SteveCastellano.com

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I was asked to perform at a friend’s wedding ceremony recently and given free reign over the music selection as long as I avoided all of the standard wedding tunes. And that’s exactly the kind of direction I like – “Whatever you want, as long as it’s appropriate and unexpected.”

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My friends are big fans of classic 70s and 80s pop, so I took advantage of the excuse to whip together solo piano arrangements of Message in a Bottle and Everybody Wants to Rule the World. The former I chose because I’d been playing it in a band setting for years and had already been picking away at a solo version. The latter was in my head because The Bad Plus recorded a pretty amazing modern jazz version of it a couple of years back, which is still on my playlist (and in fact I nicked Ethan Iverson’s opening riff, though the rest of his arrangement is far beyond my ability to perform, or, dare I say, comprehend harmonically).

Then once I’d arranged and performed them, I thought I’d transcribe my arrangements for posterity (and to make sure I don’t forget them myself). So I blew the dust off my copy of Finale 2007 and hammered out the attached scores. Please feel free to download and take a swing at them yourself if you feel so inclined. For those of you who are familiar with Royal Conservatory grading, I would estimate that these wouldn’t take someone at a Grade 8 level too long to get under their fingers. In terms of your standard Piano/Vocal/Guitar arrangements they’d probably be categorized as “advanced.” It’s also been a good few years since I exercised my copyist muscles (some of you may recall I was a professional copyist for a few years back in the 90s) so if you notice any egregious errors please let me know and I’ll fix them up.

Creating this type of arrangement is a fun and interesting challenge. I was discussing the shortcomings of P/V/G arrangements the other day with a friend who has recently taken up piano as a mature student. It can be a real disappointment to realize after purchasing a book of your favourite pop tunes, and then going through the trouble of learning them, that they are poorly transcribed, too simplified, or inadequate in any of a number of ways. My friend’s teacher had in fact warned her off popular sheet music altogether, suggesting they work together on the skills required to lift and arrange songs from the original recordings. I’d have to agree pretty much wholeheartedly. Doing it this way is a lot more rewarding.

For probably about 25 years or so I have laboured under the false impression that the artist responsible for the hilarious and disturbing cover art on the Cramps compilation Bad Music for Bad People died of a heart attack at age 27. It’s an oddly believable story, but it’s completely untrue. The artist’s name is Stephen Blickenstaff, and he is alive and well. By a sad coincidence, Lux Interior, lead singer for the Cramps, died of heart failure last year. He was 62.

It’s possible whoever fed me that story had Mr. Blickenstaff confused with someone else; if these admittedly sketchy details sound familiar to you as associated with another unfortunate individual’s demise, please let me know.

Edited to add: the Cleveland Plain Dealer article that I linked to suggests that Interior’s heart condition was pre-existing; Wikipedia sources refute this claim.

there, that's a better picture

I didn’t mention in my previous post that my Etherwave was missing a part when I bought it. It wasn’t an essential, large, or expensive part – it was a compression nut that should have held the pitch antenna in place. Gravity does a fair job though, and as long as I wasn’t planning on playing on a moving flatbed things were going to be just fine. But I called my local dealer to ask if they had a replacement part anyway. They didn’t. They said, “We could order it for you, but you could just get one at your local hardware store.” So I went to my local hardware store, and my visit produced much head-scratching, but no compression nut. So I emailed Moog Music to ask if I could just order the part directly from them.

I emailed them on a Sunday. They emailed me back a few minutes after ten a.m. on the following day, and after confirming which part I was missing, assured me that they had it literally in hand and were dropping it in the mail for me. An envelope appeared in my mailbox this week, containing the missing part, and a spare. No charge. Not even postage.

I have had pretty much boundless admiration for the late Bob Moog and the instruments that bear his name for as long as I can remember. And to find out that the company that continues to carry his name is this decent and helpful to someone who bought one of their least expensive products second hand has really just made my week.

Marketers tend to go on ad nauseam about how important word of mouth is and what kind of social marketing strategy or viral video or what-have-you will get customers talking about their clients’ products. But Moog Music’s practice of making quality gear that they stand behind, and being just plain nice folks, is a great example to follow.

my first moog

As I mentioned in the previous post, scanning the musical instruments classifieds on Craigslist is a mindless pastime of mine; I do it habitually and not quite obsessively. I’ve found some pretty good deals there over the years; the Motif ES 7 is probably the best example. I’ve also made some impulse purchases that I’ve changed my mind about, like the Sequential Six-Trak.

Craigslist isn’t a secret anymore; it’s a pretty high-traffic channel. Which means it also has a pretty high noise floor, and aside from the occasional chuckle it can make a grown man wonder if he’s wasting his time. But I keep at it, a bit like the compulsive gambler but without the risk – because occasionally I have days like last Saturday, when I found someone in Markham listing a used Moog Etherwave theremin for sale or trade.

I borrowed a PAiA Theremax from the friend of a friend a few years back and found it kind of fun to play with, but the build quality and sound of those models is not really up to my standard. To be fair, they are sold mostly as oddities, in kit form, for hobbyists – and they’re very reasonably priced. So I knew I would get a theremin eventually, and the obvious choice would be a Moog. And I’ve been keeping an eye out for years now. It’s tricky to play, but rewarding. I’m running it through Mainstage on the MacBook Pro and latency is negligible – but you have to turn the automatic feedback sensing off, for obvious reasons. I’ll post some audio when I can produce something listenable.

Read part one here.

piece of cake really

When I was thirteen or so I read the novelization of Close Encounters (because it was lying around the house and I was thirteen and bored, smartass). The chapter in which the big-ass modular synthesizer appeared opened with a statement somewhere along the lines of “There are few people in the world who can afford a Moog modular synthesizer, and even fewer who know how to program one.” That’s an odd thing to say for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the synth in the movie was actually an ARP 2500, not a Moog. But secondly, as much as it serves the drama of the setting to deny it, and as easy as it is to be overwhelmed by all the cables and dials and switches, an analogue synthesizer is not really all that difficult to wrap your head around. I could teach you how to patch a modular synth in a couple of hours. It would take a little more experience for you to be able to sit down at one and duplicate a sound you heard on an album, but the principles, and the components and variables involved, are pretty straightforward.

I don’t know why they needed an ARP 2500 (or the big monochrome light organ) to play that five-note message from the aliens. By 1977 there were quite a few synths that could have done the job just as well with a lot fewer cables. Of course, it wouldn’t have looked quite as cool if that scene was done on a Minimoog, but with the right amplification it would have sounded pretty much the same. And Moog had been making those since 1970.

In the pre-digital days, manufacturers had to compromise flexibility for usability; they had to reduce complexity in order to make their instruments easier to program. Synths like the Minimoog or Prophet-5 contain circuitry which is representative of all the individual components you might find in a typical modular system from the 70s, assembled into a configuration that would be more practical for performers and recording artists. In a live situation, or in a studio when you’re paying by the hour, you want to be able to access your program parameters quickly and easily. These instruments allowed you to have all the controls that you need at your fingertips, but you lost the ability to run your LFO through the lag processor. Which, for most situations, was not a huge sacrifice.

not such a great idea in retrospect

Then digital comes along, and everything changes (okay, yes, the Prophet-5 had a lot of digital circuitry already, but let’s not confuse the general interest students) – manufacturers decided that if you could have a display screen that could tell you what parameter you’re adjusting, you could have just one big knob (I heard that, you in the back row) that could control all your parameters. You don’t have to have all those troublesome, confusing potentiometers cluttering up your front panel. You can then fill it with buttons that will recall all the different sounds that are now stored in digital memory. And then you end up with the Moog Source, which I think is probably the least desirable instrument ever created by Moog (in 1981, without the participation of Robert Moog, who had left the company several years earlier).

The next generation of synthesizers had a comparatively mind-boggling number of patch parameters with almost no real-time access. The Yamaha DX7, the most popular synthesizer ever released, has hundreds – possibly thousands, I never counted – of individual parameters per sound, and yet the front panel consists of 32 patch recall buttons, three sliders and a two-line LCD. But no one really cared because you pretty much needed an engineering degree to program one anyway.

This approach obviously creates a usability problem for people who want real-time access to those parameters, and after a few years of membrane switches and alpha dials, manufacturers realized that they were neglecting the needs of a significant customer base. The Roland JD-800 is a great example of a digital synth with a fully tweakable analogue-style interface, and it was very popular among those who could afford it. But once digital freed instrument designers from the fairly simple building blocks of analogue synthesis, samplers, ROMplers, FM and wavetable synths all became essential tools in the synthesist’s arsenal, and it was no longer practical to consider putting dedicated knobs and switches on the front panel of a synth. (Yes I know who Dave Smith is, pipe down, you.)

The advent of digital synthesis did not, however, magically eliminate the desire in performers, composers and enthusiasts to create and modify their own sounds. It just made the editing process a bit more of a pain in the ass. Fortunately, the digital synthesizer revolution was propelled by the same wave of technological advancement that was making the home computer a reality for the technologically-inclined consumer. And if you were interested in delving into the mysteries of FM synthesis, and if you had an Atari and a MIDI interface, you could design your own sounds, or modify the ones you bought from the music store, on that tiny little black and white screen – which, primitive though it may look now, was quite an improvement over that tiny LCD on the synth. All you needed was a DX7 Editor/Librarian. Create and modify your sounds with the editor, and then store them by the thousands (the original DX7 could only hold 32 patches in memory at a time unless you had the optional cartridge) and organize them with the librarian.

hey look it still works

Then one day it occurred to some clever programmer (I assume he had more than one digital synth of his own) who decided that it was foolish to have a bunch of different applications, each of which did the same thing – exchange MIDI messages with synths and display sliders and envelope generators onscreen – for a different synth. I’m not sure what the first software to do this was. The makers of Midi Quest only claim that it is “the oldest actively supported software dedicated to getting the most from your MIDI hardware,” but I can’t find any hard dates claiming anyone else got there first. There was also Dr. T’s XoR, which evolved into MOTU’s Unisyn, which is also still available.

My universal editor of choice was called SoundDiver, and was made by Emagic, the same guys who made Notator for the Atari under the name C-Lab. You were wondering where this would all come together, weren’t you? I spent countless hours sorting, categorizing, and editing sounds on a number of synths – though mostly on my Kurzweil K2000, which was the most versatile and complex of the bunch – in SoundDiver. And when you collect synths, and work at music stores, and convert DX7 patches to TG77 format, and assemble keymaps from samplesets you download from the internet, for a few years, you end up with a lot of sounds. And once you have a lot of sounds, you have to sort through them and decide which ones you want to use. And you will add keywords to your library. And you will go in and tweak them, and re-save your tweaked sounds with new names so that your originals remain untouched. And you will keep track of which multi setups and combinations use which “children.” And if you have one program that allows you to do all this in one editing and cataloguing environment, you will be the master of your domain, as I was, for a time.

And then something interesting happened. Apple bought eMagic in 2002. We all thought this was pretty good news. The developers who made all that great software get to work for Apple, and probably got some decent coin out of the deal, and as a Mac user who was already using Logic I’m happy because it means my favourite audio software is going to be supported by the guys who make the hardware and operating system I’m running it on. It wasn’t such great news for Windows users however, as support for Windows versions of Emagic products was abruptly and unceremoniously dropped.

sort of

If that made users of SoundDiver on the Mac platform feel a bit smug, that feeling would fade gradually over the next year or two. As a hardware manufacturer, Apple had little incentive to support other manufacturers’ instruments. Logic already contained a number of virtual instruments when Apple acquired Emagic, and these instruments required a significant amount of processing power. Simply put, you can run your hardware synths off an Atari 1040. But if you want to play the latest and greatest softsynths, samplers and emulators included in Logic Pro 7 (released in 2004) you needed to buy a shiny new Mac. SoundDiver was quietly throttled, and all that remains of it is an OS X public beta which you still need the otherwise obsolete USB dongle to operate. But as development also ceased on the adaptions – the modules that contain the communication protocols for your hardware – even if you can get the public beta up and running on your Mac (and I can) you won’t be able to use it on any synth manufactured after 2003.

Is there a moral to this long and heartbreaking story? Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. But when the glory of hardware fades, at least you’re still left with the hardware. I’ve got about a billion TG77 patches on Atari floppies, none of which I expect to hear again. I’ve also got a fully-functional 30-year-old Prophet-5 in an Anvil case in the basement, and I sometimes think the money I’ve spent on now-obsolete software could have bought me another one.

My wife and I went to see Kate Rusby at Hugh’s Room in Toronto’s west end two Sundays back. She’s had limited exposure here in Canada, though true anglophiles will know her as the singer of the theme song for the understated comedy Jam and Jerusalem, which comes highly recommended to fans of French and Saunders, Father Ted and so forth – though it has a much lighter touch than its antecedents. The theme song is the Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society, and Rusby imbues it with a rustic innocence and wistful melancholy.

This is not a concert review, but I must say that Rusby was a revelation, and luckily her absence from Canadian stages, by her own admission due in a large part to her fear of flying, is compensated for by the fact that she has more than half a dozen CDs to her name, all of which are available for purchase from the Pure Records site.

And while Rusby’s delicate and unabashedly northern-accented voice instantly transports you to a land with a grey sky that may or may not clear some day, where you stand on a lush green hillside with the smell of hay in your nostrils, and where you may or may not be crying but it is almost certainly raining on your face, her self-effacing charm and infectious humour will disabuse you of any expectations that she is some distant wan depressive. In between heartstring-pullers she regaled the crowd with stories of dressing her dog up in a Superman costume, and of gigs that had to be called off midway due to uncontrollable fits of laughter onstage.

If you’re not quite convinced of how cheerful, polite and winning Kate Rusby was on Sunday night, this ought to do it: mere moments into her set, she declared to the audience that she and her entourage had just been treated to an “absolutely lovely” meal. At Hugh’s Room.

Before this gets really ugly, I want to tell you that I like Hugh’s Room. It’s a warm, intimate room with good sight lines, and they manage to pull in some truly great performers. I’ve seen Kelly Joe Phelps there a couple of times, likewise Jane Siberry, Leon Redbone, Colin Hay, Nathan and a number of others. I would go there more often, but the problem is to get a good seat you have to get a dinner reservation, and the food is nearly inedible.

Why don’t I just reserve a table and not eat? I might just be too politely Canadian. But when I’m looking forward to a concert, I don’t generally think a confrontation between me and the waitstaff is going to help me to relax and enjoy the music. Plus, I’m not heartless. I know they’re trying to run a business. I keep trying to find something that I can nibble on that won’t make me as angry as a fight with my server might. I keep failing. I wonder how receptive they would be to a promise that I will happily consume the value of their prix fixe dinner in wine and beer?

The servers are often quite understanding. I remember being warned off some particularly overblown vegetarian option on one occasion. She might have seen my eye lingering on the madness of grains, seeds and raisins in the description and mistaken my confusion for anticipation. Her suggestion that we avoid that particular dish was unnecessary, but taken in the spirit intended. I only wish that she, or any server since that evening some years ago, had ventured to suggest something that I might actually enjoy eating. I give them points for their tacit honesty.

There was a dish, some time ago, that I found palatable. Penne and some kind of hot Italian sausage in a red sauce. This would have been at the Colin Hay show, I think. But since then my luck, and mercifully my memory, has not held out. I forget what my entrée was for the Redbone show. The appetizer, a caesar salad, is however indelibly etched in my mind. You see, after a few dinners at Hugh’s you will stop merely avoiding the dishes that look dicey, you will start eyeing the familiar favourites with the question “how can they possibly make me not want to eat this?” in mind. And so we come to the caesar salad. What’s the worst caesar you ever had? Are you okay with the one from the deli in the food court? If there is a little too much dressing, would you not just scrape it off with your fork? Would you say “hold the parm” at the last minute if you saw them reaching for that devious Kraft cylinder?

I think the lettuce was described in the menu as a “wedge of romaine.” That was a blatant lie. It was an entire head of romaine lettuce. Not a delicate tender yellow-green heart, a single, entire head, such as might be left if you grabbed one out of the bin at the supermarket and peeled off the outer 4 leaves. It sat there in the middle of my plate like a clown shoe, drizzled in a zigzag pattern with dressing squirted from a mayonnaise dispenser, with a single crostini leaning up against it. My dinner companion wanted me to send it back. “They can’t expect you to eat that,” she insisted. I gauged the futility of suggesting they take another swing at creating a salad as I watched a sea of identical dishes being distributed throughout the restaurant like some all-vegetable re-enactment of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I soldiered on. My butter knife was neither long nor sharp enough to hack through it entirely. My lone crouton shattered under my fork and shot off the table.

And so, faced as I was this weekend past with the prospect of another puzzling and regrettable meal, I spent some time analyzing the posted menu, weighing its potential strengths and weaknesses, plotting a bullet-proof course of action. “There,” I stabbed a finger at my monitor. “The cheese plate ($15).” My faithful companion vowed she would dare nothing riskier than pita and dip ($9) with a side of wine. They’re folkies, after all, they must be able to whip up some hummus. My metabolism tends to run a little hotter; I knew I wasn’t making it out of there without an entrée. I chose my adversary: chicken pot pie ($16).

There was no point considering the “concert special” prix fixe. I’m not the kind of penny-minding cynic who assumes that every prix fixe is a rip-off, with the cost of the main buried in an overpriced starter. But we could probably manage to spend less than $32 apiece on our meals. And the last time I ordered a tempting dessert it ended up being one of those frozen lava cakes that you heat up in the microwave.

The evening did not start well. We were seated at a two-spot about the size of a postage stamp, against the south wall. I tried to make the best of it. “I’m not sorry I didn’t bring my camera now,” I said with a shrug. We were both thinking the same thing: we brave the food in order to get a good seat. But now we’re just fucked.

We dove into the rolls, but they were of the sort that you might get pre-bagged at the bakery counter at Loblaws, with the driest ones artfully placed on top as though they’d been waiting for us in situ since about noon. We ordered a couple of glasses of viognier and, just for pure theatre, inquired after the “mussels of the day” which, for the past 5 years, have always been an unthinkable coconut curry.

“Tomato and herb,” we were told. My wife and I looked at each other in amazement. If only we were seated at a table large enough for a single plate of mussels, let alone two with a bowl for shells. Then our “how can they screw this up” credo crossed our minds like scudding clouds. We decided to pass.

“What’s on the cheese board,” I asked.

“Just what it says there,” our server replied, helpfully. I glanced again at the menu. It said “Assorted cheeses.” Well, it’s cheese then, isn’t it. It also said seasonal fruits, nuts, apple butter – accessories more suited for an after-dinner plate, but given the circumstances, a small concern. Those I could read, in any case. I couldn’t imagine her coming back from the kitchen and listing off names of cheeses that I wouldn’t want to eat, so I changed my tack. “Enough for two?”

I fancy she rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah,” she said.

My wife ordered the pita, which came with two dips. “And what are the dips?”

“One is sweet potato, the other is goat cheese and pear.”

A scribbled thought bubble such as you might have seen illustrating Lucy’s state of mind in a Peanuts strip began to form over my wife’s head. She hates pears.

“No hummus at all, in the kitchen, then?”

Our waitress was beginning to sense trouble. She squinched up her face as though she really wished she could help. “Sorry, no.”

I shrugged sheepishly, involuntarily. Even by our lowered expectations this was not going well. But finally my chicken pot pie was ordered. There was hope. Until our server returned with the inevitable news: at quarter past seven, they were out of the chicken pot pie. Our server apologized, but there had been a run.

“It was the only thing people knew they could stand,” my wife muttered. I winced. I looked over the list of entrées again, and again. I willed myself to have missed something simple, comforting, satisfying. I had not.

I am a man of fairly simple needs and pleasures. I require that a dish with a price tag north of $12 contain meat. I pretty much require meat, in some form, at every dinner. But I’m not a neanderthal. There are exceptions. Squash ravioli. Eggplant parmigiana. And fish, of any variety, qualifies as meat in my secular household. So the butternut squash risotto ($18), which I had tried before and found inoffensive but unremarkable and stingy, and the vegetable paprikash ($16) were out. Why could I gain no purchase on this menu? In retrospect, it was the sauces. The pumpkin seed basil pesto on the shrimp trottole (I feel that either basil or pesto in that description is redundant). The apple-cranberry molasses sauce on the pork. The bourbon-soaked raisin cream sauce, for God’s sake, on the roast chicken.

At last, Atlantic salmon. I don’t usually order salmon in restaurants, for the same reason I don’t order egg salad; we are quite capable of making it ourselves. my wife is responsible for the cooking, for the most part. Blackened and spicy. Maybe baked or with shallots, sage and lemon slices. Once a week, usually. With an unassuming pinot grigio or unoaked chardonnay. I am spoiled. But salmon is, after all, a big thick slab of a thing that is pretty easy to cook, and whatever you drizzle over the outside, if it turns out to have been a mistake, can be gracefully scraped or spunged off to reduce its overall effect. Salmon is salmon. Fatty and tasty, yet light and healthy. The perfect compromise, hold the compromise.

We finish our wine as we wait for the cheese. “Maybe there was a line-up at the Loblaws,” my companion suggests.

Finally it arrives, as promised, in quantity. I see why the server misinterpreted my question; there’s Brie, a mound of crumbly blue, and a stack of mild cheddar, cubed, family-reunion style. What other kinds of cheese are there, really? We suspect it really did come from the Loblaws, prepackaged. I have to admit that for $15 it was not bad value; we couldn’t finish it between us, and juggled the remnants on our bread plates as we jockeyed them around making way for our mains.

Have you seen Reuben, Reuben? At one key moment Tom Conti, playing a drunken, Dylan-esque poet, is spied by a couple of ornery waiters clumsily pocketing tips from recently-vacated tables. In a vaguely bizarre and cinematic attempt at payback, they humiliate him on his next visit by answering his complaints of small portions with an unsummitable matterhorn of chicken parts. Was this now happening to me? Did my wife’s aspersions on the menu earn me the ignominy of this cedar-plank-sized loaf of overdone salmon, which was 400 grams if it was an ounce? The vegetables were a mixed bag, pre-peeled baby-finger carrots of the type that get carved out of larger carrot pieces that you’d rather not eat, and broccoli half-bleached from lack of sun. The green beans were tasty and crisp, though untrimmed and plated haphazardly.

The pita bread appeared, much like the cheese, to have come straight from a shopping bag, cold and dull, without so much as a few seconds on a grill to acclimatize it to its new environment. The sweet potato dip had the consistency and subtlety of pie filling. My wife barely touched it, and it was later comped without an explicit request.

I’m not particularly enamoured of Gordon Ramsay or the roster of “let us fix your restaurant” reality shows that he inspired. I’m not a chef, and, surprisingly for a musician, I have never worked in the service industry. So I’m hardly qualified to offer advice on the subject. But the food at Hugh’s has been so bad for so long, and needlessly so, that I feel I have to offer some kind of suggestion, in the hopes of making everyone’s next visit a more comfortable one. And I will be back, in spite of it all; it’s simply the only club some bands frequent. Here are a few suggestions from a guy who goes out to eat once in a while, and occasionally shops somewhere other than Sobeys, to whoever is running the kitchen at Hugh’s:

Upscale your bread. You’re catering to a folkie audience. Set them up with some heartier artisanal bread, something with some seeds in it. Something that looks like it was baked by a human being.

Portion control. I will happily pay the same amount for half a romaine head as I will for a full one. It’s a salad. I’m only eating it out of a misplaced sense of duty to my mother. And a pound of salmon thrown on a plate is not a bargain, it’s a gauntlet. Make flavour and customer service your value; I can get quantity pretty much anywhere.

Aim to please, not to impress. You’re over-reaching with the current menu. There are so many things that can be cooked more simply and with less of a margin for error. Don’t put a crazy sticky sweet sauce or demi-glaze on everything. Make the raisins optional (and see how many people opt out). And keep in mind people paid a few bucks for tickets already, don’t soak them $26 for steak frites that they can get for $20 anywhere else in town. Go out and visit some other restaurants and get some ideas. How about a falafel plate for the aging hippies? How about a hamburger or a lamburger, or just a nice sandwich?

On the other hand, stop letting your mom make the cheese board. There are lots of great cheese shops in town, which means a lot of your customers buy cheese that isn’t mass-manufactured. You’re a few minutes’ drive from the Cheese Boutique, and the Leslieville Cheese Market has a Queen West location now. Stop by sometime and ask for a consultation. Consider two cheese plates, one for before dinner, and a different one for dessert. Pair the dessert and late-night platter with a port, maybe.

Pair a host or hostess with the ticket-taker at the door. I want to be greeted once and taken to my table. I don’t want my reservation confirmed only to have to stand at the threshold of your dining room like a lost kid at the train station. The show doesn’t start for another hour and a half. Someone has time to take me to my table.

Look, Hugh, I don’t go to dinner looking for a fight, or even to review. But plenty of talented restaurateurs in town would kill to have your captive dinner audience, and it pains me to think what someone who actually knows what they’re doing could make of the opportunity that you are wasting night after night. The vibe off the stage is consistently friendly. So feed us like your friends, not airline passengers.

click for a closer look

Okay so get this.

On Thursday I posted about that cool book of modern piano music (published 1963) that I picked up on AbeBooks not long ago. Well you may be aware that I’m a bit of a fan of ABC’s Lost, as is my wife. And this evening we were catching up on the episode that aired last Tuesday. We get to the part where Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) goes into his son’s room, where we learn that David Shephard (Dylan Minnette) is a musician. And bless her keen eye, my wife says to me, “rewind to that poster on the wall.” Sure enough, there’s a poster on the wall that looks like a dead nick of the New Music for the Piano cover that I just scanned the other day. Not only that, the poster on the wall is advertising a concert by someone named M. Gold. I think the fact that one of the composers featured in my book is Morton Gould is credible evidence that someone in the art department also has a copy.

We Lost fans love stuff like this.

click to enlarge

There’s been a resurgence of interest online in 60s-style commercial design, that really evocative screen-print business with the deep cool colours, the kind of stuff Saul Bass made a name for himself with. In the spirit of the zeitgeist (wow, did I just say “in the spirit of the spirit?”) I’ll share the cover of a vintage book I just bought. I read about it on Ethan Iverson’s blog one fine Saturday morning, in this post on Hal Overton, and immediately tracked down a copy on Abebooks and ordered it.