Thursday  28 Jan 2016           comment?

BBC:	Why was Bowie so influential? (paraphrase).
Fripp:	He spoke on behalf of what is highest in all of us.

Most rock guitarists are thrashing around onstage using a very low‑grade energy and this energy comes from a very nasty quarter.

If I had children, I'd hope they grew sensitive to what makes music vital and true (or alternatively: barren and insincere). And I hope I would understand that this is inherently subjective and that it would be up to my kids to find their own way of connecting with music.

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Saturday  23 Jan 2016           1 comment

Friday  22 Jan 2016           comment?

Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash‑Sheikh, current Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, recently declared chess to be forbidden in Islam as it encourages gambling and is "a waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players". This is probably an advisory rather than an edict, but even so.

Ali al-Sistani of Iraq has a helpful Q&A page explaining that chess is wholly forbidden. But he says boxing is OK as long as there's no gambling and nobody gets hurt too bad.

Wednesday  20 Jan 2016           1 comment

I'm old enough to remember when rock and roll was shocking to adults. Had David Bowie died in the 1970s, I suspect that a few commentators would have said good riddance. But this is 2016, and even a well‑known conservative talk radio host admitted to liking a few of David Bowie's songs rather than calling him a corrupter of youth. Enough people like rock and roll that putting one of its icons down would alienate a good part of just about any audience.

Other obituaries I saw in various conservative media were respectful, although I saw comments from readers wondering whether Bowie got (the right) religion before he died so that he wouldn't be spending eternity you‑know‑where.

The most plainly uncomplimentary remarks I read about Bowie this month came from someone who admitted not knowing who he was—as if trying his damnedest to exemplify the message of Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective:

[This book's] animating purpose is to demonstrate that music is an art in progress, and that objections aimed at every musical innovator are all derived from the same psychological inhibition, which may be described as Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar.

Pretty much any type of criticism leveled against rock and roll—that it's satanic, trivial, corybantic, repetitious, too loud, ...—was once said about some piece of music now deemed classical.

About 45 years ago, an uncle of mine said that rock bands had outlandish names, e.g. The Doors. Well then; from the New York Musical Courier, October 27, 1897:

Rimsky-Korsakov—what a name! It suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka!

Tuesday  19 Jan 2016           comment?

Go to NASA's picture of the day,
appreciate the pic of the sand dune,
then find the link that says horizontally compressed
and click thereon.

Happy nineteenth, everyone.

Wednesday  13 Jan 2016           1 comment

Billboard, Mojave, CA. No further information available.

Monday  11 Jan 2016           4 comments

Sunday  10 Jan 2016           comment?

Over the past few days, I made a frame for (a print of) a friend's painting. I chose wood from a few limbs I got from a neighbor a while back that I mistakenly remembered as having come from a plum tree. The color of the wood resembled cherry, same genus as plum, making it easy to persist in my error. It didn't machine well but that's part of the game when trying out new types of wood. The frame came out OK.

Only after putting the frame together did I verify what I had. I compared a piece with bark still on it to plants in my neighbor's yard and to my horror saw that it was Elaeagnus angustifolia, a.k.a. Russian olive.

I first encountered Russian olive when I lived in Colorado in the 1980s. Landscapers liked to sell it, telling clients that it's well adapted to the climate. That is, they can find Russian olives growing in drainage ditches like the weeds they are. I usually don't blog about things I don't like, but I don't care for the form of Russian olive, nor the color of the foliage, nor the smell of the blossoms. As Dr. Seuss might put it: I do not like it in a yard, I do not like it in a field, I do not like it in an arboretum.

And yet it will soon hang on my wall: an exercise in unconditional love.

Monday  04 Jan 2016           comment?

I was talking with a friend this morning about whether a mallet head looked better with decorative grooves as shown in a pic I posted three weeks ago. My friend preferred no grooves and said that good decoration has its roots in something functional. I can't remember having heard hearing that sentiment expressed before—which doesn't mean I haven't, what with how fallible my memory is. In any case, it made me stop and think. My first inclination was to disagree; isn't ornament non‑functional by definition? But now that I've reflected on it a bit, I think my friend has a point.

Looking up the etymology of ornament led to ornate and order, from Latin ordo, "row, rank, series, arrangement". I'm not one to argue from etymology, but it's interesting to see that ornament derives not from caprice but rather from order.

Friday  01 Jan 2016           comment?

Back in the 1970s I wasn't optimistic about what the 21^st century would be like. That says more about my limited view of things as a teenager than it does about the world, but there was no shortage of discouraging trends at the time: cold war tensions, pollution, overpopulation, disco.

A lot has changed in the past 40 years but some things have changed less than I would've expected. I remember a friend saying that some day we'd reminisce about driving cars powered by internal combustion engines. We didn't put a timeline on it but I think we both expected that by, say, 2016 we'd be farther down the road of phasing out gas-powered piston engines than it has turned out.

The same friend wondered when we'd have a pocket-sized computer as powerful as an IBM 370. We expected it was just a matter of time—but neither of us imagined that when such a device appeared it would be called a telephone.

Some aspects of the 1970s seem quaint now. People still calculated with slide rules. On the other hand, men walked on the moon and you could fly across the Atlantic in 3½ hours.

Happy New Year, everyone.