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Friday, November second, 2007
Belle inspires me to figure out where my iPod is and listen to some random songs so I can post them here. I'm getting lots of blues and lots of Robyn tonight.
- "Alma Waltz", Mississippi Mud-Steppers
- "Singin the Blues (Till My Daddy Comes Home)", Fletcher Henderson Orchestra
- "Broken Bed Blues", Kansas City Blues Strummers
- "Flavor of Night", Robyn Hitchcock -- this shares the quality of many of the songs on I Often Dream of Trains, where the song totally sounds like it's going to be amazing, fantastic, you can't miss its potential greatness, but somehow it doesn't quite make it.
- "Hard Way", Taj Mahal -- Janis gave me this CD in an effort to make me see how great Taj Mahal is; but I'm afraid his greatness eludes me. The instrumentals are occasionally awesome.
- "Sometimes a Blonde", Robyn Hitchcock. A solo acoustic performance at Maxwell's, in the catastrophic month of November 2004. I like this a whole lot. After the song, patter about waitress Desirée.
- "Terrapin", Robyn Hitchcock. From the second set of the April 2007 Games for May concert. With cellos!
- "I Miss You More", 13 Scotland Rd. I don't think this is my favorite song of theirs but after the long instrumental at the beginning finishes, it might be their best vehicle for Bill's voice.
- Medley of "Good Morning" and "In the Midnight Hour", by Robyn Hitchcock, who so much should not try to cover the Beatles. Oh man, this is a train wreck. What the fuck's going on Robyn? You have a really amazingly good singing voice when you're not trying to sing like John Lennon. (Though the cellos are a nice touch.)
- "Sittin' on Top of the World", Taj Mahal. Nope, still not getting it.
posted evening of November second, 2007: Respond
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I want to be able to see the following four movies in a combined viewing, or at least close in time to one another: I think the middle two movies are better movies than the first and last; but they seem to sort of go together well. The movement from the final scene of Vagabond into Even Dwarfs would be pretty cool. Thinking about it, I am really liking this line-up as a quadruple feature. (Also, this video goes very nicely with the Herzog, though it does not really bring any of the others to mind.)
posted evening of November second, 2007: Respond
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Ellen and Sylvia are in town watching Bee Story; I am at home with Even Dwarfs Started Small. ... Minimalistic dialogue is great -- watching the movie with a fairly rudimentary grasp of German you can get a good deal of it without having to rely too much on the subtitles. (Here is the post that first alerted me to the existence of this movie -- looks from A White Bear's comment like I need to go back and watch with the commentary track turned on, that sounds pretty great.)
posted evening of November second, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
We do not understand speech, because speech does not understand itself, nor wish to; the true Sanskrit* would speak in order to speak, because speech is its delight and essence.
This line is from Novalis' The Novices of Sais, newly reprinted in a translation by Ralph Manheim. (Thanks to Conrad and Forrest, for pointing it out to me.) It strikes me as so similar to Fritz' speech to Karoline about Language, that I think Fitzgerald must have used it as source material. (It is also, I think, quintessentially stoner.) Another great line from The Novices of Sais, from the chapter titled "Nature": It must have been a long time before men thought of giving a common name to the manifold objects of their senses, and of placing themselves in opposition to them. It suddenly occurs to me that "manifold" might be a good translation of vielgestaltete in the first paragraph of Hymns to Night.
*This word is kind of bugging me, because when I read it I see the name of a language, not a type of philosophy. My suspicion is that Novalis intends it to mean "mystic", so I am making that substitution when I read.
posted evening of October 31st, 2007: 4 responses
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I always have thought of Moominpappa's Memoirs as the least interesting book in the series, worth reading only for the sake of completeness. But I have been reading it to Sylvia, at her request, for the past week or so; and this time around I am getting a fuller picture of it -- it is not just Moominpappa's boastful relation of his exploits, but rather his telling to Moomintroll (and Sniff, and Snufkin). There is a level of irony and distance that I wasn't really noticing before -- what I mean is, it was clear (in my previous reading) that Moominpappa was making a lot of stuff up to make himself look important -- that is an obvious part of the joke that's going on. But I thought that was the whole joke, and it's a kind of limited and corny one. Now I am picking up on the fact that Moominpappa is himself in on the joke and that he's winking at his audience -- this seems much more interesting to me than if it's just Jansson winking at me. Also: Sylvia says of the two Jansson picture books (Moomin, Mymble, and Little My and Who Will Comfort Toffle?) that "one is funny and one is serious", and that she prefers the funny one. (I kind of have to agree, though Toffle is pretty charming too.)
posted evening of October 31st, 2007: Respond
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Have fun.
posted afternoon of October 31st, 2007: Respond
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On LanguageHat's Happy Birthday Ez thread, commenter bertil links to an archive of Pound reading his own poetry. Good deal.
posted morning of October 31st, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
Lots of new photos in the Family Album today, mostly of and/or by Sylvia.
posted evening of October 30th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, October 28th, 2007
Spring cleaning, though it wasn't really Spring,
Was the Hemulen's favorite thing
--The Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My So Ellen comes home, sees the new arrangement in the living room, likes it, and views it as an opportunity to move everything else around too! Well I'm fine with that, indeed it was part of the plan; hadn't necessarily anticipated doing it all right now, but: the living room looks very nice now, with the fresh arrangement of furniture. And somehow that led to the thought that it was time for a little autumnal cleaning -- I got out the ladder and took dust and cobwebs off all (well most of) our window moldings, door moldings, and (where it was really egregious) ceiling moldings. And with the pile of stuff moved under which my coffee table has been living in benign neglect, it seemed like a good idea to give its top, sticky in spots, a good scrub... half an hour later, it looks like oak again,* at least in part... cleaning out the corners of the sunburst in the middle of the table top was particularly interesting. The newly set-up stereo is serving as a good opportunity to listen to records I haven't heard or thought of in a while -- our cleaning music was Jackson Browne, Running on Empty, which I was not even aware we owned.
*Hmm, well like discolored, scraped oak anyway. This may take sandpaper and a whole new coat of finish before I'm done with it.
posted evening of October 28th, 2007: Respond
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When we moved into this house 5 years ago, I set up my stereo temporarily on the floor in a corner of the living room. And there it has been these 5 years, until yesterday when in a fit of organizing, I moved it into a more permanent-seeming location, on a wire rack in the next room, which I am currently thinking of as the "music room" (before it was the "play room", but Sylvia is doing most of her playing these days in her own room). The problem had always been my perceived lack of a suitable shelf. But Friday night while I was turning over various stuff in my mind, I realized that the wire rack in the garage would be just right. So yesterday morning, I sponged the cobwebs off it, brought it inside, and moved everything around. Well: my records have a home now, on a shelf where you can thumb through them instead of stacked on the floor! You don't have to crouch down to put in a CD or record! I threw out my non-working cassette player! And best of all, the sound is much, much clearer with the speakers off the ground. Spent last night with Bob, listening to old Robyn Hitchcock and older Pink Floyd. (Bob, a longtime Floyd fan, had never heard of Piper at the Gates of Dawn or indeed even known there were any records before Atom Heart Mother -- it was a privilege to introduce him to Syd Barrett's music.)
posted afternoon of October 28th, 2007: Respond
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