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Friday, March 7th, 2008
This evening I watched Once Upon a Time in the West, which I think might be the finest thing in its genre that I've ever seen. The things it brought to mind were some of my favorites (and which I think of as similarly superlative) -- the use of cliché made me think of North by Northwest, the long, slow shots and pacing and soundtracking/ambient sound (and sparseness of dialogue) of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the mythic characterizations of Against the Day -- note the overlap between "use of cliché" and "mythic characterizations" -- and also it brought to mind Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as being a failed imitation. I want to know what woodwind instrument is playing the harmonica solos, and why they did not have a harmonica playing them. (I might be wrong? There was definitely a harmonica towards the very end -- but the earlier iterations really sounded very un-harmonica-like.) Beautiful, haunting music and the oddness of it I guess heightened the sense of cinematic surreality.
posted evening of March 7th, 2008: Respond
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This morning I was thinking about how to do a fiddle accompaniment to "Mama Tried", and I came up with a melody that was pretty distinct from that song. Neat! Thought it over for a while and then hummed it into my cell phone's recorder; so I would have it later on to write down. By the evening I had forgotten it, and listening to my humming wasn't a lot of help. But I tried repeating the process -- thinking about how I might accompany "Mama Tried" -- and came up with two other distinct melodies! This song is like a gold mine. Hoping I will be able eventually to come up with the tune from this morning, I liked it; the two from this evening are Laughing in the Back Yard and Biscuits on the Table.
posted evening of March 7th, 2008: Respond
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OK, this is an awesome Firefox add-on: Vimperator changes your browser interface to behave like vim. If you like vim (I do), highly recommended to enhance your browsing experience. (A little annoying: they have mapped <Backspace> to gu instead of :back, where I am used to hitting backspace to navigate back a page, and there doesn't seem to be any way to remap it. Oh well, will retrain my fingers to use M-<-.)
 Update: Figured out how to do it. Add the following line to your .vimperatorrc: map <BackSpace> :back<C-m>
posted evening of March 7th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March third, 2008
Happy Birthday, Robyn!
posted afternoon of March third, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March first, 2008
A very nice musical find while we were on vacation: I stopped by a record dealer who had set up shop across the street from the Havenside mall in Charlotte -- his sign advertised REGGAE REGGAE REGGAE in big letters and I thought it might be nice to get a couple of Reggae records, of which I currently have almost none. But as I came to find out, the dealer is a West Virginian and he has a nice selection of bluegrass mixed in with the REGGAE REGGAE REGGAE. In particular I found and bought Kentucky Mountains by The Delmore Brothers -- I've been looking for a recording by them ever since I learned their "Weary Day" from John Miller's version. Well, the verdict -- after listening to the record, I like Miller's version better than the original (and actually, I like our version better than the original); but there are some excellent other songs on the record. "Trouble Ain't Nothin' but the Blues", "Freight Train Boogie", "You Can't Do Wrong and Get By" -- generally beautiful songs. I was interested to see that Dylan had said the Delmore Brothers "influenced every harmony I've ever tried to sing."
posted evening of March first, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, February 28th, 2008
It feels like spring now -- the daylight is noticeably longer than it was a week and a half ago, before we went on vacation. The last couple days have been very cold though. Dang, it would be March already if it weren't for those silly authors of the calendar deciding to put the extra day in February -- why not put it in a more pleasant month like May?* Tickets go on sale tomorrow for the big Nick Lowe/Robyn Hitchcock show in April!
*And, why do the dates of the Equinoces and Solstices not vary with the leap year?
posted evening of February 28th, 2008: 2 responses
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Tonight at the open mic I met Dan Kinsley. I sure like his music -- go to his web site and you can download his album Antidepressant Blues for free! His band The Unpronounceable is playing tomorrow night at Here's to the Arts.
posted evening of February 28th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
...And I would be the proudest of wives, whispered his wife, slithering closer to him, as if touched by the magic wand of a rare brand of lust, a mixture of carnal desire and political enthusiasm, but her husband, conscious of the gravity of the hour and making his the harsh words of the poet, Why do you grovel before my rough boots? / Why do you loosen your perfumed hairs / and treacherously open your soft arms? / I am nothing but a man with coarse hands / and a cold heart / and if, in order to pass, / I had to trample you underfoot / then, as you well know, I would trample you underfoot, abruptly threw off the bedclothes and said, I'm going to my study to keep an eye on developments, you go back to sleep, rest. I am wondering who "the poet" is -- is this piece taken from a poem that exists outside Seeing? I notice that Margaret Jull Costa, translator of this book, spoke about translating Saramago at the occasion of his receiving the Nobel prize; a transcript is available online. Later: well I sent Ms. Costa a letter c/o the publisher, inquiring about the source. Fingers crossed! I have not tried to contact a translator like this before. (Was going to ask Ms. Holbrook about the frontspiece to The White Castle, but the book ended up leaving me cold enough that I did not bother.)
posted evening of February 27th, 2008: 1 response
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They weren't conspirators, they were simply afraid.
The first half of Seeing is different from the rest of these two books in that it is not tightly focused on particular characters -- the events being related take place at large in the city. This portion of the book strikes me as broad political satire, and here is where the highest frequency of really hilarious punch-lines is to be found. Mixed naturally with frightening images like the detainees being interrogated about their conversations on election day. Saramago's punch-lines hit especially hard because of the rhythm of his voice -- the way he strings sentences together can become hypnotic, so as I'm reading along it's like listening to a chant recited -- then the punch-line breaks into that and snaps me out of the sing-song, and I laugh.
posted evening of February 27th, 2008: Respond
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I finished both books that I took along with me to read on the beach; each was in its own particular way, a satisfying, affecting read, and I want to post some of the notes I kept about them, particularly about Saramago's Seeing. This will take a few days to get done -- the notes are not in a particularly readable format right now but it's my hope that I can coax them into one. I want to retract my earlier suggestion that you ought to read Seeing whether or not you have read Blindness; I think that the two books are at their best when read in sequence and that while you could enjoy either one of them by itself, that would take away a bit from the great beauty of the pair. I was thinking while I read about various ways of arguing for one book or the other as the better of the two -- they are different from one another in such a way as to invite that kind of argument I think -- but in the end the only thing to say is that they complement and perfect each other. There is also a lot to say about Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- and that is the book that I find myself emailing and calling people to recommend -- I don't know how much of it I will be able to get down on paper before I read the book a second time. This book just sucked me in -- I found it completely impossible to put it down and take notes on what I was reading. I can't remember the last time I read a book that so strongly fit the term "page-turner".
posted evening of February 27th, 2008: 2 responses
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