March 4, 2012 Contact Calendar The Mix Archives
You're looking at my February project: putting window quilt drapes on the porch to keep cold out. They are open during the day and we get a lot of solar gain when it's sunny. They will be put away when winter is over. Opening them in the morning and closing them at night adds a ritual to the day. I like rituals. We are in a series of improvements actually. The standby generator is finally installed. This month we will tear out the carpeting in the bedrooms and put down the same Canadian birch that's in the rest of the house.

We've added a week onto the front of the JazzFest trip. We'll get there on April 14, with every intention of going to French Quarter Festival on the 15th, and catching Theresa Anderson at Wednesdays in the Square on April 18 and making several visits to Frenchman Street and Chickie Wah Wah's and La. Music Factory.

In my eighth year of making monthly mixes of the best new music I can find, each month I wonder if there will be enough good stuff to fill a CD, and amazingly there always is. This month out of 20 cuts, 5 are from artists new to me; that's about average. I mostly buy one cut at a time on Amazon. New CDs come out on Tuesday for some strange reason. Tuesday mornings with my first cup of coffee, I acquire the new stuff I've picked out ahead of time. NPR's First Listen is great for previewing new stuff. Sometimes one thing leads to another. On the Lyle Lovett song, a great voice is singing backup. His name is Arnold McCuller and he'll be on the April mix. The mix is really for listening to years or months later, having a lot of great self-selected stuff to enjoy. Sure it's a history of exposure, but it's also a lot like blood doping.

I'm reading Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz, kind of a travelogue among civil war enthusiasts in the South for whom it is never over. The direct quotes from the locals are always the best part. Started it as a Kindle library book, but 7 days wasn't enough, so I ordered the paperback for $5 less than the Kindle price. Remember content/venue is what I'm tracking this year.


Last Time