What are you eating?

[toledobass]

A lobster roll in Trenton!?  You should know better Allan.  Rolls are for when you are just bumping around in Bar Harbor and need a snack to get you by until you can make it down to the bridge for the whole critter.

Oops,  I wish I knew how to write with clarity.  I'd never get a roll at the pound, that just seems wrong.  My favorite thing out there are the clams actually.  I meant that I needed to try a lobster roll again while up here in BH.  I didn't understand what all the fuss was about when I tried them for the first time here last year..... I thought it was a waste of good lobster. 

Allan

[Bogey]

Oops,  I wish I knew how to write with clarity.  I'd never get a roll at the pound, that just seems wrong.  My favorite thing out there are the clams actually.  I meant that I needed to try a lobster roll again while up here in BH.  I didn't understand what all the fuss was about when I tried them for the first time here last year..... I thought it was a waste of good lobster. 

Allan

Actually my fault Allan.  In the mean time, throw me any rolls that do not meet our standards .

[MDL]

Just had a huge and rather excellent pub lunch at my local, The Ship and Whale in SE16. I had lamb shank, the other half had roast duck. Had a few beers, too, so a snooze on the sofa might be unavoidable.

[M forever]

M will be in Maine again for several days starting Monday, in Waterville, to get them set up for the "International Maine Film Festival" (sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's actually a quite interesting little film festival with fairly diverse programming). Even though that's an hour or two land-inwards, I am sure they wil have fresh lobster there, too, and I look forward to sinking my teeth into some of it!

Thinking of that makes me hungry!!!

[toledobass]

OK so I think I found the lobster roll for me.  I stopped in at a place called the Lobster Claw today to pick up a lobster roll but they had 4 options to choose from.  Although not traditional, the one I chose is called the bread and butter. It's made up of the lobster meat drizzled with butter and then placed on top of lettuce in a nicely toasted split top roll.  I generally love mayo but I've come to learn that I don't enjoy it in a lobster roll. The bread and butter is where it's at!!!!!!

(Had some nice fish chowder from there too.)

Allan

[M forever]

So what are you doing in Maine? Vacationing?

[toledobass]

I've been digging on some egg sandwiches lately.  Take some genoa salami fry it in butter, get a sunny egg going and place it all on a toasted english muffin with some siracha sauce.  And yes,  I'm riffing on a Micheal Symon (Cleveland homeboy) creation.


Allan

[toledobass]

So what are you doing in Maine? Vacationing?

Mostly vacationing but performances have been getting in the way.  I played a few solo pieces on a vocal recital.  The recital was themed with Carmen in mind (the opera happening at the festival) so I played the Monti Czardas on a Gypsy set and the Toreador song from Frank Proto's Carmen Fantasy. I also accompanied on bass during some other pieces. I have another concert where I play mostly jazz stuff for a pops concert next weekend but other than that it's just hanging out and eating/drinking.

Allan

[M forever]

How did the audition in Pittsburgh go?

[toledobass]

It went well in a lot of ways but my intonation wasn't up to snuff.  I got the comment that while it wasn't bad it wasn't superb, either.  So what did you do to lock in your intonation?  (PM me if you want)

Allan

[M forever]

I don't think that's either an "offensive" nor a particularly "personal" topic, and not entirely out of place in a music forum, so I don't think we have to keep this to PM. Maybe other people can share some of their own experiences and practicing "secrets", too.
As for myself "locking in" my intonation, I don't know how locked in it is now that I don't play regularly anymore. Back when I still did, I never had any real problems with intonation, so I guess one could say it was pretty well locked in, but that is relative, of course, and maybe something others can judge more objectively than oneself... I guess what has always helped me a lot was that I started playing in organized positions across the strings with a strong emphasis on a steady left hand position from very early on, thanks to my teacher who had studied with Findeisen and used his method, so I have never had the problem much that many students have with intonation because they spend many years somehow crawling up and down the strings, looking for one note at a time. I have also spent a lot of time practicing shifts extremely slowly, like really in very slow motion, observing whether the transition from one note to the next was really a smooth, continuous shift or jerky, overshooting or undershooting, whether the note was really where my "tactile memory" thought it was or not. Doing that really meticulously and very slowly takes a lot of time and patience, but it pays off. I have also found that position exercises like in Petracchi's Simplified Higher Technique works marvels, but only when done properly, with attention paid to really good hand position. One thing my first teacher was really into was that you really shift with the second finger which has always the same relationship to the hand, and the first and fourth open and close at the same rate when you shift up or down. Both he and my later teacher at the acadmey also insisted on a high degree of "finger fitness" acquired by a lot of very strenuous hammering exercises. Dangerous, if done wrong, but very "healthy" for the fingers if done properly. They both insisted that the hand has to be strong and elastic enough to move across the strings effortlessly and stop notes effectively, as if the string was nailed onto the fingerboard, without tiring easily because only when the hand is not busy and tired from "strangling" and "clasping" the neck can one develop the tactile sensitivity to always have a good sense of exactly where the fingers are and where they go next.

[greg]

Both he and my later teacher at the acadmey also insisted on a high degree of "finger fitness" acquired by a lot of very strenuous hammering exercises. Dangerous, if done wrong, but very "healthy" for the fingers if done properly.

I get what you mean here...... every try an exercise where you use one finger (like the first finger) in one position while hammering with the rest, higher until you can't stretch any further? The biggest stretch i can make is nearly an octave, from the F# to highest E on the high E string of the guitar. I wonder what types of wicked bass exercises people have made up? 

Ever try grasping a string between your fingers and bowing it? I read it was used in Ligeti's Requiem, although I have no idea which part. Interestingly, it has a unique effect for guitar (which i've never heard used before) which just changes the tone, not to mention the pitches aren't limited to the 12, it's more like a violin.

[orbital]

In a little while :


Of course, traditionally the eggplants are supposed to wrap lamb chunks. I substituted soy protein for lamb, let's see how it will turn out 

[bhodges]

Boy does that look yummy.  Sometimes I think eggplant is my favorite vegetable...

--Bruce

[orbital]

Boy does that look yummy.  Sometimes I think eggplant is my favorite vegetable...

--Bruce

for me, that's beyond doubt. So many ways to cook it, all equally delicious (naturally, the fried varieties are a bit more equal than others  )

[mn dave]

I had a banana muffin. 

[karlhenning]

Some lovely sausage pizza from Al Capone's.

[Bogey]

Some lovely sausage pizza from Al Capone's.

Do you have a shot of that store front Karl?

[mn dave]

Southwest salad.

[SonicMan46]

Today, i.e. July 12, was our 38th Anniversay!    Hard to believe - 

Kind of celebrated last weekend w/ our short overnight to the Umstead Resort & Raleigh to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I posted previously in this & the vacation thread, I believe - 

So, tonight just a quiet evening @ home, but a nice dinner of lobster w/ salad + a nice bottle of Sonoma sparkling wine (Gloria Ferrer, Blanc de Noirs - simple but delicious!)

She wanted to watch some DVD - hard choice w/ my collection, but we picked the Carnegie Hall 2006 presentation shown below - can't even count how many times that we've watch this production - pleasant evening!