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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Here are some tapes from today's practice -- I'm trying to really hold my focus in the song and pay attention to what I'm doing, and I think it's coming through a bit. At the end of "Bill Cheetham" I lose it. "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" I think is currently my very favorite song.
posted afternoon of March 6th, 2010: 2 responses
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Mo Menzel snapped a great photo of me while I was playing "The Irish Washerwoman" last night. Thanks, Mo! 
I've been hunching over lately when I'm playing violin -- not sure why but this posture seems to make it easier to keep my focus inside the song. (Also I am going back and forth between holding the bow nearer the frog, and choking up on it like this -- and between holding my pinkie against the wood -- which I tend to think I ought to do -- and out in the air like this, which seems to happen pretty regularly when I don't pay attention to the finger.)
posted afternoon of March 6th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Mixed results at the open mic today -- I played two songs, first one was very successful, the second was a mess. I felt pretty upset and brought down about the second one and as I was mulling it over I came to realize that having a solid bowing pattern is a really important part of knowing a song... The successful song, my "Road to Lisdoonvarna"/"Drowsy Maggie" medley, when I was practicing it this afternoon I hit on a bowing pattern that I could stick with and that really drives the song along -- the rhythmic motion of my arm complements the tapping of my foot. I have always had a pretty clear sense of where I'm going with this song but the bowing just wrapped everything up very nicely. With the other song contrariwise, "Irish Washerwoman"/"The Swallowtail Jig", while I know the song very well, I can never seem to decide just what I should be doing with my bow. And it shows -- sometimes I will practice the song and have it sound great, other times not so much. While I was mulling I got a little distracted from listening to people's performances, and my eyes were wandering among the shop's wares -- I was really taken by the minor variations in shape between every pair of violins on the shelf there -- in length, width, depth of body, proportion of the length given over to the "C" in the middle of the body, how concave the "C" is and how prominently its top and bottom jut out... One violin there has completely smooth sides, an hourglass figure, which I've never seen before. I fantasized about playing some of the more unusual specimens, and my attention slowly came back to the music.
posted evening of March 4th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, March third, 2010
I started reading Middlesex last night, with a vague expectation that I was not really going to like it very much. I'm not sure why -- I must have read a dismissive review back when it came out, and internalized that. As it turns out, the book is (so far) excellent. I have been riveted to (Eugenides' imagining of) Cal's imagining of the sack of Smyrna, and his grandparents' flight, and their lives in mid-20th-C. Michigan. Have not quite gotten to the point yet of identifying with the grandparents but they are certainly well-crafted characters; I am identifying very closely with Cal him/herself. The vivid quality of the descriptions of widely disparate times and places is stunning.
posted evening of March third, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, March second, 2010
So as long as I'm thinking about music videos, I've been seeing a lot of links to this one over the last few days; finally checked it out and boy, was it worth my while:
Not sure, frankly, how much the song does for me as a song; but the video is a stroke of genius. (Also kind of nice timing, since OK Go first came to my attention a few weeks ago, and one of the first things I found out about them was what great videos they make.)
 Update: from Kulash and MTV News, a look at the making of the Marble Run.
posted evening of March second, 2010: 1 response
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Monday, March first, 2010
The first video from Propellor Time is up at The Museum of Robyn Hitchcock:
The lines "To say you're only human,/ To say you're just a man,/ Well what does that mean?" Are reminding me strongly of something but I cannot figure out just what right now...The video is (like The Day Before Boxing Day) directed by Hannah Bird and released on Groove Egg -- now I want to find out more about this.
posted afternoon of March first, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Sylvia and I spent some time this weekend reading stories from a college book of mine, Rhoda Hendricks' 1972 edition Classical Gods and Heroes: Myths as told by the ancient authors -- a good resource although I don't love her translations. Looks like we should find some good translations of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days to learn more about the early Greek myths. It will probably be a lot more difficult to learn anything about the early Roman myths, since all the Roman writing about mythology seems to come from well after the Hellenization process was underway. I would like to pick up a good translation of Metamorphoses though, Ovid seems to be a good story-teller. Anyone who is interested in this stuff and has not read the comments to the previous post should do so -- Randolph reposted a great writeup there from Bryon Boyce.
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, February 25th, 2010
John Bramblitt learned to paint after he went blind. You can listen to a talk he gave at the Metropolitan Museum last year, or watch a documentary about his painting process to find out how he chooses colors and finds the regions on his canvasses; or just revel in the beauty of his paintings.
posted evening of February 25th, 2010: Respond
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 (To go along with the Inherent Vice playlist...)
Oh we're the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and
We haven't a care --
Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair,
Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues,
As daffy, and sharp as -- the taps on our shoes!
A group of students and faculty at Portland State U. have set to music 15 of the lyrics from Gravity's Rainbow: The Thomas Pynchon Fake Book. Excellent takes! Lotsa Laffs! Here is a Vulgar Song:
posted afternoon of February 25th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Sylvia has gotten pretty interested in learning about the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome -- prompted in part by a study unit her class did and in part by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians books; and one thing that has occupied a bit of her attention lately is learning which Latin names correspond to which Greek names. I remember doing this too, probably at about the same age; and ever since I've walked around with a sort of simple equivalence in my head, Zeus is Jupiter, Ares is Mars, Venus is Aphrodite, etc. -- that the two names identify the same entity. But I wonder how this could be? Recently I have formed a sort of vague notion that the Greeks  and the Romans, living close to each other over the millenia, had developed their mythologies roughly in parallel -- that there were two separate entities named Athena and Minerva who featured in similar stories. But how closely similar could they have been? In The Golden Bough, Frazer seems to refer to Diana and Artemis almost interchangeably, and not only that but likewise to Hippolytus and Virbius. Not only does it seem strange that the legends would be so similar that you could do this, it seems like it would be sloppy on Frazer's part to confuse two different god-and-hero pairs like this -- which brings me back to my old way of thinking, that Diana and Artemis are just two different names for the same figure. I'm puzzled though, trying to see a mechanism for this to come about -- it seems like if the religion was imparted from one group (I guess I would assume from the Greeks) to the other, the names would go along with it. I sort of thought a tribal religion was a sine qua non of a Classical civilisation, I guess.
Also kind of interesting, Frazer seems to imply at the outset that the story of Diana and Hippolytus was made up to account for the tradition of Rex Nemorensis, that this was an ancient tradition incorporated into the Greek/Roman religion à la Solstice rituals into Christianity.
posted evening of February 24th, 2010: 9 responses
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With Tim Burton's "Alice" coming out tomorrow, Alvy Singer 