The READIN Family Album
Me and Sylvia (April 4, 2002)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.

Gabriel García Márquez


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Saturday, August second, 2008

🦋 Blues in Scandinavia

The BBC documentaries about Stax records which Chris mentioned yesterday are not available to US web surfers; but you can watch the the Stax '67 tour of Norway on YouTube, albeit broken up into ten-minute chunks and subject to slow downloading. Use the playlist to watch all 6 in order.

posted afternoon of August second, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Blues

🦋 Weeding: two approaches

Ellen and I are clearing out dead stuff and overly grown stuff from the fern and forsythia garden on the side of the house, about the state of which the bitchy neighbor has been complaining and which, if the truth be told, is getting a little long in the tooth.

Me: Did you see that vine with the pretty blue flowers? I hadn't noticed that before.

Ellen: No...

Me: It was right over here -- (looks around) Huh, now I don't see it. (A little later, looking under a fern and seeing a bit of plant with a flower attached) See, like this! I could have sworn there were a lot of them over here!

Ellen: Oh yeah, those are weeds. I usually pull them, they're pretty invasive.

(And this afternoon, the neighbor thanked us and apologized for complaining about it. Nice! Back on good terms.)

posted morning of August second, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The garden

🦋 Who put the benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?

Pet clued me in to the existence of this marvelous Harry Gibson video. Here he is singing "Handsome Harry the Hipster" and making funny faces:

Update: The tune that's the title of this post is here: "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?".

posted morning of August second, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Harry Gibson

Friday, August first, 2008

🦋 Fifth Beatle

So it seems like Robyn Hitchcock has written some of the soundtrack for an as-yet-unmade movie about the life of Brian Epstein. He sang two songs from it at the Turning Point show; the first one especially is beautiful, and catchy as hell. The lyrics do not seem to be on the web yet, so here is a quick transcription (the titles are my own, just taken from the choruses; I don't know what Robyn calls these tunes):

posted evening of August first, 2008: 4 responses
➳ More posts about The Movies

🦋 Quick idea

. /
"Dot, Slash" -- "dot " is the end of the sentence, "slash" is the end of the line -- basic units of prose and of poetry. The idea is to talk about confusion and excitement generated by the missing end -- where you are expecting to hear the sentence or line end, and the artist draws it out. Properly done this can focus your attention, make you anxious, pull you in.

Also, the artist can generate interest by delaying the beginning of the line -- in singing anyway; I'm not sure there's any way to extend this form to the written word.

posted afternoon of August first, 2008: Respond

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

🦋 A perfect harmony between form and content

McGaha's observations about My Name is Red mostly just reinforce my own thoughts about that book, so not a lot worth posting about this chapter. He included a couple of details in his summary that I totally don't remember and may not have gotten when I was reading the book, like the Erzurumis strangling the storyteller, and the storyteller's chapters dividing the book into sections; good stuff to look for when rereading. A great line:

Pamuk has said he had so much fun writing My Name is Red that his "inner modernist" kept wagging his finger and reminding him that he was a serious writer and needed to be intellectual and literary.

Also I found really interesting, McGaha's discussion of how My Name is Red is similar to, and opposite to, The Black Book.

posted evening of July 31st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about My Name is Red

🦋 Introducing Songs

Over at the Fegmaniax-l, they've been discussing the evolution of Robyn Hitchcock's stage patter. I thought I'd try transcribing some song intros from a couple of weeks ago; these are taken from the July 12th show at The Blend in Ridgewood, and the July 15th show at The Turning Point in Piermont. I can't swear to the accuracy of the transcriptions but they are pretty close. Note they're not nearly as polished as the song intros I transcribed from Storefront Hitchcock; this makes me think he's doing them pretty much off the cuff, whereas for the movie he probably rehearsed a bit.

posted evening of July 31st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Robyn Hitchcock's patter

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

In the middle of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, Harry Crews appears at Sheffield's Diner ("Where Jesus is Lord"), quoting Goethe:

"There is no crime of which I cannot conceive myself guilty"... to me, my understanding of that is, he's admitting his one-ness with mankind, his involvement with mankind -- he did not escape original sin.
-- reminds me strongly of this line from My Name is Red.

Later in the same diner, the Singing Hall Sisters sing "The Knoxville Girl", which might be the best performance in the movie (though I like the Handsome Family's songs a lot too.)

(As near as I can tell from Google, the actual quote from Goethe is, "Es gibt kein Verbrechen, dessen ich nicht selbst potentiell fähig wäre" -- roughly, "There is no crime, of which I could not myself potentially be capable," even closer in spirit to the Pamuk quotation. But I haven't been able to figure out where this line is taken from.)

posted evening of July 29th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

🦋 Unfunkked 7

80 more minutes of good funk are now available from the Apostropher. Check it out -- I will listen and report more soon. This tape features nobody I'm familiar with... (So why am I calling it "good"? -- I've learned to trust Apo's ear in these matters. There will probably be like one clunker on the tape but the other 77 minutes will more than make up for it.)

OK... downloaded, burned, got it on the stereo. Not sure about Betty Davis but Nils Landgren is all right by me. The instrumentation is exactly like it should be. "Let me run into your lonely heart" sounds kind of like a faint echo of "House Party" -- I like it but after the high energy of that last song, it's not making much of an impact on my consciousness.

Now Cold Blood is picking it back up, and in an ideal way -- this is much different from the previous tracks. The opening instrumental is really nice and when the vocals come in, they really take me away. "Baby I Love You" is my new favorite track on this compilation... Yep, and "Never No Time to Burn" is pretty fantastic too. If "Let me run into your lonely heart" turns out to be the clunker track -- well, that would make this the best Unfunkked disk yet, possibly excluding #3 which I seem to remember liking really hugely.

...This stuff is just all great...

...And yes, Betty Davis is great too. The opening track didn't really grab me but the final track really made me move.

posted morning of July 29th, 2008: 3 responses
➳ More posts about Mix tapes

Monday, July 28th, 2008

🦋 Dealing with life

I was meaning to ask, what lessons can I take from The Cave? It is very clearly written with a pedagogical slant; it seems to me like Saramago intends for me to apply it to my own life. And I want, instinctively, to do so.

But how? I guess I wouldn't say the lesson of Thelma & Louise is, running away and driving your car off a cliff is the appropriate response to an abusive relationship; but then I don't recall thinking of Thelma & Louise as a movie with a moral; and also an abusive relationship is not a problem that I have to deal with. Whereas here, it would be easy to say that the moral is, running away without plans, without regard for how you're going to support yourself or lead your life, is the appropriate response to alienation from the natural world caused by capitalistic expropriation of our experience of life, by the replacement of dreams with advertisements; and there is certainly room for the claim that this type of alienation is exactly the problem that I have to deal with. So where does that lead me except to running away, a solution that I've not found to be reliable in the past?

The answer, I think, is that I should not focus on the final chapter of the book so much -- that I should look at Cipriano's style of living throughout the book as worthy of emulation, and treat the conclusion as a promise that if I live my life with this sort of honor and self-respect, I'll find connection and happiness. Which is at least a worthwhile self-deception.

posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Cave

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