Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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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.
I've been fretting for some time about how to make a gig bag for the tin-can cello -- then somebody on the FB Vintage Musical Instrument Cases group pointed out that I could just cut a hole in the back of a regular cello gig bag and sew an extension in to it. Great idea! I've ordered a cheap bag from Musician's Friend... Here's how I'm carrying it around currently, without a bag:
Following in the footsteps of Stefano Matteucci, a violin could be made using a small bodhrán for a body. Possibly tuned in a higher register than a violin, like an octave up from viola. You would want to minimize the angle of the strings crossing the bridge, to save undue pressure on the drum skin.
posted evening of March 11th, 2019: Respond ➳ More posts about Luthery
I'm getting to where there are songs I'm confident about playing. I want to start building a songbook. I want to play some songs at open mics. Once it gets warm out, I want to start busking. I want to play Maplewood Porchfest this summer.
"Like the reverend King, our Leader Trump has a dream... that one day, in the red hills of Arizona, the sons of former migrant workers and the sons of former ICE agents will be reduced to bartering scraps from the remnants of our civilisation... that one day his 5 little children will have no need to worry about the chaos of society crumbling around them, having retained an army of private goons to protect them..."
The tin-can cello had its first time up on stage last night, when I took it to Brooklyn Raga Massive's weekly concert and open jam at Jalopy in Red Hook.
The concert was an album release party for cellist George Crotty. Great, I'm looking forward to hearing more of his music. The open jam was all I'd been hoping for -- I've been meaning to get to this weekly happening for a long time. Definitely going back.
