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Saturday, March 8th, 2008
Listening in the car to Robyn Hitchcock's April '96 concert in Bilbao, and Sylvia says "I want to hear the one about the street." Cool -- I fast-forwarded to "De Chirico Street". Listened for a minute and then Sylvia says, "There's too much stuff happening on that street." 
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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So the first melody I came up with whilst riffing on "Mama Tried", was apparently this one -- not sure how exactly, it doesn't sound much like "Mama Tried" at all.
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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Never use epigraphs -- they kill the mystery in the work!
-- Adli
If that's how it has to die, go ahead and kill it; then kill the false prophets who sold you on the mystery in the first place!
-- Bahti
This morning I started reading The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk -- and as I read the first pages I had the immediate sensation of having come home. Now the context for this is having felt really strongly drawn into the writing in Snow and My Name is Red, and digging Other Colors to the point of identifying the speaker of the words as myself; and then being less impressed by The New Life and The White Castle. Now this book is definitely holding out promise of having been written by the mature Pamuk, the one who entrances me utterly. (It was written before The New Life, which surprises me a little.) What really struck me was the intensity of my reaction -- the palpable shock of recognition I felt starting from the very first sentence. ("Rüya* was lying facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt.") I've only even known who this guy is for less than a year but I've apparently given him lease on a substantial portion of my cerebral cortex. Not too much organized yet to say about this particular book, I'm just starting it; but it does seem worth noting that the switching back and forth between first person and third person narration is so smooth and natural, it took me a few paragraphs to even figure out it had happened, the first couple of times he did it. Subtly beautiful. It took longer to figure out what was going on with Chapter Two, which is a column written by the narrator's cousin, but once I had gotten that it was good. Pamuk seems to be anticipating me -- when I have a question about some detail of the plot it seems to be getting answered within 2 or 3 pages of where it arises. It's just really hard to resist giving a long quote. Here is a bit from the first page: Languid with sleep, Galip gazed at his wife's head: Rüya's chin was nestling in the down pillow. The wondrous sights playing in her mind gave her an unearthly glow that pulled him toward her even as it suffused him with fear. Memory, Celâl had once written in a column, is a garden. Rüya's gardens, Rüya's gardens... Galip thought. Don't think, don't think, it will make you jealous! But as he gazed at his wife's forehead, he still let himself think.He longed to stroll among the willows, acacias, and sun-drenched climbing roses of the walled garden where Rüya had taken refuge, shutting the doors behind her. But he was indecently afraid of the faces he might find there: Well, hello! So you're a regular here too, are you? It was not the already identified apparitions he most dreaded but the insinuating male shadows he could never have anticipated: Excuse me, brother, when exactly did you run into my wife, or were you introduced?... And it goes on from there -- this seductive prose (in Maureen Freely's translation, and hooray! for Maureen Freely, say I) won't let me go. Freely has also written an afterword to the novel, which gives some historical context to the events of the story, and talks about her process of translating Turkish.
 *Rüya is the name of Pamuk's daughter, in addition to this character's name; when Sylvia was looking over my shoulder this morning she said "Rüya, like in 'off the floor'!" "Off the floor" is a game Pamuk and his daughter play in the essay "When Rüya is Sad", and which Sylvia has appropriated for her own.
posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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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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