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Answers in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
[Image: xkcd #936, on password strength. Click image to enlarge; see xkcd itself for the full six panels and the punchline.] From whiskey river: This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal. (Dag Hammarskjöld [source]) …and: Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more [...]
Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda“
[Image: the valley of the Rhondda] I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily [...]
Midweek Music Break: Loreena McKennitt, “Down by the Sally Gardens”
Loreena McKennitt seems to love anything which hitches the adjective Celtic to the noun music. She’s traveled the world to record music both Celtic and Celtic-like, often (even on brand-new songs) using instruments which might have been recognized 2,000 years ago across the whole range of the Celts’ distribution. She’s certainly traveled farther afield than many [...]
Midweek Music Break: Dominant Legs, “Make Time for the Boy”
From a group named “Dominant Legs,” what in the hell sort of music should we expect? Tina Turner in black leather, maybe? I can’t say I have a ready answer to the question. But it wouldn’t have been, for me, something like this: a Lynchian, sweetly blissed-out, dream-dancing, burbling-organ, saxophone-accented, group-sing throwback of a pop song: [...]
Midweek Music Break: Booker T. and the MGs, “Time Is Tight”
When people think of music in the 1960s-’70s, of soul music, they think automatically of the Motown record label. But there was a heck of a lot going on further south then, too, down in Memphis: the home of Stax Records. Originally Satellite Records, the company was forced to change its name in response to a [...]
It’s Right in Front of You
[Image: unretouched photograph of an anamorphically-painted building interior, by French artist George Rousse; I found it here. As suggested at that site, be sure to see the video about Rousse's "Durham (NC) project." And while you're at it, check out the similar but sometimes entire city-sized work of Swiss artist Felice Varini. I couldn't decide which artist's work to [...]
Midweek Music Break: James & Bobby Purify, “I’m Your Puppet”
So there was this front-page headline in the morning paper: Music legend Robert Dickey dies at age 72 Er, I thought; Who?!? I mean, I hardly know every (well, possibly any) music legend in town. But I’ve been here for almost 20 years and couldn’t recall the name at all. As it happens, Dickey — that’s [...]
Midweek Music Break: Erik Satie
Early in RAMH‘s history, a post here covered what I always think of as “thought music”: music to listen to while doing things other than music — specifically, things which require mental activity: writing, programming, art… — music, ideally, to stimulate thought. One of my favorite classical composers of thought music is Erik Satie. (He was [...]
