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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
Sylvia's dance teacher invited us to a rehearsal of the show her troupe is working on currently. Wow! I am excited now about going to the performance. Lovely bodies in motion -- though we were so close to the dancers I had a bit of a hard time seeing the whole group of them as a unit -- I was just focusing in on individuals. Listening to the music of the first few dances, I was thinking "These are fantastic Dylan songs! How come I've never heard them? I gotta find out what album they're from." But turns out they are not by Dylan at all, but by Ray LaMontagne.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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My usual practice, when I'm in the gym with my iPod, is to listen to one of the Apostropher's Unfunkked tapes -- they get your blood moving nicely. Today I listened to the pod's shuffle function, which gave me mixed results as far as good workout music. 12 tracks, from getting on the machines to getting back to the locker room.
- Started out with the Hot Five's "Djangology", which turns out to be a fantastic song for running on the elliptical machine, one of the best ever I think. It's just so exuberant and fun. Source was disk 2 of the fantastic mix tape which Gertrude Crumlift Sturdley sent my way.
- Next was "Broke Down Engine", from The Definitive Blind Willie McTell. Not such a great tune for moving (although I think the Dylan version would be). Indeed I was about to make a categorical statement that Blues are no good for workout music, when
- "Candy Man" from Best of Mississippi John Hurt came on. This might not totally invalidate my thesis since it is more rag-time than Blues, but still. A funny performance -- this is recorded live at Oberlin College in 68 or so, Hurt was getting pretty old, and towards the end of the record he is missing a lot of lyrics. But you don't hold it against him -- he's good-natured about it and so is the audience. And his guitar playing is totally solid.
- "Satellite", from Robyn Hitchcock's 11/14/2004 performance at Maxwell's. I've been listening repeatedly to his cover of "Satellite of Love" and initially I thought he was playing that. A little slow, but still fun to move to.
- Between-song talk from the same concert -- a wonderful Happy Thanksgiving from Hitchcock -- he says "I hope this Thanksgiving you can find something to be thankful for -- it just has to be an internal thing," and more.
- More concert banter from Hitchcock -- this from a Jan. 2008 show in London. Cracking me up but not great for working out. Check this out:
Now, the thing about voices in your head, is, the first very important question: Is it your friend. George Bush, the president... of the, united, states... has a direct line to God. But we only have his word for it; God has said nothing at all. When your little pal in there gets chatty, just... don't give him your pin number.
- "For the Sake of Days Gone By", by America's Blue Yodeler, Jimmy Rodgers (though I was thinking at the time, it was by Ernie Tubb). Now this is more like it -- I'm moving fast again.
- A twofer, "Mule Skinner Blues" by Jimmy Rodgers.
- Stage banter again? From Hitchcock's 3/14/97 show at the Knitting Factory.
- Good music again -- I seem to be hitting about .500 -- "Skoodle Oodle Doo" by Big Bill Broonzy. I should make a "good music for working out" playlist which could then be shuffled freely.
- "Sugarfoot Stomp" by the Fletcher Henderson orchestra, which would definitely go on that playlist.
- "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" by Dylan, which would probably not go on; but it was a very nice song for cooling down and walking back to the locker room. I wonder if Dylan was thinking about "The Walrus and the Carpenter" when he wrote this lyric, it fits very well.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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I'm reading this article in the NY Times Week in Review, and scratching my head. I have a sort of vague memory that the night before the war against Iraq started, there was a bombing raid with the objective "to kill Mr. Hussein and end the war before it began." I don't remember that event standing out much though against the general horror I was feeling that my country was being pulled into an illegal war by an illegitimate administration. But thinking about it now: wasn't this raid flatly illegal? To make an attempt on the life of the sovereign of a country we are not at war with? Or perhaps war had already been declared*, prior to the initial attack. Thinking about it further, I guess Hussein would be considered a member of the military by virtue of being something like "commander in chief", so a legitimate target.
 Also in the Times today: endlessly depressing and enraging op-ed pieces by supporters of the war allowing as how there might have been some problems with the execution of the war.
*(I mean, not "declared" and not "war" -- I don't quite understand the language that would be needed to discuss the legality of the whole kit n' kaboodle -- but it seems to me now like the initial raid was no more illegal than the rest of the, for lack of a better word, war.)
posted afternoon of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Last night and this morning, I added another feature to the site, which you might not notice if you don't use my blogroll often; but it's a neat feature so I'm going to tell you about it. The expandable categories in the blogroll will now remember between invocations of the site, whether they are open or not; so if you click on "Blogs | Politics" and then visit Obsidian Wings, next time you come to READIN, the Blogs | Politics links will be open. A little thing but I had been wanting to do it for a few months now. Ideally I would like to have the categories be prefaced by a "+" or "-" character to indicate that there is material beneath them; right now you just have to know that something is there "because it looks like a blogroll", which doesn't seem ideal. I think this is within my Javascript programming abilities, look for it to happen sometime in the next month or two. Also, I improved the formatting of the indentations in the blogroll. I had been doing it with blocks of characters; instead I am now using <span>s with padding-left. This means that long link titles wrap with a hanging indent rather than wrapping to the leftmost column; much prettier.
posted morning of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Wild -- I dreamt last night that the print edition of The Nation had a column of reader comment about blogs, and that someone using the handle "erms" (a sneaky pseud for Emerson? was my first thought) had written in to say READIN was "the second Google hit for anything book-related" and "the most consistently boring blog on the Internet". And I'm such a publicity hound, I was lapping it up! In the dream I was posting something here to the effect of "should I feel flattered or consider packing it in?" as an excuse for linking to the article.
posted morning of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
For a while my A string has been fraying and in need of replacement -- tonight I put a new string on. Well a couple of things about this: it took a frustratingly long time to get it on and wound properly, a job that should take less than a minute. So I'm frustrated about not being skillful at it. But more, I don't like how long it took me to get around to doing it -- I get intimidated by stuff like this in a really not useful way. Both of these things are also true of sharpening knives, and it drives me crazy that all the knives in my kitchen and most of the blades in my wood shop are not sharp the way they ought to be, and how intimidated I get at the thought of making them sharp. I'm not sure how to approach this.
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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I bought a painting! Ragebunny is making me a print and soon the violin birds will be looking down benignly* on my desk. Exciting!
 *(Perhaps better, "frantically".)
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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Look, Horton Hears a Who is not Dr. Seuss' best work. It has some nice moments, but if you spend any time thinking about it you quickly realize that 1, Horton is doing the Whos a massive disservice by interfering with their destiny and 2, the whole thing is pretty sappy. But whatever, the pictures are great, the poetry is great, it's a fun book. A really good animated short could probably be made out of it. (My dream of a live-action production with no dialog, probably not something that would ever come to pass.) Expanding it into a feature film was a really bad idea, because it meant that the film-makers had to dwell at great length on the incoherencies of the plot and insert lots new poorly-fitting stuff as well. (The whole plot line about politics in Whoville was totally lame, even though it produced as a happy accident, one interesting moment where the idea that the Whos had to prove their existence to the outside world was inverted; also the plotline about the Mayor's relationship with his son -- lame and tacked-on, no relationship to the rest of the movie.) So, Sylvia is having Kaydi over to spend the night -- as a prelude to they festivities we went over to the South Orange cinema. The girls loved the film and your kids probably will too, but try and get somebody else to take them. Or find a way of bringing some powerful intoxicants along, that would probably make the movie worth while. (OTOH, if you've got powerful intoxicants handy, there are much more interesting ways you could make use of them.) Some of the visuals, particularly the outdoor shots of Whoville, are lovely; though sad to say Horton and the kangaroo, the visual centerpieces of the film, are pretty uninteresting. The Rube Goldberg musical machine the mayor's son builds at the end is totally splendid.
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 14th, 2008
We are watching Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun tonight -- I am finding I like the actors and director a lot but without identifying very closely with the movie. It is pleasing to be able to recognize dribs and drabs of the language, even if it is almost all words like "sister", "brother", "I", "you", "he", "thanks"... The lighting is very poorly done, it seems like the worst part of the movie -- it totally does not show that a scene is taking place at midnight, if it is in a darkened room with the windows brightly illuminated.
posted evening of March 14th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Jerry and I practiced this evening for the first time in about a month, and it was productive. We're going to play the open mic at Tierney's next week; our set will be chosen from this list: - Weary Day
- The Louisville Burglar
- Bed on Your Floor
- K.C. Moan
- John Hardy was a Desperate Man
There are other songs we can play pretty well but those five are solid. If you're around Montclair next Thursday evening, come by and check us out. (The fiddle lessons that I have just, in the same past month as we have not practiced, started taking, seemed to really be paying off -- along with the increased amount of practicing I am doing on my own to support them: I was feeling much more confident with rhythms and starting to see some new ornamentations I could apply to vary the melodies and harmonies I play. Also, double stops! Few and hesitant to be sure, but palpable double stops.)
posted evening of March 13th, 2008: Respond
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