debris libris

I seem to be addicted to blogging.

I have now created another blog for the purpose of posting little scraps of writing that I write or say or think of in the course of a day - things that are interesting or cool or different but don't have much hope of having a life beyond their first utterance.

debris libris

I could probably post to it all by myself, but I would really like to get other minds involved, so if you'd like to contribute (by which I mean post your own interesting, cool, or different snippets of words whenever you feel like), let me know. With enough people and enough posting, this thing could become a big seething pit of inspiration or just plain old good thoughts.

I'm going to add a feed to it on the sidebar of this blog, watch out.

Good day.

Amadou & Mariam

Often when I put something on my Amazon.com wishlist, I have no idea whatsoever what it is - I just found it somewhere and the album cover art looked cool, or the title was clever, or the genre was something I like.

Such as the case with Amadou & Mariam's album Dimanche a Bamako (ahem, cover art), a musical duo from Mali. Up until this week, I had no idea who they really were or what any of their music sounded like.

I then came across one of their songs (Coulybali) on Last.fm here at the store, and immediately fell in love. Amadou & Mariam both sing and play, but most importantly they create. This is not your typical folksy African music, or your standard new-agey pseudo-African filler. They really make fun music, interesting music, that has roots not only in Mali's folk, but in American blues and jazz, Latin music, eastern instruments, and good ol' rock and roll.

Now if the story ended there, it would be pretty damn good, but I fired up Wikipedia discovered a stunning fact about Amadou & Mariam: they are both blind. In fact, they apparently are commonly known as "the blind couple from Mali." They met at Mali's Institute for the Young Blind (who knew that Mali had such a thing?) and from there started to make music.

Their website is terribly fun. If you go to the Radio section, as I now have done, you can sign up and listen to their music interspersed with music that has influenced them. For instance, I just heard my favorite Coulibaly followed by Nina Simone's Sinnerman and now Diana Ross is singing.

PS - Yay Mali! These are not the first musicians from Mali I've come across and liked: Salif Keita is awesome, too. You might know his song Madan which has been remixed and featured in a Buddha Bar album (V, Disc 1) and in Techhouse Dance Parties. Salif Keita is not blind, but he is an albino. AND Malian royalty. His nickname is "the Golden Voice of Africa."

Etsy

Right on the heels of becoming a Threadless crusader, I've found this:

Etsy.com is a very large online middleman for arts and crafts people. It's like eBay, but classier, focusing on storefronts rather than auctions. It's like CafePress, they don't produce anything themselves - their users do all the production - they just maintain the forum in which to sell.

So what you've got here is a big bunch of crafty crafts people who make awesome things out of (usually) their own home. Ah, the internets.

Want original watercolor paintings? They have them. Hand painted porcelain? Got it. How about owl-themed stationery? They seem to have a lot of this.

There's even people selling earrings that look like scissors, for god's sake.

The Etsy people were also smart enough to include what they call the Geolocator: a tool for finding sellers nearby. This makes it oh-so-easy to buy from local artists and craftsmen.

It always gives me a warm feeling inside whenever I support the little guy, and Etsy is this amazing beast made up of thousands of little guys. It is, in my opinion, the perfect place to get one-of-a-kind birthday gifts.

Really, what's with all the owls?

PS - Kadam, if you're reading, this one's for you.

PPS - Can someone tell me what this is about?

Looking for Contributors

In an effort to baloon this nifty little blog of interesting things to sizes unknown, I hereby put out the call for contributors. If there's anyone out there who's listening and would like to join me in posting about interesting, pretty, or cool things, please let me know! Weekly postings, which seems to be my current frequency, would be perfect. Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?

Impending Cocktails

Let's see how many of you read this blog: on this upcoming Monday night, at around 8pm, I will be hosting a cocktail party at my house. Anyone who attends as a result of this blog and mentions it gets a free drink.

You see, the key to the success of this cocktail party is about two pounds of glossy paper called The Ultimate Bar Book by Mittie Hellmich. This little compendium of cocktails is not just a recipe book - oh no - it is a full fledged education in alcohol. Reading it, I feel like I should have filled out a FAFSA to pay off the tuition.

Organized by main ingredient, the Book systematically conquers one major alcoholic establishment after another. Gin, Rum, Tequila, Vodka - they are disected, clarified, and explained in copious detail like exotic butterflies plucked out of the air by an overzealous 19th century encyclopedist.

Every recipe - and there are a lot of them - is accompanied by a snipet of back-story: where the drink originated, its evolution, and tricks for making it perfect. The Book actually has an unusually large collection of old drinks, harkoning back to the turn of the century and the 1920's especially. "Bring these drinks back into vogue!" it cries from its shiny pages.

In addition to information about the liquids themselves, the Book provides accompanying instructions on the subject of equipment, the hardware of drinking. In an easy and friendly way, it provides not only a detailed list of aparati required to mix drinks, but gives a profile mug-shot of the appropriate glass for every single drink.

The Ultimate Bar Book is a license to mix. It empowers any old DIY-obsessed schmo to go absolutely nuts in a pursuit of fine beverages. I am one such schmo, and I intend to offer lavish libations at the altar of DIY this Monday at 8.

Threadless!

If you don't know Threadless t-shirts, then - I'm sorry - you've been living in a cave for the last five years. Otherwise, how could you have missed the adoringly artistic and witty internet-age pheonomenon that is Threadless??

Okay, so maybe you don't know Threadless. Sucks for you. But I, being magnanimous, will explain what you've missed:

Threadless makes t-shirts, but they don't design their t-shirts. Nay, they invite you, "the people", to draw or photoshop something and send it in. Then they take those submissions and post them online, letting "the people" (again) to score them.

Once this is done, they take the cream of the cream of the crop and print 'em up. They don't print many, and they usually only print designs once - so when they're gone, they're gone. (There are some exceptions, for the especially awesome.)

It's brilliant. The people-powered design strategy allows for some really amazing artsits and clever graphic designers to get their stunning work produced, and keeps all the styles right on the button of hip. Plus, with the constant input of new designs and the limited runs, they create an awesome "limited edition" feeling - the shirt you're wearing, aside from being beautiful and/or witty as hell, is one of only a tiny number that exist or will ever exist. It's almost one-of-a-kind.

For whatever reason, Threadless designs now have a certain character, making them all identifiably Threadless. What I mean by this is that most shirts are either a) intelligently chuckle-inducing, b) sublime, or c) downright bizarre. Sometimes, they're a combination of all three. The artsists love to play with words (the Community...ahem...party) and they love to play with visual puns and sneaky easter eggs.

I just bought a bunch of shirts. The prices are reasonable ($15-17, hoodies are more expensive). The shirts themselves are quality, and the concept is - have I mentioned it? - brilliant. So, I strongly suggest you head over and peep the catalog for an overload of awesomeness.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Raw Emotion, and JMW Turner

I am actively trying to use this blog to highlight wells of inspiration and artistic vigor that occur in our own time, but I today I would like to take my readers (all two of you) back a little less than a century to gaze in slow wonder at the sublimity of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many English composers drew upon folk music as a source of raw material for their high-art masterpieces. This trend might be traced back to the 19th century's Romantic movements, both in music and in art. It is no coincidence that, in the mid 1900's the pastoral subjects of John Constable became popular just before folk music became popular in orchestral music.

But at the end of the century, new artistic forces had arisen. Classical, stuffy pastoral landscapes like Constable had given way to the wide swaths of paint applied by JMW Turner. No longer were attention to detail and accuracy of effect the criteria of excellence, but instead quality and clarity of impression, feeling. In his paintings, Turner took the real world and distilled it down into a blurry field of color and light, giving the observer not a historical account of what happened, but the feeling that the event or scene elicited.

Vaughan Williams does for music what Turner did for painting. Definitely taking a page from the playbook of Gustav Mahler - whose music has been said to "move like glaciers" - Vaughan Williams knits folk themes into a wide, slow moving quilt of raw feeling. There is no frill, there is no baroque ornamentation on his music; there is nothing to distract the listener as the music flows on in a single-minded, instinct-driven direction.

His players hold their notes so long, the strings and horns are so plentiful, and the punctuation so sparse, his music reminds us of the melodramatic fare that accompanies movies like Lawrence of Arabia. That's because Vaughan Williams shares the fate of another English composer, Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets, in that his music has been (and continues to be) relentlessly imitated by Hollywood soundtrack hacks.

If you'd like to know what I mean, here is one of Vaughan Williams's most famous works and one of my favorite pieces of music ever, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.