Raking the Past

Five things to share from the week

“How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” —Dr. Seuss

Here are five things I’ve been doing/exploring/thinking about this week:

1. Making music: I think Rake by Townes Van Zandt is one of the best songs ever written. While recently organizing audio snippets of my music ideas, I ran across an old experiment—what would Rake sound like backwards? In the snippet I played and recorded it on acoustic guitar, then turned it around. Here’s the result (if you don’t know the song, you can listen at the link above first):

2. Reading: As I read more fiction after a long dry spell, revisiting an old favorite: Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné stories. Moorcock often reminds me of Robert E. Howard. Such a great combination of sword & sorcery, old school fantasy, and mind-bending twists of reality (the New Yorker called him the ‘anti-Tolkien’). Fun fact: Moorcock’s Elric was a huge influence on Martin’s Game of Thrones, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and many other authors; even the game of D&D.

3. Because my 13-year-old daughter’s obsessed with Weird Al Yankovic, we listen to Dare to Be Stupid (1985) and other Weird Al hits in the car daily. She doesn’t get most of the song references (the title track is a parody of Devo, who she’s never heard), but she loves it.

4. Charles Bukowski always seems hit or miss, but when he hits, it’s a knockout. I thought about Bukowski’s poems Wasted and The Laughing Heart often last year, and I still can’t shake them. It’s like Bukowski is watching me, waiting for me to do something.

5. Genealogy: Via an interesting (and free) app called Family Tree, I learned something surprising (to me): a sixth-generation ancestor is from France (and French). He supposedly married an English woman and moved to America, where they had a mess of kids. Laissez les bon temps rouler.