Welcome to the Eclecticon

I have wanted to review MBD (aka Shara Worden) I am the Workhorse since I picked it up a few years ago (I still have not heard its follow up, and so far my only exposure is this one album). A decidedly focused but eclectic bit of chamber pop with a lot of almost kitschy cabaret touches. It’s orchestral post-folk pop…how about that for a subgenre name?

Seriously, it has a detached but earthy sound. Lots of strings in places, but in a smart way that shows a sharp attention to arrangement. The vocal melodies are languorous and sentimental, but not sappy.

She sounds sometimes like Jeff Buckley at a Kate Bush recording session, and sometimes like Jonatha Brooke trying to cover Björk.  Sometimes it even evokes a Portishead kind of melancholic darkness; that kind of simmering sadness that isn’t emo-trite but simply has an emotionally dark, seductive hue.

I have read that there are bits of opera in Worden’s music, but I don’t hear it; I hear the cabaret and the poppy bits, and the more out bits (i.e. Bark Psychosis is just ever so mildly evoked in a cut like Freak Out) but none of the operatic elements claimed by what I am guessing is by hipsters who think a strong voice is somehow operatic.

Only a retro styled soul-jazz band oriented for dancing from Japan would name themselves Soil+Pimp Sessions. They have such varied album names as Pimpin, Pimp Master, Pimp of the Year, Pimpoint, and…6.

This energetic cut is from 6 and it’s a decently bouncy bit of funny groove that is somewhere between James Bond themes and the opening credits to a 60s era variety show, with costumes like a failed marriage of biker bar patron and 70s blaxploitation extras.

Went looking for some restocking of the wine rack, and ended up picking up mostly some unusual beers:

• J.W. Lee’s Harvest (matured in Lagavulin Whiskey casks)
• North Coast’s Old Rasputin XII Russian Imperial Stout (aged in Bourbon casks)
• Russian River Brewing’s Pliny the Elder, which Mr. Guntharp swears by and to my knowledge is not aged much at all (the bottling date is 10/21/09)

I need to find a place to procure stuff from Scottish brewhouse Harviestoun, as distribution in the US seems woefully limited.

It sounds a bit more developed but otherwise as equally ascetic in direction as his previous full-length, Blemish. But in the case of tracks like Small Metal Gods from new album Manafon, the spartan instrumentation and the cadences of the melodic fragments reminds me of some abstract marriage between a folky blues and the spare melancholic post-rock of solo Mark Hollis.

I will not lie, I miss the work David Sylvian did with Nine Horses and with his efforts that involved headier collaborators like Fripp and Sakamoto, but these later releases have a certain charm for very still, reflective moments.

So the structures are yurts (or rather upscale versions of true yurts, which are what nomadic peoples of Central Asia/Mongolia live in) and the missus and I spent a few days in one out in the expanse of Big Sur, at a place called Treebones Resort.  These yurts are sturdy, with small skydomes to see the stars and moon at night and wake up to a real, unobstructed dawn, as well as sinks, a wood/gas combo fireplace, and otherwise ascetic but well provisioned furnishings.

To give you an idea of how open this part of California is, imagine a place that is nearly 100 miles in length (following the coast) and as much as 30 miles inland, with fewer than 1000 permanent residents.  If it wasn’t for Route 1, it would probably still be largely impossible to traverse, as it faces a jagged set of cliffs and microclimates going all the way into the Saint Lucia mountains.

It was a famous hangout last century for writers like Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Henry Miller (the latter of which even has a bookstore/museum right off Route 1, but was closed both times we drove by it).

I had first read about Treebones in the FT, and later the Missus decided this would be a great idea for our eighth anniversary.  She was right (she usually is), as its perfect for disconnecting.  Phone service is patchy for most carriers (there is a landline in the lodge, but we didn’t use it), and the whole point is to be away from everything anyway.  This place is not Blackberry or iPhone friendly, which makes it me-friendly by default.

This forces you to do things like hike the various trails  and look at the local flora and fauna; there are a multitude of birds (including hearing a raptor one morning), hares, and at least one lynx/bobcat.

I got to really put my Vibrams to task, and they get more comfortable with each use.  They force you to be aware of your footfalls and your posture.  The trails on the resort are limited in length, but nonetheless give you some variety of terrain and elevation.  Since the resort abuts two parks (one state, one national) it isn’t as if you lack options.  As a matter of fact, the area is teeming with parks and preserves; Los Padres, Limekiln, Pfeiffer/Burns, Fort Hunter Liggett, Point Lobos, Molera, and the Point Sur Naval Lighthouse.

It is easy to sit in your yurt and read (which we both did), walk the grounds and take trips to the central lodge for food, which includes an odd mix of rustic fare (their pork loin is pretty damn amazing, and they also have a decent lamb tagine) as well as a small sushi bar.  They grow most of the produce on the resort grounds themselves, which truth be told, seems to make a difference.  They also have something called the Nest, which is a structure that sits off to one side of the resort grounds and faces the ocean.

It pretty much makes it impossible to not relax and feel like the world is ok.  That is frankly, worth the money spent.

Also, they have cool permanent residents like the really friendly Sammy the pitbull/dachshund mix (see above, who K and I met before a morning walkabout).

About the only downside to this whole place was the one young, inept hipster on staff that just did not seem to have it together – not when we checked in, not when we checked out, not during our first evening meal.  Everyone else on staff…totally cool, especially the manager and the sous chef.

Just the drive alone is relaxing. Route 1 can unnerve some folks, as there are parts where the high winds and short distance to a gravity-assisted demise off the cliffside can cause some slight increase in bloodflow to the panic gland.  Otherwise, it is a really idyllic roadtrip, and certainly an idyllic destination.

If you actually bother to leave the resort (we did not) you are in very close driving distance to the Esalen Institute , the aforementioned Henry Miller library, several galleries and Catholic retreat grounds.  And don’t forget, just another 30 or so miles south is San Simeon and Hearst Castle.

Both are Miles Davis alumni. both are known for radical sonic constructions that range from the very standard setting to the very avant-garde. Both show a great level of tasteful playing when dealing with material from Bill Evans, whose own work was both complex and demanding on the one hand, yet utterly accessible and emotive on the other.

The pencils for this are a few years old, and I hammered the water-soluable colored pencil, acrylic ink, gouache, pen (Pentel brush, triplus fineliner) and digital post-processing in the last two evenings.

This is Cory, who was another colleague from my VA Linux Systems days. A really affable guy, who worked out of the DC Metro offices. Since then I hear he left after years of being in IT/Tech to do contracting/home interior design and building (and apparently quite good at it).

As the 10 year anniversary of Sourceforge and the LNUX IPO come up, I find myself recalling more of the various events and people of that crazy period more often.

This one has been sitting around for a while (at since at least February of this year) and it is based from a reference shot of the great Afrika Bambaataa in the book Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang, on the formative evolution of hip-hop.

I still listen to AB, since his early explorations that married street soundsystems full of dub and funk with the coldly precise discotectonics of Kraftwerk and an overall aesthetic that was equal parts P-Funk party groove and Sun-Ra cosmic have never really lost their appeal to me.

The man was a true game changer whose early efforts literally helped ignite what has become more than simply a genre of music.

I worked on this in small bursts when time allowed, and its Pentel brush pen, clutch pencil, gouache, acrylic paint, Pro-White, Pigma micron and PS7.

There actually is a more developed version in storage, but I suppose I’ll save that for material in the art book.

Monster Energy Drink (which I find generally to be garbage) is bullying a microbrewer in Vermont in what has to be something right out of another PR fiasco of a company, Monster Cable.

An interesting question about where there is some disconnect between the buzzword of ‘government 2.0′ and the actuality – especially in terms of conflict of interest(s) between the citizenry and the citizenry that are also government employees.

A recent BSA report again devolves into a series of questionable statistics based on an obscured methodology. When are these organizations going to realize that pumping out figures as if you just use a random number generator is going to very rapidly be picked apart by people who understand math and understand the technology at work? They make colossal gaffes at a rate that almost competes with SCO and MS.

Speaking of SCO, they fired Darl McBride. I’d like to say something professional and analytical about this, but given the jaw-dropping, frivolous-lawsuit inducing, FUD factory that the man has been, I think “good riddance” is actually the most honest and sensible response.

Massive Attack have a dense, layered sound that one would not necessarily expect to work live, but footage like this shows clearly otherwise.

The group uses an extended lineup that let’s the tunes breathe with a muscular beat section, exerting all the tripped out dubwise effets and ethnic percussion between floating pads of sound and laconic vocals.

Yes, I was sitting on the couch in a food-coma of sorts. Felt like re-living a moment of my previous post (namely the flight of various fish, including a live -but not for very long-  scallop) so I scribbled the following using a Pentel brush on bristol.

I probably should not have filled in the table in black (and may fix that later) as I just am too inert to expend too much effort on drawing wood grain.

The above menu was from one of the best dining experiences I have ever had, at Saison in the Mission. As this is part of K and I celebrating eight years together. Big ups to the Missus.

There is essentially nothing about the experience that was pretentious, as everything seems wholly focused on the food.  There are no requirements for dressing up, but it is a weekend only establishment, working out of the Stable Cafe building, of which you do not pick from a menu; you book (and pay) in advance, then arrive to a multi-course meal that is prepared, presented and paced impeccably well.

And while that menu shows five courses, there were actually seven, with segue courses consisting of a tomato-based jelly with melon and a scallop with chard in a reduction of some kind that was so much epic win.

And they freely promote seeing the kitchen at work: