Oscar Peterson has died. There will be numerous obituaries in the coming days, lauding a “jazz giant,” “one of the greatest jazz pianists of the 20th Century,” or even “the best damn jazz pianist in the whole world,” and while all these tributes will be well-placed, they don’t sum up the loss I’m feeling tonight.

For me, Oscar Peterson is (not was - his recordings live on) the jazz piano. I don’t know for certain what the first jazz record I ever heard was, but if I was pressed to guess, it would have been Oscar, heavily favored, with the Modern Jazz Quartet or a Stan Kenton as distant, dark horse alternatives.

Though I’ve grown to love jazz and jazz piano beyond Oscar, for me he’s the touchstone, the Ark of the Covenant, something that I can always count on, the tower at the center of my ever-widening circular exploration of some of the greatest music ever recorded. No slight is intended to Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck, George Shearing, Bud Powell, or Horace Silver, but the small world that is my outlook on jazz will always be framed by Oscar and his piano. In particular, Oscar’s album Night Train spoke to my soul in some fundamental way at a crucial point in my musical development, and if it wasn’t for him, I might never have begun my love affair with the greatest musical form of the modern age.

I also owe my love of jazz to my step-dad, who, though he banned rock and roll from the house, was more than willing to share with me his knowledge of jazz, both as a brass instrumentalist and a life-long concert-goer. Kevin’s enthusiasm for Oscar’s work sparked my own interest well over a decade ago. Our relationship had always been a little strained, a little uncomfortable when I was a kid, and Oscar’s music was the first bridge between us. Nights spent in the living room listening to Oscar really brought Kevin and I closer, something I’ll always be thankful for.

Kevin’s seen Oscar a few times in his life, probably at least once in each decade of the Seventies, Eighties, and Oscar’s post-stroke Nineties revival. I have never seen Oscar live, nor will I ever have the opportunity now.

No matter how long I live, this will be one of my greatest regrets.

Farewell, Oscar. You helped me build two relationships I’ll have for the rest of my life, and so your contribution to my family is never forgotten, I’ll try to build these same relationships with my children.

About a month ago my friend Tim invited me to be the “conservative” co-author of his blog, Dammit. I was initially hesitant to accept because I didn’t want to disappoint him the way I’ve disappointed myself here, but I realized that I needn’t force myself into a daily, or even every-other-day, posting schedule. Tim’s matchless daily work on his blog wasn’t something I wanted to step on even if I did have the drive necessary post that regularly, so a loosely bi-weekly interval between my posts seemed a good middle ground.

I’ve enjoyed writing for Tim’s blog immensely, and I’ll be continuing to do so. I suggest you read the blog as it stands, so I’m not going to link directly to any of my posts, be they past, present, or future. I will post the occasional plug for Dammit should anyone take a backroad on the Interwebs and wind up in my driveway, looking for directions.

I can’t emphasize enough how refreshing Tim’s work is in my eyes. He deserves a much larger readership than he currently has, and I hope he has the endurance I could never muster to keep going until someone with sufficient enough a following gives him the exposure that he deserves.

One of the surest ways to kill off any blog readership one might have is to quit posting for seven months. I’m sure the dearth of new content here has done the work of the harshest of winters in this part of the worldwide digital vineyard. The cycle of inspiration and desolation of the mind is as inevitable as the change of the seasons, but warmer climes have been much more hospitable for anyone who might have been moderately interested in what I had to say.

I make no promises of regular content this time. With school obligations, a wedding to plan, and occasional co-authorship of another blog my life is much more hectic than the last time I attempted to grow anything here. Although the time appears right to till the earth again and resow the seed of thought, I’m not certain of the outcome. I might eventually grow something capable of yielding a few bottles of table wine, but history says I won’t.

That’s fine. When I originally bought this digital plot I had the idea to build it into some kind of digital obschina, a collective intellectual project that would feature not only my own writings and thoughts, but those of acquaintances, friends and relatives. That vision is more humble now, or at least more realistic. What I have here is a binary hobby farm, something to work on when I’m intellectually engaged. Maybe I’ll occasionally bring a crop to market, but my existence isn’t dependent on it. Instead, I’ll be able to create something small for myself and concentrate on the craftsmanship instead of the constancy. I can put up some supplies to get me by during the lean months, and in the mean time we’ll see how the grapes fare.
If you’re in the neighborhood, you’re welcome to come in for a glass of wine and some biscuits and preserves.

Mucking around on the Internets as I do, I often will come across some truly incredible sites that no one seems to know about. At least I think that must be the case, because no one is telling me about them. In the interest of getting to bed at a decent hour and giving you something to do when you should really be collating I’ll give you five of my favorite places on the web to waste an hour or three while expanding my horizons. If you make it to the end of the column without getting sucked off into one of these powerful vortexes, leave a comment with a link to a couple of your favorites. Together we can lower the productivity of the country this week!

Gnarly Maps

If you don’t know about Radical Cartography and you even spent one day as a kid making a treasure map or a diagram of your neighborhood with secret hideouts and the like, you’re missing out. The site has everything: a Flash-animated map showing the development of area codes in the US, a map comparing the various mass-transit systems of North America, a cool overlay map illustrating the relative sizes of Europe and the US (I always thought Wisconsin was about the size of Germany; looks like I was wrong), and a map of the world from a New Yorker’s perspective. There are more cool ones, but I’ll let you discover them on your own.

My Old Kentucky Virginia Home

You know how some people are nostalgic about the old family farm? The owners of Enon Hall are rightly crazy about their property. Enon Hall, located in Lancaster County, Virginia, was the ancestral Hathaway homestead from 1762 - 1939. The present owners, themselves Hathaway descendants, bought the homestead in 1999 without even having toured the entire house. What has followed is a labor of love in restoring the home and the grounds, documented in a journal and aided by an extensive collection of historical documents. I just discovered this treasure this past weekend and have read up through November of 1999. I plan on reading the entire journal and then continuing to check back each month as the owners continue to rebuild a significant part of their family history.

Bullet Trains

I’ve held forth at length here in the past on the subject of high speed rail connections in this country. The MHSRA has crammed more information into one place than I can possibly link to, so you’ll have to do the exploring on your own. Worth looking at no matter if you’re a railroad buff, a proponent of sound civil engineering, or just curious about why high speed rail is such a no-brainer for the Midwest.

It’s like hacking, only with buildings!

I link to Action Squad in the sidebar, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you really should, especially if you’re from the Twin Cities or you liked sneaking around like a favorite spy character as a tot. Whether crawling through the ruins of a state mental hospital, messing around in an abandoned bowling alley, or infiltrating the abandoned mines beneath Ford’s assembly plant in St. Paul, Action Squad leaves you wanting to do a little urban exploration of your own.

Ghost Towns, Junkyards, and the Salton Sea
If I ever have an office to myself again, I think I would like to decorate it exclusively with prints of Troy Paiva’s work, showcased at his Lost America website. Eerily beautiful, haunting, and just plain cool. And no Photoshop - just plain old lens mastery and long exposures. Brilliant.

Share the love with links in the comments!

Ten months ago I wrote about high-end prefabricated homes developed by Marmol Radziner.  Just the other day I found another (literal) architecture tidbit - the micro compact home [m-ch].

Like many designs in minimalist architecture, the [m-ch] hails from Europe.  Developed with techniques adapted from automotive and aviation design, the high-tech little cubes follow the less-is-more school of thought to the bleeding edge, then over it.

Effectively about 8.5 feet cubed, the [m-ch] manages to cram two compact double beds, a dining area for 4-5 people, a shower and toilet, a kitchen with induction burners, microwave, sink, refrigerator/freezer, and storage space, and standard HVAC amenities into the living module.  With a customizable exterior and interior, the [m-ch] runs about $32,000 in base form.

I spent some time living in a converted shipping container in Iraq, and I have to say the [m-ch] appears to be light-years ahead of that living arrangement.  Even with all the space inside an isotainer I don’t think I could have crammed that much stuff into one space.  Not the way KBR laid those containers out, anyway.

Trials of the [m-ch] have already begun in Europe.  Students in Munich have rented the mini homes for $150/month, keeping logs of their experiences and helping designers iron out the bumps in the product.  A few glitches (over-sensitve smoke detector, drainage issues in the bathroom) in such a small place have drastic effects on quality of life issues.  I remember how badly my buddy Vinny’s feet would stink up our isocontainer (not that mine were probably all that pleasant); I’m sure shower water seeping into the sleeping area isn’t amusing, either.

I find extremely utilitarian/efficient design quite interesting, and though I don’t think I’d want to live in such a small space any longer, I can see how attractive these little dwellings would be for student housing or for large seminars.  Maybe even for Olympic Villages.  They can be transported by truck or even helicopter and are installed with a crane.  The warranty is for five years, making them attractive to operations which figure to see significant turnover or fluctuation in size.

I can almost see a miniature neighborhood of [m-ch] units with Dodge Slingshots and Smart Forfours parked in to-scale driveways, students milling from dwelling to dwelling.  Is it part of the solution for affordable, compact, and efficient student housing in America?  I doubt it.  My guess is no American college student willingly will stuff their belongings and themselves into a 8.5-foot cube, even if they had it all to themselves, just as I expect the Smart car sell poorly in the US when introduced in 2008 (which is too bad, because it’s really a great little vehicle).  Still, it is nice to know that there are designers out there attempting to squeeze every bit of use out of every cubic inch available to them, whether that cubic inch is in a micro compact home or a micro compact car.