SOUNDTRACK: NATHAN SALSBURG-Tiny Desk Concert #213 (May 3, 2012).
I had never heard of Nathan Salsburg until the Joan Shelley Tiny Desk Concert (posted about yesterday). Salsburg in a fingerpicking guitarist and his accents and trills sounded wonderful in Shelley’s folk songs. Well, this show from three years earlier has Salsburg playing two gorgeous instrumentals (which maybe explains why he didn’t sing backup with Shelley). The blurb notes that “he’s been playing guitar for 22 years, yet he’s only played out publicly for a few months.”
Were it not for the blurb, I never would have guessed that the first song, “Affirmed” celebrates the Triple Crown-winning horse Affirmed. It has a slow easy pace (not racehorse-like at all) but it is full of lovely riffs and lines and sweet melodies.
The blurb continues, “when Salsburg picks up the guitar, what comes out is a mix of blues and ragtime, but these are 21st-century rags from an old soul with new energy.” And that’s quite apt.
The second, song “Eight Belles Dreamt the Devil Was Dead,” tells the tragic story of Eight Belles, who in 2008’s Kentucky Derby tripped across the finish line, coming in second place, and tragically broke both her front ankles. The horse had to be euthanized on the field.” Despite this horribly sad tale, this song is not sad, it is also pretty, measured and upbeat–a celebration rather than a dirge.
I feel like there aren’t many people making music like this anymore–delicate acoustic guitar instrumentals with complex phrasings and lengthy passages. It’s quite beautiful, all of it.
[READ: June 1, 2016] Science Comics: Dinosaurs
The first Second non-fiction comics are some of my favorite books that they have put out. And this new series called Science Comics proves to be just as outstanding as I could have hoped.
I started with this dinosaurs book first. It opens with a testimonial from Leonard Finkelman a professor of philosophy at Linfield College. He talks about how he used to draw dinosaurs as a kid and he thought he was being so outrageous because he gave them stripes! No one knew any better back then, but now we think that many dinosaurs had all kinds of marking and some even had feathers!
Okay so my son is 11 and when he was 5 or so he went through a dinosaur phase. I thought I knew everything there was to know about them back then. I learned the ones he liked but never really went any further in my knowledge (despite all of the books in the house). Well, this book showed me just how dumb and ignorant I was about dinosaurs (in a really fun way). (more…)
I Just Read About That... 