Author: Tim Jarrett

Venturing through the slipstream

Doom & Gloom from the Tomb: “Astral Weeks,” Van Morrison, Aquarius Theater, Boston, Massachusetts, May 19, 1972. With the impending release of Ryan Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, finding a live performance of any of the songs by Van in Boston is an unexpected treat, even if it’s a few years after the event. But this performance is doubly a treat: peak Saint Dominic’s Preview-era Van Morrison, with much of the hazy adventure of the original performance supplemented by a forthrightness and confidence (and horn section) characteristic of the latter record. A fun listen.

Jefferson, the gourmand

I keep thinking about Jefferson and being afraid that I’ll forget something about him, so I’m posting these thoughts as I come to them. If you’re not a doggy person, you may want to check back in a few days.

From the time he came home, Jefferson made it clear that he belonged to the Jarrett family: by his propensity for naps, his heroic snoring, and most of all by his appetite for food. A few weeks after we brought him home, we were shaking down our newly installed oven in our Kirkland house, cooking a turkey for Christmas dinner, and he sat in front of the oven door and watched. Just watched. With a concentration bordering on the unshakeable, he sat in front of that oven door and took in the smells coming from it until he could no longer stand it.

That’s when he would start growling. And blowing out air in frustration (see the “fuffing” in the video above). And eventually, full-on barking at the oven.

The whole family could tell when I was cooking breakfast for the dogs—especially toward the end of Jeffy’s life, when a persistent canine digestive problem had shifted us to feeding him on home cooked ground pork or turkey and rice. He would stay upstairs with Lisa until he could smell the food cooking, and then he would head down the stairs (something he rarely did under his own power; as a doggy of leisure, he preferred to be carried) and sit under the kitchen table and watch me cook, usually at around 6:15am. And then as the meat started to brown, he would start barking at the food. And it wouldn’t stop until his plate hit the floor.

Jeffy would eat anything. And he would always try to steal his sister’s food. In his younger days, he would simply wait til she wasn’t paying attention and then voom on over and start wolfing it down. As his joints started giving him problems, he would move more subtly and slowly—or as subtle as a slightly rotund Bichon with arthritis can be.

I knew that we were in trouble with him when his fabled appetite finally started failing. We now know that he was suffering from a slow moving progressive kidney disease that impaired his digestion and generally made his life hellish, but it wasn’t until the last few weeks that it became a roll of the dice whether Jeffy would eat dinner (or breakfast). In those weeks he got to enjoy the full range of food left to him: poached salmon, ground pork, turkey and beef, grilled flank steak, pressure cooked and roasted turkey. I like to think that wherever he is now, he’s eating heartily.

Creature of love

On December 4, 2003, we brought home our second Bichon puppy, Jefferson. Today it’s time to say goodbye to him.

Before Jefferson and his sister and littermate Joy joined our family, I had never known dogs. I was always terrified of them as kids: the boundless energy and jumping, the sharp teeth, the barking. These puppies were an entirely different experience. They had boundless energy—Jefferson could bound through the grass like his legs were springs—but they also would curl up and go to sleep on our laps, next to us on the sofa, at our feet. They weren’t the dirty yard dogs of my childhood memories; they were fluffy and white and wagged their tails anytime they thought they could get some attention (or food). In fact, they seemed to be powered by love.

At the other end of Jefferson’s life, I know this to be true. Tens of thousands of years ago, the first dog decided to make a bargain, to give up independent life and settle as part of a human family. I always assumed the benefits were a more stable life and access to the food the humans would procure. But I think the real benefit was more mysterious and deeper than that. Somehow, I think, that first dog got part of our soul, a part that was made of pure love.

And these creatures of love have been bound to us since. They love unconditionally and incessantly, even when sick; even when old and in pain.  They trust us to care for them, to share joy with them, to feed them and bathe them (albeit reluctantly). And they trust us with their lives.

Today we made that last decision for Jefferson. His pains and hurts were too grievous for him, and for us, and it was time for him to suffer no more. And time for us to honor our end of the bargain, because now we will suffer too and mourn. And I hope, in time, be glad that this creature of love was part of our lives.

Reckoning with Jim Crow

Cavalier Daily: Sullivan announces commission focused on UVa’s history with racial segregation. Clearly President Sullivan isn’t completely playing the lame duck. I am grateful that the University of Virginia continues its commitment to exploring its original sins, and recognizes that those don’t stop with slavery. Other notes in UVA Today.

While the reckoning is long overdue at UVa, it’s worth noting that it isn’t the only university coming to grips with its history in this regard, and may even be ahead of some of its northern colleagues. As an MIT alum, I got an email from the president of the institute yesterday discussing MIT founder (and former UVA professor) George Barton Rogers’s slave-owning history, which is discussed in a Boston Globe article today. The fact that L. Rafael Reif could say “Quite frankly, it was shocking to me” and that he is still “reeling” simply means he, and the Institute, haven’t been paying attention.

Making history. Or at least transcribing it

Boston Globe: Boston Public Library asks for help in transcribing abolitionist letters. William Lloyd Garrison’s letters are among the more frequently consulted collections in the Boston Public Library; this project seeks to make them accessible and searchable over the web. This is a rare opportunity, in this world of Google Books and OCR, to help to digitize an asset the old fashioned way. You can sign up to help at antislaverymanuscripts.org. The effort uses the new-to-me Zooniverse platform, which enforces not just crowd sourcing but also crowd-correction: no transcription is accepted unless three volunteers provide the same transcription.

I did a bit of book transcription when I had my first Internet-facing job in 1994, as an undergraduate in the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia (now absorbed into the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities), but most of what I worked on was marking up and correcting texts transcribed by volunteers at Project Gutenberg. Crowdsourcing digitization goes way back.

Song of the day: Coralie Clément, “Bye bye beauté”

There are some songs where my attraction to the music is clear and immediate; others drift in over the transom.

I first found Coralie Clément‘s song “Bye bye beauté” in a cover version by Nada Surf, on their 2010 covers album If I Had a Hi-Fi. After I found I couldn’t get the song out of my head, I finally went looking for the album. The music (written by Clément’s brother Benjamin Biolay) simmers and builds; her voice is above it, breathy but intense.

Lesson learned

I’ve been slowly working my way through digitizing a bunch of records and finally finished one I picked up last year when I was visiting my parents in Asheville. (Thanks to the awesome Harvest Records.)

There’s a lot to be said for finding bootleg releases of bands you love — they can be great documents of moments in the band’s history that don’t appear in official releases. There’s also a lot to be said for getting records instead of digital downloads, between the tangible artifact and the often warmer sound. But I’m not sure there’s much to be said for getting vinyl of bootleg recordings from the late 1960s.

The Velvet Underground boot pictured above is a two record set recorded in 1968, between The Velvet Underground and Loaded. The Doug Yule version of  the band is in full effect here, with John Cale’s drones replaced with the choogling multiple guitar work that characterizes both the official releases from this period (“What Goes On”) and some of the often-anthologized but never-on-official-LP release songs (“I Can’t Stand It”). The band is in good shape here. But the recording isn’t. Our bootlegger was standing too close to some of the speakers for some songs, or Lou’s vocals weren’t high enough in the mix, or something, and it’s hard to listen to the performance from start to finish as a result. I should have just looked for a download of the thing instead.

The Virginia Glee Club in World War II, part 2

This is a continuation of a post from earlier this week.

I’ve finished an index of Virginia Glee Club members who gave their lives in World War II. Here are a few more stories:

Mason Williams was shot down over Munich at the end of 1944.

John McCown died fighting in the mountains near Florence and is buried there.

John Gordon died serving in the cavalry in Europe.

Moss Plunkett was killed in action in New Guinea in 1943.

Louis Smith died two months before V-J Day, somewhere in the Pacific Theatre.

Alfred Marshall Luttrell, like Robert Gamble and Edmund Van Valkenburg, was killed in action, though we know nothing further about his death. 

In addition to the casualties, a further ninety-eight Glee Club alumni are known to have served in the war.

 

The Virginia Glee Club in World War II, part 1

Rotunda memorial tablet for UVA students killed in World War II. Photo courtesy Andrew Breen

As part of my ongoing work on the history of the Virginia Glee Club, I started researching the lives of Club members who became casualties of World War II. With some help from fellow fossil Andrew Breen, who thoughtfully photographed the Rotunda memorial tablet for me, I’ve been able to fill in a few additional names of Glee Club alums who gave their lives in service. This work is ongoing; I have no doubt I’ll find more than the seven I’ve found thus far.

It’s fascinating to me to learn about the particulars of the heroism of these young men. Of the seven I know about so far, five died in action overseas, but two died in accidents in training or at Stateside bases. One, Edwin Robson Nelson, died a prisoner aboard a Japanese ship in the Philippines. Another, Bruce H. Bode, suffered engine failure in his small plane while taking off in France, and changed course to avoid crashing into a backyard occupied by children playing, knowing that he would destabilize his aircraft and almost certainly die as a result. William Noland Berkeley Jr. landed in France six weeks after D-Day and was killed in action in an ambush a month later. Robert Gamble and Edmund Van Valkenburg were killed in action, though we know nothing further about their deaths. Ralph Chandler‘s plane disappeared while on a flight to the USMC base at El Toro, California, and Fielding Mercer died while Stateside in Pensacola, Florida.

The variety of ways in which young men gave their lives to save their country during this war is both inspiring and daunting. I’ll post more information as I get it.

Retro gaming emulation: SheepShaver

I’ve written about SheepShaver a few times on the blog, but generally in passing. Today seems like a good day to acknowledge this software for the miracle it is.

Computers are simultaneously the most advanced and the most fragile thing humanity has invented. There’s no guarantee that a piece of software more than a few years old will actually still work (well, there’s no guarantee that any software will actually work, but there we are). And yet, a German programmer has created an emulation environment that actually works and runs classic Mac OS software.

The latest version has a weird crash on my late-2016 MacBook Pro, but setting the memory allocation to 512MB seems to fix that. So far, I’ve successfully played Lode Runner, Abuse, the Ambrosia shareware apps, Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, and various CD-ROM titles (the latter on my older MacBook Pro at home, which still has an optical drive). Oh, and Reagan’s Watching (above), which I dimly remembered being called SimReagan and which turns out to be slightly less funny, but still topical, all these years later.

Weekend entertainment: Super Mario HTML5

I started my kids on Super Mario Brothers, which we own in emulation on the Wii (the only game console I own). I’m still trying to teach my son which way to hold the Wiimote to play the game, but my daughter is pretty conversant already with the game. So I can already tell I need to practice if I want to stay ahead of them.

Super Mario HTML5 looks like a pretty good way to do that while I’m away from the Wii. The gameplay is pretty close, at least for the two levels I’ve played so far, with the exception that the sky and ground expand to fill the browser window.

Bandcamp find: Yussef Kamaal

Increasingly my new music hunting has been on Bandcamp, where I’ve found some amazing music just by browsing and sampling. Other than Grand Banks (of course), it’s been fantastic for getting archival records, out-of-print Jim O’Rourke, and new jazz.

An especially rich vein has been jazz from London groups. I first stumbled across Ill Considered, by saxophonist Idris Rahman, late last year. Last weekend I went back to the site and discovered Brownswood Recordings and Yussef Kamaal. The latter, a group featuring Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu) on keys and Yussef Dayes on drums along with an assortment of session musicians, make experimental groove-based jazz-funk that wouldn’t have been out of place in Herbie Hancock’s early to mid 1970s discography—except for the hip-hop inflected drums, a common thread in the Brownswood recordings I’ve heard, and in fact in most of the really exciting 21st century jazz I’ve found.

Infuriatingly, Yussef Kamaal were one of the musical groups caught up in President Trump’s travel ban. Denied entry to the United States in March, they missed the opportunity to perform at this year’s SXSW.

The debut album from Yussef Kamaal, Black Focus, is engaging and rewarding, and a fun listen on a snowy day like today. Recommended. I’m also enjoying the live sets by the group on Youtube, including the group’s very first show, the Boiler Room session.