January 4, 2024 - Madison, WI
Happy new year! I hope this coming year treats you better than the last.
I just got back from Paris, France - not Paris, Texas, although I've been there in the last year, too. Paris is a city of many things: food, lights, love, dog poop, cigarettes, architecture, and museums. We visited several amazing museums while we were there, but one of the ones I was most excited about was the Cinematheque Francaise, a museum and cinema dedicated to the preservation and showing of films, often in their original 35mm format.
France is the birthplace of cinema to pretty much the same extent as the USA. Sure, the USA was pretty dominant in terms of media and cinema from the start, but many of the most groundbreaking filmmakers of all time are French.
Cinema is a form of complicit trickery where an audience knows that they are being duped by a projection of an image onto a wall. It has its roots in vaudeville theatre and illusionism as one might have seen in a circus in the 19th century. The Frenchman George Melies (pardon my omission of the accents in his last name) was one of the earliest pioneers of cinema, who took his experience of being a magician and used the developing medium of the moving image to create whimsical skits and stories. In the process he pioneered many of the tricks of the trade that are still used today.
His most famous work is A Trip to the Moon, which came out in 1902. Inspired by Jules Verne's writing, the film focuses on a group of scientists that look like wizards who ride in a capsule shot out of a cannon to the surface of the moon, where they do battle with the locals and take one of the moon-men back to Earth. There are plenty of special effects throughout the film that put special effects from even 30-40 years later to shame. What stands out most to me about this film and all of his films is the element of fun that permeates them. Melies, from his experience working as a magician, clearly understands how to captivate people and make them smile and wonder. Sure, the stories aren't all that interesting or complex by modern standards, but that's alright. The homemade feeling of the sets, the special effects, and the costumes makes them unique and charming.
The economics of film making have changed considerablely since the early days. Melies himself was somewhat of a victim of changing tides in filmmaking, going out of business less than two decades after the height of his popularity and living the rest of his life in relative poverty. He did experience a renewal of interest in his work within his lifetime, luckily, and was acknowledged as one of the men who created the language of cinematic storytelling.
Nowadays the technology needed to make a "movie" is cheaper than ever. Everyone has technology in their pocket that puts the technological wonders of 1902 to shame, from the perspective of image quality and fidelity. The only thing that has been lost is the magic. Computers make every visual experience possible and much cheaper, so that it's hard to appreciate the miracle that is the moving image, in even its most basic form. The fact that we can capture an accurate likeness of a human being moving and changing through time, store it and then play it in the future, crystalizing some aspect of their being in that moment, is amazing in its bare, unadorned state. That's why early viewers of moving images were so blown away by what they were seeing: they had never before seen realistic moving images that weren't a part of reality. So when Melies could make a human being disappear into a cloud of smoke, or project two versions of himself onto the same screen, it was captivating and interesting despite its relative simplicity in comparison to the special effects and CGI bonanzas of the Avatar movies. (The Cinematheque has a James Cameron exhibit right now, too. No hate.)
The best movies of all time are those that entertain, captivate, and expand a person's awareness of the world. They are movies that give an insight into a particular person or place and increase the viewer's empathy for the subject. Certainly there is a place for mindless entertainment, for fart jokes, shallow action movies, and tasteless shlock. Not everything somebody watches has to be some intellectual exercise. I just think that the most interesting and important movies are the ones that involve human stories, human labor, and human care. George Melies would sometimes color his films by hand, painting each individual frame with brushes. This makes the creation of the films become a story in itself. Each scene you see you wonder, how did he do that?
The ideal model for making movies, in my mind, is a bunch of independent makers who have local communities all invested in making entertainment for local audiences. The problem here is that it's a huge industry and colossal undertaking to make a good movie, so that means companies centralize the creation and distribution of entertainment due to consolidation of resources and talent. Nowadays, though, the distribution is decentralized and the whole industry is in turmoil. Theaters survived COVID-19 but I rarely go to one and remark at how full it is. Everyone watches media on their phones. The creation of films is still pretty centralized in certain companies, but the movie format itself is becoming a little more amorphous. Just like the limitations of the 33 rpm record defined the length and format of the rock and roll record, movies were defined by the roll of film, the theater system, and the tastes of the public. You paid for around two hours of entertainment and then you got out. Unless you were seeing a Martin Scorcese movie, in which case you paid for three hours of entertainment, developed a blood clot from sitting too long, and then stroked out. (At least he died doing what he loved, watching Joe Pesci stab people!)
When there is no longer that same ecosystem, and you can watch little clips whenever and wherever the feeling strikes you, and those clips are given to you by social media giants that use your emotions to keep you engaged so that you can be precisely advertised to and constantly convinced that the world is a scary, bleak, competitive nightmare, then the moving image becomes a lot more sinister than any movie villain ever was.
I suppose the same dilemma has existed throughout all of history: entertainment is a leisure activity, and creating entertainment takes free time and effort, so this means that the majority of people, given the choice, will consume media rather than create it. That certainly seems to be my choice, most of the time. I rarely come home after working and sit down and create something. Most of the time, I just want to put something on TV. But even the simple act of watching TV is better with company. I enjoy movies more when I have somebody else on the couch watching them with me. It's difficult to remain completely focused on a film for two hours without picking up my phone, unless there is another person there with me watching the same thing.
It's funny how these things work. When movies were invented and became popular, I'm sure there were people like me who thought that the medium spelled the death of culture. Reactionaries saw the negative implications of technology and panicked that their children would become inundated with images of violence and sex if they went to the picture show. Mass communication mediums always allow those in charge of the modes of distribution to sway the viewing audience. What scares me about the current modes of distribution is that they are so insulating from feedback from the outside world. Everyone has a personal stream of information that they see, and that adapts to their viewing habits, that for the most part is completely private and doesn't always receive feedback from the reality and community in which the person is actually embedded. Consequently, the person is a little less embedded in whatever reality they find themselves in. Their need for community gets synthetically met. Reality becomes less real, or at least less compelling. The problem isn't even that the media isn't being created by the watcher - its that there isn't even a buddy sitting next to you watching the same thing who could laugh with you or cry with you in reaction to a shared experience. While it's certainly good for people to have independent pursuits and interests, I just don't think it's a positive thing for every person to live in their own scrambled digital world and to silently, slowly lose the ability to create shared stories unmediated by devices and platforms fabricated by corporations to benefit whatever structures in power they see fit to create.
So I suppose I'm encouraging you to watch a movie with your friends. Or to MAKE a movie with your friends - it's never been easier to do. Or, heck, I'd be happy if you scribbled a drawing on a post it note and showed it to your dog. The ability to create stories is fundamental for human cooperation, and as George Melies showed over 100 years ago, it can be an act that lightens the load of living and brings people together in a SHARED fantasy. Losing that ability would mean a whole lot more than just losing the AMC theater at the mall down the road.
December 12, 2024 - Madison, WI
It's the time of year where my knuckles and fingertips begin to crack along the lines in my skin, protesting in the cold, dry weather. I've only just moved to Madison, but the one thing that is really impressive is the Madisonian's commitment to riding his/her bike around even when it's below freezing. The cold is just a fact of life up here, so you can either avoid living outside for around six months or you can accept it and gear up.
It seems like everybody and their brother is starting an Alternative Country band these days. I'm not sure what did it, but like every pop cultural phenomenon, there are always faint rumblings of the coming wave before it hits. I grew up resisting country music. I associated it with musical and lyrical unsophistication. I guess the thought pattern was, more words/chords == more better muzak?? I thought it was pretty cool to be a snob as a child.
I have come to believe, in my ripe old age, that it is possible to like nearly any genre of music as long as you spend enough time listening to it, and you have the appropriate cultural context. When I was young, I felt like country was the American simpleton's genre: the songs were about hard work, the joys and sorrows of drinking, and all of life's hardships and failures. I consequently would never put it on and listen to it, except to bash it. At that time, the music wasn't for me. I hadn't done any difficult work in my life, had seen relatively little adversity, and couldn't sympathize with people down bad, because I was a lucky fourteen year old in the suburbs.
I couldn't understand why people from the suburbs who had never been on a farm liked Luke Bryan when he was singing about tractors, but couldn't see the irony in my feeling justified for liking when Jimi Hendrix played "Hey Joe" despite the fact that I had never shot a lover for infidelity. I still think a lot of really popular country music is pretty soulless and commercial. The feeling of being pandered to raises my hackles, even more so today, where recommendation algorithms and advertisements are put to use by huge companies to classify and target people en masse. But just because something is popular doesn't mean that it is intrinsically bad. I find myself enjoying a lot of the really catchy "stadium" country music that comes out of Nashville and ends up on pop charts because it does sound good and has really catchy hooks. Morgan Wallen's "Seven Summers" was one of my most played songs of 2023, and I doubt it was because I wanted to listen to it ironically.
I think the path to country music enjoyment unknowingly began as soon as I started listening to rock music. Country is connected to Rock just as Jazz and Blues are connected to Rock. When I was young, I loved the Beatles. Their song "Rocky Raccoon" is a pastiche of American country music, and the Beatles listened to plenty of Carl Perkins, Elvis, and the rest of the Memphis country ilk. But the first time I explicitly started listening to music that was explicitly country was when I discovered Sturgill Simpson.
Sturgill Simpson released "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music", which was called "psychedelic country", around the time I was really heavy into the music of Tame Impala, in the mid-2010s. This was a golden period for "neo-psychedelic" music, and I thought that everything psychedelic was cool, because it was music that was explicitly about changing your perception of the world, perfect for the rapidly changing adolescent I was. So when Sturgill Simpson released something that applied that psychedelic label to country music, it was too inticing not to buy the CD. And once you buy the CD, that means it is going to play over and over again in your mom's Pearl White Toyota Prius, which means you're going to know every track start to finish. The sounds that once would have turned me away from his music became more comfortable and enjoyable.
Then, in 2020, one of my final years of college, I discovered John Prine. His terse couplets were deeply impactful to me at a time when I was feeling directionless in my life and overwhelmed by thoughts of all of the things I thought I should be and should have done. His music addresses the dark and fringe parts of life with remarkable empathy. He sings about old people, losers, and weirdos in a way that makes you feel like they're just as much a part of this weird, cockeyed life as everything else. With a hoarse, twangy voice, he made me understand that there was just as much dignity in being a mailman as there was in being a brain surgeon, as long as you were whatever imperfect thing you were with kindness and humor.
My Prine-binge pushed me down a long road of classic records, from the Flying Burrito Brothers, to the Byrd's "Sweetheart of the Rodeo", to Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline",Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Dwight Yoakam, and on and on. I began to see the connection between rock and country, and started to really value the songwriters behind the music, who in my estimation are some of the best songwriters of all time.
And now, modern artists like Post Malone, Waxahatchee, MJ Lenderman, Kacey Musgraves, Faye Webster, Beyonce, Charley Crockett, My Morning Jacket, Colter Wall, and everybody else you know seems to either have started adding country elements to their music, or have been playing country music for a long time and I'm just now putting it all together. While I can't say exactly why there has been such a resurgence of this type of music in the alternative and indie scene, I think part of it is a desire to have a piece of American culture reclaimed from some of the more regressive tendencies that have gained steam in the last ten years.
There is a big emphasis in this type of music on authenticity (and pedal steel, of course), which is at a premium these days when popular trends get inauthentically amplified. I certainly understand feeling alienated from elements of popular culture and desiring some type of participation in a cultural identity that doesn't feel reactionary or fake. A part of my identity is that I am an American, and I still want something in that identity to be proud of, because I'm sick of feeling ashamed of the political situation or how I feel American culture is changing in a negative way. And heck, maybe me listening to country is a lot like putting on cowboy boots and walking down Broadway in Nashville pretending like I grew up chasing outlaws on horseback through the great plains, but if the boot fits comfortably, and you don't use it to stomp on somebody else's toes, then what is the harm in wearing them for a little while?
December 11, 2024 - Madison, WI
Frank Sinatra's birthday is tomorrow. My mom told me a story about how Frank, who lived in Palm Springs and loved the desert sunrise, would drive around all night in his car and watch the sun come up in the morning. I like to imagine that he was blasting easy listening music in a long pink cadillac and drinking whiskey out of a high ball glass. Mind you, that was at a time when drinking and driving was legal and morally good, so it was fine for him to do that back then.
I'm up early and listening to 91.7, WSUM, the UW Madison community radio. The show is called "Under the Covers with Jake 'The Snake' Foster". Between every song he puts in little tags of random local people saying where they are from and that "This is Randy from Cross Plains, WI, and you're listening to Under the Covers with Jake the Snake Foster". I like that - there's no question where I am or who I am listening to. It's nice to wake up with good music and good coffee that I make poorly. Enough half and half can make any cup of joe acceptable. Thanks for making up for my lack of skill, cows.
Nona and I live right by a branch of the Madison Public Library, and we have no internet other than phone hotspots, which are never quite fast enough to do what you want. This means that we've been renting DVDs and Blu-ray disks (TM) for our evening entertainment. Like the properly middle aged couple we are, we started watching the show Yellowstone, with Kevin Costner. Ol' Kev' plays an old rancher who owns the largest ranch in the state of Montana, and is under attack from all of the neighboring property owners who are trying to ensure that the ranch falls out of his family line. It's a character drama with elements of action, nature documentary, and even scenes of full frontal nudity - fun for the whole family!
I know it makes me 85 years old but I like watching it. It's a revisionist western with elements of self awareness. The characters grapple with illness, changing tides of culture and power, technology, and the legacy of American imperialism. No character is purely good and clean. There are definitely some comically melodramatic moments, though. One character in particular constantly finds himself in situations where he is punching or shooting someone even though he doesn't really want to. Consequently, all of his screen time features close ups of him grimacing empathetically and then shooting someone. "Ope sorry let me just shoot ya in the face real quick, sorry". "Ope I'm just gonna punch you in the face about ten times real quick, sorry". That's good television, folks.
I went to the bike repair shop I volunteer at yesterday and started repairing a Schwinn bike. I'm not exactly sure what kind of bike it is, but it has a threadless headset, which isn't something that I am used to. I want to talk a little bike anatomy, to clear things up for myself. I've casually ridden bicycles for my entire life, but I don't know all of the names for the individual components. This makes it difficult for me when I go to repair bicycles and just end up pointing to different spots on the bike and saying "that thing".
To introduce the bicycle stem, I'll start with the bicycle wheel. The front bicycle wheel is connected to the handlebars through several components. On either side of the wheel there are the two blades of the bicycle fork that are joined together at the top by the bicycle fork crown. Directly above the bicycle fork crown is the steerer tube, a long tube which runs from the fork crown, through the head tube of the bicycle frame, up to the stem and the handlebars. It is this part of the bike, the stem and headset, that I am focusing on. The stem, also sometimes called a goose neck, connects the handlebars to the steering tube of the fork. The headset is a bearing assembly that sits in the head tube and allows the steerer tube of the fork to rotate within the head tube. The two different designs of stem are called a quill system or a threadless system.
The quill system is the standard historical stem design. They aren't really used by the industry anymore on sport bikes, but the first little bike that I repaired for Wheels for Winners featured a quill stem, so that's what I have (minimal) experience with. They are the standard on utility bikes, which are bicycles that are used primarily for transportation rather than for competition or sport. The quill stem requires that the steerer tube have threads that extend through the headset, but don't protrude up beyond the top of the headset. The quill stem then goes down the steerer tube and uses a wedge shaped nut and bolt or a cone-shaped expander nut and bolt to hold the stem in place inside of the steerer tube.
The "threadless" stem doesn't actually refer to whether or not the stem has threads on it, which is really confusing. It refers to the fact that the steerer tube does not have threads while using a threadless stem system. For a threadless design, the steerer tube of the fork protrudes above the headset, and the threadless stem clamps around the top of the steerer tube. There are also differences with the headset of a threadless design, but frankly I don't understand the minutia well enough to explain it.
Each design offers advantages. Threadless designs make it easier to change stems and also allow for lighter carbon fiber steerer tubes, which makes them the only option on very light carbon fiber bikes. They also prevent the internal binding that can occur with the wedge and cone bolts used by the quill stem. Quill stems offer fine adjustments of handlebar height without using spacer increments that are required with threadless designs. Many people, especially those that prefer the aesthetic look of older bicycles, like the smoother appearance of quill stems. Quill stems also offer the ability to remove the stem and handlebars from the bike without disrupting the headset assembly.
Sorry for the incredible amount of bicycle jargon without any visual help. For an in depth view of what I am talkin about, you can visit this page, where I got most of my information. Here's also someone else's discussion with regards to the different types of stems and their benefits and drawbacks.
I hope you have a great day.
December 5, 2024 - Madison, WI
I left Madison and it was warm (~40F), and now I've returned and it is very cold (~15F). Yesterday I drove a big box truck with some of my belongings across northern Indiana and Illinois up into Wisconsin. The drive is relatively relaxed across most of northern Indiana - there's nothing but farm fields and small towns - but by the time you hit Chicago roads get crowded.
It's always reassuring when you see forty different billboards for auto injury lawyers within a single two-mile stretch. At least if I were get be injured I know that Dumont, Sarkas, AND Bellweather have my back! Injury lawyers are either smiling and holding hammers, or standing with their arms crossed gently scowling at the camera. I think it would be cool to see these advertisements escalate, because everyone is used to the "lawyer-holding-hammer" bit. There's probably a hammer lawyer in every major metropolitan area at this point, so there isn't even a guarantee that you would show up to trial and your lawyer would be the only lawyer holding a sledgehammer. If a lawyer really wanted to make an impact, I think it would be wise for her billboard photo to be feature her posturing with a glock, or even sitting at the controls of a remote drone operating setup. "Call Robin Fisk, the one with the gun. 1-800-666-AR15".
Luckily I didn't have to make use of any of the billboards on account of traffic, but wind pushed around all of the high profile trucks on the road. The gusts muscled my loaded box truck side to side. Dried corn husks from the harvested fields were whipping across the highway, gently smashing into windshields and wheel wells like kamikazee paper airplanes. Any birds still migrating south gave up and decided that Elgin, IL was as good enough a place as any to sit with puffed up feathers and be cold.
Soon after sunset, I stopped around the outskirts of Madison at a gas station with my fuel tank nearly empty. The little display in the car had gone from "Range: 43 miles" to "Range: Stop playing with fire and get some gas". I stepped out of the truck and tried to put my coat on. It billowed out behind me like a sail. Had any of the receipts or small bits of paper that collect in my pockets over time fallen out, they would have just flown away into infinity. I wonder if it still counts as littering if the trash never touches the ground.
It was a relief to make it back safe and sound. Hot food and sparkling water waited for me in my apartment like some sort of great lakes oasis.
Ecoregion of the day: Ouachita Mountains
The Ouachita Mountains are marked as ecoregion 36 on the map above. I hadn't heard of these mountains before Nona and I drove through Arkansas on our way to Dallas and ended up breaking down in Hot Springs, AR for three days. Luckily, this region is incredibly beautiful. The Ouachitas, pronounced "WAH-chih-taw", are a part of the US Interior Highlands region, the highest area between the Appalachians and the Rockies other than some of the Texan ranges in the far south. The highest peak is Mount Magazine, at 2,753 feet. This might not seem like a lot compared to the towering Rockies, but hiking in the area will convince your lungs that the Ouachitas are indeed mountains. The mountains are heavily forested, and contain oak, hickory, and pine trees. One subrange of the Ouachita Mountains is called the Crystal Mountains, named for the high quality quartz which speckles the ground everywhere in the area. If you've ever had Mountain Valley spring water, the spring water in the green glass bottle, you've had water from the Ouachita mountains. Summers can be hot and dry, but the northern-facing slopes of some of the mountains remain moist enough to support unique aquatic and amphibious species even when most streams stop flowing in the hottest months. There is plenty of great hiking to be had in this area, and it's nowhere near as crowded as many areas of the country that are more well known to outdoor enthusiasts.
December 3, 2024 - Fort Wayne, IN
the following story is 70% true
There is a running gag in my family called the "Fort Wayne Moment". It could be rephrased as a "small town moment", because I imagine people from other places that are small(ish) and connected have similar experiences, but I'm from Fort Wayne, IN, so that's the kind of small town moment I have. A Fort Wayne moment is when something happens that reveals the incredible interconnection you have to the people around you in unexpected ways. You might meet someone at a bar, and then go to work and mention the interaction to a coworker and that coworker is the bar-goer's cousin. I'd tell that story to my family and my dad would invariably say "that's a fort wayne moment".
These moments happen in Fort Wayne, a city with nearly 300,000 people, with shocking regularity. This morning I woke up, had my coffee, and decided that I would go walking in my favorite place in town, Eagle Marsh. Eagle Marsh is a wetland preserve on the boundary between the great lakes watershed and the mississippi watershed. It's not Yosemite, but in Fort Wayne terms, it's very scenic. On the way to the marsh I turned on the radio and heard the NPR host talking about police issuing an arrest warrant for a man who had been illegally practicing dentistry under the name "Dr. Love". Apparently Mr. "Dr." Love had been masquerading as a dentist and performing various plein air dental cleanings, extractions, fillings and drillings out of a souped-up '96 chevrolet malibu. His patients didn't have any complaints with his work, in fact, many of his customers called him "an artist" and "a visionary", but the state board of dentistry doesn't take too kindly to practicing amateurs.
I showed up and walked around for a while through the grassland and oak savannahs that are in the area before turning around and heading back to my car. The path back took me by the water treatment plant located at the edge of the marsh. You usually smell the treatment plant before you see it. The treatment they use doesn't seem too effective at taking the poop smell out of the poop, but I'm told by prominent scientists that just as it's good to eat a wide variety of foods, it's also good to smell a wide variety of smells. Outside of the main buildings of the plant is a semi-trailer that contains a portable water-treating device that takes raw sewage in and rolls flattened brown chunks out the other end on a conveyer belt and empties into a dumpster. Apparently us Fort Wayniacs produce more waste than the station can deal with using their normal setup, so the company had to bring in mobile treatment units. This being near thanksgiving, the plant was working overtime
So, with senses distracted, I walked past the treatment plant towards my car. I crossed over a bridge containing one of many water-filled ditches that, this time of year, have frozen over except for the little holes a few stoic ducks make in the frigid, slowly encroaching surface. Suddenly all but one of the ducks took flight into the air. The only one that remained seemed to be fishing for something at the bottom. The duck's head was submerged and its feathered rump pointed up into the air. I waited for it to come back up to the surface and find itself alone.
Before it could resurface, a car door slammed, and I looked over and realized that there was a parked car on the other side of the foot bridge in the grass to the side of the paved trail. A man in an orange hunting beanie, thin white tank top, and red-plaid pajama pants got out of the car and started walking towards me casually. He stopped half way between me and his car.
"Hey brother," he said. "Got any hurt teeth?" He smiled, showing two perfect rows of white teeth and a single gold canine. Under his right eye was tattooed, in cursive, the word 'cavity' and his left eye the word 'free'. "I'll fix ya up right quick in the back of my ride. Got a little portable x-ray machine, dental hygenist, and everything." I politely declined and he shrugged amiably. "All good, dude. Don't forget to floss, big man!" He flicked me a little sample pack of Oral-B floss and it sailed through the air. I caught it, he nodded, and turned back to his car. A woman in the drivers seat had her shoes up on the dash and her nose in her phone, but looked up as the man got back in the car. She waved to me as the car revved to life and set off down the path towards Engle road.
Back at home, I walked into my dad's home office where he always keeps a radio running. The announcer was saying that Dr. Love had been seen south of town but had managed to evade law enforcement up to this point. I told my dad that I had just met him. Without averting his eyes from his laptop, my dad muttered "that's a fort wayne moment".
December 1, 2024 - Chicago, IL
Here I sit in the ORD airport, en route home from the holidays. My flight got delayed so I'm biding my time in the rotunda area to escape some of the crush of humanity down near the gates.
Airports are a kind of purgatory - everyone waiting, everyone looking for something to kill their boredom, their hunger, their headache. My time-passers/boredom-killers of choice are sugarfree gum (usually mint) and library books (usually mystery/thriller). When those stop working, I go to my spotify and flit from song to song. If I want to finish a song I have to force myself to sit through it. I just don't seem to be completely happy with whatever is playing at the time.
That said, I have been enjoying listening to bluegrass music recently. I found a bluegrass jam in Madison at a bar called the Muskellounge Bar, and have gone a few times and learned a lot about bluegrass music and the mandolin. I'm usually a guitar player, but picked up a mandolin about a year ago just for the heck of it. The mandolin is much more portable than the guitar, and I find it's just as fun. The bluegrass jams consist of people standing in a circle with different traditional instruments: guitars, dobros (slide guitars tuned to open tunings), fiddles, mandolins, stand-up basses, and banjos. The single most important instrument in the room seems to be the stand-up bass. When that guy walks into the jam, everyone is relieved. The bass is so low and so loud that it keeps the song stitched together rythmically and harmonically. We go around in a circle and call the songs, usually well known bluegrass standards, some instrumental, some with lyrics. If you don't know the song, it's okay, as most of the bluegrass songs are simple enough, with an A section, a B section, and no more than 6 chords (on the high end).
I could see how you could think that bluegrass songs are simple and repetitive, because a lot of bluegrass songs are simple and repetitive, much of the time. In a sense, that's the beauty of the genre: the songs are simple enough to be learned relatively quickly and passed along at impromptu jams where accuracy isn't paramount. Bluegrass is a social genre - the songs are designed to inspire dancing, singing, carrying on, and even crying. Many of the songs are about a river, a mountain range, or a woman. Usually, someone drowns in the river, pines for the mountain range they once called home, and laments the fact that the woman just up and left one day. Who needed her, anyways, he said through tears.
Nona and I lived in Asheville for a while. That area is one of the birthplaces of the genre, and the mountainous beauty of the region is inspiring to this day. Before internet, television, and radio, there wasn't much better entertainment than playing songs on the porch with all of your buddies from up in the holler. Sure, you didn't have shoes or very many teeth, but as long as the bow had some rosin on it and the guitar had most of its strings, you could have a fun night.
That communal, impromptu spirit is what makes music fun for me. Since the advent of recorded music, people judge the quality of homemade music too harshly. Not everyone can sound like Marvin Gaye, but everyone should feel like they are good enough to play a basic chord progression with a group of people and not be held to the standards of music that is recorded by professionals in very specific environments (and a whole lot of computerized help).
That isn't to say you shouldn't practice your scales or try to be better at whatever instrument you decide to play. It also doesn't give you the right to be the guy with the guitar at the party when nobody wants to hear you play. I've been guilty of that before and I'll be guilty of that again. I think I just believe that people do better when they are working together to make something in a group, and bluegrass is a genre that allows this with minimal equipment. Not everyone can sing lead at the same time, and it doesn't sound good if everyone tries to. The harmony of multiple voices working together is better than a bunch of michael jacksons trying to out-michael each other (four part sha-mon, hee-hee, and air thrust).
Ecoregion of the day: Southeastern Wisconsin Till Plains
If you're not familiar with the concept of a ecoregion, it's an area of land that is defined and classified by things like similar geology, animal species, weather patterns, and plant life. It's pretty similar to the concept of a biome or ecosystem. There are a whole bunch of them and you can look at different levels of granularity, from level I - least granular, to level IV - most granular. For my purposes, I'll look at level III ecoregions - not to granular, not too panoramic.
Here's a link to all of the level III ecoregions as a PDF put together by the EPA.
For today I'm gonna talk about ecoregion 53 - Southeastern Wisconsin Till plains. This is a region on the west side of lake Michigan reaching down into northern illinois. Madison, the capital of WI, is located in this region, as is Milwaukee. This area is largely flat and contains mostly cropland today. It's a transitional ecoregion where the hardwood forests of the areas west of the area transition to the tallgrass prairie of the south. Natural vegetation includes hardwoods like sugar maples, basswood, and oak of many kinds, as well as prairie vegetation. The Rock River is the main river that drains the area (shoutout Rockford, the second biggest city in Illinois). The soils in this area vary from sandy loam to clay, and there are a lot of glacial morraines, or areas where glaciers deposited rock and debris. Glaciers formed a lot of kettle lakes in this region, which are lakes that are formed when glaciers leave large chunks of "dead ice" (ice that has broken off of a glacial ice sheet and no longer moves) behind in "kettles", or depressions formed by retreating glaciers. The ice melts and poof, you've got yerself a lake. Between the kettles and the morraines, the topography can vary pretty widely, by midwestern standards. (Look, ma! A small hill! Wow!)
November 30, 2024 - Nashville, TN
Hello there. This is Robert Greene. Periodically I set up a blog, make about three poorly written posts, and then never use it again. This is just one of many of those setups.
I recently moved to Madison, WI, and have really been enjoying biking around the city. Biking feels like flying. I feel more free when I bike, like I don't have to follow any traffic laws and am impervious to physical harm. That said, I almost ran into a car door when the driver of a parked car opened his door when I was in the bike lane. The sudden stop probably wouldn't have felt amazing. I've been volunteering at a local organization called "Wheels for Winners". I've been doing this selfishly to learn more about bicycle repair, have access to great tools, and meet cool people. All for a good cause - works for me.
Moving to a new place has been awesome after a year of working on farms. It was one of the happiest years of my life. I met so many amazing people and learned a ton about farming, organic production, and physical labor generally. All the while, I got to work directly with my partner, Nona. You really learn whether or not you can make it work with someone when you both live and work with them every single day, and I feel confident when I say we can really work well together. She has strengths that I don't have, and vice versa (my list of proprietary strengths is certainly shorter than hers).
I've been working on a setup to do paper animation, using my phone as a camera. I made a cheapo stand out of 1/2 inch PVC pipe, and use a small LED drawing pad to light up the paper. I draw on the paper using sharpie and have a small piece of plastic between the paper and the led pad to make sure that my sharpie doesn't bleed through onto the drawing pad. I took a lot of inspiration for this setup from Michel Gondry's setup for hsi movie "Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?" which was a series of conversations that Michel had with Noam Chomsky and then animated. Here's a great look at his workflow from the film. It's been very time consuming, but I find that I can enter a flow state when I do the work.
A little clip of the animation
