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Transatlantic Sessions series 7?

I read a few weeks ago in a year-old interview with Jerry Douglas that a new series of Transatlantic Sessions was to be recorded in October of last year, so I’m hoping that did happen and that a new series will appear this year.

In the six BBC Scotland series to date – released irregularly in 1995, 1998, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013 – there are twenty-one hours of some of the finest music I’ve heard and seen. It’s by far the best-produced live music series of the many I’ve watched. Jerry Douglas and Aly Bain are the musical directors for all six series; their names guarantee the quality of the finished product.

All six series of Transatlantic Sessions are available on DVD, often for around US$20 a series on eBay – cheap at twice that price if you ask me. Make sure it says region 1 or 0 if you’re in the US. You won’t be able to play UK-produced region 2 discs unless you have an all-region player like me. I would avoid the PBS-released version because it’s a short compilation.

If I included all my favourites below, you’d be scrolling through to the day after tomorrow, so I’ll show just a handful. Okay, a baker’s dozen. These tunes are all from series 3, 4, and 5 – in my opinion, the best of the six series.

Considering the fact that most of the musicians in the series work together infrequently if at all, and that most tunes took just three or four attempts before they captured the version released, the comments below by Bain and Douglas in the “making of” documentary included in the series 3 DVDs are a bit boggling, but not really surprising given the extreme level of professionalism that permeates everyone involved.

Jerry Douglas and Aly Bain

Aly Bain: “We don’t know lots of the music that’s being played, so in actual fact, we’re doing, sometimes, five recordings in a day and we don’t know any of them.”
Jerry Douglas: “And that’s with everybody learning – cameramen learning, sound people, musicians, everybody. We’re a little rehearsed; we’re not completely unrehearsed, but we’d like to leave some of the bark on the tree. We don’t want it to be so rehearsed that it sounds like a record you can go buy and hear anywhere else.”
Bain: “No, we’re only about ten percent rehearsed on a lot if it.”

(Yes, it is Tyminski’s voice when Clooney sings this in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahf5V-PQ0AQ

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Timely bread in more ways than one

Click for a larger version

After seeing this ThermoWorks article this morning, I decided it was high time I made soda bread for the first time – the result above. This late date is slightly embarrassing since I’m of Irish extraction (100%, I think) and this is maybe the twenty-fifth or thirtieth kind of bread I’ve made.

Several years ago, I bought the pictured 3.5 quart KitchenAid Dutch oven (alas, long-discontinued) to get a better shape on the sourdough boules I bake, and figured its smaller size would probably help with this fairly wet dough as well, and it did indeed. It probably sped the baking a bit, too. When I took the lid off at 40 minutes, the central temperature was 203°F/95°C, just a couple degrees and minutes from being done.

It’s a fast and tasty bread. I’ll be making it more often than never from now on.

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Cinnamon tree just out of range

Chang’e 4 (left arrow) and its rover captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera on 8 February

The source LROC article is here. As to the title: The Chang’e lander is named after the goddess of the moon and the rover, Yutu 2, takes its name from the large jade rabbit said to accompany her. Both were mentioned as Apollo 11 orbited the moon prior to landing. From the mission transcript:

095:17:28 Capcom Ron Evans: Roger. Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning is one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-O has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the Moon because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not reported.

[Chang-O is also spelled Ch’ang O and, in the more modern rendition, Chang’e. Chang’e was subsequently adopted as the name of the Chinese unmanned lunar exploration programme, the first spacecraft of which was launched in 2007. The third in the series, Chang’e 3, was the first to land which it did autonomously on 14 December 2013 in Mare Imbrium. The rabbit’s name of Yutu, stated by Evans as not reported, was given as the name of the first Chinese lunar rover, delivered to the surface by Chang’e 3 and it translates to ‘Jade Rabbit’.]

095:18:15 CMP Michael Collins: Okay. We’ll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.

Chang’e

Update 2 May 2019: Much closer Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter views can now be seen in the LROC posts Above the Landing Site and Chang’e 4 Rover on the Move

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Faulty premise

I heard this interstitial while listening to “Car Talk” today:

“As soon as you wake up, you need the latest.”

Do I really? This seems presumptuous.

“And that is why ‘Up First’ is here. It is NPR’s morning news podcast.”

Yikes. That sounds like a stressful way to spend the first minutes of consciousness.

“In just ten minutes, you can start your day informed.”

Yeah…no. In just ten minutes, I can start making my second Americano.

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Apollo 11 documentary update

The trailer for “Apollo 11” is out, and the reviews for its premiere last week at Sundance are quite enthusiastic, so there’s a chance of it having more than the very limited theatrical release Sundance-selected documentaries usually get. Here’s hoping.

“It’s one thing to boast about the specs of these images, and quite another to see the spruced up footage for yourself. It’s rare that picture quality can inspire a physical reaction, but the opening moments of ‘Apollo 11,’ in which a NASA camera crew roams around the base of the rocket and spies on some of the people who’ve come to gawk at it from a beach across the water, are vivid enough to melt away the screen that stands between them. The clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”
– David Ehrlich, Indiewire

I was glad to see that, at least in the trailer, they used none of the footage previously seen in the 1972 “Moonwalk One” documentary.

“There was one guy, his name was Urs Furrer, and he was a well-known cameraman. He was a big guy – his name means ‘bear’ and he was big like a bear. I’d look for him because I knew that he could put this camera on his shoulder. I don’t know how much it weighed with a thousand feet of film on it; it was a ton. But he could use it like a handheld camera.”
– Theo Kamecke, director of “Moonwalk One”

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The Surveyor landers would be jealous

Here’s some beautiful descent footage from the Chang’e-4 spacecraft that made the first ever soft landing on the far side of the moon last week. When it rotated quickly toward the surface at 1:01, I found myself instinctively saying with a grin, “Pitchover!” I’d suggest viewing this full-screen.

July 2020 edit: The original video went missing, so I’ve replaced it with this Planetary Society copy.

Here’s the descent profile you’re seeing in that video:

Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Centre

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team have determined where Chang’e-4 touched down, its approximate position in the Von Kármán crater shown in the older LRO imagery of the area below. LRO will next pass over the Chang’e-4 site toward the end of this month, when they ought to be able to snap a picture of the lander on the surface. Depending on LRO’s altitude at the time, it will show up as anything from a few bright pixels – remember that it’s just the far side and not a dark side – to something showing a bit more detail of the lander, the rover, and perhaps its tracks.

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

First full panorama released of the landing site, produced from 80 images:

“Yeah, sure, high-def landing video, but does it bounce? I thought not.” – Surveyor 3

Okay, so the descent engine didn’t cut off at the right altitude, but that new one still can’t bounce.

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A prickly situation

Above, my Christmas present to myself this year: a 1991 Looney Tunes sculpture by Ron Lee. When the Warner Brothers Studio Stores still existed, I would visit whenever I was near one – almost never buying anything, but spending fifteen or twenty minutes admiring all the Ron Lee stuff in the back of the store, where two or three dozen of his latest sculptures would be on display. I think he produced well over a hundred Looney Tunes sculptures over several years, possibly approaching two hundred. They were too expensive for me back then, but their extraordinary quality and beauty were compelling. Like all his work, this is made of white metal with a solid polished onyx base, so it’s pretty hefty at nearly six pounds. It’s about ten inches high.

Lee has done a lot more than just Warner Brothers characters – he’s most well-known for clown sculptures (shudder) – but the Looney Tunes and Betty Boop designs are my favourites. I have four now – five if you count the Tweety duplicate I have over at my office.

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Found Apollo footage

Crawler-transporter in a widescreen 65mm Panavision frame from the found footage

A new documentary called Apollo 11 that features never publicly seen footage is in its final stages. That footage is part of a miles-long cache that’s been squirreled away in the National Archives ever since a planned MGM Studios project on the story of Apollo was cancelled in 1969. After the cancellation, some of the footage was used in the 1972 Moonwalk One documentary – included below – and the unseen footage being used now is the leftovers from both of those projects. Vanity Fair has the details on the discovery here.

A few weeks ago, the new film was selected as one of the documentaries that will be premiered at the Sundance Festival early next year. If I wasn’t in the final few months of my five-years-to-debt-free project, I think I’d give serious consideration to visiting Utah for the first time. I’d have to find something else to do as well, of course – I rarely make even a local trip without at least two purposes in mind.

From the Vanity Fair article:

In May of last year, [director Todd] Miller received a startling e-mail from [National Archive and Records Administration archive supervisor Dan] Rooney. “I was used to the way in which archivists and librarians communicate, which is typically very monotone, very even keel,” Miller said. “But I get this e-mail from Dan, and it’s just insanely long and full of exclamation points and bolded words.” Rooney’s staff had located a cache of old reels that he identified as the “65mm Panavision collection.” (In this format, the negative is shot on 65-mm. film and then printed as a 70-mm. positive.) “The collection consists of approximately 165 source reels of materials, covering Apollo 8 through Apollo 13,” Rooney wrote. “Thus far, we have definitively identified 61 of those 165 that relate directly to the Apollo 11 mission, including astronaut mission preparations, launch, recovery, and astronaut engagement and tours after the mission.”

Apollo 11 teaser trailer:

Moonwalk One full version, from 1972. If you’ve got Amazon Prime, a much better recently-restored copy is free there.

I’m a wee bit more interested in this film than First Man.

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“We are a puny and fickle folk…”

“Avaritia” from the Seven Deadly Sins series by Pieter van der Heyden (1558)

Continuing the title quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Method of Nature,” originally in a speech to the Society of the Delphi at Waterville College, Maine, 11 August 1841:

Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

It came to mind today as I wrote to a bookseller from whom I had ordered, last Monday, the one book by Ricky Jay that I don’t own. After I got the “shipped” email from Amazon, the third-party seller cancelled and refunded my order, claiming this: “We were in the process of packing and shipping out your order from the warehouse when we discovered significant damage.”

You would be wrong if you thought I believed that. You would be right if you think I’d be hopping mad if I then actually caught them in the lie. Just now, I did…and I am. I composed and sent this message to them only after counting to ten (see the clip below):

People are so predictable. Once you discovered Ricky Jay had died, you refunded my $54 order for this book, claiming you found the “Good” book was not even in acceptable condition when you went to ship it. I have to tell you that I didn’t believe a word of it. Now, a week later – exactly as I expected – you’ve re-listed the Good condition book at more than three times* your original price.

Did you really think, in these days filled with avarice, that I would accept your inexpert explanation and forget about it? That I wouldn’t think to check for you re-listing it on Amazon? That I wouldn’t also see it re-list in places like Abebooks? I mean, I am looking to buy the book, right? Frankly, your optimism surprises me.

Ricky Jay, for forty years one of my few heroes and a serious book collector himself, probably would have summarized this behavior with one word: despicable.

I can’t blame you too much for yielding to the temptation to cash in on Jay’s death as so many others are trying to do. I am, however, disappointed that you ended up fitting so precisely into the mold I imagined you would. My cynicism level remains unchanged.

*After I sent this, they of course sent no reply but did increase the price to four times their original, so no conscience at all. Wouldn’t it be amusing and immensely satisfying if they’ve priced themselves right out of the market?**

**That’s exactly what happened. Months later, after I got a ridiculously inexpensive new copy from Sweden, they eventually reduced their price back down to US$54.

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52 assistants, no curator

Ricky Jay has left us – and left us bereft.

I have two recommendations for the uninitiated: The “Secrets of the Magus” profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker in 1993 – happily not behind their paywall – and the 90-minute documentary “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay” (2012). The latter also aired in a severely edited, half-length form on the PBS series “American Masters” in 2015. The full version is preferred and you can find it on several streaming services. It’s free if you’ve got Amazon Prime, here.

From The New Yorker article:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.

He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”

After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”

Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right—what was the card?”

“Two of spades.”

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

The trailer for “Deceptive Practice”:

HBO aired a somewhat trimmed version of his show “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants” in 1996. As with all of his stage shows, he only performed “52 Assistants” in small venues. Given the speedy scarcity of tickets every time he performed, he could have easily done larger halls, but he wanted to make sure everyone got a good view. To him, the art was far more important than the money.

A fair-to-middling full copy of the HBO special is on YouTube and linked below, but if you search a little, you should be able to find a 558MB version that’s 640×480 and twice the quality of this version.

I first saw Jay perform on “Saturday Night Live” in early 1977. Several months later, an article about him in the December 1977 Playboy – part of it shown below – further piqued my interest. The article mentioned that his first book, Cards as Weapons, was coming out, and I bought it a few weeks later. It sits on the bookshelf behind me as I type, along with his Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers (1986), Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (2003), and others.

I’m leaving out the rest of the two-page spread due to boobs and such

I’ve traveled to see shows in New York City just twice – not Broadway shows, but off-Broadway masterpieces by Ricky Jay. The poster from “52 Assistants” is on my office wall and “On the Stem” is at home.

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Old inkjet prints never die, they just fade away

While showing dinner guests around my place last week, I noticed that all the 8×12″ photos that I have up in the kitchen and bathroom had taken on a distinctly aqua/turquoise tint, meaning they had lost a fair amount of their original red component in the years since I printed them – around 2003, I think.

I took all of the originals with the first digital camera I owned, a Kodak DC280 with a measly 2 megapixel picture size, so they’re not ideal for enlarging, but they still look pretty good from a foot or two away. These days, I have some good quality coated 11×14″ presentation paper from Epson that I can trim down to the 8×12″ clip frame size, not to mention a better printer with hardier ink, so I reprinted them all yesterday and brought out the big paper slicer to make quick and accurate work of the trimming. I also added to the bathroom the panorama I stitched together with Hugin from a series of three photos I took of the Golden Gate Bridge with the DC280. You can click on the galleries below to see the original photos and the newly-printed copies in situ.

For those with enquiring minds, dinner was my fortified version of Comfort Diner meatloaf, Julia Child’s Purée de pommes de terre a l’ail from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1, and carrot coins slowly braised in butter, glazed with a touch of brown sugar, then garnished with their close cousin parsley. I hadn’t tried braising carrots in butter before, but I certainly will again. They retained good texture long after the same time simmering in water would have turned them to mush, and they were decadently rich.

For some reason, the thumbnail of the first shot here looks normal on my Galaxy Tab A but appears fuzzy in Firefox on my desktop, as if WordPress is using an inappropriate resize for the mosaic. In any case, the image looks okay if you click on it.

Freshly reprinted and back up on the walls:

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Progress launch from ISS

Low earth orbit is not the most exciting place to be in space, but I’ll admit it is extraordinary at times. This is the launch of a Progress cargo ship taken from the ISS eight days ago, captured in a fashion Stanley Kubrick would have appreciated. Best viewed full-screen and in the dark. The Soyuz launch vehicle first appears about 6 seconds in.

Downloadable in MP4 form here. The “Source” link there is full HD.

  • Title Progress launch timelapse seen from space
  • Released: 22/11/2018
  • Length 00:01:10
  • Language English
  • Footage Type Music Clip
  • Copyright ESA/NASA
  • DescriptionTimelapse of the Russian Progress MS-10 cargo spacecraft launched on 16 November 2018 at 18:14 GMT from Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, taken by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst from the International Space Station.The spacecraft was launched atop a Soyuz rocket with 2564 kg of cargo and supplies. Flying at 28 800 km/h, 400 km high, the International Space Station requires regular supplies from Earth such as this Progress launch. Spacecraft are launched after the Space Station flies overhead so they catch up with the orbital outpost to dock, in this case two days later on 18 November 2018.The images were taken from the European-built Cupola module with a camera set to take pictures at regular intervals. The pictures are then played quickly after each other at 8 to 16 times normal speed. The video shows around 15 minutes of the launch at normal speed.The Progress spacecraft delivered food, fuel and supplies, including about 750 kg of propellant, 75 kg of oxygen and air and 440 l of water.Some notable moments in this video are:

    00:07 Soyuz-FG rocket booster separation.

    00:19 Core stage separation.

    00:34:05 Core stage starts burning in the atmosphere as it returns to Earth after having spent all its fuel.

    00:34:19 Progress spacecraft separates from rocket and enters orbit to catch up with the International Space Station.

    Credits: ESA/NASA

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Instant stock fine-tuning

Yesterday, the addition of fresh sage plus maybe 50% more carrots than usual to my instant turkey stock recipe helped it produce the finest turkey gravy I’ve ever had. The magic mix:

I also tried my hand at producing a sweet potato casserole, which I’d never made before, using the best ideas from a handful of recipes after reviewing a few dozen online. I measured nothing and decided on quantities by taste alone as I added each ingredient. Of course, when you combine sweet potatoes roasted at 400F/200C for 80 minutes, dark brown sugar, molasses, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, toasted pecans, oats, and double cream – now available in the Jersey cow variety near me – it really can’t help but taste good, but this, too, was the best example of the dish I’ve had. My visiting best mate said, “Oh, my. This is the only way I want sweet potatoes from now on.” I’m not one to argue with impeccable taste.

If I were to add an egg or two, I think I’d then call this sweet potato pie filling

James Martin’s Croissant Butter Pudding topped off the evening quite nicely.

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