At first I didn't quite know what I would do with the book, other than read it over and over again. My distrust of history then was still strong, and I wanted to concentrate on the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript's scientific, cultural, anthropological, or 'historical' value. I was drawn to the author himself.
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The Kitchen Tapes
From the intimacy of his kitchen, The Modesto Kid scraping and singing for you.
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.
The latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes is my arrangement of Nat King Cole's "Frim Fram Sauce" -- and right now it feels like this playlist is complete, it encapsulates my sound very nicely. I'm going to keep recording songs and uploading them to YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever other such service; but The Kitchen Tapes playlist will remain as is -- I'll start working on the next playlist. I've been doing a lot of asking friends to listen to it and link to it over the past week or so -- if you are one such friend I hope you don't mind the spamminess of it all. (And thanks for the link, cleek!) Very happy and proud about how the tapes are sounding -- I have this thought in mind that somehow if enough people put the link out, it could find an audience not composed solely of my close friends and family... If you listen to it and like what you hear, do me a favor and pass it along.
(What I mean to say, I'm really excited about having made a record.)
Latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes mix is short and sweet. It is an old fiddle tune that I've been wanting to learn for a long time; last night I went ahead and tried it out. After five or six takes I got a version I'm pretty happy with.
(The embedded video is a YouTube playlist. After each song, the next one should start. Use the fast-forward and rewind buttons to skip around, or visit YouTube to get links to the individual songs.)
The Sailor's Hornpipe (trad.) 1:30
Frim Fram Sauce (Nat King Cole via Diana Krall) 2:59
John Hardy was a desparate man (I am not sure if this is trad. or by a Carter) 3:55
East Tennessee Blues (trad.) 1:28
Barbara Allen (trad, Child ballads) 6:08
Serpent at the gates of wisdom (Robyn Hitchcock) 4:03
Jeremy's Breakdown (The Modesto Kid) 1:19
All songs arranged by The Modesto Kid. That's like nearly 22 min. of music! Fully a ¼ of it Barbara Allen, whoa...
Recordings are made with Kodak Zi8, whose built-in mic is for all its smallness and cheapness, one of the best recording instruments in my house. Edited and saved using Windows Live Movie Maker and YouTube's "edit video" function.
Update: I changed the set listing a bit, so the first two comments below will no longer make sense. ("Humoresque" used to be included and is no longer, since it (a) was not recorded in the kitchen and (b) did not rise to the level of these tapes.) A word about the arrangements: I'm really taken with this form! It seems like something brand-new.
