Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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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.
This is encouraging! I went to sleep last night thinking about "Walk Right In", with the different versions running through my head; and I woke up this morning with some ideas for my own version running through my head. So far today I have recorded three versions of it, each one sounding progressively better -- takes 2 and 3 even being music that I would play for somebody else without feeling embarrassed! It still needs guitar in it to sound like a complete song -- if you'd like to hear what I'm working on you can download take 3 from my box.net account.
This seems like a good place for a note about my current recording setup, which has gotten a lot more hi-tech in the last couple of weeks. I am recording into condenser mics which are going to a Behringer Xenyx 1204 mixing console, then a Behringer UCA-200 analog-to-digital converter, into my USB port, and REAPER is storing the sound and turning it into .WAV and .MP3 files. This seems to work pretty well -- I am happy about the sound quality of the recordings -- I need to spend some time on learning the ins and outs of the software, which is a good deal more complex than Audacity but also works better. John and I are working towards the goal of recording both of us together; to do this properly we mainly need another mic stand or two and possibly another mic.
posted afternoon of January 18th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
John and I played this 80-year-old song yesterday -- I thought I would link to a couple of source versions.
Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (1977) rock right out. This might be my favorite version of the song, certainly the first one I think of when I think of this song. (Even though the version I first heard, I'm pretty sure, is that of The Rooftop Singers (1963) -- which I now find comparatively bland.) The original is Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers (1929) -- fantastically good, maybe more inventive play with the lyrics than in any of the covers I've heard. And the version that brought this song back into my conscious mind recently, off of a mix tape my brother made for me, is by Corey Harris and Cassie Taylor (2008), off of the record Recapturing the Banjo.
And suddenly the scales fall from my eyes! Practicing the tune this morning I realize it's another variation on the melody from "They're Red Hot!"
A good weekend for music with friends -- John came over last night and we played for a couple of hours, then I went over to Bob & Janis' place this afternoon and played, I am hoping to practice with the Lost Souls tomorrow evening. Set lists below the fold.
John and I played a pretty eclectic mix of music: A couple of takes of my "Bonaparte" medley, "Jockey full of Bourbon", "Behind that Locked Door", "Meet me in the Morning" (which I think has potential to be really great), "The Battleship Maine" (by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers),"Little Ditches" (by Michael Cross, about undertaking), "One of these Days", "A Man of Constant Sorrow" (ditto on the potential greatness), and "Walk Right In" among other songs.
With Bob and Janis and Greg I played a pretty Grateful Dead-centric hour of music; starting with a drastically slowed-down version of "West Texas Cowboys" we played "Panama Red", "Breakdown Palace", "Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms", "Loser" and more.
I happened on Matt Logue's E M P T Y L A project earlier this week -- impressive and beautiful! Impressive in a totally different way (and beautiful in a roughly similar way) are Masataka Nakano's Tokyo Nobody pictures -- rather than editing out the crowds and cars, Nakano waited for the moment when they were gone.
At Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, I find new pictures of Mars from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Thanks for the link, cleek!) The pictures of Martian sand dunes make a beautiful desktop background, so think I: (To a first order approximation, this is formations produced by the interaction between sand storms and frozen CO2.)
(Clicking on the "Full image (grayscale, non-map projected)" to the right under "JPEG Products" will give you a very large image file which you can crop at your leisure...)
posted evening of January 14th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Wallpaper
I went over to Woody's house last night and watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I've seen a couple of times and loved for its visual beauty; I think I may be getting past the gawking and starting to be able to appreciate the tragic beauty of Joan's story. In particular I was noticing something in common between watching this movie and reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ -- how my understanding of the story is shaped by knowing the lead character will suffer martyrdom. It probably goes without saying (though I don't know if I would have made the connection myself before yesterday) that Joan is a Christ-like figure -- in her story as in Jesus' there is a sense of fatality, that he will go to his death on the cross and she to hers on the pyre because God has set in motion the course of events and it is not subject to change.
Something that had held me off from reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was the subliminal fear that it would be mocking Jesus -- I am not a religious man and indeed have been known to appreciate lampoons of religion and of Christianity, but the idea of a life story of Jesus which mocked him was rubbing me the wrong way. I am glad to find my worries were totally misplaced.
Adam Bertocci has written -- on a lark, in order to get some attention for his more serious projects -- a script for The Big Lebowski as Shakespeare might have written it. And what a job he has done! The Knave abideth. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.
Update: As of January 9th (quick work!), Michele Schlossberg and Frank Cwiklik have announced that they will be producing Two Gentlemen of Lebowski at the East Village's Kraine Theater (upstairs from KGB Bar) in March, with Mr. Cwiklik directing.
I'm impressed again by Saramago's eye for the details of the story as he looks at Joseph and Mary's predicament -- they are in Bethlehem, 100 km from Joseph's shop and source of livelihood, they need to find a way to feed themselves for the 33 days Mary must remain in confinement following the circumcision of her son. My unresearched understanding of the Nativity sort of has the Magi showing up with their gifts immediately the night Jesus is born (and I am wondering whether the visit of the Magi will figure in Saramago's retelling*) -- I should go look at some source material and see how close this is to the accepted story. Joseph's taking work building the Temple has me thinking of Balthazar working on the Convent.
Two passages from this section that I think illustrate the broad range of tone Saramago brings to this story. First a belly laugh:
On the eigth day Joseph took his firstborn to the synagogue to be circumcised. Using a knife made of flint, with admirable skill the priest cut the wailing child's foreskin, and the fate of that foreskin is in itself worthy of a novel, from the moment it was cut, a loop of pale skin with scarcely any bleeding, to its glorious sanctification during the papacy of Paschal I, who reigned in the ninth century of Christianity. Anyone wishing to see that foreskin today need only visit the parish church of Calcata near Viterbo in Italy, where it is preserved in a reliquary for the spiritual benefit of the faithful and the amusement of curious atheists.
and only a few pages later, Joseph is walking back from the construction site where he has found employment; he passes by Rachel's Tomb, and we get deeply reverent, mournful introspection:
Without so much as a word or a glance, one body separates itself from another, as indifferent as the fruit that drops from a tree. Then an even sadder thought came to him, namely, that children die because their fathers beget them and their mothers bring them into this world, and he took pity on his own son, who was condemned to die although innocent. As he stood, filled with confusion and anguish, before the tomb of Jacob's beloved wife, carpenter Joseph's shoulders drooped and his head sank, and his entire body broke out in a cold sweat, and now there was no one passing on the road to whom he could turn for help. For the first time in his life he doubted whether the world had any meaning, and he said in a loud voice, like one who has lost all hope, This is where I will die.
* No, it does not.
posted afternoon of January third, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about José Saramago
