Still going after all these years.
Cool new feature on Houseblogs.net, the site that aggregates the home improvement ramblings of housebloggers worldwide: Ask.Houseblogs.net. It’s still in beta, in fact there’s only one question posted right now. But I can think of no better way to leverage the collective bruised fingers and hard learned lessons of all us amateur contractor types than through a model like this. Brilliant, and kudos to Aaron and Jeannie for putting it together.
You can subscribe to the Ask feed via RSS.
Remix albums aren’t normally my thing; generally I end up wishing the remixers had left well enough alone. The exception to my rule has been Verve’s excellent Verve Remixed series, which has treated the source material—killer jazz cuts from Verve’s deep vault—with respect while shining a fresh new eye on the performances. Now the same treatment has been applied to works from Impulse!, the revolutionary jazz label that Verve started managing when Polygram and Universal came together, and the results are consistently mindbending.
It helps that the Impulse! catalog is so good. It’s sometimes known as the House that Trane Built, after John Coltrane, its most famous musician, who recorded some of his most famous albums for the label. But you won’t find remixes of A Love Supreme on the disc—Coltrane’s sole appearance is on the album’s last, and only non-remixed track, a beautiful reading of a poem that Coltrane wrote with musical accompaniment from his son Ravi Coltrane on sax. The album focuses less on the avant garde perspective that Trane brought, staying instead with the more melodic contributions of artists like Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Oliver Nelson, and Pharoah Sanders. There’s a fair amount of Latin jazz on here as well, both through Diz’s influence (he contributes an Afro-Cuban “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” that is nicely swung by remixer DJ Gerardo Frisina) and through artists like Chico O’Farrill (playing with Clark Terry).
But it’s hard to buttonhole a collection that crosses genres this exuberantly—one freewheels from Diz’s “I looked over Jordan and what did I see/an Eldorado comin’ after me” to a searing remix of Archie Shepp’s “Attica Blues” by The Chief Xcel of Blackalicious, a trance-inducing take on Pharoah Sanders’s “Astral Traveling” by Boozoo Bajou, and—my personal favorite—a sublime reimagining of Oliver Nelson’s great “Stolen Moments” by Telefon Tel-Aviv. I’ve always loved the latter composition—the absolutely iconic melody, the group performance by a first-rate horn line—and thought it a shame that the only contemporary reimagining was the version that United Future Organization did for the Red Hot + Cool compilation a few years back, which to my ears was chirpy and a little soulless. Telefon Tel-Aviv deftly redresses this wrong by re-envisioning the work as an orchestral masterpiece heard through a distant radio station, with strings tuning up and then faintly carrying the famous lines through static and synths. It’s the highlight of a generally excellent collection.
Originally posted at Blogcritics.
I have a fair number of updates from the weekend to post, including Justin Rosolino’s gig at Club Passim, the annual Old South Thanksgiving service at the historic Old South Meetinghouse, and the (all-but) completion of our bathroom renovation—not to mention a CD review. But in the meantime, check out the Sony Boycott blog, where things have been popping now that the mainstream media has picked up the story. And be sure to listen in when I go on the air to discuss the Sony situation, in about fifty minutes.
Now this is what Blogcritics does at its best: White Stripes Nation, a group blog series that performs critical readings of various seminal White Stripes songs in the context of a manifesto for Jack White as Dictator-For-Life. The first post is beautiful, on a par with the Onion’s classic Clinton Threatens to Drop Da Bomb on Iraq:
Greetings, Comrades. This is a communique from Generalissimo AlbertoBarger regarding the present crisis. The current administration is anabject failure. The Bush regime is weak, and incapable of DecisiveAction. Doing the denial twist in the cold, cold night is insufficient.The People demand change. A state of emergency exists.
Therefore, martial law is hereby declared. A directorate of The People has taken over, and a new executive has been chosen.
We must have a real leader, someone with a track record of realachievement who could impart the required principles of leadership andtradition. On careful examination, The People see that there’s only oneperson fit for the task, a man of achievement equal to the job- a manwith a genuine sense of geometry and theology.
Jack White has been appointed El Presidente for Life…
Go see what other magic Al Barger (er, Generalissimo Alberto Barger) and Legendary Monkey have wrought. ¡Viva la revolución!
One feature that Windows portables have long had that I’ve wished for in Macs is a suspend-to-disk (aka hibernate) mode, where instead of a normal sleep session the current contents of memory are written to the hard disk and re-read on startup. This allows a user’s session to be preserved even if the battery drains completely. This appears to have been added as a fully supported feature on new PowerBooks; now Matt Johnson has published an Open Firmware hack that enables the feature on other machines that came to market in the last two years or so. Thanks to Daring Fireball for the pointer.
Stop what you are doing, right now, and go read Doc Searls’ latest for Linux Journal: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes.
Key quote:
Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it’s not only packets, or “content” or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context.
That context is best understood as a place. When we speak of the Net as a “place” or a “space” or a“world” or a “commons” or a “market” with “locations” and “addresses” and “sites” that we “build,” we are framing the Net as a place.
Most significantly, the Net is a marketplace. In fact, the Net is the largest, most open, most free and most productive marketplace the world has ever known. The fact that it’s not physical doesn’t make it one bit less real. In fact, the virtuality of the Net is what makes it stretch to worldwide dimensions while remaining local to every desktop, every point-of-sale device, every ATM machine. It is in this world-wide marketplace that free people, free enterprise, free cultures and free societies are just beginning to flourish. It is here that democratic governance is finally connected, efficiently, to the governed.
It is on and not just through—prepositions are key here—the Net that governments will not only derive their just powers from the consent of the governed but benefit directly from citizen involvement as well.
Why is Doc’s piece important? Key quote from the opposite side, Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC:
[BusinessWeek]: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
And Doc’s right about the importance of reframing the discussion in terms of a marketplace, rather than just a transport system. Trivial as the distinction sounds, it matters. All words matter in discussions like this. Think of how important calling the anti-abortion movement the “Right to Life” movement has been in terms of re-framing the debate–instead of arguing about the economic and health effects of denying abortions, we’re talking about when life begins. And it took weeks of stories linking the words “Sony DRM” to the words “spyware” and “rootkit” (and “boycott”) for people to stop talking about controlling “consumer use of media” and start talking about the real threats to individuals—and corporations—that are introduced by the uncontrolled rush toward DRM.
And if we succeed in reframing the discussion, then we have a leg on which we can fight the Broadcast Flag, and the HD Radio Content Act of 2005, and the Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005, and clueless broadband providers who want their customers to be “consumers,” and on and on and on.
Enough. Go read. I need to finish reading the piece myself. It’s long, but it might be the most important thing you read this month.
The New York Times has an unusual food article today—unusual for the run-up to Thanksgiving, anyway: The Pilgrims Didn’t Brine, in which their writer canvasses a number of chefs to find the simplest possible turkey preparation that still turns out well.
Given my adventures last year, their findings—start with a fresh, locally raised turkey; roast at 425, and tent the breast with foil to keep it from cooking too fast; then let rest for a half hour—sound pretty good. I’m still probably going to brine, though this year I think I’ll make the brine on Tuesday so it will have enough time to cool.
It’s probably a good sign that people are starting to joke about the Parisian riots. I mean, as opposed to my horrified silence as I watched most of the coverage over the last few weeks. Anyway, the Attu Sees All blog claims that this is the latest souvenir trying to cash in on the civil unrest: the Parisien Matchbox car.
(Over at the Boycott Sony blog, I’m getting links from the damnedest sites. For every Slashdot or BBC, there are probably a hundred links from random sites like Attu. In addition to making me happy that the word about Sony BMG’s shenanigans is spreading, I’m finding the most random stuff imaginable on some of these sites… the above is a minor case in point.)
In the spirit of making a list, and checking it twice:
Ah yes the holidays. Our favorite part of the year.
There is a long stretch between the earliest known polyphony—the works of Perotin and the other masters of the Notre Dame school—and the next high point in the 15th century with the works of Ockeghem, Obrecht, and others. In between lie the Black Death, the birth of the Renaissance, and other major cultural developments, of course; musically there is a school of early polyphony called the contenance angloise, literally the “English guise,” so named because the composers on the Continent who adopted the English techniques were said to be putting on an English face. Without the composers of this school, the course of the evolution of Western music would be dramatically altered. With this background, this recording of the works of John Dunstable, foremost composer of the contenance angloise, takes on historic significance.
Even without the historical setting, this recording earns its musical significance on its own merits and on superlative performances by the Clemencic Consort. The ensemble, comprising three male voices and Dr. René Clemencic on a reproduction positive organ, is superbly tight, and the polyphony is rich and vibrant. In fact, the musical ideas in the polyphony, including the use of Gregorian melodies as a cantus firmus on which the piece is built, are consonant with the work of composers who flourished a hundred years or more later. It is difficult to remember that this music, which sounds as though it came from the height of the Renaissance, was written within fifty years of the plague’s devastation. Dunstable’s work is thought to be influenced by contemporary understandings of astronomy—one of the few surviving artifacts that attests to his existence (many of his scores having perished during the Dissolution of the Monasteries) is a note in his hand in a book on astronomy at Cambridge. Whatever the source for his inspiration, his music is presented on this recording with warmth and humanity.
Allegro Music is reissuing a number of other pivotal recordings from the Arte Nova label (this recording was originally released in 1995), and on the basis of this performance the rest of the series is certainly worth checking out.
Originally published at Blogcritics.
Whew. Lisa and I are finally starting to feel as though we are over the hump for our renovation projects. The tile guy is a day ahead and will finish our upstairs bathroom today, meaning that the remaining fixtures will be installed by the end of the week and we can start painting. Last night I sanded the new plaster on the first floor—in the process realizing we had unpainted surfaces in every room in the house, thanks to the new shower and the radiator niche patching—and Lisa tacked the dust away. We’ll paint tonight.
Incidentally, for the sanding we used a vacuum equipped sander with drywall sanding screens, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Very little mess was created and it did the trick, removing the few ridges and blots left behind by the plastering work. We didn’t use a name-brand sander, just a generic kit from one of the home warehouses, and it seemed to work just fine.
There are still a few loose ends that I need to make sure the contractors get wrapped up, though. In particular, the grab bars for the downstairs shower, which we need for her dad, haven’t arrived yet, and we are still waiting for a few odds and ends of trim—soap dishes and such. But we’ve come a long way and I am looking forward to having the final stages over and done with.
Oh—and they might even be able to get the front door and storm door replaced this week, too. Swoon. Likely later, though.
Just in time, too: Lisa’s folks arrive Wednesday for the holidays, and her brother will fly in late Thursday—while her niece will drive down from Vermont on Friday or Saturday to hang out with us for a few days. The new bathrooms will get a real workout.
I crossed a mini-Rubicon on Thursday: I finished ripping both my classical and my jazz discs. (Somewhat ironic, in light of the Sony Boycott Blog activities—but I haven’t bought many new CDs, if any at all, in the last year.)
New totals for the losslessly ripped files: 355 artists, 441 albums, 130.64 GB for 5584 tracks, 19.4 days of playing time.
Hey folks. If things are a little quiet here today, it’s because the Boycott Sony blog is kind of getting Slashdotted at present. “Kind of” because there’s no direct /. link, just a link in a comment on a related article that has still steered almost 900 visits here. At the same time the blog has been linked as related to a BBC article about the situation, so things are a bit hectic. Feel free to stop by and join the discussion.
Courtesy Boing Boing, the Urban Outfitters version of Charlie Brown’s pathetic Christmas Tree. Someone could bring this to my house at Christmas if they were inclined (hint hint). UO has done a remarkable job of reproducing the pathos of the original animated version, though you have to supply your own security blanket:
However, there is some irony here: the point of Charlie Brown’s tree was that, as scrawny and pathetic it was, it was real. Urban Outfitter’s tree is “made of wire branches and plastic needles.”
Update, 2009: The current version of Charlie Brown’s tree at UO now comes with the security blanket… but is still “bendable wire branches and plastic needles.”
Boston.com: Home in Lexington explodes, sparking evacuation. And folks, when they say “explodes,” they mean it, judging from the before and after pictures. The gas company—our gas company, Keyspan—says the system “overpressurized.” I say, huh? How can that happen? And I say, urgh. Maybe we moved to gas too hastily.