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Monday, December 17th, 2007
Lately I have been experimenting with taking stuff off my violin. Like for the past couple of months I have been playing without a shoulder rest. I kind of like the feel of the violin that way; and when I tried to figure out what it is I like about it, I came up with that my ear is in closer to the sound box -- that is, the natural position of my head when I don't have the shoulder rest is leaned in next to the fiddle, so my cheek is against the chin rest instead of my chin, and it feels like I'm closer to the sound. Well with that going on, I've been thinking the next logical step is to remove the chin rest, so my cheek and jaw will be against the actual sound box. I tried that tonight and I'm not sure yet -- it does sound really nice*, but it's a lot of work to keep the violin in the correct position. I will try it out for a while though and see how it goes, if I can adjust to this position it would be nice. The adjustment to no shoulder rest didn't take very long. Also, I took the pickup off -- time to learn how to play into a microphone. The pickup was throwing off the instrument's balance.  *Also I think I am getting a better sense of how well I am making contact with my bow -- the distinction in sound between full contact and partial contact is really sharp, I think moreso than it was with the chin rest on. Although another possible explanation is that when I was playing with the chin rest on, my bow hold was much more consistent.
posted evening of December 17th, 2007: Respond
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Sylvia's semester is wrapping up; and yesterday and today she played at the winter concerts of the Youth Orchestras of Essex County, her first performances since she joined the Overture Strings (the youngest group in YOEC) in the fall. The shows were great. Overture Strings performed "The Blue Danube Waltz", "The Great Gate of Kiev" from "Pictures at an Exhibition", and "The Nutcracker March". Lots of fun, although Sylvia found the second violin part for "Blue Danube" quite frustrating -- it is mostly disjointed quarter notes with rests in between and it's hard to get a sense of the melody when you are practicing by yourself. Her favorite piece was "Pictures at an Exhibition".
posted evening of December 17th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, December 15th, 2007
With the sojourn in Güdül, The New Life is starting to feel more like a book than it was before. I mean it is still very weird and different from other books -- but I now have the sensation that I'm reading a novel, which I didn't really before. I'm seeing some intimations of Snow -- the narrator's reaction to the town is a bit reminiscent of Ka in Kars; his desire for Janan is like Ka's desire for İpek -- and this though they are very different characters individually and pairwise; and the militant fundamentalism in Güdül, and the sense that the place is on the edge of breaking down -- these are some bits that I think come out more fully in Snow.
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Another evening, another movie -- tonight we watched the first act of The Magic Flute, and were pretty pleased with it all in all. My experience with Bergman has been pretty mixed; I liked this a lot. It had the beautiful photography and lacked the slowness and storyless-ness that has turned me off to some of his movies. And it presented the opera in a way that allowed me, who am not much good at enjoying opera, to really dig it -- I especially liked the reaction shots of the audience. Sylvia was into it too, except for the part with Papageno and Pamina singing about the wonderfulness of love, which she found boring. ...Idly wondering whether Bergman's films had much influence on the creative process of Monty Python. There were a number shots in this film that made me think of The Holy Grail. The dragon at the beginning could easily have been a Gilliam design. Both movies came out in the same year so I guess there isn't much of a possibility of direct influence one way or the other; but it seems to me like they could be coming from similar places stylistically. And if this were so I would tend to think of Bergman as the source and Python as the derivative since Bergman had been around for a lot longer at that point -- or I guess it's also possible that the source was some third party from which both The Magic Flute and The Holy Grail are derivatives -- but the similarities were striking enough to make me want to think there is a closer point of connection.  (Note: if you are watching this movie with young kids, there are one or two scenes in Act II that you will want to skip over.)
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Excellent news: Allan Evans of Arbiter Records has just released a new disc of old blues: Lifting the Veil: the First Bluesmen (1926 - 1956). It features newly remastered tracks from Davis, Leadbelly, Broonzy and more; and in the liner notes is a previously unpublished 1951 interview of Davis by Alan Lomax's wife, Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold.
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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I am a better violinist than I am a guitarist -- not really surprising considering I have been playing violin much more than guitar over the past few years. At the show tonight, I felt like I played a really respectable fiddle on "Smile to Pretend" -- like the performance was pleasurable in the same way that listening to really good music is, like I was tight and in the groove. My guitar parts felt more like flailing and nerve-wracking. So I think I am going to work on my violin and let my guitar serve as an aid to writing chord charts for songs, more than a performance instrument. (It can be hard to figure out what the chords are, to tell to other musicians, when you're only playing a melody.) Something I really appreciate about the work I did with Hannah for this gig, is her helping me to work out a violin part to "Smile to Pretend" -- the chart she wrote for me helped me to listen to her CD in a way of actually hearing what the violinist was playing and how I could adapt that to my own voice. I'm not used to listening to music this way but it is something I ought to do more of. A feature of this fiddle part was long baritone notes during the lyric, moving into fills between the lines -- this sounds really good. After the show, the second act was Felt, whom I haven't seen in a year or so. They asked me to sit in on "Angel from Montgomery" -- I was really happy to have the evening end up with more fiddling and not have to think as much about the flaily guitar playing.
posted morning of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, December 14th, 2007
The gig is tonight! I'm pretty excited and nervous. Hannah has been wonderful and encouraging throughout our brief acquaintance -- I hope I don't let her down! This will be the first time I have played in a bar other than at an open mic or jam. Looks like I'll be playing guitar on "Misguided Angel" (Cowboy Junkies), "River" (Mitchell, seasonally appropriate), "Can't Tear Myself Away" (Reimann, featuring horribly unfamiliar chord shapes, and that change throughout the song), and possibly one other song; and fiddle on "Smile to Pretend" (Reimann).
posted afternoon of December 14th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Tonight's family movie was Pippi Longstocking, poorly dubbed into English, a Hannukah gift from Sylvia's aunt Miriam, whose favorite movie it was in her youth. It is a (mostly) beautiful film visually which looks like it was made on a shoestring budget. The colors were enough to blow my mind, and to make me think of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. (Also the candy-store scene helped bring that association to mind.) It was hard to tell how well anybody was acting (besides Nilsson, who very obviously stole the show) because of the horrendous dubbing -- I would be trying to focus on an actor's face and see what they were doing when all of a sudden somebody else would start speaking. I haven't watched a dubbed movie in a really long time,* I don't think I've ever noticed this kind of thing before; I wonder whether this particular dubbing is just done really poorly or if this is a common attribute of dubbed films which I have not been perceptive enough to pick up on in the past. Here is a 7-minute clip of Pippi and her friends and her father, from near the end of the movie, in Swedish. One thing I get from that clip that I did not really get from the dubbed movie, is that the girl playing Annika seems to have a real gift for acting -- I see from IMDB that she did not play any other roles after this, which is a shame.
 *Oh wait no, that's wrong; I watched Lamorisse's White Mane not long ago, dubbed into English, and did not have this complaint. But there was also very little dialog in that movie: most of the dubbing was of narration, where it's not a problem in this way.
posted evening of December 13th, 2007: 2 responses
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Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
So I have a letter in the in-box this morning from Network Solutions, letting me know that my domain name is expiring in a year. This seems like a good time to ask: what's the story with other domain name registries besides NS? I understand there are some, and that they are cheaper -- do they do the same thing? NS is charging $100 for a 5-year registration which seems a little steep -- seems like it was less than that last time I renewed. I'll pay it if switching is a big hassle; but I reckon it's probably not a hassle. If you have any experience with this please let me know.
posted afternoon of December 11th, 2007: 2 responses
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...but this story, linked by Matthew Yglesias, is the kind of thing I just can't pass over in silence. I've been outraged about the situation in Iraq since before there was a "situation in Iraq" -- by the Administration's many-tentacled approach to starting a war, and to keeping the war going, and to generally running America's foreign policy into the dirt -- but for an American company to enable its male employees to rape their co-worker without facing sanction, and to threaten the victim with termination, and to hold her prisoner -- it just takes my breath away. Not sure what I can do beyond telling other people to read the story, so I'll do that. Kudos to Ms. Jones for the way she is handling this, fighting KBR, telling her story, attempting to help other victimized women.
Update: MoveOn has created a petition calling on Congress to hold KBR accountable for this. You can sign it here.
posted afternoon of December 11th, 2007: Respond
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