When it comes to cell phones I’m pretty cheep, nothing smart around here either; plus I prefer a netbook for traveling anyway, especially considering the cost of a phone internet connection in this country. Nevertheless, since my three year old antique is showing signs of use and my contract was up for prolongation I stopped by the company’s local outlet to check out their offers.
Sure enough, for the symbolic sum of 1 swiss franc an all new fancy 6303 was passed over the counter. Which is satisfactory I hope, we’ll see when I get the next bill since there are a couple of irremovable links to the web that are there to push if you don’t watch out, plus the fact that depending on the application, you don’t know if you’ll end up there or not… Isn’t society’s drive to consume fun! Forget to lock the keyboard and there goes your next vacation…
On the positive side is a 3.2mb camera which is so-so but certainly a step better than the old phone’s 640×480 pixels. The picture of the street behind my place is from this morning at around 8h30 and the blurry one of a corner of my studio, yesterday afternoon.
In any case hopefully it will be good enough to document concerts and other items of this blogs interest.
:-)
Three/four years ago while first looking for washboard players on the web I stumbled on the website of Jimmy Sweetwater which is filled with good music and pictures of cool washboards, and it was one of those that I thought I recognized while browsing through a few recently uploaded washboard videos last Sunday.
Sure enough it was the same board, and in good company too! Hope the next time I make it to San Francisco I’ll be lucky enough to catch an evening with The Mission Three.
Last Thursday I had hoped to go down to Geneva and jam at the BAG but circumstances decided otherwise and I ended up at the Café Omega over in the small village of Cortébert with Blaise for a jamming evening of Blues to raise funds for Haiti.
One thing you get living in small villages and towns up here in the Jura Mountains is a certain feeling of emptiness which on a dark frozen snow covered winter night can make the rest of the world seem a figment of the imagination. So it’s always a special thing to leave the void of the outside, the secret filled black windowed houses lit by two or three streetlights that painfully cast their feeble luminosity through the misty air, and enter the overheated people packed room of an open café.
The jam band and musicians behind the event organization were already rocking it out when we got there (picture by Roman Meyer who has a photography studio in the same building) and we soon joined in and even played a few acoustic tunes with Dave who, having also decided to come, had arrived a bit later.
Otherwise the evening was mostly electric blues, jamming the well known standards. It’s always a lot of fun to play the washboard along with a drummer.
One of the main problems with blogging is that when you have lots of stuff to blog about it often means that you have a lot to do which means you don’t have much time to blog… And so it has been the last few days, so hopefully (do I really want that?) life will calm down enough to catch up (no).
A few weeks ago I finally joined the Rhythm Bones Society, something I had been wanting to do for a while, and with their greetings I received one of their newsletters of a few years back in which there was an article about Klepperle / Chefele “rhythm bones” from south eastern Germany and north eastern Switzerland. I found that kind of funny since I had never heard of them nor had anyone who saw me play around here said: hey, that’s like an instrument they play in certain parts of German speaking Switzerland”… OK, so it’s a fact that the linguistic parts of Switzerland are culturally further apart than mere distance measured, but still…
Here’s a video of some traditional Swiss “roots” music with a Chlefele player:
(if you don’t understand SwissGerman you can skip the first 40 seconds of the above video)
Fortunately the newsletter had a link to Rhythmics, so with the help of google translate I was able to learn a bit more about these “clappers”, as they are called on that website, and even order a pair which came in the mail yesterday!
I took them along for an afternoon walk in the snow covered landscape just out of town and tried them out. They are very loud! The fact that the player in the video can play as softly as he is (everything being relative) suddenly becomes very impressive indeed.
Compared to rhythm bones (and keep in mind that I’ve only have a years experience playing them), Chlefele are a lot easier to hold because of their shape. But I had to give them more impulsion to get them to click, all the weight is underneath your fingers and they are chunkier than bones, I also had to concentrate on avoiding tightening the pressure of my middle and ring fingers; the Chlefele between them wasn’t going to fly off like a bone can and the pressure just prevented it from moving as freely as wanted.
It will be fun to play with them in the band, we’ll have to write a Swiss Blues for them.
:-)
Thursday I spoke wrote to soon!
On the way to the foundry I realized that I had forgotten to take note of the edition numbers and dates for the two works but turning around meant loosing the whole morning and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to stamp the date on a bronze that had already received its patina… On Friday of course the stamp slipped, scratching the surface….
Hard to say if this was simply due to fate or if other even stranger magics were at work but the fact is that within my “what to do with all these old bronze works from my past” inner fight there was a voice saying that turquoise colored patina could be better… Cornered by these events, I faced the beast Saturday and attacked it with my long unpracticed and stale patina making technique which lead me closer to disaster than I care to admit but then somehow, towards the end of a 3 hour fight and as dusk was falling (I was outdoors in the cold), all came together out of nowhere and turned into the patina as you can see on the right of the picture, the left being as it was on the work return from the foundry.
When it comes to cell phones I’m pretty cheep, nothing smart around here either; plus I prefer a netbook for traveling anyway, especially considering the cost of a phone internet connection in this country. Nevertheless, since my three year old antique is showing signs of use and my contract was up for prolongation I stopped by the company’s local outlet to check out their offers.
On the positive side is a 3.2mb camera which is so-so but certainly a step better than the old phone’s 640×480 pixels. The picture of the street behind my place is from this morning at around 8h30 and the blurry one of a corner of my studio, yesterday afternoon.
