Author and artist Maira Kalman writes a monthly blog for the New York Times called "And The Pursuit of Happiness"—I did not know this till I found this month's entry linked from elsewhere in LJ, but I'm glad I do now. This month's installment is titled Back to the Land and comments on how we eat and what some people are doing to improve how we eat. I can think of a few people who might well be interested. It's thought-provoking and the layout is quirky, almost a children's-book style but clearly for grown-ups.

I'm going to tonight's Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert with Dave (who's sleeping in the other room, and he might be a bit put-out when I go wake him up in a couple of minutes...). The program is called Kalichstein Plays Mozart, featuring pianist Joseph Kalichstein in Mozart's Piano Concerto #27. The program also includes Bach's Toccata and Fugue, as scored by Leopold Stokowski for, if I'm not mistaken, Fantasia, along with Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass and two Ravel pieces, Pavane for a Dead Princess and La Valse. Leonard Slatkin, the DSO's music director, was scheduled to lead the performance, but he had a small heart attack while in Europe a month or so ago and is resting on advice of his doctors and a guest conductor will be on the podium. Can't promise I'll have a concert review tomorrow, but I'm expecting a good concert.

In other recent news, I did not go shopping yesterday, continuing my streak of ignoring the insanity of Black Friday. Mom cooked Dave and me a tasty Thanksgiving dinner, even after she did most of the dinner we had at my house on Sunday. (Fortunately, unlike the dinner on Sunday, no one went into labor the next day, which would've been somewhat surprising for all of us.) Non-turkey dinners have included a night of Mexican and a night of Indian. No hamburgers for me until at least Monday, although a part of our concert tradition includes a chocolate shake from McDonald's on the way home (mmmmmmmm...).

My nephew and his wife now have a second child, reinforcing my status as a great-uncle. The original due date was November 26, which astute Americans will recognize is Thanksgiving Day. So, we had a turkey dinner at my house this past Sunday. That went well in a tasty way. Mrs. Nephew went into labor the next morning bright and early. As my nephew said, at 6:15 he was awakened by his wife saying "I don't know if my water broke or ... oops my water broke." So off to the hospital they went, and around six hours later little Kathryn Marie was born. I took my mom to go visit last night, and I did get pictures, but ... well, she's still so new, she looks kinda scrunched, or maybe she's just clenching her eyes shut wishing she was back in that nice warm wet place she was in before.

It's totally amazing that a little tiny newborn turns out OK, that it all tends to work most of the time.

Discovered a new web comic today. It's called Subnormality, with the subtitle "Comix with too many words since 1997." It does have a lot of words, but they're interesting words. All you weird people should read the November 11, 2009 comic, especially if you feel a little insecure or bummed about your weirdness.

It's optional to comment and tell me which panel of weirdness you identified with.

Actually if you go up to the viruscomix.com top level, there's a lot of other stuff worth reading and seeing, too.

I'm wearing a watch today. I almost never do, and haven't for at least a decade. One could say that I'm choosing to not be a slave to time, that as a free and creative person I will not abide by what the watch tells me to do. I will not be oppressed! But the truth is, I don't wear a watch because I am hardly ever far from a clock, whether it's on the wall or on my computer screen. I try to not watch the clocks, but it's hard to avoid knowing what time it is these days anywhere one goes. Even my cell phone has a time read-out, which I use frequently.

The other reason I haven't been wearing a watch much is, somehow I've lost not one but two favorite watches sometime in the last decade. They were both comfortable to wear, easy to read, somewhat outdoorsy-looking, and almost embarassingly basic—just analog time and date. It bugs me that I can't find them, but it has been long enough that I should just buy a new watch. I'm wearing the watch that got me through high school, but it works and is rather conservative stylistically (so I'm not embarassed by youthful timepiece indiscretions). The one flaw is the metal watchband tended to irritate my skin, especially in summers. I think I can handle it for one autumnal day, though.

The reason I'm wearing a watch is that I'm hosting the AJ's Music Cafe Tuesday open mic again tonight. Much thanks to jjfmi for asking me to fill in again, while he searches for his lost voice. OK, he knows where it is, and he's actually resting it. I suggested that he could point at performers when it's their turn, but he came up with the idea of having a substitute instead. That works, too.

Here at Songdog Radio Land, sometimes affectionately known as "Where old, cheap tech goes to die*," I've dug up a stack of Polaroid prints from the late 80s and 90s, which led me to unearth my old Polaroid cameras. The older one on the left, a OneStep that took SX-70 film, still had a pack in it, and I could occasionally get it to spit out a photo today, or what would be a photo if an image had registered on the film. I think this one had stopped working reliably long ago, which led me to buy the one on the right, a OneStep Closeup that took 600 film. Near as I can tell it would still work, but I'd have to buy film. Since Polaroid film is a rare and endangered species, it's very expensive now, even more so than in its heyday. I don't think I'll be finding out its operational status anytime soon. Anyway, I have one of those newfangled digital cameras now, and the film for them is really cheap. (I dunno if it's ironic that I used a digital camera to take a photo of my Polaroids, or just Alanis thinks it is.)

But even though Polaroids were more expensive shot-by-shot, and the cameras were low in features (mine don't have auto-timers, for example), and the images were kind of limited in resolution and tend to color-shift over time... they were still fun. I spent a lot of time in the late 80s and 90s trying to get them to give me photos I wanted, and I had some successes. Most of them I can't share with with most people *giggle* but here's one of the last good shots, done in the time-honored style of holding the camera out at arm's length.



Polaroid is still around, only now they make digital cameras, but at least some of them will print a photo for you right out of the camera, which is pretty nifty, actually. There's also a campaign to keep old-style Polaroid around called SavePolaroid.com.

* or, at least, sit on a shelf and collect dust for years and years.

I know, you were probably just as surprised as I was that anyone would ever let me host an open mic in this town again, after that one post. But I was asked to fill in at last night's event at AJ's Music Cafe (thanks, jjfmi), and I went and it was actually pretty cool. Sure, most of the issues I complained about two weeks ago were still there, but they seemed smaller this time—were actually smaller, in some cases. Plus, I didn't go in thinking this would be The Perfect Open Mic Night (tm, pat.pend.), which left me room to be pleasantly surprised, and I was. There seems to be a turnover in the roster of regulars going on, and it's bringing in people and styles of music I haven't seen in years of open miking. It was a lot of work, and a bit chaotic in a couple of spots, but it worked out well in the end.

I opened the night, as is the host's duty (so the first performer doesn't have to deal with a cold stage), and played "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." That's at least the 25th year I've played Gordon Lightfoot's magnum opus to commemorate the events of November 10, 1975.

The biggest misgiving I had was that my back wouldn't hold up, and I did get awful tired and hurty, but a heating pad when I got home helped a lot. I should have gotten a heating pad decades ago.

When I was a kid, I looked forward to the days when telephones would sound really good. I don't know what I really expected, maybe that the voice at the other end of the line would sound as good as FM radio or even better. That to me was the benchmark of "better." (Maybe there'd even be picturephones.) So imagine my dismay when the 21st century arrives, and phones aren't "better", they're just smaller, more portable, and do more things than a Swiss army knife. Sonically they're an absolute mess; when the signal doesn't cut out completely, the voice is usually muffled, and don't even get me started about the one-second delay in a digital-to-digtal phone call that only leaves me stuttering like a fool.

My problem, here, is that I had only one definition of better, ignoring all the other properties that might make one decide a thing is better than another thing. Wired magazine explored the subject in their September issue with an article titled "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine." Their main example was the Flip video camera, which is very stripped down, delivering a fraction of the features a "mainstream" video camera does. Yet the Flip is wildly popular and very useful for those who want to quickly shoot a video and get it on their YouTube page. The article also holds up the .mp3 as an example. All these years one might assume the goal was to get the best sound possible, but many people—probably most, actually—are perfectly happy to have a huge collection of songs in relatively low-resolution .mp3 format, because they can take them anywhere and organize them how they want. Even now that computer memory and processing power is ridiculously cheap and available, listeners find it's not essential to have huge, uncompressed audio files.

The article gives many examples where "good enough" is perfectly fine. I think there are many other examples the article could have included, because really this trend has been going on for several decades now. USA Today is hardly the New York Times as far as in-depth journalistic quality goes, but it's everywhere and it's eyecatching and it tells the news quickly to those who want it quick. That's why it survives while other papers who were trying to be the NYT struggled and either changed or died.

I don't really like this, because I always aspired to some platonic vision of Quality, even if I was unlikely to obtain it. But, to be realistic, I'm never going to shoot an award-winning film; I just want to make goofy little videos from time to time. Why not have something cheap and easy like a Flip? If my aspirations and skills ever merit it, the good stuff is out there should I need those tools. As long as the good-enough stuff doesn't crowd out the good stuff completely, it's cool.

I'd still like a better-sounding phone, though.

When last we checked, Mom and I were in metro Louisville visiting cousins. It was a fun trip, except for the part where my one cousin was so sick from bronchitis and maybe from flu. After we were home we learned she went to the hospital either Sunday or Monday (though she was supposed to be released either today or tomorrow).

Oh, and the part where my back decided to ratchet up the suffering in my life. My usual back problem seems to have become sciatica, so now I have the ever-lovely shooting pain down my right leg too. I would wish this on my worst enemy, but only after careful thought and reading the Geneva Convention. The pain made driving home on Monday a bit of an ordeal, especially the part of the trip where we were stuck in a three-mile backup between Cincinnati and Dayton due to a traffic wreck.

I'm not making this sound like a very good trip, am I? But it really was good; we got to spend time with family, I got to spend time with Dave, and the weather was sunny and seasonably warm almost all weekend.

I got home Monday night, struggled through work on Tuesday, and made an appointment with the doctor this morning, which marked four days out of the last six where I had to get up more than an hour before usual. Ouch. But it was worth it, especially today because I got a shot for my back and it helped a lot. I also got X-rays but any help from them would be longer-term, I suppose. I've had a bad back since approximately 1981, and maybe it's time to find out what's really wrong with it. Maybe.

I'm in Louisville with my mom—well, more specifically I'm in Indiana with Dave and Mom is in Louisville with one of my cousins and her husband, but soon I'll be over there too (just waiting for a phone call and directions). The drive down was easy enough, because we managed to skirt the huge storm system with all the rain until the very end, although we had a strong headwind for most of the trip. It was 80 degrees in Cincinnati and 81 in Louisville yesterday, temperatures I don't think will be seen again in Detroit till at least May.

The bad news today is, one of my other cousins here is sick with a fever today, so she won't be able to go to dinner tonight. Since we came to her house last night, it's not hard to wonder whether she was sick enough to be a carrier last night, churlish as that thought might be. I'm going to try to not worry about that, because worrying will only spoil things at this point.

Besides, I'm doing enough worrying already, trying to figure out how to keep three cousins, one spouse of a cousin, a mother, and a partner happy, as if they're not capable of keeping themselves happy. When I step back, I'm kind of amazed that (1) I'm as whacked out as I am, and (2) that I'm even mentioning it in LJ. Well, maybe I don't have a lot else to write about, so that explains point 2.

... OK, got the call telling me where to go. So everything will be cool and fun tonight. Yes. Now all I have to do is not run over any trick-or-treaters on the way there. That could be awkward.

In case you're wondering why I'm not writing much here in LJ, it's because I'm having a hard time coming up with things to write that aren't negative and whiny. But let's do something negative and whiny. ( Let's start with open mics )

I was at AJ's Cafe in Ferndale watching the open mic (for I had not called in, and the sign-up list filled up, but they need audience too), when I noticed I had missed a call on my cell phone. It had been Trish from Trixie's Coffee, inviting me there for what was probably their last open mic night. So I apologized to jjfmi and headed across town, where I stayed and eventually played. Emotionally I was pretty much flat until I got halfway through my second song, but it wasn't the song that got me shaky as much as trying to decide what I would play next. I came close to playing the Beatles' "In My Life," since that's the last song I played at Gotham City Cafe's second and (so far) last farewell show. But that would've been really hard to get through. Luckily someone requested a song of mine that's really sad but not to me (somehow), so I did that.

I'll feel bad about Trixie's closing. And it's worth pointing out that they're still hoping something can be arranged, extension on the bills or a benefactor or eventual reopening down the road. But for now it looks like their last day open will be Sunday, and that'll be sad. But I have to admit I'm possibly projecting my still slightly festering feelings over the demise of Gotham nine years ago. It's not that I'd wish they'd open Gotham again, because it wouldn't be the same, anyway, after all this time. But I do miss the life and times of Gotham, especially the mid- to late-1990s.

I will miss the people, though. Gotta find a way to stay in touch. Some of them, I will run into at other musical venues, I'm sure.

Anyway, in the department of very small silver linings, it does simplify my decision making as to which open mic to go to on Tuesday nights, since Trixie's and AJ's both held open mic on the same night. (Only once have I ever played both of them. It's hard to do on a weeknight.) That's more than outweighed by losing a regular performing venue; most of my shows in the last few years have been at Trixie's.

Change ... bah humbug.

Dave sent me a link to a long New York Times magazine article on Pandora.com and the Music Genome Project, The Song Decoders. You'll need a lot of time to read it, but it's a fascinating article. The founder of the project and Pandora, Tim Westergren, is my hero for doing something using actual humans—actual trained musicians in many genres, y'know, experts— that everyone else would let either happen by itself (e.g. indexing of websites using keywords) or "crowdsourcing" (e.g., Last.fm and so many others). The underlying philosophy is that what other people like is not the most important factor in identifying new music one might like. It could be starting point, maybe, but other people just don't know everything, y'know? They know what they like, but sometimes that's not terribly relevant. If your mission is to discover new music that appeals to you, the opinions of the crowd would only lead you to stuff you already know and connections that have been made countless times already. Meanwhile, if you can get people together to classify recordings according to dozens of criteria, then use powerful computing technology to explore the resulting web of connections... well, I believe it works.

When I first learned of the Music Genome Project, it was one of those few times I actually thought "Wouldn't it be GREAT to work there?"

Westergren is hosting a "town hall" on Pandora in metro Detroit tonight. I was tempted to go, but I doubt I'll get out of work in time.

This is one of those photos that I've fought with over the years, trying to figure out how best to present it. I just decided to do it today and get it done with, so I cropped it mostly square and just went with it.

It's a little detail out of a waterfall, just slightly more than a rapids really, in a river in the Adirondacks. I don't exactly remember the year, but I think it was fall 1991. I was hiking there with the Ott Lake Rambler. I do remember it was pretty cold at times (a lot like it has been this October, really), and that it was really pretty, and the time spent with the Rambler talking as we hiked was rewarding.


I've been posting a lot of photos to my Flickr account this weekend. They've mostly been from my DeviantArt account; now all the DA photos are on Flickr. DA has had consistent issues with ads being hijacked by worms. Though I haven't encountered a problem this weekend, my antivirus program had to block a baddie from that website the previous two weekends. I may be abandoning DA as a result. I doubt they'll miss me there, to be honest. I haven't been involved in any of the community resources there in the 2+ years I've been there.

You may wish to take heed: If I do quit DA, at some point I'll post some haiku here.

Tonight (that's Friday, Oct. 16), Jo Serrapere is having her final CD release party for her new disk Love Going South at the Cadieux Cafe in Detroit. I have this CD and it's maybe the best local CD I own; the production is outstanding and the songs are finely honed works of art, performed by a group of Ann Arbor and Detroit's best musicians. She'll be performing with her band the Willie Dunns.

The Cadieux Cafe is a great place to see local music. You may also have seen it on the Food Network show No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain; video clips are displayed on the Cadieux's website.

Saturday night (Oct. 17), Mama's Coffeehouse (at the Birmingham Unitarian Church) is hosting a benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which will be kind of a commemoration of two area musicians who passed away recently, Denise Marie Stein and Pamela Campau. The musical guests include Stewart Francke, Josh White Jr, Matt Watroba and Floyd King & the Bushwackers (Denise played with the Bushwackers). I think the place will be packed, and for a good reason too.

Last week, Detroit's smooth jazz station became a top-40 station. Today I learned that our second country station became a top-40 station—excuse me, a "Rhythmic AC" station (AC=Adult Contemporary, I guess). So in the department of drum-machine squealy girl autotuned music we've gone from 1 to 3 outlets, at least.

So if anyone asks why most of the stations I listen to have call signs that begin with a C, that's why. Seems like the only stations doing anything different anymore are the ones located in Windsor. There's 89X, the modern rock station; 93.9 The River, kind of a AAA station; CJAM, the University of Windsor's student station (which just moved from 91.5 to 99.1), which I can barely get; and of course the CBC. (I have to say that 93.9 The River is playing way too much classic rock these days, unfortunately.)

OK, there are the public radio stations. If only they weren't all just beginning pledge drives....

A side note: I finally switched the car radio preset button I've had for 96.3. It has been a few years since it was a cool station, so I decided to replace it with the our FM sports station. Yeah, I know, but I was listening to baseball and hockey games more often than I was listening to the just-barely-beyond-Disney-pop music on the other one.

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* Yes, I know Canadian Thanksgiving was Monday. I'm running a little behind here. Or maybe I'm 4 weeks early. I dunno.

I just got a letter from my prescription drug insurance company, saying that their new primary method for filling maintenance scrips -- e.g. metformin and simvastatin -- will be by mail order through them. In fact, though I may choose to have the first and second filling of the next prescription done otherwise, they will not pay for the third unless I get it by mail order (and, presumably, this will continue thereafter). So, goodbye to my long-term pharmacy CVS, except for those rare instances where I need something like a sinus med. I won't even be able to have my doctor's office fill the script, and they just built a spiffy little pharmacy for that purpose.

I am so happy to have private health insurance so that the government is not telling me how to spend my health care dollars or with whom. One of the arguments by opponents of single-payer health care is that citizens wouldn't be able to choose their own doctor, and by extension other health care personnel (like, say, pharmacists). Well, why suffer through the government doing that, when private industry can do that just as well. Don't you feel more capitalist now, citizen?

Follow-up on my Kalevala post a few weeks ago: Last weekend I visited John K. King Books North in Ferndale, and came away with, among other things, an Everyman's Library edition of the Kalevala, as translated by William Forsell Kirby. The edition I bought, two cute little volumes (smaller than a mass market paperback), was printed in 1936 and originally published in 1907. Hey, it's an old text, and I didn't need a 2009 printing... especially since the price was nice.

Old bookstores can be special places. They're like mini-temples to all the books that have been published since Gutenberg made it all possible with his invention. Granted, few of them hold books that date back five centuries, but some, like John King's, have a nice selection of books from the 1800s and early 1900s, along with a ton of contemporary used books. Plus, they frequently have cats. I made the acquaintance of a gray beastie when it meowed at me from near the back room. It readily let me skritch it and give attention due. Picture a cat in a Borders or Barnes & Noble; I bet you can't do it.

Among the other books I picked up, pretty much by accident, was a used copy of No Plot? No Problem!, the book by the founder of National Novel Writing Month. I've read the first half of it, but can't read the second half until I either decide to do NaNoWriMo, in which case I would read one chapter per week as November goes (each chapter is a pep talk keyed to the likely mental state of the writers that week), or I decide to not do it at all, in which case I can read what I want. I've been tempted by it for years now, but haven't really tried it, and I can't say I will this year, either, but it's still intriguing.

I've been completely obsessed with the new Ken Burns documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which has been running on PBS nightly since Sunday. This has been a pretty good week for this obsession, because the only thing I had to miss was going to an open mic on Tuesday, and I'd been to one for something like six weeks in a row so the world was probably glad for the break anyway. Detroit Public Television is running National Parks at 8 p.m. and then repeating it at 10 p.m. and 2:30 a.m., which makes them pretty obsessed with it too. But it's beautifully shot—ok, they had Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, Denali and Mt. Rainer to work with, how could it not be?—and full of geeky historical detail related in an engaging way. The soundtrack is infectious, and one guitar piece, "Sligo Creek" by Al Petteway, has been a constant earworm for over a month (since they used it in the promo pieces).

The show makes me want to go to a national park, any park, I don't care. It's been a long time and I'm overdue. One of the consistent themes is how people like John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen Mather (the first director of the National Park Service) and many others find that the parks heal their spirit and makes them whole. I know what they mean, and I haven't even been to the big showy western parks yet. Here's my whole list:

• Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Michigan
  
• Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota (was a National Monument first time I was there)
  
• Badlands National Park, South Dakota
  
• Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota (but only briefly)
  
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee & North Carolina
  
• Keweenaw National Historical Park, Michigan (but before designation as such)
  
• Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, Kentucky/Virginia/Tennessee
  
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Montana
  
• Mount Rushmore National Monument, South Dakota
  
• White Sands National Monument, New Mexico
  
• Home Of Franklin D Roosevelt National Historic Site (Hyde Park), New York

Which national parks have YOU been to? Non-USians and their parks NOT excluded.

Didn't realize FDR's home would be on the list....

THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH

People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species. Edward Carr tracks some down ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009 (Intelligent Life seems to be related to The Economist.)

I always thought being able to know or do a lot of different things was Good. Apparently, it's a waning phenomenon. Much the pity, if only because synthesizing from several sources tends to give us big new advancements.