Fuzzy things

A couple of our nice fuzzy native plants...
Cirsium occidentale: cobweb thistle. I grew it from seed!

Clematis lasiantha: pipestem, between its lovely creamy flower and its appealing puffball stages...

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 89

I've been listening to the Murray-Allen-Carrington Power Trio recording, Perfection, and the album title is not far off. Here's a studio recording of the title track, with a couple of guests. It's not my favorite track on the album– Craig Harris gets things off to a slow start– but it gives an idea of what they're up to. David Murray sounds like... David Murray... always first-rate, never phoning it in. Terri Lyne Carrington is a drummer to be reckoned with. Geri Allen (RIP) was more of a chameleon... she could do sophisticated or New Age-y, Ellington or Evans, and she could do fists, elbows, and glissandos. This was the dream trio for her talents– one more reason to lament her premature death at age 50.

Ngoni

The humble little ngoni has a sweet lilting sound that can also rock, especially with judicious use of wah-wah pedal, and in the hands of Bassekou Kouyate and friends and family. Amy Sacko does the blazing lead vocals. Beautiful.

Random reading

Sometimes you just have to pick it up and read it, not knowing exactly what to expect.

Tears of the Trufflepig
Fernando A. Flores
The cover of this book, with its unappealing title, caught my eye at the local library. A near-future political dystopia, somewhere on the Texas-Mexico border... why not? It's a good read, reminiscent in style of Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, with its touch of magic realism, humor, dread, and local flavor, along with the humanism at the core of the main characters. Add to that two (count 'em) border walls and trafficking in genetically engineered designer animals, and you have what strikes me as a fully plausible storyline ripped from the headlines of 2030.

Onward and Upward in the Garden
Katharine S. White
Consisting of her collected reviews of garden catalogues, starting in 1958. Seeds, bulbs, and roses. I kid you not. I don't garden much, and when I do it's not even close to the kind of gardening White engaged in. So why am I compelled to read on, season after season, hybrid after hybrid? It's the writer's voice, of course...

By August a flower garden, at least on the coast of eastern Maine, where I live, can be at its best—and at its worst. Most of one's successes are apparent, and all of one's failures. For me, this year, heavy memories remain from spring of the disaster area in the north bed of old-fashioned roses, where field mice, hungry under a snowdrift, stripped the bark off the bushes and killed two-thirds of them. Like all disaster areas, this one is still, although replanted, rather bleak. A more recent sorrow is the sudden death on the terrace of a well-established Jackmani clematis, which turned black overnight just as its big purple blossoms were opening. There are numerous theories in the household about this loss—too heavy a dose of fertilizer, too much watering, too strong a spray drifting over from the nearby rose beds, a disease still undiagnosed. My own theory is dachshund trouble. 

Game 4 and Dark Magus

This has got to be one of the most god-awful sloppiest-ass first halves of basketball I have ever seen, Klay aside. I watched with the sound off while listening for my first time ever to Miles's Dark Magus, a relentless masterpiece of funk-noise. Hard to imagine what the Carnegie Hall audience back in 1974 made of Pete Cosey shredding and Dave Liebman and Azar Lawrence honking and squawking. The Miles recordings of these years went somewhere music has never gone before and probably never will again.

Dr. John, RIP

American music is the best music, and New Orleans music is the best American music, and though Dr. John may not have been the best of New Orlean music, he was pretty damn good.

The Panda's Thumb is my Achilles' Heel

A sesamoid bone "is a bone embedded within a tendon or a muscle." In the ball of your foot, the two little metatarsophalangeal sesamoid bones can become inflamed and cause a small world o' pain. As they are doing in my left foot as I write.

Until reading the Wikipedia entry, I had not known (or had forgotten) that the panda's thumb, as made famous by Stephen Jay Gould, is in fact a sesamoid bone. I'm happy for the pandas, who can use that sesamoid to grasp and strip tasty bamboo leaves from a branch. As for me, it feels as if somebody shoved a bamboo sliver right into the ball of my foot. Nothing a little ibuprofen and ice can't cure... for now... I hope...

The bad dream that is Trump

Every time Laura expresses justified outrage at the latest Trumpian outrage, I remind her that we should be very thankful that Donald Trump is an incompetent idiot... that he really hasn't done all that much permanent harm. In this regard, I am very much in agreement with Kevin Drum. Of course Trump is appalling, and the sooner we are rid of him the better. But almost any currently influential Republican you can think of would probably have done more damage as president– it's just that he (yes, I presume he) would not have been as downright embarrassing.