Columbus better buy us some freakin’ dinner next year
Today is Columbus Day. (Well, what’s left of today at any rate.) I thought about it a bit, and I recalled that on Columbus Day last year, my wife and I did a marathon 26-hour round trip to northern Illinois and back to pick up an Avid system that I’d won on eBay. Getting that machine home and operational was what emboldened me to escape from the TV station grind, which has something to do with why, this Columbus Day, my wife and I are again spending a great deal of time in each other’s company, taking care of Evan. It’s funny how many cycles and circles one can read into this whole thing if one wants.
We also watched some Burn Notice today, finally getting caught up with the whole show. It’s an interesting little series, that one, and hey, it’s got Bruce Campbell, so it can’t be all bad. I’m not sure I’m as googly-eyed over Gabrielle Anwar as everyone else who’s seen the show seems to be, but hey, that’s just me. In some ways, Burn Notice is also dangerously informative about…well…how to do certain things. MacGyver, it ain’t.
Evan’s doing okay; the other day while I was watching him sleep, I glanced at his hand and he had a little “live long and prosper” thing going. I thought it was pretty funny, if accidental, but there are certain members of the family who go around mumbling stuff like “don’t get him started on that geeky Star Trek shit” who probably wouldn’t be as amused. Much more interestingly, I’ve started introducing him to music. Some time back I picked up all three volumes of Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Baby, and they’ve proven to be a big hit with Evan. He’s completely mesmerized by that stuff. Most people filed Raymond Scott as a footnote under “the guy who actually composed a bunch of the stuff that Carl Stalling adapted for the Warner Bros. cartoon music”, but Scott was also a great innovator of electronic music in the early to mid 20th century. In some ways, he was paving a road that others such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would follow, messing around with purely electronically/electrically generated sound. Soothing Sounds is one of those experiments; it’s all very electronic, but it’s also just about hypnotic. It’s repetitive, a bit of highway hypnosis for the ears, but gradually more complexity is introduced and then phased out again to keep things interesting. Evan laid on my chest, and if he wasn’t almost asleep, I could see in his eyes a sort of mental “Processing…” progress bar – what is this? I hope this was just the first of many, many listening sessions for us. Music is simply one of the greatest things there is about being human, and I look forward to sharing more of it with him.
I’m working on a mix minidisc for him, with a random playlist, consisting of the Raymond Scott material, as well as other electronic music that I went back and listened to and found stuff in a similar vein – again, the early BBC Radiophonic Workshop music (reviewed here) and a bit of Hot Butter (reviewed here) and Famicom 20th Anniversary music for good measure, with a smattering of Bedtime With The Beatles too. A little something to stimulate and soothe at the same time. I’m sure there are folks out there screaming “Why not classical?” I’ll get around to that in due course, fear not. I can comfortably go from Radiohead to Rachmaninov in a single sitting, and eventually it’s my hope that Evan will have at least as broad a musical palette, if not more.
Oberon snuggled up next to Evan the other night when the little guy was being colicky. He rubbed all over Evan’s hands, sorta like if you don’t pet me, I’ll pet you! Evan didn’t mind; it didn’t distress him any more than he already was. I just thought that was incredibly cute. Obi’s gone from being the goofy cat to being the goofy cat who’s proving to be an incredibly loyal companion to someone he’s just met. We couldn’t have deliberately picked a better one.… Read more
