell to get two free tickets to whatever the hell the band is doing because basketball season hasn't yet begun here and my wife needs something with which to light our barbecue.

HONORABLE MENTION:
Joy Felt, Reseda, CA:

Dear Abby, I mean, Dear Flaw,

I’ve never written an advice request letter before so you may find this a bit long. Please do not edit my words of panic. So you see I have this friend and I just don’t know what to do about our relationship. He’s always a bit of a raskal and doesn’t believe me when I tell him that I had to walk the dog and couldn't do my homework . I’ve tried bribing him with chocolate but he’s a curmudgeon when it comes to bribery. I’ve tried being mean by ignoring him, but he simply laughs uncontrollably. I’ve even tried changing my time with him. Alas and alack, I’ve been unsuccessful. So, even though I could easily tell you about my 17 closest friends, and why they deserve a ticket to this special concert as well as my heroic efforts, I still aim to have him be less relentless. My final effort must then certainly be a kindness by presenting him with A-Flat deal where he cannot B-Minor in attitude nor B-Dim’d in in his enjoyment. He might, however, only enjoy a Quarter of the program altho I suspect that Half of his pleasure will be Waltzing to the concert hall to see a bunch of folks Staff(ed) with axes and picks in hand for his entertainment pleasure. It will be grand for the banjo player to C him. I must mention that my friend’s frustration is that I don’t always follow directions...like not first extolling the Flaw’s virtues. So, I must mention that the Flaw ...well...ain’t flawed. Ask their following and the judges at the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest. They’ve had to defend their many wins and are not likely to step aside any time soon...thankfully! Therefore, 2 little dots do not keep me from refraining to repeat my forte proclamation....for a kool time see the hot stuff of Murphy and the Pickers. With tones in every register and no decrescendo at the end they are certain to delight! Respectively submitted, THE RASKAL (J.F.)

HONORABLE MENTION
Phil Meyers, North Hollywood:

The banjo player is astonishingly good-looking, but can't hold a candle to the fiddle player. (Does this mean I win?)

Did we say FREE TICKETS? Why, Yes, We Believe We Did!

Dear patrons of the arts,

A week to go before the big concert and we know some of you are hanging back in anticipation. Kind of like when somebody brings out the big chocolate cake, but you don't want to be the first one to dive in.

We understand. About the cake. Frankly, we don't know how this applies to bluegrass....We sure could use some cake right now, though.....mmmmmm

FOCUS! FOCUS!!

Oh, yeah....we're here with FREE Tickets to the Flaw concert to whet your appetite (mmmmm, cake....!).

No, this isn't welfare, and it's not some kind of government arts grant project, either.

(Uh, do you KNOW of some welfare or a government arts grant project? We're just asking for a friend. Five of them, in fact.)

Here's how you can win the tickets:

1. Compose an email telling us how wonderful we are.
Tips: Concentrate on the astonishingly good-looking banjo player. Don't talk about hair -- few of us have any. That's all the help you're going to get.*

2. Send it to suckingup@murphysflawband.com

3. First place entry: 1 ticket.

4. Second-place entry: 2 tickets.

Now, if you're bringing a date**, you have to engineer your entry so that it will jusssssst miss first place and magically fall into the second place category and you're set for a wonderful evening in beautiful Granada Hills, inside the delightfully air-conditioned Blue Ridge Pickin' Parlor.

Operators are not standing by but some blinking computer is, so get to work.

/The Flaw

* additional regulation: entries containing the phrase "me love you long time, soldier" will either win or be disqualified, depending on whether they refer to the astonishingly good-looking banjo player.
** this is hypothetical, since people who listen to the Flaw generally can't GET dates.

Dear Patrons of the Arts,

All is not well across the Flawed landscape these days. The band has foolishly agreed to stage some kind of "CD Recording Concert" on Saturday, July 19, a scant (you do the math; we're tired) days from now, at the Blue Ridge Pickin' Parlor, somewhere in Granada Hills, which is somewhat north of Los Angeles (ditto).

And now various members of the band are in full-on, screaming banshee panic mode. There are three main streams of angst flowing into a mighty, neurotic river:

• We're not prepared to get up and play in front of a paying audience, practicing only once a week, and most of that time devoted to tuning the banjo.
• Nobody will pay $20 apiece to come hear us (though it's just $15 in advance, we're just sayin'...)
• We're all going to die. Of embarrassment.

Bad enough? Not for the Flaw.

There's more.

The guy upon whom we were relying to record the concert, a professional sound engineer, has to go to a wedding. So now there's nobody available to record the concert that's so bad nobody will pay to hear it and there will be rotting embarrassed band corpses all around anyway.

Our legacy is intact.

There is a fallback position for the recording. We have a telephone answering machine with a fresh tape in it that we can set near the stage and we think we can get some CD tracks with that. Of course, each song will be limited to one minute and we can't start until we hear the beep.

There will be updates as the situation worsens. Meantime, here's the concert poster. Staple it to a loved one so you don't forget.

--The Flaw

Getting the kid started right!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13947426@N07/2418995621/

We're Number Three! We're Number Three!

Woo-Woo!

Yes, The Flaw entered into that local crucible of cut-throat bluegrass competition, Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest, and it's now official:

We are once again a third-rate bluegrass band.

But you knew that, right?

Given Sunday's heat we're amazed that the festival wasn't moved to an estuary off Oxnard, but tradition must be served, along with lots of water, snow-cones and kettle corn.

Also in keeping with tradition, we were "taken downtown" by the impossibly gifted teenagers (and one pre-teen) of the Muddy Buddies (First) and Murphy Family Band (no relation, Second)

Additionally, we're ashamed to report that Guitarist George Biner won Second Place in solo Flatpicking.

So what do you get with a second-rate flatpicker inside a third-rate bluegrass band? Ego problems, that's what.

But we'll get through this; we've had to cope with outbursts of talent before.

Nonetheless, through gritted teeth, we congratulate George.

At the other end of the bell curve, John Bryan (banjo) and Edie Murphy (fiddle) turned in such Flawed performances that they didn't even place. That's the kind of band solidarity we could use more of in these troubled times.

You can check out the Flaw, and other eventual Topanga highlights, here on the Flaw Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8T0lr0UJQ0

Yours for institutional inadequacy,

The Flaw

Come for the Kettle Corn, Stay for the Sunburn

Dear Patrons of the Arts,

It's Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest time again, and that means we practice in the back seat of the car -- in a cold sweat -- all the way to Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, because we're afraid we're about to make jackasses of ourselves before several hundred people.

No, wait -- that was our wedding.

This is different. There was no kettle corn at our wedding.

At any rate, The Flaw has been rehearsing constantly -- for 2.5 hours every week -- in anticipation of the keen competition that takes place starting about 9:30 a.m. Sunday on the sun-drenched meadow of Paramount Ranch.

That's a total of 650 person-hours of the Relentless Pursuit of First Place, Bluegrass Band Competition.

Well, actually, Edie went on vacation, and George went up to Cambria and Jarrett went on a business trip and Paul just plain forgot one time and John wasted nearly the whole practice trying to figure out his new fancy recorder, and everybody got the flu or allergies or mange or something. So maybe it's closer to 275 person-hours, but trust us, when we were all there together we were relentlessly pursuing first pla.....okay, there WAS a lot of tuning and downloading of lyrics, and then retuning and discussions of the need for retuning, and the importance of a rock-solid rhythm foundation and the Relentless Pursuit of First Place.

Make that 25 person-hours. (Sigh.)

Nonetheless, the stakes are huge.

Last year, we were barely nudged out of the winner's circle by Scott Gates and Pacific Bluegrass, which is a bunch of insanely talented kids -- KIDS! What do they know of life? Of The Relentless Pursuit?®

Bah.

This year we're up against eight or nine other bands and we don't know what will happen -- THEY might have practiced or something.

Thank goodness, at least, for the kettle corn.

See you all Sunday,

The Flaw (contestant #29)

Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest

Dear patrons of the arts,

The pleasurable feel and heft of a good, leather-bound first edition of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" is hard to describe, particularly when it's EXACTLY the right thickness to level the 50-inch plasma TV we got last weekend at the warehouse store.

Now the professional wrestling looks absolutely, positively real because the ring isn't tilting downhill.

And Dr. Phil isn't literally talking down to us when we're passed out on the floor. Thanks to a book, we have achieved an inner peace that is non-inconsequential.

We had prepared for this challenge by majoring in English. Through years of the painstaking study of literature, we already knew what you mere mortals would have to learn by experimentation:

Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"=Too much screen-tilt the other way. Dr. Phil would be talking to the chandelier.
Richard Bach and Russell Munson's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"=No help at all. (On several levels)
Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"=Just right.

The currents and eddies of the literary experience have melded to become a wave that has dashed Murphy's Flaw on the jagged, rocky shoals (English major!! Woo! Woo!) of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books for a third year.

No, they haven't caught onto us yet. Mum's the word.

We'll be there Saturday, at 11 a.m. at the Etc. Stage, which is a concrete structure somewhere on the UCLA Campus, amid a bunch of tents. (Hey, we weren't geography majors....)

Luckily, you can get your bearings here. /festivalofbooks/directions.html>

More information on the festival can be had here /festivalofbooks/> .

It's free, except you have to pay for parking, but even that provides part-time work for some luckless freshman who must return Monday to the dank bowels of Norton's Anthology of English Literature (Woo!).

The Flaw hopes to see you for some Accidental Bluegrass on Saturday morn, and bring money for books.

They're a joy that will provide a lifetime's support. Also, if needed, for your TV.


The Flaw

From the management:

August 15, 2007

Dear patrons of the arts,

It's been a fun summer so far...

-- Guitar-mando freak Paul McCallum was taking mando lessons and running through the impossible exercises that attend such things, and he pulled up lame with a sore tendon on his fretting hand. So he's been day-to-day. Finally he put himself on injured reserve and sees the doctor in October and then who knows. Luckily, he's switched to the Dobro, the safe haven for all kinds of musicians with left-hand injuries. So now we have two, count 'em, Dobro players available. One can only hope they don't decide to play at the same time.

-- In a freakish bid for attention and sympathy, New Paul (Dorn, see the website for a tutorial), who plays string bass, burned the thumb and two fingers of his right hand after over-zapping something in the microwave. We think he'll be back soon, but possibly playing one of those dern electrical basses while he heals.

Flawed, indeed.

The other members of the band are at this writing afflicted only by age, overwork and mood swings, which only qualifies them as musicians.

------------------------------
-----------------

SOMETHING YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS. IF YOU MISS IT A TEAR WILL ROLL DOWN MONA LISA'S CHEEK

On Saturday, Sept. 1, at 8 p.m., Beantown Coffee Bar, Sierra Madre (check the site for a map and directions). The Flaw will be joined by Stephanie Bettman & the Boys. It figures to be a fun Bluegrass evening. Each band will do a set and then from 10-11 p.m. we'll be doing a "Mishmash," solo numbers or small ensembles from members of both bands. The coffee is fantastic, pastries, sandwiches and ice cream likewise. Tips will be accepted because the Flaw is saving up for a CD. Not to record one, to buy one....

It's a cozy place so you may want to hie yourselves into the car early and get a sofa or easy chair.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
IF ONLY THE WEB WORKED WITHOUT COMPUTERS -- OR HUMANS

It all started as a harmless upgrade.

In the computer world everything bad starts as a harmless upgrade.

We were moving the Flaw website from one hosting company to another, lured by promises of Lots of Nifty Stuff.

The transfer was going well -- then suddenly --- darkness.

Suddenly, we were floating above the servers that had once housed the website. We could see and hear everything being said, yet we were not part of it. We could see the cursor on the screen, but we couldn't move the mouse.

At the far end of the domain we saw a white light, growing brighter. It seemed to beckon us. We walked toward it, our website feeling free of this old, retched hosting company.

It was almost like....floating.

Then we saw bands that had gone on before us -- String Theory, Los Feliz String Band, Blue Grass-Stains, All the jam sessions -- they all seemed to say, "there's nothing to fear now, you'll always be in tune. You'll always have an audience. You'll remember lyrics, instrumental breaks. You'll sell CDs, T-shirts, coffee mugs."

It was very comfortable. We wanted to linger, to play one more banjo breakdown.....

Suddenly, there was a flash of electricity and we woke up. The new hosting company was at our side. We felt the pain of data surging through our site, but we knew we were once again -- ALIVE!


It turns out that an itinerant, banjo-playing web administrator had canceled the old account before the move was complete.

The idiot.

Some of you may have tried to reach the website but were met with a page full of ads. We regret that. We especially regret that we didn't make any money off them.

The future is upon us, however. More bandwidth is available, the better to watch Flawed Video, should it ever materialize. More storage space. More Computer Stuff, some of it useful.

---------------------------------------------------

And speaking of the future, you should know about these insanely adequate Flaw appearances:

(After what we've been through, the least you could do is come on out and listen)

*** Sunday, August 19, West L.A. Farmer's Market: Noon. http://www.westlafarmersmarket.com/
*** Saturday, Sept. 1, Beantown Coffee Bar, see above. http://www.beantowncoffeebar.com/
*** Sunday, Oct. 14, Taste of Encino, on Ventura Blvd. http://www.tasteofencino.com/
*** Saturday, Oct. 20, Fall Festival, Tierra del Sol, Sunland. Joining the Flaw will be Cinema Girls and VinFizFlyer.
It'll be a blast and it's for a great cause. http://www.tierradelsol.org/
*** Saturday, Dec. 8, Beantown Coffee Bar again. Ready for more punishment? Sure you are! http://www.beantowncoffeebar.com/
*** Tuesday Jan. 15, Bluegrass Assn. of Southern California, Braemar Country club. http://www.socalbluegrass.org/bascnite.html

Enjoy the arts, if you must....then, when you're fed up, Enjoy Murphy's Flaw!