I'm going to draw a CD at random every few days or so from my big drawer o' cd's here at work and treat y'all to reviews of them. I'm not going to promise to do it any more frequently because I tend to listen to CD's for days at a time, if not weeks.
Today: "Glass Organ Works", Donald Joyce, Organist
OK, if you can't stand Phillip Glass, just stop reading right here. Nothing I say will matter. Glass has been a favorite of mine since I learned to spell "Koyaanisqatsi." It's amazing to me how much interest he generates with repetitive, simple phrases. I know a lot of people find it boring, but one of my favorite things to do is put some Glass on the headphones and just watch the world go by.
Lots of Glass's work uses organ very effectively, as a unique color in a small ensemble. When I saw him in concert, he cheated by using a small synthesizer in place of the organ. It sounded cool but nowhere near what you want from an organ.
Donald Joyce plays the Anton Heiller Memorial Organ of the Collegedale, TN, Church of Seventh Day Adventists in a thrilling round of Glass virtuosity. You get all the triple/double duality and mindless repetition you expect wrapped up in an awesome, beautiful package. This organ really throws down. A special treat is the 9:25 excerpt from Act III of Glass's "Satyagraha," a familiar piece seen in a new light.
Why I have it: gift from a friend who received it as a Classical Music Club member but who hates Glass.
Disposition: Saved to Realaudio library. I'll be back.
Gads - Twenty years at the AJC. (Warning: rapacious signup and popup regime in effect. Do not click.)
Prior to this place, the longest I'd ever stayed in a job was 2 years, and that was the Army. And that was because they'd have shot me if I'd tried to quit.
I'll post a sample Performance Evaluation later.
I hatched a plan to (very mildly) disrupt the Republican Convention here in New York next week.Along with fifty or sixty others, I'm going to dance at them. Dividing ourselves into several platoons of guerrilla dancers disguised as ordinary pedestrians, we are going to roam the sidewalks in Republican rich zones, periodically erupting into wild and inexplicable explosions of dancing. We will sustain these for a few minutes before melting back into the crowd and heading off to strike someplace else.
Lots of fun in the comment thread (except, of course, the usual earnest bitterness from the usual suspects.) I'll repeat my comment here:
I don't notice any reference to choreography. Would that be too regimented for you folks? You're merely going to fulfill your own stereotypes if you look like the guy on the bad acid dancing in his underwear at the last outdoor concert I attended.
My favorite comment is this one, though. The mind blossoms with possibilities:
Oh no! No, not that! My brittle Republican ego will shatter into a thousand points of light!But seriously, dance at me and I'll dance right back...and it'll be on. Last hoofer standing wins a beer.
Bring...it...on...
(Link via Instapundit.)
Pity this kid:
Jesse Huffman insists he didn't do it on purpose, but the toilet he left plugged after "nature called" at this border crossing in north-central Montana has him facing criminal charges.Toole County authorities charged the 19-year-old college student from Great Falls with criminal mischief after a border agent accused him of intentionally clogging the toilet.
Huffman said the clogged piping was completely unintentional, the result of an urgent, but natural bodily function.
"Huffman"?
"Toole"?
This story is too good to be true by about 1/2.
My last visit to the emergency room was for treatment of a crapping injury. I was living in an apartment that had a broken ceramic TP dispenser. The super had taped over the break; well, I didn't notice it but one morning the tape fell off, exposing the razor-sharp edges. V-shaped razor sharp edges. My elbow neatly fit into that and the only way I knew it was from the tiny whoosh of air entering the wound when I pulled it off - the seal was that perfect. Took 5 stitches, it did.
And "Huffman" just entered my lexicon.
(Link via Romenesko)
My blogroll being such a wee thing is probably not worth this kind of effort, but Mitch is up to the "B"'s on his. Boviosity is mentioned.
Comments are open again. I just enjoy them so much. I'll deal with the spammers. Oh, yes I will.
Hey, did you read last week's Daily Probe? It's a Boviousalanche!
I'm glad the Probe is back. I've been feeling kind of funny lately.
Why oh why haven't I been posting, you ask?
Well, I've been working on something else. I've been writing my adaptation of several Edgar Allan Poe stories for my favorite community theatre troupe to produce (that's me as Mayor Shinn from "The Music Man" over there on the left on the main page; my 404 page features me as kindly Matthew Cuthbert in "Anne Of Green Gables")
Anyway, I've decided to start a blog on it, although this kind of thing has been doomed in the past because I can't put stuff on it that might hurt the feelings of the people involved. Look for links to the script in the next couple days.
I'm adapting "The Fall of the House Of Usher", "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", and "The System Of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether". Also in the show are "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask Of Amontillado", "The Masque Of The Red Death", and "The Raven". It's going to be a good show, I can tell. My last adaptation, of "The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer", which I also directed, was well received and sold a lot of tickets; my last directorial effort, " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", sold out two shows out of three, and received high marks at the Georgia Theatre Conference. So - high confidence here. Tomorrow is the last day of auditions, with callbacks on Thursday. Look for links to pop up on the other blog, and maybe the occasional post here if anything noteworthy happens.
If the pretty girl in image 10 (and others) on "Sleepy Hollow" looks familiar, it's because - she's a movie star! Besides being a stone cutie, she's easily the best actress I've worked with and a dream to direct. She's moving away from the area soon and we're all going to miss her.
I'm officially not that guy any more.
You know the one. I think The Onion even featured a story about him once. The Dad who stubbornly insists on saving money by buying store brands, which are either "just as good" (a demonstrable falsehood in many, many cases) or are "good enough" (demonstrably true in nearly all cases.)
I'm tired of playing that role, the victimizer who deprives my family of what they *really* want, which is Coca-Cola, NOT K-Cola or whatever the Kroger brand of flavored carbonated sugar water is. Maybe it's a little codependent or otherwise sick, but I don't bring stuff home to my family in order to have their shining faces droop in disappointment.
The flip side of that role is the guy who has to smirk when his wife does the shopping, holding up a jar of Smucker's Grape Preserves and saying, "Only the best, eh?" I'm also not that guy any more, thank God. (I've given up saying, "You know, for the purposes of making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, the kids really don't care if it's this or the store brand which is $.50 less." The massive eye-rolling this engenders is just not worth it.)
I'll pay the extra $.10-$.50 per item and ignore the fact that at 100 items in a cart that comes to around an extra $10 per cart. Lord knows, they're ignoring that fact. I've tried for 15 years to drive this point home. I give up.
So when I went shopping for hot dogs on Saturday, I brought home Ball Park dogs and Sarah Lee buns. NOTHING but the best, that's my motto.
They were yummy.
Oh, and would you believe it - I actually received a complaint of the extravagance of the Sarah Lee buns.
Here ya go, buddy. Have fun!
Seems the only activity this site has been getting lately is me deleting 15-20 spam comments per day. I'm going to try banning comments altogether via a "*" in the "banned IP's" list, and not opening comments except on specific threads.
Why spammers? Why spam comment threads?