Puttering in the Study

Dallas DCI show

I took Grayson to his first drum & bugle corps show last night - we met my college roommate Bryan Dickerson in Mesquite for the 31st North Texas Festival of Drums & Bugles (affectionately referred to as "Lake Highlands" since until this year that's where it was always held).  http://www.dallasdci.com/
There were ten corps there, and I was happy to see that Grayson's favorite was mine, the Concord Blue Devils.  We didn't stay for the scores to be announced, but I read this morning that BD won with a 90.40, beating the Cadets and Phantom Regiment.  Carolina Crown, which we particularly enjoyed, placed fourth, followed by Blue Knights, Colts, Crossmen (another good one) Mandarins and Southwind.  Frontier, a senior corps from Dallas, also performed.

Twin Peaks - Season 2 DVDs

Just finished the Season 2 Twin Peaks DVDs last night, and watched the short interviews with various cast members.  Although I'm still immensely pleased with the quality of the DVDs - they blow up to a six foot wide 4:3 image in the purple room (our home theater) the series did trail off a bit as the second season wore on.  It was something that a third season could have picked up and run with (the chacaters remained great), but the ending - with all that bizarre stuff in the Black Lodge really let the series end on a bad note (I'll be watching the prequel movie Fire Walk With Me soon and will see if it changes my impression).
I now have the season 1 and season 2 episodes on DVD, but not the original pilot, which isn't available on DVD (yet).  It's available on VHS but in the format of the European version, which had a different ending tagged on.  Fortunately, I taped all the original episodes (including the pilot) when they re-ran on ABC in 1990, so I have the pilot on VHS.  This morning I copied the pilot over onto a DVD so I could watch it without having to switch back and forth between the movie VHS and the original episode.  I thought the original has commercials as well (all of this was taped uring the first Gulf War) but the pilot at least doesn't - and I now suspect that I copied it from one VCR to another so I'd have all of them organized in order.  The video quality is awful - it's amazing what we tolerated twenty (here seventeen) years ago - but at least I have the original.  Now I can watch it on a DVD player, and save it to the server so when the original tapes degrade I won't have lost it.

Continuum - John Mayer

I really liked Mayer's first two albums, and while this is undoubtedly good stuff, it's not as catchy, and will take a little while longer to sink in.  Not quite what I wanted, and I'm, not sure I'll have the patience to listen to it enough to see if it's something I'll end up really liking.  He's apparently trying to do depper into blues and avoid the lighter pop that has been so successful for him, but that's sort of what I liked. 

King Kong soundtrack - John Barry

My favorite music growing up was soundtracks, and John Barry's classic to the 1976 remake of King Kong was one of my favorites.  When the album finally became available on CD last year I snatched it up.  The recording is pretty thin, and the music itself is heavily dated in spots (and often reminds you of his other '70's soundtracks, most notably 1979's Moonraker) but it is good stuff in many, many places, with driving action scenes in a couple of places and a lush love theme.  Not a great soundtrack, but a nice one.

Tears for Fears - Everybody Loves a Happy Ending

After rediscovering how much I liked Raoul and the Kings of Spain last week I started on the long-delayed followup Everybody Loves a Happy Ending in the car on the way to a hearing in Tyler this week.  It's not a bad album, but I couldn't remember much about it.  It has some really nice things on it, but it was just a little too all over the place, and a little hard to nail down.  A little judicious editing might have focused it better.

Sting - Mercury Falling

As much as I like Sting, like a lot of other people I didn't much care for Mercury Falling (although in fairness, I did decide to ask Jamie to marry me based on one of the tracks, so it wasn't all bad).  I listened to it again this week in the study and the car when I had a few minutes, and my opinion hasn't much changed.

Raoul and the Kings of Spain - Tears for Fears

Had a little time to listen while working in the study today, and I had some songs from this album in the back of my head so I put it on and let the speakers play a little (read, I cranked it a bit). 
This is just one hell of an album.  I was planning on just listening to tracks 1 and 2, but they were so good I listened to the whole thing again.  I don't really have time to do a detailed review - sufficie it to say that this is about as good an album as I think I have ever heard.  It has some standout tracks, and bears a careful listening - as with most of my albums it's spent way more time fighting with road noise on a car stereo than it has on a good sound system.
Do yourself a favor - get this.

Goodbye Alice in Wonderland - Jewel

I bought this last year and completely forgot to post on it after listening to it.  I saw Jewel on Las Vegas last year and was really blown away at how good her music was and how well she performed (I knew who she was before that, but didn't know what songs were hers and had never seen her perform).  Especially the ones where she just laid back and rocked - specifically "Only One Too".  So I got the album and was really impressed with how good overall it is.

Symphony 3 "Sorrowful Songs" - Henryk Gorecki

I've had this CD since about 1993, and decided to listen to it today in the study while trying to paint a test board for the study ceiling (with books on Palladio out seemed something classical was called for).  This is a very simple but very touching piece, and grows on you the more you hear it. 

Tears of Joy - Don Ellis

In the summer of - oh, probably 1983, I was obsessed with a Don Ellis piece called Strawberry Soup that was being performed by the Madison Scouts drum & bugle corps.  I thought I had the meter figured out as a constantly changing one - probably lots of 3/8 and 6/8 with some 2/4 and 4/4 mixed in (since there was no other way to stitch the thing together).  I later copy a friend who had this copy to run me a copy of SS, and that's been the only version of the original I have ever ben able to lay my hands on.
It turned out that Ellis' compositions were all kept at Eastfield Junior College in Mesquite - literally across the highway from my roommate's home, so at some point he went over and copied the manuscript score for SS.  To our shock, with the exception of the 4/4 finale, the entire composition was in 9/4.  Even for college music students, the thing was nearly impossible to follow, even with the 1971 recording playing, and the score right in front of us.  We transcribed a few of the more familiar parts for trumpt, trombone and horn, but generally just shook our heads.  And kept listening to the album.
Over the years I have never been able to locate a copy of the original album (of course I haven't had a turntable since 1993, so it wouldn't have done me much good).  Then, I just discovered this CD at a Virgin store in Chicago Tuesday night.  When I listened to it this week, I discovered that you could actually make out much more than on my 23 year old cassette recording of the album, and that what I'd always heard as a thin, bass-less performance actually had pretty much all the sound range you'd want from a big band performance.  Couple of other surprises as well - this 1971 double album includes Loss, which was a highlight of the drum corps theatrical production BLAST! a few years ago.  (Haven't listened to it - or anything else - yet, but am looking forward to it).