The acoustical guitar belt runs from Texas north through the Heartland to Minnesota. Or at least it used to, then "unplugged" albums came out and the electrified Coasts rediscovered wood. I don't know how stark country is pigeonholed, but The Pines, out of Minneapolis, are the latest practitioners in a long line of low-key north country bluesmen. Writing about The Pines in Rolling Stone, David Fricke called it, "quietly gripping tension". I would like to say it's nice to have 89.3 The Current, a Public Radio station that regularly features quality live music. Also, the Dakota. So...be gripped...but no toe-tapping please. 
THE TIME IS RIGHT for this new-century revision of PLAGUE and the MOONflower to come to the United States, as the prospect of a dying planet thrusts both despair and inspiration upon us, more and more each day." Learn more
The Plague Demon
More than you wanted to know: http://www.trykit.com/ 
The video is by Paul Patzkowsky of Longmont, CO. The video quality is ..well, not good, as it was the first time the operator had used a video recorder. When Paul leans side-saddle through the turns, we can still get an idea of how wild the ride would be in a race with a number of riders.
It seems like it's been raining for weeks. It was the coldest September on record. If nothing else, the cool dampness greened up the moss on the path, the signature feature of the garden. The last of the Fall migrating warblers have filtered through, to be replaced the last couple of days with flocks of White-throated Sparrows and a handful of Least Flycatchers. After the hard freeze we had, it has to be hard making a living catching small gnats and mosquitoes. Today I saw the first Juncos, Arctic visitors that winter down here, basking in our Minnesota sunshine. As always, all things are relative. Now that the leaves are falling for real the local birds, Chickadees, Cardinals, Nuthatches and Woodpeckers have a lot of nervous energy. It's like they think they should be doing something, but don't know what it is. Weather changes always seem to agitate them. They fly around peeping and making continual runs to the feeders burning off energy, practicing for Winter. Since I posted the owl house pictures, the Barred Owl has generally made himself scarce. I've seen him occasionally during daylight moving through, trying to shake his escort of Crows and Jays, but we haven't heard any calls at night. At this point I don't think I can consider him "our owl". I'm still optimistic.
I took 5030 around the block. It was a bit of a trick as there are no cables attached,i.e. one gear, no brakes. Since the last ree-port I got the old Modolo brake levers back from their vacation in California and reunited in marriage with their Modolo Pro calipers. Thanks a bunch, Jon. I also installed the period REG bottle cage (per Allan Pollock's suggestion) and the Cinelli toe straps (pretty, pretty). I wrapped the Campy toe clips in leather because they were scraped up and it was cheaper than buying new ones. Eventually I'd like to find Cinelli clips. I have some, but they're all beat to hell. After this thing is built-up neat I'll take a set of pictures, then ride it hard without worrying too much about it. It's not a weapon that should be sheathed. The bars will shortly be wrapped with dark blue Tressostar fabric tape. I considered stitched leather covers, but it wouldn't be typical for the period. In general, I really like the angles of this bike and it's quite light for a 60cm steel frame. The photo is nicely detailed if you want a closer look.
The picture of Willy DeVille reminds me of my late friend, Phil Wylie. Now Phil looked bad too. He looked bad and mean. Phil was a biker - could just make those Harleys fly. I never thought much about his appearance. He was just Phil. He was intelligent, creative and funny. When I talked with Phil on any subject the conversation was always stimulating. One day I was pissed at my bank and I asked him where he had his checking account. "Checking account? Hell, when you look like I do you have to show an I.D. to pay cash." Never, NEVER judge a book by it's cover. (More on Phil later...)
Hi All,Nov. 5 - Public Assembly featuring live painting by COOL Magazine; Brooklyn, New York, $8
Nov. 12 - White Room; Miami, FL, $10
Nov. 18 - DC9; Washington, DC, $8 in advance, $10 at the door
Nov. 19 - Enormous Room; Boston, MA, FREE
Nov. 20 - Tazza Café; Providence, RI, Price TBA
Nov. 21 or 22 - Venue TBA (a part of German Week); Las Vegas, NV, Price TBA
Nov. 27 - The Purple Lounge at The Standard Hollywood; Los Angeles, CA FREE
Thanks to all of you for your continued interest in my work. I am an artist in my heart and will always be! I have attached the piece that they are showing, so in case you do not have time to go to their site, you can easily take a look at it. This piece is one of 85 drawings that are in the series, completed in Berlin in 1985. If you would like to see more of my Berlin work, please let me know.
Best regards,
judijudijudi
Some of the most wonderful craftsman do not have websites. J.P.Weigle and until recently, Chris Kvale come to mind. But damn, they do nice work. Check out the handmade stem, neat rear bridge and Iris Blue paint on this sweet little 650b mixte number. She's hot! |
| 1986 Peter Mooney |
(Apologies for the full photo. House layout forces me to shoot at a downward angle, which distorts bars, seat, etc - looks top heavy.)
I received the New Yorker this afternoon. This is high humor of the type that people like myself find quite amusing. "People like myself", he said...in that stuffy, New Yorker sort of way.
Claude Debussy—“La Mer” by Yoni Brenner
Though poorly received by critics at its 1905 première, “La Mer” (“The Sea”) has survived to become one of Debussy’s most beloved and enduring orchestral works. A brilliant exhibition of cascading motifs and shimmering orchestration, “La Mer” was a deeply personal project for Debussy, who had long been fascinated by the sea, having roomed with a langoustine at university. For years, he had sought to capture the majesty of the ocean in various quartets and sonatas, but he destroyed them all, explaining, “They never sounded wet enough.”
The opening section, “From Dawn to Midday at Sea,” begins with the plaintive call of the oboe, announcing the rising sun. The English horn and the trumpet answer in a minor key, as if to say, “Thanks for the tip, asshole.” The flutes quickly change the subject, introducing the famous surging triplet melody. The theme bubbles and courses through the orchestra, constantly elaborated and ultimately recapitulated in a massive crescendo of horns and trumpets, at which point the flutes are totally drowned out and seem not a little jaded and you have to wonder if they regret having introduced the theme in the first place.
“The Play of the Waves” is often described as a scherzo, light and humorous, although, as in much of Debussy’s work, the laughs come at the expense of the violas.
“The Dialogue Between the Wind and the Sea” pits roiling strings against strident brass, belligerent woodwinds, and unhinged timpani bent on physical reprisal. Again, the composer ingeniously juxtaposes regular and triple figures, a development that for many years was hailed as a breakthrough in modern composition, although it is now generally acknowledged to have been a printer’s error. Still, the layered rhythms create a spectacular lurching effect that vividly evokes the roll of waves, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
Tchaikovsky wrote only one violin concerto, or, as he himself said, “one too many.” Tchaikovsky had always had an uneasy relationship with the violin, which scholars attribute to a childhood nightmare in which he found himself violently and relentlessly rubbed against an enormous brick of rosin. Though he had already employed violins to magnificent effect in the Second Symphony and in “Romeo and Juliet,” he never trusted them, a neurosis that only intensified when an unbalanced concertmaster sucker-punched him during the first performance of “Swan Lake.”
The composer’s anxiety is manifest in the turbulent Allegro Moderato—among the most vindictive movements of the Romantic canon. The violin plays nearly continuously through the movement, introducing the theme and weathering a ferocious cadenza, while several other instruments, including the trumpets and the second bassoon, luxuriate in anywhere from thirty-five to forty-seven measures of rest. It is unclear whether this accommodation was made specifically to taunt the soloist, but many conductors will encourage idle instrumentalists to doze off or grab a sandwich or something to heighten the effect.
Quiet meditation gives way to exuberant pyrotechnics in the finale, in which the composer either eschews or forgets the theme from the first movement. Instead, the violin launches into a galloping melody that catches everyone by surprise except perhaps the basses, who had a sectional rehearsal earlier in the week. A brilliant, robust allegro follows, packed with dynamic swings, dramatic key changes, and a delightful murder mystery featuring an intrepid dowager and her endearing but accident-prone Portuguese gardener.The searing Andante has been variously interpreted as Tchaikovsky’s anguished confession of homosexual love for his nephew Vladimir Davydov and as a metaphor for the Resurrection of Christ. As always, the truth is somewhere in between: the movement is in fact a metaphor for Christ’s anguished homosexual love for Tchaikovsky’s nephew.
Johannes Brahms—Symphony No. 2, Op. 73
Little is known of Johannes Brahms. He is believed to have been Dutch and to have possessed at least a rudimentary knowledge of music composition and theory. No photographs exist, but he has been described as five feet seven or five feet eight, with small, piercing eyes—one green, one blue—and extremely annoying.
“A genius,” the Post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec once said. “His appetite for life was surpassed only by his appetite for food, which was surpassed only by his appetite for crossbreeding house cats with wild squirrels. Also, he smelled of cumin.” Although the two artists never met or corresponded—nor were they really contemporaries—their unique and idiosyncratic bond remains one of the most fascinating artistic partnerships of the nineteenth century.
The Second Symphony was written at a moment of great trauma. Brahms had suffered from bouts of paranoia for years, convinced that a man named Meier was trying to steal the “h” from his last name. Just two weeks before the première, Brahms caused a scandal during a state dinner when he put Franz Liszt in a headlock and refused to release him until he confessed his homosexual love for Tchaikovsky’s nephew. Brahms was briefly imprisoned, but was granted clemency when Liszt intervened on his behalf. This led to a poignant moment, three years later, when a chastened Brahms visited Liszt at his summer retreat in Weimar, and solemnly resumed the headlock.
Even though Symphony No. 2 is believed to be Brahms’s first symphonic work, the composer demonstrates a sure hand from the outset, with a glowing thematic statement from the horns. The flutes answer with a supple ascending line, requesting that the horns be more specific. But the horns simply re-state the same phrase a half step up, which only serves to irritate the flutes, who promptly hand the melody to the violins, as if to say, “Here, you deal with them.” Brahms sustains this call-and-response pattern throughout the movement, a motif that he first explored in the little-known Variations on “The Dreidel Song,” Op. 34 together, the second and third movements constitute one of the most elegant and sophisticated symphonic interludes of the Germanic repertoire. Taken separately, they are cloying, derivative, and sort of hard to take seriously. Regardless, authentic performances are rare, owing to the difficulty of securing a bullfrog who can transpose to E-flat.
The last movement, Allegro con Spirito, is nothing short of a miracle. Lush, organic, effortlessly powerful, it resolves the major themes of the symphony with phenomenal grace and imagination. Like all great art, it imparts to the audience a profound sense of empathy and belief, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate.
Also, another plug for Jim's new Dakota Backcountry blog. Try it free for five days. If you aren't completely satisfied he'll refund your money.
"I was thinking about a nice toad or two to sit on the flat rock I propped on the edge of my "water feature" to give the birds and critters access. For years my namesake grandfather had a large toad he dubbed Molly. Molly? Anyway they had a dripping outdoor faucet beneath their bedroom window. The enormous toad would sit under it to stay cool. Grandma said she went to sleep to the thump... thump...thump of the waterdrops hitting the big toad on the back. Grandpa would pick up the old toad in the morning and take it out to the garden while he worked. He hoed; the old toad ate slugs. When he was done he'd pick it up and drop it off under the tap on his way to the kitchen."
For ten or fifteen minutes of my early life I attended a college where I studied, among other things, Scandinavian Philosophy. No shit. So this one caught my eye and jarred my memory. Hamsun may have been a fine writer but he was a scumbag of a human being - enough of a scumbag that he been filed under slime in the library and you've never heard of him. Unless you happened to attend an obscure midwestern Norwegian college. Now we have to ask ourselves the question. Can we separate the person from his works? Can we appreciate what he did rather than what he was? In this case, apparently not. He went over the line. 
Minnesota was seven games down to the Tigers on Sept. 6. They finally caught the Tigers yesterday to move into a tie for first place in the American League Central. As I have said before, I am not the REAL fan in my house, but it's hard not to get swept up in the excitement. The Twins are a team of journeymen players with the exception of Joe Mauer (batting average .364 & beauty in a catchers mask) and Justin Morneau ( who has missed the latter part of the season with a stress fracture in his back). They develop sound ballplayers which then tend to migrate to major market teams because the Twins cannot match the money. Their pitching is only adequate except for closer, Joe Nathan. In baseball parlance they are "scrappy". They play "small ball" with speed and sound fundamentals. White Sox coach, Ozzie Guillén referred to them as the "Piranhas". He said they aren't like sharks that attack you, they are like piranhas that slowly nibble you to death. We Twins followers are viewing the upcoming one game playoff with Detroit on Tuesday as only a technical formality. Then they will face the Yankees and no doubt get blown away. But it's a short series and who know? Though I suppose they ought to deal with the Tigers first.
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