(no subject)

[the_rck]

Getting up at 7:00 is both harder and easier than I expected. I really, really don't want to drag myself out of bed, and I can't seem to think until after I have some coffee (and even then... Well). I think I may need to eat more for breakfast than just a banana when I'm getting up this early. I used to be able to get by on coffee until noon when I was still getting up with Cordelia on school days, but I don't seem to be able to any more. The part I like about getting up early is that it leaves me with a couple of hours more to get things done. I expect that, today, I'll be done with all my daily online reading by 9:00 or 9:30. Then I can get on with link finding.

I want more caffeine and/or more sugar right now. I don't actually have a headache, but I have a shadow of one, just the heavy sense that something's lurking. I feel, as I always do, that, if I can just find the right thing to eat or drink, I'll feel better. I know that it doesn't actually work like that, but it's still my instinctive response. It probably couldn't hurt to eat some almonds or cheese. Either of those would probably be better than more coffee.

Someone recommended Peter Bellamy's Kipling performances to me, and I tried some on YouTube. I'm fairly indifferent to them, so I don't know that I'll buy any or listen to more. This did, however, lead to me finding music I like a lot-- I let YouTube chain and just keep playing stuff, and it started playing stuff by Blackmore's Night. I haven't bought any yet, but I will. Cordelia has labeled the music 'boring.' I disagree. Our tastes differ considerably.

I have noticed that the music Cordelia likes to listen to sounds, apart from being unfamiliar to me, an awful lot like what my sister and I listened to in the early 1980s. I rather expected music to change more than that.

This is day two with Cordelia's friends visiting. Their mother has a learner's permit for driving, so she can bring them over and pick them up if she has a friend with a license to ride along. Otherwise, it takes an hour to get here by bus from their apartment. The other family provided lunch yesterday and again today. I've got stuff for lunch for tomorrow and Thursday. I'm not sure what we'll do for Friday, but I don't feel particularly urgent about it yet.

Scott bought a lot of frozen fish from a specialized truck that was selling near our grocery store a week ago. It was very expensive, but there was a wide variety available, and it's not like we don't have room in our basement freezer. Last night, Scott grilled some, a 'sampler pack.' We're not sure which bit of fish is which, apart from the salmon which is obvious. There's supposed to be tuna, mahi-mahi, and swordfish in there. It's just unfortunate that, if we particularly like something, we won't know which it is.

The kids walked to Wendy's for frosties yesterday morning. I probably shouldn't have let them go as close to lunch time as I did. It resulted in them not wanting real food until about 2:00. I got the impression that they might choose to go back today or some time later in the week. The book store that's near the Wendy's isn't open on Mondays, and the kids are interested in that, too.

They also hiked to the school playground in the afternoon. Given the construction, it's a lot more of a walk than it used to be, but it's still not very far. They didn't stay out long, however. There's no shade on the playground, and the sun was bright, so the playground equipment was unpleasant to touch. It was also kind of hot, about 87F.

I meant to start link finding yesterday afternoon, but I played around on GoodReads instead, mostly seeing what books authors I like have marked as read. Some of those were things I'd read but hadn't thought to put on my list previously. Some were things that sound interesting enough that I want to read them myself. It was kind of interesting to see which authors were willing to rate things as opposed to just marking them as read. I have a sort of general impression that rating may be more acceptable for authors in some genres than in others and that authors of fiction are more willing to rate books they've read for research and books by people who are safely dead than they are recent books in their own genre. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens aren't likely to say nasty things in response to a negative (or less than utterly glowing) rating/review or to retaliate by slagging the reviewer's books. There were a lot of authors who only rated things they were willing to give five stars.

Comments

[zhelana]

I love Blackmore's Night. No one has ever heard of them..

[the_rck]

The friend I was talking to on AIM a couple of days ago knows and loves them, so that makes three of us.

Cordelia thinks the music is 'boring.' Of course, she doesn't care for anything I listen to. That seems to be automatic.

[zhelana]

hahaha i guess my parents got lucky that I listen to just about anything they listen to, and always have. I never even made them listen to 80s music, preferring the 60s and 70s station that they listened to.

[the_rck]

My mother and step-father didn't listen to music as a rule. They listened to NPR news programs a lot and also, eventually, Prairie Home Companion.

We had a largish collection of LPs, however, that I eventually began playing and listening to on earphones when I wanted to shut the rest of the family out. That was mostly stuff from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I'm pretty sure it was all my mother's. I'm not sure why she stopped listening to it. Well, she probably got out of the habit during the years when she ran a daycare center in the house. All she could play then was stuff aimed at toddlers or, at least, enjoyable by toddlers. I remember hearing the Beatles a lot during those years.

My father did listen to music, but we were only with him on weekends, and that stopped when he moved out of state the year I turned eleven.

[zhelana]

My parents only listen to music in the car, or when they're swimming, and we didn't have the pool when i was growing up, so it was just in the car. They'd have played whatever I wanted to listen to, but it was usually the oldies station, which pleased them. When I got older and started listening to 90s alternative, they put up with it.

[the_rck]

Ah. We didn't have a car until after I turned twelve. My mother didn't learn to drive until then, and we wouldn't have had a place to park one anyway as our driveway was shared with the next door neighbors, who did have a car, and was only wide enough for a single car. It was long enough for two, but one person would always be parked in. The street was narrow enough that, if someone parked on it, there was only room for one car to pass.

My sister got into top 40 radio in the early 1980s and kind of dragged me along for the ride. I had a radio in my room but not a record player or tape player, and there weren't a lot of channels to chose from.

[zhelana]

My sister got into country in the 90s and kind of dragged me along for the ride. I don't mind though, some of it was pretty good.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

Peter Bellamy was my favorite live performer. I saw him approximately annually between 1978-1990. On tour in the US, he played solo, with only a concertina for accompaniment. He was a compelling storyteller, which I think is one of the things which drew him to the Kipling material. I figure he must have had friends in the East Lansing area, because the audiences for his shows were never very large.

For years I wasn't able to listen to his recordings -- just too upsetting. Even a cover of Bellamy's setting of "A Smuggler's Song" by John Roberts & Tony Barrand would get me crying a little bit. After 25 years, I have recently decided I should try to pick up the CD reissues of Bellamy's stuff, as a good chunk of his recordings have come out anew in the last decade.

Now he's regarded as a tremendously influential figure in the British folk scene: you can hear echoes of his singing style in Spiers & Boden, and their band Bellowhead. But back in 1990 his commercial prospects were dire, and the last time I saw him live he was bootlegging cassettes of his own out-of-print albums.

(I may have written this response for you before.)

[the_rck]

I wasn't sure why you'd be sad, so I went to Wikipedia. What a terrible, terrible thing.

I'm also sad about this sentence from the Wikipedia article: "It is said that Celtic Records have a large cache of quality recordings that are unlikely to be issued."

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

I probably shouldn't go on lots more about Peter Bellamy, since you didn't love the YouTubes you sampled. As a result of your mention I listened to some YT clips from Bellamy's earliest Kipling albums (Merlyn's Isle of Gramarye and Oak Ash and Thorn, both albums which were unobtainable until their recent CD reissue) and I'll try to pick those up this month. I wonder who the other performers are on those discs -- maybe The Young Tradition singers? I also found an excellent Bellamy retrospective, 20 years after his death, from Colin Irwin, who is probably the leading British journalist on folk music going back 40 years or more.

""It is said that Celtic Records have a large cache of quality recordings that are unlikely to be issued." " I tracked this through to a Mudcat forum post about Peter Bellamy. This is a reference to the company Celtic Music and its owner Dave Bulmer. Celtic Music used to be a nice normal CD label and distribution company based in the UK -- many of the folk LPs and CDs I got from the old Schoolkids Records store had Celtic Music Distribution stickers on them.

Dave Bulmer got, shall we say, weird about business later in life. CM acquired the rights to several British folk labels which went out of business in the 1970s and 1980s -- most importantly the Leader/Trailer family of labels run by Bill Leader. And then he decided to just sit on this accumulation of master recordings. Bulmer seemed to feel that if he piled up this horde of recordings which no one could listen to, somehow it would increase in value and he could cash in. Sometimes he would state that he would not release any of the classic recordings on CD until he had sold off his stock of LPs -- this was after sales of LP had gone to effectively zero, in the 1990s.

Dick Gaughan had a masterwork with his "Clan Alba" supergroup album in 1995. But Dave Bulmer decided that Celtic Music would get rich by having a monopoly on sales of that album -- literally, the only way you could get a copy was by mail order from CM, it was not in any stores, not even UK folk specialist stores. And so the album disappeared almost without a trace, even though it is epically good.

(Here's a live YouTube of a Clan Alba performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtyXYdP6f6g
Dick Gaughan, plus the Sileas harp duo, plus Brian McNeill on fiddle, bagpipes, drums, another guitarist.)

Some items from the Celtic Music collection did get reissued on CD, in limited run CD-R format. My information is that such CD-R discs did not have to have royalties paid to the original artists under UK copyright law, and that while regrettable, this was all completely legal.

I had not heard before that Celtic Music had a batch of Bellamy recordings, but this ties in with the idea that CM were hoarding things. Dave Bulmer died in 2013, and I hold hope that his estate will somehow sort things out.

More than you wanted to know, right?