A personal weblog written by Robert, a Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, budget audiophile and paper airplane mechanic.
Chris Stewart from Black Marble sets his Joy Division-like post punk to footage from a rodeo, what appears to be a county fair and a horse race. He plays his icy synth on the outskirts of a concert crowd watching a band that seems a much more likely rural attraction. Stewart doesn’t stray far from the sounds of his Brooklyn origins, despite the subject matter of the video. It’s a strange juxtaposition, but it works in a slice-of-life kind of way.
Black Marble – Private Show (YouTube)
My Sabbath days are rarely boring. My wife Shira and I often have guests for Shabbat meals on Friday nights and Saturday lunches. And just about every Friday night, Shira and I play Scrabble, a board game that is perfect for Sabbath observers: no electricity and no writing (another Sabbath prohibition). How do we keep score? We each have a big fat book where we match our score with the page number. If you get forty points, you turn forty pages. (Shira usually wins.)
Ari L. Goldman, writing about his Sabbath practices as an Orthodox Jew
Here in Raleigh, NC, we have a park that opened a few years ago on the site of a former mental hospital. Dix Park has been an impressive undertaking, though I’m sorry to say I’ve never been there. The latest edition to the park is the sure-to-be-popular Gipson Play Plaza, which opens this weekend.
This new ginormous playground looks like a kid’s dream. Featuring several different sections such as Sensory Maze, Slide Valley and Watermill Mountain, the park spreads out over 18 acres (!!!). It makes me wish my sons were back to playground age and we were headed there today.
When someone complained about the surface noise that came with listening to music on vinyl, the late BBC disc jockey John Peel (a notable lover of the format), was said to have replied, “Mate, life has surface noise.”
It’s hard to argue with Peel’s assessment of life in this mortal coil. Who among us wouldn’t wish that things were different, though?
I’ve come to a point of frustration with my record collection where even new records have an amount of surface noise (crackling, pops) that are hard to ignore. It’s especially irking when you pay so much these days for any music pressed to vinyl. I’ve tried various methods to reduce the noise:
Nothing has made a substantial impact. I still have newer records that sound like they’ve been gathering dust in the attic for years. I even have some older records that won’t play. Here’s video of one of my favorite records with the needle skating across it.1
Independent records labels, in particular, have gone all in on vinyl. I get countless emails from various labels touting their latest releases on wax. I just received an email from Polyvinyl Records today about new vinyl variants of albums by the band Alvvays. These are in edition to several variants that are already offered by Polyvinyl and at places like Newbury Comics. You can hardly blame the artists and the labels for milking this cow for all it’s worth when opportunities for compensation from making music are drying up.
Despite being sympathetic to the plight of the recording industry, vinyl is a market that I’m becoming less likely to participate in.2
Inspired by a post by @Jonah on Micro.blog, I looked into the art of Daniel Matsui.
One of the images that captured my attention was the “INVENTION of the HOLY CROSS.”
The image came with some apocraphyal stories to which I have become accustomed in the Orthodox Church.
In the year AD 326, St. Helen, the mother of the emperor Constantine, travelled to Jerusalem to seek the True Cross. One of the scholars of the city knew its location: a hill upon which a temple dedicated to Venus had been built. This was a secret that had been passed down through his family since the time of the Passion. Helen had the temple razed and the ground excavated; there, three crosses were found. To distinguish the cross of Jesus Christ from the crosses of the two thieves, each was held over a corpse. The deceased came to life upon contact with the True Cross.
Matsui also includes an explanation of his rendering of particular elements.
I’ll write a hymn again.