A Nice Time from India: I've just learned about Amit Pasricha, a photographer in India dedicated to preserving a record of Indian architecture and culture. Much of his work is panoramic, and his books are just gorgeous. Among them are:
Went to see Cat in the Hat. It's cute but I fell asleep about 40 minutes in and slept until the credits. Settling in on the couch for the remainder of the day. Got a window open and it's 61° here in the condo. I'm under two blankets and going to sleep some more. Still feeling like I took a beating yesterday.
[my nice times once again involves my favorite rare books dealer, who has brought in a collection of space-era stuff, including letters and first editions from Werner von Braun, the first book on rocketry ever published, by Robert Goddard, and the collected Apollo VII operating manuals which had belonged to Walter Cunningham, the astronaut, amongst other amazing bits of history - Random! come down and touch this stuff!!]
A sad note about someone who brought many Nice Times to music lovers. You probably haven't heard of Bear Family Records unless you are into vintage pop, country, and bluegrass or an academic. I got to meet this amazing gentlemen a few years back at an Association of Recorded Sound Collections conference in Chapel Hill.
"Richard Weize - An Obituary
Bear Family Records mourns the loss of Richard Weize. The music archivist, record-label owner, founder and longtime head of Bear Family Records died on November 13, 2026, of heart failure.
Richard Weize was born on August 4, 1945, in Bad Gandersheim, in the state of Brunswick. As a young child, he discovered Bill Haley through the American Forces Network (AFN). His initial enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll soon developed into an enduring love of American country music, then still known as hillbilly music. Young Richard was an avid reader (his family ran a bookshop and stationery store). Suddenly, his interests came together: stories and music.
He had always loved surrounding himself with beautiful things. Through his parents’ bookshop, Richard ordered records by his heroes directly from the United States and financed his passion by placing orders for other collectors, a circle he gradually cultivated himself. Richard Weize was a shrewd businessman even in his youth. He also had an eye for aesthetics and a talent for organization. It therefore came as no surprise to his family when he began training as a window dresser after leaving school. More surprising was the fact that Weize, who scarcely drank himself, moved to London in 1966 to work for several years as a sales representative for a German wine distributor. “I never knew anything about wine, but I can sell anything,” he liked to reply when asked about it.
Back in Germany, he settled in the countryside near Bremen with his then-wife Petra and founded Bear Family Records in 1975, the record label he would run for almost 40 years. Throughout his life, Weize regarded himself as a “rather crazy collector,” acquiring everything from Disney comics, Mainzelmännchen figurines, pinball machines and jukeboxes to country-music memorabilia such as a hat belonging to Hank Williams, a dressing-room door from the old Grand Ole Opry and 1930s posters for B-Western films.
His true passion, however, was records of every kind: traditional country music, rock ’n’ roll and, along the way, pop, jazz and rhythm and blues. Anything from the period between 1920 and 1970 that caught his interest. In German popular songs of the 1950s and early 1960s, he saw a domestic counterpart to country songs. He decided to reissue all this music and introduce it to a broad audience, both in Germany and internationally.
Bear Family Records quickly became a major name on the international music scene. Richard Weize imported LPs from around the world and cautiously began releasing projects of his own. His young label’s first significant success came in 1978 with The Unissued Johnny Cash, an album of previously unreleased recordings by the country icon. At the time, American record companies showed little interest in their own musical history, and the tapes gathered dust in storage rooms and studios across the United States. Richard Weize and a handful of other European enthusiasts discovered a lost world of unreleased music and preserved the cultural heritage of famous and lesser-known artists for posterity.
The limited playing time of an LP imposed a constraint that Weize, an obsessive collector and completist, found unacceptable. With the release of Bear Family Records’ first LP box set in 1980, he did not invent a new format, but he transformed it. Together with his team at Bear Family, he introduced standards previously unknown even in classical music, revolutionizing the record industry. Each LP in a box came in its own full-color sleeve. The depth of the research and his personal meticulousness surpassed many scholarly sources; the recordings were painstakingly restored for sound quality; and the sets included extensive LP-sized books containing biographies, discographies, recording-session details and numerous photographs and illustrations. The box set Rockin’ Rollin’ Bill Haley became the benchmark for subsequent artist retrospectives and historical documentaries on LP and, later, CD.
Over the following 35 years, Weize brought nearly 300 such box-set projects to fruition. In total, he oversaw well over 2,000 Bear Family releases as producer—an extraordinary lifetime achievement that left little time or room for anything beyond music. Weize liked to claim that he worked 18 hours a day, 365 days a year. Taking holidays, enjoying leisure time, switching off or simply letting a day drift by were alien concepts to him. His “job” was a privilege. He did not regard his calling as work; he considered himself fortunate to be able to support himself and his family through his passion for music.
For many years, his name was associated with the roots of American music. That changed, at the latest, when he began documenting historical German subjects, including the unique account of Jewish musical life in Berlin from 1933 to 1938: Vorbei … Beyond Recall, an 11-CD box set with an additional DVD and a 518-page book. He also released CD series on the history of political cabaret, a documentary collection of songs from the German labor movement, a book-and-CD documentation of the beginnings of the German singer-songwriter scene at Burg Waldeck, and a series devoted to German chanson.
His audio releases received the German Record Critics’ Award (Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik) on numerous occasions, and he personally received its lifetime achievement award. Bear Family and Richard Weize were also honored with an ECHO award for their contributions. In early 2021, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in recognition of his life’s work. Numerous international honors, including the W. C. Handy Award and the Kurt Weill Prize, followed or accompanied these distinctions. In 1998, Richard Weize became the third partner in Bremen’s Klaus Kuhnke Archive for Popular Music, alongside Peter Schulze and Manfred Miller.
Weize saw himself as an archivist whose task was to preserve ephemeral musical recordings for future generations, unearth lost treasures of music history and make them accessible to interested listeners. In his tribute on the occasion of Weize’s award of the Federal Cross of Merit, Götz Alsmann compared Richard Weize’s importance to that of Ludwig Köchel, who created the Köchel catalogue for classical music.
Although Bear Family Records is a commercial record label, many of Weize’s productions resemble scholarly publications in character. He set them in motion without asking whether they would be commercially viable—a privilege that often sent his business partners into a panic.
Having withdrawn from day-to-day operations years earlier to concentrate entirely on developing new project ideas, Weize sold Bear Family Records GmbH to two longtime employees at the end of 2014. He then founded the RWA (Richard Weize Archiv) label, through which, even “in retirement,” he continued to release LPs and CDs with affection and meticulous care. Through his second label, …and more Bears, which had existed since the early 2000s, he issued countless digital-download releases. Until his death on November 13, 2026, his passion for collecting, researching and publishing continued to drive him.
The void left by his death cannot be filled. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” as the Americans say. What remains is his immense legacy—a cultural heritage of global significance: a vast collection of comprehensive historical music projects that stand as monuments not only to countless musicians, but also to Richard Weize’s own life’s work and passion. He will never be forgotten. Thank you, Richard!
Richard Weize was 81 years old. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his wife, Birgit Niels, and with his children and grandchildren."
Nice time = nap time: boat launch closed, small craft advisory. Reading new lois lowery book. NOT in the giververse but similar concept. Also new Scalzi book monsters of Ohio. Set in some darke county town that isn’t Bradford but a lot like it.
Ugh. I've got to clean out my refrigerator. I had a drain fly infestation in my kitchen and they got into the fridge and freezer and died en masse. It's not a pretty sight.
We had company over for dinner last night, and it was lovely. The couple is recently married, and I have never seen my long-time friend so centered and comfortable. His husband is a wonderful and warm person.
A friend of a friend was bedridden with a severe illness, and as his roommate left for work one morning saying "Must be nice not to have to go to work" so he wrote this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CXd80OynUo
So I’ve picked up on as I fell through the wiki rabbit hole. But if she had the full-on, and much rarer, form where one can not only recognize exact pitches, but can resolve chord clusters into their components on the fly, it would explain her extraordinary ability to improvise in tandem with another player improvising as well. But all this is academic musing. It suffices for me to just kick back, and let the Lady sing!
I’m quite done with superhero movies. It does crack me up that all comic book superheroes have old-fashioned waspy names like Steve (Captain America), Peter (Spider Man), Dick (Robin), Donald (Thor), Hank (Ant-Man)
Republican showed us they have no interest in sharing democracy with those different from them.
Democrats overwhelmingly showed "that's fine, we don't have to share democracy with you" . . .
A Nice Time from India: I've just learned about Amit Pasricha, a photographer in India dedicated to preserving a record of Indian architecture and culture. Much of his work is panoramic, and his books are just gorgeous. Among them are:
Monumental India https://www.behance.net/gallery/46276759/The-Monumental-India-Book-Excerpts?locale=en_US
India at Home https://www.chitr.org/alok-blog/india-at-home-amit-pasricha-photobook-review
India Lost and Found https://www.instagram.com/indialostandfound
Went to see Cat in the Hat. It's cute but I fell asleep about 40 minutes in and slept until the credits. Settling in on the couch for the remainder of the day. Got a window open and it's 61° here in the condo. I'm under two blankets and going to sleep some more. Still feeling like I took a beating yesterday.
thaaaaank you boss!
[my nice times once again involves my favorite rare books dealer, who has brought in a collection of space-era stuff, including letters and first editions from Werner von Braun, the first book on rocketry ever published, by Robert Goddard, and the collected Apollo VII operating manuals which had belonged to Walter Cunningham, the astronaut, amongst other amazing bits of history - Random! come down and touch this stuff!!]
A sad note about someone who brought many Nice Times to music lovers. You probably haven't heard of Bear Family Records unless you are into vintage pop, country, and bluegrass or an academic. I got to meet this amazing gentlemen a few years back at an Association of Recorded Sound Collections conference in Chapel Hill.
"Richard Weize - An Obituary
Bear Family Records mourns the loss of Richard Weize. The music archivist, record-label owner, founder and longtime head of Bear Family Records died on November 13, 2026, of heart failure.
Richard Weize was born on August 4, 1945, in Bad Gandersheim, in the state of Brunswick. As a young child, he discovered Bill Haley through the American Forces Network (AFN). His initial enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll soon developed into an enduring love of American country music, then still known as hillbilly music. Young Richard was an avid reader (his family ran a bookshop and stationery store). Suddenly, his interests came together: stories and music.
He had always loved surrounding himself with beautiful things. Through his parents’ bookshop, Richard ordered records by his heroes directly from the United States and financed his passion by placing orders for other collectors, a circle he gradually cultivated himself. Richard Weize was a shrewd businessman even in his youth. He also had an eye for aesthetics and a talent for organization. It therefore came as no surprise to his family when he began training as a window dresser after leaving school. More surprising was the fact that Weize, who scarcely drank himself, moved to London in 1966 to work for several years as a sales representative for a German wine distributor. “I never knew anything about wine, but I can sell anything,” he liked to reply when asked about it.
Back in Germany, he settled in the countryside near Bremen with his then-wife Petra and founded Bear Family Records in 1975, the record label he would run for almost 40 years. Throughout his life, Weize regarded himself as a “rather crazy collector,” acquiring everything from Disney comics, Mainzelmännchen figurines, pinball machines and jukeboxes to country-music memorabilia such as a hat belonging to Hank Williams, a dressing-room door from the old Grand Ole Opry and 1930s posters for B-Western films.
His true passion, however, was records of every kind: traditional country music, rock ’n’ roll and, along the way, pop, jazz and rhythm and blues. Anything from the period between 1920 and 1970 that caught his interest. In German popular songs of the 1950s and early 1960s, he saw a domestic counterpart to country songs. He decided to reissue all this music and introduce it to a broad audience, both in Germany and internationally.
Bear Family Records quickly became a major name on the international music scene. Richard Weize imported LPs from around the world and cautiously began releasing projects of his own. His young label’s first significant success came in 1978 with The Unissued Johnny Cash, an album of previously unreleased recordings by the country icon. At the time, American record companies showed little interest in their own musical history, and the tapes gathered dust in storage rooms and studios across the United States. Richard Weize and a handful of other European enthusiasts discovered a lost world of unreleased music and preserved the cultural heritage of famous and lesser-known artists for posterity.
The limited playing time of an LP imposed a constraint that Weize, an obsessive collector and completist, found unacceptable. With the release of Bear Family Records’ first LP box set in 1980, he did not invent a new format, but he transformed it. Together with his team at Bear Family, he introduced standards previously unknown even in classical music, revolutionizing the record industry. Each LP in a box came in its own full-color sleeve. The depth of the research and his personal meticulousness surpassed many scholarly sources; the recordings were painstakingly restored for sound quality; and the sets included extensive LP-sized books containing biographies, discographies, recording-session details and numerous photographs and illustrations. The box set Rockin’ Rollin’ Bill Haley became the benchmark for subsequent artist retrospectives and historical documentaries on LP and, later, CD.
Over the following 35 years, Weize brought nearly 300 such box-set projects to fruition. In total, he oversaw well over 2,000 Bear Family releases as producer—an extraordinary lifetime achievement that left little time or room for anything beyond music. Weize liked to claim that he worked 18 hours a day, 365 days a year. Taking holidays, enjoying leisure time, switching off or simply letting a day drift by were alien concepts to him. His “job” was a privilege. He did not regard his calling as work; he considered himself fortunate to be able to support himself and his family through his passion for music.
For many years, his name was associated with the roots of American music. That changed, at the latest, when he began documenting historical German subjects, including the unique account of Jewish musical life in Berlin from 1933 to 1938: Vorbei … Beyond Recall, an 11-CD box set with an additional DVD and a 518-page book. He also released CD series on the history of political cabaret, a documentary collection of songs from the German labor movement, a book-and-CD documentation of the beginnings of the German singer-songwriter scene at Burg Waldeck, and a series devoted to German chanson.
His audio releases received the German Record Critics’ Award (Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik) on numerous occasions, and he personally received its lifetime achievement award. Bear Family and Richard Weize were also honored with an ECHO award for their contributions. In early 2021, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in recognition of his life’s work. Numerous international honors, including the W. C. Handy Award and the Kurt Weill Prize, followed or accompanied these distinctions. In 1998, Richard Weize became the third partner in Bremen’s Klaus Kuhnke Archive for Popular Music, alongside Peter Schulze and Manfred Miller.
Weize saw himself as an archivist whose task was to preserve ephemeral musical recordings for future generations, unearth lost treasures of music history and make them accessible to interested listeners. In his tribute on the occasion of Weize’s award of the Federal Cross of Merit, Götz Alsmann compared Richard Weize’s importance to that of Ludwig Köchel, who created the Köchel catalogue for classical music.
Although Bear Family Records is a commercial record label, many of Weize’s productions resemble scholarly publications in character. He set them in motion without asking whether they would be commercially viable—a privilege that often sent his business partners into a panic.
Having withdrawn from day-to-day operations years earlier to concentrate entirely on developing new project ideas, Weize sold Bear Family Records GmbH to two longtime employees at the end of 2014. He then founded the RWA (Richard Weize Archiv) label, through which, even “in retirement,” he continued to release LPs and CDs with affection and meticulous care. Through his second label, …and more Bears, which had existed since the early 2000s, he issued countless digital-download releases. Until his death on November 13, 2026, his passion for collecting, researching and publishing continued to drive him.
The void left by his death cannot be filled. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” as the Americans say. What remains is his immense legacy—a cultural heritage of global significance: a vast collection of comprehensive historical music projects that stand as monuments not only to countless musicians, but also to Richard Weize’s own life’s work and passion. He will never be forgotten. Thank you, Richard!
Richard Weize was 81 years old. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his wife, Birgit Niels, and with his children and grandchildren."
From the Bear Family Records FB page
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1596590342508066&set=a.565719852261792
A long and interesting life. His memory will be a blessing to many.
I agree, Zigs. T IS a fucking badass. I’d love to meet her and talk shit about Rumsfeld.
I love hearing her stories.
You guys would have a great conversation.
And you think I’m insufferable NOW!
Nice times from last night. Lane Kiffin does an epic facepalm after Texas beat LSU on a last second touchdown.
https://substack.com/@mysterysurf/note/c-387797330
I love it.
Yeah, it's a beautiful sight. I had to get a screen cap off of ESPN's highlight clip. It seemed important to capture for posterity.
Nice time = nap time: boat launch closed, small craft advisory. Reading new lois lowery book. NOT in the giververse but similar concept. Also new Scalzi book monsters of Ohio. Set in some darke county town that isn’t Bradford but a lot like it.
I do wish that Anthony Mackie as Captain America thing had met with more success. He's so good, grabs the screen and holds it.
Guess who organized her freezer this morning? This guy. Holy cow do i have a lot of jam.
It's a bit past time that I defrosted the small chest freezer. The problem is that it's full of food, and it will take a while to get it mostly empty.
Ugh. I've got to clean out my refrigerator. I had a drain fly infestation in my kitchen and they got into the fridge and freezer and died en masse. It's not a pretty sight.
Dang. I didn't know that could happen.
Extra protein.
The 3-5 Saints are playing the 3-5 Panthers for NFC South dominance today! Mediocrity is within the reach of one of these teams. Geaux Saints!
How are the 30-50 feral hogs doing?
Nice times at my house.
We had company over for dinner last night, and it was lovely. The couple is recently married, and I have never seen my long-time friend so centered and comfortable. His husband is a wonderful and warm person.
Great friends, good food, fun conversation.
Life does not get better than this.
A friend of a friend was bedridden with a severe illness, and as his roommate left for work one morning saying "Must be nice not to have to go to work" so he wrote this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CXd80OynUo
Farrah the cat has such soulful eyes
Something I learned today, that explains a lot. Ella Fitzgerald was one of the 1 in 10,000 people with perfect pitch.
So I’ve picked up on as I fell through the wiki rabbit hole. But if she had the full-on, and much rarer, form where one can not only recognize exact pitches, but can resolve chord clusters into their components on the fly, it would explain her extraordinary ability to improvise in tandem with another player improvising as well. But all this is academic musing. It suffices for me to just kick back, and let the Lady sing!
It’s as much a curse as a blessing if you love music, believe me.
Did not know that. She's a goddess.
I’m quite done with superhero movies. It does crack me up that all comic book superheroes have old-fashioned waspy names like Steve (Captain America), Peter (Spider Man), Dick (Robin), Donald (Thor), Hank (Ant-Man)
lol
I've only just started.
Yeah, I've always been late to stuff.
lol