Wordle If You Would

Oh, hell. Here's my Wordle of del.icio.us tags...

Library Paternalism

My Dad recently made me aware of this:

Lakewood -- Lakewood Public Library Director Kenneth Warren wants you to know there's nothing private about the 60 public access computers at the main branch.

Every 15 minutes, a staff member takes a stroll around the center to make sure library patrons are not looking at pornography, engaging in illegal gambling or visiting other questionable Web sites.

As somebody who used to frequent the Lakewood Public Library's old digs in the pre-Internet days of the early 90's, as well as being a librarian currently working at a library that neither monitors nor filters the information its patrons are perusing, I can't help but think this is paternalistic at best and chillingly invasive at worst.

According to the Library's Acceptable Use Policy, "Employees are authorized to bring to an individual’s attention any act which will detract from the decorum of the library or will create a hostile workplace in violation of state and federal civil rights laws."

"Excuse me, sir, but that website you're looking at is clashing with our color scheme."

The Library is also considering using software that will allow its prying librarians to monitor what patrons are looking at remotely.

There's a surprisingly, refreshingly civil conversation about this going on here that's worth a peak.

She's Gonna Be A Big Sister

Everything is good, the baby is perfect and on track for a November 20th due date. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion we'll be eating Thanksgiving in the delivery room? And it's definitely a girl, no question about it. My estrogen levels are no doubt on the rise once again.

Drift

I've been a music making hobbyist for close to 20 years now. I began by recording on a friends 4-track recorder in the early 90's and slowly, as the technology became more available and affordable, created a decent home recording studio built around Pro Tools and Reason software.

I began making Drift, my latest album for friends and family, in January of 2002 when we were living in Berkeley. Those were very difficult times for me and making music was, as it often is, a source of solace and respite. I never intended it to take this long, though I never had any real goals in mind to begin with. I recorded whenever I was moved to do so, accumulating roughly 60 songs in various states of disarray. Over the years a handful of songs continued to hold some allure, and those are the ones that eventually made it to this album.

It's not perfect (he said with a resigned sigh), certainly not what I had hoped for, and there were times over the last year, as I was happily discarding, that I contemplated simply deleting everything and starting over. Perhaps I should have. There were those moments when I'd find myself asking, "Is this really all there is to it? Is this the best you can do?" It all began to feel stale, more a burden then a source of fun. I was visited by that odious brand of nagging self-doubt that can turn such benign enterprises sour with apathy. I was and am lucky to have had Cathy there, not only giving me more time and space then I deserved to sort such silly things out, but by offering terrifically boosting words of encouragement when I needed them most.

And there are a handful of songs I'm genuinely happy about, songs I'm excited for others to have a chance to hear. They seem to offer good incentives to keep trying. I'm looking forward to recording with my friend Dennis over the next few months, too, hopefully making an E.P.'s worth of pop songs available digitally by the end of September.

Kusturica Doesn't Do Storytelling

I am against the notion that cinema is storytelling and a film director is a storyteller. Storytelling is for a talk show, not for the cinema. It's one of the aspects of cinema, but cinema is a much more complex picture of the world than storytelling. It's like saying James Joyce is a storyteller, which would be completely stupid. Of course, there are storytellers. But if you read Shakespeare or Chekhov, you cannot say they are just storytellers. They had a story that they turned into a drama. But drama is not the same as story.

-Emir Kusturica, from the book My First Movie: Take Two

Chautauqua In The Summertime

I'll be heading to the Chautauqua Institution in Bemus Point, New York with my Dad right after the Fourth of July. It's a place rich with family history dating back to when my Mom vacationed around those parts with her family as a child. In fact, somewhere there's an amazing Super 8 from the early 50's of her Dad reeling a fish out of Lake Chautauqua. After my Dad married my Mom he was equally smitten with the place and they took us kids there, often staying a month or more over the summer months in a rented cottage or for a long weekend at the Hotel Lenhart.

The Chautauqua Institution, where my Dad and I will be hanging out for a week, is a fascinating place. It's the holdout (and now a designated National Historic Landmark) of a late 19th Century religious and educational movement that found its inspiration in that throughly American quest for self-improvement. Culture, with a capital C, along with heaping servings of Protestant religious instruction were the guiding lights of its founders, Lewis Miller and John Vincent, when they founded the Institution in 1874. In fact, its original name was Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly.

Now that sounds like pure drudgery to me. But it's not the Sunday School strain that I found compelling (and the sacred was never any real match for the secular in my family anyway) so much as the residue of those enchanted summers I spent there as a child in the early 80's and how they've shaped my own fond feelings for the place in the present. Not having been there in over 20 years, I'm excited to see how it's both changed and been preserved.

My parents gave me a couple nice coffee table books about Chautauqua for my birthday this year. In the preface of one of them, Chautauqua: An American Utopia, Jeffrey Simpson is kind enough to give voice to some of my own sentiments about the place. Simpson feels conflicted with the two Chautauquas that crowd his mind-- the modern, "vital Chautauqua of today," and the "kindly, sleepy, rather shabby Chautauqua" of his childhood. Of that old Chautauqua, Simpson writes:

This was the Chautauqua where it was said that "old ladies brought their mothers." It was a kind, serene idyll, a sort of Chekhov play where private dramas were played out in atmospheres of wicker and ennui.

I mean, the place has over 1200 Victorian cottages, most of them with porches smothered in wicker. I remember those old ladies hobbling up and down the hills. And those little Chekhov plays were being played out by my own family, accompanied by the sound of music students practicing clarinets from nearby porches mixing with the rattle of silverware from a hotel's kitchen somewhere below. I wasn't there for the cultural life, though I suppose I found it anyway at the local Boys and Girls Club, where I became friends with half a dozen or so other kids, most from New York City, for a couple fleetingly enchanted summers.

Eating

Abby and I headed over to the Lincoln Restaurant to enjoy some silver dollar pancakes and a somewhat embarrassingly humongous Civil-War themed omelet for lunch. I was surprised that I hadn't done this already with her, though eating out with a 2 1/2 year-old isn't exactly what I'd call leisurely. But she was gentle dictator, demanding a few extra dollops of maple syrup and happily chatting away with our waitress. We came home and both took naps.
Taking advantage of the much appreciated balminess, we ate dinner in our backyard tonight, something Cathy seems committed to taking better advantage of this summer. We have a nice little fortress back there, ringed by fences and teeming with green and a raised patio space.

California Split

Robert Altman had one of the most amazing runs of feature films of any mainstream American director working in the 70's. From 1970's utterly wacky and lovable Brewster McCloud through to 1980's Popeye, are all very good, with a few, such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and Nashville being stone cold masterpieces, as much a product of their times as they are somehow ravishingly timeless. It's not surprising that many consider this his "golden period."

1974's California Split, starring Elliot Gould and George Segal as a couple compulsive gamblers in search of their next big score is one of the very good ones. Altman's love of overlapping dialogue (most of it written just prior to the shooting by screenwriter Bill Walsh) and documentary like ambiance are in full effect throughout the film, allowing the viewer to eavesdrop on conversations in the peripheral of the main dialogue track. And Elliot Gould continues to be a revelation. Was he ever better then in the films he made during the 70's with Altman? For somebody like me whose impressions of Gould were formed by his avuncular character acting work of the 90's and 00's (on Friends and the Oceans films), seeing him in Altman's The Long Goodbye was a completely unexpected surprise. There was a time there when Gould blew everybody out of the water, creating characters that were scruffy, moody, cynical and suave. They took hits and they hurt but they always prevailed. In California Split, Gould's Charlie chews up every scene he's in, often leaving George Segal's Bill to churn somewhat helplessly in his wake.

Broadcasting Live From Our Block Party

Ran across the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP), a collective of spirited WLUW castaways looking to nudge Congress into acting on some bottle necked legislation that would hopefully open the FM band to support a more localized, not-for profit form of community radio.

The Bill, the Local Community Radio Act of 2007 or H.R. 2802 for those keeping score, recognizes that the FM spectrum should be opened up to include low-power, community based radio services and programming. And by low power we're talking roughly 10-100 watts. The hope is that with the passage of this legislation schools, churches and other community-based organizations could, if they so desired, launch their own radio programming. Sure, the signal wouldn't reach very far, but I like the idea of having a radio station that only broadcasts out for a few blocks, and besides, what's the harm?

Big Radio is harmed, that's who! All those big, steaming slices of the FM spectrum under their carefully manicured control are going to get messed with by these ruthless upstarts. In fact, all these volunteer based, low-power FM signals coming out of churches, retirement homes and elementary schools are going to cause some serious "interference" on the FM band. Or so the broadcasters and their lobbyist have claimed. A two-year Congressional study concluded in 2000 (see Finding 14), however, that "the broadcasters' concerns were demonstrated to be unsubstantiated."

The Local Community Radio Act of 2007 is currently languishing in subcommittee limbo amongst 73 other Bills. The Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, itself encompassed by the Committee On Energy and Commerce (where they, no doubt, feel your pain at the pump), was referred this bill in June of 2007. Jan Schakowky, my own representative in the House, was one of this bills original sponsors, so it seems like a no brainer to contact her office and see what she can tell me about its current state. Even better to contact members of the Subcommittee itself. Two Representatives from Illinois, Bobby Rush and John Shimkus, are on it. Couldn't hurt to write them and see what the hold up is.

Creep, Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa, 31, leader of the Mothers of Invention, likes to call himself a "creep," and says his upbringing made him that way.

More here.

Lay Across My Big Brass Bed

After watching I'm Not There last weekend, Todd Haynes' joyous and playfully clever ode to the many lives of Bob Dylan, I've been, not surprisingly, on a bit of a Dylan kick this past week. I have roughly half of his catalog from the early 60's up through 1974's Blood On The Tracks, so I've been throwing myself and Abby a bit of a Dylanathon, or at least Dylan seemed to be on in the background while Abby and I raced around the house earlier this week.

It took me a long time to get around to actually paying any attention to Dylan. Certainly I was aware of his iconic status growing up, but I always thought of Dylan as a guy who wrote some decent songs that were at their best when covered by others (i.e., The Byrds Mr. Tambourine Man). I was wary. Dylan was such a seemingly ossified 60's touchstone, hallowed Baby Boomer ground. There was no man, just a tired, overly-trodden myth. There was that. And I feared his body of work. I worried that if I fell for Dylan's music and the tantalizing myths and associations that have sprouted up around it, then I'd , as comes inevitably to any music junkie, feel compelled to go about seeking out and listening to all his albums and reading up on the body of Dylan literature. Blood On The Tracks was Dylan's 15th studio album. I suppose I have or have heard roughly 10 of those first 15. I've only read one book about Dylan, and that was his own.

My brother Randy forwarded along a copy of a Dylan mix a friend had made for him not long after we moved back to Chicago back in the winter of 2004. I was ready for it, or at least to listen to Dylan with an open mind. My old friend Dave Walulik and I, back when we were both attending Ohio State, went through a bit of an old-time music kick, checking out old Woody Guthrie and old Smithsonian Folkways CD's from the mighty main branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. Dave owned a copy of Dylan's Nashville Skyline and would put it on from time to time around this same time. It fit in nicely with field recordings, union songs and Appalachian social music we were listening to at the time. I remember being shocked to hear how different Dylan's voice was on the album-- he sings with an almost Kermit the Frog like crooning sweetness unlike his infamous nasal sneer. My favorite cut is still the album's lead track, a new version of Girl From the North Country where Dylan shares vocals with Johnny Cash. The whole album is wonderful though, a mellow country-rock album, one of the first of that genre, coming just a year after the Byrds' own Gram Parsons helmed country-rock classic, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and just as good.

Mr. Microphone

I really want a quality, portable microphone for capturing sound in my documentaries. I've recently fallen under the spell of the Zoom H2 Handy 2 Track Recorder, which according to its product description, "is the only portable recorder with 3 mic capsules onboard for mid-side recording. A directional mic is in the center (mid) and two directional mics (side) are positioned left and right." Oh, that sounds nice!

I think, as a lot of newspapers making the leap to providing video reporting on their web editions are learning, it's ultimately the quality of the sound, rather then the footage, that matters to the viewer. The footage can be kind of crappy, a fuzzy talking head shot of the reporter, but if the sound is cruddy, if there's, say, an overbearing ambient hum of fluorescents buzzing throughout the piece or the person being interviewed is barely intelligible over the garble of the wind making hay of the reporter's microphone, then who really would be compelled to stick around and listen, right? Thankfully, some of the more involved video reporting pieces I've seen lately (and many papers are moving, albeit probably too slowly for their own good, away from simply putting up some lame accompanying video of the author's talking head giving a Cliff-Notes synopsis of their longer written piece) are beginning to demonstrate a more adventurous technical proficiency, complete with crisply composed shots, decent editing and a sometimes stunning overall sound design.

I'm not anywhere near capturing that "stunning overall sound design" in my own stuff, what little I have of it, but I'm really looking forward to exploring it more through some documentaries that I hope to get around to making. Operative words here are "getting around to making." But when I do, one of these includes a series of mini-documentaries, exploring favorite songs. I'd make some time to sit down and interview family and friends, get them to play me their favorite song and talk about it on video. They could do it in a single take (the length of the song, naturally) or a few if that suited them. We'll make it into a seamless whole. They could tell me a story they associate with the song, what the lyrics mean to them, how much the band or the singer or bass line meant to them or they could just tell me about the dinner they had this past New Years Eve.

I'd post them on a video-blog. Begin a series. They could be edited. Certainly I'd make sure that whatever song was being discussed sounded great in the final mix, sometimes in the background of the speakers reminiscence, sometimes in the forefront so as to punctuate a particular point in the narrative. When I'm really feeling the whimsy, I like to think that it might be fun to try and reenact one of the stories somebody tells about their favorite song. And come to think of it, maybe it would be better to stick to just asking one question, to have folks talk about a song and the memory they associate with it.

In any case, I'm attracted to Zoom's H2 Recorder not just for what seems to be its impressive sound capturing abilities (and the 100+ reviews on Amazon all seem to conclude that it's pretty great), but its portability. I like the idea of having the person talk about the song in an interesting place. It could be on a forest trail, along Lake Michigan or from the comfort of their favorite chair. I want to be able to conveniently, easily, capture the intimacies of the speakers voice and the ambiance of their environment. The microphones on most commercial camcorders, while decent, don't do such a good job of capturing this and offer few options for overcoming their modest sound capturing abilities. One of the things I love most about Dust-to-Digital's Art of Field Recording: Vol. I, a stunning collection of American field recordings made by the archivists Art and Margo Rosenbaum over the course of 50 some years, are the interview heavy selections, where you can hear the creak in the chair the interviewee is sitting on or some dog trotting by.

In any case, I'm kicking this idea down the road a ways.

Home Movie Love

My Dad shot some really great Super-8 home movies from roughly the late 60's through the early 80's. A couple hours of them were transferred (poorly, my Dad and I both think) to video for the occasion of his 60th birthday celebration 6 years back. The whole family got a huge kick out of seeing them, though getting a better quality transfer of this footage, especially while the actual 8 mm film reels are still in decent shape, is something I keep meaning to do.

But poor quality or no, I'm looking forward to toying around with some of this home movie footage sometime in the next month or two, putting together some short video essays exploring Breitenbach family folklore. Like a lot of folks, I'm fascinated by the Super-8 medium, the rich family history found in the scenes they depict (to say nothing of how these "scenes" can take on their own accumulative power over time and come to shape a family's own sense of history and shared experience, in a word, folklore) and the almost impressionistic quality of its grainy picture. Hell, I'm fascinated by how the grainy, color saturated moving images inherent of so many 8 mm home movie footage has been used in any number of Hollywood films over the years (sometimes gracefully, sometimes like a hammer) as a kind of shorthand for childhood nostalgia, authenticity and depicting the nuclear family at play.

Howard Jenkins gave a Patricia R. Zimmerman's Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film a shout-out in his own boundlessly enthusiastic Convergence Culture. I recently picked it and plan on cracking it later tonight. I can't think of a better way to ring in the Memorial Day Weekend.

Zimmerman's book, according to the declarative blurb on its back cover, "the first historical study of amateur film." Sounds good.

Update: And dadburnit if I didn't just come across that Zimmerman was co-editor of another book that I have perhaps completely unjustified high hopes for: Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, a collection of essays exploring some of the more fascinating aspects of amateur film. I suppose it runs the risk of that dry, flaky prose some wings of the academy seem perennially onset with--though I almost find that with any collection of these kind of academic essay collections, you usually have the good luck of finding at one or two voices strong enough to follow further.

When Three Becomes Four

As Cathy heads into the second trimester, we're making the impending expansion of our family official. It's (we won't know the gender until the next ultrasound around week 20) due around November 20th.

The accompanying ultrasound picture is from this past Thursday. The baby is doing great and, as you can see, is almost all head. At one point he or she ("it" sounds so alien) began to wiggle their arms as we watched the monitor. Seeing this helps to wash away the surreal veneer that accompanies bringing a new life into the world. It's not detachment so much as it's coming around to the ontological gravity of that expanding bump around Cathy's midsection
Here's Abby improvising a nice little song on the mbira about becoming a big sister, with a some riffing on Three Blind Mice. I recorded it with our digital camera, hence the crackle in the sound.

Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007

I suppose a good deal of the success of any one of these yearly "Best Music/Sports/Political/Food/Business Writing anthologies, and there are many, is due in good part to whoever happens to be editing it that particular year. So, after neglecting it the past several years, I was pretty happy to pick up Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007 on the strength of seeing Robert Christgau in the guest editor chair. I've always enjoyed reading Christgau's music criticism, especially his expansive, championing coverage of Afropop. And as a nice bonus, Christgau "as the only full-time rock critic, experienced music editor, or that matter professional journalist ever to assemble one these books," as he's right to point out in his introduction, had "something to prove and only one way to prove it." He wanted the anthology to include representatives of the best music writing of the year. And having read at least three of this anthologies predecessors, it's definitely been the most consistently enjoyable.

Halfway through, two pieces have really stuck out- Jonothan Letham's astounding summation of James Brown and his gift of funk, Being James Brown, and Erik Davis's Always Coming Home: Joanna Newsom, a beautiful account of the making of Newsom's sophomore album, Ys. I'm about midway through Elisabeth's Vincentelli's affectionate, personal essay on the long running chessefest Eurovision Song Contest, Bulgarian Idol, which has inevitably leads me, out of garish curiosity, to YouTube.

Adult Conversations, Toddler Shenanigans

I. How many conversations have I had over the last couple years where my attention is split, about evenly, between what my fellow conversationalist is saying and what Abby is getting herself into?

Talking with Jason tonight, I found our conversation wonderfully emblematic of this early stage of parenthood. Abby and Sean happily playing at our feet while both of us took turns putting our conversation on pause while we told our respective toddler that toys were not to be thrown and stairs were for walking down, not playing on. You're not a referee really, but something close. Parental responsibility demands some measure of your attention be given over to that creature, that Mary Poppins with a little bit of monkey in her (as I've been calling Abby lately, much to her approval) and whatever mischief they're up to. At this age, they're ripe with shenanigans. Your job, then, as a parent, is to constantly negotiate the space your toddler is in--what's possible within it and what's not.

II. Listening to The Meters' 1974 gem, Rejuvenation, some fine gumbo-pop funk and a perfect way to keep my thoughts on good friends enjoying the soggy fairground fields (it's been raining) of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. In his ArtsBeat coverage for The New York Times, Jon Parales posted this gem today:

In a conversation with Quint Davis, the producer and director of Jazzfest, he mentioned a startling statistic. One of the festival’s marketing surveys found that people who visit Jazzfest for the first time return as regulars for the next five years. That’s serious recidivism.

Funny, because just yesterday I posted about my own five year Jazz Fest run from '96 to '00. I'm looking forward to boosting my recidivism rates in '09.

That's Abby in the accompanying photo above, sporting a hat I bought from a vendor in Congo Square.

New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

Reading Joe's Twitterings and the Times' ArtBeat blog coverage (Jon Pareles and Nate Chinen, having too much fun and posting ecstatic updates about it) of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this morning has been wonderful. I was lucky to go Jazz Fest 5 years in a row from '96 through 2000, though any number of events have conspired to keep me away since. Given that it's hands down one of the best music festivals you'll ever have the pleasure to experience, with amazing music, food and some of friendliest crowds around, I've really missed it. Doubly so since Katrina did its devastating best to drown New Orleans.

It does me right to know Jazz Fest, unlike so much of New Orleans, has bounced back post-Katrina. But it is, as Pareles points out in one of his posts, "precious...because it represents New Orleans’ cultural persistence–which is by no means as easy or as secure as it might look–despite all the changes wrought by Hurricane Katrina."

I'd love to see Jazz Fest broadcast more of its proceedings online. With over 10 stages playing what's almost always guaranteed to be great music, I can't help but think it wouldn't be difficult to make live streams of each of these stages available online. Currently, the local New Orleans Jazz Fest radio affiliate, the amazing WWOZ 90.7 FM, hosts 32 live broadcasts from Jazz Fest over its 7 day, two-weekend run. You can listen to those broadcasts online. But WWOZ is only broadcasting from one tent at a time, and that may not be the tent you'd be enjoying your crawfish etouffé and shuffling your feet in if you were actually at the Festival. You may be catching some high school gospel choir approaching liftoff with the help of the mighty tambourine lady in the Gospel Tent or resting your weary feet over at the Economy Hall Tent catching some old timers stirring up some Dixieland. Why not offer streams from off the boards of each stage?

I can't imagine it'd be too difficult to get some telecom to sponsor the whole set up, to put the necessary infrastructure in place and make sure it ran smoothly. Going online, the user could check out the schedule for the day, pour over all the amazing musical acts simultaneously performing on one of those 10 Jazz Fest stages, and stream whatever caught their fancy. If they liked the performance well enough, they could buy one of the CD's or downloads of the performances that Jazz Fest conveniently makes available. Everybody wins, right?

The Business of Storytelling

A little over a year or so my Dad mailed me a newspaper clipping of an ad for the Digital Discovery Center, an after-school program located in the suburb just west of their own in Bay Village, Ohio. It looks like a pretty cool place, and the credentials of the couple who own it (backgrounds in childhood development, special education, independent schools) are pretty stellar.

Click on the About section on their site and you learn that the Digital Discovery Center "provides children with hands-on access to sophisticated technology that is often missing from their current school programs. Robotics, digital filmmaking, and photography, and other forms of digital media are exciting new means of communication that captivate children and challenge them to develop their creativity and problem solving skills."

They offer courses in digital filmmaking, stop-motion animation, digital music creation and robotics. It's a niche that I can't help but think public libraries should more aggressively be looking to fill. The joint venture between the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, the remarkable ImaginOn, is the best and most exciting example of how public libraries should be responding to the fact that their patrons are no longer simply consuming media. They're creating it, as well. Lot's of it. Films, photographs, fan fiction, blogs, music and remixes. Distributed online to friends, family, and sometimes, mysteriously (virally), a few million of the curious who have followed a link to your YouTube post.

The folks who had the audacity to follow through and actually get ImaginOn built realized they were, at their chewy center, in the business of storytelling. And they realized their patrons, especially the younger ones, were hungry to tell their stories. So ImaginOn does just that. It doesn't matter if they're fictionalized or confessional, filmed against a blue screen or performed on a stage, using stop-motion animation or painted on a canvas, told through a dance or a song. The building is designed to help nurture and create stories by offering the tools, space and support to make it happen. (The above photograph is of one of ImaginOn's two performance spaces.)

Which makes me wonder. Does ImaginOn then archive the material these teenagers are creating? Does that content, with the creators consent, become part of the libraries permanent catalog? Can, for example, one teens ImaginOn supported documentary on skateboarding be accessed and watched (and commented on and tagged) by his peers via the libraries catalog?

I'd love to see a larger body of literature out there about ImaginOn, a Library Technology Report or a collection of essays, heck, a book written by some of its directors or an intrepid reporter. I want to know more about what's working and what isn't, I want to see some of the content that's being created and hear what the kids who created it thought about the process and what they thought of their end results. What kind of collaborating is happening and how is it being facilitated? Can their successes be replicated in other public libraries?

The sheer scale of what they're setting out to do at ImaginOn is almost too overwhelmingly good to be true. For a place in the business of telling stories, it very much needs to share its own.

The Romance of Biking Rails-To-Trails

As Cathy can tell you, I find the whole rails-to-trails movement--of converting old, unused rail lines into multi-use trails--wildly romantic.

The whole rails-to-trails thing is all about riding my bike. No walking, definitely no jogging and certainly no roller-blading. It's all about me and my bike, the wind in my face and a unknown trail full of potential stretching and winding out ahead of me. It's all about riding those old railway routes, now tastefully, respectfully re-purposed and paved with asphalt and limestone (though I always imagine a dirt road, which somehow feels more appropriately Rockwellian) and getting a chance to ride my bike through interesting spaces not burdened by cars. I like the serendipity of it, too. Of the natural beauty these trails promise. Of the little towns they take you through, perfect, I always imagine, for stopping and grabbing some lunch.

Browsing the smart and unfussy Rails-to-Trails Conservancy site tonight, I fell under the spell of their December 2006 Trail of the Month: Wisconsin's Military Ridge State Park Trail. My romantic notions of rails-to-trails doesn't have time for any pint-sized trails. Anything under 20 miles seems too dainty, too potentially abrupt. The Wisconsin Military Ridge State Park Trail is a little over 40 miles long, which isn't too shabby. Most of it runs along what was once, according to the accompanying description, "the old Chicago and Northwestern (CNW) railway corridor." (See picture above of the Challenger, a train that ran on the CNW.)

And there's this:

It (the trail) flows uninterrupted from Dodgeville to Fitchburg through scenic farmland, woods and wetlands. In between, it meanders west to east through the communities of Ridgeway, Barneveld, Blue Mounts, Mount Horeb, Riley, Klevenville, and Verona.

"Meanders." I like that. The trail meanders. That's nice. After this winter, I definitely need to meander. But really it was this stunning photograph below that sold me:

Its alluring caption reads, "Several long stretches of trees provide shade along the trail." And, wait, is that a dirt road I see?

Close To The Edit II

Over the last few weeks I've been editing some home video with iMovie. It's a powerful little tool (at least as handy as a good Swiss army knife) and I can't imagine there's a better introduction to basic film/video editing out there. It's consistently intuitive and comes packed with more then enough decent editing tools to give anybody the editing bug. I know I've got it.

Reading the Walter Murch book has been the perfect antidote to my tinkering with the purely technical aspects of iMovie. Murch, as I've said before (but it's worth repeating), is an utterly compelling advocate of film-editing. His answers almost always offer perfectly revealing anecdotes, a scene he edited in Godfather II or Apocalypse Now (where Martin Sheens hypnotically intimate voice-over narration--written by the amazing Michael Herr, whose Dispatches is one of the best, most vivid historical accounts of Vietnam I've had the luck to read--is a good part of the allure the film has for me) and how he came to respectively shape them in the editing room and the affects he hoped they'd have on the films -on Coppola and Puzo's and Milius, Coppola and Herr's-respective narratives.

Editing allows for this near endless opportunities for massaging whatever materials you're working with. The ability to sequence, add musical cues, titles, photographs, voice overs, sound design, animations, among other editing effects--can all be used in service to whatever narrative, whatever story, you're trying to tell.

The goal, then, is to make that narrative a compelling one. I'm still working on that one.