Before our holiday weekend begins, a tip of the hat to two recent good experiences:
(1) On Wednesday morning I went off to the O’Reilly “Where 2.0″ conference, which was all about the new world of digital mapping and the mobile technologies and applications built upon them. That stuff is all well and good, but as a map geek from early childhood I was most excited by hearing the keynote from David Rumsey, a cartographic historian and collector of historical maps whose talks I’d heard superlative things about in the past. Rumsey did not disappoint. He put the current frenzy of excitement in stuff like Google Maps into a four-century perspective of the human quest to create maps that are not only useful and accurate but beautiful and meaningful. Then he showed us some simply astonishing techniques by which old maps can first be precisely positioned as overlays to contemporary digital satellite imagery, then transformed into 3D screenscapes — allowing, for instance, a fly-through of San Francisco as it looked a century ago.
As soon as I am off my authorial treadmill (only, aagh, two dozen more books about software to read!) I am sitting down with Rumsey’s book, Cartographica Extraordinaire, for a nice, long journey through time. (If you haven’t visited it already, Rumsey’s Web site is a jaw-droppingly amazing collection of historical maps.)
(2) Last Friday, fresh off the plane from New York, I high-tailed it over to the Bottom of the Hill for my second-ever experience of a Mountain Goats show. I’ve already logged my enthusiasm for the new Sunset Tree album from John Darnielle and his collaborators. It takes a lot, at my advanced mid-40s age, to get me to stand in a dim club until midnight to listen to somebody else’s music. (My five-year-olds will wake me at 6 a.m. regardless, so it’s a self-sentence of sleep deficit.) It was, in this case, utterly worthwhile.
What amazed me was that the set of maybe two dozen plus songs, which featured one catchy, clever, moving song after another, barely overlapped with the equally great set I heard from the Mountain Goats last year at the same venue. The two shows shared, at most, three songs. I can’t think of another artist (except for, you know, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, guys who are, uh, way older than Darnielle) who’s got both the back-catalog depth to pull that off and the will to actually do it, instead of playing the same handful of fan favorites over and over until both band and audience are bored with them. And I got to hear Darnielle play the song that first turned me on to his music, the rollicking downer “Palmcorder Yajna,” with a drummer borrowed from the band that preceded the Goats, and their producer, John Vanderslice, adding a second guitar and harmonizing at the mike on the chorus.
Darnielle established his reputation by recording songs solo on a boombox, accompanied only by a persistent capstan hiss. More often, these days, the Goats play as a duo (Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes). But for a couple minutes last Friday, they looked like a rock ‘n’ roll band — and like, for those couple minutes, nothing else in the world was quite as much fun.
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