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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.
Hm, well no going to the health club in my day today, like I was planning to do every day of my vacation. Did get a little walking in anyway, we went in to the city to see my sister for brunch and walked around a lot on the lower east side and in Greenwich Village. I just want to mention the Polish deli on 1st Ave. and 7th St. where we got some bread and cheese to bring along with us, it is an excellent place.
I did some fiddling today, the upshot of which is a few posts down. This was the kind of thing I am looking for in music, where I could hear in my head just how the part should sound and how it should fit in with the vocal line. The translation to actual sound was as usually riddled with errors but it actually came close enough this time for me to feel happy about the whole thing.
Before the movie, we ate at a good Chinese restaurant in Montclair, which is a major enough event that I am going to repeat it, with emphasis: A good Chinese restaurant in Montclair. I had been believing for some time that there was no good Chinese restaurant in all of Essex and surrounding counties; so this is a lovely thing to have found out about. It is Sesame, on Bloomfield Ave. not far from the Montclair Book Center and the movie theater. A strange restaurant -- you walk in and get the feeling that it is going to be a lousy, pretentiously high-end fusion restaurant. But once you get over that hunch and look at the actual menu, you see a couple of things that sound good, you get some good smells coming from the kitchen; you realize that it is not really overpriced, just that the first page of the menu is all the highest priced dishes (I still don't quite understand this); and you order. I'm glad I did not let first impressions (and expectations) turn me off to this place.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: 2 responses
Sylvia is over at a friend's for the night; Ellen and I went out to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which I was thinking, it would be funny if the title were "Belle et le Papillon" -- but it's not, so y'know, ignore). Wow: that was a really good movie. For the first twenty minutes or so I was thinking it was going to be a drag and kind of tiring to sit through; but somewhere along in there I got pulled strongly into M. Bauby's story and once I was in it it did not lose me.
I was identifying his experiences at the very beginning of the movie with my own experience coming out of a coma over the course of several days when I was 12 years old, after an auto accident -- it was nice to have something to connect it to, and I thought based on my memory of that time, that Schnabel did a pretty good job of communicating the confusion of it. (Except in retrospect, I think it would be truer to my own experience if his internal voice were not so quickly lucid.) But I didn't want that to be the whole movie, it didn't seem like enough. Well turns out that's not the whole movie, there is plenty of meat in there to fill up the time.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
Ok, I'm pretty happy with this recording. Not perfect, there are several places where I have rhythm trouble and I generally have a little trouble with starting the verses; but the ratio of moments that work to embarrassing gaffes is a good deal higher than on the previous attempt.
(I re-recorded this tune. See the new post for the recording.)
Here is a story about "John Hardy Was a Desperate Man": It is my very favorite Carter Family song out of those that I have heard, which is a fair portion of their catalog. (Yes -- I even like it better than "Will the Circle be Unbroken".) Listening to it just puts me into a trance. Sadly I have not listened to it in a couple of years because I lost the disc on which it is recorded -- but this has a very nice upshot. In all that time of not being able to listen to the original I feel like I have come up with a very worthwhile version that is properly my own. The chords are different from the Carter Family's version, the key is different, the melody is different. This is about the only song that I cover where my version is really substantially different from the version I am covering. (Not to imply that my covers are of similar quality to the originals, just that they are imitative.) Anyway, listen to it and let me know what you think.
I am thinking maybe I should try playing this in A minor or G minor, that that might be better suited to my vocal range. I had originally chosen D minor because the guitar part is really easy there; but seeing as that's not a concern currently....
Yes! It sounds way better in G minor. I will re-record it later this morning.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Songs
I'm starting to use my new mixing program, Audacity. In the spirit of audacity, I'll post a working version of "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning". Not satisfied with much of this but I think some individual bits work very well. My laptop's microphone captures my fiddle surprisingly well; I think for further vocal work I am going to need to get a microphone. And a better sense of rhythm -- it's surprisingly difficult to figure out where to come in when you are listening to a track you laid down previously.
posted evening of December 21st, 2007: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Music
I need to come up with more descriptive titles than "Melody 1", "Melody 2" and so forth for the tunes I come up with. Sylvia suggests that the most recent one be called "Sandwich Song", and so it shall be.
Ooh, I never got to do this before! -- being catless and all. My dad sends along this picture of a stray the animal control people brought into his office. (He is a consultant for the city government.)
I worked out a little melody on my viola this evening, and wrote it down! Thanks to the magic of ABC Notation, I can make it available here, in ABC format or PDF. I used ABCEdit to enter it, and boy is that useful -- I had thought the 3-note runs were triplets but ABCEdit's playback feature showed me that was wrong, and that I wanted two short notes and a longer one.
You can repeat the verse many times, there are a lot of rhythmic variations and note-order variations that are pretty easy to find. Also I think there was a bridge when I was playing but I could not find it when I was writing the tune down.
Update: Ok, I expanded it a little, found a part that sounds kind of like a bridge. Again, to make this sound at all interesting when you're playing it you will need to add in a lot of variations on your own.
Another fun thing about ABCEdit is it makes it pretty easy to play around with the time signature and stuff. I tried this out in 12/8, with a sort of swingy feel -- it sounds really corny that way.
posted evening of December 20th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So I have a week off coming up! Fun. My hope is that I won't let the time hang heavy on my hands, that I will do stuff and be engaged. Towards that end here is a list of some of the things I want to do with my free time:
Exercise! A perennial New Year's resolution is to be more physically active; this year it's pretty urgent that I devote some attention to that. I've been feeling more and more like a slug over the past couple of months. So: go to the gym daily, ride my bike if it is not too cold. Get Ellen to come along with me.
Practice my violin. Goes without saying, but regardless, I want to spend some serious time on that. Maybe do some recording with my great new software. (I've come up with a fiddle arrangement of "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" that I think sounds really nice.) I should call Jerry (and Neal) and see if they have any free time next week.
Walks with Ellen and Sylvia. There should be some nice weather (I hope!) and it's pleasant just walking around.
Reading and blogging, of course.
posted afternoon of December 20th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fitness
Meredith Sue Willis has a blog! (Found via South Orange Journal's list of links.) One without permalinks, which I haven't seen much of lately. But if you scroll down to December 12 you will see she is recommending José Saramago's Blindness. This is good timing because I had been looking for a book to read, Blindness was on my list but forgotten, I think now is a good time to find a copy and read it.
posted afternoon of December 20th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Blindness
