This is the sort of thing I love about the English language: seemingly arbitrary, yet also somehow rational—not to mention poetic. From Lapham’s Quarterly:
This is the sort of thing I love about the English language: seemingly arbitrary, yet also somehow rational—not to mention poetic. From Lapham’s Quarterly:
In a comment on yesterday’s post, regular reader and photographer extraordinaire (and, full disclosure, long-time friend) Derek Helt raises an interesting question: Because the use of physical media for storing and playing music is generally perceived to be “outdated technology,” is Spokane actually ahead of the curve by not offering a full-service music store?
Let’s open this up for a little discussion. (Yeah, I know, there are only three or four people who read this blog, but try to humor me. I’m genuinely curious.) How many of you regularly purchase CDs or LPs? If you do, where do you get them? And are your tastes in music such that you don’t need to go too far out of your way to find what you’re looking for? And for those of you who download your music from iTunes or Amazon or a similar provider, do you purchase individual songs? Entire albums? Do you listen to your music primarily through earbuds or headphones, or through loudspeakers?
I’ll go first: I buy music almost exclusively on CD. Why? Because unless you’re purchasing lossless files, digital downloads are compressed to such an extent that dynamic range is compromised. That’s fine if it’s the flavor-of-the-month hip hop song, but not so good when it’s Bruckner. Plus, I dig the album art and liner notes. I purchase most of my CDs at Amazon; sometimes I buy directly from record labels or other outlets (ArkivMusic, Burning Shed, Discipline Global Mobile, et al.) if Amazon doesn’t have what I’m looking for. My tastes run from Stockhausen to Bowie to Coltrane to Bach to the Dead. I listen with headphones at work and over a stereo at home.
Your turn. Tell us about your music-buying and -listening habits.
Walla Walla has a population of 32,148; Spokane 210,103. Walla Walla has an honest-to-God record store; Spokane doesn’t. Discuss amongst yourselves.
Ed Edmunds, star of the Travel Channel’s Making Monsters, poses with two of his creations for ILF Media director of photography Jim Swoboda. Ed and his wife Marsha own Distortions Unlimited, where, out of a nondescript warehouse in Greeley, Colorado, a group of “designers, artists, carpenters, sculptors, painters, pourers, patchers, seamers, welders, woodworkers, mold makers, sprayers, shippers, seamstresses, cutters, electricians, assemblers, managers and office personnel” work together to create the stuff of nightmares.
Setting up a shoot at downtown Greeley’s Café Panache, a Parisian-style crêperie where, in addition to sweet and savory crêpes, you can get soups, salads, and your very own beret. Executive producer Cary Seward (left) and director of photography Jim Swoboda (right) are from ILF Media in Spokane; at center is John Pantaleo, public information officer for the City of Greeley.
Tim O’Hara (left), a commercial photographer based in Fort Collins, Colorado, poses with Armando Silva (center) and our fearless leader during a photo shoot in Greeley last week. To combat the rampant misperceptions of Greeley as the exact opposite of Hawaii, Silva is one of a group of people chosen to reflect Greeley’s unexpected characteristics.
At Milne Auditorium on the University of Northern Colorado campus, CK (second from left) poses with belly dancer Ann Martinez and members of the Persian Music Ensemble. At a population of fewer than 100,000, the city of Greeley is a surprisingly diverse community.
After a week in Greeley, Colorado, it’s good to be home.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Greeley. On the contrary, it’s not at all what you’d expect if you labor under the fairly common misapprehension that it smells, that it’s dangerous, that it’s nothing but cows and cowboys.
Don’t laugh. People who have never even been there will swear that it’s all true. Which brings me to why CK and I were visiting. The City of Greeley has hired helveticka to change those misapprehensions; to communicate that Greeley’s got it going on. So last week, on our third visit to the area in less than a year, we were shooting stills and video footage for an upcoming awareness campaign.
Over the next few days we’ll share some photos from our trip—like the one above, taken by CK, of a downtown mural by performance/visual artist Armando Silva. By the end of the week, you’ll want to go there yourself.
CK and I will be on a photo and video shoot in Colorado this week (CK’s already there, as a matter of fact; I’ll be joining him tomorrow). Blogging will be spotty at best, so I figured I’d give you a little something to keep you occupied for a while. Behold: Meenakshi Amman Temple. Not every photo is great, but each is worth seeing.
After all these years, “Arena” remains one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. Watching this brilliant commercial, it’s not hard to see why.
Okay, this is pretty cool. Music + art + science = full frontal geekery, as far as I’m concerned. (Though I still can’t quite say “Uranus” without stifling a giggle.)
Given the nature of today’s collection, we probably should have saved these links for “Weird Wednesday”:
The mysterious death of George Haycock.
“Be the Gifting Hero this year with a hand sculpted Bust of your Family and Friends!” Only $120!
Photos of the Golden Tortoise Beetle.
Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” has been clocked at around 3 trillion meters a second.
Want to be a spy? Here’s a handy a list of shibboleths.
Somehow, we let yesterday slip by without acknowledging an important birthday: Mr. Rogers would have been 85 if he hadn’t died in 2003. Mental Floss’s John Green presents 35 facts about the educator, minister, author, composer, and Peabody Award-winning television host:
It’s been a while since we did a book review around here. And while I’m not quite finished with it yet, I’ll go ahead and pronounce Michael Korda’s Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Contrast that with some of the one-star reviews on Amazon:
“Korda takes a fascinating topic and destroys it with horrendously opaque writing. Early on, I encountered, on page 11, a sentence with 51 words. Incredibly, later on the same page there is a sentence with 114 words. There is simply no excuse for this.”
A sentence with 51 words?!? OMG!!! Maybe you should stick with the Twilight series.
“I find the book too detailed, tedious and the author seems to be physco-analizing [sic] T.E. Lawerence [sic]. He keeps straying away from the main theme.”
Um…you do realize, don’t you, that Lawrence is the main theme? And that if Korda wanted to psychoanalyze him (which, 500-odd pages into his 700-page book, he has yet to do), wouldn’t that be in keeping with the “theme”?
“I wanted to like this book, and really tried to. But the first 100 pages are terribly boring. And frankly the writing is not fluid or entertaining. It was a chore to finish.”
Julius Caesar was stabbed on this day in 44 B.C. But you already knew that, right? We’re mentioning it to make a point.
Shakespeare describes the scene thus:
Caesar: Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?
Casca: Speak, hands, for me! [They stab Caesar.]
Caesar: Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar! [Dies.]
Cinna: Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Did you catch that “Et tu, Brute” line? And you, Brutus? Sounds to me like Caesar started a sentence with a conjunction. Uh oh. If he were enrolled in a high school English class today, he’d probably get a frowny face on his paper. He’d still be right, though. Dead, but right.