The Best Bus Driver in the World (weblog wafted away on the digital winds), acting on a ukelele-inspired whim, bought me a copy of Pete Seeger’s well-known American Favorite Ballads, figuring that since he was buying himself a copy I might be interested too.
Happily, the book appears to be the source for several old faves of mine, introduced to me for playing by Greg via xeroxes back when we were in the Boxers.
publicdimension.ch points out how to kluge a local real-time transcoded stream with the help of VLC. Not quite what I need, but interesting nonetheless.
Cron for Palm, give or take. I’m looking for an autotaske for the Treo that combines the ability to start streaming web audio as an alarm clock and can do things like send an SMS as a scheduled task.
True cron on a full-fledged box would handle that with ease, but I dunno about this.
This musing prompted by my use of the phone as a transistor radio this afternoon work, a transistor radio playing radio stations from Russia and the Netherlands. Spooky!
JB hipped me to The Panics vs. The Briefs. My minions are toiling away on John’s behalf even as you read this.
A big TYVM to Eric for pointing out Hoosier Vinyl, pickin’ and sharin’ from my home state.
We live on a steep hill which reliably ices over in weather such as that we have tonight, and just as reliably, I grow more and more irritated with the helpless sound of spinning wheels and engines burnt out.
My irritation has moved me, this night, to place some random traffic cones abandoned in the neighborhood by a gas-main project active this summer (also to my irritation, due to the construction contractor’s persistent practice of parking their heavy equipment on my muddy front property, foolishly left unlandscaped for fifteen fee to the street by the house’s original constructors).
Stay, I say, not just the fuck off my lawn, but also my very street. Perhaps I’ll save a life or some insurance rate increases, but clearly altruism is not my motivation. It’s more irritation flowering through misanthropy into hatred.
Few things chap a man’s hide the likes of realizing he’s mislaid both the vinyl and CD copies of the Velvet Underground’s late-period works Loaded and Live at Max’s Kansas City.
UPDATE: As this entry was prompted by having decided the right way to see 208 in was to listen to the Velvets on vinyl from around 8 until midnight at least, some thoughts:
For some reason, when I read Gene Wolfe, it is these recordings I hear in my mind. I am not sure why, as Wolfe’s interests and opinions would at first appear diametrically opposed to those of Lou Reed, for one.
On slight reflection, Reed’s songwriting has always been about subjectivity, and that is a major theme in Wolfe’s work.
Wolfe, of course, is probably the sole English-language writer to successfully hybridize the aesthetics of the Vienna Secession with that of Borges and Marquez; how could a language worker so invested in the idea of decadence and referentiality NOT somehow reflect the work of the Velvets?
Ultimately, Wolfe writes coded explorations about his specific Messiah filtered through the characters he conjures, holographic reimaginings of Jesus. Reed’s stuff isn’t about Jesus, but nearly always he’s aiming for a purity of experience and looking to convey his characters’ spiritual orientation. It’s the source of both artists’ excess, and probably why I love their work so much.
Poking about this weekend as I listened to Steve’s 20-year-old tape, I came across a few posts from some MP3 blog called ‘Shards of Beauty.‘ Imagine my surprise when, after finally locating Steve’s blog, ‘Made Explicit,‘ it became clear to me that I know the anonymous poster behind Shards of Beauty, and that he’s been busy digitizing and posting some exceedingly interesting vinyl and cassettes from back in the day.
Due to an odd confluence of events, the past week has been all about the Vulgar Boatmen. This reminds me that if a certain bus driver wants some Boatmen miscellany, such as live recording or obscurities from the deep past, he has but to ask.
Also I note that the archives are having problems with ‘proper’ quotes and the like. i don’t know why this is but will be looking into it.
When a near-twenty year resident of Seattle finds out about a freakin’ Sonics reunion the night before the NYC show from the New Yorker, I think one can safely say that there is something wrong with the world. Or at least my media ecology. No Google trail of any local appearance, but if so: I will.