Easy on the Eyes

I recommend a computer add-on called F.lux to spare your eyes & improve your onscreen life, for MAC, Linux, and Windows. It calibrates monitor brightness to your location and time of day. I’ve been using it for several months and really like the mellowing effect, especially when I work evening hours. You can read about it and download it at this link. Oh, and it’s free. Props to @herf and @lorna for making this useful program.

Ari Fleischer, Gone But Not Forgotten

Update: A day after reporting Fleischer’s role in advising Komen, ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum is now reporting that Fleischer’s role with Komen is ongoing–he’s still advising them. Komen is paying the ex-Bushie to help them try to recover from the public relations disaster of this past week. Our donations to Komen at work. #WontBeFooledAgain.

As I wrote on this site a month ago in “George W. Bush, Skunk at the Party” Republican candidates this year have shunned W.’s memory and never mention his administration. I was struck by this again tonight in reading Judd Legum’s report in ThinkProgess that Ari Fleischer, W.’s longtime press secretary, advised the Komen Foundation in December 2011 on hiring a Senior V-P for Communications and External Relations–a reader points out it seems they may have anticipated dealing with bad press from a controversy such as de-funding Planned Parenthood. Even while many right-wingers feign amnesia, a salutary result of the Komen scandal would be if it serves to remind voters that though W. and his minions are gone from the West Wing we must remember the baleful influence of the Bush presidency lest the country fall under its malign spell again.

#Fridayreads/Feb. 3

#fridayreads ‘Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music,’ a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) annual award in criticism–I’m always good for some rockin’ music essays. Also, ‘The Disposable Man,’ one of Archer Mayor’s superb Joe Gunther police novels set in Brattleboro, VT. Great cop, great story.

Putting Printed Books and Ebooks on Equal Footing

With indie record labels now routinely making downloads of music available to buyers of vinyl LPs, I’m heartened to see a similar strategy taking hold among indie publishers too, with regard to ebooks and printed books. . . . With the print book and ebook initiative announced today, Coach House has demonstrated their continuing relevance, if it were needed–and that of publishers like them– in the burgeoning digital age that publishing has entered. I wonder how long it will be before big, commercial houses are also routinely making ebooks available, or some digital product, available with purchase of a new book. Meantime, congratulations to Coach House Books for leading the way. // more. . .

Neil Young, Musical Hero

Neil Young, who has for quite awhile been vocally decrying the sound of much recorded music nowadays said this at a tech conference today: “Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl (albums),” as reported by the AP.

In other Neil news, a recently recorded 37-minute Crazy Horse session is burning up the Internet, http://www.neilyoung.com/. For now, we’ll have to listen to it in a compressed digital file, but it still sounds pretty great. I bet this will be part of a new Crazy Horse release soon, and available on vinyl.

Alan Lomax, Song Collector

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I’ve lived for 20 years I used to see this big man with a scratchy looking goatee. He seemed somehow familiar, and interesting, like if each of us hadn’t been hurrying we could’ve had a good conversation at a neighborhood diner. Eventually, a neighbor pointed to me who he was–“That’s Alan Lomax, the song collector.” Of course, that’s why I recognized him.

Before I moved to New York, I ran Undercover Books, a Cleveland, Ohio bookstore that also sold recorded music. We used to handle albums from such venerable labels as Folkways, Nonesuch, and Rounder. I had seen Lomax’s picture on the liner notes, as he had for decades been recording field hands, convicts, laborers, and other bearers and keepers of musical traditions. Leadbelly was only one of his great discoveries. I admired Lomax, just as I admired the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams, who earlier in the 20th century, even before he would become a brilliant composer of orchestral music, had ventured into the fields, docks, and sheep-shearing paddocks with early recording equipment to hear and record the tunes of local folk.

I never did get to have that sit-down with Alan Lomax, who died in 2002. But I was delighted to read tonight, via this article in the New York Times, that the vast archive he left behind is soon going to be accessible in a digital storehouse that will be widely accessible to scholars, musicians, and the public. Hooray for Alan Lomax, and the Association for Cultural Equity, the project under the hands of his daughter Anna Lomax Wood that is making these treasures available. When you read the Times article, don’t miss the interactive feature with recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bessie Jones, and other greats.

Never too Late for Justice

Just desserts won by a former slave, eloquently expressed in a wonderful letter he sent to his former master. Be sure to read to the end. H/t to Lisa Christiansen of CBC Radio 3, @LisaChristCBC @NealBrennan @lettersofnote and their neat website, LettersofNote.com.

Farewell to Scottish Friend, Architect Isi Metzstein

I was saddened recently to learn that Isi Metzstein, a longtime friend and the father in a family I’ve been close with for many years, died at his home in Glasgow, Scotland on January 10. Isi lived a remarkable life and was a well-regarded architect and teacher, as the obituaries that have run all over Britain attest, including prominent notices in the Independent (“Architect Hailed for Modernist Vision and Inspirational Teaching”) and the Guardian(“Innovative Architect Designed Remarkable Postwar Buildings”). //more . . .