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Showing posts from May, 2010

Old Black Solo

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“Old Black, a 1953 Gibson Les Paul plugged into a 1959 Fender Deluxe. The guitar came from Jim Messina, who found the instrument’s monstrous sound uncontrollable. Young bought the Deluxe for approximately fifty bucks in 1967. As Young told writer Jas Obrecht, he ‘took it home, plugged in the Gretsch guitar and the entire room immediately started to vibrate…I went ‘Holy Shit!’ I turned it halfway down before it stopped feeding back.’ The Les Paul/Deluxe combo, which remains the cornerstone of his sound, would make its thunderous debute in Young’s music on his very first record with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere .” – Jimmy McDonough, Shakey , page 298 Jennifer and I treated ourselves last night to catching Neil Young’s Twisted Road Tour live at the Fox in Atlanta. About two months ago, thanks to a heads up from some friends in Atlanta a few hours after the concert was announced, we were forced to slave ourselves through the monopoly of Ticketmaster and secure tickets

"You Can Let Go Now"

Well, after six seasons of critical acclaim and a worldwide following, the Lost series concluded last night. It kicked off with a better-than-expected two-hour “pre-game” show that reviewed all the high points of the series from the pilot episode all the way up to the point which the finale began. I guess it was kind of a “super bowl” thing. Let’s talk about the thing as much as we can before the thing happens so we can generate as much ad revenue as we can. And ABC charged a boatload for advertising during the finale itself. But, that’s a bit too cynical for the moment, really. The truth is there are legitimate reasons for celebrating the success of the past six seasons and for the work everyone from the producers to the actors to the technical crew put in to making what was, for me, the best show on television. The sixth season of Lost was much like those preceding it. Plenty of twists and turns, surprises, complex puzzles, great character moments, action sequences, and multip

The Bear is back

Three days ago Richard Russell wrote: "First, we saw the recent April highs in the Averages. Then we saw a plunge in both Averages to their May 7 lows -- Industrials to 10380.43, Transports to 4298.12, next a short rally. If ahead, the two Averages turn down and violate their May 7 lows, that would be the clincher. Such action would signal the certain resumption of the primary bear market." The bullish confirmations of Dow Theory (the last and strongest one was on March 17) have now reversed themselves. Today the Dow closed at 10,068 (down 376 points, 3.6%) and the Transports at 4,161 (down 214 points, a dismal 4.9%) - well below the May 7 lows. The selloff was global . According to Dow Theory, this now means we will most likely retest previous lows set in February. The internal structure of the markets has been deteriorating rapidly for several weeks. Last week's so-called " flash-crash " was not a glitch so much as a zealous indicator of where we are headed

Silence of the honeysuckle blooms

Marcel Proust’s brilliant, sprawling novel In Search of Lost Time is about a great many things, indeed one might say it is about the full spectrum of human life and not exaggerate the truth too much. Fundamentally, however, it is about memory and the experience of memory through time. Proust’s theory of memory is complex but it includes the fact that unexpected memories emerge often from the most subtle things. Perhaps the most famous episode in his 4,000 page novel actually occurs near the beginning, in Swann’s Way , when the narrator bites into a madeleine tea cake. A flood of childhood memories return to him in a powerful, life-affecting moment for the character. Proust expounds (as he always does) upon this moment. “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remember

Well.....Dog Gone

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We put Parks down today. (In the pic to the right, taken two weeks ago, he's already looking kinda ethereal.) The cancer that was supposed to have been his demise back at the beginning of 2009 finally got to the point where the poor guy was in obvious pain. These past two days he whined constantly. He woke us up barking in at 2 a.m. He refused to be comforted when we checked on him. His lips became increasingly swollen and he started staggering around with his head oddly cocked to the left, which I took to be a sign that he probably had an irritating growth in his sinuses or someplace thereabouts. I never wanted to see him suffer and, until recently, he didn't suffer much. Last night he was as spirited as ever at feeding time. But, otherwise his whole demeanor had drastically changed. He was running into things. Walking under bushes and rubbing the side of his head into the ground. There was a constant grumble. So, enough. We did all we could, longer than any one expected and f

Great Fifths

Note: This is a continuation of a monthly series on what I consider to be the greatest symphonies in western classical music. There is probably no more recognizable piece of classical music than the opening to Beethoven’s Great Fifth Symphony . The stirring four opening notes are the first classical composition I recall hearing. Naturally, the first movement is my favorite. It has been described as death or fate “knocking at the door” of the individual human being. Yet, the work does not give me so much a feeling of doom or inevitability as it does heroic individualism in the face of rather stormy circumstances. To that extent I find Beethoven’s Fifth to be very inspirational. Almost three-quarters through, the opening movement slows and softens in to calm meandering oboe before a punctuated resolution. The second movement develops two themes, with a series of crescendos. It equals the opening movement in terms of intensity and boldness. It is more stately and regimented, a march at

Slow Motion Disaster

The recent major oil spill off Gulf Coast made the news cycle. We’ve seen daily coverage of the “disaster”. Anytime you can use that word you increase media consumption, which drives advertising, of course. Luckily, we have yet to see massive stretches of beaches soaked in black oil, with dead marine creatures adrift in the tide, and shore birds soaked in the residue unable to fly. For this reason the “disaster” is not quite the news item that it could become. It is a bad situation and still getting worse every day , but it is still very much a “pending” situation as far as human experience is concerned. The oil spill remains something off the coast somewhere, relatively far away, even as congressional testimony on the matter began yesterday . Like so much happening in the world today, the gulf oil spill is in human terms happening in slow motion. Everyday the spill gets larger, the resolution to the environmental disaster so far eludes us, yet the significance of it remains abstract.

Escobar out at the plate

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I continue to play the latest version of OOTP in what spare time I have these days. The game allows you to play any baseball season in history from 1871 to the present. It is very entertaining to replay the 1927 Yankees or any of the other great teams from baseball’s deep rooted past, making comparisons between the chemistry of the teams, their lineups and pitching staffs. You learn a lot about baseball that way. Or, of course, you can create a completely fictional baseball universe to your liking, but I’m not much into the fictional aspects of the game…yet. I have put myself in as a player and simed way into the future (say up to the 2019 season) and that can certainly be fun. Not only does OOTP allow you to span the decades of baseball lore or create some version of baseball that never existed, but – more importantly perhaps – it allows you to get inside the individual game; play a season out virtually pitch-by-pitch, if you so desire. The in-game experience of OOTP is worth noting