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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.
Another image from Heimat is making me wish I could find some stills and clips from this movie online; but no luck. The opening shot of Paul has been all in black-and-white; as he reaches his parents' farm he looks in the window of the barn where his father is working at the forge; its interior is shot in color but you don't notice this at first because it is dark -- the camera pans to the bar of iron that Herr Simon is hammering and its orange glow just fills the screen. And just as quickly pans/shifts back to outside and black-and-white. (The gruff, happy interaction between father and son in the next scene is pretty affecting stuff also.)
I'm finding myself annoyed and puzzled by a bit of subtitling at the beginning of Heimat. Long, beautiful tracking shot without dialog (is this a German thing originally, or is it borrowed from Westerns?*) -- the young man is walking home from war to his village -- and then the view switches to a young woman in the village looking out the window, seeing him come, and says to an older woman, exactly what I'm not completely sure but it sure sounds like, "Ist das niemals Paul?" -- I don't know this idiom but it sure sounds like it would mean something like "Hey, isn't that Paul?" and not, as the subtitlists assure us, "Isn't that Paul Simon?" Why give us this bit of information, that the characters last name is Simon? This is going to be important certainly but there's no reason to cast it in there... And of course it is distracting because of the name being what it is. It seems like very frequently in the first half hour or so, somebody will say "Paul" and it will be subtitled with his family name.
Aargh, never mind, what the characters are saying is of course "der Simons Paul" -- the subtitles were doing the right thing if I would only let them work.
* Well according to Alan Bracchus, the technique has been around as long as the medium of film; but he says "perhaps the first true, universally-accepted ‘long tracking shot’ is Orson Welles’ opening shot in Touch of Evil (1958)." I guess I am associating this technique with German directors because I've watched a lot of German movies lately.
posted evening of January 18th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
As I've been (very slowly) reading La sombra del viento, I've been trying to figure out what is bothering me about the story. Something a little off, like the plot depends too heavily on coincidences, and too many things seem to happen all at once (in a story that takes place over a span of several years, all the narrative time is spent on key points where the plot advances -- it feels kind of heavy-handed)... Yesterday I put this into words for the first time at Oswaldo's place, and I realized what is really going on with the plotting, and why it is turning me off -- the obvious, slightly clumsy presence of the author is making it difficult to feel paranoid about the events in the novel, which seems like a key element of enjoying a detective story.
Well, so the strangest thing happened: after I verbalized that complaint I went back to the book; and it suddenly seemed like a much better book -- I'm at a loss for why* but last night and this morning I am really enjoying the story for the first time since the first couple of chapters.
* It seems to me like there are two possible explanations: (a) the book starts out slow and gets better, and I'm at the point right now where it gets better. Because I am reading it so slowly, the draggy parts are magnified for me. Or (b) my figuring out what my complaint was let me drop it and move on. (b) seems more plausible except I'm not sure quite how it would work; and also the portion of the book that I'm reading today just seems better than what I've been reading for the last couple of weeks. But I'm suspicious about the coincidence...
This is encouraging! I went to sleep last night thinking about "Walk Right In", with the different versions running through my head; and I woke up this morning with some ideas for my own version running through my head. So far today I have recorded three versions of it, each one sounding progressively better -- takes 2 and 3 even being music that I would play for somebody else without feeling embarrassed! It still needs guitar in it to sound like a complete song -- if you'd like to hear what I'm working on you can download take 3 from my box.net account.
This seems like a good place for a note about my current recording setup, which has gotten a lot more hi-tech in the last couple of weeks. I am recording into condenser mics which are going to a Behringer Xenyx 1204 mixing console, then a Behringer UCA-200 analog-to-digital converter, into my USB port, and REAPER is storing the sound and turning it into .WAV and .MP3 files. This seems to work pretty well -- I am happy about the sound quality of the recordings -- I need to spend some time on learning the ins and outs of the software, which is a good deal more complex than Audacity but also works better. John and I are working towards the goal of recording both of us together; to do this properly we mainly need another mic stand or two and possibly another mic.
posted afternoon of January 18th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
John and I played this 80-year-old song yesterday -- I thought I would link to a couple of source versions.
Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (1977) rock right out. This might be my favorite version of the song, certainly the first one I think of when I think of this song. (Even though the version I first heard, I'm pretty sure, is that of The Rooftop Singers (1963) -- which I now find comparatively bland.) The original is Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers (1929) -- fantastically good, maybe more inventive play with the lyrics than in any of the covers I've heard. And the version that brought this song back into my conscious mind recently, off of a mix tape my brother made for me, is by Corey Harris and Cassie Taylor (2008), off of the record Recapturing the Banjo.
And suddenly the scales fall from my eyes! Practicing the tune this morning I realize it's another variation on the melody from "They're Red Hot!"
A good weekend for music with friends -- John came over last night and we played for a couple of hours, then I went over to Bob & Janis' place this afternoon and played, I am hoping to practice with the Lost Souls tomorrow evening. Set lists below the fold.
John and I played a pretty eclectic mix of music: A couple of takes of my "Bonaparte" medley, "Jockey full of Bourbon", "Behind that Locked Door", "Meet me in the Morning" (which I think has potential to be really great), "The Battleship Maine" (by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers),"Little Ditches" (by Michael Cross, about undertaking), "One of these Days", "A Man of Constant Sorrow" (ditto on the potential greatness), and "Walk Right In" among other songs.
With Bob and Janis and Greg I played a pretty Grateful Dead-centric hour of music; starting with a drastically slowed-down version of "West Texas Cowboys" we played "Panama Red", "Breakdown Palace", "Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms", "Loser" and more.
I happened on Matt Logue's E M P T Y L A project earlier this week -- impressive and beautiful! Impressive in a totally different way (and beautiful in a roughly similar way) are Masataka Nakano's Tokyo Nobody pictures -- rather than editing out the crowds and cars, Nakano waited for the moment when they were gone.
At Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, I find new pictures of Mars from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Thanks for the link, cleek!) The pictures of Martian sand dunes make a beautiful desktop background, so think I: (To a first order approximation, this is formations produced by the interaction between sand storms and frozen CO2.)
(Clicking on the "Full image (grayscale, non-map projected)" to the right under "JPEG Products" will give you a very large image file which you can crop at your leisure...)
posted evening of January 14th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Wallpaper
