Category Archives: All

Latest night ever!

Posted on by jqr

Eyes bleary from lack of sleep and mouth acrid from stale coffee, I
check in with my faithful readership. I don’t know how I got myself
roped into working the graveyard shift here at the Emotional Trauma
Center and Whine Ward. It’s been refreshingly quiet and the phone has
not rung since I got here at 10:30 p.m. Jason, tonight’s able
assistant, and the pet mouse sit in the front room, buying motorcycle
helmets online.

 It seems like a long time since I went biking this afternoon in the
warmer weather. I actually stripped down to short-sleeves for the
first time in about three weeks and was rewarded with a good hustling
pace, making 18 mph on my pair of seven-mile loops. Unfortunately for
me, the fickle wind shifted direction between the first loop and the
second. On my first loop, I was cycling in the doctrinally correct
manner, pushing against the wind on the out leg and reaping the
benefit of the tailwind on the return leg. That created a nice reverse
split, where the back half was faster than the front half.

 On my second trip around, I noticed myself daydreaming a little bit
about the book I was reading (Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories)
instead of really pushing hard, and a couple minutes later at the far
western extent of the loop, I checked my time and saw that though I
hadn’t pushed too hard, I had still beaten my corresponding split time
on the first lap. Of course, the return leg was a doozy because I was
pedaling into the wind. Takeaway lesson from that is: if it feels too
easy, it probably is and you should push more.

 On that last doomed leg, however, I discovered something new: an extra
(fourth) gear. Not really a gear, as if I had an automatic
transmission instead of two leggy-pegs, but a metaphorical gear. First
gear is just pushing the pedals along, second gear drops the elbows to
relax the arms and lower the upper body while the legs start to move
the pedals in circles, both pushing down and lifting up (I have found
that not overlubricating the chain is actually a pretty good way to
determine this because I can hear the ruff-ruff of the mostly pushing
stroke, as opposed to the smoother circular stroke sound). Third gear
involves pushing the ischial tuberosities back off the end of the
saddle, which moves the fulcrum of my femurs slightly more distal,
like choking up on a baseball bat, shortening the pedal stroke. This
new fourth gear, which came upon me as unexpectedly as a power-up in a
video game, involves the same position as third gear except for a
slight extra bend forward and just more pedal strokes, more quickly. I
wonder if I’ll be able to get to it again.

Sory Kandia Kouyate

Posted on by jqr

Many readers know that I am a huge Sory Kandia Kouyate fan, and have
been ever since I first listened to “Souaressi” on the Syliphone 40th
Anniversary compilation. I’m pretty excited, therefore, to have
discovered another collection of his available on emusic a month or so
ago: L’épopée du mandingue, or the Mandeng Era. You can grab a
copy yourself with your own emusic subscription here.
 
What’s even more exciting about this one is that I recognize several
of the song titles: I have other versions of “Massana Cisse,” “Keme
Bourema,” “Toutou Diarra,” and “Duga” in the sonoteca already,
so I can look forward to some exciting comparative listening.
 
The whole griot-song oeuvre really is such a source of joy and
creative energy to me, and has been for many, many years.
 
My thoughts on balafonist El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyate
 
Picture is one of my many thiebou-dienn photos, from Dedeao’s party on Hart St in February 2008.

Tune-Yards, “Sunlight”

Posted on by jqr

This song has pretty much everything tossed in, as if it was some kind
of whirling food processor of a pop-song. There’s a rock-solid drum
beat, the girl’s vocal, the bass drops in at just the right time to
make the grove swing. Then the chorus pops out, like the girl from the
cake in “Some Like It Hot,”
 
“I could be the sunlight in your eyes/couldn’t I?”
 
The singer (Merrill Garbus, a proud Vermont product, evidently) must
have listened to lots of Brigitte Fontaine while making this record.
MG has exactly the same balance between threat and vulnerability as
BF, but sings more lightly .
 
Is that a car alarm sound in the background of the second chorus, and
a symphonic string section coming in around the bridge, or what? Plus
the disco-like breaks here and there, where the whole song is reduced
to a single note, a single instrument, a single pulse or beat. But you
don’t need to wait for those moments to come up, at any moment, like
some kind of hologram, each individual instrument or drum contains its
own solitary, perfected nature; I could spend hours just listening to
the decay of the hi-hat.
 
Obtain your own copy here.

Quote for the commonplace book 002

Posted on by jqr

“Julia was wrong; it wasn’t not having a car that had unmanned
him. It was the money. Real men had to earn a hard crust. They had to
labor at the coal face, both real and metaphorical. They didn’t spend
their days filling up their iPods with sad country songs and feeding
apples to French donkeys.”

 What’s nice about this quote from Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn
is that she nicely inverts traditional definitions of masculinity as
outward-looking and action-oriented. Clearly, the protagonist
(Jackson) is concerned about masculinity, but doesn’t the author make
it seem as if by obsessing about it as he mopes around Edinburgh he’s
admitting that he doesn’t really have a clue about what makes a man,
except for the single datum that whatever it is, it’s not what he’s
doing.

 When I read a quote like this, uttered by a protagonist who is
spending the first few chapters of the book mulling over his personal
history while his artsy actor girlfriend rehearses her show, I begin
to suspect that the book will entail the protagonist’s discovery of
new azimuths on which he may express his masculinity or that he will
move on to discovering some other kind of virtue, like a different
lodestar. Sadly, I’m not sure the book is really moving in that
direction, leaving the promise of this quote suspended, like a fresh
set of washed linens on the line outside an abandoned house in the
country.

Jackie Mittoo vs. James Bond theme

Posted on by jqr

Everyone who hears the version of the James Bond theme by (former
Skatalite) Jackie Mittoo & the Soul Brothers probably has the same
fleeting impression that I did just now on hearing it again: wouldn’t
it be great if the movies had the same kind of grungy, two-tone energy
that the recording has?

 Probably not; something has to remain shiny and airbrushed in order
for everyone to have a good comparison to the ordinary run of rusty,
grimy, mildewed, just plain chaotic things. I had some good pictures
of rust out on Staten Island to include with this, but in the search
for them, this one of huitlacoche from El Paisa on Myrtle Ave (right
under the el, oh fond memories of home…) struck my fancy. Buen
provecho.

Fang fix

Posted on by jqr

Went to the dentist today. Dr Quinn is a friendly guy and I know him
socially, as if there were indeed circles of society here at the
secret city. I popped part of a filling off the other day while
wolfing down salt pastiller, and immediately I knew I had to go
get it fixed.

 The good news is that I am an excellent flosser and that good flossing
technique saved the enamel directly encasing the nerve, so I don’t
need a root canal. The bad news is that most of tooth no. 18 is now
actually that ceramic they use to replace it. I feel kind of funny
about that; as if my left ulna and humerus were made out of
papier-mâche or something.

 Still, the dental visit, coming before lunch, messed up the workout
schedule. I desisted on the morning’s run not fully cognizant at the
time (4:20 a.m. for cryin’ out loud, who would be?) of the condition
awaiting my afternoon: Dr. Q told me to go home and take an analgesic
stat, and then I missed lunch at the refectory because my mouth
was still numb at 2 pm when they closed, and I decided I didn’t want
to go earlier and chance biting through my numb tongue.

 Of course, once I had skipped lunch, I neatly psyched myself out of
going biking (I would have been fine, if anything a little logy, but
that’s not a killer) which I justified to myself by blaming the missed
nutrition and the slim possibility of something going wrong in my yap
while out riding in equal measure. Taking a second analgesic pill, at
three p.m., didn’t help persuade me either. On to tomorrow, as I
listen to Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite and finish up The
Wreck of The River of Stars.

Tweaking my shuffle-play system

Posted on by jqr

It’s that time again, to add a new wrinkle to the iTunes shuffle-play
system. Something about this week’s selection seemed a little bit
stale, and when I looked it over, there were a number of tunes from
way back in 2004 that I remember fondly, but a little too over-fondly.
 
The system’s goal is to extract a fairly random set of 45 hours of
music from the sonoteca, which today encompasses about 1,778
hours of tunes. That’s 2.5% for those of you keeping track. The
fundamental ratio is 8:2:5–or eight hours of tunes I like, two hours
of stuff that I thought was just OK, and five hours of new-to-me stuff
I haven’t rated yet (and probably haven’t heard). The 45 hours of
music lasts about two weeks over here in the secret city. When it’s
finished I plug the player back into the computer, resynchronize
everything, and generate a new set to listen to.
 
A lot of these tunes that seem to have been coming up, like Fase’s
“Nadie,” or Le Roy’s “Good Time,” or Dudu Nobre’s “A Grande Familia,”
aren’t that great except for certain portions, but I rated them highly
years ago and can’t bring myself to downgrade them (I really like the
line about “squirrels smoking crack” from “Good Time,” but that comes
in the first 45 seconds and nothing else reaches that pinnacle). So by
adjusting the recipe so that I limit this particular group of tunes to
an hour’s worth (down from two hours), I should create correspondingly
more room in the other 44 hours for slightly less worn-shiny favorites
from the collection.
 
So, to come to the interesting part, what comes in and what went out?
From this week’s data, I find the following songs added:

Kékélé, “Ponton La Belle ft Loko Massengo“
Kanda Bongo Man, “Assali“
Nine Horses, “Wonderful World“
Mory Kanté, “Courougnegne“
Jimmy Rushing, “Take Me Back, Baby“
Bugotak, “Maadai-Kara (Mission Impossible)“

And the following songs taken out:
 
Bonga, “Monta Ki Ngi Xica“
Patty Griffin, “Rowing Song“
Pretty Girls Make Graves, “All Medicated Geniuses“
Rilo Kiley, “It Just Is“
Norah Jones, “Don’t Know Why“
Reis ensemble, “Bô Dame Canja“
Brenda Holloway, “Trapped In A Love Affair“
Abbey Lincoln & Hank Jones, “Close Your Eyes”

More road-bikers spotted

Posted on by jqr

There was a whole group of road-riders, six or seven, that I came upon
this afternoon as I was doing my laps. They were going the opposite
direction, so I saw them three times. I did my best to hurry through
the laps in order to pass them strongly. Of course, going in the
opposite direction makes you look like you’re going faster.

 I wouldn’t mind riding with other folks more often, but these days I’m
in such a groove, with the same distance every afternoon, that waiting
around for such a group would be a disincentive for me to train. I
just don’t think I’d go as far as often as I do now.

Mon semblable, mon frère

Posted on by jqr

Finally, I am not alone! Guess who caught up to me today? Another single-speed rider! I’ve been here at Secret City for seven months and this guy is riding the first vitesse unique I’ve seen besides my own. His is blue, with some kind of circle-R nameplate, and rainbow accent striping around the tubes. But it’s definitely a single-speed frame, with the dropouts facing the rear to help maintain proper chain tension. I was circling around in the non-customary direction (clockwise) today, having just passed the detention facility, and he came along from behind, then I caught up to him.

We started to hammer along past the same marines who were running in groups as last week, while I hung on his wheel, then as we approached the taxiway I told him I would pull from there. So I got in front and we went along past the new chapel and the fire station. At the Barrels, the junction with Perimeter Rd, he went left, back down the hill, and I went right, around for another loop. I saw him again a half-hour later going in the other direction.

I said only three things to him (“I’ll pull from the taxiway on” / “I’m going around for another loop” / “Okay.”) but there’s something about seeing someone with the same kind of bike that makes me feel as if I have a secret friend in the secret city. Someone else came to the same conclusion I did about how much easier it would be to maintain the fixed-wing down here, and how the absence of gears would be compensated for by the absence of hills, and made the same choice I did! I am vindicated! I’m a trendsetter!

Of course, the next chapter of the story is that it was a real doozy of a ride. I broke the 7-mile-loop record I set and wrote about last week, doing the circuit in 21′ 19″, and I was so energized the whole way through that I did the full 28 miles in less than 1:33, or faster than 18 mph. I guess considering this morning’s run it’s been a pretty good fitness day all around. Now it’s six p.m. and time for dinner.