Another Week: Number 114

Inch by inch, I’m beginning to understand my new life alone as a design assignment. A clutter of pieces needs to be pared down and organized. Some items are helpful or joy-producing, others are stumbling blocks. Chipping away, you gain space and a shape begins to emerge.

Two years ago, Amy Poehler produced a show for Peacock called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. My wife Amy and I watched a couple of episodes. The idea was to minimize your knickknacks before you die. Later in the year, she frowned at me and said, “You’re going to get stuck with that basement.” And here I am.

It’s not just literal housecleaning, though — it’s feelings. External and internal tidying go hand in hand. Straightening up makes you feel better, but feeling better — through music, for example — makes you feel more like straightening up. You might even need to sort out your music playlists before shuffling them to improve your mood.

When I’m working on web design projects, the playlist is often classical. Bach’s counterpoints seem to help layouts come together. This week I ordered a set of Mozart’s piano concertos through Amazon. With classical music, used CDs are the way to go because, when importing them, you can fuse a complete piece together instead of having each movement shuffle as a separate track.

Lately, my off hours have mostly been spent in front of basketball on TV — women’s college games featuring Notre Dame or UConn or Iowa, Unrivaled games with the Rose, plus the Milwaukee Bucks. Games serve as a background while I maintain my guitar callouses over an hour or two — and smooth out my feelings at the same time.

Thursday was a gorgeous spring day. Friday was crazy windy.

I walked 9.7 miles this week.

World of Books: Sell Your Books

When we moved here, we learned just how heavy our collection of books had become. I had a fondness for hardcovers from Book of the Month that required many large Rubbermaid latching boxes and plenty of huffing and puffing to transport. Once here, Amy discovered the AAUW Used Book Sale and wedged even more books onto our shelves.

These days, I buy Kindle books whenever possible. With a Kindle, you can carry hundreds of books around on a lightweight tablet or even pull them up on your phone — and while I cannot bring myself to deface a printed book with my handwritten notes, I don’t hesitate to add digital notations to Kindle books.

Very slowly, I am winnowing my bookshelves. There are bunches of Amy’s books that I’ll never get around to reading. Those are mostly going back to the AAUW.

But, inquisitive pauper that I am, I wondered whether any of these blocks of paper could be exchanged for — say — cash money.

That question led me to BookScouter and, from there, to World of Books. Both services offer a mobile app that includes a barcode scanner. I ended up using the World of Books app, “Sell Your Books,” because it offered the best prices among the multiple buyers queried by BookScouter.

Many of the books I scanned offered me 28 cents, others nothing. Those will go to the AAUW. But some did better. Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan biography, for example, rang up at $5.35. Now, I realize my used copy could sell for much more than that on Amazon, but I don’t want to deal with shipping costs and returns and reviews — I just want to unload the book. I’ll never refer to it, and I’m tired of dusting it.

So I collected 24 items — a few DVDs as well — and packed them in a box. I printed out the PDF FedEx label, taped it on neatly, and dropped the box at my local FedEx Ship Center.

World of Books says they’ll send me $37.50 upon receipt.

Rick Beato: The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse

At YouTube’s suggestion, I have watched a Rick Beato video now and then. He’s a gray-haired guy two years younger than me, from the state of New York, and he knows more about music than I ever will.

The latest video that grabbed me was his explanation of how the sacred art of popular music has been degraded by commerce and technology. On the one hand, I can relate to an old guy yelling at the cloud. On the other, I like to think there are still some artists out there capturing four minutes of inspired human magic — even if it’s on a silicon chip.

Either way, Rick Beato has a compelling style and a caring heart.

Hoosiers (1986)

On Thursday, news broke that Gene Hackman and his wife had died, so Saturday night, my mom and I watched Hoosiers via Prime Video. Neither of us had previously seen it.

The movie has some nice elements. The setting in rural Indiana in 1951 is quaint. Gene Hackman‘s performance is top-notch.

It’s the formulaic story of an underdog basketball team and their new coach — an outcast given his last chance. Barbara Hershey is wasted in a robotic role obstructing Hackman until they suddenly kiss in perhaps the most hurried and pointless screen romance ever. Dennis Hopper plays an alcoholic parent with the kind of facial anguish you might expect in a silent film from the 1920s.

As the credits started to roll, I noticed the name of someone Amy had taken a shine to during one of our trips to Maui — Eric Gilliom, who played music and hung out with The Steve Dahl Show for one of our weeklong remote broadcasts there. According to The Hoosiers Archive, much of his part as an opposing player did not make the final cut.