"fat albert" blackburn
Much of the day I listened to the music from the VW Boys videos made Friday. Last night I watched the dvd made of all the still pictures and all the videos, plus some Skeeter & the Skidmarks filling in the last half hour of a 2 hour disk. On disk, I don't have to keep it in the computer for archive. Sat with Caterpillar on my lap watching the concert again. It's a concert video. It had a good musical spirit about it. I noticed after awhile that the visual seems to have a feel for the music, flows with the music. I like to keep the camera in more or less motion moving from musician to musician, paying most attention to hands and fingers, seeing what they're doing. Looking through these VW Boys videos that were all dynamite music, I was seeing how especially in the 2nd half of the show, the camera was like it was taking its own motion flowing with the music. I doubt it could be seen by anyone but me, seeing visually what I was feeling inside, free flow with the music, taken up by it and going with it.
My videos don't have really good sound, though it is plenty adequate considering it's a hand-held point-and-shoot $150 camera, fujifilm finepix S1500. 10.0 megapixels. I love about this camera that it is easy to operate, easy to learn. I'm not asking any more of it than it can deliver, because it delivers so much I don't need anything it can't do. When it focuses automatically during the videos, a sound of turning gears inside the camera is picked up by the internal mic. A little distracting sometimes. The camera's ears amount to two tiny holes the diameter of a paper clip wire. They pick up the sound very well. It has a shrill quality when played a little bit loud, but that matters so little considering what I'm doing--recording a concert with one little box easily held in one hand. Digital, so I don't have to have prints made unless I want prints of particular images. I waited all my life for digital cameras and didn't know it.
It's been a good day with VW Boys music in my head all day, hearing songs several times apiece, admiring every one. I put on a Bob Dylan album I'd never heard before, Oh Mercy. Have had it for several years, never even took the cellophane off the case. It was the album he wrote about making in his autobiographical book, Chronicles. This cd I've held with the notion that when I was ready, I'd go pick it up. That's what I did. The VW Boys playing Wagon Wheel, listening to it 3 times today urged me to play it. Wow. I think I waited for the right moment. Before, I'd have put it on with expectations. This evening I just put it on to hear what Dylan had to say in that recording studio in New Orleans. It is great Dylan, like everything he's recorded. He's like Ralph Stanley in that way, never recorded a song short of definitive. It's quite a beautiful album, Oh Mercy. The music has a Lucinda Williams quality in it. It makes me want to play Dylan the next several days, hear his most recent ones again, the ones I think I like best of all the Dylan I've heard from the beginning. He has matured along the way as an artist who started out better than anybody else and went from there over the next half century to the place where American poets embrace him as a poet, of their own will. I've an idea he's the most powerful influence on all the poets his age and younger.
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