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Sunset, Tuesday, 28 July 2009
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William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.
In Which iPod Exposes Music Theft
No, not illegal downloads – songwriters stealing from each other. I’ll say at the outset I think the song that contains the arguably stolen material is probably even better, overall, than its model.
(Which I think is pretty unusual. For example, was Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” really worth rummaging through Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto?) (That’s O.K., Eric, we’ll always have The Raspberries.)
So, anyway, you know of course how iPod shuffle can get spooky – supposedly random orders producing weirdly synchronous sequences. And sometimes if you have a live track from a CD, at the end of that track you may hear the intro to the next song on the disk – but of course, because you’re on shuffle, that is almost never the next song you’ll hear from the iPod.
So I’m editing client work today, and playing music because the work is fairly low-intensity and it’s after lunch and I’m trying to keep from crashing face-first onto the desk. The song playing is from Concert For George – “That’s The Way It Goes,” done by Joe Brown. Song ends and after much applause for Brown’s fine performance, Eric Clapton announces, “TOM PETTY ... and THE HEARTBREAKERS!”
O.K., place goes slightly ape, but – that’s the end of that track.
To my confusion and surprise, the next song is – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – except I knew (in the very first instants) that not only was this song not on Concert For George, I did not even have this song.
Then I realized – of course! It’s not “American Girl” – this is the other song with this intro and rhythm track! – “Last Nite” by The Strokes.
(I realize that not just one but possibly both of these songs will seem ancient to some people. Oh, well. To put things in perspective, today I also heard “Lonely Blue Boy” by Conway Twitty ... and remembered when it came out.)
In Which Bill Saves the Planet ... Slightly
I was leaving the produce section of the grocery store today with a two-pound container of Michigan blueberries, on sale, when I suddenly realized – Wait a minute, I’m supposed to go looking for wild blackberries today!
Back go the trucked-in or flown-in Michigan blueberries, and, later, out into the briar patches go I. WHAT a hero. Off the grid!
In Which Bill Wakes Up ... At Least for a Moment
So I’m walking down the fields toward blackberries, and you know how it is some days, your mind is more or less filled with a whole lot of things you’re working on, many of which are a long long way from working out right, and there’s just a sort of jammed-up, cloudy mix of things, large and small, to think about. Well, maybe you don’t know how that is, but that’s how it sometimes is for me. And it’s a hot, steamy, not very comfortable summer day, I guess you could call it a very average Virginia summer day, more than half cloudy, the sun beating down through three or four shifting layers of thin white and dull blue and soft gray and – just not what you call a stellar, striking sort of day.
And then I stop, or actually I keep walking but I do a sort of tight but goofy-stumbly 360 while I’m walking down the field. And I realize, Man, are you crazy? Look at this! I’m walking outside at four in the afternoon, in a huge green bowl of grasses, the sky’s enormous, everywhere there are gallant stands of oak, there’s the spring and the pear tree, big hot steel blue clouds in the west ... Look at this. This is IT.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 09:16PM | by BVD | in Sunset Paintings | tagged Albemarle County, Blue Ridge, Conway Twitty, Eric Carmen, Joe Brown, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Stony Point, The Raspberries, The Strokes, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, blackberries, iPod | Share Article | Comments Off 
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Sunset, Friday, 24 July 2009
I got introduced lately (thanks to Aime Ballard-Wood) to a superfine blog called Sweet Juniper! (exclamation mark theirs, not mine, although ... I would have been happy to add one). I really don’t think I’m the last person in the world to find out about it, quite.
I’ve only scratched the surface of this rich rich site, but I think it’s written and photographed by James D. Griffioen, with occasional posts by his wife, who pens under the name Wood. I love the blog’s sensibility, the flowing and wide-ranging connections it makes, the feeling that there’s so much creative energy, love, irreverence, reverence and intelligence behind it that anything can and probably will happen.
Before I mention the thing that got me going today, I want to recommend posts on alphabet books JDG has made for his kids – this very funny account of his book of Greek letters contains links to the others – and to second his enthusiasm for the group Heartless Bastards. The two videos he posts from SXSW should win you over.
Feral houses. That’s what Griffioen calls abandoned houses that are overgrown and falling apart. He lives in Detroit, so he’s ‘got a million of ’em’ – and seemingly almost that many photographs, of houses and amazing larger buildings, even an abandoned zoo.
I won’t try to recap his riff on why these houses are ‘feral’ – except his comment that they’re returning to a wild state made me think about the attraction ruins have always had for artists, whether it’s someone like my man Corot going off to Rome or your grandpa painting an old barn. It occurred to me that I’ve never read anything about the source of the appeal. (That’s probably because I don’t get around much – seriously.) But I guess it’s just sort of assumed that these places are obviously ‘picturesque’ and/or, maybe, that their association with the past makes them ‘romantic’.
As Griffioen says, these houses start to return to nature:
For a long time, I’ve thought the artistic appeal of ruins was simply that: they become more integrated with the environment, they show a natural process at work. Now I see two other related aspects.
First, the art process, by definition, tends to unite anything it renders, such as any building, old or new, with everything else around it – that’s in the nature of style. Ruins are great because they’re already halfway there.
Second, a ruin contains time.
So, strange to say, even though it’s about the past, and time, it’s not about what the buildings once were. It’s all about what they now are.