the · affected · provincial’s · almanack

This Wednesday, The Corduroy Club will be holding its grand annual meeting. More information here.

Seeing these boys tonight at Record Collector in Bordentown, NJ. My grandmother used to play spoons and thimbles/washboard in a jug band. I'm a sucker for the stuff. Anyone who can't tap a toe to this stuff needs a fun transplant.

Becky was a friendly acquaintance whose paintings I admired. Tragically, Becky was killed in October 2004 while she was changing a flat tire on I-95. She was just 28 years old.

Becky's portraits are now on display at The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, which open s this weekend. It's gratifying to see her work get the attention it deserves.

Just thought I'd see if anyone wants my skull after I'm done with it. I'm not planning on being buried, anyway, and I'd rather it go to a friend. All you have to do is write up a pitch/proposal on what you'd do with it. The winner gets my fat noggin upon my demise. Now go!

There's no polite way to broach this topic, so I'll just ask: what's your take on men shaving their bits? I'm told by my lady friends that it's now become de rigeur. I've never given it much thought before, but now I find myself in the position of being regarded as a middle-aged dude with a big bush. Thoughts?

I discovered today that while beaver scat is essentially sawdust, it is still quite slippery.

This gentian nearly glowed amid the dead vegetation. Found it growing on a cedar bog riverbank, which struck me as an odd place to find one. Seemed to be the very last in bloom this season.

Only found one fragrant water lily bloom today, too. Got chilly out there.

"It takes a certain kind of courage for a man to go into a battle with rouged cheeks, wearing a chiffon scarf and waving a copy of Vogue — and quite another to go back under fire to snatch a wounded comrade. I don’t know what bias this exposes, but it’s hard to imagine both forms of bravery inhabiting the same person. Yet they did in Neil Roger, a London couturier before and after serving in World War II, a major wag, a tireless flâneur, a glittering social bauble, a wasp-waisted dandy...the list goes on. To say that "Bunny," as he was widely known, was from another era is only to state the depressingly obvious."

Read more.

This is my friend Dan (of Wilbur Vintage fame) dressed as Poseidon at this year's Henri David Ball. I've known Dan for a long time: he's always been as stylish as all getout, as well as one of the most interesting people I've known.

Speaking of style: Dan has some great ties in right now at his shop, Wilbur Vintage at 716 South 4th St., just across from Patrick and Mary at the beautifully curated Brickbat Books. Get there before I do!

Anyone interested in seeing video of Goodiepal's rooftop rant in Philly last week can go here.

Friend Liz Rywelski invited me and a few others to her home in South Philly this week. It was a cool but dry autumn night, and was perfect weather for the evening's event: a lecture/performance/rant by eccentric Danish musician and artist, Goodiepal. Four or five of us clambered out the third floor window, climbed up a rickety ladder, and joined an awaiting Goddiepal (aka Kristian) on the flat, tarred rooftop. Tall, boyish-looking, lavishly mustachioed and sporting tattered French brogues on his feet, Kristian quickly launched into his rapid-fire, quasi-shamanic lecture as he scrawled a web of chalk notes and diagrams that eventually covered the entire roof. This was soon accompanied by Kristian's array of oddly-shaped vinyl records in the shapes of cars, hearts and countries. After his lecture he generously gave me a couple of these, as well as a copy of a book that, when combined with this mp3, is apparently a collaborative, half-finished project that hopes to establish a new form of musical notation. I will investigate further, of course.

There was a weird cadence and musicality to it all, and his theories became a kind of poetry. The setting couldn't have been more fitting, as the whole spectacle took on a surreal air with the skyline of the city behind him. His delivery was antic and fitful, and so was hard to follow--but very entertaining.



Suffice it to say that Kristian has been met with controversy in Europe over his ideas about electronic music and where it is going (a somewhat surprising bone of contention from an American point of view). He has even been accosted with beer bottles.



imomus lays out his premise more clearly than I: Goodiepal's lectures go along these lines: Computer Music and Media Art are stupid to the extent that they ask us to replicate the way computers think rather than complement it with our own human ways of thinking. Even computers, should they develop intelligence, won't want us just to do what they already do. They'll want us to do something different. We should fox them -- and fascinate them. We should make art and music that is "unscannable".



In light of this, I'm glad that I gave him a bag of acorn caps, each of which yielded a unique note when used as a whistle (yes, I included various species). I took it as a compliment that he referred to me as "one of the rare ones" when presented with them. High praise from a man who has invented cosmic planet games and has built bird automatons by hand:

This time, it's forests. Enjoy the mushrooms.