News, April 2004
First, let me apologize for not getting this newsletter out much sooner. Just when you think your projects have settled down, whammo--something else pops up. I've tried to keep this backlog to a minimum, but it hasn't been easy. While I finished my bear book last June, something new started to take hold of a large chunk of my life afterward. Dad had taught me to be something of a packrat, and as one result, I'd taped a lot of TV shows over the previous twenty years or so. Now, with entertainment studios starting to put out DVD packs of their TV series, one pack per season, I've started buying these to replace the tapes, partly to simplify my video library and partly to make more shelf space available. It'll be more economical in the long run too--on two different levels. In the early part of 1999 I spent four months dubbing 500 hours of video--which I now view as being economically stupid. If I'd worked those 500 hours for, say, $12 an hour, I'd have grossed $6,000. So that's $6,000 down the drain plus the cost of about 300 videotapes plus wear and tear on the VCRs, which probably weren't designed to take that level of heavy-duty usage in the first place. Buying these shows on DVD means I save money--other people have done that dubbing work "for" me, DVD is more durable and less magnetically vulnerable than videotape, and the video quality far surpasses what I came up with using two VCRs and a video signal enhancement kit.
Secondly, building a huge video library means I won't have to subscribe to cable TV in the future. I don't generally have a lot of time to watch first-run TV these days--when Star Trek: Enterprise first came out, that's all I had time to watch, and before long I discovered I didn't have time to watch even that. If I paid for cable TV at, say, $50 a month, but had time to watch only one hour of TV a week, it wouldn't be feasible--I would be spending $600 a year to watch a series I could buy on DVD at only $75 a year. And I can get my news fixes via CFRA or my Palm Pilot.
But there's a catch. Every once in a while there are DVDs that have digital glitches on them, and so I have to make the time to go through these DVDs to make sure I don't have to take them back to the store to exchange them for another copy. I don't want to buy these things, wait five or more years, and only then discover I've got a botched copy. So I take about three hours a day going through these, buying two packs a month, and for the most part I haven't found any problems. I've projected that I should be finished by December 2005, eliminating about 200 tapes--some series that I taped, such as The Six Million Dollar Man and Cleopatra 2525, may not be available on DVD on this side of the Atlantic for some time.
That's part of what I've been doing since last July or thereabouts. On top of that, we have some 457 slides that my dad took roughly from the period 1950-1979, and now that DVD players have begun to be sold with the capability of displaying JPEG images--and given that Dad isn't going to be around forever--I've long felt we should have a digitized, captioned set of these slides. I tried to get that done before Christmas so I could make copies of the finished CD-R as Christmas gifts, but my scanner broke down around mid-November to the point where I can still scan opaque stuff, but I can't scan slides properly.
Nor have I had time to address the scanner problem. In November I was handed a project by the Liturgy Committee at St. Augustine's to revamp the music at the 4:30 mass, but nobody seemed able to tell me specifically how we should revamp it. So I gathered all the material the parish has done since CBW I came out in 1972, along with material we hadn't done previously but can now because we learned certain melodies in connection with certain other hymns, and created a cross-reference document listing, by CBW volume and then by hymn number, what CBW-assigned themes were associated with what hymns. Then, in just two and a half weeks, I created a 195,000-word lectionary from scratch, keying the text from a hardcopy Bible, the idea being to create a reference document that would give me some idea of what each Sunday had as a general theme or combination of themes. My aim was to eventually have a reference document that would tell me what hymns best fit what Sundays. Then I found a web site, www.canticanova.com, which gave most of the information I needed. But my work up to that point hadn't been in vain. Cantica Nova is an American site, and we currently use CBW III, which was never authorized for release in the States probably due to copyright issues. As a result, I had to translate Cantica Nova's thematic terminology into CBW-specific terminology, and from the documents I'd created so far I was able to create the Sunday-specific reference document I wanted to create. All this took me four months. I still have some copyright-related issues to address regarding the material I want to use that appears in CBW I and/or II but not in III, but I'm at the point in this project where I don't have to work on it 24/7 any more.
In conjunction with this project, I started another project I'd had in the back of my mind for years but had never begun. I'm currently working on a series of psalm settings for all the Sundays in the liturgical cycle, and the way I do it is probably unique. The Roman Catholic Church uses 75 psalms (out of the available 150) and three canticles on Sundays (I exclude the Easter Triduum from these totals because I never have to worry about music planning for this--other people take care of it for me). For each of these, I write one master setting that includes all the verses that are used for the psalm in question, not just the verses used in the upcoming particular Sunday. For example, Psalm 119 might be broken down so that verses 27-35 might be used on one Sunday and verses 110-125 on another. I write the settings in sort of a hymn style rather than a chant-on-the-verses style, and I write them so that whatever verses we use on a particular Sunday, the resultant extract as a whole will still make musical sense.
For those of you who have complained about the changes I've made to the text for these settings, I'm sorry, but I have no choice. Many times the Grail text that we use does not easily lend itself to musical adaptation, and anyway we've been using those same texts for at least forty years--for example, does anyone, without looking at their dictionaries, really know what "winnowed chaff" is? So I feel the text needs reworking in spots, both to fit the music and to make it easier to understand for today's audience. I use The Living Bible and the Good News Bible as my alternate sources.
On the performance front, things have really started to pick up in the last several months. One of my bands, Hotter than Ice, has begun playing semi-regularly at Groovy's Roti Hut, and next month we're about to begin appearing there regularly on the second Saturday of each month. We have since done a couple of performances at the Good Companions Centre, a house party in South March and a peaceful anti-racism demonstration at DND headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
During one of our appearances at Groovy's, I dropped of a copy of my promo kit with the owner, Groovy Wilson, a trombonist with the Ottawa-area band Stone Soul Picnic. So much did he like what he heard of my CD that he got in touch with Stone Soul Picnic's lead vocalist, Vijay Agard, who hired me to sub for the band's regular keyboardist at a gig in Hull on February 14. As a result, I'm now a reserve member of the band: if we get a booking at a place that can't afford the whole band, then the band will give its horn section the night off and assign the horn parts to me. We were supposed to appear at Bar de l'Ouest on March 10, but that gig got bumped back to March 19 and then to April 7--and has since been postponed yet again. In the meantime, Stone Soul Picnic is currently negotiating a gig at Tucson's for July 17, but as far as I know the date hasn't yet been set in stone.
The Fabulous Edsels now have their own web site, www.thefabulousedsels.ca. We have recently got ourselves a booking agent--and, as you might expect, more gigs. Check out my finally-updated calendar page for specific dates. Like last year, I'm planning to be in Toronto this year for Toronto Trek. This time I'll be there from June 28 to July 5. If you're in the Toronto area and you have an event there you'd like me to play at during that time frame, let me know so I can plan my time accordingly.
On a personal note, I was browsing through the online version of the Connecticut Post on March 21 when I found an obituary worth noting. My ex-girlfriend had a friend, Nadia Czubatyj of Milford, CT, who had died on March 19. I had known Nadia and her husband Lu--not, of course, as well as I'd known my ex, but better than I'd known most of my ex's other friends. I wasn't able to go to the funeral, mostly because I didn't want to cause my ex any more grief than she was obviously going through, and partly because I'd found out about the funeral too late to give Greyhound their required 24 hours' notice to reserve a seat on the bus to New York City--when going to Connecticut I always transferred buses in the Big Apple.
But I did mark the event in other ways. If I'm ever inclined to "cry in my beer", as I was the morning of the funeral, I go to a Starbucks and order a venti frappuccino. I did this at the exact same time a service for Nadia was being held at the funeral home. Less than a week later I set up an announced mass in her memory for next March 19. And the next teddy bear I add to my collection will be named for her.
Requiescat in pace, Nadia. Du wirst vermißt sein...
Nadia Czubatyj--1944-2004
Secondly, building a huge video library means I won't have to subscribe to cable TV in the future. I don't generally have a lot of time to watch first-run TV these days--when Star Trek: Enterprise first came out, that's all I had time to watch, and before long I discovered I didn't have time to watch even that. If I paid for cable TV at, say, $50 a month, but had time to watch only one hour of TV a week, it wouldn't be feasible--I would be spending $600 a year to watch a series I could buy on DVD at only $75 a year. And I can get my news fixes via CFRA or my Palm Pilot.
But there's a catch. Every once in a while there are DVDs that have digital glitches on them, and so I have to make the time to go through these DVDs to make sure I don't have to take them back to the store to exchange them for another copy. I don't want to buy these things, wait five or more years, and only then discover I've got a botched copy. So I take about three hours a day going through these, buying two packs a month, and for the most part I haven't found any problems. I've projected that I should be finished by December 2005, eliminating about 200 tapes--some series that I taped, such as The Six Million Dollar Man and Cleopatra 2525, may not be available on DVD on this side of the Atlantic for some time.
That's part of what I've been doing since last July or thereabouts. On top of that, we have some 457 slides that my dad took roughly from the period 1950-1979, and now that DVD players have begun to be sold with the capability of displaying JPEG images--and given that Dad isn't going to be around forever--I've long felt we should have a digitized, captioned set of these slides. I tried to get that done before Christmas so I could make copies of the finished CD-R as Christmas gifts, but my scanner broke down around mid-November to the point where I can still scan opaque stuff, but I can't scan slides properly.
Nor have I had time to address the scanner problem. In November I was handed a project by the Liturgy Committee at St. Augustine's to revamp the music at the 4:30 mass, but nobody seemed able to tell me specifically how we should revamp it. So I gathered all the material the parish has done since CBW I came out in 1972, along with material we hadn't done previously but can now because we learned certain melodies in connection with certain other hymns, and created a cross-reference document listing, by CBW volume and then by hymn number, what CBW-assigned themes were associated with what hymns. Then, in just two and a half weeks, I created a 195,000-word lectionary from scratch, keying the text from a hardcopy Bible, the idea being to create a reference document that would give me some idea of what each Sunday had as a general theme or combination of themes. My aim was to eventually have a reference document that would tell me what hymns best fit what Sundays. Then I found a web site, www.canticanova.com, which gave most of the information I needed. But my work up to that point hadn't been in vain. Cantica Nova is an American site, and we currently use CBW III, which was never authorized for release in the States probably due to copyright issues. As a result, I had to translate Cantica Nova's thematic terminology into CBW-specific terminology, and from the documents I'd created so far I was able to create the Sunday-specific reference document I wanted to create. All this took me four months. I still have some copyright-related issues to address regarding the material I want to use that appears in CBW I and/or II but not in III, but I'm at the point in this project where I don't have to work on it 24/7 any more.
In conjunction with this project, I started another project I'd had in the back of my mind for years but had never begun. I'm currently working on a series of psalm settings for all the Sundays in the liturgical cycle, and the way I do it is probably unique. The Roman Catholic Church uses 75 psalms (out of the available 150) and three canticles on Sundays (I exclude the Easter Triduum from these totals because I never have to worry about music planning for this--other people take care of it for me). For each of these, I write one master setting that includes all the verses that are used for the psalm in question, not just the verses used in the upcoming particular Sunday. For example, Psalm 119 might be broken down so that verses 27-35 might be used on one Sunday and verses 110-125 on another. I write the settings in sort of a hymn style rather than a chant-on-the-verses style, and I write them so that whatever verses we use on a particular Sunday, the resultant extract as a whole will still make musical sense.
For those of you who have complained about the changes I've made to the text for these settings, I'm sorry, but I have no choice. Many times the Grail text that we use does not easily lend itself to musical adaptation, and anyway we've been using those same texts for at least forty years--for example, does anyone, without looking at their dictionaries, really know what "winnowed chaff" is? So I feel the text needs reworking in spots, both to fit the music and to make it easier to understand for today's audience. I use The Living Bible and the Good News Bible as my alternate sources.
On the performance front, things have really started to pick up in the last several months. One of my bands, Hotter than Ice, has begun playing semi-regularly at Groovy's Roti Hut, and next month we're about to begin appearing there regularly on the second Saturday of each month. We have since done a couple of performances at the Good Companions Centre, a house party in South March and a peaceful anti-racism demonstration at DND headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
During one of our appearances at Groovy's, I dropped of a copy of my promo kit with the owner, Groovy Wilson, a trombonist with the Ottawa-area band Stone Soul Picnic. So much did he like what he heard of my CD that he got in touch with Stone Soul Picnic's lead vocalist, Vijay Agard, who hired me to sub for the band's regular keyboardist at a gig in Hull on February 14. As a result, I'm now a reserve member of the band: if we get a booking at a place that can't afford the whole band, then the band will give its horn section the night off and assign the horn parts to me. We were supposed to appear at Bar de l'Ouest on March 10, but that gig got bumped back to March 19 and then to April 7--and has since been postponed yet again. In the meantime, Stone Soul Picnic is currently negotiating a gig at Tucson's for July 17, but as far as I know the date hasn't yet been set in stone.
The Fabulous Edsels now have their own web site, www.thefabulousedsels.ca. We have recently got ourselves a booking agent--and, as you might expect, more gigs. Check out my finally-updated calendar page for specific dates. Like last year, I'm planning to be in Toronto this year for Toronto Trek. This time I'll be there from June 28 to July 5. If you're in the Toronto area and you have an event there you'd like me to play at during that time frame, let me know so I can plan my time accordingly.
On a personal note, I was browsing through the online version of the Connecticut Post on March 21 when I found an obituary worth noting. My ex-girlfriend had a friend, Nadia Czubatyj of Milford, CT, who had died on March 19. I had known Nadia and her husband Lu--not, of course, as well as I'd known my ex, but better than I'd known most of my ex's other friends. I wasn't able to go to the funeral, mostly because I didn't want to cause my ex any more grief than she was obviously going through, and partly because I'd found out about the funeral too late to give Greyhound their required 24 hours' notice to reserve a seat on the bus to New York City--when going to Connecticut I always transferred buses in the Big Apple.
But I did mark the event in other ways. If I'm ever inclined to "cry in my beer", as I was the morning of the funeral, I go to a Starbucks and order a venti frappuccino. I did this at the exact same time a service for Nadia was being held at the funeral home. Less than a week later I set up an announced mass in her memory for next March 19. And the next teddy bear I add to my collection will be named for her.
Requiescat in pace, Nadia. Du wirst vermißt sein...
Nadia Czubatyj--1944-2004
posted by Jamie at 12:10 a.m.
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