Miscellaneous
interesting sites
Miscellaneous
interesting sites
Very miscellaneous--and largely, but not entirely, musical.
Other other stuff--'Allo 'Allo, aloha shirts, hula bobbers, Flashman, and toy robots. Life is good.
Treefrog Instruments--Website of luthier/singer-songwriter-guitarist Steve Cloutier. (He built my guitar.)
Taropatch.net: Focused on materials for learning (books, videos), but with a forum for posting reviews, news, and exchanging ideas.
Keola Beamer's Homepage: One of the younger-generation (that is, under-sixty) players. History, lessons, pictures, audio/video clips--a slack-key university.
George Kahumoku, Jr.'s Website: Another of the "younger" players (and Keola's high-school classmate). Player, composer, school teacher, sculptor, pig farmer, storyteller--you name it, George has taken a whack at it.
Dancing Cat Records: A label dedicated entirely to slack key guitar, founded by George Winston.
Hawaiian Music Island: Mail-order Hawaiian records (probably the best source on the mainland), plus links and a concert schedule.
Hawai'ian Music Resources: Many links, quite useful--a real hub site for exploring.
Hawaiian Slack Key Network: Links and a chat room (untested by me).
Nahenahenet's list of slack key artists: Part of Keola Donaghy's extensive website devoted to Hawaiian music and culture.
Gypsy jazz (a.k.a. Hot Club jazz, string swing, and Django-style jazz)
The Django Swing Page: Started by UK enthusiasts. Player bios, playing hints, links.
Eurojazz Jazz Guitar Catalogue: UK-based site offering hard-to-find guitar CDs from Europe. Especially good for gypsy jazz.
Yahoo! Gypsy Jazz Guitar eGroup: Very active and lively forum, plus other useful stuff in the Files section.
Elderly Instruments: My favorite mail-order music source. This doesn't replace their new-instrument, book, or CD catalogues, but the used instrument list (one of the best such sources in the country) is updated weekly.
Gruhn Guitars: One of the highest-profile vintage guitar dealers around, and a very nifty site. Gruhn's complete inventory is here to drool over.
Mandolin Brothers Home Page: The third (in alphabetical order) of the Big Three of high-visibility vintage dealers who do both mail-order and walk-in business.
Tim Sparks: One of many terrific Twin Cities guitarists--and one of the very few with a Web page.
Woodpecker Records Home Page: Also the home of Harvey Reid, super fingerpicker, singer-songwriter, champion of traditional tunes and the six-string banjo. Everything you need to know about Harvey is here, short of the most important thing, which is his music.
The Guitar and Lute Music Page: Includes standard notation, tablature, and MIDI files for mostly-renaissance pieces.
Bagpipe music (I told you it was miscellaneous . . . )
Northumbrian Smallpipes: Another first-rate encyclopedic site (maintained by Julia and Barry Say), this time dedicated to the least-known, sweetest-sounding of all the pipes of the British Isles. Piping history, bios of notable players, societies, discography, pipemakers. Northumberland's regional government also maintains a nice site, Northumbrian Music, with links to more smallpiping sites.
Wheeze and Squeeze: Bagpipes of the World
Science Fiction Resource Guide: Lots of links to bibliographic and reference tools and pages about writers.
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror: 1984-1996: The continuing on-line incarnation of Bill Contento and Charles Brown's massive bibliography series.
Greg Egan Fan Page: Australian Egan is one of the hottest younger writers in the field, mixing computer science and biotech with some really dizzying philosophical speculation.
The Jack Vance Archive: A Dutch site (in English) dedicated to one of my favorite writers. Features a multilingual Vance bibliography and much, much more. Vance is so popular in the Netherlands that the Dutch translation of his 1996 novel Nightlamp preceded the American edition by several months.
The Jack Vance Information Page: A US counterpart to the Archive. Includes news, bibliographical info, (very small) images of pages from one of his famous multicolored manuscripts, and links to yet more Vance-related sites.
The Vance Phile: On-line version of Greg Parmentier's Vance fanzine with reviews, news, and bibliographical information.
The Official Philip Jose Farmer Homepage: Dedicated to another of my other favorite classic SF writers, best known for the very fine Riverworld series, but always a surprising and playful mind--see the Wold Newton Universe department of the site, wherein are revealed the secret connections among and between many of the heroes and villains of popular literature. And you thought somebody made these guys and gals up, did you?
'Allo 'Allo Web Site: All about one of my favorite Britcoms.
Robot Home Page: An amazing Italian site dedicated to toy robots. Lots of pictures, so be prepared to wait.
Toy Ray Guns: An big, encyclopedic site devoted to just that. It eventually became a coffee-table book.
Tin Robot and Space Toys: UK site with more robots and other space toys, including articles on collecting and repairing and links to spare-parts makers and dealers.
Hawaiian shirts by mail: Reyn's, and Kamehameha Garments.
Island Madness (formerly Hoo-La-Goona!): An on-line oddities-merchant (that is, he sells oddities on-line, not on-line oddities) with lots of Hawaiian kitsch, plus Paradise Found and Diamond Head aloha shirts.
Royal Flashman Society of Upper Canada: One of several associations devoted to my favorite antihero, General Sir Harry Flashman, whose papers have been edited by George MacDonald Fraser. Includes access to the Flashman Web Ring.
Treefrog Instruments: Steve Cloutier (luthier, singer-songwriter, and ace picker) builds nifty solid-body electric mandolins. He used to build guitars, too, but quit to devote more time to playing and composing and to run Cloutier Web Design. (I play a 1994 Cloutier fingerstyle model, one of the best guitars I've ever owned.) Also check out Steve's music pages and the one devoted to Skeek the Wonder Cat.