Although I have done it all these thirty years or more, although I live my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, still I think that there are few activities so worthy of inspection as the reading of novels.
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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Agnès Varda has her 80th birthday today. What a great life she has led these 80 years. (And oh boy! A new movie in post-production! Click on the picture for more info.) If any of you have not seen her movies, check my archives for some recommendations. One of the greatest (though hardly the most prolific) filmmakers of the 20th Century.
In the Turkish paper Zaman, Fehmi Koru has a column today about Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and with reference to Pamuk, that strikes me as most thoughtful, though the premise on which he hangs the column seems kind of insubstantial. Koru does not allude directly to the controversy I referenced yesterday -- which makes me think it is probably not as big widespread as my reading was leading me to believe -- but it was in my mind as I read his column.
posted evening of May 29th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
...Is the bass line of "Got to do it right". And well, there are a lot of seriously great bass lines on the record -- that one just stood out for me this morning.
Ways to respond to rhythm in music
I want to think some more about this idea that I can't enjoy Funk unless I am able to shake my bootie... I was listening to Danko and Helm playing "Caldonia" this morning and I was loving it, digging the rhythm -- but my response to the rhythm was just to nod my head, tap the beat with my wrist. I mean I think I probably would have danced if I hadn't been driving; but there wasn't any urgent demand to. So what's the distinction between Blues and Funk that's driving this? I could totally also just be seizing on a single experience and trying to generalize from it in an invalid way -- this is a pretty common pattern with me.
On the topic of involuntary responses to music -- I find it impossible when listening to "Caldonia", not to sing along with the lines "Caldonia! Caldonia!/ What make your big head so hard?" That is running through my head all morning now.
posted morning of May 29th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
I see from a cursory look at the Internet, that people (or anyway, "nationalistic Turks") are comparing the acceptance speech given by filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan at Cannes, with that given by Pamuk at Stockholm (or well, rather with Pamuk's failure to acknowledge his motherland and with his reference before the Nobel was awarded, to the Armenian genocide), and finding fault with Pamuk's lack of patriotism. I don't know how widespread this is -- I've only read the Turkish Daily News article I linked above, which references some other articles and columnists, and a couple of Turkish bloggers. But it seems terrible to me -- every speech I have heard of Pamuk's has made reference to the importance of Turkey in his writing and in his mental life.*
My first thought was, Well this seems sort of like American right-wing radio hosts bitching about Obama not wearing the lapel pin, or whatever their cause du jour is. But then I remembered Pamuk is currently living in exile, which makes his situation seem a lot worse than (obviously) Obama's. The nationalists in Turkey have a lot more power than the right wing here -- scary to think about when I'm so often outraged by how much power the right wing has here.
* (Reading this I see I was not quite clear in my expression -- this derogation of Pamuk for inadequate patriotism would be terrible whether or not he spoke as often and as passionately as he does about his homeland.)
posted evening of May 28th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
The Apostropher has posted volume 6 of his funk mix and it's good stuff. I've only listened to the first six tracks so far but what I've heard makes me happy.
This is kind of interesting: I was listening to it in the car this morning and just not getting any response to it at all, which surprised me since I had really been digging it last night. But then I went to the gym, turned it on and immediately started grooving. The difference seems to be whether I am standing or sitting down -- when I was sitting in my car I could not really move my legs, which seems to be a vital component of digging this music.
The portion of "Crumbs off the table" where it's mostly the drums playing, with Lee* singing and an occasional strummed chord, is excellent and hypnotic. "Flunky for your love" is fantastic except the ending, which gets progressively weaker as it goes on longer. (If memory serves -- there was a weak ending on one of the early tracks, I think it was this one.)
Update: Curs'd memory! It is not "Flunky for your love" that ends weakly but "I'm comin' home" -- a song which, while danceable, is not nearly in "Flunky"'s league of greatness. It's built around one riff, and not a powerful one enough to support the whole song. And that ending just blows -- you end up waiting for it to be over already.
* It's just a coincidence, but a nice one: I find it difficult to say "Laura Lee" without thinking "Lorelei". What a great name for a singer.
And bang! summer is here. Today is the first hot day of the year -- really late this year. (And not even that hot, really -- like in the 80s or low 90s. But it feels really hot after the unseasonal chill we have been experiencing here in northern NJ.)
We came home from the Memorial Day parade (in which Sylvia marched with her Brownie troop, troop 61) to find a baby raccoon staring at us from our neighbor's tree. So cute!
...Wow, and thunderstorms likely tomorrow! This is shaping up to be a dramatic season.
Update: here's a picture of Troop 61 marching in the parade:
All they have in common is both being accessed from Crooked Timber this evening. The first is an Argentinian art video by BluBlu* that Kieran Healy posted without comment -- living graffiti!:
And the second is of a band recommended by xboy in comments to this post: Dr. Michael White's New Orleans jazz band plays some sweet sounding traditional jazz. Check out the "Christopher Columbus"** reference in the trombone solo. Right up my alley.
* Be sure to visit their web site if you enjoy this video -- there is lots more great stuff there including more videos of similar installations.
** And hey, I found a recording online of Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band doing "Christopher Columbus" -- the first version I ever heard, from a band close to my heart. It is the first couple of minutes of this podcast from Mike Pell.
Sylvia and I saw Prince Caspian tonight -- we enjoyed it and I would recommend it to people who are fans of the books. I don't think I'd recommend it as a movie to somebody who is not predisposed to like it; I guess my reaction to it was a little bit like Ebert's reaction to the latest Indiana Jones movie.
Good things: the talking animals, great; Trumpkin, great; the beautiful scenery and handsome actors were candy for my eyes. The camera work in the opening sequence was really startlingly good. Not so good: There wasn't really anything to distinguish this movie as a different film from the previous one -- where the two books are quite distinct from one another. A lot of the battle footage in particular, which made up a huge proporiton of the film, seemed like it could easily just have been lifted out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Sylvia had a good time identifying the differences between the movie and the book, which I guess means the movie was faithful enough to the book, for them to stand out.
Good things: the talking animals, great; Trumpkin, great; the beautiful scenery and handsome actors were candy for my eyes. The camera work in the opening sequence was really startlingly good. Not so good: There wasn't really anything to distinguish this movie as a different film from the previous one -- where the two books are quite distinct from one another. A lot of the battle footage in particular, which made up a huge proporiton of the film, seemed like it could easily just have been lifted out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
By way of 
is 