April 11, 2021 – Keith Robertson

“Ollie Ollie Ollie, Oi Oi Oi”

After a long day of travel back from Bend on Monday, I was ready to settle in and enjoy the NCAA basketball championship game. While I was happy to see Baylor win for the first time in forever, I was hoping that Gonzaga would have made it a closer and more exciting game. The synchronicity of crossword clues with life events is starting to get a bit weird. We flew through Seattle Tacoma airport (SEATAC) a few hours before this clue appeared:

On of my readers who was catching up on a month or more of my posts, complained that there are not enough Ollie pictures included. Now you can likely guess which reader registered the complaint. Ok Will – here are a selection of photos of Ollie (called Easel by the breeder) prior to being collected by Will and Christine:

And, for extra credit, here’s a picture of a special Ollie approved dinner with probiotics and apple. Definitely one of the best cared for and trained pups out there.

I had a bit of an early start on Tuesday as I had agreed to meet a work colleague for breakfast – fortunately just around the corner from the house. That was quickly followed by a visit by the piano tuner and his hour long note by note movement up and down the keyboard. Then it was time to take Diana for her second vaccine. The process was slower and more annoying this time around, but it’s done. No Finnesque side-effects experienced. I’m glad we both skated through with no real noticeable impacts from the vaccines.

I started watching the “Hemmingway” documentary series by Ken Burns. Really interesting so far.

After that we enjoyed a new livestream series from the wonderful Curtis Stigers – Wednesdays from his kitchen with dogs. Anybody that starts with Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed” from the Wonder Boys (excellent movie and book) and transitions into “What’s so Funny About Peace Love and Understanding” by Nick Lowe (mentioning how many millions he made Lowe by including that on “The Bodyguard” soundtrack) is good for me.

We received another excellent Andy production of the Gypsy Hill wildlife. This one features a mountain lion mum and cubs having a stroll down the road that links Adamo and Clorinda’s homes:

On Wednesday night we watched the documentary, “We Work – the Making and Breaking of a $47 billion unicorn”. Quite amazing how many were fooled by the stories that the founder Adam Neumann spun. And quite tragic that he walked away with a $1.7 billion parachute as 6,000 employees were laid off. A scary cult like company, with a great concept, that never faced reality.

I checked in on Finn and found him sounding great and continuing to do really well. What a joy!

I was doing an internet search on Thursday morning and saw this video in my Google feed. There’s just something about the sound of a great organ, being played well, in a massive church. This organ is from the 1890s, restored in the 1950s, and the details on all the stop and pedal settings are listed in the information about the video on YouTube. So powerful and yet soothing.

Friday was maintenance day – I got a haircut and Penelope got a bath. I took Diana’s car for inspection and a bath to start out Saturday, then we went for a pleasant walk, enjoying the perfect weather. The Arts in Bloom festival was happening in downtown McKinney all weekend and so we decided to sample it on Saturday afternoon. The weather continued to be perfect for rambling around the stalls. These swirl pictures reminded me of some art that Finn did a few months back, and he liked them a lot when I texted him a picture. The only other thing that caught my eye was this colourful elephant.

Rachel joined us for dinner on Saturday night – Zin Zen delivery – and updated us with stories about her dating experiences and home remodel likes and dislikes.

Jose sent this video of Diana’s new kitchen cabinets in progress – he’s quite the craftsman. The funny part is at the end – he had a bad motorcycle accident while our bathroom remodel was finishing and his wife has been after him to sell the bike. You can see the For Sale sign on it but it’s not going to get much interest parked at the back of the barn.

I found this mug to send to Finn. I was searching for a funny penguin mug like the one he used when he was staying with us, and this one is perfect.

We did some yard work this morning and now I’m relaxing and watching The Masters golf tournament.

This article from The New Yorker is one of the most interesting that I’ve read in a while. Kathryn Schulz pulls fascinating details on how animals navigate during everyday life and in migration from a number of recent publications. There are some truly amazing examples of how much smarter than humans many animals are when it comes to navigating – and without all the tools that we have at our fingertips.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/why-animals-dont-get-lost

I loved the time I spent with “The Train in the Night – A Story of Music and Loss” by Nick Coleman this week. What a great read. Coleman spent his life as a music journalist until going completely deaf in one ear in his late 40s:

“Silence descended suddenly and without warning. I put two mugs of tea on the bedside table, sat down, passed one to my wife, hoicked my legs into bed, lowered my head and…pfffff.

One ear gone.”

The book is just as much a reminiscence on his time developing his musical taste in his youth as it is about coping with his hearing loss. A paragraph on how diminished his enjoyment of music has become:

“What my brain can’t do is fill in the timbre, warmth, texture and depth stuff – what Dr. Levitin calls the ‘higher-order’ qualities. Does this mean that it’s the higher-order qualities which generate the emotional response to music? Or is it just me? Does it merely mean that in order for me to be able to register music’s architectural dimension, and therefore have a special place in which to cue up and explore emotion, I need warmth, timbre, texture and illusion of spatial depth?”

I really enjoyed the section where Coleman talks about the first seven albums he purchased – quite an eclectic mix.

“The First Seven remain accessible to me on a multitude of levels, and in minute contextual detail. I have access to just about every note. I know who played what instrument on them, and which record company put them out. I can remember the weight of their sleeves in my hand and on my lap, the texture of the cardboard, the dazzle of the artwork, the sound the inner sleeves made as they slid out of the gatefold, the name of the printing firm which printed the sleeves. I can recall how the music made my bedroom change. Here they are, in order:

Nazareth: Razamanaz (on the Mooncrest label)
Lou Reed: Transformer (RCA)
Genesis: Nursery Cryme (Charisma)
Yes: The Yes Album (Atlantic)
Derek and the Dmonioes: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor)
Gong: Camembert Electrique (Virgin)
Rolling Stones: Goat’s Head Soup (Rolling Stones)”

“History tells that in 1973 Nazareth were an entertaining Scottish hard-rock band with a working-man’s-glam edge, and that Razamanaz was their finest thirty-six minutes. Theirs was not music for the ages but for the moment. But really Nazareth were Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” with the artiness taken out.”

I can remember writing most of a paper on Munch’s “The Scream” for Will, but can’t remember why he wasn’t able to do it for himself.

Talking about a performance on “The Old Grey Whistle Test” by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band in December 1973:

“But Alex Harvey was sensational in actuality, as well as in name. He performed Jacques Brel’s bleak chanson of ripped innocence “Next” right into the camera’s mouth, as if trying to bit out its tongue. He hugged a Telecaster to his chest and showed all his teeth while executing a perfectly baleful Gorbals Sprechgesang.”

I’m going to have to see if I can find that performance online somewhere. I introduced Diana to Harvey’s music when she did some spin art on one of his albums at our last Christmas party.

Speaking of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”:

“The song barely needs its words. The first one is an utterance: “Ooooo-ooo”. Beneath that, the lollop of tom-toms which rolls the voice into the song is one of the most exquisitely placed and executed rhythmic figures in all popular music (right up there with the cymbal crash which ushers Miles Davis into “So What”).”

That tom-tom lollop is at 0:19:

And the cymbal crash is at 1:31 in one of my all time favourite pieces of jazz music:

Coleman describes how his love for music originated with his time in the church choir. I enjoyed this description of the church organist:

“Mrs. Beeton would always pull out a couple of stops to give the last verse some welly. She’d toe the right pedals, too. And afterwards the thing would linger in the air for what seemed like minutes, like a taste in the mind. An atmosphere. The sacred as a form of weather.”

A great description of the lingering sound that you can hear in the Dvorak organ arrangement earlier in this post. Give it “some welly” – this weeks phrase that I had long forgotten.

Continuing with the church music theme, this section about “In the Bleak Midwinter” really resonated with me:

“Yet it isn’t even the best bit. That comes after the interrupted cadence at the end of the third verse, which has been sung by tenors and basses and apparently closed off by the organ.

‘What can I give him, poor as I am?’

The re-entry of the boys at this point is so stunning in its guttering delicacy that I am not sure I can find a way to write about it. Perhaps it would be easier simply to wonder whether art has ever possessed the power and subtlety to express the idea of tenderness in a way that corresponds with the experience of the emotion. If it has, then i haven’t felt it. For me, this is as close as it has ever got. There is no Nativity painted by a Renaissance master which will give you such quiet, and no poem which can , with words alone, describe the sufficiency of such a feeling. It is as if, at the end of the carol, it is time for the words to run out.

‘Yet what I can give him: give my heart.'”

An excellent description of the role of the trombone in an orchestra:

“The trombone is a beautiful thing, a rich, sonorous, perfectly chromatic tone-cannon endowed with unmatchable weight of shot, handicapped only by a slow rate of fire.”

It’s quite late in the book when Coleman shares what is believed to have caused his hearing loss:

“‘I think’, said the consultant, ‘that you may have had a migraine so bad that it sent a blood vessel between your brain and your inner ear into spasm, and the spasm lasted long enough to kill the cilia off on that side and leave you with the mess inside your head.'”

Just an excellent read throughout!

This song from Lana Del Ray’s new album caught my attention on the radio. Listening to it again I realized what it was linking me to – “Calvary Cross” from the perfect “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” album by Richard and Linda Thompson. I’ve always loved the F, Am, G chord sequence that underpins that song. Turns out the sequence of piano chords at the start of the Lana Del Ray song are F, C, G – Am being the Aeolian or natural minor of C, and why they sound so similar to my brain.