Updates on Flood Recovery (The Stuff)

So we finally had the overseer from the contractor that the insurance company wants us to use come over.  He agreed that the stairs also needed to be included, which probably means a small change to the claim, which I guess they are processing; I'll try to call Monday to see if that is working its way through the system.  I don't think I need to do anything.  They think they'll actually be ready to come here and start in about 3 weeks, and it will take 3-4 weeks to do the job.  So about 2.5 months from the flood, and we should have our basement back finally.  Fingers crossed.

I think I mentioned that fortunately, I had brought the musical instruments up.  I am very sorry that I tried to straighten up and took a milk crate of records downstairs, as they would have survived of course if I hadn't bothered.  A lot of them were my wife's actually.  For some reason or other, I had moved one of her Duran Duran LPs (Seven and the Ragged Tiger) and a Power Station 12" single to higher ground.  I don't think she's going to end up replacing too much of this, but I dropped into a record store in Stratford and saw they had the Power Station LP on vinyl, so I grabbed that.  I'll see if I see any of their other singles turn up at Kops or Sonic Boom or even BMV and maybe replace those.  She's extremely bummed out that this Nick Rhodes art book was tossed out.  I do feel terrible, though it was on the list, which she did review, and if she had paid more attention and told me she wanted it, I could have retrieved it.  Or when we were going through things the first time, she was so upset, she really didn't look through those boxes, and I ended up grabbing material (and scanning what was broadly salvageable...).  Of course, since it meant so much to her, I'm really sorry she didn't bring it upstairs after the move.  Well, there's always a lot of second guessing involved with these sorts of situations.

Almost all the CDs that were in the basement had been ripped (or I wouldn't have put them in the downstairs listening pile), though in a few cases it took a long time to track down where the files had gone!

I only just found Forth Inversion (Mike Murley and Bob Fenton).  It turns out there is another CD by the same group at the Toronto Reference Library, though unfortunately it doesn't circulate.  Also, the Reference Library is undergoing all kinds of renovations right now, and that collection isn't even available, so I'll see about going in and listening to it in early Nov.

Other rarer CDs where the ripped files have turned up are:

Kenny Burrell is Forever by Yoshiaki Okayasu (and also Ballade for the Night)

Rebirth of Three Blind Mice Records (2 CD set!) 

Toshiko Akiyoshi Just Be-Bop (with Charles McPherson!)

Chris McGregor and Brotherhood of Breath - the self-titled record and Country Cooking

Isao Suzuki Now's the Time (Live session on Three Blind Mice)

George Crotty Chronotope

Bongo Records The Original Sound of Mali

Ambrose Akinmusire Prelude (to Cora)

Med Flory Go West, Young Man! 

And a double album (or rather two LPs on one CD): Duke Ellington's All American in Jazz and Midnight in Paris).*

I think the main thing, particularly for the rare CDs, is to ensure they are copied over to at least 2 hard drives.

As far as the CDs I didn't rip, it looks like Myra Melford's For Love of Fire and Water and Hear the Light Singing are missing.  These are CDs I picked up when I heard her and Ingrid Laubrock playing at a small arts venue in Toronto.  Most of her recordings are on Bandcamp, so I guess that is the easiest way to replace them.

The new Tafelmusik CD of 2 Hadyn symphonies seems to have been skipped over, as well as the ARC Ensemble Two Roads to Exile** CD.

I was quite surprised that I didn't rip Sviatoslav Richter recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.  I decided to just go ahead and replace this, and it should arrive relatively soon.

Even though I still held onto the somewhat damaged vinyl version of Hutcherson's Linger Lane (and recorded off the LP a long time ago), I saw that there was a Japanese import of the album on CD.  There was only one left, and the price wasn't too bad, so I ordered that as well. 

I'm still debating some of the urban (and architecture) books that were on the bottom shelf on the bookcase.  Some of them are in Internet Archive, but a few I'll probably replace where the price isn't too high (and the shipping to Toronto isn't too dreadful!).  So far I have ordered Downtown Chicago in Transition, but I'll surely order a few more.

I'll never be fully reconciled to losing this much stuff, but I am glad I backed up much of it, and that it is possible to replace a lot of it without too much effort or dosh, with a handful of exceptions, of course.

 

* I did find this, though the search took way longer than it should have.  Now oddly enough, the first track off All American in Jazz, "Back to School," is missing as well as the very last track a solo guitar version of Guitar Amour.  (I presume there was some mastering problem that preventing me from ripping the first(!) and last tracks from the CD.)  After a deep dive down the Internet rabbit hole, which I really shouldn't have indulged in this morning, I found an on-line store (which didn't seem too scuzzy) that sold it as a download.  That's probably better than reordering the CD and finding the same problem all over again.  I am super annoyed that because this was the first track and it has some truly horrendous cover art, this seems to be overwriting the actual cover art for the rest of the album, and I can't seem to fix it (and I'm really out of time now this morning).  Sigh.

* If I truly didn't rip this (and it doesn't look like I did), it does appear to be in at the UT Music Library, so I'll investigate that option shortly.

Catching Up on Reading

I ended up taking the TTC over to Skye Wallace's gig on Wed. evening.  I used the time to read a few more chunks of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.  I think I had mentioned I was a bit annoyed at the Secret Life of Books folks for SPOILING the ending of the novel, but indeed, Baldwin has something in mind much closer to a Greek tragedy where the fate of one of the characters is pre-ordained, so we know within only a few pages that the guillotine(!!!) awaits one of them.  The countdown to the fatal blow is very much a recurring theme throughout the novel.

I was actually pretty fortunate with the TTC, and a 72 bus turned up right away and there were no disruptions on Line 2.  I had never been to Burdock Music Hall before.  It turns out it is a space pretty similar to Cameron House, where I saw Skye play once.  It is just past Dufferin on Bloor, so I decided I would grab a bahn mi sandwich at the place near Paradise I eat at when I am in a rush.  I made it just at 8:03, and the opening act (Flora Falls) had just started.  There was actually a free stool right by the wall, so I parked myself there all night.  

The wrist-stamp

 
While I enjoyed Flora Falls and liked their back story (she's from Australia but moved to Berlin, and he was from Vancouver and also moved to Berlin), I took the time to finish reading Patrick Grace's Deviant (on my phone).  As most of the poems in Deviant are about gay life in urban Canada, there were actually some clear parallels with the (sordid) gay demi-monde that Baldwin was describing in Giovanni's Room.  Interestingly, at the time, homosexuality was not illegal in France (while it very much was illegal in the UK, the US and Canada), though it was very much seen as deviant and shameful.

It was an interesting gig, particularly as Skye was featuring completely new material off of a forth-coming album and didn't do any of her hits.  She also didn't do an encore!  It does seem she has truly broken up her band.  She still plays a lot with her bass player, but the guitar player and keyboard player are out of the picture.  Life imitating art to some degree, not that I ever was able to share my short playlet on the same topic with her.  I hung out a bit after the gig and replaced Terribly Good, which suffered some damage in the flood, and is probably my favourite overall album.

I had about 15 pages left in Giovanni's Room, so I just powered through it when I got home.  Tonight, I'll probably have at least a bit of time before the TSO concert (and thankfully my TSO tickets did turn up in the mail!) and at intermission, so I'll start on Harvey's Orbital and probably skim MacIvor's How It Works.  Then Friday I am taking the Stratford bus and will have a couple of hours more or less between plays, so I should definitely finish up Orbital (in time for Book Club!) and make a very good dent in Thien's The Book of Records.

While I am definitely behind where I would like to be in my reading, I can finish up the remaining library books: Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.  At the top of my list after that are Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49,* Baldwin's Another Country, McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores** and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net.

A pretty good list as we go powering into Autumn.

 

Edit (09/28): Of course, I can never leave a good list alone.  I was at BMV, looking for Power Station on vinyl and couldn't resist some cheap Ray Bradbury novels, which then led me to adding The October Country to my hold list at the library, with the intention of trying to read it in October, and gradually reading a few of the Bradbury I just picked up at BMV.

 

* I really dig the Jacobean play he dreamed up -- The Courier's Tragedy.  I kept reading it as The Courtier's Tragedy, though I guess no play by that title exists either...

** I'm fairly sure I will find this disappointing, which is one reason I have delayed reading it, however, I suspect I will still like it better than his "lost" (or rather saved from the scrap heap) novel Until August, which was (as expected) a let down.  I'll have to try to get back to some of his best work next year, maybe starting with some of the shorter pieces like Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Dreary Day

Yesterday was so incredibly frustrating.  We're generally getting bad news on winning the work I really want to do, and I am left overseeing a bunch of projects that don't appeal to me.  My firm never had the best qualifications for this sort of work in the first place (and personal quals don't count for much), and now a bunch of firms are coming in selling snake oil about how AI can harness Big Data and do the same work at a fraction of the price.  It's all a lie of course, but it just muddies things up a lot (and frankly firms that won't embrace the lie get left behind).  I thought there might have been 5 decent years left in this field, but it looks like less than that, maybe just 2 or 3.  I'm a bit too old to retrain for anything else. My back-up plans aren't really any better, so I am in a deep funk today, not at all helped by the weather.

I'll just post this cartoon (by Ben Jennings in The Manchester Guardian) as it certainly fits my mood right now (and it even hints on how in the midst of this shitstorm, we are still distracting ourselves to death -- with apologies to Neil Postman* for stealing from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death). 

There's another cartoon I will get to soon, but it requires a much longer discussion.

 

 

* I'm amused by the AI-generated summary that popped up, as I often forget to turn off AI in Google searches, which said many critics turned on Postman for offering "Pessimism Without Practical Solutions."  I am definitely in Postman's camp and think that the search for silver linings or win-win-win campaigns, barf, at all costs has prevented people from realizing that we are in the boiling water, and it is now too late...  In general, people don't like being around pessimists (and especially those Cassandras who are nearly always right), and a lot of times I don't like sitting with my own dark and dreary thoughts.  But maybe even more fundamentally they don't want to be told that their current standard of living is unsustainable and that they have to change their ways and consume less (and it absolutely isn't enough to just blame Big Oil and other corporations -- it actually means delinking environmentally destructive economic growth (i.e. essentially all of it) from modern life).  Almost no one is on board with that, particularly where it means getting less (and probably paying more for it!), so it is easier to just ignore and shun the messengers.