My affection for gustatory exotica is, well, a byword. Among the food-oriented (or even -orientated) blogs I follow is Dumneazu: Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere, and today's posting, on half-sour pickles, would be wonderful even if it didn't include this bit of lore:
Readers of this blog already know my attachment to Katz's, the only place in the world where I would not think of complaining about paying $15 for a pastrami sandwich. The sandwich is really only a vehicle for the mustard and pickle. And the New York half-sour garlic pickle is the perfect food for the summer, hardly defined someplace between a raw veg and a salad. At Katz's you should tip the counterman a dollar - he'll cut your meat more generously, but more important, he'll dump a half kilo of mixed pickles on a plate for you. It pays to tip your man at Katz's.Almost enough to entice me to New York. Not quite...
Man, I just LOOOOVE it:
(via Dial "M" for Musicology)
We've lived just down the road from the ferry to Monhegan Island for the last 3 years, but hadn't ventured out there until today. Unfortunately, the digital camera chose this morning to announce its retirement (thus creating an Opportunity for the impending Birthday Month), so I was unable to record anything of Monhegan's fabled visual wonders. It occurred to me that Flickr might stand in for me, and sure enough a quick search discloses more than 6000 images tagged 'Monhegan' and quite a few of the first hundred-odd will give an idea of why people rave about the island. We walked about half of the cliffy Atlantic side, mostly in hazy/foggy obscurity, and clearly it's worth many return trips.
...what with summer visitors, a weekend at an extreme yoga workshop, more summer visitors. But here's one that summarizes a lot of what I learned about The South in 13 years of living on its fringes, courtesy of Michelle Shocked:
Several things this morning:
(1) The feed from my Delicious bookmarks is still out of commission, but here are three, eclectic as ever, from the last couple of days:
Magic From Space: Traffic from Space Videos Blow Our Minds, Pants, and Socks (yup. UK traffic visualizations, the sort of thing I've been imagining for years, and here it is)(2) Today's BoingBoing tells us of Cliff Bolling, an enthusiast for 78 RPM records, who has digitized a whole lot of them (all this via a Wired blog posting). Since I've been playing around with the same general sort of effort to extract music from obsolete formats and organize the resulting mountain of mp3 files, it's useful to see how somebody else approaches the enterprise.
Geeks, nerds, or dorks? (Joho the Blog points to an explanation of the frontiers of physics)Dumneazu: Polish Truck Stops: We Like Them. Very Much. (more food and music)
(3) via Keep Swinging: Chinatown My Chinatown as a banjo duel. The banjo player on the left is Spats Langham; on the right Johan Lammers:
(Not sure why the auto function isn't working again)
(Not sure why the auto function isn't working)
I happened upon this bit of organological serendipitude via Make's blog, featuring a Pitch Bending Thumb Piano:
As an instrument, I think it's not totally successful, but certainly heuristic for those who think about musical experimentation. Lately I've been deeply immersed in a wide spectrum of African musics, and the clip sent me off on a search for some interesting variants of approach to "thumb piano" (so many other names... sanza, mbira, kalimba...). Here are some of the results:
Mbira at the LakeJazz improvisation on a 5 octave Array mbira
Garland - Suite for Bass Sanza
Don MacLane's musical instruments
Ken Kolodner Plays the Dulcimer-Mbira in West Virginia (and more via his Web site)
The always-enlightening Benn Loxo du Taccu posts from Beijing with a link to an ASTONISHING 9-minute piece by the Uyghur jazz group Panjir:
Nazirkom
Other tracks are accessible via the band's Web site.