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Spotted on campus this Saturday:
I suspect that this was related to Geek.Kon, which was going on all weekend in the UW Humanities Building (which we musicians share with historians, artists, and scholars of the Abrahamic religions), but I’m not sure of that. Apparently this isn’t a unique idea; I found a couple of other examples here and here. I kind of wish I’d been around to see the biker’s arrival or departure, to see what (or who?) rides in the coffin.
John and Pansy
At the end of last semester, I was talking to my boss (and friend) John about the pictures I took of a woman with four dogs on her bike. He remarked that he also has a basket on his bike for his dog, a miniature dachshund named Pansy. He’d told this to a number of people, who’ve naturally all wanted to see pictures of Pansy in her basket. But, he’d never had any pictures to show them. So, I offered to take some pictures once I got my new camera. After a few attempts foiled by bad weather or scheduling conflicts, we finally got together a few weeks ago to do a photo shoot. John and Frannie had Veronica and me over for dinner (a delicious homemade gazpacho with crusty bread and raw milk butter), and we walked over to a nearby bike path to shoot. I ended up taking over a hundred pictures, but I’ve cut it down to the nine best. Click the photo above to see the gallery.
When we were visiting my mom in Nevada last month, one of the activities she arranged for us to do was to take a guided tour of Grimes Point Archaeological Area. Grimes Point lies about an hour an a half east of Carson City, near the town of Fallon. For much of the last 10,000 years, a lake existed in the area — making it an attractive place for native peoples to settle. Fluctuating water levels resulted in multiple distinct areas and layers of occupation. Today, the site sits sort of out in the middle of nowhere, with no sizable body of water in the immediate vicinity.
Grimes Point has two main draws: Hidden Cave and the Petroglyph Trail. Hidden Cave is only open a couple of times a month, so we’ll have to do that on another trip. The Petroglyph Trail is always open, but we had a special guided tour. I’ve seen petroglyphs in a number of places in Arizona and New Mexico, but never in as high a concentration as there is at Grimes Point. Just about every sizable rock had some sort of rock art on it, and many were practically covered. Some of the oldest petroglyphs (roughly 8,000 years old, I think) have been almost entirely reclaimed by the desert, and are only visible from certain vantage points or in certain light. (Most petroglyphs in the American Southwest are created by scraping the dark patina — known as ‘desert varnish’ — off of rocks. The ‘varnish’ is redeposited over time, meaning that the oldest glyphs are now almost the some color as the surrounding rock.)
We saw quite a range of iconography and techniques. Some of the earliest carvings are deep snake-like grooves and little round depressions known as ‘cupules.’ Later work ranges from seemingly abstract geometric symbol and designs to things that are more obviously representational: animals, people, and the like. Some motifs are similar to glyphs at Petroglyph National Monument and others I’ve seen, but the style is completely different (as one would expect from different cultures living in similar but distant areas). One particular example is the spiral — a motif the seems to be pretty common across the southwest. Spirals I’d seen before have very thin lines, lots of rotations, and are quite compact. The one spiral we saw at Grimes Point was constructed from a very wide line that only makes two-and-a-half or three rotations.
I took lots of photos on our walk, many of them attempts to capture the same glyphs from different angles. I cut the collection down quite a bit, and posted 22 pictures in a gallery. Click any of the photos above to view the whole set.
When I was thinking about making recital posters for my multiple recitals last year, I thought a few times about trying to create a bassoon version of Activision’s Guitar Hero (a guilty pleasure I engage in from time to time). I got as far as downloading a hi-res version of the game’s logo and a bunch of screen shots, but I never got around to doing anything with them, and I sort of forgot about the idea.
Then tonight, I happened across this:
Someone (I don’t know who) has had the same idea, and done a very good job realizing it. The artist neatly sidestepped one photoshopping issue that kept me from working on the idea: by placing music stands in front of the players, s/he eliminated the need to erase the bodies of the guitars, which are much wider than a bassoon. The necks of the guitars don’t pose the same problem, as the bassoons’ bells easily cover them. The image is very well done all around; I especially like the Wii-style bassoon controller.
[via Dead Robot]
Through the magic of Facebook, I recently became aware of an upcoming concert at my alma mater, Arizona State. The event, which features a number of student ensembles, will offer alternatives to the standard sit-in-your-seat-and-quietly-watch-the-stage concert-going experience. While listening to the ASU Symphonic Band, a structured improvisation group, and an array of chamber ensembles, audience members will have their choice of activities. From the event page on the ASU School of Music website:
Interactive options include: blogging with musicians in real time, getting a play-by-play of the event from a knowledgeable musician just as in sporting events, immersing yourself in music-related conversation with other audience members, or you can simply sit back and enjoy the music in a traditional concert environment. Please remember to bring your laptop or smart phone with you, should you plan to participate in the blogging activities.
The idea is a very interesting one — trying to attract new audience members by altering the whole dynamic of the event. I assume that the various groups of people will be located in different parts of the hall. While Gammage Auditorium is quite large, I wonder if the play-by-play or the conversation corner will bother the people who opt for a traditional concert experience. I also wonder how many people will actually live-blog the concert. That sort of thing seems to be most popular for political conventions and Apple events.
I hope the event is a success though, and I applaud the effort to shake things up a bit. Gary Hill, the Director of Bands, is very forward-looking as a conductor and music director. Although I only played under him for a couple of years, I got the chance to play a plethora of cool new music — much of which was outside the traditional conception of what ‘band music’ is or should be.
I wonder if I’ll be able to find a live blog of the event, since I can’t attend myself…
When we were in Nevada a few weeks ago, we spent an afternoon and evening at Sand Harbor on Lake Tahoe. It was hot outside, and refreshingly (if initially shockingly) cold in the lake. The water is very clear, although there wasn’t a whole lot to see — near the beach, at least. It was pleasant to go for a swim in a large body of water, dry out on the sandy beach, and realize that I wasn’t covered in either salt or lake sludge.
After we’d had our fill of the beach, we cleaned up and walked over to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival’s outdoor stage, which has the lake for a backdrop. My mom had gotten us tickets to that evening’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After finding our seats, we sat down to a delicious picnic assembled by the various members of our group. The food was tasty, the venue was gorgeous, and the play was… weird. Most of the Athenians were rich yacht club types (a good fit for many of Tahoe’s summer residents), while the rebellious Hermia and Lysander were goths. The faeries were mostly pseudo native American, except for the token black guy wearing a loincloth and carrying a spear. The mechanicals were a variety of blue-collar workers, with Nick Bottom as a guitar-wielding hot dog vendor.
To these disparate (and never satisfactorily explained) groups was added a bizarre mishmash of music. Nick Bottom came out to The Boss’s “Born in the USA.” The various songs within the play were sung in rock-ish settings with instruments played by members of the company. Throughout the play, a new-age Navajo — who was often on stage — played so-called “Native American flute.” Perhaps the weirdest thing came at the end. During Puck’s soliloquy (“If we shadows have offended…”) the flutist played and another Indian conducting a smudging ceremony on stage. The whole thing was a hodgepodge of different and largely unconnected directorial directions. But, at least we had plenty to talk about on the ride back down to Carson City.
Scoop WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
Up-and-coming writer John Boot desperately wants an excuse to leave London so as to escape an unwanted admirer. He spots the perfect opportunity when civil war breaks out in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. He persuades an influential friend to get him a job as a foreign correspondent for one of the major London newspapers. This friend convinces Lord Copper, the head of the Dail Beast, to hire boot and send him to Ishmaelia. But owing to ambiguous instructions and subordinates eager to cater to Lord Copper’s every whim, the wrong Boot gets shipped to Africa.
William Boot has no aspirations to fame or adventure; prior to his promotion to foreign correspondent, William had written a bi-weekly nature column for the Beast from the comport of his somewhat ramshackle rural family estate. Now, William finds himself in a land about which he knows nothing, assigned to a task for which he has little aptitude, experience, or interest. On top of this, he has to contend with scheming competitors, slow and misdirected telegrams, and the vagaries of the ever-changing Ishmaelite government.
Waugh is in top form here, satirizing sensationalist newsmen, incompetent business leaders, banana republics, and a handful of other things. Some of his references are a little obscure for a reader separated from him by seventy years and the Atlantic Ocean, but the rest of the book is hilarious enough to more than make up for it.
About a week ago, Veronica and I returned from visiting my mom in Carson City, Nevada. We were there for about a week, and did a whole bunch of fun stuff, like swimming in and boating on Lake Tahoe, seeing a bizarre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, visiting the Nevada Art Museum, getting a guided tour of an area with lots of petroglyphs, and attending the Carson City Jazz Festival. I took a bunch of pictures, and will be posting them in chunks over the next week or so.
The first set of pictures is from Washoe Lake, which lies just north of Carson City. Much of the shore of the lake is part of a state park, which includes a couple of wildlife observation platforms. Walking around the southern shore of the lake, we saw quail, ducks, butterflies, and a lone great blue heron. I almost stepped on a large praying mantis, who I was certainly not expecting to find on the gravel path on which we were walking. (S)he was a very cooperative model, letting me take lots of pictures, and at times even seemingly mugging for the camera.
At Little Washoe Lake, just north of its larger namesake, we spotted a cluster of pelicans floating, with one soaring overhead. Unfortunately, they were too far away for any decent photos. While driving between the lakes, however, we came upon a red-tailed hawk perching on a bale of hay. I managed to snap a couple of pictures from the car before he flew off to join a friend atop a nearby telephone pole.
Click any of the above photos to see the whole gallery.
How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
In his prelude, Duffin mentions a recent book about the history of equal temperament. The book to which he refers is Stuart Isacoff’s Temperament (reviewed here), although Duffin only identifies it in his endnotes. He takes issue with Isacoff’s treatment of the subject, saying that Isacoff “concluded that Rameau discovered equal temperament (ET) in 1737, and basically we all lived happily ever after.” Duffin sees this as more or less the party line amongst present-day musicians; he relates an anecdote about the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi as an example of this.
As one might guess from the book’s title, Duffin does not agree with the view of equal temperament as the be-all and end-all, the Holy Grail of tuning systems. He criticizes authors like Isacoff and Murray Barbour (whose 1951 book Tuning and Temperament is the standard scholarly study of the issue) for approaching the history of tuning with an extreme bias towards equal temperament. Duffin asks how Barbour, who admitted that he had never heard anything other than equal temperament, could possibly dismiss all other tuning systems as inferior and unusable.
Thus, Duffin sets out to write a balanced history of tuning systems, one that does not take the supremacy of equal temperament as a given. In doing this, he goes beyond the standard historical writings. He examines instrumental methods, the writings of lesser-known musicians, and even musical passages (such as in the cello part of Haydn’s String Quartet op. 77, no. 2, where the composer specifies at one point that an E-flat and an adjacent D-sharp should be played as the same note, indicating that he probably didn’t expect this elsewhere). Duffin also delves into more recent history, examining the practices of nineteenth-century piano tuners and analyzing early sound recordings made by prominent artists such as violinist Joseph Joachim.
Duffin brings all these disparate sources together to argue not only that the current predominance of equal temperament developed later and more sporadically than is generally accepted, but also that prior to about 1917, so-called “equal” temperaments were often not so equal at all.
Duffin writes convincingly on his topic, and does so with passion and a sharp wit. His intended audience is more scholarly — or at least more musically trained — than that of Stuart Isacoff, but his prose is still delightfully readable. There are quite a few sidebars throughout the books, mostly devoted to short biographies of persons mentioned in the text. It’s nice not to have to refer to Grove or Baker’s to get some background information on some of the more obscure personages, but these sidebars often interrupt the text in awkward places. There are also a handful of cartoons scattered through the text. These sort of set the tone of the book, but even the best are only smirk– or groan-worthy. I’d recommend that anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject of temperament read both Isacoff’s and Duffin’s books in order to get two very different perspectives on the matter.
I’ve been watching alot of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics (or the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, for you purists) this summer. Having been an aquaphile my whole life and a competitive swimmer through high school, I’ve naturally been most interested in the aquatic events. There’s been plenty of exciting swimming in prime-time, along with gymnastics and track. I’ve also seen some diving, rowing, trampoline, field, cycling, and basketball. But the sport I’ve probably seen the most of is volleyball. Why? I have no idea.
Sure, it was exciting to watch Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Trainor squash their competition for their second gold medal in as many Olympic games. It was also impressive to see Todd Rogers and the gargantuan Phil Dalhausser fight it out for the gold. And, it was funny to notice that the Brazilian women competed in sports bras that said “BRA 1″ and “BRA 2.” But, why is there so much beach volleyball (and seemingly just as much of its less exciting sibling: indoor volleyball) being broadcast live? It’s been on pretty much every night I’ve watched, and some mornings, as well. Volleyball isn’t exactly a huge spectator sport in the US. Why is it getting so much more coverage than other lesser-known sports? What about sailing, white-water kayaking, or ping pong? Where are weightlifting, tennis, and archery? And most importantly, why is volleyball on now instead of the Modern Pentathlon, which NBC’s site tells me is also happening at the moment?
“What,” you may be asking yourself, “is the Modern Pentathlon?” I asked myself the same question a short while ago while browsing the Olympics page on Wikipedia. It is, in short, the most bad-ass event at the Summer Olympics, and it’s getting no TV coverage. The Modern Pentathlon is not a track and field event, as you might be inclined to guess. Instead, it combines skills from a range of disciplines: épée fencing, pistol shooting, a 200 meter swim, show jumping, and a 3 kilometer run. Yes: it involves running, swimming, jumping over things on horseback, shooting at stuff, and fighting with swords. And instead of these impressive demonstrations of modern-day-knightly skills, I’m watching twelve men in short shorts hit a rubber ball back and forth. What the hell, NBC?
The Navigator (NUMA Files) WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
The Navigator more or less follows the typical Cussler formula: the life of a beautiful woman scientist becomes endangered as she pursues an important historical/archaeological artifact, Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino (or in this case, Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala) swoop in and save her while testing a cutting-edge piece of marine technology. They then team up to find the artifact and thwart the evil mastermind/shadowy multi-national corporation/secret society that needs the artifact to achieve world domination. The good guys, of course, save the world, recover the artifact, and thereby cause a large chunk of history to be rewritten. The Navigator improves on this somewhat by touching on two levels of history: a Phoenician treasure located by Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries. Other than that, it’s standard, formulaic, thrill-a-minute Cussler.
Portrait of a Killer Jack the Ripper Case ClosedWorldCat • Read Online • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
The case of Jack the Ripper is one of the world’s most enduring unsolved mysteries. During the 120 years or so since the killer claimed his first victim, there has been almost constant speculation as to his identity. Doctors and surgeons have always made popular suspects, as some of the victims are thought to have been dissected or dismembered with some skill. Other theories have suggested English nobles. petty theives, “insane” persons, and even Joseph (not John) Merrick — the Elephant Man — as the killer.
In this 2002 book, Patricia Cornwell details her investigations of and conclusions about the case. She has, for the first time, brought modern forensic techniques to bear on the case. Little physical evidence remains, but she subjects what there is (letters, mostly) to DNA, mitochondrial DNA, paper, watermark, ink, and handwriting analysis. She uses the resulting evidence to link Walter Sickert, a British painter of German extraction, to the crimes. With this evidential connection established, Cornwell uses a great deal of circumstantial evidence to bolster her case.
Among many other things, Sickert often painted and drew very dark and menacing pieces, and Cornwell sees parallels between some of these and the Ripper;s victims or crimes. She cites the fact that Sickert, a former actor, was a master of disguise, and that he would often disappear for days into one of a number of secret studios he kept in the seedier sections of London.
Cornwell also argues against some basic suppositions of the Ripper case. At the time of the murders, hundreds of letters were sent to the Metropolitan Police, claiming to be from the killer. Most of these have long been considered to be fakes. Cornwell posits instead that the variations in handwriting among the letters would have been easy for a skilled artist like Sickert to fake, and that similarities in writing style and paper types mean that a large number of the letters are actually from the killer. She also disagrees with the idea that the Ripper appeared, killed a handful of women, and then disappeared again. She identifies one murder that took place prior to the acknowledged Ripper killings and a number that occurred after them as the work of the same person — Walter Sickert.
Portrait of a Killer is compelling, but as Cornwell herself admits, most of her evidence is circumstantial. It appears — at least from the organization of the book — that she set out to answer the question “Was Walter Sickert Jack the Ripper?” rather than the question “Who was Jack the Ripper?” As such, it comes off as more of an investigation of Sickert than of the Ripper. The evidence, as Cornwell presents it, shows that the artist could have been the killer — not that he was, and not that any of the other suspects weren’t.
Fast Food Nation WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
Much of what has been written about the fast food industry in recent years has focused on how unhealthful the food is and the industry’s presumed link to the rise of obesity in this country. While Eric Schlosser touches on this, his examination of fast food goes far deeper. Schlosser details the history of the industry, tracing it to its origins in southern California in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He sees the concept of fast food as purely a product of post-WWII American culture: squeaky-clean restaurants using assembly line or automated preparation methods, providing almost instant gratification to the rapidly-growing population of car owners.
Schlosser goes on to show how intimately the fast food industry has been connected to various economic, social, and industrial developments over the last sixty years. The practice of business franchising — in which a company licenses its name, business plan, and procedures to individual entrepreneurs, thus creating uniformity of products and demanding uniformity of supplies — is an invention of the fast food industry. He also links fast food to such things as the rise of monoculture, the industrialization of meat processing, the low national minimum wage, and the increased use of processed and artificial ingredients and flavorings.
Although Schlosser spends most of his time examining what he (and I) see as detrimental effects of the fast food industry, he does find a silver lining. He discusses some good things the industry has accomplished, and singles out some companies (such as In-N-Out Burger, one of my favorites) that buck industry trends. This book is a fascinating read, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you plan to continue eating fast food with any regularity.
Walking around the UW campus, one is constantly bombarded by advertisements for all sorts of things, ranging from the commercial (new restaurants, bar drink specials, coupon books) to the social (fraternities and sororities, intramural sports, student clubs of all sorts) to the religious (regular appearances by Mennonites, Hasidic Jews, and fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumpers) to the political (Democrats, Republicans, anti-war, pro-China, anti-China). These ads often appear in the form of flyers, picket signs, wearable sandwich-boards, banners, or good old-fashioned soapbox oration. By far the most prevalent (and least annoying, in my opinion) form of advertising on campus is chalking.
It is not uncommon, as I walk from the library or music building to the bus stop late at night, to see people carrying around buckets of brightly-colored sidewalk chalk, stopping every few feet to claim another blank area of pavement. These sorts of ads are usually fairly simple, owing to the necessarily one-at-a-time method of creation as well as to the ephemeral nature of chalk — indeed, of most things that are tramped upon by thousands of feet throughout the course of a day. Occasionally the chalking becomes more ambitious; a number of 20-foot wide peace symbols come to mind.
Near the end of the spring semester, I spotted what is definitely my favorite bit of chalking so far. It was done on the wall of a building, and parodies so well the style and tone of other more serious chalk advertisements:
The Thursday after the Folklife Festival, I had a free day to roam around Seattle. As is my wont, I celebrated my first day of freedom from walking around the festival grounds all day by… walking around the city all day. I started out the day by meeting Jerin for morning coffee/tea at Elliot Bay Books. After that, I spent awhile shopping in and around Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market. I had an amazing lunch at the Three Girls Bakery — a big slab of baked salmon with havarti, spicy Dijon mustard, and lettuce on fresh rosemary garlic bread. It was the best sandwich I’ve had in recent memory. I ducked into a little record shop at Pike Place before moving on. In the jazz ‘New Arrival’ bin, I found an LP by the Australian Jazz Quintet — a group that featured Erroll Buddle on bassoon and tenor sax, and whose LPs I’d heretofore only been able to find on eBay.
Next I headed to the relatively new Olympic Sculpture Park, an extension of the Seattle Art Museum that sits right on the waterfront. The park has quite a few permanent pieces by sculptors such as Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, and Alexander Calder. There are also a number of temporary pieces on display, most prominently (right now, at least) a number of giant orange safety cones by Dennis Oppenheim. The park is also home to the PACCAR Pavilion, an expansive gallery space that currently houses a large and interesting installation by Geoff McFetridge called “In The Mind”.
After spending awhile in the Sculpture Park, I continued strolling around town. I stopped in at the magnificent Rem Koolhaas–designed Seattle Public Library to pick up a little something for Veronica. I’d been there before, so I didn’t stay too long. Next, I wandered past City Hall and up into the International District for some sushi. Along the way, I spotted the fanciest fire station I’ve ever seen, and a very decrepit former hotel. Soon, I’ll have some pictures to post from the last portions of my trip — involving boats, trains, and an eccentric millionaire.
Kitchen Confidential Adventures in the Culinary UnderbellyWorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
Anthony Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his lifetime in the restaurant industry. He sets out to describe what the people who toil behind swinging kitchen doors are really like, explicitly pointing out the differences between them and squeaky-clean TV chefs — or at least their on-screen personas. Bourdain details his rise through the culinary world, from a teenaged dishwasher in a coastal Massachusetts tourist town to the Culinary Institute of America-trained Executive Chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York. His ascent was far from smooth — inexperience, drug addiction, crazy emploerys and employees, and run-ins with organized crime all took their toll. But for Bourdain, cooking — really food — is an all-consuming passion, and he seems able to bounce back from anything.
Beyond being a gritty memoir, Kitchen Confidential offers a great deal of insight into how professional kitchens and restaurants in general function. Bourdain explains on which days of the weeks various food items are generally freshest, which dishes typically have the highest mark-ups, what menu items to avoid, and what sorts of special requests tend to piss cooks off. He also offers advice on kitchen tools, garnishing methods, and ingredient selection for the amateur cook hoping to emulate fancy restaurant techniques.
Kitchen Confidential is a very interesting read, if one can get past Bourdain’s blustery tone, salty language, and sometimes unsavory doings. He is a good writer, despite these things, and his intelligence and whit often shine through, making this a book that’s hard to set down.
I had very little to do on Memorial Day, the last day of the festival, other than repair some easels and distribute a couple of sponsor banners to stages for specific shows. So, I was able to spend most of my time walking around, taking pictures, and listening to music. There’s always at least one Taiko group at Folklife, and the high-energy shows are always fun to watch. The group I saw this year was Inochi Taiko, which performed early Monday afternoon. Other highlights of the day included a professional jump-rope troupe (I had no idea such things existed), a performance by my friend Jerin, and perhaps the last thing I expected to see/hear at the festival: a sing-along performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass.
Monday evening, it was time to start breaking down all of the festival gear. I went around to the various stages and areas, scrambling to take down signs as soon as the programming in each place wrapped up. I worked until about midnight, and managed to get most things pulled down that night. I was happy that this year — unlike every other year I’ve worked the festival — none of my banners were taken out by overly tall box trucks. After the production crew and I had finished for the night and locked up, we set out for some celebratory beverages. As soon as we turned around to start walking, a Pepsi truck sped up the road in front of us and — BAM! — hit a banner, ripping out two corner grommets.
With the help of my able assistant Whitney, all the signage was taken down, sorted, and put away by Wednesday morning. I then threw my efforts into helping production finish all of their stuff. I think we were done in record time, and quickly commenced the annual unofficial production wrap party/bar crawl. As always, the festival was a lot of work, but also very fun. After doing the same job for five years, it’s fairly low stress for me now.
I’ve posted another dozen or so photos from Monday — click any of the thumbnails above to see them.
Villa Incognito WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
Dern Foley, posing as a priest, is apprehended as he attempts to smuggle illicit narcotics from Laos into Los Angeles. This is far more than a standard drug bust however; Foley and his two compatriots Dickie Goldwire and Mars Stubblefield had until this time been missing and presumed dead since their plane was shot down over Vietnam twenty-eight years earlier. Foley’s case represents a public relations nightmare for the CIA dn U.S. military. What to do with a former POW who decides to stay missing, then turns up years later as a drug smuggler? The agencies scramble to find out who Foley is working with, where the drugs came from, and if there are any others like him still in hiding.
Meanwhile, Dickie Goldwire is braving the mean streets of Bangkok in search of a guitar to take back to Villa Incognito, the former POWs’ headquarters. Shortly after his return, his fiancé Lisa Ko arrives at the Villa with news of Foley’s arrest. Goldwire and Stubblefield argue about how to proceed and, after a short visit, Lisa Ko returns to her traveling circus in the U.S. There, she discovers that her tanukis, the odd little east Asian mammals which she trains to perform — and with which she has a bizarre ancestral connection, have escaped in her absence.
Robbins’s storytelling is far from linear; his narrative is a tangled web, working roughly from the inside out. This in no way makes for a disjointed reading experience, but it does trip one up when trying to summarize the book. Robbins’s writing is delightfully convoluded on a smaller scale as well — he twists sentences around, going off on brief tangents and making frequent asides to the reader. His cast of characters is weirdly hilarious, including (in addition to those mentioned above) a Bangkok prostitute who happens to be working on a degree in comparative literature, an unemployed draftswoman with a clown fetish, an entire town of out-of-work Vietnamese circus performers, and a Japanese animal-god come to earth in more or less human form. Although this is one of Robbins’s most recent novels, it’s my first of his; I’ll have to seek out some of his earlier books.
I’m currently in Seattle, working at the Northwest Folklife Festival for the sixth consecutive year. (Posts from previous festivals here, here, here, here, and here. I’m once again working as the Signage Coordinator, overseeing all the signs and banners for the 4-day festival. Things have run relatively smoothly for me despite some unexpected setbacks, like the removal during the past year of a number of trees from which I usually hang banners. I’m worn out though; I’ve been getting to Seattle Center between 7 and 8 a.m. for the last week, and leaving between 6 and 11 p.m. Tomorrow, the last day of the festival, I plan to go in a little bit later. It’ll be a late night though, as we start to tear things down as soon as the festival is over.
The weather has been beautiful, and I’ve had a fair amount of time to walk around and enjoy the festival. We (the staff) were given coupons for free meals from various food vendors, so I’ve been studding myself with festival food for the past few days. Tonight I had my favorite festival dish: the blackened salmon Caesar salad from Scotty’s. That represents just about the pinnacle of festival nutrition; my other selections have included Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream and an elephant ear.
I’ve had a chance to play with my new camera some more. I’m still getting the hang of it, but I’ve managed to get a few decent pictures. I’ve posted 30 or 40 of what I’ve shot so far. I’ll probably have some more after tomorrow. Click any of the thumbnails above to visit the gallery.
