GeoClark » Uncategorized

A “Green” Kindle Case

geoclark — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:35:22 +0000

I made a cover for my new Kindle out of materials at hand. Cardboard, packing tape, and lined with felt.

Space Baby

geoclark — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:25:03 +0000

Great Redeemer

geoclark — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:45:24 +0000

The second in a series of drawings of screens from the past few years of my notebooks. So, obviously, the title is a more than a little ironic, as actual contact with actual people is more in the line of what sustains us. And church is an important part of that for me. But I would be disingenuous if I didn’t say that amid the dreck there is actually a lot of great art that happens on TV, and that I have been renewed by actors, artists, musicians, and other professionals (even clergy–Jesse Jackson, Brethren Christmas Eve service, to name a couple) who share on the tube, or whose work eventually winds up there. So thanks to all of you.

Simple Sample Supple

geoclark — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:05:05 +0000

Writers’ Blog

geoclark — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:05:25 +0000

Check out “The Art of Practice,” a new blog by Lesley Howard on managing creativity and life. Together. At the same time. I’m dying to learn.

Jazz, Born in Boston

geoclark — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:15:54 +0000

Live in the Boston area? Wish there were more jazz in your life? If so, you should help support the ESP vocal trio as they cut their first studio album as a group. ESP features the dynamic and warm voices of Emily Browder, Sandi Hammond, and Patrice Williamson. They give you a feeling of sophistication like attending your first grownup party and a feeling of fun like reconnecting with dear old friends. They are almost at their fundraising goal. Make your contribution on Kickstarter. With 45 backers and only $990 to go in five days, you could be the contributor that puts them over the top. Contributions both large and small are welcome; if you pledge $600, they will record your request on the album–of course it has to be a song that they like, too. Preview their music in the promotional video at the Kickstarter link above. You won’t be sorry.

Update: Thanks! They met their goal, but I’m sure they would be happy to accept further contributions.

Roots Music Twitterati 140

geoclark — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:11:22 +0000

Many thanks to Jon Goldmann , aka @thesessionspot, of the roots music publisher and aggregator No Depression, for putting me (as @DobroSwamp) in his list of the Roots Music Twitterati 140. That made my day. Check it out. Lots of cool folks to follow there. And really great that Jon and colleagues are looking at the big picture of who’s tweeting about roots music.

Friday Night Lights

geoclark — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:26:10 +0000

This short video clip (“Football’s Stupid“) illustrates why Friday Night Lights is one of the best dramas on TV. The show is ostensibly about football in smallish Texas town. It is, but it defies stereotypes. The show works because the writing is good, the characters are complex, and the acting is subtle.

In this clip, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and booster Buddy (Brad Leland) are at a local park sizing up a kid playing pickup basketball, a potential recruit for their high school team. The kid tells them that football embodies all that is wrong about America, and plus he doesn’t like the uniforms. Even though we can’t see Coach Taylor’s eyes (he’s wearing mirrored sunglasses), he comes across as smart, sensitive enough to know that there is some truth in what the kid is saying, and passionate enough to try to convince the kid otherwise.

Like Sports Night, the 1998-2000 Aaron Sorkin series about the cast of a SportsCenter-type news program, FNL is a great drama that deserves more than to be written off as a just show about sports. Or a show about teenagers. Or a show about a part of the country that you don’t know much about. Or whatever other label you might want to put on it. Don’t take my word for it. Check out Virginia Heffernan’s New York Times 2006 review of the pilot which opened thus: “Lord, is ‘Friday Night Lights’ good. In fact, if the season is anything like the pilot, this new drama about high school football could be great — and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art….” The fifth and final season, which has already aired on DirecTV, has its premier on network TV (NBC) on April 15th.

Life Hack — The Veggie Bagel

geoclark — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 01:27:05 +0000

Back in the day, you could go into a certain bagel, soup, and sandwich restaurant chain and order a bagel and cream cheese for two bucks, and they would put all the vegetables from their sandwich board on it for free. They even had sprouts back then, before the sprout boogie man started lurking around the place. Then, one dark day several years ago, I ordered the same thing and poof–it’s not a bagel and cream cheese anymore. If you order more than two or three vegetables, it’s a bagel sandwich, and it costs five bucks. Well, these days, the same “bagel sandwich” will run you close to seven bucks. So much for that vegetarian bargain. Or so it would seem. Enter: the veggie bagel life hack.

Instead of ordering all the vegetables and cream cheese on one bagel, split up the toppings. A bagel with a couple veggies on it still costs about a buck, and a bagel and cream cheese costs about two. So: order one bagel with cream cheese, carrots, tomatoes, and onions–the messier mix, and order a second bagel with cucumbers and lettuce–easy to move onto the first bagel. Buy the ingredients as two bagels and it’s $3.40 including tax. About half price over the “bagel sandwich.” Plus you get an extra bagel for later. After you pay, shift the cucumbers and lettuce onto the first bagel, wrap them both up, and you’re ready to go. Mmm. Veggie bagel. Still no sprouts, though.

Bluegrass, Twitter, and a Little Bit of Dobro

geoclark — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:46:52 +0000

There has been a great conversation starting up between Ted Lehmann and some others on social media in bluegrass music as well as how to involve a more diverse and younger set of people in this musical genre that many of us love. See Ted’s guest blogger Dustin Ogden’s recent piece on these issues, including a link to an exciting use of bluegrass sampling by rap artists. I recently posted a long post about Twitter on the Google group resoguit-l, a great group of resonator guitar (Dobro) players, luthiers, and such. As a way of connecting more directly to the conversation of Ted, Dustin, et al., I’m reposting that piece here, slightly revised:

* * *

I’ve been trying to establish a greater presence on Twitter for the resonator guitar by tweeting and retweeting on that and related topics at http://www.twitter.com/DobroSwamp. I suspect that resoguit-l members run the gamut from active users of Twitter to those who have no idea what Twitter is. Most are probably in between, thinking Twitter just sounds like a dumb fad and isn’t this post pretty off-topic? I’m writing to encourage the latter folks, especially, to check out Twitter, because it matters for folks interested in the resonator guitar and in bluegrass more generally. I would love to have lots of folks much more knowledgeable than me telling folks on Twitter about this great instrument.

Twitter is a “microblogging” service that allows anybody to post short messages and to connect to other members (think Facebook friends, only for short messages of text). But it’s really more than that. It is a giant index of what well-wired folks are thinking about at any point in time. You don’t have to sign up for Twitter to be able to see what people are thinking. And sometimes they’re thinking and sharing information about the dobro.

Here are some reasons why I think Twitter matters, both in a general sense and for the dobro:–You can use Twitter to learn about stuff and to make connections with others who are interested in the same things that you are.

You can publicize yourself. For example, see
http://twitter.com/stringdusters
It is quicker than adding to a blog or changing a website.
There is free stuff to be had. Bands, venues, and publishers wanting to add to their Twitter readers often give away tickets, cd’s, free downloads, and stuff.
You can reach a young audience. Clearly educational venues like http://www.etsu.edu/das/bluegrass/ , Joe Val Kids’ Academy http://www.bbu.org/BAWebsite/JVKA.html, and http://www.berklee.edu/focused/roots/ mean that bluegrass is alive and kicking with the young. But I imagine that most of us know or are married to someone who sees bluegrass as fringe music for weird old
people. I’d like to make bluegrass more accessible to everybody and more widely appreciated. Twitter an help do this.
You might just change a life: Twitter might be how the next Rob Ickes connects with a mentor. Maybe she’s growing up in South Dakota and wondering how to find out where the other dobro players are within
a hundred mile radius. And she’s on Twitter.
You can easily keep in touch with people at an event if everybody agrees to post messages with the same hashtag, like, say, #ibma2011. (A hashtag is a way of dropping metadata directly into a Twitter message. You type the hashtag into Twitter’s search function and you can see everybody’s posts on that topic.)

Despite these good motivations to get on Twitter, there are certain challenges one encounters upon trying to look up the word “dobro” on Twitter. It’s a common word in a couple of foreign languages, so simply searching for “dobro” brings up a lot of unrelated stuff. Best to search for a combination of terms like “bluegrass dobro” or “dobro player.” And “resonator guitar” is too long a phrase to be used much in a short medium such as Twitter. I’m advising folks to include the hashtag #resoguit in the text of posts that are dobro-related. I hope to see many of you on Twitter soon. If you have a reason to have a website, you have a reason to have a Twitter stream.

Here are some interesting folks who have Twitter accounts already:

Luthier Abraham Wechter http://twitter.com/AbrahamWechter
The Ryman Auditorum http://twitter.com/TheRyman
Rounder Records http://twitter.com/rounderrecords
The Bluegrass Blog http://twitter.com/Bluegrass_Blog
Alison Krauss http://twitter.com/AlisonKrauss

If you’ve read this far and want to know more about Twitter, you can see my 2009 article on Twitter in _Environment_ magazine:
http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-O… or http://tr.im/envirotweet . Though the article is about environmental stuff, much of the Twitter information still applies. Apologies for a couple out-of date links in the environment piece–it’s a static publication. And thanks for hanging in through this long post.