Mask of the week is a Canadian transformation mask. Closed:
Open:
Categories
Category: Culture
My sister is going on holiday to Egypt in a few days to do a Nile cruise. Of which I am quite jealous. Anyway, I was looking through bookshops today for books that she might like to have with her, and I decided that what she really needed was a field guide. A good field guide is a reference book and identification aid in one, and that’s just what you might want, going round the Valley of the Kings.
The format would be like the best bird guides, i.e. pictures on the right-hand page and the corresponding text on the left. But instead of the book being divided up into ‘pipits’, ‘waders’, ‘hawks’ and so on, it would be split into ‘sarcophagi’, ‘deities’, ‘columns’ or whatever. You could use it either in a museum or a site, just to give you a starting point for making sense of what you see.
I wonder if there are any other areas where the field guide idea would work well? It feels like an idea with legs, but I suspect there are only a limited number of things which are sufficiently visual and sufficiently easily classifiable for it to be helpful.
I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you, but humour me.
I’m amazed by how much it has changed my listening experience, having all my music on the computer. I didn’t actually intend to put all my music on the hard disk when I got the computer – the CD player is within easy reach of my desk anyway, and I don’t have an mp3 player – but I tried it out mainly because I wanted to play with the software on my new machine. What makes the difference isn’t the way that all your music is at your fingertips, although that’s nice. It’s that I have a whole load of albums which I like, but don’t particularly want to listen to all of at once. The simple fact that the computer mixes up tracks from different albums breathes life into your collection, just because you don’t have to take the decision to listen to a whole hour of acid house, or Breton folk, or early blues, or whatever it might be.
I thought that if was going to make a lot of use of the playlist function it would be making playlists like ‘funky stuff’ or ‘easy-cheesy’ or ‘Americana’: specific selections to suit my mood. In fact my main playlist completely ignores genre and mood; it consists of a combination of:
high-rated songs that haven’t been played for four days
unrated songs that haven’t been played for two weeks
current favourites
Oddly enough, the fact that the playlist might go ‘Charles Aznavour – The Prodigy – Bob Marley’ isn’t as much of a problem as I would have expected. I thought that switching between wildly different kinds of music would just be annoying – but actually I quite like the variety.
I’ve added a list of music I’m currently listening to in the sidebar on the left. It uses a neat little WordPress plugin called WP-Scrobbler that grabs the info from your Audioscrobbler feed. So that list on the left automatically updates as I listen to music thorough iTunes. Or at least I think it updates every six minutes.
The default setting is to give the song title, artist and date and time for each song. That seemed like too much information, so I’ve got it just giving the last eight artists. But if you click on the name of an artist, it’ll link you to the Last.fm page for the particular song I listened to.
Categories
Mask of the Week
This page and this page, about the art of Burkina Faso, have so many fabulous pictures that it’s hard to pick just one. My mask(s) of the week are these three Bwa plank masks:
But also make sure you look at this Dafing leaf mask, this Bobo antelope mask and these Mossi ‘red masks’. And just browse around a bit.
No, not nanowrimo, actual Hell. BLDGBLOG – where Dante and Botticelli meet opencast mining.