2012 — 8 August: Wednesday
Once sleep has gone walkabout1 I find the best policy is to recognise that fact and make the finest cup of tea I can. [Pause] Done. And the repaired teeth that Frederick said might be 'sensitive' (a euphemism if ever I heard one) to temperature are keeping their heads down, too. A few twinges from the bits of jaw that were for too long too far ajar, but that seems to be all.
Not very nice weather right now, but the well-spoken lass on BBC Radio 3 has just promised sunshine and warmth later in the day.
I was feeling...
... a little aggrieved at my (you should excuse the pun) signal lack of success with the USB connection from BlackBeast to the Audiolab DAC/CD yesterday. An email from Len, conveying the considered wisdom of a Cyrus engineer on the topic ("Avoid it"), was depressingly reassuring. It's a pity, 'cos it had held out the promise of using the Audiolab box to control the playback from the PC "from the comfort of my armchair" — though quite how you're expected to navigate in excess of 40,000 music tracks (let alone the 77 days worth of podcasts) was lightly skipped over.
In fact, the JRiver jukebox is, in some ways, quite acceptable as a control interface at the PC end. I re-installed it once I'd given up on USB and reverted to the perfectly satisfactory (but only one way) optical interface. I've already tried, and discarded, one of the Logitech Squeezebox solutions though they keep chopping and changing their range. I do still look, from time to time, at the Brennan solution. I may yet succumb, though it offers only the controlling interface over what I presently have. Mind you, a good user interface is a precious thing — witness its comparitive rarity in the wonderful world of computing.
My masochistic streak, combined with a tad of obsessiveness, also takes me here and here occasionally. Re-ripping precisely and losslessly... now there's a hobby and a half for the twilight years of ever-diminishing capability.
This wonderful...
... quotation from the now-late Robert Hughes...
Truly bad art is always sincere, and there is a kind of forcible vulgarity, as American as a meatball hero, that takes itself for genius; Jacqueline Susann died believing she was the peer of Charles Dickens. "My peers," [Julian] Schnabel told The New York Times last winter, "are the artists who speak to me: Giotto, Duccio, Van Gogh." Doubtless this list will change if he tries a ceiling, but Schnabel has never learned to draw; in graphic terms, his art has barely got beyond the lumpy pastiches of Max Beckmann and Richard Lindner he did as a student in Houston. The dull, uninflected megalomania of his kitsch-expressionist imagery (Sex, Death, God and Me) is rant, a bogus "appropriation" of profundity.
... reminds me of one of my earliest "expensive"2 books, compiled by Gillo Dorfles in 1968:
The book develops and beautifully illustrates the thesis that 'Bad taste' is an approximate and inadequate translation of the German word "Kitsch". My later database comment on it was "My own taste developed early, I note". I love bad taste :-)
Neat trick
One of my heroes (Fred Hoyle) wrote the obituary for another of them (Bernard Lovell).
Is this the thin end...
... of the doubtless-looming Alzheimerian wedge? For the second time in 1,635 days I arrived at the Waiting Rose sans wallet. Festina lente, dear boy.
Today's noteworthy postal dropping...
... is a film (that gained 'Un certain regard' at Cannes) that had flown completely under my radar until I read an interview about a later film "Take this waltz" with the delectable Ms Williams in the Observer at the weekend.
She seemed quite taken with her co-star Mr Gosling in this earlier one. And contrast £7-99 for a Blu-ray laden with extras with the £9-99 to £12-99 of pre-recorded VHS tapes in the 1980s. No real contest, is it?
I'd been contemplating the not terribly joyous prospect of a trip out to see dear Mama in the care-home but ended up putting the car back in the garage about five minutes ago, and about four minutes ahead of the rain. The clouds out there are remarkably dark at the moment — enough to persuade me to unplug the two aerial leads, in fact. Never mind: it will soon be summer.
[Pause]
Alas, I cannot regard the film with the same 'certain regard' as its Cannes judges did. No matter, at least I also found a new Loudon Wainwright album to play (with) that came out a month or so back.