Friday, August 16
my days, indeed my hours (not much more than thirty, if all goes according to plan) in boston are numbered. and much remains to be done. bad enough that i'm behind in real life; blogside things are looking dire indeed. so many happenings to be recounted. well, i'll see how far i can get. as i write, on a stickie, in the living room, i'm making a tape for someone who i'm sure is reading so i won't mention his name. it's about 2:30 and, well into the first side, i've decided to start over again on a different tape deck.
listen: i took the bus into town on tuesday and walked myself over to the fogg art gallery (sorry, no hyperlinks right now, i'm unconnected). at first, the novelty of the experience struck me, and i realized i hadn't had a serious interaction with art in rather a while (oberlin's fine gallery notwithstanding.) so the pertinent question was: "do i even like art anymore?"
after a couple of rubens failed to storm my psyche, i wasn't so sure, but i think my final answer was probably affirmative. item: the featured exhibit of articles from Ur, including a lot of the really famous stuff (the ram in the thicket, which is actually a goat, and the huge bull-headed lyre; i thought i saw the freakin' standard there in the corner, and bade my time getting around to it, but it turned out to be a replica, of course. don't remember if i saw that in the British museum, but it's pretty cool.) what i was most impressed by was how modern much of it looked, particularly the jewelry. one could easily wear any of those necklaces out to a fancy dress ball, or even a funky restaurant, circa 2002.
like the best college collections (which this is), it was a perfect survey of everything - fantastic room of imps and post-imps, but limit one or two per notable (picasso got a handful, and nice ones too but then he's special.) so, all the old favorites. another temp. exhibit was of a artist i didn't know whose massive works combined silverplate photography with sculpted sheets of lead to remarkable effect. that was in the modern-er busch-reisen-something gallery, which also had a hammershøi (my latest favorite.)
that was really fun. i would have liked to check out the third museum in the complex, with non-western stuff, but instead i went down mass. ave. and did this other thing i like to do. oh, record shopping. oh dear. this was to be this summer's of equivalent of my splurge at amoeba last year, but as it happened my penchant this time was for old lps rather than new-ish cds. used in both cases.
i spent, not a stupid amount of money (no, rather a respectable amount of money - something like $2 a disc on average), but on a stupid number of albums. stupid because it's fun to use the word like that, but because a) i don't have a phonograph yet b) i have to carry the suckers, and this added nearly if not double the weight to my collection. yes, i must remember not to double the size of my collection in one day again, unless that's the day my folks get rid of their turntable.
it wasn't the most visceral pleasure i've gotten out of record shopping, but it was a satisfying time because i finally followed the reason i decided to start collecting vinyl in the first place: most of my purchases were jazz or blues records; a couple world and one country. for the most part stuff i really don't know much about.
an issue: if i'm not necessarily a huge blues or jazz fan, and don't want to build a huge collection, do i focus on just the essential classics, or do i just take a sample of whatever i come across that's easy and cheap, since it's not worth shelling out for the (inevitably more expensive) selections that a purist might select. i think some of both. i know what to look for in jazz, but beyond a few names i'm pretty lost in the blues. but learning. particularly, i don't have a sense of what i would like.
i need to find a good place to look for funk and soul records. i bet philly has something to offer there. these two places were great. stereo jacks is manned by your typical record nerds. i was there for an hour or so, and got to hear them have it out with numerous customers, would-be-sellers (over the phone) and oddballs off the street. they were pretty nice to me (i asked about a freddie hubbard record and a caetano veloso record) but still a smidgen smarmy.
record hog was in marked contrast to the orderliness of that business: stacks of lps all over the place, maybe a third of them haphazardly labelled. their posted hours were "noon-ish to seven-ish," but the retiring proprieter announced "we close at six," which was only minutes after arrived. she let me and one fellow customer poke around until 6:20 as she tended to the three or four cats and put towels over the used cd racks. then refused to give me a bargain on a used daedalus cd i noticed without a pricetag, and tried to interest me in a vanguard folksinger compilation.
mandy and ruth stopped in while i was there. we reconvened at the flat a little while later and shortly left to meet miriam for dinner at the west end lounge. that was excellent; more fun than i anticipated even. nice to have a conversation (long-form, as ben said) conducted in that intellectual style that has been lacking this summer; it's an enjoyable mode, even if i don't know how closely i associate with it.
we talked about art. we talked about word games. we deconstructed and reconstructed the myth of the jane:miriam/rebecca:ester analogy. there are some parellels, certainly (that order is the right one), but i'm not fully convinced. we listened to some compilation of awfully unoriginal beatles covers and ate food:
i ordered appetizers, which came all at once and first - seafood ravioli, mesclun salad, and gazpacho (intriguingly, "with cilantro-infused ice cubes," which turned out to be round and not cold enough) - they got fish entrees. the chef, who reminded me of a combination of julia walsh, miss piggy, but prettier and butcher, came out ostensibly to hear our opinions but also it seemed to boast of her menu-assembling prowess.
it was already a bit late, so ruth and i only played one game of anagrams. we tried using a scrabble set, including the blanks, which i think i like better. (using a blank, for instance, allowed FART>dRAFT>RAFTeD>RATIFiED>FIlTRATED.) i don't even remember who won. i think it was me. yes, it was me.
blah di dah. wednesday, nick came over and we set up some mikes to record me playing drums and he playing digeridoo. it took so long to get things sorted out that we only played for an hour or so. i haven't played all summer, which is ridiculous considering how many drums are in this house, and i felt impossibly rusty.
later endeavors: trying to clean up the inflight recordings, i get frustrated but take another stab and get somewhere, maybe.
when you sleep late you wake late, duh, and today lunch had ended before the day had barely begun - dan sez let's go meet jim and autumn in the apple store. cambridge galleria, mac store, where there's a huge display counting down to the release of OS X.2 (jaguar!) i have to say, i dig some parts of the mac aesthetic, but some (most of the white and clear hardware, but especially the borders on the huge flat screens) don't do it for me. a coupla rounds at the genius bar, lunch at the cheesecake factory (faux-egyptian decor, of course, and a "navajo sandwich": avocado, tom, let, chik, mayo, etc. on fry bread, actually quite tasty) with discussion of alternatives to bass (specifically, to jesse, who i saw on the street with ruth.) lop.
a stop-off at another big computah store, where we both got suckered in by a wicked good deal on no-name no-graphic cd-rs. (50-pak for 1.99 w/ mail-in rebate. hyaa!) now, what to do with 100 blank cds?
scarcely a break for the actual day - financial awareness discussion, internet ketchup, call home - before off again to buy beck tickets (yep, that's right. money money, but at $50, i think a respectable bargain), and pick up Sali Oyugi on the way to the gig.
she's a transplanted Kenyan singer whose drum parts Dan knows well enough. upbeat african groovy stuff. dance music, with some incongruous earnest moralizing in between tunes ("it's okay to make a mistake, because you'll be learning from it.") Sali called me up on stage to dance, so i tried to do a mostly stationary version of umfundalai, with my little square footage. umf.
in the green room, chilled with the infectious-esque headliner (iii kings - know 'em?) and had some post-set ribs + mashed sweet + turnip greens. this was at the house of blues, by the way.
and now here i am doing this, and it's after five already. after i post this, finish the mix (or not), go to bed and wake up, i'm going to the mfa, among other things. and on saturday, vermont. which means i have to pack.
ruth showed up in the morning a little later than expected, which allowed us time for a scrabble game and some goofy bugging with mason. dawdle dawdle and we went to Duck Pond, a marvelous little watering hole, cristal clear. mason and i raced down to the water (i won.) becca and i swam across and played with our fingers. mason caught pollywogs. i read my book. mmm.
we went to a clamshack. fried clamstrips and cornonthecob and chowdah. and ice cream. froggyshirt. mason and i raced on the beach (he was disqualified for running in the wrong direction, or maybe i was.)
back to the house (we were staying at someone else's friend's place): anagrams and lou rawls hilariously in and out of speed on the wobbly poor-powered turntable. unhappiness. and sleep.
next day (which was friday, like now), i remember butterfly catching with mason. i remember another brief beach, with much bigger waves and a kite. back to p-town, for dinner with jane at esthers.
i think i told you about the rest of it. time to post. it's getting light. i like this mix, but i'm a little afraid of it. i wonder if it's too wide-ranging for its own good.
check 'em out y'all
check checkin' 'em out
listen: i took the bus into town on tuesday and walked myself over to the fogg art gallery (sorry, no hyperlinks right now, i'm unconnected). at first, the novelty of the experience struck me, and i realized i hadn't had a serious interaction with art in rather a while (oberlin's fine gallery notwithstanding.) so the pertinent question was: "do i even like art anymore?"
after a couple of rubens failed to storm my psyche, i wasn't so sure, but i think my final answer was probably affirmative. item: the featured exhibit of articles from Ur, including a lot of the really famous stuff (the ram in the thicket, which is actually a goat, and the huge bull-headed lyre; i thought i saw the freakin' standard there in the corner, and bade my time getting around to it, but it turned out to be a replica, of course. don't remember if i saw that in the British museum, but it's pretty cool.) what i was most impressed by was how modern much of it looked, particularly the jewelry. one could easily wear any of those necklaces out to a fancy dress ball, or even a funky restaurant, circa 2002.
like the best college collections (which this is), it was a perfect survey of everything - fantastic room of imps and post-imps, but limit one or two per notable (picasso got a handful, and nice ones too but then he's special.) so, all the old favorites. another temp. exhibit was of a artist i didn't know whose massive works combined silverplate photography with sculpted sheets of lead to remarkable effect. that was in the modern-er busch-reisen-something gallery, which also had a hammershøi (my latest favorite.)
that was really fun. i would have liked to check out the third museum in the complex, with non-western stuff, but instead i went down mass. ave. and did this other thing i like to do. oh, record shopping. oh dear. this was to be this summer's of equivalent of my splurge at amoeba last year, but as it happened my penchant this time was for old lps rather than new-ish cds. used in both cases.
i spent, not a stupid amount of money (no, rather a respectable amount of money - something like $2 a disc on average), but on a stupid number of albums. stupid because it's fun to use the word like that, but because a) i don't have a phonograph yet b) i have to carry the suckers, and this added nearly if not double the weight to my collection. yes, i must remember not to double the size of my collection in one day again, unless that's the day my folks get rid of their turntable.
it wasn't the most visceral pleasure i've gotten out of record shopping, but it was a satisfying time because i finally followed the reason i decided to start collecting vinyl in the first place: most of my purchases were jazz or blues records; a couple world and one country. for the most part stuff i really don't know much about.
an issue: if i'm not necessarily a huge blues or jazz fan, and don't want to build a huge collection, do i focus on just the essential classics, or do i just take a sample of whatever i come across that's easy and cheap, since it's not worth shelling out for the (inevitably more expensive) selections that a purist might select. i think some of both. i know what to look for in jazz, but beyond a few names i'm pretty lost in the blues. but learning. particularly, i don't have a sense of what i would like.
i need to find a good place to look for funk and soul records. i bet philly has something to offer there. these two places were great. stereo jacks is manned by your typical record nerds. i was there for an hour or so, and got to hear them have it out with numerous customers, would-be-sellers (over the phone) and oddballs off the street. they were pretty nice to me (i asked about a freddie hubbard record and a caetano veloso record) but still a smidgen smarmy.
record hog was in marked contrast to the orderliness of that business: stacks of lps all over the place, maybe a third of them haphazardly labelled. their posted hours were "noon-ish to seven-ish," but the retiring proprieter announced "we close at six," which was only minutes after arrived. she let me and one fellow customer poke around until 6:20 as she tended to the three or four cats and put towels over the used cd racks. then refused to give me a bargain on a used daedalus cd i noticed without a pricetag, and tried to interest me in a vanguard folksinger compilation.
mandy and ruth stopped in while i was there. we reconvened at the flat a little while later and shortly left to meet miriam for dinner at the west end lounge. that was excellent; more fun than i anticipated even. nice to have a conversation (long-form, as ben said) conducted in that intellectual style that has been lacking this summer; it's an enjoyable mode, even if i don't know how closely i associate with it.
we talked about art. we talked about word games. we deconstructed and reconstructed the myth of the jane:miriam/rebecca:ester analogy. there are some parellels, certainly (that order is the right one), but i'm not fully convinced. we listened to some compilation of awfully unoriginal beatles covers and ate food:
i ordered appetizers, which came all at once and first - seafood ravioli, mesclun salad, and gazpacho (intriguingly, "with cilantro-infused ice cubes," which turned out to be round and not cold enough) - they got fish entrees. the chef, who reminded me of a combination of julia walsh, miss piggy, but prettier and butcher, came out ostensibly to hear our opinions but also it seemed to boast of her menu-assembling prowess.
it was already a bit late, so ruth and i only played one game of anagrams. we tried using a scrabble set, including the blanks, which i think i like better. (using a blank, for instance, allowed FART>dRAFT>RAFTeD>RATIFiED>FIlTRATED.) i don't even remember who won. i think it was me. yes, it was me.
blah di dah. wednesday, nick came over and we set up some mikes to record me playing drums and he playing digeridoo. it took so long to get things sorted out that we only played for an hour or so. i haven't played all summer, which is ridiculous considering how many drums are in this house, and i felt impossibly rusty.
later endeavors: trying to clean up the inflight recordings, i get frustrated but take another stab and get somewhere, maybe.
when you sleep late you wake late, duh, and today lunch had ended before the day had barely begun - dan sez let's go meet jim and autumn in the apple store. cambridge galleria, mac store, where there's a huge display counting down to the release of OS X.2 (jaguar!) i have to say, i dig some parts of the mac aesthetic, but some (most of the white and clear hardware, but especially the borders on the huge flat screens) don't do it for me. a coupla rounds at the genius bar, lunch at the cheesecake factory (faux-egyptian decor, of course, and a "navajo sandwich": avocado, tom, let, chik, mayo, etc. on fry bread, actually quite tasty) with discussion of alternatives to bass (specifically, to jesse, who i saw on the street with ruth.) lop.
a stop-off at another big computah store, where we both got suckered in by a wicked good deal on no-name no-graphic cd-rs. (50-pak for 1.99 w/ mail-in rebate. hyaa!) now, what to do with 100 blank cds?
scarcely a break for the actual day - financial awareness discussion, internet ketchup, call home - before off again to buy beck tickets (yep, that's right. money money, but at $50, i think a respectable bargain), and pick up Sali Oyugi on the way to the gig.
she's a transplanted Kenyan singer whose drum parts Dan knows well enough. upbeat african groovy stuff. dance music, with some incongruous earnest moralizing in between tunes ("it's okay to make a mistake, because you'll be learning from it.") Sali called me up on stage to dance, so i tried to do a mostly stationary version of umfundalai, with my little square footage. umf.
in the green room, chilled with the infectious-esque headliner (iii kings - know 'em?) and had some post-set ribs + mashed sweet + turnip greens. this was at the house of blues, by the way.
and now here i am doing this, and it's after five already. after i post this, finish the mix (or not), go to bed and wake up, i'm going to the mfa, among other things. and on saturday, vermont. which means i have to pack.
ruth showed up in the morning a little later than expected, which allowed us time for a scrabble game and some goofy bugging with mason. dawdle dawdle and we went to Duck Pond, a marvelous little watering hole, cristal clear. mason and i raced down to the water (i won.) becca and i swam across and played with our fingers. mason caught pollywogs. i read my book. mmm.
we went to a clamshack. fried clamstrips and cornonthecob and chowdah. and ice cream. froggyshirt. mason and i raced on the beach (he was disqualified for running in the wrong direction, or maybe i was.)
back to the house (we were staying at someone else's friend's place): anagrams and lou rawls hilariously in and out of speed on the wobbly poor-powered turntable. unhappiness. and sleep.
next day (which was friday, like now), i remember butterfly catching with mason. i remember another brief beach, with much bigger waves and a kite. back to p-town, for dinner with jane at esthers.
i think i told you about the rest of it. time to post. it's getting light. i like this mix, but i'm a little afraid of it. i wonder if it's too wide-ranging for its own good.
check 'em out y'all
check checkin' 'em out
