Yesterday we signed for the house. Viv gets the keys tomorrow morning.
I’m deeply unhappy and upset about it. I feel like I’ve just murdered someone, a friend. I don’t really wish to write about it, but it seems wrong to let it simply pass by without a mention.
Something unexpected just occurred as I worked to copy some text files into the ‘albums’ directory of my Gallery install – all the albums directories vanished. Alas!
Uh-oh. Regarding ‘mv’:
As the rename(2) call does not work across file systems, mv uses cp(1) and rm(1) to accomplish the move. The effect is equivalent to:
rm -f destination_path &&
cp -PRp source_file destination &&
rm -rf source_file
Thus the effect of applying ‘mv’ like this:
mv * /path/to/intended/destination/*
will result in the removal of the files in the destination directory.
oddly, the command was not issued with -r and thus I would have expected it to error out on the first directory it encountered. Shit. Hope one of my ancient backups is about.
if not, back to Galleryadd.pl. Or maybe install G2 from scratch and then do the import.
Something unexpected just occurred as I worked to copy some text files into the ‘albums’ directory of my Gallery install – all the albums directories vanished. Alas!
Incredibly, word has belatedly reached me of the wrap on a Darby Crash biopic, which will apparently lead to a Germs reunion tour. Don Bolles, later of Nirvana and in between his Germs time and that with Kurt, was the original drummer for 45 Grave, who also recently were slated for a revenant tour, but have apparently dropped out.
Bolles stayed with me for several days in my freshman dorm room circa 1984 when he was separated from his 45 Grave bandmates. He was reunited with his cadaverous colleagues shortly before my floor’s residential advisor approached me about the discarded needles that had unexpectedly begun to appear in the men’s restroom facilities. Despite this, I recall my week with Don fondly, as he slept a great deal and embellished my copy of “GI” in black marker before autographing it in behalf of the long-departed Darby.
Posting slowdown? Me frowning a shitload and generally hatin’?
Yup.
As PF reminded me, it’s September. So this month, you all get to add Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Flood of Ought-Five, and Hurricane Rita to your 9-11 reflections, while I add these two recent seasons of ire to my own, well-aged one. I really thought I would get out of the month without the black time.
Interestingly, the specific catalyst is clearly the house deal. I drive or walk around my neighborhood and wander the hall of my apartment saddened by the anticipation of missing it, which even I find both absurd and appalling.
As I noted yesterday, I first really became a serious appreciator of Bob Dylan about ten years ago, when I first picked up a cutout copy of Good As I Been to You, the first of two stripped down, scratchy-voice-and-guitar records of mostly old-time songs. The other record, World Gone Wrong, is entirely comparable.
The records were the occasion of much headscratching in the press at the time they were released, 1992 and 1993. For me, they arrived well after their initial release date and just as I had nearly worn out my copy of the great CD re-release of the legendary Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of Folk Music, which I picked up on release in 1997. Whoops, that makes it under ten years ago. Whatever.
On vinyl, I think I had The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde, and one other record, possibly Highway 61 Revisited. Of these, Freewheelin‘ was my clear favorite, as I largely eschewed the shaggy-dog compositional techniques seen on the other records.
However, Good As I Been To You‘s spare, affectionate, and utilitarian renditions of old songs both familiar and new to me struck my ears with the weight of an archetype. It was a record I had been wanting to hear since my enthusiasm for Billy Bragg first prompted me to look into Dylan’s early work. The record remains my favorite recording by Dylan. Curious where the old man had gone since recording these songs, I picked up Time out of Mind, and loved it. I also really like Love and Theft, but Time out of Mind is something different, like listening to someone’s dreams after a night of listening to really old folksongs. Amused by the shambolic bounce of the record, I started looking back at the earlier works, including the late-sixties period so beloved by so many. To my surprise, I found I now understood some of the enthusiasm, as I wrote here a while ago.
This past spring, Greg and Stacey gave me a copy of Chronicles, Dylan’s autobio, and to my surprise, devoured it, chuckling. The first section, a generous memoir of Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village in the early sixties, seemed to me to be based directly on Desolation Row. I recall thinking that he had reused sections of the lyric throughout; I don’t recall if I was ever able to establish this as a fact or not. Even if he did not, he engaged with his recollections to tie his experience of the Village to the deep past. When the below-grade Villlage clubs are described as firelit rooms from another era, Dylan deliberately riffs on Martin Scorsese’s vision of Old Five Points in Gangs of New York. Dylan recalls the clubs as a kind of magic cave whereupon entering he gained access to the America of all past times and was granted the mystical power to return from that time to our own bearing visions and dreams of souls long gone.
Whether or not Dylan actually believes this is simply not germane. He wants the reader to believe he does, I think, the better to fulfill his role as a performer. In “Masters of War,” he wrote ” I want you to know that I can see through your masks.” As Scorsese seems to be helping his old friend to say in the film I’m watching tonight, for Dylan, there may only be the masks.
I am, and as far as I know, always have been, a pessimist.
Listening to news reports of the second hurricane-related flooding of New Orleans as gas prices rise are not proving to be conducive to the frame of mind traditionally associated with the experience of buying a new home which may be characterized as “happy,” “triumphant,” or “pleasant.”
Despite this, I do believe that the home we have a bid in on is the home that we will be buying.
You know, it’s a beautiful thing when a news editor pitches a news item to a publication’s senior editor and the senior editor’s response to the pitch is “Holy crap!”
You know, watching Lost tonight after watching a plane land on bum gear at LAX this evening has affected my experience of the show. I’m not sure in what way, exactly.