Month: August 2011

Grab bag: business round up

New mix: Hurricane Irene

Well, here we are again, in the middle of a storm. So far, knock wood, it’s been a lot of rain and very little wind, but this will be the day that Massachusetts really gets it. So I threw together some music to weather the hurricane by.

  1. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
  2. Rain In the Summertime – The Alarm (Eye of the Hurricane (Remastered))
  3. Goodnight Irene – Tom Waits (Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards)
  4. Florida Hurricane – St. Louis Jimmy (Chess Blues 1947-1952)
  5. Goodnight Irene – Johnny Cash (Sun Recordings)
  6. I Can’t Stand The Rain – Ann Peebles (The John Peel Singles Box)
  7. The Rain Song – Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin Remasters)
  8. Rain – The Beatles (Past Masters, Vol. 2)
  9. Have You Ever Seen The Rain? – Creedence Clearwater Revival (Pendulum)
  10. Devil Sent The Rain – Charlie Patton (Founder of the Delta Blues)
  11. In The Rain – The Dramatics (The Stax Story: Finger-Snappin’ Good [Disc 3])
  12. When It Rains, It Really Pours – Elvis Presley (The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Complete 50s Masters)
  13. Rain (Falling From The Skies) – Frank Sinatra (The Complete Capitol Singles Collection)
  14. Comes a Hurricane – Shannon Worrell (The Honey Guide)
  15. Irene – Lead Belly (Where Did You Sleep Last Night?)
  16. Ballet For A Rainy Day (2001 Digital Remaster) – XTC (Skylarking)
  17. Blowin’ In The Wind – Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
  18. Wild Is The Wind – Cat Power (The Covers Record)
  19. The Wind – PJ Harvey (Is This Desire?)
  20. Sauget Wind – Uncle Tupelo (Still Feel Gone)
  21. Rain Please Go Away – Alison Krauss (Lonely Runs Both Ways)
  22. Dry the Rain – The Beta Band (The Three EP’s)
  23. It Can’t Rain All the Time – Jane Siberry (City (collaborations))
  24. Goodnight Irene – Robert Cage (Can See What You’re Doing)

New mix: a piece of hope holding us together

End of summer is happy mix time. Now that I’m putting out only two mixes a year, it seems like one is downbeat and the other is happy. Lots of fun tunes in here, including a rare Shannon Worrell track that I had to pull off a 17 year old cassette tape.

  1. Moonlight In Glory – Moving Star Hall Singers (Sea Island Folk Festival)
  2. Sunflower – Low (Things We Lost In The Fire)
  3. Postcards from Italy – Beirut (Gulag Orkestar)
  4. The Ballad of Ronald Jeremy Hyatt – Justin Rosolino (The Leaves Are Right to Tremble – EP)
  5. Boy With a Coin – Iron & Wine (The Shepherd’s Dog)
  6. Lighthouse – Shannon Worrell (Shannon Worrell (EP))
  7. Lowdown – My Morning Jacket (At Dawn)
  8. You Can Have It All – Yo La Tengo (And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out)
  9. Hex – Neko Case (The Tigers Have Spoken)
  10. Home – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros (Up From Below (Deluxe Edition))
  11. Love And Anger – Kate Bush (The Sensual World )
  12. In Liverpool – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  13. Neither Heaven nor Space – Nada Surf (Let Go)
  14. My Back Pages – Bob Dylan (Another Side Of Bob Dylan)
  15. Begat Begat – Jane Siberry (Maria)
  16. Inside of Love – Nada Surf (Let Go)
  17. Give Up the Ghost – Radiohead (The King of Limbs)
  18. Polegnala e Todora – Bulgarian State Television Female Choir (Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares)

Grab bag: Hurricane Steve

Grab bag: experiments

Grab bag: Rimbaud, currency psychology, symbolic violence

Late August

Tomatosauce

Ah, late August. The temperatures are still high (well, high by Boston standards, anyway–growing up, 83° was more like a warm fall afternoon) but you can tell summer is getting to be a little long in the tooth.

For starters, the tomatoes are starting to come in. We only have a handful of tomatoes on the plants this time around; I have no idea why, except that we didn’t spend as much time with the plants this year. So we’re supplementing with the big boxes of seconds that are starting to show up at Wilson Farm and using those for our annual tomato sauce exercise. The process looks something like this photo set from last year, except this year we didn’t have a big crop of cherry tomatoes so I diced the big ones by hand instead of using the food processor. We make about a dozen to 20 quarts every year, and they last all through the winter and into the high summer if managed right, even given our relatively high pasta and pizza consumption. Case in point–we opened the last 2010 jar just last week.

So I’m making sauce. Instead of mowing the lawn (it can wait a day) and instead of napping while my son naps, which I might regret later. But right now it’s feeling like the right thing to do. Because sometimes you have to take a look at the future and say, I want to be ready.

Liberal business

  • What they’re “protecting” us from – Anil Dash
    “So, who is this man? He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3”, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.”Or, why claiming liberal values are bad for business is a complete crock.

    (tags: apple politics)

Earliest Virginia Glee Club concert program

I got a digital download the other day from the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. It contained what I’ve jokingly been calling my Historian’s Christmas present–high resolution scans of ten artifacts from the Glee Club’s archives, which have been donated to Special Collections over the years and have therefore been less accessible to Club. One of the items was of particular interest: the earliest known Glee Club concert program, dated December 1891.

Let’s put that in context for a second. This concert happened a mere 20 years after the Glee Club’s founding, and a few years before its first significant tours in 1893. It was before the authoring of the Good Old Song. It was before Thomas Jefferson’s original Rotunda burned to the ground. In fact, the concert was held in the Public Hall, which was the large auditorium in the Annex that was totally consumed by the fire and never rebuilt.

I had known that the concert program existed, because a scan from it was used to illustrate a library exhibit on American song. But that scan was only of the cover. The library digitized both sides for us, including the program and list of members. In doing so, it gave us one of our earliest full Glee Club rosters, and a rare glimpse at the repertoire performed back in the banjo & mandolin days.

Oh–I’ve also been able to do some mini-bios of the Club members listed as officers. See the articles on W. H. Sweeney, W. P. Shelton, W. S. Stuart, Charles L. DeMott, and O. W. Catchings. I particularly like the history on DeMott’s involvement with the founding of the Natural Bridge Appalachian Trail Club.