Seeking Ferret

New Caroline Shaw piece commissioned by Mozart in the Jungle:




Say what you want about how great The Good Place is, and it's plenty great, but the one place Mozart in the Jungle has it topped is in original Caroline Shaw compositions. You hear that, Mike Schur? When are YOU going to commission a Caroline Shaw piece?

The words they use to describe the piece on the show: "The piece that she [Shaw] gave me is called "Hi" and it's about how she wishes we could all say Hi to each other with total explosive joy and realness... like a volcano of happiness and sorrow, or like a spaceship... but I guess you guys don't actually know what a space ship is, but like a spaceship you could take to the stars, and from there you can see everything."

I think that's about right. The music starts out in hi, in the interrogatories of meeting new people for the first time and sorting them out, and then when the instruments stop and the voices come together, Shaw attains something numinous and unexpectedly joyful. Also there are flower pots.

The annual list for bookherd of my favorite new songs of 2017 (or 2016 but I didn't hear them until 2017 because I'm not hip at all)

-"Old Apartment" by Barenaked Ladies and the Persuasions. Okay, not at all a new song, a song I've loved for years, but the whole BNL/Persuasions album, "Ladies and Gentlemen: Barenaked Ladies and The Persuasions" is an absolute delight. I described it to someone as "Barenaked Ladies, but with even better vocal harmonies." But in case somebody doesn't know "The Old Apartment", let me sell it to you. It's a story about a guy who had a shitty bachelor's apartment. He got married, bought a house, moved on in his life. But one night in a fit of perversity and nostalgia, he breaks into his old apartment and imagines he's still living his old life. And he knows this is not sustainable, both because he literally committed a crime and because his new life is in most ways better than his old life. But some part of him doesn't care about any of that. It's one of my favorite explorations of memory and growing up- and the Persuasions make it even better particularly because of the way they nail the ambiguity of the ending..


"When Will I Be Changed" by Josh Ritter. New Josh Ritter album means new Josh Ritter song on this list, duh. An airy, questing prayer created with the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. A lot of people tried to create an anthem for 2017's complicated political waters; I won't say Ritter succeeded, but I think his version's a lot more listenable and less insufferable than most.


"Sleeping Wild" by Norah Jones. There's a half dozen songs on "Day Breaks" I could've mentioned, and the Wayne Shorter(WAYNE SHORTER!)-backed title track is particularly worth a look, it's such a polished and well put together jazz vocals album. But this is my favorite thing on the album because it uses Jones's new, more technically perfect adaptation of the Adult Contemporary style from her first album... and then it goes just a little bit wild the way some of Jones's better, more adventurous later albums do. I also love the lyrical construction, with its structured internal meters. "I love you, adore you/ Awake, but in the night/ Deceive you and leave you/ Sleeping wild" strongly reminds me of things like Lorenz Hart's "I'm wild again/ beguiled again/ a whimpering simpering child again." Which is one of my favorite lyrics ever, so that explains why I like this clever invocation of it.


"John Wayne" by Lady Gaga. I miss that moment in our pop culture when a new Lady Gaga album was more of a cultural event than a piece of music. Joanne is an excellent pop album, but it doesn't mean anything more than that. Academics aren't writing ten thousand word essays about it. But I like this song's engagement with tropes: Aware that lyrical invocation of John Wayne in our modern moment implies a deconstruction of 1950s masculinity, Gaga undeconstructs. She makes an embrace of toxic masculinity a conscious choice, with inherent risks leading to risky rewards, and in doing so stakes a female claim to toxic masculinity.


"Supernova" by Meklit. So I only had three songs on my list and it felt like I ought to have more, so I poked the new music bin at my library and this popped out. And I've thus been obsessively listening to her new album and some of her older work for the past several weeks. MEKLIT IS GREAT. THE END. Ethio-Jazz is Meklit's roots, and it's the baseline for her music, but she uses it as a base to go off in all sorts of fascinating directions, as she declares in the fiercely expansive "I Want to Sing for them All", namechecking Ethio-Jazz legends I've never heard of alongside Michael Jackson and Prince and Leonard Cohen. But "Supernova" is my favorite thing on her new record. There's a deep Afro-futurist vein in Meklit's music most definitively expressed in her 2012 collaborative scifi concept album "Earthbound", and "Supernova" taps into that vein and effusively gushes it all over the place, over a rollicking baseline.


DOWNLOAD PLAYLIST HERE

Because I am perverse, I structured my vidding panel around the reasons why you shouldn't vid jazz music. I had come up with a pretty good list of reasons before the panel:


-unstructured 'songs', not necessarily verse-chorus-verse-chorus
-many different versions of songs, no 'canonical' expected version from audience
-audience not as familiar with the music as with pop songs
-vidder not as familiar with the music as with pop songs
-sounds old-fashioned
-Can be hard to follow the melody
-syncopation/swing makes tricky rhythms to cut to
-Songs often much longer than typical vids
-concern to be sensitive about jazz as an African-American music and avoiding racism/appropriation
-not a lot of female musicians visible in the genre/misogyny in the music


The audience agreed that yes, these were all good reasons not to vid to jazz. We considered adjourning the panel right there. Instead, I tried to play a variety of kinds of jazz music to illustrate some ideas I had about how to overcome these problems. I didn't manage to mention all of my ideas in the panel, so these notes will constitute both an attempt to summarize what we talked about at the panel and an attempt to restructure the panel retrospectively so that it conforms more closely to its platonic ideal form.


The first set of music I played was five version of Jelly Roll Morton's classic jazz melody "King Porter Stomp." Composed in honor of his friend and fellow pianist Porter King in the early 1900s and first recorded by Morton in the early 1920s in the infancy of recorded jazz music, "King Porter Stomp" has had long, long legs as a jazz standard.

The playlist was

Jelly Roll Morton - "King Porter Stomp" 1924
Benny Goodman and his All Stars- "King Porter Stomp" 1935
Pat Williams- "King Porter Stomp" 1968
Manhattan Transfer - "Stomp of King Porter" 1997
Wynton Marsalis - "King Porter Stomp" 1999

By looking longitudinally at one song, we get to see the way jazz reinvents itself while retaining its history. Goodman's version is considered historically important as the kickoff of the big band era, at a seminal Los Angeles concert that told the record companies that swing would sell. The subsequent recordings retain specific and calculated quotations of both the Goodman and Morton arrangements- the Williams recording opens with the exact piano riff from the Morton version, the Manhattan Transfer version uses the Goodman arrangement but interpolates lyrics relating the story of the creation of the Morton version, and the Marsalis version returns to the original Morton arrangement only with a more highly prominent trumpet part and better recording fidelity and .

I had intended to talk more about the recording technology and the history of jazz, as I think it's actually important to keep in mind since jazz's history overlaps almost exactly with the history of recorded music. Until the mid 1940s, jazz was recorded to wax, which was then laboriously transferred to a metal master for pressing to 78 rpm vinyl. The result was mono both in recording and playback: If you wanted to 'mix' different instruments you did so by literally rearranging the musicians with respect to the recording head, moving the horns to the back to keep them from drowning out quieter instruments and so on.

In the '40s, three technologies emerged in parallel that changed this: the electronic microphone allowed instruments to be recorded individually with different recording settings, magnetic tape allowed those recordings to be separately edited and mixed and overdubbed, and the LP allowed those recordings to be played back at a substantially higher fidelity. As a bonus, the LP gave musicians the choice of either writing multiple songs to fill a side, or for the first time recording songs longer than ~ 3 minutes. The technology changed the way jazz was performed once artists assimilated the new capabilities.

So if you are looking to use a jazz song from the '20s or '30s, one of your difficulties is that it's going to sound like shit, and it's specifically going to sound old fashioned, because that grainy, mono sound is what we think of when we think of old fashioned music. You have several ways of dealing with this. One is to embrace it. If you're vidding a 1920s fandom, or vidding something more modern that you want to sound old fashioned, then choosing something recorded to wax will give you the sound you're looking for. The other alternative is to look at recordings like the Marsalis recording- there are musicians today who are recording consciously nostalgic versions of classic jazz songs, with the latest and greatest new recording technology.


The other thing we pointed out about the set of "King Porter Stomp" covers is that the song is a dance song, with a straightforward 4:4 time signature, obvious and repeated jazz form, and a lot of elements that make it fairly unintimidating to vidders compared to a lot of jazz music. In the late '40s and into the '50s, jazz was transformed from primarily being a dance music to being as much a concert music for sitting and listening to as a dance music. The next set of music I played was a collection of jazz music from this period of transition, highlighting the new sounds coming into jazz: Trickier rhythms, stranger harmonies and dissonances, faster note patterns. Music not consistent enough to dance to, but music that relied on the individual voices of its lead practitioners to tell expressive, emotional stories through music.

The playlist was:

Miles Davis- "So What"
Charlie Parker - "Ornithology"
Thelonious Monk w. John Coltrane "Bye-Ya"
Dizzy Gillespie - "Salt Peanuts"

To counter comments from the audience about the difficulty of finding structure in these more musically complex pieces, I pointed to specific structures common in jazz music, like the precomposed call and response passage that opens "So What", a technique originating in jazz's history as a music inspired by African folk traditions, and a technique we'd come back to in the Modern Jazz playlist to follow. I also pointed to examples of improvisional structures such as 'trading fours', the technique of two soloists altenrately improvising four measures back and forth. I also pointed out that the classic AABA 32 bar pop song form and 12 bar blues song form don't go away in this concert jazz era, it's just that rather than repeating the melody each time, the chord progression is what's repeated, embellished and revoiced to suit the individuality of the soloists. Someone in the audience pointed out that this individuality of instrumental expression offers opportunities for vidders to associate particular instrumental parts with themes or characters.

It was particularly hard for me to cut these songs down to a minute or so, because their overall structures play out over the full scale of the song.


The next set I played was Women of Jazz, to present some female voices, both singers and instrumentalists, as a counter to the idea that jazz is this male-driven genre. Because I do think this is a problem for vidders, who are predominantly women. This set also let me revisit some genres and techniques otherwise not as well covered by my music choices- Ella Fitzgerald's song highlighted the use of vocalese or scat, a technique of singing nonsense syllables that offers tremendous potential value to vidders who are often thwarted by that one lyric that undermines our whole vid. "Take the A Train" is also the prototypical 32 bar song, and "Evil Gal Blues" is a prototypical blues, so it let me talk more about the importance of those song structures to jazz music, and to consider those structures if you need to cut down a song. Meanwhile, Mary Lou Williams let me bring in some more swing music that wasn't "KIng Porter Stomp", and Terri Lyne Carrington introduced listeners for the first time in the panel to contemporary jazz sounds.

The playlist was:

Billie Holliday- "They Can't Take That Away From Me"
Ella Fitzgerald - "Take the A Train"
Mary Lou Williams with Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy - "Mary's Idea"
Albinia Jones with Don Byas' Swinging Seven - "Evil Gal Blues"
Terri Lyne Carrington - "Mosaic Triad"


I concluded with a set of music from the last ten years or so, contemporary jazz in some of its multifarious forms.

The playlist was:

The Bad Plus- "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Esperanza Spalding - "Endangered Species"
Vijay Iyer - "Optimism"
Ikue Mori - "Invisible "Fingers"
Matana Roberts "Pov Piti" from Coin Coin vol. 1

It's a bare sampler of the diversity of modern jazz, but it at least hints at all the directions jazz is heading in, use of electronics alongside acoustic instruments in Ikue Mori's music, use of rock and roll idioms in the music of Iyer and the Bad Plus, use of funk and soul idiom alongside jazz improv in Spalding's music, the incorporation of spoken elements in "Pov Piti" and the consciousness of modern political struggle. And I pointed out that the opening call and response between piano and bass in the Bad Plus "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is an almost explicit homage to Miles Davis's "So What", that no matter how much jazz pushes in new directions, what makes it jazz is its awareness of its history and its relentless reinterpretation of that history.

So I think the bottom line of the panel was that jazz is a terrible music to vid, but it's awesome music, and the more you learn about how jazz works, its context and its history and its structure, the easier it will be to overcome the inherent difficulties it presents to vidders. That's not necessarily an easy answer, there's no great and simple technique that solves all the problems, but different jazz music suffers from different problems, and in this way the diversity of jazz is a tremendous asset to vidders.

I will post a download link for all this music once I'm back at home after Worldcon.


Also, settiai posted notes on the jazz panel

For morbane

A Playlist of Interesting Instrumental Music

"River Pulse" - Anoushka Shankar

Shankar is ravishingly, ferociously talented on the sitar, in ways that feel so individualistic that comparisons to her famous sitarist father don't seem useful.

"Carmen Fantasie- Movement 1" - Anne Sophie Mutter

I love the whole thing, a virtuoso violin adaptation of themes from Bizet's opera, and I particularly love Mutter's rendition, but here, have a taste and see if you can choose not to seek out of the rest.

"Death by Triple Fiddle"- Edgar Meyer, Joshua Bell, Sam Bush, Mike Marshall

-So many fiddles! So fast! And Joshua Bell's electrifying solo!

"Mah Yedidus" - Andy Statman and co.

-I just mentioned Statman's concert last week. This song... It's a bluegrass rendition of a Jewish song traditionally sung at Shabbat lunch. I love the fusion so much.

"Caravan" - Fanfare Ciocarla

-Romanian wedding band cover of a Duke Ellington classic

"King Porter Stomp" - Wynton Marsalis

-An elegant modern take on one of the THE essential jazz tunes... which honestly I am putting here because I HATEd leaving it off the playlist I made for liv.


Download morbane's playlist here


For bookherd

A Playlist of Songs I Can Listen to On Indefinite Repeat When I Have A Headache


"Twinklebell Canon" by Rodney Farrar's Fat Notes

-Cello choir mashup of Pachelbel's Canon and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It actually works, trust me.

"Vexation of Erik Satie" - Jean-Yves Thibaudet

-A ridiculous piano piece that comes with instructions to play 840 repeats. Needless to say, it's not been performed in its entirety many times, and it's unclear if Satie ever really intended for it to be performed, but it hits a nice balance for me between repetitive and having enough harmonic content to hold a tiny part of your brain occupied.

"U Smile Slowed Down 800%" by Justin Bieber

-This was a weird viral hit a few years ago, and I actually wrote a whole NaNo novel while listening to this on repeat. It's freakishly soothing.

"Sakura, Sakura" by Chanticleer

-Honestly you can't go wrong with anything by Chanticleer, right? This is a Japanese folk melody.

"Untitled 1" by Sigur Ros

-From their weird Hopelandic album (), spacy and gorgeous, with a clear sense that the band is operating in a different paradigm of time.


Download bookherd's playlist here

I haven't done this in a few years, and I had fun the last time...

Comment on this post and I'll make you a playlist. If you want to specify things you are looking for musically, you can, otherwise I'll just surprise you.

I bought it a couple months ago, but I've finally given Norah Jones's latest, Day Breaks, a few listens in the past few days. It's quite an impressive album.

The media around it has talked about it as a return to the sounds of her full length debut "Come Away With Me". Aside from the ubiquitousness of "Don't Know Why", "Come Away With Me" was not my first introduction to Jones and is still not my favorite mode of Norah Jones, though I do think it's also an exceptional piece of work. Each piece of it is a small mastercraft unto itself, a little story that doesn't push very hard but knows exactly what it is and where it lives in the history of jazz and pop. After that and the sudden success it afforded her, Jones created a marvelously odd set of albums bouncing off in all sorts of surprising and exciting musical directions, and I caught on that Jones was something more than just a pop-jazz songstress.

Purely in the sense of genre, Day Breaks is a return home to the language of "Come Away With Me", but Day Breaks is a very different, and in my opinion much better album. The musicianship both of Jones and her accompanists is worlds better, and conscious of this improvement in quality, the mixing brings the instruments more to the fore and blends Jones's stellar, remarkably controlled vocals deeper into the ensemble mix. There is a sharpness and a precision in the sound that isn't there on "Come Away With Me" that comes of bringing musicians of Wayne Shorter's caliber to play with Jones, and more importantly, comes of having producers involved with the musical intelligence to understand how to take advantage of bringing in people of that caliber (Jones co-produced the album herself- clearly she knows a thing or two she didn't know fifteen years ago).


I'm always going to love it more when Norah Jones makes weird shit with her friends like El Madmo, in which a group of brilliant musicians perform the perfect deliberately bad punk album (A song like "Carlo" is such a studied contradiction, with remarkable guitar work playing stupid-obvious chords and controlled vocals shout-singing the absolute dumbest punk lyrics). But if Norah Jones wants to return to her most commercial fare, this is absolutely the way to do it.

Terry Riley's "In C" is a really special piece of music. It consists of about fifty short snippets of music, all of course in the key of C, to be performed by any number of musicians, in order, but each of the snippets is to be played any number of times, at the discretion of each of the performers. The result is amazing, a tug of war between musicians that will never turn out the same way twice. The piece can be as short as twenty minutes, or over an hour in length.

I got minorly obsessed with it last year and collected about ten different recordings, all of which I've listened to multiple times. It astonishes me how the same piece of sheet music can yield so many different interpretations, and each of the interpretations astonishes me on its own as an expression of musical joy and creativity. What I have always loved most is the moments of overlap, where some musicians have moved on to the next snippet while others are still playing the last one.

A high school friend invited me to see the Darmstadt Ensemble play it live at le Poisson Rouge last night and I could not say yes fast enough.

And it was a blast, a performance that lasted over an hour, some thirty musicians playing and singing for the love of it for a rapt, packed crowd. And though what I have always loved most about "In C" is those moments of overlap, what caught me seeing it live was something else. The moments of overlap represent the negotiation. Riley has, of course, ceded some of the composer's power to each of the musicians. In order for music to emerge, they must negotiate with each other to decide how to perform. And I've always loved listening to that negotiation, the back and forth, the disagreements. But what was coolest about Darmstadt's performance was not the negotiation, but the eventual agreements that emerged, those times when the whole group found itself together again. Those were moments of the highest kind of musical communion, ecstatic celebrations of the power of music.

Josh Ritter's new album is out today, "Sermon on the Rocks", and I can't wait to listen. I thought I'd do a quick review of Ritter's discography.

-Josh Ritter- his eponymous self-published debut was my first encounter with Ritter, from the sample tracks posted on mp3.com for free download. "Potter's Wheel" has held mindspace for me continuously in the fifteen years since- the rolling chord progression makes the whole thing feel cyclic and insistent and makes me ruminate on the mysteries of life. "Hotel Song", less impressive on its own, remains memorable to me for a concert performance where Ritter interrupted the song to tell a story about grave robbing.

-The Golden Age of Radio- actually the third Ritter album I listened to, after Hello Starling, it's Ritter's best pure folk album, particularly in its fully acoustic guise. "Harrisburg" I like to say is the best railroad ballad written in this century, and while that's a peculiar distinction it makes it no less powerful and evocative a song.

-Hello Starling- most of the music I found on mp3.com in its heyday as a source for interesting indie music, I lost track of the musicians after the demise of the site. When I found Hello Starling in Tower Records (RIP as well), I was excited to learn that Ritter had gone on to better things, especially once I listened and heard how impressive it was. It's still probably my favorite end-to-end Ritter album, and "Kathleen" is still my favorite Ritter song, with its sharp and memorable lyrics and evocative portrait of making the best of unrequited love. But from start to finish it is fully of songs that put a smile on my face, from "Bright Smile"'s charming seduction to "Bone of Song"'s meta meditation on storytelling's power to "Wings"'s post-apocalyptic landscape.

-The Animal Years- the only Ritter album that gives Hello Starling a run for its money, sharply bookended by the brilliant "Girl in the War" and the terrifyingly passionate "Thin Blue Flame". It's an album of the late Bush years, and it is deeply about the politics of the era, but it's not a polemic in any fashion. It's a collection of songs about faith and doubt and love in the face of terror and fear. I've seen "Thin Blue Flame" live twice- once it was plaintive, a prayer for a certainty we know we'll likely never have. The other time, it was angry, furious about a world so broken that prayers seem to have no effect. Both ways it was mesmerizing, eight minutes of building emotion to a powerful payoff.

-The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter- Evolving out of the heavier sound developed in "Thin Blue Flame", and taking advantage of the solidification of Ritter's Royal City Band in the aftermath, marks the beginning of a shift in Ritter's music from folk-rock toward more songs that are more clearly in a full rock 'n roll vein. Overall, the songs are less memorable than Hello Starling or The Animal Years, but there is one clear advantage to the rock-ier songs- they make for a more danceable concert. And there's one notable exception to all this: "The Temptation of Adam", a song which I have written fic for twice because it's such an amazing story and it's so well-told. It's about lovers in a nuclear missile silo contemplating ending the world so their love can endure till the end of days, chilling and disturbing and yet somehow really, really believable. It's also the song that probably introduced a lot of fandom to Ritter by way of isagel's "The Temptation of John Sheppard", one of my all-time favorite fanvids.

So Runs the World Away- Likely my least favorite Ritter album, it does at least have the mummy love story of "The Curse", but it doesn't have much else worth remarking on.

The Beast in its Tracks- Ritter's post-divorce album, it's more introspective than the albums that precede it and it's mostly maybe a little too personal, a little too hard to connect with. But "Joy to You Baby" is I think Ritter's best song since "Kathleen", with the lyrics perfect and memorable and clever while still being incredible emotionally resonant as a story about letting go of a relationship and trying to feel good about it despite the pain. And here I'll once more mention my own Ritter fanwork, a Fringe vid that uses the sharp sense of place in "Joy to You Baby" to resonate with the AU NYC of Season 5 Fringe.

Ornette Coleman's "Tone Dialing" came out in 1995, but I probably didn't discover it until around 2000. I still don't universally love the album, but there were enough surprising and delightful things on it, particularly a reinterpretation of a Bach Prelude, that it stuck in my head. It blended funk and jazz and 1990s electronica with surety and style.

Eventually, of course, I was led to Coleman's "Free Jazz" by a co-worker on one of my college internships. Now that was a revelation. Over the last decade, I've probably listened to the whole forty minute thing a dozen times, when I'm looking for creative inspiration. Last time was about a year ago. It's still so fresh sounding, so original, so expressive. I think that last is the most striking thing about "Free Jazz"... I hadn't realized, before my first listen, that music was capable of saying the things that "Free Jazz" says. Its exuberance, its playfulness, its sense of freedom, remains unrivaled.

Coleman's death is a great loss.

Stuck at work waiting for software to update, so let's talk about life.

Passover so far has been pretty excellent. I have successfully kept up my Omer count so far!

First night seder was at my aunt and uncle's house across town. Second night seder was at my parents' house. Food was great and in massive, impossible quantities both nights, and had some interesting conversations about the historical context of B'nei Brak seder with a goyish labmate of my cousin who was there the first night. He asked why we don't still eat Karban Pesach, which is one of my favorite questions ever. It's so interesting to me to imagine a Judaism that did eat Karban Pesach even after the Churban, and to wonder what that Judaism would look like and whether it would have survived.

At the second seder, I used my new shiny Asufa Haggadah, which was beautiful. I loved turning a page and being stunned by both the beauty of the art and by the reinterpretation of the meaning of the page it forced upon me. The seder as a board game with a series of steps that must be followed in order to win. Hallel as a drunken outcry of joy for the redemption. Chad Gadya as a dizzying and deadly duel with the Malach Hamavet.

My cousin was back from having made aliyah less than a year ago, with stories of the election and her life on the Tel Aviv beaches. My sister shared stories of her engagement and wedding preparations. My father ranted against Obama. My uncle wisecracked under his breath. It was family, for good and for bad. I missed my grandfather, but not as much as I'd expected I would.


I was born on second seder night, thirty years ago- my mother literally leaving the seder to go to the hospital. So we had chocolate pesach cake at the seder to celebrate. Tuesday was my birthday on the Gregorian calendar, marked by a terrible pesach seven layer cake. I'll mark the birthday with my friends next Tuesday, when I'll be able to eat real cake and real beer. I don't really believe you can have a real birthday celebration without those two things.


On Sunday, I've got tickets to see the Mountain Goats. Their (I never know which pronoun to use for bands with plural names but functionally only one performer) new album, which comes out this week, is apparently about professional wrestling, and I haven't listened to it yet, but hell, I'll go see John Darnielle sing songs about professional wrestling if that's what he wants to do. I'd go see John Darnielle sing about much stranger things. Pro wrestling is one of those things where the concept was always more appealing than the actuality. I love reading ABOUT pro wrestling, I love people dissecting the angles, but I don't actually enjoy watching it. So in all likelihood I will enjoy hearing John Darnielle sing about pro wrestling.

And um... that's life. Besides work, which is a sinkhole of misery from which I cannot escape. No, not really, but it would be nice if my boss had some comprehension of the fact that when he gives me a tight deadline and I say "Okay, that's tight, but I can manage it," I don't mean "I can still manage it if you also give me five other things to do." Oh well, the deadline will slip and he will just have to live with his frustration or hire another damned engineer like he's been saying he will for the past year.