Aug. 9, 2022
#GEMsOfWisdom / #RawHoggin
Now this knot is starting to loosen up. The tips still don't look particularly feathery, and there's still a ton of rigidity to the knot, but I feel like there's now the telltale promise of comfortable scrub. I also only used a little over a half gram of soap, though this lather was a bit thin, and I'll succomb to u/gfdoto's peer pressure and add a few more swirls.
But here's the thing—I don't try to minimize soap usage to conserve it. I try to keep the amount of soap loaded reasonable because I hate how long it takes to hydrate all that soap if I load too heavy. I particularly hate long lathering times if I'm in the early stages of breaking in Zemporor Scrubby, Destroyer of Faces. I want to keep the abuse to a minimum.
Speaking of, I tried shaving with a very light touch today, and let the razor hinge in my lightly pinched fingertips. Doing so worked well. No cuts, no irritation, and a very close shave.
| Date |
Soap Before (g) |
Soap After (g) |
Usage (g) |
Loading |
| 8/1 |
235.5 |
232.5 |
3 |
|
| 8/2 |
232.5 |
228.0 |
4.5 |
|
| 8/3 |
228.0 |
227.0 |
1 |
|
| 8/4 |
227.0 |
223.3 |
3.7 |
|
| 8/5 |
223.3 |
220.3 |
3 |
40 seconds |
| 8/6 |
220.3 |
218.8 |
1.5 |
30 seconds |
| 8/7 |
218.8 |
217.9 |
0.9 |
40 swirls |
| 8/8 |
217.9 |
216.5 |
1.4 |
40 swirls |
| 8/8 |
216.5 |
215.9 |
0.6 |
40 swirls |
⁂
#sidetracked u/Teufelskraft
Yesterday I mentioned that I don't listen to Bob Dylan's music that often. However, that's not quite true. Dylan is famously one of the most often-covered songwriters out there, and I count many of those covers among my favorites, including the three I'll highlight today. (Presented in chronological order.)
Dylan adapted the traditional "Who's Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I'm Gone" melody into his "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and I'd bet most folks associate that melody with Dylan. But his own recording of that song isn't my favorite. American folk contemporaries Peter, Paul, and Mary (for the youth out there, yes, that Peter, Paul, and Mary) performed a bunch of Dylan songs, but their version of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" is so hauntingly beautiful—so poised—that it even helped push The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan up the charts.
I started this month's #sidetracked posts with a relatively modern Bryan Ferry cover, but he's recorded many over the years, and Ferry's take on "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is one of his best. These Foolish Things is great because all of the covers are so consistently sincere; a little goofy, but also obviously reverent of the original source material. "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is possibly the most obvious exception, deconstructing the overly sombre lyrics and filtering them through a performative, arch, high-energy rendition. Starting in the second verse, Ferry includes matching sound effects after a few of the lines, and after all of them in the third (thunder, waves, newborn baby, howling wolves, whispers, laughs, sighs, and a crying guitar bend), which is both detailed and impossible to take seriously. Ferry makes the song his own, utterly transforming it with a wink and wiggle of the shoulders.
And finally, while almost unseated by Antony and the Johnsons' 2019 version, Warren Zevon's version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" will always be my favorite. It's arguably the most emotionally resonant take on the song I know of; both Antony and Zevon's sound wounded, weary, and scarred, but Zevon's cover is made all the more impactful by his terminal cancer diagnosis at the time of the recording, which I'm pretty sure you can hear in his voice throughout The Wind. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" is an artist in top form, looking back on their career, and starting to come to terms with it all through a tribute to the lyrics of one of the greatest songwriter's of our time. Zevon embodied the song's meaning as literally as a performer can.
sotd.djudgement_invitations: [<DjudgementInvitation 585>, <DjudgementInvitation 2841>]