This is a resonant cello podium.
I was asked to build this by Effe Baltacigil the principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony. He was very happy with it, the amplification is amazing. Two positions one on the platform itself and a brighter one on the Sitka spruce inlay. Steel reinforcement bar on the skinny part of the foreword sound hole.
Thanks and credits to Matt Armstrong, the luthier who built this beauty.
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AFTER “SLOW FOOD”, “SLOW MUSIC” AND “FREE WILL” IS THE WAY!
WHY I BELIEVE THAT FOR LISTENING TO MUSIC THE PHYSICAL MEDIA IS NOT AT ALL OBSOLETE, COMPARED TO ITS CURRENT DIGITAL ALTERNATIVES, AND WHY ITS RELOCATION IN THE SPACE OF CULTURAL EDUCATION SHOULD STILL BE A COMMITMENT AND A GAME TO BE PLAYED.
1. Cultural and ritual value: The CD is not just a medium, it is a cultural object. Unlike streaming, listening to a CD implies a deliberate choice, a dedicated time, a sequence thought up by the artist. This makes it part of a ritual, not a passive consumption.
2. Tactile and aesthetic experience: A CD has a cover, a booklet, graphics. It offers a visual and tactile experience that is part of the work. It is an object that can be collected, given as a gift, shown. Digital listening, however convenient, is dematerialized and impalpable.
3. Stable sound quality: Contrary to what many believe, the quality of CDs is often superior to that of compressed streaming. Furthermore, a CD on a good audio player provides a fidelity and depth that not all digital services guarantee.
4. Responsibility towards artistic memory: Abandoning physical media also means making music more vulnerable to oblivion or arbitrary removal. CDs remain, even when an algorithm decides that a song is no longer useful.
5. Education in listening: Offering and promoting CDs means educating new generations to listen more attentively, less bulimic. It means sowing a culture of slowness, of in-depth analysis, of quality.
6. Digital ecology: Streaming is not immaterial. Its environmental impact is far from zero, between server farms, data traffic and continuous updates. A CD, once produced, consumes less in the long term.
These answers are based on a simple idea: not everything that is new is necessarily better, and not everything that is old is to be thrown away. True innovation does not lie in the uncritical abandonment of the past, but in its conscious reinterpretation.
Re-educating listening: an act of cultural resistance
In an era where everything is instantaneous, where music is consumed by shuffling, jumping from one song to another like from one shot to another on TikTok, talking about physical media such as CDs may seem anachronistic. But perhaps this is precisely why it has become urgent.
The new generations are not to be blamed: they are immersed in an ecosystem designed to fragment attention and accelerate rhythms. Digital psychopathology is not just an addiction to screens, but a progressive inability to stay in the time of experience, discovery, fertile boredom. Listening to music – the real one – instead requires slowness, patience, waiting.
So how can we reactivate this desire for depth, for “presence”?
1. Giving music a body back: Every song has a story, a cover, written notes, intentions. The CD – or vinyl, or cassette – is a body that bears witness to this story. Showing this to new generations, perhaps at school or in workshops, can be a revealing act: "Look, this is a complete work. It's not just a file."
2. Ritualizing listening: You can teach that listening to a record from start to finish is like reading a story or watching a film. It's a journey. Initiatives like guided "collective listening", evenings in which you turn off your phone and put an entire album on the turntable, help to re-educate the ear and the mind to the long term.
3. Encouraging research as part of pleasure: Finding a CD, looking for it in a market, ordering it, waiting for it to arrive: it's a process that amplifies the value of the object and the experience. Show kids that “owning” something – in the full sense of the term – is different from “having it available”.
4. Questioning the freemium model: Everything immediately and (almost) for free has a hidden price: loss of attention, standardization, algorithmic manipulation. Discussing this openly in schools, in the media, in families, can open their eyes to how much they are really paying, in cognitive and emotional terms, for this apparent freedom.
5. Creating “slow” places for music: Media libraries, cultural spaces, independent shops can become laboratories for slow listening, for comparison between generations, for exploration of sound. There, the CD is not a commodity to be placed in a sandwich, but a living trace of a cultural heritage that is renewed.
Returning to physical media is not an escape into the past. It is a radical gesture of resistance and reappropriation. It is remembering that music is not a background, but an entire world to travel through. And the very act of looking for it, touching it, listening to it carefully... is already music.
Thanks to Stefano Amerio for the above insight, which I totally agree with 🖖
From Mary Halvorson:
“Really looking forward to performing duo with Bill Frisell today at Long Play Festival in Brooklyn, at 1:30pm at Roulette! We'll be doing a tribute to the late great jazz guitarist Johnny Smith.
Then later, at 8pm, I'll be at BRIC Ballroom with the Tomeka Reid Quartet (with Jason Roebke and Tomas Fujiwara). Tons of great music all weekend. Hope to see you there.”
How, HOW I’d wish to attend to these events 💫💎💫
HYPERION, the tallest tree on the planet
This tree measures 115.85 meters tall and its trunk has a diameter of between 4 and 5 meters. 🧐
It is a relatively young Sequoia Sempervirens, about 800 years old. To give you an idea of its height, consider that the Big Ben tower is only 96 meters high.
Photo: National Geographic, Redwood National Park, California (United States)
“Guess if you can:
the whale is not a fish,
the bat is not a bird;
and some people, who knows why,
seem human and are not.”
Gianni Rodari - from “The Book of Whys”
After the production process of DST15 Iceage, the sound test process is completed and now it‘s time for the final packaging and sealing.
Everybody should be able to enjoy this masterpiece.
💎
I already wrote about this nice story: I must admit that I was a bit obsessed when I saw “China Girl” video on MTV, years ago…
In 1983, New Zealander Geeling Ching was 23 years old and waiting tables at a Sydney cafe when she was chosen to play the lead role in David Bowie’s “China Girl.”
She says the music video and the brief romance with Bowie that followed in the 1980s were like a surreal dream and a life changer.
The death of the British rock star from cancer at age 69 stunned fans worldwide. Ching was watching a tennis tournament in Auckland, where she lives, when her phone started buzzing: Is it true?
She was already a fan when she met Bowie. As a teenager, she’d put Bowie’s posters up on her bedroom wall and bought one of his albums.
“There was something quite other-worldly about him,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “He was beautiful. Just beautiful.”
The video parodies Asian stereotypes and went on to win an MTV award. At the time, the unedited version was banned from New Zealand and some other countries for a raunchy scene on a beach.
Ching said she and Bowie, then in his mid-30s, were naked for the scene, but it wasn’t romantic.
“We got up at 3 in the morning to shoot that, to catch the sunrise, and it’s the least sexy I’ve ever been in my life,” she said.
She said she was freezing and struggling with salt water getting into her mouth. Some crew kept away curious joggers while others stood by with bathrobes. In another scene, she said, she accidentally head-butted Bowie but thankfully didn’t break his nose.
A real-life romance did develop, she said. She was struck by Bowie’s intelligence, his charm and how he was so relaxed in chatting with fans.
After the shoot, she said, Bowie invited her to join him on tour in Europe. She traveled on a private jet and saw the frenzied fans.
“It was completely surreal,” she said.
It didn’t last long and Ching, who these days uses the Anglicized version of her family name Ng, returned Down Under.
“It’s had the biggest influence on my life that I could have ever imagined,” she said.
Her role in the video opened doors and she took some acting roles, including one in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” But she loves the hospitality industry and now works as a restaurant manager.
In 2007, she ran the New York City Marathon, listening to Bowie’s “Heroes” album as she crossed the finish line.
Ching didn’t make contact with Bowie again until he played in New Zealand in 2004. He was doing a photo shoot with executives backstage when he saw her.
“His face lit up,” she said. “He walked away from the photos and said, ‘Geeling, you’re here! Fantastic.'”
La ballata della masturbatrice solitaria
di Anne Sexton
trad. Monica Messa
La fine di una storia è sempre una morte.
Lei è la mia officina. Occhio che scivola.
Dal branco di me stessa, il fiato
trova che te ne sei andato.
Faccio paura a chi mi guarda.
Ma sono sazia.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
Dita sulle dita — adesso è mia.
È qui. A un passo. È il mio appuntamento.
La batto come una campana scassata.
Mi sdraio dove tu la cavalcavi.
Mi hai presa in prestito su quel lenzuolo a fiori.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
Prendi questa notte, amore,
la stessa che ogni coppia fabbrica
a colpi sotto e sopra,
due corpi gonfi su piume e spugna,
in ginocchio, che spingono, fronte contro fronte.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
Mi scavo fuori dal corpo così.
Un miracolo molesto.
Potrei vendere questo mercato di sogni?
Sono stesa. Aperta. Inchiodata.
“La mia piccola prugna”, dicevi.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
Poi è arrivata la rivale dagli occhi neri.
La signora d'acqua, sbucata dalla riva.
Pianoforte tra le dita, vergogna sulle labbra,
e voce da flauto.
E io? Una scopa con le ginocchia sfondate.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
Lei ti ha preso come si strappa
un vestito a saldo da una gruccia.
Io mi sono spezzata come si spezza la pietra.
Ti ridò i tuoi libri e la roba da pesca.
Il giornale di oggi dice che vi sposate.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
Stanotte ragazzi e ragazze sono la stessa cosa.
Si sbottonano. Si slacciano.
Si tolgono le scarpe. Spengono la luce.
Le creature che brillano sono tutte bugiarde.
Si mangiano a vicenda. Sono strapiene.
Di notte, da sola, sposo il letto.
The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
by Anne Sexton
The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today’s paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was one of the most intense and controversial voices of American poetry of the twentieth century.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, she transformed her personal pain into a raw, visceral and revolutionary poetry. With a confessional style, she addressed taboo subjects for the time, such as troubled motherhood, female sexuality, mental illness and death, becoming a symbol of the breaking of the limits imposed on women and on poetry itself.
Writing was for her a form of salvation, a way to reconnect the fragments of her existence. Her tormented life ended tragically in 1974, but the power of her words continues to influence generations of readers.
🌸
Winter took a toll on the Woodstock Monument.
It’s looking a little rough. Hopefully Mikey Randels will come to the rescue once again!
The Woodstock Monument, while honoring many performers, omits four key individuals: Artie Kornfeld, Michael Lang, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman.
These four men were the original founders and producers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.
The monument also omits Max Yasgur, the farmer whose land hosted the festival. In addition, several other performers are also missing from the monument, including Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin, Quill, and the Keef Hartley Band.
… yes: maybe a turntable, an amp, a reel-to-reel… the cables, the records 😉🤪😉… step by step, I see the light 💡
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