Just stumbled across this one. A fascinating site it is. Among other things, I learn that Captain America was fighting the Nazis at least a year before the United States entered World War II.
Back in the 70s, in my SPARC days (more about that sometime), I worked with a cartoonist, Rich, who was a Hanna-Barbera refugee. In his spare time, he was creating comics and turned me on to some really obscure stuff, mostly politically-oriented. I will have to dig that out sometime. Also a note to myself to search (in my infamous basement/garage storage spaces) for my copy of the allegedly first comic book created entirely on a Macintosh. Done in the mid-80s, what was it -- Shatter or something like that? While I am at it, I also should resurrect my old photo-based comic strip, done to celebrate the birth of my son. Watch this space.
There is some controversy swirling about in photography circles concerning the Callie Shell work (see The Big Picture, Again post of 11/11/08). Some believe it is clearly inspired, if not a direct rip-off (particularly, Shell's Whistle-Stop Tour piece), of photographer Paul Fusco's 1968 work on the RFK Funeral Train. Judge for yourself.
Revisit Callie Shell's work in a Time photo essay (Time.com has a number of other great photo essays worth a long look) on the Obama campaign, including this great view of the Obamas watching Bruce Springsteen perform:
Luciana Lopez, pop music critic for The Oregonian newspaper, declares this to be "Tango Week". Visit her blog for daily postings this week of some great tango MP3s you can hear online, plus lots of tango lore. (Not a bad blog to follow anytime for tracking with pop music of any stripe, too!)
Many, many years have passed since I seriously tried learning to play the piano, and what I did learn never exceeded a pretty primitive level. But that was when, as a child, I first heard the music of J.S. Bach, and that fascination stuck. You may recall that I considered Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier a leading candidate for my "desert island top ten" (Top Ten?). Plus my previous remembrances of my aspiring classical-pianist-roommate Michael, whose piano (Cello and Beyond) in our front room inspired me to wander through the pages of his collection of those Preludes & Fugues (which explore every major and minor key), slowly picking out the notes (but only when I was comfortably alone in the house!).
David Stabler is the classical music critic for The Oregonian (and he is one critic I always look forward to reading). Today's Sunday edition carries an article by Stabler, describing his year-long project to learn each of the 48 preludes and fugues that make up the Well-Tempered Clavier, after his years of absence from professional piano performance. You can follow his progress on his blog, which is also a terrific source of information about all manner of Things Classical.
Stabler has a great description of a Bach fugue:
I love how fugues start with the grain of an idea and a second strand joins in and then a third, and it gets bigger and begins rolling, gaining momentum, adding density, largeness -- always largeness with Bach -- until it's unstoppable. Listening to a fugue is something else entirely, like trying to track simultaneous conversations at a cocktail party. Bits and pieces drift in and out of earshot.
While we are at it, let's listen to the ubiquitous C Major Prelude No. 1 from Book 1, this performance attributed to the ever-controversial late Glenn Gould (something that is so wonderful about the Preludes & Fugues is how strikingly varied they can sound in the hands of different interpreters):
Probably should be doing the associated Fugue as well, but this post could go on forever, as there is so much to hear and compare and savor. Maybe I will do more along these lines in a future post on the Preludes & Fugues. In the meantime, do check out David Stabler.
My friend John passes on a link to an amazing post at DesignObserver. Thanks, John, for pointing this out and helping me discover the very wonderful DesignObserver.
They may roll their eyes now, but I am hoping that someday my kids will come to wonder what interests their dad and whether some of his notions might be worth exploring after all.
I sure as heck don't know much about music or art or culture, but I do increasingly find that music, especially, is almost as important as eating and sleeping in how I get through each day. I just want to share this with Nik and Ivi, and if anyone else wants to listen in, welcome! (And one of these days, I might get my photo blog and sites reworked for more of this kind of thing.)
So there you have it -- a highly-biased (mostly) music appreciation course for my kids.
(btw ... most of the snippets of music presented herein are lo-fi, found wherever, often recorded under very unfavorable circumstances and may be almost unlistenable. However, we hope that your interest will be sharpened just enough to seek out proper recordings or performances for the Real Deal ...)
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