selecting an album

one of my consistent toys during the earliest foggy years of my infanthood was the lunchbox sized portable yellow & red bumpy plastic disk player. i had a pretty good selection of records; blue, yellow, red. i forget exactly how it made sound come from those hard bologna-slice-sized platters. but it did. they were fairly jammin tunes if i remember correctly, not your standard nursery rhyme fare or waltzes, just plain old simple two four beats. plunk... pluank... plunk.

this all started thanks to taree, a sweet woman who lives in south berkeley with a bandsaw, a lathe, fruit trees, a winter garden, shaggy bamboo, mounds of wood shavings, rotting apples on the ground from an ornery apple tree that had sprouted up from its rootstock with feral fruit, and until recently a Yamaha C-2 Pre-Amplifier that she was giving away for free via the freecycle alternaconomy.

it's a pretty nice unit. so i hooked it up to my system tonight.
the speakers are an older pair of 8" oak cabinet infinitys. there's a yamaha natural sound stereo amplifier ca-1000 II with a finnicky mode but a nice silent volume knob. Into aux1 of the ca-1000 i run the new Yamaha C-2 Pre-amp (Cycle on terry), and into that i've got two signals; one from my laptop via a gold plated heavy duty triple core RCA cord (into the AUX input) and the other from Sage's parents' turntable, a delidded Technics SL-D2 that was recently cleaned, oiled, balanced, and leveled (into the Phono 1.)

while my audio gear is by no means jaw-dropping, i have to admit that with the new pre-amp it just sounded significantly better. all the audiophiliacs always drone on & on about the complete necessity of a really good preamp and, i'll admit, i've always just shushed them under the carpet with the guys who buy the new computer chips for their car to get a gain of like .5HP. in any case, it sounded so good that I couldn't even choose a record record to play, so i just I decided to play all the records straight through from left to right, one at a time, one side at a time.

1. The Beatles - A Hard Days Night Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Un. Art. UAL 3366. (Click HERE for back)

a pretty good album, much better than i expected. a few real knockout gems on here. three hazy instrumentals: and i love her, ringo's theme (this boy) and the classic; a hard day's night. such nice high contrast portraits of them on the back, hamming it up like they really wanted to make it big but weren't quite sure that they would.

NEXT UP...

roy buchanan

yee hah

Photo copyright . some other needle's record . 2008 . HODGES & CO. all rights revealed.

garden, two weeks ago

urban homesteading

as food prices continue their steady slog to the upper stratosphere, we as a household decided it was high time we skipped capital accruing middle-people, put our own seeds in the ground and transformed (bit by bit) our rental oasis into a productive urban homestead. self-reliance in the city is a new battle-cry being hollered back and forth in blogs, magazines, and workshops. a steady & disheartening wash of internet research has made us suspicious of what we see in the supermarket, each product label the source of debate and moral tussling. living in the citycore fosters a disconnected & sallow engagement with our food production, and while farmer's markets bring us closer it just seems wasteful to not break up the hardpacked backyard clay and let seeds do what they do best. grow.

moreover, we are interested in quantifying this process, seeing just how it all pans out. measuring the yields, monitoring the air, soil, and water. biological diversity in the garden edges, temperatures in the middle of the pile, money saved, money spent. we are interested in the process the product and the documentation.
soil=garden=food=data=art=sharing=learning
so stay tuned we'll need all the help we can get.