I have passed the road test portion of my driver’s license certification and between the time I began to write this sentence and the time I write this word they shot my license photo.
On Monday I will celebrate the first of many Drive Your Car To Work Days.
Viv and I had the pleasure of attending a show by the notable X spinoff band The Knitters Friday night at the Showbox. The Knitters were a semi-joke band that featured Exene Cervenka, John Doe, and DJ Bonebreak of X as well as the remarkable songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin. They recorded a record, Poor Little Critter in the Road, which was released in the last days of Slash Records, around 1985. The record featured a mix of irreverent covers of American country songs and some jokey originals (cf. the LP’s title). Since then the band has released another record and become a primary touring vehicle for the musicians.
Poor Little Critter in the Road is without question the first time that I actually listened closely to country music and realized how much it had in common with punk rock, the music I came to the record from. Without it, I rather doubt I ever would have taken up the mandolin. Doe and Cervenka’s songwriting and music, like that of Dale Lawrence, helped form my worldview and musical taste. I expect to listen to them with the same interest interest twenty years from now as I did twenty years ago.
I saw X once the year Poor Little Critter in the Road came out, and they were on their last legs, bickering onstage. This made me sad, as the depth of my love for their first two records, Los Angeles and Wild Gift, burned bright in my nineteen-year-old heart and has never flagged. Since moving to Seattle, I have seen X a couple more times, but had missed the last couple visits by the band in the guise of the Knitters.
The addition of Dave Alvin to Doe and Cervenka’s songs is a happy one. Alvin moved to L.A. from Texas just before X formed, as I understand it, and so the players have known each other for some time indeed. Alvin’s amazing band at the time, The Blasters, remains a personal favorite. As I watched him crank out blistering solo after blistering solo tonight, I realized I had somehow overlooked to see him performing electric guitar live, although as I admire his songwriting very much, I have seen him more than once in acoustic settings.
The show opened with John singing “Silver Wings,” and they worked their way though a mixed set of country and old-time covers and both Knitters and X originals, happily for me including “This Must Be the New World.”
We met our friends Patrick and Kara at the show; Kara’s cousin Johnny plays bass for the band and had arranged for comps for us, kindly enough. I like buying tickets for shows, though, and so I prematurely did so in this case. Too bad! Ah, well, it’s a classic case of poor planning anyway – I should have brought my old X and Blasters and Knitters vinyl for inking, but it did not occur to me.
Jon Konrath passes along a link to the Google Maps satellite view of the Breaking Away quarry and the nearby complex of quarries. The linked review is a must-read, by the way. I thought it was interesting that he located it by searching for “Empire Mill Road,” as it was a staple of Bloomington folklore that Bloomington limestone is the stone used in the construction of the Empire State Building. I wonder, could these be the quarries that stone came from?
I have many memories of stumbling along a narrow path through the woods on our way to these quarries, the cleared areas of stone glimmering bluely in the cool light of a full summer moon.
August 28 will see Brian Wilson performing Smile live at the Paramount, and I must miss it. For those of you heroes and villains who like vegetables, it seems probable that you know what to do.
Hard at work.
Holding forth on the subject of mattress copy.
Pointing out a possible error in historical attribution.
There has been an invitation, brothers.
Manuel notes the pleasing fack: SJ is back!
Sparked by Editor B’s remarking upon my Google Maps and Indiana post of yestereve, a denizen of the Hoosier state drops a line:
It is interesting how the term “satellite imagery” is thrown around fairly casually these days. Google would lead us to believe that all their imagery is satellite imagery. In fact, the Indiana images are part of a statewide aerial photography project that was undertaken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2003. Indiana looks different at small scales because this aerial photography is much different data than the majority of the course-scale satellite imagery displayed on Google Maps. Note the difference in resolution and color when you look close at an area near the state line.
The Illinois image probably has a 30-meter spatial resolution (each pixel is 30m x 30m), whereas the Indiana imagery has a 1-meter spatial resolution. This has a huge impact on the ability to view detail at large scale and the overall color of the image at small scale.
Note also that some areas of Indiana and other states have some areas of even higher resolution imagery.
I suspect much of this higher-resolution data is aerial photography–not that it matters much to the casual user.
You can view the same imagery for Indiana which runs on IU’s Research Database Complex.
Simply zoom in near Bloomington and turn on the 2003 Aerials (also need to turn off the 1998-1999 aerials).
Hope this clears things up a little.
The correspondent has been invited to provide self-attribution in the comments; if he does not, it’s due to privacy concerns.
One cat:
Several golden plums:
The tree has fruited this year more than any since we’ve lived here, over ten years.
