Monday, December 31, 2018

The End of August thru October

This will be another whirlwind, catch-up post. 


Joe Mitchell and I meet up now and again in Chinatown to debrief and commiserate. We always park in the same lot. This BBQ trailer has been there for over a year. I finally checked it out. It is pretty cool on the inside. If I were going around hawking BBQ, this would be at the top of the list for rig choices. Behind it is a wall, on the other side of which there are some private gardens. There are some overhanging vegetables and fruit. I am not clear on what the fruit is. In the photo they look like they could be roma tomatoes, but that was not the impression on the spot. The other one is definitely a form of bitter melon. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momordica_charantia] I considered taking one, but figured somebody had worked hard to grow them; the melons belonged to them, not me. 






On the last day of August I did some smoking of big pieces of meat.


As you know, I have many animal body parts made into instruments. It is easy to convert a horn or bone into an instrument, but success is not guaranteed. You can cut too much of the end off and then you are stuck with a piece of trash. It is better to make a short cut then work your way down. Think of cooking a piece of meat. If you undercook it, you can cook it more; if you overcook it...bring out the ketchup. No matter what I did, I couldn't make this gemsbok horn work as a lip reed instrument. It cost enough that I wasn't comfortable with throwing it out. So I thought, try an actual reed on it. No luck with a bassoon reed. No luck with a piri reed. Finally, I ordered a couple of duduk reeds, which are not cheap. That was the answer. It also became clear that I needed to make the finger holes larger. BTW, those holes are all in the wrong place, but when I put them in, I figured I was going to trash the thing anyway. If I do it again, I'll give it all some more serious thought. In any case, the horn kind of works. It has a timber somewhere between a tenor sax and clarinet.



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