December 2024 archive
Much like a pic from
four years ago.
It was a nice sunny day today. Two friends and I were out climbing.
One friend's seven-year-old son Diego was in attendance. His imagination was going wild the whole time. He likened different rock formations—or, as he called them, rock structures—to foods. He asked me to taste one rock and say what food it reminded me of, where taste implicitly meant pretend to taste.
Nothing immediately came to mind. After a moment I figured I'd name something that the color of the rock vaguely reminded me of. "Tater tots," I said.
Being with Diego this afternoon made me realize how dull we adults are by comparison. Without a youngster in the mix, we conduct ourselves in a routine manner and talk about matter‑of‑fact stuff.
My having resorted to naming a food that the rock resembled visually exemplifies my poverty of imagination as an adult. The seven‑year‑old me had more immediate access to seemingly random thoughts.
Today featured many simple pleasures. Just hearing Diego call something ginormous made me happy.
One friend's seven-year-old son Diego was in attendance. His imagination was going wild the whole time. He likened different rock formations—or, as he called them, rock structures—to foods. He asked me to taste one rock and say what food it reminded me of, where taste implicitly meant pretend to taste.
Nothing immediately came to mind. After a moment I figured I'd name something that the color of the rock vaguely reminded me of. "Tater tots," I said.
Being with Diego this afternoon made me realize how dull we adults are by comparison. Without a youngster in the mix, we conduct ourselves in a routine manner and talk about matter‑of‑fact stuff.
My having resorted to naming a food that the rock resembled visually exemplifies my poverty of imagination as an adult. The seven‑year‑old me had more immediate access to seemingly random thoughts.
Today featured many simple pleasures. Just hearing Diego call something ginormous made me happy.
Desert rain is like this sometimes.
YouTube recommended Lucas Imbiriba's guitar playing to me yesterday.
In this still, he is fretting an A♭ on the low E string
and an E eight frets higher on the high E string. I grabbed
a guitar to see if I could even reach that far and it felt like I was
going to sprain my thumb.
This A♭ is, coïncidentally, the lowest note on my marimba. I can reach far enough to play it and the E he's playing but my peripheral vision isn't good enough to see both bars clearly.
Happy nineteenth, everyone.
My friends are uniformly appalled that the USA has again elected
a certain man whose name I hate to spell out on these pages.
Implicit in that statement is that I no longer have friends who
vote Republican. I haven't disowned anyone—it's just
how things have played out.
Also, I'm not close to any
living relatives—neither geographically nor personally—and
thus didn't have an awkward experience at Thanksgiving
as a lot of families experienced in this polarized time.
It wouldn't be remarkable to have no Republican friends in, say, San Francisco but I live in a rural red county. Republicans are among my acquaintances here but we aren't friends.
More so than city life, rural life sees people making friends with people unlike themselves. I made friends with conservatives when I moved here but almost all of them are now deceased. I don't know where they would've stood in today's politics; I don't consider the current GOP conservative.
None of my rock climbing buddies votes Republican and I don't have a good explanation for why that is. It's not like climbing is an inherently blue sport. There was one maga climber in town but he moved to Utah.
Many of us never anticipated seeing politics like this in the USA in our lifetimes. One friend, who's around my age, is still taken aback eight years after the election of 2016. Evidently you're never too old to lose your innocence.
Last year, Sroyon wrote
The song is Europa by Die Nerven. The couplet, sung twice starting at around 30 seconds into a live performance, is
Some people find German a harsh language for lyrics but I like the forceful quality that the fricative in dachte gives these lines.
It wouldn't be remarkable to have no Republican friends in, say, San Francisco but I live in a rural red county. Republicans are among my acquaintances here but we aren't friends.
More so than city life, rural life sees people making friends with people unlike themselves. I made friends with conservatives when I moved here but almost all of them are now deceased. I don't know where they would've stood in today's politics; I don't consider the current GOP conservative.
None of my rock climbing buddies votes Republican and I don't have a good explanation for why that is. It's not like climbing is an inherently blue sport. There was one maga climber in town but he moved to Utah.
Many of us never anticipated seeing politics like this in the USA in our lifetimes. One friend, who's around my age, is still taken aback eight years after the election of 2016. Evidently you're never too old to lose your innocence.
Last year, Sroyon wrote
Among the many songs that I like, there is a niche category where the singer (or band) delivers a line/couplet in a way which infuses it with a sense of heightened emotion or significance.and invited readers to cite other examples. In addition to one I mentioned at the time (a Frank Zappa lyric), I like a particular expressively-sung couplet in a song about loss of innocence after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The song is Europa by Die Nerven. The couplet, sung twice starting at around 30 seconds into a live performance, is
und ich dachte irgendwie(roughly: and somehow I thought no one ever dies in Europe)
in Europa stirbt man nie
Some people find German a harsh language for lyrics but I like the forceful quality that the fricative in dachte gives these lines.
Over 100 former Republican national security officials signed a
statement
in August saying DJT was unfit to serve another term.
Among them was Olivia Troye,
former Special Advisor to Mike Pence.
DJT is unfit to be President because (among many other things) he makes atrocious choices for key government positions, e.g. Kash Patel for FBI Director.
Patel didn't like some comments that Ms. Troye made about him on MSNBC earlier this week. Two days ago, Mr. Patel's lawyer sent a letter to Ms. Troye's lawyer demanding a retraction. A Bluesky post has the full response from Ms. Troye's lawyer but the key part is below.
DJT is unfit to be President because (among many other things) he makes atrocious choices for key government positions, e.g. Kash Patel for FBI Director.
Patel didn't like some comments that Ms. Troye made about him on MSNBC earlier this week. Two days ago, Mr. Patel's lawyer sent a letter to Ms. Troye's lawyer demanding a retraction. A Bluesky post has the full response from Ms. Troye's lawyer but the key part is below.
Most rock and roll guitarists stand while performing.
Robert Fripp of King Crimson and Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter of Steely Dan
are exceptions. Both play while seated (and both are fine guitarists).
When Fripp said he wanted to sit on a stool, his band mate Greg Lake said no, you'll look like a mushroom on stage. Fripp sat anyway. From his journal for May 14, 1969:
When Fripp said he wanted to sit on a stool, his band mate Greg Lake said no, you'll look like a mushroom on stage. Fripp sat anyway. From his journal for May 14, 1969:
A personal turning point following a discussion on presentation: I sit down after 8 gigs standing. Hendrix, dressed in white with his right arm in a sling approached me afterwards and said, "Shake my left hand, man, it's nearer to my heart."Rick Beato posted a long interview with Jeff Baxter yesterday. Jeff explained how he got started by working in music stores in Mexico City and in New York, where all kinds of musicians would come in the stores. He said (starting at 3:41, edited for brevity),
So one day Andrés Segovia comes in because he's playing at Carnegie Hall and one of the tuning machines on his Ramirez had broken. We didn't have anything in stock so I ran across the street to Charles Ponte who was the cello and violin guy thinking, you know, maybe, maybe. He had one set so I bought those, took them back, took the Ramirez back in the room, repaired it, strung it up, and meanwhile it was Frank Zappa, Mike Bloomfield, I'm trying to think of the other guitar player it might have been, and they're all rocking away, all standing up and they're all having a great time and Mr. Segovia is just sitting there on the couch in the front room, very quiet.
So I brought the guitar out, I said hold on guys, hold on a second, so I hand him the instrument. Sitting there, he tunes it up, he plays the first 64 bars from the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo.
And it sounds stupid, but it's like all the photons left the room except for Andrés Segovia. I mean this man, whatever was going on with this guy, he had an aura about him. The place got completely quiet.
Afterwards he said thank you very much, paid Dan, and then turned to me, in Spanish he said, "Would you please tell them that you don't hang it around your neck like a canoe paddle, you hold it next to your body because it's a part of you, it's right next to your heart." And I thought, yeah, I'm sitting down, works for me.