Dracula

I watched a DVD of Dracula with the Philip Glass music last night. I was interested in the music, and the movie was fun. I don't know when I last watched this - probably after school sometime in the 60s - or if I ever watched the whole thing straight through, but it was spooky and dripping with shadows, weird glows, and brooding sounds. The music is best during the long pauses while Bela Lugosi glowers at one person or another, and the slow scenes of hands groping out of coffin lids and so forth - the score oscillates in place while we wait to see what's going to happen next. There are a lot of slow scenes but the string quartet eddies and that's where the fun is anyway, watching the count slowly close in on another neck. Everything is in shadow, we see very little of what happens, and each victim basically ends up being swallowed by darkness. Dracula strangles Renfield, piqued at having been trailed to his lair, but otherwise doesn't even kick when he's staked, off camera. It's all very ritualistic. I don't know why Van Helsing stays in the cellar at the end. The last lines are kind of oddball - "Q: Aren't you coming with us? A: Not yet - presently". I suppose Van Helsing is just the type to seize on an opportunity to hang out in a vampire's lair a bit longer.

Or maybe not

Here's a post that doesn't make sense to me: Glen Branca in the NY times on how Music is At An End, or words to that effect. I don't know very much about music - my art form happens to be beer - but I have ears and it doesn't sound to me as if music is at an end. After all, if there is no new music, why is it that I'm always hearing new music? Plus, I don't like the squishy way this is written - check out the 'Maybe' construction here:

Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either.

You see the flaw with the Maybe clause at once, of course, and here it's heightened by the even more revolting 'Maybe even...either' construction. Luckily no one has ever read a Maybe of this shabby sort without immediately, and correctly, thinking to oneself, 'Or maybe not'. Because of course anyone can tell the difference between Muzak and music. Muzak is a protected brand name, for one thing. Ask any lawyer.

On the other hand, here's a post I really liked: Andrew Durkin on music-making as bricolage, cobbled together out of what is at hand. It isn't new, and it is. Roger Corman, quoted extensively in the post, made all those great Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price - 'Masque of the Red Death', 'Pit and the Pendulum', and so forth - those are going on the Netflix queue immediately. There's a great bit in 'Masque of the Red Death' when the evil prince played by Price realizes who the fellow in the red mask - or rather 'masque', I guess, excuse me - really is, and then flees through all the differently colored rooms of his palace. To no avail. So are those movies new, are they art? Was there any point to making them? God knows, but they are fun to watch. Anyway, it was nice to run into Durkin after Branca, and it had the effect of an antidote.

Here's a pumpkin masque, carved by my wife a couple of Halloweens ago. I inexplicably failed to document her jack-o-lantern activity this year, even though it was a banner year for her, in my opinion. You'll have to take my word for it, but her 2009 efforts were unlike any pumpkins ever carved before. They had a brand new eeriness. They provoked feelings of uneasiness never before provoked. I really should have taken a picture or two, but we'll have to settle for this.

November sun

Fantastic buckets of sunshine today. When this happens any time between November 1 and May 31st in Oregon, you take advantage or regret it for weeks. The river is so different with the rain and the cold. The willows are bare and the nests that have been hidden all summer emerge. The willows that are standing in the current tremble, or sometimes dip out of sight, maybe gone for good. It's been birdy out, as the birders say. Every time you stick your ears outdoors there are 30,000 geese swearing at each other overhead, and flocks of bush tits and chickadees are whirling through the undergrowth in profusion. I saw two hawks chasing each other, or chasing something, on a flat, direct flight through the trees on the east side of the river, then later I saw a sharp-shinned hawk with something limp dangling from one claw, and then later I saw a bald eagle.

I was also buzzed by some kind of big darner (dragonfly), but he didn't come close enough to be more than an impression. In another incident, when I drug myself through a patch of flooded willows, I found tiny spiders and fragile gnats in my hair and lap. A tough time for insects you'd think, but probably they know what they're doing. In memory of the jolly old days of August, here's one of my better dragonfly photos of the past summer.

Bones

Indians having made off with her job, my wife is now studying anatomy and physiology at the community college and the change is all for the best. She's enjoying herself, and eventually the corporation she used to work for will get its comeuppance, and the Indians have the paycheck and the headaches. It's a fine thing all the way around. Anyway, it turns out that there are a devil of a lot of bones within each and every one of us, and I'm fascinated by the names. The coracoid process for instance, up in your shoulder, is named that odd way because the bony protrusion looks beakish (crows and ravens are of the genus Corvus).

I've tried to do my bit to help her studies - singing of Ezekial in the Valley of the Dry Bones mostly, but I also made and shared with her a series of amazing discoveries of my own, clustering around the concept that the skeleton is a series of echoes of itself. For instance, the elbow is the knee of the arm, while the ankle is the wrist of the leg. The finger is the toe of the hand and the hip is the shoulder of the waist. The neck is a kind of tail, the teeth are thick white claws, and the eye is a nostril that inhales light. Every one of us has our own dry bones, and it is possible that at a word these bones might rise and dance.

Jazz

No new beer this weekend - every carboy is full and I don't have enough empties to bottle anything, though old Al dropped by a dozen from his beer-making days last century. And anyway, it's nice to take a breather and enjoy what I have, especially the Oct 4th bitter that is a little bit red because of a quarter pound of roast barley. And with time, a few beers, and an Internet connection, of course I buy music. How different from the days when I saved up for Coltrane or Mingus LPs at five cents per irrigation pipe moved. I still have all those records, though I haven't listened to them in decades. I made mp3s of a few of them, but the pops and hiss are unendurable, and now I can just download a new perfect copy. But I accumulated those LPs so slowly, like a guy with a telescope mapping canals on Mars, I can't throw them away now, even if the latest technology renders them somewhat beside the point. Let's just say I grew up a long way from the Village Vanguard, but I remember reading about 'A Love Supreme' (probably in one of those incredible Nat Hentoff liner notes), wanting ' A Love Supreme', having the money, but not being able to interest the guy at the store. He was skeptical. Made a good deal more money off the Bay City Rollers, of course. Somehow, back then, special orders were more special, something the guy might think about or dangle as a possibility, but mostly a small joke on a farm kid. He did write down the title, but check back as many times as I might, it was never in. Today I can download it for $9.50 and I don't even have to figure out how to get the wrapper off the CD.

Of course you know that album though - but do you know Steve Lehman? Try the Steve Lehman Octet - 'Travail, Transformation, and Flow'. He's great. Needs to work on his titles perhaps, but still great.

Decoctions

Most of Bach's keyboard music still only sounds right to me if Glen Gould is playing it, even though the gurgling he makes under his breath sounds like a sick dog. My understanding is that this conservatism on my part is a psychological phenomenon by which we cling to our first impression or introduction to a thing, or something. There's nothing we can do about it. If you pick up a CD of Gould's at age 18, you're doomed to find yourself still listening to it 30 years later whether you want to or not. Schiff just sounds kind of funny and you wonder "where's the humming?"

Likewise, when I first started making beer straight from grain, I bought Greg Noonan's book on brewing lager beer, and after I'd puzzled my way through it, I was of course a confirmed decoction masher, following the regimen of four rests achieved by removing and boiling thin or thick portions of the mash. It's difficult, time-consuming, and messy, but that's probably what makes it the right thing to do. And it's how the Germans do it.

Now, the thing is, you can't read anybody else's book without running into the assertion that with modern malts, all this is unnecessary - a single rest at 150 degrees or thereabout will do it. Still though, I've remained a decoction masher for years. You'd hate to make a mistake and have to throw out the whole thing, and that's what so often occurs when you follow haphazard advice about modern anything, isn't it? And how do the Germans do it again?

This is what makes yesterday something of a revolution in my career - my first single step mash. And damned if it didn't work. At least it appears to have, and I got about the same conversion I'm used to - from 11 pounds of grain I got 1.060 original gravities. Others do better, I know, but that's par for my kitchen. So now, with this apparently successful experiment, I have to wonder if perhaps I should cut back, from 4 decoctions to 3? Actually, I did do a decoction at the end yesterday, to raise the temp to 170 for sparging. Couldn't help myself. Probably some ghostly German whispering in my ear. Well, we'll see what it tastes like.

Here's a photo of a maple seed pod outside our window - I noticed and was impressed by how calm it remained yesterday, throughout the brewing process, even at the knottiest and most fraught points where decoction steps were being skipped.

Lichen aquarium

I took a couple of pictures today that I liked, particularly this spider out for a ramble among 25 or so different brands of lichen or fungi. There aren't many spiders out any more, or insects of any kind. It's cold, and hopefully they have snug burrows in which to spend the winter making beer. I suppose they actually die instead. But not the more sporting, or smaller types, like this one, still up for a prowl on a nippy November morning. Will he still be springing from coral head to coral head next weekend?