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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
You know what debugging tool I just hate having to deal with? Purify, is what. Its interface seems insanely cumbersome to me, it's hard to use in conjunction with gdb, I dislike having to compile a separate version for heap-checking. Well today, my co-worker Nick hipped me to valgrind, which just seems like it was made for me. Exactly suited to my style of debugging. Basically it just spits out a ton of messages to stderr, interspersed with your own stderr output you can troubleshoot very quickly and come up with a bug location to reproduce in gdb. My goal is to become a power user of valgrind -- starting with no knowledge of the product I was quickly able to isolate the problem I was seeing. If I acquaint myself with it's features it's going to make a really valuable addition to the toolchest.
posted evening of November 25th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
So Wikipædia's page about Modern Times asserts that "Beyond the Horizon" is based on "Red Sails in the Sunset" by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams. I don't know the song so I looked around and found several versions of it on YouTube -- Tab Hunter, The Platters, The Beatles, Nat King Cole, Fats Domino. And more! (No idea really, but I'm assuming the Cole version is the standard.) And... huh. It's a kind of pretty song, and I guess I can see where the idea comes from that "Beyond the Horizon" takes this as its source material -- similarities in structure and topic are not hard to see. But it's not moving me to anything like the degree to which I was moved by the Dylan song. Look at this! YouTube user teclo64 created a video for "Beyond the Horizon" using Chaplin footage from The Gold Rush and Modern Times:
posted evening of November 23rd, 2008: 3 responses
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
Before the concert tonight, Ellen and I were looking around for a place to have dinner. Our idea was to have chicken and plantains at one of the many Dominican restaurants on the Upper West Side, not because they are especially great but as a way of remembering our first dinner date, at La Rosita. But as we were walking along Amsterdam, what should we see but Pio Pio! Can it be? This was one of our favorite places when we lived in Queens; we had no idea it had come to the Upper West Side. But it has; and that is the place to go if you're hungry for chicken and plantains.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2008: Respond
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(Note: lots of great pictures of the show at brooklynvegan's blog, and more from Dave Kaufman. And another review at The Song In My Head Today.)
(Update: woj has the full setlist and links to a tape of the show at Internet Archive.)
"This music is a place that cardinally does not and never has existed." -- Robyn had opened the concert with some pure music, "Sometimes I wish I was a pretty girl" playing on a tape recorder as he walks in wearing a top hat, sits down at the piano and starts playing with the tape speed. He quickly tires of that, turns off the tape and plays "Nocturne"; then Terry Edwards walks out carrying some wind instruments and they perform "Flavor of Night" together. It was kind of a somber opening, I found -- but after Robyn started talking about his music, things warmed up a lot. Captain Keegan came on stage while he was describing the process of dissecting his lyrics as similar to looking at magnified pictures of rotting tomatoes online, wasting valuable time when you could be sending e-mails, and they launched into "Sounds Great When You're Dead" -- this is 
Photo by Dave Kaufman when the dim blue lighting became bright and red, and everybody started smiling and moving. "These songs are basically subtitles," said Robyn, "they flash up underneath while life is going on" and serve as a means of translation between understanding and feeling, or words to that effect. And played "I Used to Say I Love You." He had some technical difficulties with a loose wire during this song but recovered from it very gracefully -- the final line of the chorus is "And I've lost my illusions about you now", but instead he said as his amplifier crackled and retched, "And I've... ah, really fucked up this guitar, keep it going for a minute you guys, I'm just going to plug this in really deep here,..." and came back to reprise the chorus. There was a lot of chat about editing thrown in at various points during the show, because it was being filmed for inclusion in a documentary of the tour, for instance IIRC Robyn said something about editing out that bit with the recovery from the technical difficulties. I hope they would not; that was one of the really key lovely moments in the show. (Also lovely: in the program was a chronology of Hitchcock's life and work from his POV, similar to this one but expanded through 2009.) Robyn made his first of many references to the recent election when he said of November 4th, "suddenly the scheme of things did not suck." He talked about how he wrote IODOT during the Reagan/Thatcher years when there was not much to feel hopeful about, but he had flashes of hope such as the one that led him to write this song: and played "This Could Be The Day", with "Nubian slaves" inexplicably edited to "Nubian Dave". Then Edwards gets up from the piano and takes Robyn's electric guitar, the black one with white polka dots that matches his shirt, and Robyn says "This is gonna be in C. C, the mother of all keys..." and talks for a while about key signatures and editing -- "We've just survived 8 years of faith. Let's see where a little disbelief can get us." And the three of them sang "Sleeping Knights of Jesus", with some great edits to bring the song up to date a bit. Talked for a while about railroads as an embodiment of love as an intro to "Trams of Old London", and then talked about the physical skeleton of the city, as an intro to "My Favorite Buildings". "Catholicism is best described as a form of insurance. ... Oh crap, did the Lord cut off my mic? -- It's back, someone must have given him something." And they played "Mother Church", and Terry and Tim left the stage, and Robyn played a solo "I Often Dream of Trains" on electric guitar with all of his enormous personality focused into the microphone -- this song was stunning and brought a standing ovation, one which brought everybody back out for some encores. In the encores they played a song I didn't know but which I loved, and have asked the Fegs to identify for me;* and both songs from "Rachel Getting Married" (which Ellen hopes gets an Oscar for its music); and "Listening to the Higsons". And a special extra encore, after everybody had gotten up and started moving toward the exits, of "Goodnight I Say" -- which was funny and nice, because I had been thinking before the show about how this would be the ideal closing number. Anyway: too long and too unfiltered a post; I just wanted to get some of this down while I still remembered it.
 (Oh, I forgot, something I really liked: the last thing Robyn said at the end of the first encore, and I think as all the musicians on stage were playing the final notes of "Higsons", was something like, "Things never end. But for the purposes of editing, we're going to stop here." And the sound cut off, and the musicians exited. The extra musicians playing on the encore were Gaida Hinnawi on vocals and Amir El Saffar on horn, both from the cast of Rachel Getting Married.) (Another thing I just remembered: After Terry and Tim had left the stage at the end of the set, before Robyn played "I Often Dream of Trains," he spoke for a bit about the concert ending -- "This is the needle lifting from the dusty groove" -- he likened the end of a record or concert to the transition from sleep to wakefulness, the music being a remembered dream, and the transition from "then" to "now." "But this is still then," and started playing.) *And the responding Feg says, Robyn played this song on Wednesday too (at World Cafe Live), and she thinks she has never heard it before. Which I take to mean it's a new composition.... Another Feg says, it is called "I'm Falling" and is written for the soundtrack of The Fifth Beatle. It will be track 4 of Goodnight Oslo.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2008: 4 responses
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 Ohboyohboyohboy! Ellen and I are going out to the Upper West Side and watch Robyn and the boys play I Often Dream of Trains! I've been reading reviews of the tour -- on the web and on the fegmaniax list -- and it sounds like it's going to be really great. Busy day until then -- I'm going out in a couple of minutes to run errands, and when I get back will be working on home improvement type of things until the afternoon. Sorry I haven't been keeping the blog up so frequently over the last week or so, real life has been too busy. I'm definitely planning to post a review of the concert, late tonight or tomorrow morning.
posted morning of November 22nd, 2008: 2 responses
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Thursday, November 20th, 2008
Lately I've been reading a lot of blog posts about comic strips. This is sort of removed from the core mission of READIN but I just wanted to link to some of them for the sake of keeping the links in one place together.These links come primarily from Eddie Fitzgerald's Theory Corner. Eddie's post about Fearless Fosdick mentioned the blog of the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive -- they have tons of great images there, comic strips and animation cels. I'm pretty taken with the idea that Fosdick was the inspiration for Harvey Kurtzman to create MAD Magazine, without really having anything useful to say about it. Below that, Eddie linked to comic strip historian Allan Holtz' blog, Stripper's Guide, a wonderful resource for interesting old comic strips. Lots of Herriman, lots of old political cartooning, lots of miscellany. Elsewhere, Fluxtumblr links to a hilarious page at Comics Should Be Good!: Comic Book Legends Revealed #181 tells the story of The Incredible Hulk #142, which adapts Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic to superhero-world. This is just too funny; you've got to go look at the pages they reproduce there.
posted evening of November 20th, 2008: Respond
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I've been listening to Dylan's Modern Times a lot over the last couple of days, and having some reactions that seem like I could put them together into an article or essay. For now I'll just list some of what I'm thinking about, off the top of my head. - I like the record. It's nowhere near Dylan's best stuff; but it's a pleasure to listen to and to move with.
- One of the things I really love in Dylan's music is the way he creates a persona in his songs. I think here his focus wavers and sometimes the lyrics will not ring true, not go with the persona. One thing that occurred to me is that maybe here Dylan is not singing in a character, just being himself.
- The songs are long and do not always hold my attention. That's not necessarily bad -- when my attention wanders the song is happening in the background, then I come back and slip back into the song.
- The songs fall roughly into three groups, two that I like and one not: (A) "Spirit on the Water", "When the Deal Goes Down", "Ain't Talkin", and "Beyond the Horizon"; (B) "Thunder on the Mountain", "Rollin' and Tumblin'", "Someday Baby", "The Levee's Gonna Break"; (C) "Workingman's Blues #2" (which I'm maybe just putting in a group by itself so I can not like it.) "Nettie Moore" I'm reserving judgement on. Group (A) is more melodic, Group (B) is hard rocking, driving beat, often with a blues structure. (B) is generally more exciting; I really love "Beyond the Horizon" though, it might be the most moving song on the record.
- I really like hearing Dylan with a band behind him, and it's especially nice to hear the violin and cello. The band's sound might have been what prompted me to compare it to Basement Tapes, I think the comparison was mostly spurious.
posted evening of November 20th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, November 17th, 2008
 Matt Madden's book Exercises in Style arrived today and is proving to be just as much fun as I was expecting it would be. (i.e., A lot.) Funniest cartoon so far is "Dynamic Constraint", a takeoff on the Dynamic Tension ads in the back of every comic book of my childhood, starring Ray Queneau as Charles Atlas. That made me laugh helplessly for about five minutes.
posted evening of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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Janis lent me a copy of Dylan's recent disk, Modern Times. The first thing that hits me listening to it is what a huge range of variation there is in Dylan's work.  I mean listening to this you recognize instantly who is the author -- his voice and his personality are unmistakable -- but it's a brand-new sound, not quite like anything he's done in the last 40+ years. (That I can think of anyway. I don't have an encyclopædic familiarity with his work, but I do know a lot of it. The closest thing to this that I can think of, is Basement Tapes; but that's not at all a perfect match.) It's a groovy sound, too, different though it is from any of the Dylans I know and love. It's going to take a bunch more listening to really get to know the songs -- on first listen it seems like the real highlights of the record are "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and "The Levee's Gonna Break"; the only song I really didn't like was "Workingman's Blues #2" -- it seemed plodding and lifeless. A couple of the other songs were not perfect lyrically -- the quality of inspiration that you feel in Dylan's best work was not always present -- but the instrumental power carried them. I'm looking forward to keeping this on my car stereo for the next while and listening to it every day until I really get to know the songs. Also interested in finding out more about the source tunes these are based on; the only one I really know is Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'."
posted evening of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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 Sylvia asked the question tonight that has been bugging me since we started reading The Golden Compass: "How do people get their dæmons when they are born?" I have no answer -- I said well, do you think the dæmons are born with the people, and she was like maybe...
posted evening of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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