The Good Wordle

Here's a cool time waster: Wordle. I used it to create this here word cloud for Oddment of Sandwiches.


And now back to your regularly scheduled life, already in progress.

(Tip from Good Evening)

What Though The Way May Be Long

This delightfully odd little film, set to the song "What Though The Way May Be Long" by Sweden's Esbjorn Svensson Trio, shows how much can be done with very little, on a number of levels. Today it takes on an additional melancholy layer of meaning with the news that pianist Esbjorn Svensson died over the weekend.

More over at The New Low Down.

RIP Esbjorn Svensson

Video: A Picture Of Doris Traveling With Boris

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Sad news for a Monday: A bright light in the musical firmament has gone out, and much too soon. Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson died over the weekend in a scuba diving accident near Stockholm. He was 44.

When I first heard the Esbjorn Svensson Trio (a.k.a. est), it felt as though the music was arriving from the future and the past simultaneously. Although generally labeled as "jazz," their music drew from classical and Baroque influences even as it reached out the hip hop generation, touring with Bjork and other "rock" groups. I'm proud to have his statement above serve as the motto for this here blog. To say he'll be missed is a severe understatement. est's 12th album, Leukocyte, is scheduled for release in September.

Read also:

• A video tribute and survey of est's development at AllAboutJazz.com
  
• This remembrance of Svensson from Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, est's American fellow travelers
• My paltry musings about the band from last year

See also:

• This video for the song "Goldwrap" from the group's most recent CD
• This haunting fan video of "What Though The Way May Be Long"

Who's Watching

Here's an update on activity in my other blogs.

The New Low Down

• KISS and Condoleeza Rice

An Oddment of Sandwiches
This purposely un-bloggy thing has turned into a story collector, of all things, thanks to a writing exercise I came up with back in November. I take the Word of the Day from two word-of-the-day services and try to sketch out a scene that makes use of both words, for example "garboil" and "lacuna". One time what came out was a poem. I try to keep this to a single page in a 7x5 notebook, so most of them come out pretty short. Initially, I tried to use both words in the story which was fine at first, but quickly began to feel forced.

It's been a profitable exercise, artistically speaking, although being in control of all these characters can be a burden. Bumping off a talking penguin is one thing, but with one poor sap I needed two edits to make sure he was dead.

So we'll see where this goes. Most of the pieces I've sketched are still in the notebook, where they will remain. No use crying over spilled ink. But there are several characters who keep turning up asking me for fresh scenes. I get the feeling that two of them are going bound to meet sometime.

Condi: Behind the Music

The things that catch a person's eye.

Not long ago I was on the phone, idly perusing the webdoggle while my father informed me about the weather in South Dakota, when this surreal snippet derailed my rapt filial attention:

Condoleezza Rice meets rock band Kiss

The link led to an Associated Press report on the chance meeting of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and the members of "legendary glam rock quartet" KISS. Seems they were all staying in the same hotel in Stockholm and when Gene Simmons and his cohort found out, they invited the secretary to stop by and say hello.

Sadly, no reporters were present at the actual meeting (which sounds like the setting for either a Don DeLillo novel or a Bullseye Rooster post) but the AP's Matthew Lee, dutifully passes on the official gloss: Rice said it was "fun" to meet the undead novelty act and noted that Kiss "seemed well informed about current events." State Department spokespersons told Lee that the band signed autographs and handed out backstage passes to Rice's staff. The story doesn't indicate whether the Secretary herself accepted a backstage pass.

And then, as so often happens, the interesting details are consigned to the bottom of the piece:

Rice, a classically trained pianist, said she has eclectic musical tastes ranging from Beethoven to Bruce Springsteen [nice alliteration, Mr. Lee]. Hard stadium rockers like Kiss are included in the mix and Rice said her favorite tune of theirs is "Rock and Roll All Nite."

But, she conceded she had never seen the group in concert.

In fact, although she frequently attends classical music performances, Rice claims to have been to only four rock concerts in her life [hopefully the AP has a summer intern verifying this "claim"]. The first was in the early 1960s when she went as a 10-year-old to see Paul Revere and the Raiders in her home state of Alabama.

After her family moved to Colorado, Rice went at the age of 16 went on her first date with an Air Force cadet to see Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. She later saw Earth, Wind and Fire in Denver and her last rock and roll show was a U2 concert in Washington, she said.

Suddenly the painfully stiff, prickly-defensive, seemingly constipated public figure we've become familiar with over the last 7 years makes a lot more sense, at least to me. I look at the face in the State Department photo above and I can picture a young Condi, alone in her room, dorky-dancing with her headphones on, hoping no one catches her.

None of this will make listening to her woman-on-the-verge-of-a-hissy-fit style of speaking any easier to take. It also doesn't absolve her of complicity in prodding us into and stubbornly defending an unnecessary war. But barring a vice-presidential nod, the end is at hand. Rice has given every indication of wanting out of the spotlight once an ignoble dusk settles on the Bush era.

I've never subscribed to the whole "music will set you free" school of thought. But I have to wonder what might have happened if Ms Rice had gotten out to a few more rock and roll shows as a youngster. Given the line up above, you could argue she hasn't been to a "rock and roll show" yet. Big ups to Smokey and EWF, but I'm just saying...

Preposition trouble

A little something for the Word Dorks from this morning's Chicago Tribune Daywatch:
So many questions: Is the governor's desk on wheels now? Can he raise and lower it like a bus? Are free rides the only way to get the disabled off his desk? What are they doing up there to begin with?

(And yes, the title of this post is a reference to this classic cartoon. Money line at ~3:06)

A Day with Harvey and Bo

I spent much of the morning following a string Harvey Korman videos on YouTube (starting here), which led to a string of Carol Burnett show clips and outtakes. Then this afternoon email brings word that the great Bo Diddley has passed. So it's back to YouTube where a retrospective of this sui generis pioneer is there for the searching.

All in all, a pretty good way to spend a day.

The clip above features the now foundational Bo Diddley riff stripped down to its essence. Why bother with lyrics about buying diamond rings? The riff is the man, as the man is the riff, world without end, amen. (To see just how wound that riff is into rock's DNA see this.)

Requiem in eternas, Bo. And Harvey. You made this world a happier place.

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Korman clip tip from XO and TT (who are unlikely to ever share a sentence again).