Latest birthday doodle using some of the "little monster" characters from the fairy tale. These have a family business as "The World's Greatest Spies." They all wear an eye patch over their left eye whether they need it or not.
I had a cavity filled today. Four hours on from when they started, my upper lip on that side is still numb. Ah, the joys of trying to drink from a glass when you can only feel it on one side.
"it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it"
this ^^^
I'm sure it's obvious from my comments here over the years that I'm fine with an active government.
But the government we have right now is profoundly toxic.
We need to resist all of that wherever we can, to the degree that we can, with whatever resources we can bring to that effort. But turning all of that around, for whatever meaning of "turn that around" manifests itself, will take time. And a lot of government-y stuff is going to be broken, and some it will stay broken indefinitely, perhaps forever.
So it's important to find other avenues for, as the cliche has it, making the world a better place. Which mostly amounts to helping each other and not shitting on the given world we all live in. Or, you know, trying our best to do those things.
The federal government we have right now is effectively a cabal of greedy vindictive malicious wanna-be tyrants. Most of them are deeply incompetent, and the ones that aren't we probably wish were.
Find ways to work around them. Get in their way if you can, to whatever degree of risk you can tolerate. Which might be none, which is OK. But find ways to do constructive things in spite of them.
I'm surprised that the formalized concept of Euclidean rhythms didn't come about until 2004. It's like someone just last week being the first to recognize that people sit on chairs.
This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We're in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I've been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I'll have planted 240 trees around the world.
It's a small thing, but it's something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.
For the last week or two I've been dealing with water infiltration and resulting black mold in the basement. Which has been, to a surprising and welcome degree, a great way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by all of the Trumpian BS.
It's a tractable problem, and I can fix it. Tear out bad sheetrock and insulation, bag it up and throw it out. Treat the remaining nasty spots. Hang new insulation and sheetrock. Tape prep and paint.
All done! All better! It's actually been kind of therapeutic.
Household chores, same. Pruning, fall cleanup. I've been putting peanuts out for the crows, who have figured out my schedule and arrive more or less on time each morning in a kind of raucous crowd. Gonna put the feeders up for the songbirds this weekend.
Listen to music, play music. Stay in touch with friends. Be mindful of my own reactions to events, emotionally physically and spiritually, and step away when it begins to overwhelm.
It will, for better or worse, still be there when you feel up to dealing with it.
I was volunteering at a local food bank, but stopped back in June when I got COVID. Now I just send them money, but it's actually much more satisfying to contribute in person. So I may go back to that once I finish getting the basement cleaned up.
There is a limit to what any one of us can absorb, and to what any one of us can do about it all. Recognize and respect your own limits. That doesn't mean put your head in the sand and pretend nothing bad is happening, it just means don't let it run you over.
You're doing all good things, wonkie. It's an inspiration to me, personally. Carry on, and take care of yourself.
I feel pretty much the same as wonkie just upthread. Maybe it's age-related in me, I can hear the clave when it is isolated out, but actually in the music I don't hear it. On the other hand, that doesn't stop me really enjoying the music, and if I didn't feel so under the weather I might even have danced around the room a bit!
Wonkie - my best advice would be to find a good camera store in the area around you (Seattle has to have a few) that has been around for years and has a good selection of used cameras. You are probably looking for either a "compact" camera (with a built in lens) or a "mirrorless" camera (which would mean getting at least one lens to go with it). If it were me, I'd be looking for a camera from Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, or Sony with at least 16 megapixels. If you talk to the people there about what sorts of things you paint, they can probably find you the appropriate combination of camera body and lens to take some good pics with minimal fuss.
I have an Olympus OMD e-M5 with a 12-40mm pro lens. It's nice and compact for carry and the camera and lens are both waterproof. A 12-40 lens is great for landscape and street photos (equivalent of 24-75mm zoom on an old 35mm slr). If it's set to auto and auto-focus with the focus set dead center, you can quickly pick the thing you want to have in-focus, set the focus, then get the framing you want and take the pic.
I spend a lot of time with my pics on the software side to get them to look how I want, but most of these modern cameras have a few presets you can play with to give you some pics that look more like an old school film camera. Find what pleases your eye and then set it as default and you should be good to go.
Anyone heard from JanieM? She'd probably have some good advice here, too.
Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.
I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.
The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.
Fascinating. I don't think I get it--I'm sure I don't--but you have helped me have a deeper appreciation both historically and in terms of the intricacy. I think people who grow up with this have very different "ears" than the more simple and melodic music that I understand.
Fair warning! If anyone posts a comment about a music topic they like with a couple of youtube video links, it is liable to be front paged! You have been warned!!!
Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.
Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.
Thanks for putting this up, LJ! And thanks for adding the cubanet link, it's great reading.
We were supposed to go hear these fine folks this evening, but their visas were denied or cancelled.
As an aside, this is why we can't have nice things, episode 1,832,782. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_iMIvPHLc
These folks are not at all traditional, more of a Cuban chamber music ensemble, if you will. But rumba is in almost everything Cuban, one way or another. Certainly everything that isn't purely or primarily European in origin. Espirales (the folks in the video) seem to bring an interesting blend of Euro and trad.
I think a way to think about rumba in Cuba is to compare it to blues in the US. Originally a folkloric style rising out of the people of the African diaspora, but working its way into every nook and cranny of American popular and traditional musics.
It is the demotic musical language of Cuba.
Good weekend to you all, and no worries if the videos make you dance around the room a bit. :)
Oh my God, the surprise of seeing your own video explanation, russell! I wish you could have seen my smile of pleasure and delight to see you and hear you sounding as cool, knowledgeable and just plain nice as you do in writing! Thank you! And I have just watched, also with great pleasure, the Rumba en Atares guaguanco video too, what a mood enhancer. I'm going to hold off on watching the rest because I'm pretty flu-ridden, and need to go lie down, but I'm on for it tomorrow.
On the Robert Palmer piece I searched for lj, I definitely did as thorough a search as I could. But on the other hand, I also definitely have limited ability in these kinds of things (as I have proved to myself many times), so somebody else with an NYT sub (or more advanced google-fu) might do better. I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Muchísimas gracias, Russell! I accidentally left the link in at the bottom, as I thought I was going to add to Russell's post, but thought better of it, but will leave it there cause I think it will be of interest
Another article that I remember had me wondering about how this clave thing worked was this
Article Title: The Clave: Tricky Latin Rhythm, Hard to Master
Author: Robert Palmer
Publication: The New York Times
Corrected Date/Section: October 5, 1980, Section D, Page 22
which now seems to have disappeared from the NYT archive (thanks to GftNC for looking!) If anyone else wants to apply their google-fu to finding it, in my memory, it is definitely worth a read. It gives the anecdote of one band having to re-record an entire album because they had reversed the clave. Ouch!
But watching Russell's explanation above, I realized that the clave is not something you can read about and figure out, you actually have to have two things to bang together. I'm slightly closer to understanding it, but since there is not a lot of Latin music jams out here in rural Japan, I'm afraid that like a lot of my other desires, it is going to be an unrequited love,,,
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can't login, I don't think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn't seem to work
And so, I am sad. :(
Thank you!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
Latest birthday doodle using some of the "little monster" characters from the fairy tale. These have a family business as "The World's Greatest Spies." They all wear an eye patch over their left eye whether they need it or not.
"
...going numb...
I had a cavity filled today. Four hours on from when they started, my upper lip on that side is still numb. Ah, the joys of trying to drink from a glass when you can only feel it on one side.
"
last few weeks i've learned that i cope by a combination of going numb and keeping busy as a distraction.
doing? utterly awful.
someday i'll share why.
"
"it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it"
this ^^^
I'm sure it's obvious from my comments here over the years that I'm fine with an active government.
But the government we have right now is profoundly toxic.
We need to resist all of that wherever we can, to the degree that we can, with whatever resources we can bring to that effort. But turning all of that around, for whatever meaning of "turn that around" manifests itself, will take time. And a lot of government-y stuff is going to be broken, and some it will stay broken indefinitely, perhaps forever.
So it's important to find other avenues for, as the cliche has it, making the world a better place. Which mostly amounts to helping each other and not shitting on the given world we all live in. Or, you know, trying our best to do those things.
The federal government we have right now is effectively a cabal of greedy vindictive malicious wanna-be tyrants. Most of them are deeply incompetent, and the ones that aren't we probably wish were.
Find ways to work around them. Get in their way if you can, to whatever degree of risk you can tolerate. Which might be none, which is OK. But find ways to do constructive things in spite of them.
That's how we get through.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
I'm surprised that the formalized concept of Euclidean rhythms didn't come about until 2004. It's like someone just last week being the first to recognize that people sit on chairs.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We're in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I've been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I'll have planted 240 trees around the world.
It's a small thing, but it's something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
And here’s Sepultura in their full Afro Caribbean mode back in 1996
CDs are very durable, because I should have worn all the bits off my "Roots" CD years ago.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
For the last week or two I've been dealing with water infiltration and resulting black mold in the basement. Which has been, to a surprising and welcome degree, a great way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by all of the Trumpian BS.
It's a tractable problem, and I can fix it. Tear out bad sheetrock and insulation, bag it up and throw it out. Treat the remaining nasty spots. Hang new insulation and sheetrock. Tape prep and paint.
All done! All better! It's actually been kind of therapeutic.
Household chores, same. Pruning, fall cleanup. I've been putting peanuts out for the crows, who have figured out my schedule and arrive more or less on time each morning in a kind of raucous crowd. Gonna put the feeders up for the songbirds this weekend.
Listen to music, play music. Stay in touch with friends. Be mindful of my own reactions to events, emotionally physically and spiritually, and step away when it begins to overwhelm.
It will, for better or worse, still be there when you feel up to dealing with it.
I was volunteering at a local food bank, but stopped back in June when I got COVID. Now I just send them money, but it's actually much more satisfying to contribute in person. So I may go back to that once I finish getting the basement cleaned up.
There is a limit to what any one of us can absorb, and to what any one of us can do about it all. Recognize and respect your own limits. That doesn't mean put your head in the sand and pretend nothing bad is happening, it just means don't let it run you over.
You're doing all good things, wonkie. It's an inspiration to me, personally. Carry on, and take care of yourself.
"
This was supposed to go up a day earlier, but I got confused with the date line. Thanks and apologies wonkie!
My confession is that I really don't know anything about flowers. Though I am a big fan of Candide...
On “Something Different”
Thank you. There's probably a camera store in Olympia too.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
I feel pretty much the same as wonkie just upthread. Maybe it's age-related in me, I can hear the clave when it is isolated out, but actually in the music I don't hear it. On the other hand, that doesn't stop me really enjoying the music, and if I didn't feel so under the weather I might even have danced around the room a bit!
"
And here's Sepultura in their full Afro Caribbean mode back in 1996:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YUJit9iNE0
"
russell - https://www.invisibleoranges.com/opeth-bembe/
"
fantastic stuff, russell. thanks!
On “Something Different”
Wonkie - my best advice would be to find a good camera store in the area around you (Seattle has to have a few) that has been around for years and has a good selection of used cameras. You are probably looking for either a "compact" camera (with a built in lens) or a "mirrorless" camera (which would mean getting at least one lens to go with it). If it were me, I'd be looking for a camera from Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, or Sony with at least 16 megapixels. If you talk to the people there about what sorts of things you paint, they can probably find you the appropriate combination of camera body and lens to take some good pics with minimal fuss.
I have an Olympus OMD e-M5 with a 12-40mm pro lens. It's nice and compact for carry and the camera and lens are both waterproof. A 12-40 lens is great for landscape and street photos (equivalent of 24-75mm zoom on an old 35mm slr). If it's set to auto and auto-focus with the focus set dead center, you can quickly pick the thing you want to have in-focus, set the focus, then get the framing you want and take the pic.
I spend a lot of time with my pics on the software side to get them to look how I want, but most of these modern cameras have a few presets you can play with to give you some pics that look more like an old school film camera. Find what pleases your eye and then set it as default and you should be good to go.
Anyone heard from JanieM? She'd probably have some good advice here, too.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
OK, now I gotta check Opeth!
Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.
I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.
Here's Jerry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G0qZsW481g
The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.
"
Fascinating. I don't think I get it--I'm sure I don't--but you have helped me have a deeper appreciation both historically and in terms of the intricacy. I think people who grow up with this have very different "ears" than the more simple and melodic music that I understand.
On “Something Different”
Nous, can you recommend a specific camera for me? Something easy to use.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Fair warning! If anyone posts a comment about a music topic they like with a couple of youtube video links, it is liable to be front paged! You have been warned!!!
"
Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.
Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.
"
Thanks for putting this up, LJ! And thanks for adding the cubanet link, it's great reading.
We were supposed to go hear these fine folks this evening, but their visas were denied or cancelled.
As an aside, this is why we can't have nice things, episode 1,832,782. :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_iMIvPHLc
These folks are not at all traditional, more of a Cuban chamber music ensemble, if you will. But rumba is in almost everything Cuban, one way or another. Certainly everything that isn't purely or primarily European in origin. Espirales (the folks in the video) seem to bring an interesting blend of Euro and trad.
I think a way to think about rumba in Cuba is to compare it to blues in the US. Originally a folkloric style rising out of the people of the African diaspora, but working its way into every nook and cranny of American popular and traditional musics.
It is the demotic musical language of Cuba.
Good weekend to you all, and no worries if the videos make you dance around the room a bit. :)
On “Monarchy in the UK”
oops!
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Oh my God, the surprise of seeing your own video explanation, russell! I wish you could have seen my smile of pleasure and delight to see you and hear you sounding as cool, knowledgeable and just plain nice as you do in writing! Thank you! And I have just watched, also with great pleasure, the Rumba en Atares guaguanco video too, what a mood enhancer. I'm going to hold off on watching the rest because I'm pretty flu-ridden, and need to go lie down, but I'm on for it tomorrow.
On the Robert Palmer piece I searched for lj, I definitely did as thorough a search as I could. But on the other hand, I also definitely have limited ability in these kinds of things (as I have proved to myself many times), so somebody else with an NYT sub (or more advanced google-fu) might do better. I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
"
Muchísimas gracias, Russell! I accidentally left the link in at the bottom, as I thought I was going to add to Russell's post, but thought better of it, but will leave it there cause I think it will be of interest
Another article that I remember had me wondering about how this clave thing worked was this
Article Title: The Clave: Tricky Latin Rhythm, Hard to Master
Author: Robert Palmer
Publication: The New York Times
Corrected Date/Section: October 5, 1980, Section D, Page 22
which now seems to have disappeared from the NYT archive (thanks to GftNC for looking!) If anyone else wants to apply their google-fu to finding it, in my memory, it is definitely worth a read. It gives the anecdote of one band having to re-record an entire album because they had reversed the clave. Ouch!
But watching Russell's explanation above, I realized that the clave is not something you can read about and figure out, you actually have to have two things to bang together. I'm slightly closer to understanding it, but since there is not a lot of Latin music jams out here in rural Japan, I'm afraid that like a lot of my other desires, it is going to be an unrequited love,,,
On “Something Different”
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can't login, I don't think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn't seem to work
And so, I am sad. :(
Thank you!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.