In most of the world today, common salt (sodium chloride) is taken for granted; salt shakers sit on every home’s dining table and restaurants offer it for free, sometimes in convenient single-serving packets. But salt has not always been so inexpensive or so plentiful. Humans, like all other mammals, need to consume salt to survive. Furthermore, until the invention of canning in the 19th century, salting (or the related process of pickling) was the primary method of preserving meat, fish, and vegetables. The ability to produce large amounts of preserved food has long been a prerequisite for staging extended military campaigns as well as sea voyages of exploration or conquest. Thus, the production and control of salt have done much to control the course of human history.

Mark Kurlansky details the changing relationships between people and salt around the world and throughout recorded history. He discusses how salt figures into various mythologies and rituals. He talks about methods of salt production ranging from simply scraping crystals from desert sebkhas to refining the material with sophisticated vacuum evaporators. Particularly interesting are the historic recipes he weaves into his narrative, including a bevy of salty sauces: Roman garum, the Chinese ancestor of soy sauce, Tunisian charmula, and even Louisiana Tabasco. Kurlansky also devotes considerable time to the salt-related events and policies that have directly shaped history: discoveries, taxes, and monopolies. Along the way he points out how many of our place names — Salzburg, Halles, Gaul, innumerable –wiches — and words — salad, salary, soldier, salami — have roots meaning “salt.”

This is the second of Kurlansky’s books that I’ve read, the first being Cod, which shares some subject matter with Salt. He does a very good job of extracting exciting narratives from what at first glance might seem like mundane topics. He at times seems to ramble a bit from one thing to another, but always in a charming — rather than distracting — way. I recommend this book highly, alongside many of the other single-word-title materials histories that I’ve read.

Zydeco Fiddler

Last weekend, I returned from Seattle, where I’d been working at the Northwest Folklife Festival. For the last eight years, I’ve worked as the festival’s Signage Coordinator (see posts from previous festivals here). The weather this year was pretty crappy — unseasonably cold and rainy, even for Seattle. But, I still managed to have a great time. Many of my coworkers have been at the festival for many years as well, so I was happy to get to hang out with many of them again. As always, most of my work takes place before and after the festival, and while the event is happening I have plenty of time to listen to music and take pictures. I’ve posted my best shots here; click on the photo above to see the whole gallery.

Last July, I bought Veronica a domain name for her birthday. (What can I say? I’m old-fashioned when it comes to gift giving.) I installed WordPress, and we spent a while customizing themes, installing plugins, and getting the site looking just how she wanted…

…Then the semester started, and she had more important things to do than start blogging. But in the new year, she’s started writing on a variety of topics, from book reviews to running technique, to a new nation-wide student group she’s started. So, go check her new site out at Divagatious.com!

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I happened upon this record at a thrift shop in Madison. It was in the Easy Listening (slash things-that-defy-categorization) bin. The photo of Civil War brass players on the front caught my eye. Then, I noticed the track list: “Hey Jude,” “Spinning Wheel,” “Light My Fire,” “Michelle,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” etc. Those tunes in combination with the photo and the name of the group convinced me to add the record to my stack. I don’t think I really looked at the back of the album until I got home. The back has a picture of some Union officers, and a couple of paragraphs of complete B.S. that doesn’t give much of any real information about the disc’s contents or the musicians who appear on it.

The one bit of real information — which would itself have been enough for me to buy the disc — is that one member of the group plays a contrabass saxophone. This beast of the sax family (photos here, here, and here) is pitched in E-flat, one octave below the baritone saxophone (and two octaves below the familiar alto). Here, the contra is part of an mix of instruments — trumpet, clarinet, banjo, trombone, string bass, Hammond organ, accordion, and drums that create sort of a psuedo-neo-Dixieland band. The whole record is quite strange, but most of it falls squarely into the good/funny-weird category. Here’s my favorite track from the disc, one that prominently features the massive contrabass sax:

Listen to The Burbank Philharmonic — These Boots Were Made for Walking

We grad bassoonists were asked to assemble a quartet to play on the evening concert. As it turned out, only 3 of us (out of 5) were going to be around the week before DRD, so we asked our prof., Marc Vallon, to join us. For the occasion, Brian and I spent a few afternoons creating a bassoon quartet arrangement of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Our performance was very well received, and a number of audience members approached us later to say, “that should be on YouTube!” We liked that idea, and so here it is:

In Thunderstruck, like in his earlier book Devil In the White City, Erik Larson follows two men — one a visionary and the other a cold-blooded killer. In this case the hero is Guglielmo Marconi, the first man to create a successful method of wireless communication. The villain is Harvey Hawley Crippen, a sometime doctor and seller of patent medicines who was to all outward appearances a kind, gentle, upstanding citizen. Larson follows the lives of the two men from their births in the third quarter of the nineteenth century until their paths (although not the men themselves) met in a very public way in 1910.

Marconi became fascinated with magnetism and electricity at an early age. By his early twenties, he had become an obsessive experimenter, spending days at a time in the laboratory he had put together in the attic of his parents’ villa. Marconi had a basic idea of what he wanted to do — transmit a message using invisible waves — and how to do it — he had read descriptions of earlier experiments by Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge — but he worked almost entirely by trial and error. It was this approach, that of a practician rather than a theorist, that would later make Marconi the subject of other scientists’ derision. Marconi’s method of working would also prove costly for his wireless telegraphy company, as he built ever larger and more complex installations on the coasts of England, Canada, and the United States, trying to perfect wireless trans-Atlantic communication without having a firm grasp on the underlying laws of physics.

Harvey Crippen, trained in homeopathic medicine at the University of Michigan, worked in a variety of medical professions. He had a private medical practice in San Diego and was employed as an optometrist in St. Louis, but spent the bulk of his career working for various patent medicine companies in Philadelphia, New York, and London. Crippen worked hard to support his wife, Cora, whose exotic tastes in clothes, furniture, and jewelery, along with the pursuit of her unrealistic ambitions of becoming a famous singer, proved very expensive. The Crippens presented the front of a happy couple, but mistrust, betrayal, and Cora’s controlling nature lurked beneath the surface.

Larson does a wonderful job of setting the scene for his two stories. Edwardian London is the chief setting, as both Marconi and Crippen spend fair amounts of time there. But the other side of the Atlantic — and indeed the ocean itself — also serve important roles, as ships and radio waves travel back and forth. My complaint about Larson’s previous books has been that his use of dialog and descriptions of individuals’ thought and feelings strains historical credibility. Larson does a much better job in Thunderstruck, using less dialog and more explicitly citing his sources within the text itself.

I found the two stories fascinating — especially that of Marconi — but through much of the book I felt that the connection between the men is tenuous at best. By the end Larson makes a pretty good argument for combining the two, but I’m not sure that I’m convinced. Still, he knows how to tell a good story, and Thunderstruck makes for a compelling read.

Tule Plants

We didn’t celebrate on Christmas Day itself, as Veronica wasn’t flying into Reno until that evening. Instead, my mom and I drove out to the Stillwater Wildlife Refuge east of Fallon, hoping to see some migrating Tundra Swans. We only saw one other person at the refuge, and that was only briefly. Most of the time, the only evidence of civilization we could see was the very road on which we were driving. Unfortunately, there weren’t any swans to see, either. The refuge comprises a network of lakes and wetlands, but on the day we were there they were all frozen over. So, no open water to attract migrating birds. We did see a few hawks, some Prairie Falcons, a couple of Great Blue Herons, and one Bald Eagle, but all from a distance. That evening, Veronica arrived following a relatively smooth trip.

Soaring Hawk at Washoe Lake

We had our Christmas on Boxing Day, emptying our overstuffed stockings, unwrapping presents, and eating my mom’s delicious crème brûlée French toast. Then, we headed up to Reno (stopping at Washoe Lake along the way) for some shopping and a visit to the Nevada Museum of Art. The Museum isn’t huge, but it always seems to have very interesting exhibits. The featured exhibition this time was a collection of more than 100 of Rembrandt’s prints. Although he’s known primarily for his paintings, the Dutchman was also a prolific printmaker. Since many of the works are small and have very fine details, the museum provided magnifying glasses to carry around the gallery with you. Not knowing much about printmaking, I appreciated that the curators provided good explanations of the processes, often showing multiple versions of the same print to show how changes in technique can alter the final product.

Us on the Marin Headlands

The next day, we headed over the mountains to the Bay Area to stay with our friends David and Francesca. We had a pretty relaxing visit — one day hanging out in Berkeley, and one in San Francisco. Among other things, we made a pilgrimage to the original Peet’s, drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, shopped at the City Lights Bookstore (where many of the beat poets hung out, and one of the best bookstores I’ve ever been to), and visited the Legion of Honor Art Museum (more on that in another post). Our one scheduled event while we were in California was a great one — my mom took us to see Wicked. Veronica had seen it before, but the other two of us hadn’t. The pseudo-clockwork set was very cool, the show was funny, and the singers were amazing. The lead roles were being played by the standbys, but they were great; except for the program, I wouldn’t have known they weren’t the regulars.

I didn’t take all that many photos on the trip, but click the thumbnails above to see my smallish gallery. I’ll leave you with a picture of Veronica behind bars at Battery Spencer, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge:

Mining engineer Philip Mercer attends a Paris rare book auction, charged by a friend with buying a nineteenth-century journal written by Godin de Lepinay. Lepinay explored Panama during the planning stages of the Panama Canal, and Mercer’s friend Gary Barber thinks that the journal might offer some clues to finding a fabled Incan treasure. At the auction, a mysterious Chinese bidder buys everything associated with the Panama Canal. Luckily the auctioneer is an old friend of Mercer’s, and sets aside the journal for him. But, Mercer doesn’t make it very far from the auction house before he finds himself being pursued by three Chinese assassins. He leads them on a chase through the catacombs and sewers of Paris, eventually managing to escape with the journal intact.

Mercer then travels to Panama as quickly as he can, intending to meet up with his friend. He arrives at Berber’s base camp deep in the jungle only to find the whole team dead. Mercer and Captain Lauren Vanik, a U.S. Army officer stationed nearby, scope out the area, and are nearly killed by another team of Chinese mercenaries. Realizing that they have stumbled into the middle of some sinister plot, they set out to investigate further. Along the way, they are joined by a team of French Foreign Legionnaires, a former canal pilot, and a retired sea captain, and reveal an impending Chinese power-grab on the world stage.

I picked this book up because I was curious what one of Clive Cussler’s “co-writers” writes under his own name. Unsurprisingly, Cussler and DuBrul seem to be cut from the same cloth. River of Ruin contains many of the elements that make up the standard Cussler formula: a rugged scientist/adventurer, a gorgeous and very capable love interest, an archaeological puzzle, water-based action sequences, and a nefarious plot to take over the world. DuBrul’s tale comes across as a bit more grounded in reality than do many of Cussler’s, however; River of Ruin is still a thrill-a-minute adventure novel, but it is lergely free of the “oh, come on!” moments that abound in Cussler.

In my search for reed cases from various double reed suppliers, I came across the web site of Roger Garrett, who is professor of both clarinet and instrumental conducting at Illinois Wesleyan University. On the side, Garrett is a skilled woodwright. He makes reed cases, batons, baton cases, pens, and a variety of other items. On his site, he provides a wealth of information about his reed cases — standard sizes and configurations, examples of bespoke cases he’s made, and photos of cases in a variety of common and exotic woods.

I corresponded with Garrett a bit before placing an order, asking about the prices of different woods and the possibilities of modifying his standard bassoon reed case design. His basic case has a foam strip that holds six bassoon reeds, but I have a similarly sized case that holds nine. I ended up having him send along one of his oboe reed strips, which with a little modification allowed me to fit eight bassoon reeds instead of six. He happened to have a curly maple contrabassoon case and a quilted maple bassoon case ready to go, so I bought them:

Bassoon and Contrabassoon Reed Cases

The Cases Opened

The prices were very reasonable (the same or less than I would’ve paid for less interesting cases from a double reed supplier), and as you can see, the cases are gorgeous. Someday when I’m rich and famous, I’ll order some African blackwood or cocobolo cases with a matching fountain pen.

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The UW Little Big Band had its fall concert a few weeks ago, and I’ve just gotten around to posting the recording. This semester, our instrumentation was trombone, cello, bassoon, guitar, piano, bass, and drums. We’re a little bass-instrument-heavy, but I think our arrangements neatly dealt with that fact. One big change this time around is that Pat (the cellist) and I played amplified, in order to achieve a better balance within the ‘horn’ section. It worked well in concert, but the balance is sometimes off in the recording. See the program and hear the tunes here.

Previously:
Little Big Band April Concert
Little Big Band Concerts
Front Page News
Little Big Band
My Jazz/YouTube Debut