Dulcimer stuff

Now and again a really resonant wave collapses on my desktop, and this morning it’s the video of Robert Force doing “On the Hard Drive Now” (12MB, about 3 minutes) linked at Old Blue Bus. Jeez, I’m gettin’ to be one of those Old Guys who remembers when… and gets out the old Richard and Mimi Fariña records for a bout of nostalgia. Suppose I’ll hafta reread Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Yup, there it is on the top shelf…

On creativity, and bittersweetness

Don’t miss ZeFrank in his Last Week of The Show. Today’s episode is both poignant and pointed, as the best of his whatevertheyares generally are. Trying to find the words to describe my own emotional entanglement with The Show, I’m projected toward polyvalent and semantically fraught expressions from other languages: the Portuguese Saudade and the German Sehnsucht as in Reitz’s Heimat series, and Wikipedia points me to the Japanese expression Mono no aware. The archive of the year’s shows (mentioned today, and to be sponsored by ??Dewar’s??) is gonna be rich territory for mashups.

Stepping in the same river

I spent the weekend walking around Boston and Cambridge, revisiting old haunts and enjoying the leading edge of what will eventually turn into Spring. Among the locales I visited were Harvard’s Agassiz Museum (nowadays it’s called “Natural History”) and Peabody Museum of Anthropology, both of which I frequented at several points in my young and not-so-young life. Many of my favorites were still in place, and I could trace the distant origins of later fascinations. The stuffed animals were pretty startling because I remembered expressions and postures very exactly. Even the basic smells of the place are pretty much the same as they were when I first knew them about !! 60 !! years ago… Amongst the ornithological specimens I found illustrations for

Auk! that’s no puffin I know
Can’t pronounce “guillemot”
...can't pronounce 'guillemot'
That’s a murre
...that's a murre

(Hark back to mid-2006 for other “That’s amore” variants)

Another bit of resonance was the ceiling-hung skeleton of a Right Whale which I can remember being especially impressed by as a child:

business end of a baleen whale

…which was (doubtless) the source of the image I used to retail to classes of students as an analogy for the search process: you take in a LOT of information and sort through it as a baleen whale sieves krill, keeping the tasty bits…

Another image, from a later date, is provided by the Pirarucu

Pirarucu

…the namesake of the Collaborative Information Management tool I was working on in Summer 2002 –a scheme that was Ahead of Its Time.

A seriously wonderful CD

Ry Cooder’s brand new My Name is Buddy is surely not for just everybody, but it certainly has brightened the corner where I am for the last 24 hours (ever since the UPS dude delivered it, still warm from the anvil). Sidemen include Mike Seeger and Roland White (to cite two of my own musical heroes), and the artwork on the album is stunning too. Check out this story from last Sunday’s Observer for further details and inducements to purchase.

EatingAsia again

Really the most mouth-watering food writing AND food photography (surely this complex vice needs a name… gustopr0n?). Today’s episode, on a Hokkienese Hideaway in Kuala Lumpur, is paradigmatic, no doubt about it. Just drink in the poetry:

Her wide, stubby yam strips go all sticky-chewy in a dark soy-soused stir-fry with cabbage, pork, and shrimp. White cabbage, Chinese celery, and pork cracklins add crunch, but the overriding flavor here is a wonderful char from the high-fired wok…

That last phrase is the chorus of a foodie chantefable that I aspire to write someday.