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Sunday, April 24th, 2011
A story idea (or, well, a character idea -- nothing happening in the story, yet) that developed in China as I interacted with vendors at the Shanghai textile market. I was not really there to buy anything, just keeping Ellen and Sylvia company in their hunt for silk... So the idea is, there's this character, a sexually/interpersonally-frustrated American businessman who spends time in China working for his company. Not really sure of the details of this, possibly I would model him on a British expatriate we met in Suzhou who had lived there for several years doing marketing for a British telecommunications firm. I think the character's name is Morris Babel, just because I was reading 100 Years of Solitude recently and thinking what a great character name that would be, and it seems to work for this character. Babel's business does not involve textiles but he develops the kink of hanging around the fabric and clothing markets having people sell to him -- the salespeople, who are generally attractive young women, make eye contact, greet him, ask him to look at their wares, and if he pauses to take a look, aggressively market the merchandise, pulling him in and connecting with him, or creating the appearance of a connection. Babel finds this addictive and returns daily to the markets, buying clothing and fabric and trinkets he does not have any use for in exchange for this experience of feeling wanted. It seemed to me at the market like this form of direct personal marketing was the primitive form of the advertising industry I have been exposed to all my life in America, probably (almost certainly) more effective on a per-exposure basis than mass media advertising but of course much less efficient in terms of money, since labor is involved in each exposure.
posted morning of April 24th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
 Rest in peace, Hazel Dickens. Ms. Dickens passed away yesterday, 75 years old. She has a thick catalog of songs; I will remember her especially for "Dark as a Dungeon".
posted evening of April 23rd, 2011: Respond
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Friday, April 22nd, 2011
ä½ å¥½! We spent the past two weeks in China. Some scattered notes about being there, below the fold; and click on the picture of us at the Confucian temple in Shanghai for a photo album.
↷read the rest...
posted evening of April 22nd, 2011: 1 response
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Saturday, April second, 2011
Well out of a year and a bit of jamming together, John and I have put together something worth listening to (IMO obviously). You can download our demo tape from box.net if you'd like to check it out. (Click the "Download Folder" button to get the tape as one big .zip file.) Streaming here:
Track list
- "Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan (with a bit of fooling around with the lyrics from yours truly)
- "NJ Transit" by Jeremy
- "Dancing Barefoot" by Patti Smith
- "Revelator" by Gillian Welch
- "Shady Grove," traditional
- "California Stars" by Woody Guthrie and Wilco
- "St. James Infirmary," traditional
Mountain Station is John Hicks on guitar and vocals, Jeremy Osner on Stroh fiddle and vocals. Follow us on Facebook to see new songs when we record them, and works in progress...
 Update -- I am thinking with this post I'll be taking a brief hiatus, a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading, those of you who stop by regularly -- I'll be back, just want a little time off. Please help us find our audience! If you are reading this post and you like the music, I would greatly appreciate links back, from your blog or your rss reader or Facebook, whatever. Help get the word out...
posted evening of April second, 2011: 4 responses
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Thursday, March 31st, 2011
 Eddie Fitzgerald has a funny site. I'm never quite sure what to make of Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner, beyond that Eddie has a wonderful eye for faces, for photos and drawings of faces. Today's post is no exception to the rule -- a bunch of great images tied together with a thread that I don't quite get.
posted evening of March 31st, 2011: Respond
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Slicing Up Eyeballs reports that another new Norwegian disc is coming our way from Robyn Hitchock. (or possibly from the Venus 3? They do not say.) One track is available for listening now! (And another one!) Another track is on the soundtrack of a movie coming out next month! Anticipation...Update: The record will be coming out next weekend and will feature 8 new songs, a re-recording of "Raining Twilight Coast," and a Norwegian-language recording of "Goodnight Oslo."
 *(Note: I had never actually bothered to look at a map and see what this lyric means. Tromsø is at the very top of Norway, inside the arctic circle; Christiansand is on the southern tip of Scandinavia.)
posted evening of March 31st, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
100 Years of Solitude is a pretty engaging book overall. What is really making the reading experience work for me though, what I'm thinking of as the high points, is the 2-to-5-page narrative sections told in long, quickly flowing paragraphs, anecdotes from Macondo's history. The journey leading up to the founding of the village was one such portion, another is the epidemic of insomniac amnesia which ends when MelquÃades returns to the village. It would be worth while to compile a list of these passages, they seem like the heart of the story to me but I'm not really sure what proportion of the book they make up. It is impossible to stop reading in the middle of one of these passages. Very difficult to quote from them, too -- I want to pick something from the insomnia passage which will communicate its feeling, but I can't quote one sentence without everything around it -- the passage is atomic in a way. Its impact lies in the flow of narrative from image to image rather than in any particular image. Well maybe this: Úrsula has been running a business selling candies shaped like little animals; these animals are how the plague of insomnia is eventually transmitted from the BuendÃa family to the rest of the village -- Children and adults sucked happily on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite rosy fish of insomnia, the tender little golden horses of insomnia, and when the sun rose on Monday, the whole village was still awake.
And, and look at this: Aureliano and his father have been fighting the amnesia by labeling everything in the village with its name and function -- "This is a cow. One must milk it every morning, and must warm the milk and mix it with coffee to make café con leche." A sign in the middle of town states "God exists." After months of this, when MelquÃades (as yet unidentified -- no one remembers who he is) returns, José Arcadio BuendÃa found him seated in the hall, fanning himself with a worn black hat, compassionate and attentive, reading the notes taped to the walls.
posted evening of March 30th, 2011: 2 responses
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Monday, March 28th, 2011
 At the behest of the Wisconsin IWW, Eric Drooker has created posters calling, in a wide variety of languages, for a general strike.
posted evening of March 28th, 2011: Respond
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Yeah, so, just two pictures that I thought go nicely together. One is the work of Scott Beseler from the streets of Covington, Kentucky; the other is one of Stanley's C-ville finds.
posted evening of March 28th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, March 27th, 2011
I now believe that what most interested me in the novel, was to tell the story of a family obsessed by incest.
— Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
Interview with Claude Couffon, 1968
Incest is all over the place in 100 Years of Solitude, practically every narrative block contains an incestuous relationship or one that hints at incestuous desires. I wonder what it is doing, what it is signifying? I've always sort of thought of this novel as being about the history of Colombia and about the Spanish conquest of Latin America; I'm not sure what role incest (or inbreeding, or incest and inbreeding as metaphor) plays there. Likely, of course, not a simple metaphor...
It was interesting to watch Máncora last night, a recent Peruvian film about (among other things) an incestuous relationship, and have GarcÃa Márquez in the back of my mind while I was watching it. Not much similarity at all between the two works or between the uses of incest in the two works, but fun to think about how the two different authors are using this device for their own ends. Looks like it's a bit of a central theme for this filmmaker, Ricardo de Montreuil; his other movie is called My Brother's Wife.
 (...and now all of a sudden I am thinking about Ada...)
posted evening of March 27th, 2011: Respond
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