Mavis Staples, Bob Dylan and Barack Obama

Saturday mornings often find me listening to NPR radio while I catch up on household bookkeeping and the like. A highlight during these sessions is hearing the news quiz show, "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me". This morning I had the unexpected pleasure of hearing Mavis Staples appear in the It's Not My Job guest slot. And, yes, she recounted her years-ago romance with Bob Dylan, including how Dylan asked Pop Staples for Mavis' hand in marriage. (I guess I thought that story was just a rumor back in the 60's -- apparently, Pops was good with it, but Mavis said no.)

Anyway, to help Kim remember Mavis and her role in the Staples Singers, I found this early vid of one of her terrific classic numbers, I'll Take You There:



And here is a later, much later, version (is that Dr. John on piano?):



Geez, Mavis Staples is a Chicago institution and she wasn't invited to the Obama inauguration?

Nico Muhly and The Reader

Just noticed that Nico Muhly (see previous article posting) composed the score for The Reader, the movie with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes that is to be released early 2009. An Apple-format download seems to be available now from iTunes:



Amazon is also taking pre-orders for January release of a CD soundtrack, but you can also download an MP3 album now.

I'm itching to hear it, but I would rather buy a high-res/high-fi version, so I will wait for awhile. Maybe I will actually see the film first! (With Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, it has to be pretty much a must-see for this household, anyway.)

In the meantime, you can visit the film's Web site where you can watch a trailer (on the splash page), and better yet, hear some of the music, if you set it to Audio On. I just let the music loop for a long time while I worked ...

And don't miss the pièce de résistance: The Nico Muhly Concert, under the Video and Stills menu link.

Let The Conversion Begin

Stepping outside the house to embark on my walk to work this morning, I simultaneously confronted the single-digit-temperature air and popped on the iPod. Up came, believe it or not, the title track from Laurie Anderson's seminal 1982 (or thereabouts) Big Science album.

The first line: "It's cold outside ..."

(Then I remembered that I had pulled some Laurie Anderson CDs from the shelf last night, while I was testing and tweaking and messing with my new "project", and had checked to see if any resided on the iPod.)

And it was even colder last night, reported variously as minus seven and minus ten. A good night to stay home, as Kim was off to the Elgin Opera House with Ivi, three of her musician friends and Grandma Janet, affording me an opportunity to initiate a long-overdue project -- creating a FLAC library of my CDs.

Why FLAC? Like MP3, it is a compression format, but unlike MP3, it is "lossless" and (theoretically) does not result in degraded sound quality.

I decided to use an old favorite, Exact Audio Copy, as it has been my most successful tool over the years when I wanted to rip CDs to WAVs and/or MP3s. The version of EAC on a couple of my computers is about five years old, so I downloaded the current -- v.099prebeta4; yes, it is still in some sort of beta state. Turns out that, although I had separately downloaded the latest FLAC codec package, this latest EAC comes rigged with an option to directly install an included FLAC.

EAC/FLAC then got installed in my MacBook under its Boot Camp partition running WinXP (sorry, no Mac or Linux version for EAC, but FLAC comes in all those flavors ... and I briefly considering running EAC under WINE on one of my Linux boxes). The MacBook became the weapon of choice, mostly for its portability and convenience, but also because it is definitely the best Windows machine I own.

SIDEBAR: While I have experienced Parallels, VMware Fusion and Crossover inside a Mac partition, I definitely prefer using a separate Boot Camp partition. Why? Because having to boot into Windows separately is not really an issue for me when most of the operations I do under Windows need to be running solo -- like ripping DVDs and CDs or rendering video -- without interference from other processes, anyway. Plus I get to maximize my access to all available RAM. And, like I said, Windows on an Intel Mac is likely to be the best Windows experience you will ever have in terms of stability and robustness of drivers; it sure has been for me.

EAC is slightly perplexing to set up, as it is a power user's dream with screens and screens of configuration options but lacks any formal documentation beyond a simple FAQ! However, you can piece together some guidance with the help of your friend, Google. FLAC's own site points at some HydrogenAudio documents, among others, which seemed to cover an earlier, somewhat different version of EAC, but they helped a bit. Before I go too far into this project, I will probably try to do some empirical testing of the results with varying EAC configurations.

Anyway, I did throw some Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir CDs at EAC for an initial go.

The results so far? My FLAC file sizes are running about 50 - 60% of the ripped WAV files. It looks like I will be able to store about three CDs-worth of tracks on a single 700MB CD disk. This probably translates into a few thousand CDs on a one terabyte hard drive. And today's prices for a 1TB drive at a supplier like Newegg or at my company's store, aren't much over $100. For the time being, I am moving the FLACs to my Linux NAS box, but I will probably build a newer, bigger one to serve up these files. And, of course, a mirror backup drive will also be in order.

I can't really distinguish between the WAVs and the FLACs as to sound quality. Haven't done any real rigorous testing yet. But, so far, they sound pretty darn good using a USB-connected HeadRoom BitNet head amp with my old Sennheisers. I have some Grado phones on the way, so we shall see how those work out. This FLAC business may entirely ruin me for MP3s (although I encode most of mine at bitrates of 256 or 320). Maybe I will need to pick up a larger capacity iPod and run it with RockBox so it will handle the FLAC format ... C'mon, Apple, your lossless format isn't the center of the universe.

What player software for the computers? The piece of software in use on all of my machines -- whether Windows, Linux or Mac -- is VLC, the open-source player from VideoLan.org. It will handle almost any format, audio AND video, you throw at it. I also like and use Winamp (latest version is around 5.5.4) on some of my Windows boxes. I find iTunes to be rather unpleasant, and now use it only for some podcast/videocast subscriptions. And I find Windows Media Player even less useful. My daughter is fond of Media Monkey, as am I -- it is a great freeware player of FLAC, et.al. and is a great substitute for iTunes. Songbird has been recommended to me as a good open-source, cross-platform music player/manager, so I am starting to spend some time with it as well.

Haven't yet figured out how I want to deal with making my FLACs accessible throughout the homestead (and playable through standalone audio systems, as well as just on computer). For now, everything will go on the Linux network-attached-storage (NAS) box, which can be seen by any computer in the house. I also have had a Hauppauge MediaMVP (bolted into my main stereo system) for a few years, but it only knows MP3 and WMA, audio-wise.

In (necessarily) keeping this as a poor man's solution, I will definitely not be investing in something like the McIntosh 750 music server ($6K) or even Sonos ($1K and up) or Olive Opus (just under $2K). Maybe I will look at the (now Logitech-owned) SqueezeBox Boom $300-$400?) for a bedroom adjunct to stream music to fall asleep with, wirelessly.

This project is going to take forever, probably, as EAC -- or at least the way I have it set up now -- is no speed demon. So I will be feeding the MacBook CDs as I watch the NewsHour, read the newspaper, eat my dinner, visit the bathroom, and so on. Will report progress and observations as warranted. That is, unless global climate change or the predictions of James Howard Kunstler haven't overtaken us by then.

Vanity Fair Photographs

John w. tells me about visiting LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) recently where he saw and highly recommends the Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008 exhibition. Through March 1, 2009. Look at the photographers represented: Cecil Beaton, Harry Benson, Julian Broad, Imogen Cunningham, Annie Leibovitz, Man Ray, Mary Ellen Mark, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen, Mario Testino, and Bruce Weber. Quite a list. Stop by if you are in L.A. in the next three months.

Reza: War and Peace

Just as I awoke this morning, NPR Radio was presenting an interview with Reza Deghati, exiled Iranian photojournalist. You can hear the interview, view a gallery of his work and learn about his latest book: Reza War and Peace: A Photographer's Journey at this NPR page.

Left is a photo by Gerard Rancinan of Rez and his wife, Rachel.

Running White Deer

About the time I was getting into photography, one of its leading lights was Paul Caponigro. In 1967, he captured an image of running white deer in Ireland, an image that has gone on to be one of his signature pieces. He and his son, John Paul -- widely-known in this era as an expert digital craftsman and teacher -- have collaborated on a new digital print of Paul's timeless image. You can find out more about it here. (Yes, I would buy a print for myself if I had the budget for it; no, I have nothing to personally gain by pointing you to this thing.)

Song of the Day

J.S. Bach's Chaccone in D Minor for Solo Violin, performed by Hilary Hahn

More and more, I am randomly shuffling with my iPod as I walk to work, letting it discover pieces I had almost forgotten. This one -- Bach's Chaconne for Solo Violin -- is shaping my entire day, and here is a YouTube version:


IMHO, this is one of the most incredible pieces for solo violin ever. When I get a little more time, I must hunt down performances by Yuhudi Menuhin, Pincas Zuckerman, et.al.

And go here to learn more about the wonderful Hilary herself ... http://www.hilaryhahn.com/

(I remember when Hans -- a gifted graphics designer and fellow music lover who worked for me a few years ago -- and I thought we heard a snippet in a then-new Radiohead piece that reminded us of something we had heard in Bach, so some research ensued -- and we found Hilary.)


Here is Itzak Perlman:




And Menuhin, this said to be from around 1935:

Song of the Day

Walking to work this morning, I set the iPod to random shuffle mode and out came the late-great Otis Redding and I've Been Loving You (Too Long ...), which I hadn't heard for-almost-ever. Here is a visual version, live at Monterey, from quite a few years ago:



Otis died in a plane crash around 1967, but he remains -- in my mind -- the absolute quintessential soul singer.

Farewell, Odetta

Today I learned that legendary folk singer Odetta died Tuesday at age 77. Hers were among the first folk records I started collecting in the late 50s or early 60s, along with Peter, Paul and Mary, et. al. I first saw her live, soon after I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-sixties, at the Troubadour on Hollywood Boulevard where she nearly blew me out of the house with her huge voice. It was my first time at that venue, and I was on my own, barely knowing a soul in L.A.

Odetta was especially noteworthy as a voice of the civil rights movement and influence on people like Bob Dylan (whom she famously covered) and Joan Baez. Let's try something-- Water Boy -- roughly from that period of time:




Sometime quite a bit later; I don't have the date for this take on The Midnight Special:



And very recently:



Odetta is said to have been scheduled to sing at Barack Obama's upcoming inauguration. A shame that won't be.

UPDATE 12/4/08:
Seems that NPR has a nice page with a wealth of interviews, music and information about Odetta.

Will She Run in 2012?

Arguably the best-known photographer of our times, Annie Liebovitz has done an upcoming Vanity Fair cover starring the best-known political impersonator of our times, Tina Fey. This sneak preview is making the rounds of the Internet: