Weekend update

This is a three-day weekend for me, since I get President's Day off on Monday. So I have all kinds of grand plans to get some writing done, but managed to avoid accomplishing much of anything yesterday. I think I also managed to avoid succumbing to a cold by snarfing some echinacea before dinner, but I'm feeling slightly pre-buggy again this morning.

My niece came up on the late train last night -- very late, as it turned out, because various delays caused it to arrive at 12:15am rather than 9:45pm. She is attending a seminar on travel photography that's being presented by the National Geographic at the public library downtown today. She's headed off to Indonesia after midnight tonight, so she'll be able to put her new knowledge to immediate use.

I plan to celebrate President's Day by catching a showing of Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which finally opened here on Friday. I'm really looking forward to a nice dose of absurdly recomplicated self-referentiality.

I've been listening to loads of Hawaiian slack key guitar music lately, and found a used copy of yet another Keola Beamer album yesterday while I was avoiding writing: Moe'uhane Kika - "Tales from the Dream Guitar". The theme of dreams comes up a lot in this music, as we shall see again in a moment, and the air of relaxed reverie is a good part of the attraction for me. I also just got a collection called The History of Slack Key Guitar which purports to be the first twenty recordings of slack key guitar music ever made, all from the late '40s and early '50s. Appropriately for a historical project like this, it includes extensive liner notes, and I loved the fannishness of a comment on "Music for Dreaming" by William Namahoe: "William recorded another track around the same time called Serenade of the Strings, 49th State #131, which is the only historical slack key track that we have been unable to find. If anyone has knowledge of this 78-rpm recording, please contact Hana Ola Records or Dancing Cat Records."

So, hey, if you have that 78, let me know, and I'll pass along the contact information. (49th State was the label, in case that isn't clear. Hawai'i, as some of you might not know, was the 49th state to be coerced into join the Union.)