I’m no sure how many people out there are really tracking my notation projects, but this is an update about my current one, notating “Monk Suite”–an arrangement of tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet and orchestra that I put together as an undergrad student.
UPDATE (26 Feb. 2017): Some fascinating commentary, and even a new photo, can be found in the comments section below. Don’t miss it! ORIGINAL POST: So, since we got back from Korea, I’ve been struggling to get back to work on my novel(s), but I have managed to do some editing and send out a piece that I wrote earlier this year. I’ve also started editing another into shape, and have been knocking together bits and pieces that will become stories at some point. One of the more dark and harrowing stories concerns one Viktoria Yankovsky—well, not real Victoria Yankovsky, …
A quick post about resolving the admin-ajax.php CPU usage problem on my blog. Probably not of interest to most people.
I’ve long promised a roundup of places in Jeonju that I’d recommend to people… or, rather, places that I make a point of going when I’m in Jeonju myself. For anyone not in (or going to) Korea, well… this might be of less interest to you, unless you love reading abut amazing restaurants that you’ll probably never visit.
So, the last few days have been a whirlwind of cooking, and I’ve learned a few interesting things. Let’s see: 1. When you make pesto, grind the nuts first. Then add the leaves, then the cheese. Oil and butter come later, along with salt. Nuts first allows the leaves to be ground up dry, which gets you a better grind. (I didn’t make the pesto, Mrs. Jiwaku did. It turned out really good!) 2. With homemade pesto, substitutions are the name of the game. If you’re unable to use pine nuts–say, because your spouse is allergic to them–other nuts are …
I’ve just read Jack Womack’s second and third novels (both of books set in his “Dryco” series) back-to-back. Longtime readers will note that I lauded the first novel in the series (in terms of series timeline) with lavish praise back in 2012. I also read the Womack’s first novel, Ambient, and it made a strong impression on me at the time, but that was years and years ago, and I’m due for a reread since I’m apparently trying to read all the Dryco books this year. (Actually, when I read Ambient, I wanted nothing more than to read everything else …
I normally don’t post about computer games, and think of the “Gaming” section of my blog as being about tabletop RPGs. However, both Mrs. Jiwaku and I have enjoyed Frozenbyte‘s Trine 2 quite a bit, so I’m going to make an exception: By “quite a bit,” I mean the degree of enjoyment, not the amount of play: it’s taken us ages (and I mean, months on end) to finish the game, but that’s because we’ve rationed it to sessions of about an hour at a time, of only occasional frequency. Still, it’s been great fun playing together, and working out how …
I’ve added another composition to my Music page: it’s an underwhelming score, in fact a royal mess, but I figured it was worth notating in Musescore for the practice, as well as to capture the way I thought about music and composing in 1994, about halfway through my formal music studies. I suppose you could call it my attempt to compose “Third Stream” music: that is, music that combined jazz and classical approaches to create something new and alien to both sides of the divide. Here’s a copy of the score, though it’s pretty useless without the tape (and still …