The Best Album I've Heard in Years

If you'd rather listen to it than read my jibber jabber, check out the myspace page.

"Punch" is the second album from the newly renamed "Punch Brothers," their first being "How To Grow a Woman From the Ground." It's unclassifiable music, which clearly springs from bluegrass but with influences too numerous to count. It mixes the idioms and instruments of bluegrass with the complex harmonies of contemporary classical and jazz. I guarantee you've never heard anything like it. It makes Bela Fleck sound tame and traditional. Chris Thile, the frontman for the group has been called "the most virtuosic American ever to play the mandolin," and the other members of the group receive less effusive praise only because their instruments are more common. Here they are put to good use playing things that have never before been played on these instruments.

The meat of the album is contained in a bewildering, four movement, forty minute piece entitled "The Blind Leaving the Blind." Despite the length and the stretches of dissonance, it's never inaccessible for long; the lyrics and melodies stay rooted in telling the emotional story of Chris's recent divorce. Every so often they break into an old-fashioned bluegrass jam, but then change keys in a few measures to remind you what you are listening to. On my first pass through it was exhausting to listen to, and it was a stretch for the band as well.

"For me, when I first received the score and saw what Chris was asking me to play on my instrument, that had to have been just as traumatic as him getting his divorce papers," Pikelny says. "He figured, 'Hey, if you have the notes there, you'll figure out a way to play it.'"

Chris Thile's voice, though adequate, doesn't match the quality of the playing and composition, and the album suffers from what Dan and I call "Great Album Syndrome." (Every truly great album must have one unbearable song, i.e. "The Crunge" or "Fitter Happier." On this album it's the first track, "Punch Bowl.") However, if hearing a banjo in a song doesn't immediately turn you off, (I understand that excludes a fair number of people) then give this a listen.

If you're having trouble spying on me . . .

. . . since I haven't updated in a while, here are a few other options. I've started using jaanix.com, which I think has the potential to be a great social news/content aggregator. I still read reddit but I haven't been happy with it recently. A lot of the content on there has become either unbearably sensational or focused on political minutiae, so here's hoping jaanix takes off since its easy to tune out what you aren't interested in. One nice feature of jaanix is that every user gets their own subdomain full of the things they've submitted. Mine is at moultano.jaanix.com, which you can subscribe to in the rss reader of your choice should you feel so inclined.

I've also become a regular user of Google Reader which has dramatically increased the quality of what I read online. If you read online news but don't have a feed reader yet, you owe it to yourself to try it out. The purpose of Reader is to be your "inbox for the web." For most sites that include regularly updated content (like this one) you can drop the name of the sitel into the reader interface and it will keep track of it for you. Reader becomes your one stop shop for checking the sites you like to read, because all of the sites' updates will show up there like email messages as items for you to read. One great feature of Reader is that it allows you to share any item you are reading with your friends with a single click. It doesn't send anyone any annoying email, it just drops the item onto a page of your own which other people can also subscribe to (if you use google talk, the shared items of your friends will automatically show up in reader.) View mine, or drop that url into your feed reader of choice.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2007

I can't think of any appropriate title for this.

On Saturday night, someone was murdered in the park behind my apartment. I heard the shots from my couch.

(09-24) 11:45 PDT Mountain View - -- An alleged gang member has been arrested on suspicion of fatally shooting a friend over the weekend- Mountain View's first homicide in two years, police said today. Marco Jauregui, 25, was booked on suspicion of murder in the weekend slaying of his friend, Rene Escalante, 24, said Mountain View police spokeswoman Liz Wylie. Police said Jauregui shot and killed Escalante at about 12:30 a.m. Sunday at Whisman Park on the 300 block of Easy Street. Escalante was pronounced dead at Stanford Medical Center. A motive for the shooting was unclear, and police were investigating whether the shooting was gang-related, Wylie said. "All of the involved parties are affiliated with the Mountain View Sureños," Wylie said. "We're still trying to figure that all out. We're not quite sure why a good friend, who is affiliated with the same gang, would kill his friend."

I thought it was fireworks at first but then I heard people yelling. I went out to my porch to see what was going on, then decided it wasn't a good idea to be back-lit on my porch if someone had a gun and went back inside. An ambulance and police showed up in 5-10 minutes. I could see where they were putting him on a stretcher from my porch, and it isn't more than 300 feet from my apartment. Helicopters were circling low overhead for the rest of the night.
View Larger Map I'm somewhat accustomed to having violence happen in my neighborhood, but this is the first time I've actually witnessed it. The most chilling part was the pauses between the shots. There were three or four shots fired and they had a couple of seconds gap between them. It didn't sound like a burst of rage. The person fired, stopped and saw what they were doing, and then fired again at least two more times.

Andy Kehoe

I wanted to share an awesome artist with you guys that Neil introduced me to a year or so ago, Andy Kehoe. His stuff has a vague narrative that runs through it with thematic characters. His "Truth" character is my favorite. I find them all really profoundly effecting. His site keeps drawing me back either to show friends or just to look at the images again. I love the textures. I just bought prints of the first two as birthday presents to myself.

Finding hope in a clearing.


Greeting the simple life.


Truth kills another crow.


Truth wanders alone.


After the flood, Truth wavers.


Death comes for me on a beautiful autumn day.


No answers out here.


Tragedy in the woods.


War hovers over us again.


King crow grows rampant.


Noble voices lie hidden and mute.

Shee Atika

Sitka 2007

Most of the people I talk to about Alaska immediately think of snow and ice, but southeastern Alaska is a temperate rainforest and the ocean dampens the wide temperature swings that happen further inland. While I was there, it rained every day, and the high temperature never deviated more than 2 degrees from 58°F. The summers are often sunny and a beautiful 70° and I heard that the weekend before I arrived was a great example (grumble grumble grumble.) The rain is the dominant feature of the climate. The hills and mountains are covered in acidic muskeg peat bogs that you can only effectively cross on the wooden planks that are laid out for the hiking trails. Walking off the trail is a good way to get your boots sucked off. Large fungi grow everywhere. One particular shelf fungus bears the common name "Chicken of the woods," because theoretically it tastes like chicken. I didn't try it on this trip, but on a previous trip we threw some in the spaghetti sauce after a long day of backpacking, and it was delicious. There are three main trees that grow in the area, Sitka spruce, yellow cedar, and western hemlock. The wood of Sitka spruce trees is used for piano soundboards and in some high end guitars. "Devil's club" is common in the underbrush, so called because it's stem is covered in spines. It's significant enough in Tlingit medicine that SEARHC (South East Alaska Regional Health Consortium) uses it in their logo. The large trees there take 300 years to grow, but when they fall they also can take 300 years to decay. In that time as "nurse logs" they provide nutrients for new trees to sprout right out of their bark.

Although the last visit was 9 years ago, I've been to Alaska several times before, but never this late in the summer. As a result this is the first time I've been there to witness the salmon spawning which was an incredible experience. The only thing I can think to compare it to is watching a thunderstorm overflow the storm sewers. Hundreds upon hundreds of salmon fill a stream that is in some places 3 inches deep. Mostly they just hover in place spending only the energy it takes to resist the current. At this point in their life cycle they are near death and very weak. At one point Roger reached into a stream and just picked one up out of the water. I reached in and held a few of them, and they barely struggled against me. The bears near the coast grow much larger than those in the interior because they can gorge themselves on salmon before hibernating every year.

The only really low tides while I was there happened before dawn, so I got up at 5:30 on Saturday to go explore the tidal pools. There is a small island right off of the coast of my Aunt's place called Magic Island, because at low tide there is a path that runs out to it from the beach. It's a great place to observe the intertidal wildlife. This was the first opportunity I've gotten to test out the waterproof case for my camera, so you'll see some neat pictures from that in the album. I discovered that morning that starfish are as entertaining for me at 23 years of age as they were when I was 13. One pycnapodia decided it was not going to let go of my hand under any circumstances. Maybe it thought my hand was the last thing saving it from being swept into the cold dark abyss. Maybe it thought something was imminently going to devour it if it let go. Maybe it thought that my hand tasted like a delicious rotting carcass. It probably didn't think anything at all, but I'm sure whatever Precambrian era these things evolved in didn't prepare it for dealing with curious little kids. After about 10 minutes of trying to coax it back into the water or onto a rock, I finally had to just tear some of it's little tube feet and pull it off. These things readily grow back whole arms so I'm not too torn up about it. Some salmon were feeding right next to the island and periodically leapt into the air.

The incredible thing to me about the whole area is how full of life it is. The morning I left we saw a pod of killer whales moving through the bay behind my aunt's house, a male, female, and two young. My aunt tells me that the island has one grizzly bear per square mile. It's hard to go a day without seeing a bald eagle. Ravens and various shorebirds are everywhere. On Friday Linda, Lee, and I drove 15 minutes up harbor mountain and within half an hour had picked more blueberries than I could eat in a month. Huckleberry bushes are everywhere, as are blackberries and salmon berries (like raspberries but orange.) I know that generations ago much of America was probably just as verdant, but by comparison to what exists now Alaska seems singularly blessed. The livelihood of everyone in the region is dependent on the vitality of the land; fishing, lumber, and tourism are the major industries. The wilderness cannot be ignored, and it infuses the local culture. Every mountain in view has a name that everyone knows. The local radio station is KCAW, Raven Radio. People regularly talk about the odd things they've seen local wildlife doing, and it's a rich set of stories. One thing that has often bothered me about living in Mountain View is how little the architecture and culture responds to the area in which it is built. Except for the ever-present sun, Mountain View could just as easily have been built in Iowa or New York. Green grass simply does not grow here on it's own, and we spend a lot of water to transplant it. Industrial salt evaporation pools block our access to the bay, and we don't know the names of our mountains. The Steven's Creek trail and Shoreline Nature Preserve are blessings, but in the residential and commercial areas the natural beauty of the area is ignored. I think the Stanford campus and much of San Francisco get it right architecturally, and I wish more places did.

The native population plays a large role in the culture of the Sitka. The name Sitka is an anglicized form of "Shee atika" which was the Tlingit name for the village (atika) in the region they called "Shee." Northwest coastal native art is possibly my favorite style of art, and Sitka has some great examples of it. The style is a wonderfully inventive blending of strict and elegant iconography with compositional experimentation. The components of the forms are attractive in themselves but the brilliance I see in it is in the ways the animistic figures are bent to fit within the geometric shapes of decorated objects or as compositions on their own. Sitka National Historic Park (totem park as I've always called it) has many very impressive totems on it's path through the woods. This picture should give you a sense of the scale of these things. The more naturalistic raven head at the bottom of this totem is modeled after the helmet that a famous Tlingit warrior wore into battle against the Russians. You can see the actual helmet on display at a nearby museum and it is still periodically used in ceremonies. Totems are still regularly made, and the going price is approximately $1,000 per foot if you'd like to commission one.



Roger has been running the Sitka Fine Arts Camp for 7 years now which teaches native arts amidst music, art, and drama. Recently he's become an advocate for the building of a brand new and beautiful theater at the local high school. It's nearly completed, most of what remains to be added is the expensive electronics. One neat bit of legislation in Alaska is that 1% of the budget of every public building project is required to be set aside for art to decorate it, and I really liked the installation at the theater. Roger took the opportunity of our visit to demonstrate the acoustics of the stage. You wouldn't guess it from the haircolor, but I'm related by blood to Roger, and not Jeanine. Somehow though we manage to keep those red-headed genes in the family. :) It was great finally getting to meet my first cousins once-removed. Mina is at an age where she can be entertained by me growling and chasing her around, or alternately by just providing a lap and arms as a jungle-gym for her to climb on. Both Anja and Mina love listening to stories, and the three of us took a few trips to see the fantastic things on Mulberry Street. Everyone I've told about my trip has asked me how my Aunt and Uncle came to live in Alaska, and I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know at all, but they've lived there for over thirty years.

Hopefully I'll be able to go back next year. It was a great experience.

Don't trash the 'nati.

Weekend in Cincy

My journal entry about this past weekend was several pages, so I don't have much energy to write about it more here. Most of it was either too personal for me to talk about it on the internet or for others to want to read about. Picasaweb has a feature where you can place each of your pictures at a geographic location so that others can see them in context, and I've done that for this whole album so check it out! Several times as I was driving around this weekend I looked at familiar places and tried to bring up everything I could remember that happened there. It was pretty overwhelming, especially after living for a year in a place with so few memories attached to it. I suspect that eventually cameras and the internet will be able to do that for us. I've found already after a few years of having a digital camera that I remember events that I have pictures of more vividly and more often.

I ate enough of the Cincinnati-specific staples this weekend to tide me over until my next visit: goetta, cottage ham & beans, Graeter's icecream, and Skyline Chili. I've failed to explain what cottage ham is to many people before, so if you are still curious I've thoroughly documented it in the photos.

I'll try to get Eric to post the video of us jamming so you can see how I blistered my fingers, and how poorly I remember my blues scales. If I play guitar at all this week I'll be playing with a pick. This was a pretty musical weekend all around. I went to the Cincinnati Blues Festival on Friday and saw some of Eric's friends play in the Jon Justice Band. Neil gave me a CD that his brother produced with an artist named Sorie Kondi in Sierra Leone. You can see the music video for it to the left.