Tuesday, just like Greta Garbo

Wow, yesterday was only Monday. All of it. One of those days that seems to cram so much into it that you just know half the week went with it. It wasn't that the calendar was all that crammed, just ordinarily full. But there are busy days and then there are brain-busy days, and I think yesterday was one of the latter.

Today is Tuesday, that slip of a day-in-passing, the overlooked weekday. I'm going to make a concerted effort to dial today down and focus on things like clearing up the pending items in my inbox and to-do list. Don't call. Or, as Van Morrison says in Just like Greta Garbo:

If anybody asks you have you seen me
Please just tell them no
...

Well I guess I'm going A.W.O.L.
Disconnect my telephone
Just like Greta Garbo
I just want to be alone

Oh, it's sprinkling and cloudy again this morning. Yesterday the sun came through late in the day, and today has a chance of doing the same. Top up on the way in, top down on the way home. I can live with that.

Great soundtrack this morning! More songs fit into it, too, for whatever reason. Lightfoot is more than comfort food to my generation, he is an excellent songwriter and Carefree Highway is a good example. Madeleine Payroux's cover of Dance me to the end of love lead me to explore Leonard Cohen more deeply, for which I will be forever grateful. With her Billy Holiday-esque timing and languid vocal gait, Payroux is a fascinating singer and songwriter, and would be a favorite even if she hadn't lead me to re-discover Cohen.

Finally, there is the Guggenheim Grotto. If you have never checked out their music, I can't recommend doing so more strongly. There is no such thing as a "typical" GG tune, but today's number is as good a place to start as any. Dial it up in Pandora, sample it on iTunes or Amazon, listen through the whole album (The Universe Is Laughing) while you're at it. Good, as they say, stuff!

- Gordon Lightfoot: Carefree Highway
- Madeleine Payroux: Dance me to the end of love*
- The Bestles: Revolution
- Big Head Todd & The Monsters: Silvery Moon
- The Guggenheim Grotto: Wings and Feathers

*I use the capitalization convention of each artist/label when I list songs, rather than standardizing. Some capitalize every word, others just first words, and still others think they're e.e. cummings.

- Posted via Hermes.

It's wet out, therefore iPad

It's Monday again and it's raining again. However, the weekend afforded some great weather, especially Sunday. When Monday brings rain after a rare taste of sunshine in what has been a record-breaking cold and wet spring, he really does live down to his image as least popular kid on the playground. The forecast does call for some more sunshine this week, in between clouds and wet.

I missed posting a couple days last week, again for early morning meetings. This week looks mostly normal, so hopefully I can get back on track. Not that the world is any poorer for the lack of a couple days of this blog, but because one year of consistent daily recordings of the commute music was the reason I started this in the first place I still feel compelled to stick to the rules and goal.

Before I get to the music, a couple of recommendations for fellow iPadians. The first is really for iPhone 4 users: Camera+. Camera+ adds several enhancements to the iPhone and gives it the potential to take professional quality photos. It means that not only is the best camera the one you have with you (as goes the old saying), but the phone you have with you really may be your best camera. The ability to do some very powerful editing of each image in a lightbox before saving them is especially powerful when you want to get just the right result.

On the iPad, Photolog and Filterstorm combine to give you, first, an excellent way to create, manage, and upload albums of photos to Facebook, Flickr, Picassa, and other popular photo sharing sites, and second a strong set of image manipulation and adjustment tools to ensure each photo is as good as you can make it.

Finally, a non-photographic app, Venus for iPad. Venus is a solid Facebook client for the iPad. I've played with all of the FB clients available, and each has it's strength (well, some have very few strengths, to be honest!) but each one fails to something well. Some don't update reliably, other won't let you comment on posts, some don't see all entries, some won't let you download pictures, some are sloooooow, etc. It's early days yet, but this one appears to be quite solid as well as very nicely interfaced. It looks like you've opened a tabbed notebook and, while scrolling up and down on what looks like a page of an opened paperbound book is a little strange to the eyes, the layout works quite well for presenting and organizing all the things one does on FB.

This morning's music was very good, though it started off a bit like cartoon hour with a couple of silly tunes. Speaking of what could be silly but is actually nicely done: how often do you get to hear Robert Palmer doing a cover of a Gershwin tune?

The full playlist:

- The Beatles: Rocky Raccoon
- Bela Fleck & The Flecktones: Flight Of The Cosmic Hippo
- Franco de Vita: Mira Más Allá (Live)
- Robert Palmer: I Got Rhythm
- Peter Doherty: Palace of Bone


- Posted via Hermes.

Startlingly small world

Wednesday, wet, and... something. I'm not quite sure what, though. I have referred to Wednesday as Mr Malleable before, a lump of mid-week clay waiting to be shaped into either a half full or half empty whatever. Today feels that way. Still early in the day and it feels like it could go either way.

That being the case, and in the hopes that I can give the day a tip into the half-full side of being, I'm starting the day with comfort food for the ear, mind, and body: Sigur Rós and a gourd of mate.

To be honest, the iPod got dialed into my Sigur Rós playlist yesterday afternoon and I forgot to flip back to shuffle for the drive in. Had I thought about it, though, I probably would have left it on Sigur Rós anyway.

Funny how, through the magic of the shrunken world, Icelandic ambient rock and a South American beverage have, over time, become comfort food to someone living in the US. From geographic near-polar opposites, no less. Small world.

This morning, as I was pouring hot water into my gourd, a colleague popped into my office bright and early for a quick good morning chat. Us early birds are like that. For the first time he really noticed a painting I have hanging in my office, and it really pulled him up short. Art can do that, of course, but this was clearly a very deep reaction to the painting.

I have two paintings hanging side by side, intentionally grouped because, like South America and Iceland, they are such a compelling contrast:



The small image size here may not do either justice, but hopefully gives the flavor of them, at least. For my colleague, the one on the left took him back to a very different time and place, a housing project in Chicago. The image evoked by this painting was so similar to a building he had lived in growing up that he could even see which of the windows was his unit; he pointed it out on the painting. He then showed me the real place on the Web, now closed up and ready for demolition. The similarity was startling.

Both paintings are from my daughter, each painted a number of years ago. The one on the left was based on a smaller version she did about the time she was serving in City Year (Americorps), where she did a stint in.... wait for it... Chicago. Small world.

Today's full playlist:

- Gobbledigook
- Starálfur
- Go Do - Live
- Straumnes

- Posted via Hermes.

PS: I love how the iPad's adaptive on-screen keyboard makes typing a wide variety of accented characters so much easier than a traditional fixed keyboard. Just press and hold a vowel, for example, to get a whole pallet of accented versions of same to select from. Brilliant!

Misting, smokey, and then it's over

Tuesday and the return of the clouds. It looked touch and go as to whether I would get away keeping the top down on the drive in. In the end, I raised it and did get lightly misted on along the way. Nothing I wouldn't have survived top down, but why get wet at all if you don't have to? Especially on a Tuesday.

Busy morning, so I'll keep this to the musical point. Today's playlist was smokey vocal jazz (mostly) with Kurt Elling giving voice to the Bob Mintzer Big Band number. Elling's amazing vocal style often leaves me wondering if there are any fixed notes or if he is just completely extemporaneous in his vocal wanderings. ELO closed out the commute by declaring "It's Over" just I pulled into a parking spot.

Today's full play list:

- Rod Stewart: Someone to Watch Over Me
- Bob Mintzer Big Band: All Is Quiet
- Norah Jones: Come Away With Me
- ELO: It's Over


- Posted via Hermes.

Sun, bear, Bruce, wedding, and Morning Jacket

Monday after the beautiful weekend, and it's still top-down weather. The forecast gives us this one additional day of sunshine before assigning sun mixed with rain to us again. Makes for a beautiful commute and a strong desire to play hooky from work.

My commute started with a phone call to my cell phone just as I was pulling out of the driveway. A bear was was being tracked by police about a block or two from our campus. It was cornered in an abandoned shopping plaza and, by the time I got to campus, they had shot and killed it. So the campus is safe from bears, but the bear wasn't safe from us. For this end it was born?

It was a busy weekend, but in a fun sort of way. Saturday night was the Bruce Cockburn concert in Seattle.



My one or two even-occasional readers know that I'm a big fan of Bruce's music. Nobody provides such a rich mix of lyric depth and poetry, instrumental virtuoso, and wide-ranging musical styles and influences. If you missed the show and want to see pictures from the show (from the Vancouver and Victora BC shows) or listen to a bit of the concert from the CBC site: look and listen. The latter is from a concert in Banff, and the playlist is very similar, but not quite the same as we heard on Saturday.

Then a wedding on Sunday. The daughter of a good friend, a Producer for KING 5 News in Seattle, married another KING 5 Producer on board a moored ferry on Lake Washington. A beautiful day and a beautiful setting for a beautiful wedding. And, yes, several station celebrities were among the guests celebrating the union of their two employees.

My Morning Jacket just leased a new CD last week, so this morning's commute was limited to listening through the first few songs from the new disk (Circuital):

- Circuital
- Wonderful (The Way I Feel)
- Slow Slow Tune

From what I have heard so far, this is a welcome return to their usual sound (that last disk being an interesting departure) and songwriting. I occurred to me this morning that lead singer Jim James's voice reminds me of early Larry Norman. So far, good stuff.


- Posted via Hermes.

It's been a week, it's a wrap

Friday is back like he just ran around the block. What, Friday already again? How can this week possibly be gone?!? No complaints, mind you. The Popular Dude, harbinger of the weekend, is a most welcome sight right about now. A short week, but a very condensed week in the thickened-reduced down-dense-intense sense of the word. Dense enough to generate extra gravitational pull that whipsawed me from issue to issue with little regard for my already-crammed calendar.

So while this imminently-approaching weekend is on the obligatedly-busy side as well, at least it affords some little space to call my own. I sincerely hope so, this week particularly.

But lest that sounds too much like a complaint, know that the drive in this morning was refreshingly top-down, infinitely blue-sky capped, wind whistling through my hair (well, sweeping the top of my scalp, anyway), bird song cutting across the iPod-driven soundtrack, and sunglasses absolutely required. I treated myself to coffee from the favorite coffee kiosk (something I realized this morning I haven't done in some time), and have a solid block of unscheduled morning in which to get a bit caught up. Add a strong gourd of Barbacua mate to follow the coffee and things are really looking up.

Like the Gottfried Benn poem Tracing, the morning is mine to create, within reason:

So you faced the day: the font
without bubbles, dawdling
buildings and staircases; the houses
locked up, it was for you to create
the morning, early jasmine,
its yelps, its incipient aboriginal
stream—still without end—O those years!

Interesting soundtrack this morning. It ran quietly through the drive, since I didn't want to overpower the birds or shatter the relative quiet of the neighborhoods I passed through. What can you say about a short playlist that pits Stafrænn Hákon directly against Oscar Peterson, having kicked off with David Gray?

The full playlist:
- David Gray: Lead Me Upstairs
- Jump In The Water: Saint Teresa
- Stafrænn Hákon: Iodine (live Birmingham 2004)
- Oscar Peterson: Con Alma


- Posted via Hermes.

Purchasing: about those missing hours

Wednesday, good ol' Mr. Malleable, is back. So is the rain, though the forecast suggests today's weather may also be a bit of all things to all folks. It's this point in the holiday-shortened week that I most feel it. Everything I have planned to get done this week (ignoring for an unrealistic moment all the things that come flying unexpectedly at the week's scant few hours of productive time) should be half accomplished by noon today, and I can clearly see that's not going to be the case. Purchasing Dept: quick - order me up a couple of extra hours for today!

My mate gourd is settling back on it's haunches and producing the deep intense flavor that only comes from the first couple of fills of mate by the gourd. Maybe if I do a couple more gourds this morning I can compensate for those missing hours?

Great commute soundtrack again today. In a contrary spirit I upped the volume on So Quiet In Here because I love that song and that album. If I had a quickly accessible steering wheel button for directing the iPod to play the album the current song is from I would have tripped it.

Cher breezed through a sultry rendition of the Gershwin tune It Ain't Necessarily So, from a collection of Gershwin tunes covered by an very varied all-star cast. A fun rendition of a witty tune.

The full playlist:

- Van Morrison: So Quiet In Here
- Duke Ellington: Stompy Jones
- Cher: It Ain't Necessarily So
- Fountains Of Wayne: Baby I've Changed
- Blue Merle: Either Way It Goes

- Posted via Hermes.