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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.
In emails last week, John and I have been talking about how to approach our weekly rehearsals, with the thought in mind that we'd like to have a good enough sound to play some shows before too long, and make recordings. What we eventually came up with was a two-pronged approach: if we start with a small group of songs that we think of as our book, and spend some time on those songs every week trying to get them to sound really polished, then we can also spend some time each week playing new songs, songs we haven't tried and are thinking about, or songs we enjoy that occur to one of us on the spur of the moment... So that's how we did it on Saturday and it worked out pretty well. The songs we are beginning with as our book are:
Jockey Full of Bourbon
Bonaparte medley
Louisville Burglar
Man of Constant Sorrow
California Stars
Meet Me in the Morning
Walk Right In
St. James Infirmary
Angel From Montgomery
This is a nice mix of musical styles and of songs he sings with songs I sing. We played every one of these (except St. James I think) on Saturday, and they are in general really starting to come together. And we had time left over to fool around -- we did a couple of Dylan songs, one by George Harrison, one or two by Neil Young; also "Praying Mantis" by Don Dixon, which we've done before and which might be a candidate for the "book" list...
So my sticking point on "Mack the Knife" is, I keep thinking it should be in D. But the recordings I'm listening to are mostly in C; and it turns out to actually be easier to finger in C than in D. But I need to avoid switching keys in the middle of the song...
I added another video to last night's playlist, a Brazilian performance by Servio Tulio and Glauco Baptista -- a lovely performance and sort of a midpoint between Lenya and Sinatra, or another interpretation with shadings of both. This is the first I ever heard of Tulio and Baptista but there seems to be a lot of great music by them up on YouTube.
Accompanying National Geographic's new article about the chimpanzees of Goualougo Triangle are some great videos, including a hilariously cute tape of one of the chimps discovering the hidden camera. Thanks for the link, Martha!
Ellen and I watched Quiz Show tonight, and among other things it made me want to learn the song "Mack the Knife" which plays (Sinatra's version) over its credits. Here are some versions:
posted evening of January 22nd, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
✷ Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
It would be hugely ambitious, and almost certainly misconceived, to try to render Joyce's Ulysses as a graphic novel. The folks at Throwaway Horse, LLC have taken on a project that strikes me as (a) even more ambitious and (b) far more likely to have a useful, valuable outcome: they are creating a graphic/web companion to the novel, a set of resources for the reader which center around a beautifully composed (by artist Robert Berry) webcomic. There are mouseover translations of foreign phrases; there are context-sensitive links to a reader's guide (written by Mike Barsanti) and dramatis personæ. The 55 pages that are up so far -- covering the first 13 pages of the text, as they are numbered in my Vintage Books edition -- are outstanding. I think if I were part of Throwaway Horse I would be trembling before the size of the task; but I wish them well with it and I hope that they are able to pull it off.
posted evening of January 21st, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Comix
So here is something I find frustrating about La sombra del viento -- it is seeming to me like way too much time is given over to Daniel's longings for female companionship. I understand that he's an 18-year-old kid, and one who has never kissed a girl, and he's going to be spending a lot of time thinking about that -- I can identify quite easily with that head -- but it just seems lamely cartoonish when every woman he interacts with is described in superlative terms as the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. Particularly annoying when he presents himself as such an ingenu, it seems like there are very labored descriptions of the beauty of women's faces and how he wants to kiss them but no acknowledgement of anything else. GarcÃa Madero's constant harping on his virginity in part I of The Savage Detectives could get annoying certainly but at least he was up front about what he wanted.
I told her about my first visit to the Graveyard of Forgotten Books and about the night which I had spent reading The Shadow of the Wind. I told her about my encounter with the faceless man and about that card bearing Penelope Aldaya's signature which I kept with me always, without knowing why. I told her how I had never gotten to kiss Clara Barceló, nor anybody, and how my hands had trembled brushing against the lips of Nuria Monfort just a few hours before.
See I can't quite picture him relating these particular details of his saga to Bea, the current object of his infatuation, as he's telling her about the mystery of Carax.
Great news! Clashmusic.com reports that the new album from Venus 3 (which was actually recorded before Goodnight Oslo) will be available in two months' time.
Nice quote from Hitchcock: "We wanted to create a sprawling record like The Basement Tapes: so we sprawled for a week and then spent three years editing it."
Another image from Heimat is making me wish I could find some stills and clips from this movie online; but no luck. The opening shot of Paul has been all in black-and-white; as he reaches his parents' farm he looks in the window of the barn where his father is working at the forge; its interior is shot in color but you don't notice this at first because it is dark -- the camera pans to the bar of iron that Herr Simon is hammering and its orange glow just fills the screen. And just as quickly pans/shifts back to outside and black-and-white. (The gruff, happy interaction between father and son in the next scene is pretty affecting stuff also.)
Levi Stahl has been reading Tolstoy lately. In today's post, he references one of my very favorite passages from Anna Karenina; and includes an utterly charming photograph by rocketlass.
