Month: October 2005

ECM hits the iTunes Music Store: go get some Pärt

I thought I was seeing things a few weeks ago when I saw an ECM release in the iTunes Music Store, but no: a bunch of essential ECM classical releases have been added this week, including the Pärt Te Deum. If you haven’t already added this recording to your collection, I highly recommend it. And don’t buy just the tracks; go ahead and get the album so you can get the recording of the “Te Deum.” I remember sitting around in Monroe Hill with fellow Glee Club member Morgan Whitfield listening to this and being in awe back in 1993, and then being just as awed in 2002 when I sang the work with the Cascadian Chorale.

Other Pärt ECM recordings of interest in the iTMS: Tabula Rasa, the Miserere,
Kanon Pokajanen, and the Passio (which, as on the CD, is a single 70 minute long track).

BSO update: A Child of Our Time

My first BSO concert of the season is coming up: a performance of Sir Michael Tippet’s oratorio A Child Of Our Time under the direction of Sir Colin Davis. The work, a response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particularly Kristallnacht, in the days leading up to the Second World War, alternates highly chromatic and difficult choral passages with settings of African-American spirituals. While on first blush the description sounds too “high concept” for comfort, the choice of spirituals is appropriate: the texts of the spirituals evoke images from Old Testament (i.e. Jewish) history as a response to slavery, particularly “Go Down Moses” and “Deep River” (“my home is over Jordan”), and the juxtaposition of the spirituals with the texts about persecution brings things full circle.

Rehearsals with the chorus have been good so far. We start orchestra rehearsals next week, and performances are at the end of the month (the Mozart Posthorn Serenade is also on the program), on the 27th, 28th and 29th. I hope some of my Boston area readers can make one of the shows.

Splendid Sundays in Slumberland

New York Times: Restoring Slumberland. There’s an eerie synchronicity about reading this article at the same time as Cory Doctorow’s Themepunks serial in Salon. Peter Maresca’s painstaking restoration of Winsor McCay’s century old comic strips, which still stretch the limits of the form in both imagination and quality, and his subsequent decision to self-publish the results seems as brilliantly quixotic as the creation of garden gnomes with face-recognition for providing context-sensitive household memos.

What’s best about the new book is that it’s about a passion for something that was itself insanely passionate. No hack working in syndicated comics today could pull off anything like the imagination and brilliance of a page from this book. Unfortunately, what’s worst about the book is the infrastructure: the book’s website, sundaypressbooks.com, is was pretty much unreachable (it’s back now).

Update: Nice post at BoingBoing citing Glenn Fleishman on the copyright issues involved: “100 years later, the public that granted the limited exclusivity of copyright gets to reap in the greater benefit of cultural heritage being shared more widely.” The ironies abound in this case. Prior to the Dover reprints that surfaced a few years ago, I’m unaware of any collections that appeared while the work was still in copyright. It’s only now that the right audience has appeared to create a work that might spark new interest in McCay’s work.

Even more unbelievable: Virginia 26, Florida State 21

As Fury points out, it was a weekend for upsets, and while Michigan’s 27-25 victory over Penn State is pretty darn dramatic, my money is on Virginia’s 26-21 win over Florida State for upset of the week. Sentences like “beat a top-5 team for only the second time in their history” and (my favorite) “We couldn’t stop that dadgum No. 18” make the victory that much sweeter…and almost erase the humiliation of losses to Maryland and Boston College in the preceding weeks. Of course, Virginia’s return to the Top 25 helps too.

The mystery of the disappearing door.

the release mechanism for the lock

While I’m pondering house changes, I can’t help but be captivated by this illustration of how to make a hidden door in a bookcase. Very cool, and solves a problem with our plans for the built in bookshelves in the library… provided I can sell Lisa on it.

We have limited space in the library room for shelves. One wall is mostly occupied by a large fireplace, and the facing wall has the staircase—which has little room for bookshelves, sadly. In the outside wall of the room is set a door, which leads to the access for the water shut-off (and also provides a convenient access behind the walls for running electrical cable to the breaker box). I had thought that the door limited what we could do with shelves on that wall, but the illustrated how tos in this article suggest we may have some options.

The choice of book for the hinge is especially good: an old volume of Sherlock Holmes. Though I might be tempted to find a more literal title, like this one, to serve as my mnemonic.

Color us nervous.

Well, today is the big day: bathroom renovations started at our house this morning. Our contractor is ripping out a closet and a half on the first floor to squeeze a shower into our half bath (which makes it now a three-quarters bath, I think). We’re a little nervous and have been forgetting important things to ask. Like: when you do the demolition, if it’s possible, could we get the floorboards out of the closet so we can patch the holes and water damage left where the radiators used to live?

This is also the point of no return in a lot of ways. Most of the other jobs that we have had someone else do have been quick and relatively painless: one day at most, even for the window replacements. The HVAC job was an exception, but it didn’t make a lot of dust and noise, as opposed to this job.

And there are so many moving parts: tile, fixtures, lighting, paint, plaster, all have to be managed separately. Our general contractor has been pretty good so far, but there are still things that we have to manage.

So we deal with it. The dogs are out of the way in New Jersey, and we’re at our respective offices IMing nervously back and forth to each other with budget numbers and details we’ve forgotten. You can say what you will about doing big projects yourself, but at least you know exactly what’s going on. Makes me wish I had set up a webcam or something.

Consume, consume, consume

As I’ve mentioned before, I want a moratorium on the word consumer—both because it is disrespectful and because it builds bad thinking habits in companies that sell to “consumers.” Doc Searls’s experience with his local Internet providers today is a case in point:

The bottom line: I can replace my 3Mb/300Kb $49/month Cox home Internet account with a 3Mb/768Kb $29/month Verizon home Internet account. The business account won’t be so easy. First, I have to get a Verizon business phone account, the person on the phone said. Then I have to call a number to see if static IP addresses are available. The number “is experiencing extremely high call volume.” So I gave up.

In the course of talking, way too much, to Verizon and Cox representatives the last few days, it’s clear these kinds of companies simply cannot imagine a world where consumers also produce, where demand also supplies, where the Net is anything other than a new way to deliver the same old crap.

Least of all can they imagine that there is real business in real service to individuals working out of their homes.

It makes me think: First, where is the service offering for geeks? Second, how insidious is this C word that there are not even product offerings to meet the needs of real people for symmetric download/upload speeds? No, all “home users” (my other favorite condescending euphemism for real people) need to do is download other peoples’ stuff.

iTunes recovery

As noted on Monday I’ve been trying to rebuild my iTunes library after inadvertently deleting the central library index file. To date I’ve managed to recover detailed information on about 4700 tracks, or about a third of the library—and as about a third of the tracks are newly ripped and never played, I can reimport those from disk without worrying about losing playcount. That leaves another 4000 or so.

At this point I’m thinking that I’ll cut my losses and just reimport the music files and start rebuilding the playlists by hand. I’ve probably passed the point of diminshing returns by working with scraps of recovered Library XML files. But getting playcounts and ratings back for 4000 songs is better than nothing, for sure.

iTunes is 5 no longer

Almost forgot to mourn iTunes 5, which suffers the indignity of having the shortest major version number life in Apple History. I’m installing iTunes 6 right now, which comes 35 days after the launch of iTunes 5. It still features Scary Installer Pr0n—in fact, the only big change so far appears to be the addition of the Video category in the source list.

Video iPod, new iMac, and selling video through the iTunes store

Well, the rumors were true: Apple’s new iPod includes video support. Now that it’s here, it’s hard to see how it could have taken so long. After all, all full sized iPods now sport color screens and more hard drive capacity than my PowerBook G3 had, and it could play video.

The evolution, though, is still impressive: thinner than the original iPod, a claimed 20 hours of battery life (thought they would have learned not to boast about that), and up to 150 hours of video. Plus an included S-Video cable to play it back on the big screen.

The interesting part of the announcement is the sale of video through the iTunes Store (guess we can’t just call it the iTunes Music Store any more). Episodes of Desperate Housewives are available at $1.99 a pop, as are episodes of Lost (and supposedly others, though the landing page for TV shows doesn’t appear to be there yet).

Music videos will also be available for download, and in yet another example of the music industry’s craniorectal tendencies, they’ll also cost $1.99 a pop. Hmm, let me think: for my $1.99, I could get two songs, one four-minute music video, or 45 minutes of a TV program that I could theoretically Tivo and download to my iPod anyway. Hmm.

Update: Best blow by blow so far is Paul Boutin for Engadget. And how uncool is it that Front Row and the Apple Remote are only available (apparently) with an iMac, and otherwise only work with the iPod? I want that “ten-foot experience” with a Mini. Or for my PowerBook.

October is for antacids.

I was scanning the beer cooler at my local liquor store (which, because Arlington does not allow retail liquor, or beer and wine, sales, is in Lexington), looking for locally produced Märzen-style—okay, Oktoberfest style—beers, when it hit me: pissy weather aside, I actually like October.

This is a heck of a realization for me as there isn’t a whole lot right now that makes me really smile. But October is on the list: the weather gets cooler, you get to break out long sleeves (and tweed!) again, leaves start turning, and yes, there is good beer.

There is also Hell Night at the East Coast Grill. Last year the night left me impressed with the inventiveness of the punishingly hot cuisine. This time, I’m starting to pre-medicate a week early. Should be fun.

(Oh. And for the record? Otter Creek’s version of an Oktoberfest beer is really really good, as is the one from Berkshire Brewing Company.)

Home is where the contractors are

Lisa got stuck in the Logan radar mess this week; a quick day trip down to Richmond via National Airport turned into an extended travel trauma when her flight back to Boston was cancelled. Fortunately her flight was early enough—and she learned that it was cancelled early enough—that she was able to take advantage of the time to drive up to her parents for a day.

I’m looking forward to seeing her tonight when she gets in. I’m also envious, as she got a chance to be with our dogs, who are currently bunking in New Jersey while our bathroom renovations take place. (Aside: I never thought I would be the sort of pet owner who gets teary eyed—hell, occasionally bawls—when his dogs drive away. Don’t tell anyone.)

Demolition for the downstairs shower starts next week. I can’t wait. This will be the last set of major contractor projects (except for the replacement of our front door, which will necessitate a day’s worth of carpentry due to water and sill problems) for a while, and then we get our house back to ourselves again.

The Long Winters: Ultimatum

the long winters, ultimatum ep

It’s difficult for me to write an objective review of the new Long Winters EP, Ultimatum, because I can hardly bear to listen closely to the first track. It’s not that it’s bad—far from it—just wrenching. “The Commander Thinks Aloud,” which appeared in an electronically remixed form on Barsuk’s Future Soundtrack for America compilation, is a moving meditation on the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia from the point of view of the crew. It makes me think that John Roderick must have been doing the same thing I was that February morning in 2003: saying “no no no no no” to the radio and weeping for our future. The final coda, “The crew compartment’s breaking up,” is almost unbearable in its stately majesty.

The rest of the EP, coming two-plus years after the band’s sometimes rollicking, sometimes touching triumph When I Pretend to Fall, is consistent in gravity and musical excellence. The cover image, of falling sere leaves, is appropriate: this is autumnal music.

The melancholy of autumn is there in lyrics of the title cut, though it’s kind of a juvenile melancholy with echoes of Cummings and even Simon and Garfunkel: “No one can harness the rain/And I can make myself into rain/You’ll feel me on your cheek/And on your sleeve” is reminiscent of nothing so much as “Kathy’s Song.” The same echoes recur in “Delicate Hands,” which has one of the finer lines of regret I’ve heard in a pop song recently: “I want to feed you/butter-rum candy/But someone beat you/to me.”

The final two songs on the EP, live solo Roderick performances of “Ultimatum” and “Bride and Bridle” from When I Pretend to Fall, solidify the impression of a band in a more reflective place. The band has gone through a fairly tumultuous history in its five years, with an eight-member “emeritus” list on its official bio page (to be fair, many of them were touring members or producers only, and one—Sean Nelson—has his own band to look after. But Ultimatum makes the case that John Roderick in his own right is a substantial talent and that in the context of this band he can produce some genuinely moving stuff. A big impact from a short release. I’m looking forward to hearing the full-length, due out next year.

This review also published at Blogcritics.

PS: Shout out to the omnipresent Merlin Mann (of 5ives and 43 Folders fame), who also maintains the Long Winters web site. Small world, innit?