Sometimes It All Just Comes Together
Posted on | January 17, 2011 at 8:40 pm | 2 Comments
It’s been a long time. I stopped blogging around the same time that I realized most of my blog entries could be summed in Twitter-sized microbursts and were just as entertaining to me. All of the self amusement with only 1/20th of the time spent doing it. Win-win, especially for those who felt obligated to peruse whatever I blather about here.
But sometimes you just can’t get it all out in 140-word bytes. So I guess this space is still useful for those times when I want to elaborate on something. Like now.
I’ve gone on and on in these pages about my CD archiving project, which involves ripping my 4000+ CD collection. The collection has not really grown these past few years, since I’ve switched to downloads for new stuff. I’ve been ripping the discs to both FLAC image files and to MP3 track files, the later of which I import into iTunes. I’ve also been doing high rez cover scans and entering copious notes on the albums in Music Collector. I stopped the project for almost a year since I got tired of it and moved on to other temporary time wasters (video games, graphic novels, Kindle), but now I’m re-energized on that project and hitting it full force again. Got myself a new 2TB drive to store the FLAC files on, and they’re backed up to an older 1.5TB drive. I started off the project going in order, beginning with artists that started with numbers and then ones that started with the letter A. Once I got around to “Be” artists, I started skipping around more and hitting artists out of order, partly out of boredom and partly because I wanted to replace my previously-ripped inferior MP3s in iTunes with newer better ones.
The last week or so, I decided to archive and re-rip my entire Bill Nelson collection. Doesn’t sound like a huge task, but seeing as how the man is incredibly prolific and I own close to 50 of his albums, not even counting his records with Be-Bop Deluxe, it’s a daunting task. Especially since I think it’s the third time I’ve done it. Heck, I think there’s still some 20 albums or so of his that I don’t own!
So, anyway, I’ve been very Bill Nelson-focused these last few days. Today, since I had the day off for MLK day, I went and saw The Green Hornet (2D version), which was more entertaining than to be expected for that sort of thing, kind of a buddy-cop movie on deadpan steroids. Nice chemistry between the leads. After the movie, I waddled over to a local watering hole and ate dinner and drank beer while reading a recent issue of Denver’s alternative weekly Westword. The cover story, which I’m sure my font and typography-obsessed friends would enjoy, was all about local (but nationally famous) typography artist Rick Griffith. Excerpt:
Soon he discovered another way to give voice to his rebellion. While working at a record store in suburban Virginia, his boss showed him the album Sound on Sound, by the new-wave band Bill Nelson’s Red Noise.
Instead of the tidy, proper letterforms Griffith was used to seeing, the words on the cover were built from pieces of electronic music equipment — speaker cords and headphones and radio antennas. “The album was a knock-out punch,” he says. “From that point on, I found myself moving towards graphic design.”
Any illicit substances he was on at the time probably didn’t hurt.
I had to read that over and over again. Wow! Just two days earlier, I had been staring at that particular album cover, marveling at that very design technique. I especially like how the coiled-up guitar chord forms the “R”. But what especially got me was that here I had been obsessing over my Bill Nelson collection and marveling how this musician with one of the most prolific bodies of work in the rock (and related) field is virtually unknown to the general public, and then one of my favorite albums of his is name-checked in a local newspaper article. A warm glow filled me, and it wasn’t just the beer. Or maybe it was.
Rick Griffith turned his Revolt Into Style. Yeah.
Latre.
Note: I have attempted to remove all double spaces between sentences in this post, but confess I might’ve missed a few.
Comments
2 Responses to “Sometimes It All Just Comes Together”
January 18th, 2011 @ 4:41 am
I never heard of the guy.
(Nelson, I mean – I heard of MLK)
January 18th, 2011 @ 3:04 pm
Doubles spaces don’t show in HTML anyway, unless you do something non-proportional like PRE or TT tags.