This (early) morning’s troll of the sites I visit frequently brought Topix.net from ResourceShelf, and I was able to find a good variety of stuff on TODAY’s Sarawak news (for example), and also to explore globalization as it appears in news reports. The downside is a bunch of advertising, but as another tool for explorations, it looks like a winner.
…and more on King Rat: I assumed that the music Miéville wrote about was imaginary, but come to find out it’s a genre I missed…
In the context of globalization and music, I happened on this book by the sometime cornetist of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Some nice tidbits:
Mitchell’s Jazz Kings recorded in the early 1920s in Paris (a bunch of .ram exampes available on the page). The site notes that
In the 1920s the Jazz Kings played a five year residency at the Casino de Paris. Mitchell had his own American restaurant called Mitchell’s in Montmartre and helped Bricktop (Ada Smith-Ducongé) set up her first club, The Music Box in Paris…
Stephane Grappelli remembers that the first jazz tune he heard was Zez Confrey’s “Stumblin’ “, played by Mitchell’s Jazz Kings… (Harris in Monson 2003:109)
Harris goes on to say:
Jazz has, throughout its history, held appeal for people from many different societies and from different places within society, including at its margins. It is rooted in –and is a manifestation of– the human ability to redefine marginality as a “location of radical openness and possibility” (hooks 1990:153)… (Harris in Monson 2003:123)
The basics of look-and-feel are still a mystery to me –how to implement CSS, how to tweak appearance and functionalities displayed. It’s like any other medium: conceptual stuff seems daunting until you know the tricks, and then you wonder how you could have been so dense…
In this case it was a matter of a simple edit to the /mt/index.html file, to add /mt to the path for the stylesheet. I suppose it’s a win that I did figure it out…
…but now I can’t make it stick… when I SAVE this edit, it reverts to the vanilla form, without the formatting I specified. It’s probably something in the setup that I’m overlooking.
Moving the stylesheet to the directory above /mt/ seems to have done it…
Today’s activities mostly around globalization, but I also started thinking about words about music, and transcribed a vibrant passage from Miéville’s King Rat
A day of exploration of RSS led me to http://www.lissakaytoo.com/, which had superb instructions for installing Movable Type. I’m intending to use this blog as a means to track various things I do, as a replacement for my current.html file, which has become too overstuffed to be very useful. I think I’ll still use my W&L Webspace for a lot of my activities, but link them here as new threads and projects and digressions are begun.