Meme-tastic.
1. The person who passed the baton conch to you.
Out of the Woods Now lobbed it over a sea of scrabbling hands about a week ago, but I've been too tied up in reading, writing, and building a darkroom over at the Forest (today's lesson? plumb lines, and holding them steady) to put it under the light and say: ooh, shiny. But here we go.
2. Total volume of music files on your computer.
Let's see. On a twenty gig drive, with ten of those eaten by Windows, I'm running at 4.88 gigs of music. So a full quarter of my computer. Not bad. Could be worse.
3. The title and artist of the last CD that you bought.
I'm assuming that online purchases count, not just ones in record stores. If so, then yesterday I ordered a recording of Saint-Saëns' two piano trios, one of which I heard at a chamber music concert in Cyprus. Camille is my alpha and my omega, perhaps the best thing that ever happened to this world ever, and I have lots of little pet theories surrounding his orchestral work with which I will bore absolutely none of you today. Promise.
4. Song playing at the moment of writing.
Well, this post has taken decently long to write -- wrote the last half first -- so I've gone through several. Here are a few of them, in no particular order:
Van Morrison -- 'Astral Weeks'
Beth Gibbons -- 'Resolve'
Mississippi John Hurt -- 'Louis Collins,' also 'Staggerlee'
Satchmo -- 'Basin Street Blues,' also 'Indiana' (goddamn, I love that tune)
But right now, amusingly enough, it's Asuka Sakai and Charlie Kosei singing "Que Sera Sera" -- but not the Pink Martini version that you might think. No, this came from Katamari Damacy, about which my lawyers have suggested I say no more at this time.
(I might post the mp3 later, though, if I'm feelin' frisky.)
5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs).
1. Astor Piazzolla -- 'Concerto Para Quinteto' (Okay, look. Do yourself a favor, stop reading this web site, and go get yourself a copy of Tango: Zero Hour. Just go. Now.)
2. Jimmy Newman -- La Porte D'en Arriére (because for New Orleanians at heart, a little zydeco is never enough)
3. Arcade Fire -- Neighborhood #1, Tunnels (awesome track, thanks to Not a Zombie's Monday mp3 blogging)
4. Franz Schubert -- a piece from his 3 posthumous piano sonatas, No. 2 in E-flat. (ca. ten minutes, ABACA structure, ranging from lullaby to throwing glasses against the wall to an expert seduction near the end -- difficult to describe, so I'll leave you to track it down for yourself. Murakami, incidentally, has one of his characters give a nice meditation about Schubert in Kafka on the Shore, as out of place in the book as it seems..)
So the fifth entry isn't a song, though one of the tracks I've been listening to is actually called 'Song.' I've been downloading mp3s of poetry readings from the PENNSound web site run by the University of Pennsylvania, and listening to them on my Rio as I walk around town. I've just finished CK Williams' reading from 2001 and am now on to Robert Creeley's reading from 2000 (look under 'Featured Authors' for both of these -- and why do I like 'Bresson's Movies' so much?). Penn explicitly hosts these recordings for the public domain, which I think is fantastic, and for people with portable mp3 players I can't think of a better way to put them to use.
Well, let's see. In other news, things are beginning to heat up here in the City of Literature (read this and you'll never think the same way about UNESCO again) in preparation for the Festival season coming in August. Already you see a few buskers standing on the Royal Mile hawking whatever it is that they busk or hawk, but more interestingly, there are some Events of Note which your humble narrator will be attending. Hey, for all you tilters over at 400 Windmills, Carlos Fuentes is coming to Edinburgh next week to give a lecture on the Quixote, which I will try my very best to attend (depends on the darkroom, as does the fate of the free world these days) and make note of. And hot on his heels two weeks later is a panel of the Man Booker International Prize judges -- John Carey, Azar Nafisi, and Alberto Manguel -- led by Alan Taylor of the Sunday Herald. I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but since it's a free event I've already booked my ticket, and will do another writeup similar to the JTB prize ones back in April.
I'm not endorsing the prize, I should say. I stand wholeheartedly in the "why not give the £60,000 to someone who actually needs it?" camp, so I think of it as grist for the mill. (But what are we grinding?)
By way of closing: in reading this article, specifically these paragraphs --
Other products, though, have a greater potential for consumer spinoffs. The American Technology Corporation of San Diego, for example, displayed an ultrasonic speaker that can focus audible sound, laser-like, so that a warning message can be clearly heard more than 500 yards away.
If a threatening intruder looms, the device can send a high-pitched squeal -- "above the threshold of pain, below the level of hearing loss," said Ryk Williams, a company spokesman -- that will make anyone clap hands to ears at more than 1,000 yards.
The sound beam can be narrowed so that only a small group in a crowd can hear the message. Speculating on future applications for the technology, Mr. Williams suggested that it might be used in a supermarket, for example, sending a "buy Cheerios" message to a consumer in front of the Cheerios and "buy Corn Flakes" to another nearby.
-- I have found myself vastly entertained, not because I think I will enjoy walking down a supermarket aisle and hearing "Buy Weetabix!" (or the corollary, walking down a bookstore aisle and hearing "Buy David Mitchell!" -- or, in a further, creepier twist, hearing "Buy my new novel!" in Mitchell's own pre-recorded voice), but because it will have made a childhood dream finally come true. You see, when I was a kid, I watched a lot of Ren and Stimpy on Nickelodeon. A lot. So much so that over a decade later -- all you "Happy Happy Joy Joy" poseurs out there, you wanna roll with the big dogs? -- I can still sing the whole LOG! song and the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen anthem. (No wonder he turned out like this, they say..)
Anyway, I remember one bit on there, might have been the episode where Ren and Stimpy get stranded at the intergalactic bus stop, where the scene of them sitting around waiting ended by the narrator's saying "We'll be right back, but first, a word from our sponsor." And then you saw a baby carriage pop up on screen, because that was what the sponsor manufactured, and the narrator resumed: "And that word is BUY! BUY BUY BUY!"
And I remember thinking, yep, it sure is, ain't it.
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