SOUNDTRACK: JASON VIEAUX-Tiny Desk Concert #17 (June 15, 2009).
Jason Vieaux is the first to break the mold of folk singers playing the Tiny Desk. Vieaux is a classical guitarist. I don’t know a lot about classical guitar, but when it’s good I know it’s gorgeous. And man, is this gorgeous.
I don’t know anything about Vieaux, but in the little blurb, they say that in 2002 they invited him to spend a week as a young-artist-in-residence on their classical-music program Performance Today.
I would have been grossed out by his long fingernail if they hadn’t pointed out that he glues a slice of a ping-pong ball to the underside of his right thumbnail as a kind of extended, “press-on nail” guitar pick.
He plays 3 songs and they are all simply stunning.
Bach: Prelude (from Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, BWV 998)
Maximo Diego Pujol: Candombe en Mi
Francisco Tarrega: Capricho Arabe
You can visit the NPR site to hear about the ping pong ball thing, and you can watch the video below.
[READ: January 7, 2014] “Pure Bleach”
This New Yorker has several small essays about work. They are primarily from people who I wasn’t familiar with–only Amy Poehler saved the five from being unread. When after reading all of them I enjoyed them enough to include them all here.
The pieces are labelled under “Work for Hire” and each talks about a humiliating job.
This final installment was the shortest. Ruscha is an artist, whose name sounds familiar to me–he worked in pop art. His lame job was working in a laundromat “mixing bleach and water together in brown glass bottles for the customers to use” If you didn’t know better you would say, that sounds like an old job, and you’d be right–that job existed in 1951. Geez. He made 50 cents an hour. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 