itsapossibility

pssst!

2009-01-10T21:49:00.002-06:00

For those who've asked, here's a link to my newer blog:

http://atmyage-theblog.blogspot.com/

I'd hoped people would discover it through my profile, but I've had enough inquiries over the last year+ to break down and spell it out.

For a while, I got some things out of my system through the 1000 Songs group on Facebook, but I haven't had the energy to try to keep up with the big boys there.

I think I'll start posting again on Blogger, either on atmy age or in a new one. (I keep thinking of new blog names, so I'll probably start a new one.) If you have any interest, keep an eye on the profile.

-- 9501

just one more thing

2007-07-02T09:37:00.000-05:00

This made me laugh when I first saw it, and I laugh when I think about it now:

http://www.zippyvideos.com/7736614867119396/stanley_steemer_-_tobys_new_trick/

-- 650

...or at least something beautiful...

2007-07-02T05:52:00.000-05:00

Oops! I knew that this blog's birthday was around now, but I just wasn't in the mood to work on this post yesterday, which was the actual birthday and would have made for a nice symmetry.

On Saturday night, I went to my first concert in a couple of months -- the great Great Lake Swimmers. A Canadian band playing here on the eve of Canada Day and on into Canada Day itself, as Tony Dekker observed 'round midnight. I practically had to force myself to go. But I know myself better. I paid for admission in advance, and I set up the infrastructure that is necessary in order for me to go to a late Saturday show (in other words, I set up an extra-hours sitter for my father).

The other signs were also auspicious: a full moon rising as I left home, beautiful weather, a parking space right in front of the venue, being well rested. And then I ran into my concert friend there, so for once I had someone to talk to between the bands.

And the show was great. I had my best moment of rock transcendance in a long time during one of the songs, Where in the World, and there were some others that came close.

The main reason I went, and it turned out to be right on the mark, is that I needed something to pull myself out of a down period. Once again, surrounding myself with wonderful things and experiences provides meaning (or at least a simulation of meaning) and solace in what Nick Lowe once called "this wicked world". It's the flip side of the drudgery and dreariness of my real life.

You might say, well, why not just change your real life?

I will, but I don't have it in me to abandon my father during this heartbreaking time, and if I can't be free from that, I might as well continue to work. Work is my social life, and, more important, it forces me to use my brain in a way that I believe is slowing my own decline. One of these days, things will be very different, inshallah.

For now, art is enough for me. Like, in the end, it was for the main character, Ka, in Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, a book I finished listening to last week. This was the first recorded book I've listened to in years. I guess it won lots of awards. It was mostly commended for depicting the tension within Turkey between the European mindset and the forces of "Islamism", which, of course, is a smaller version of what's going on in the whole world and is, in my mind, hastening the fall of western civilization. (We started the decline on our own).

What meant most to me in the book was Ka's essential solitude and the role that poetry and writing played in his life. He tried - very, very hard - but ultimately nothing else worked for him. He was an outsider, even among outsiders. He reminded me of me. And seeing my Turkish counterpart objectively reminded me that that's OK. There are beautiful things - tangible and intangible - in the world, and that's enough. At least for now.

* * * * *

I don't know if I'll post here again. I've been saying the same things over and over and over. And yet, I like setting up my thoughts in a way that records them for myself and anyone else who may be listening. (Not that I assume anyone is.) I simply don't have the time or energy to make it interesting.

So I've set up a new blog, At My Age, where I expect to mostly post snippets from my readings (and watchings) about how various people - real and imaginary, past and current - deal with getting older and coming to terms with their lives. I've been carrying around four or five of them in the past week. (It's a good thing I made a written list, too, as I can only think of two at this moment.) My goal is to save those thoughts to encourage myself when I need it, but you're welcome to look over my shoulder.

-- 1360

the e-mail d t blues

2007-06-22T12:59:00.000-05:00

Heading into the third week without a computer at home, I'm surprised at how disoriented I feel.

I'm even more surprised at how difficult it is to get competent help with computers - and with anything else. Like building maintenance, or copies of forms from the IRS. Everything people touch is screwed up.

I can't do anything about the ineptitude and apathy of my fellow man. I can only try to stop myself from letting it bug me.

I can also try to be less attached to the computer - and to everything else. I already feel like I'm getting to the late stages of the withdrawal process. But I'm sure that, when the day comes that I am again on-line at home, I'll get sucked back in.

-- 650

SOMEBODY READS THIS!!!

2007-06-12T13:48:00.001-05:00

I got a call last night from a friend. It's nice to know that the ringer on my land line at home still works. The friend reads this blog once in a while. I had a feeling someone was reading, but I didn't know who. Now I do.

Too bad my computer at home doesn't work. It's been over a week. Getting it fixed has been a challenge. Supposedly I'll get a call "soon" to set up an appointment for someone to install the broken part. I've got some days off later this week -- one of my sisters is coming to daughter for a few days -- and it'd be nice to have the computer going by then.

OTOH, maybe it'd be even better to eliminate that distraction so I could get something done at home for real.

OTOOH, I don't want to blow my remaining eMusic downloads for the month. They'll expire Sunday if I don't use them. I've downloaded some tracks at my father's house. It doesn't look like I can retrieve them off the computer there, but at least they'll be on my account, and I can download them again (unless they're yanked out of the system) when/if I get back on line at home. Which, of course, I will one of these days.

There are actually a number of events to report on, but this isn't a good time. Soon, I hope.

I'd better stop now before I kill my last reader of boredom.

-- 650

what's my motivation

2007-06-03T20:09:00.000-05:00

This is similar to the phenomenon described in the last post.

When I told people that I'd be taking a quick trip to Toronto a few weeks ago, some people (but not all) asked why.

I said I was going to see a movie.

Some (but not all) asked what movie.

The only one who asked what the movie was about was the guy at immigration on the way back home. I assume he was assessing how I handled the question, in order to make sure that my attempted entry into the USA was for a benign purpose.

No one asked why I was driving over 1,000 miles round trip to see a movie.

That was kind of a relief, as I'm not sure I had a rational answer.

But it still astounds me.

I read books and go to movies (at least in part) to help me understand the human animal. Including myself. Characters in books and movies are often more interesting than real people. Or maybe it's more that the people who write these books and make these movies (the ones that appeal to me, that is) are also trying to understand people, and they share their findings in their creative output. So the characters are easier to "crack" than real people.

One of my favorite things in one of my favorite movies is how the angels in Wings of Desire could listen to people's thoughts. Books and movies let us do that with the characters. Yes, the characters aren't real. In true art, they're realer than real.

But it's too bad that it's so hard to communicate with real people. Maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's just the people I come into contact with. I don't know.

Song of the week: Five Years, by the Schramms

-- 9501

* * * * *

A couple of hours later....

Yesterday, when I realized I'd be at my father's house all day and all night today, I packed a box of papers at my apartment to go through here.

Did I get to it? Just a little. But winding down for the day just now, I reached into the box and pulled out two Roger Ebert essays from September 5 and 6 2002, both written from the Toronto Film Festival.

Here's the first paragraph of the first article:

"After Cannes, the Toronto Film Festival is the most important in the world. Last year's festival was ripped in two on Sept. 11. I walked out of a screening, heard the news, and the world had changed. Now comes the 27th annual festival, opening today. Are movies important in the new world we occupy? Yes, I think they are, because they are the most powerful artistic device for creating empathy -- for helping us understand the lives of others."

I'd been thinking how undeveloped the first part of this post is. I love the coincidence of Roger making my point for me! (Too bad this makes it harder to throw away such articles without reading them.)

Empathy. Yeah, that's the ticket!

-- 9501

* * * * *

The next morning....

And the high EQ -- empathy quotient -- in the his previous films is a big part of what motivated me to drive to Toronto for the world premiere of Alan Zweig's latest film, Lovable.

-- 9501

two kinds of people

2007-06-02T17:02:00.000-05:00

It's a bit after 5pm. I just got a call from a friend's husband, asking me and my father to join their family and parents for dinner tonight. It was nice of them to ask, but, as I told him, I've got a concert in a couple of hours.

He was in a hurry, but he asked what concert I'm going to. It's Graham Parker and Jon Langford, at the Old Town School.

I realized that most of the people I know wouldn't even ask. They're that uninterested in music and, even more disturbing, me.

That's almost as annoying as the people in the audience for a PBS fundraiser show featuring current performances by 60s artists of their biggest hits. Like Peter and Gordon, Eric Burden, the Zombies, etc. I saw a bit of it this afternoon. The audience was going nuts hearing that stuff. They'd pay a few hundred bucks to see artists like that do full shows in arenas. But if they had an opportunity to see Okkervil River, or Beirut, or Great Lake Swimmers they couldn't be bothered. (Not that they'd've even heard of those artists.)

(And, come to think of it, I'll probably be surrounded by them tonight at Graham's show. And I imagine I'll like his earlier material better, too.)

Oh well....

-- 1360

let me make one thing perfectly clear

2007-05-27T14:06:00.001-05:00

I often write about how dissatisfied I am with my current life, and how a lot of it results from my role as caregiver to my father.

But I want to make it clear that I don't hold him at all responsible for this situation. It's not his fault that he's crumbling.

And it's not my "fault" that I've gotten so involved with him and his life. And it's not even my sisters' fault for not showing much concern or interest in the old man or me. It may be the fault of our whole stinkin' culture, keeping people alive without devoting resources to make those lives better. We can afford war, but we can't afford education or health care or similar frivolities.

I do what I do because I have no choice. The old man's in trouble, and I am in a position to help, without hurting anyone else (except maybe myself). My parents didn't bring their parents in to live with us. They helped them, but they believed - and I agree with this - that their first obligation was to their primary family, namely each other and their kids.

In comparison, I've got plenty o' nothing. There's a vaccuum in my life that this sort of fills. It feels more meaningful than trying to get my stuff organized. Maybe I'll get around to that later. Or maybe, after my rotting corpse is found under a pile of old magazines, they'll come in with a pitchfork and a dumpster and just get rid of this crap - like I should.

Maybe I'd better not get too analytical about this. I've worked my way back from feeling really bad for a while, and I'd like to stay on even keel for the forseeable future. If need be, I can always summon up the demons again.

-- 1360

could be worse

2007-05-26T21:13:00.000-05:00

When I find myself in times of trouble (Hi, Paul McC!) ...

... one technique I use to at least try to feel better is to think how things could be a LOT worse.

I thought of writing about this yesterday, when, as I walked into the gym for some cardio and a bit of work with weights, I realized that my hamstrings were still achy from my training session three days earlier. Usually I feel a workout the day after, no more and no less. (When I first started working out, about 10 years ago, after decades of sloth, I was so afraid of hurting myself that I went to a trainer three times a week for about a year. I'd leave those session hobbling. But I lost a LOT of weight, and parts of me that touched each other before - and that touch again now - separated in a way that I really appreciated and would like to experience again.)

Then it hit me - when the trainer stretched me after the Tuesday session, she pulled too hard. I usually say WHEN when she reaches that point, but I thought I'd let her use her judgment this time. It turns out I know better.

I've considered switching trainers. She often loses track of the number of reps I've done, which tends to result in my doing 13 of something instead of 12. But that's OK, because I generally subscribe to the 15 reps school of thought anyway. She's mostly OK, and just doing training with anyone is what matters, so I keep going back for more sessions with her, buying 4-week packages, because there's no way I'd work that hard and that long on my own. AND (and this is the point), another trainer could be worse.

Another example of "could be worse" thinking is when I arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the town that serves as the base for tourists going to Angkor Wat and the many other temples in that area. I was nervous about going alone (but I'd never even consider taking a tour), what with landmines and touts and scorpions, so I hired a guide and a car with a driver. We went over to the actual Angkor Wat complex (as opposed to one of the other sites) right after they came for me the day I flew in from Bangkok, and I found that the guide's English was so poor that I could barely understand him. I enjoyed the afternoon, and I called him "my Cambodian son", as he was young enough to be my kid, but I was strongly considering dropping him and getting someone else for the remaining 5 or 6 days of my stay there.

But then it hit me - the next guy might be just as hard to understand and he might not be as personable. So I stuck with the first guy and was very happy that I did. Although, when I told him I wanted to go to one of the most remote and unrehabilitated temples - Bang Melea, in case you know the area - and he said the car couldn't make it so he'd take me on his moped, I said no. He had previously told me about how, when he used to work at a hotel (before he became a tour guide), he had suffered from fainting spells, the source of which had never been identified, and I didn't want to be stuck in the remote Cambodian countryside with an unconscious guide. But I really wanted to see that temple, so we got hired my driver's cousin and his 4-wheel drive, and that day was the highlight of the trip.

Today I drove out to the bat mitzvah of a friend's daughter, and a friend of the friend rode with me. I like driving alone, but it'd've been obscene for each of us to drive separately (the friend's friend lives in my building), and I knew that this woman is the caregiver for an elderly parent and I figured that, for once, I could bitch about my own plight without feeling like I was boring, annoying or otherwise disturbing my partner in conversation.

This woman recently moved in with her mother, the better to care for her. And she has three siblings in town, only one of whom gives any significant amount of help, but all of whom are concerned that the caregiving sibling might end up with some financial benefit from the move. Lawyers are involved. So I see that my situation could be worse. At least I can go to my own home more nights than not, and my sisters aren't watching me suspiciously. (Sometimes it seems like they're not watching at all, which bugs the HELL out of me, but that's a different story, and I don't want to bore or annoy or otherwise disturb you.)

And then there's the bat mitzvah family. They've got two kids, the other of whom is a boy - a young man, about 18 years old - who has some kind of pervasive neurological disorder that is at the most disabled end of the autism spectrum. On this special day for them, he had to be left at home with a babysitter, because his yelps and his restlessness and frequent need for assisted toileting would have disrupted the service. At least I have the prospect of some kind of freedom in a few years. This family has to live with a constant reminder of what they should have but don't.

Even the bat mitzvah service could have been worse. I brought along a book, a sudoku puzzle, an MP3 player, and a snack, figuring I could hang out outside the synagogue for at least part of the morning. But I ended up finding a lot of interesting stuff in one of the books that they used in the service, including maps of the middle east (current and historical), drawings of ancient garments and jewelry, a diagram of a cow's stomachs (the plural is intentional), and an annotated bibliography with blurbs about scholars who lived during the middle ages and travelled between Spain, Greece, Istanbul, etc. (which set my mind a-wandering). The book also had some commentaries that were rendered ironic by current events and by the chattering Jews sitting around me. So it could have been worse. There was also a nice little essay about how "we wait too long" for so many things in life, which I found inspiring.

Afterwards, there was a nice meal, at which I partook generously of the last sweets I'll eat until my father's birthday on July 10. So the morning could have been worse.

-- 9501

Update on Monday: Over the weekend, in an accident at the Chicago Tribune plant, a guy was killed. In the paper, they said his body was "severed". On the radio, they said it was "cut in half", although they didn't specify what two parts resulted.

Nothing like that has ever happened to me. Not even close. I guess things could be a LOT worse. (I hope they'll never get that bad.)

-- 9501

this is the life

2007-05-24T07:06:00.000-05:00

I drive my father to his exercise class every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. If I haven't slept at his house the night before, I need to leave my apartment by 7:15 a.m. to pick them up, stop at the Three Tarts bakery for a Julius Meinl coffee for Iwona and a pastry for the old man, and get them to exercise with enough time to get a good spot and change into his gym shoes (one of which still has an ungainly theft-control tag that the moron who sold him the shoes forgot to remove untold years ago; I laugh every time I look at it).

I have a session with a personal trainer every Tuesday morning at 8:00 a.m. My gym is up near my father's house, so if I haven't slept at his night before (which I rarely do on Monday nights so I can complete my recovery from the weekend), I need to leave my apartment by 6:45 a.m. I've learned the hard way that there is very little room for dawdling if I want to have even a few minutes on the elliptical rider to warm up first.

So Thursday is the only weekday that I potentially don't have to watch the clock in the morning, except for the general goal of getting to the office not too long after 9:00 a.m., when clients may start calling. Some Thursdays, though, I've set up a medical appointment for the old man or, far less often, myself. And some Thursdays, I wake up at his place, although I prefer a schedule that spreads out my nights at home more evenly through the week.

Today is one of those maybe-two-per-month Thursdays when I can move at my own pace. I love this:

* I've burned a few CDs to top off a box for one friend to deliver to another friend in Boston.

* I've gone through my schlep bag to remove the stuff that's been going back and forth for a few days.

* I'm paying a little more attention to the BBC news on TV - they keep teasing us with the prospect of an update on Castro's health.

* I'm thinking about how I'll stop at Whole Foods on the way and pick up lunch at the salad bar, to break the monotony of the sliced turkey and cheese I bought at the deli on Monday, and how I'll stroll up the cosmetics aisles and maybe treat myself to some sale item I'll probably never use.

* I consider gassing up the car, before it goes up another ten cents per gallon.

* I'm writing this, even though I spent most of my shower thinking I was going to discontinue this blog (my posts are so monotonous and predictable (like me), and there's no evidence that anyone's still reading - there're even some indications that they're not).

* I'd like to steam some broccoli to augment my lunch today and tomorrow, but I don't see that happening - it's just a bit too dutiful, even on a leisurely morning like this one.

Yikes! It's 7:20! I'd better get dressed, so I can get to Whole Foods soon after they open at 8:00. But that still leaves me almost half an hour to get ready.

-- 1360

a cat can look at a king (revised for the last time)

2007-05-23T20:16:00.000-05:00

That's one of my favorite phrases. I know it from Alice in Wonderland, but I am somehow under the impression it did not originate with Lewis Carroll. I often find myself as the cat in that scenario, on the outside looking in, looking at that which I cannot be or have.

I don't want to be part of most of what I see around me. In general, I prefer to be an outsider. That's lucky for me, since I'm an outsider whether I want to be or not.

Tonight, the phrase came to mind while I was walking over to a client's apartment so she could sign an amendment to her trust. She's shuffling who gets which fur when she kicks.

Her place is in a high-rise building on Lake Shore Drive, just a few blocks from me. The view from her apartment of the moon rising over the lake is just staggering. I had the pleasure of being there once during a full moon, although every time I looked out the window, she'd say, "Look at me!"

On the way over, I kicked myself when I realized I could have made a nice circle by walking north, cutting through Lincoln Park, crossing the bridge over the Drive at 1700 North, walked along the lake for 5/8 of a mile, crossed back through the tunnel at 1200 North, and then walked a few steps to my client's apartment. But, remembering how little time I have and how much I've got to do tonight, it seemed OK to take the shorter route.

This path took me past a mansion that a different client bought a few years ago, on Astor Street, one of the most prestigious streets in Chicago. He bought it to renovate and and then flip, which would postpone the payment of capital gains taxes on a different real estate investment he had sold. Now, two years and many, many, many tens of thousands of dollars later, the house remains dark and unsold - as do several primo apartments purchased with the same intent. The client, despite his mucho dollars, is a miserable bastard. I had the pleasure of talking to his equally miserable wife on the phone today.

The client I was visiting tonight is in her mid-90s and recently came home after a short hospitalization. She is rich and vain, and until recently could pass for being in her early 80s. (She would often say "Do you think I got to be this age and look this good by thinking negative thoughts?" I would silently think negative thoughts in response.) But when I walked into her living room tonight, where she was enthroned among her Jewish-themed books and her romance novels, she closely resembled the female half of an wretched elderly couple who frequently appeared in cartoons by George Price in The New Yorker. She's in worse shape than my poor disheveled father.

Luckily, her hearing aid was on the blink, so I was dismissed soon after we completed our business. There I was, out on a beautiful evening, and even though the prospect of watching Criminal Minds beckoned, I thought I'd take advantage of having been forced out of my apartment, so I kept on walking.

The cat/king phrase resurfaced and I found some pleasure in contemplating it and started to compose this posting as I wandered. I had the feeling that I can go anywhere and do anything I want.

I walked down another of the fancy rowhouse-lined streets, past the home of a rich guy who was murdered back in the 90s by the guy who soon afterwards killed Gianni Versace in Miami. Our guy was found in his garage, taped up like a mummy - I don't recall if he was suffocated by the tape, or if the taping was just a postmortem gesture. Then I passed through the intersection of State and Division, the crossroads for a neighborhood of singles bars. Ugh. (I guess that sums up both my reaction to them, and theirs to me.) I thought another one of my recurring phrases: That's got nothing to do with me.

I decided to stop in a Treasure Island, a quirky grocery store, where I picked up some sushi and a 6-pack of Goose Island beer. My route home took me past Clark and Division, where people panhandle, sell tube socks, and switch from the bus to the subway or vice versa as they travel to or from the ever-shrinking Cabrini-Green projects and parts west. I was happy I took this route rather than the more aesthetically pleasing lakeside route. I wondered if anyone waiting for the bus thought that they were the cat as they looked at me go by. If I were heading home to the projects on the bus, I'd hate those rich kids walking by. (Ha! As if I look rich or like a kid....)

Waiting for the elevator to take me up to my hovel to enjoy the fruits of my foraging, I realized that Warren Zevon's Poor Poor Pitiful Me had been running through my head for most of my stroll. After a week of self-pity, I was finally starting to feel better. (But not like an insider.)

-- 1360

my death

2007-05-18T20:57:00.001-05:00

This is why I don't get much done at the office.

Yesterday I was writing a trust amendment for a client. Her husband recently died, and I was tweaking her trust to reflect that. (It's actually not necessary, as wills and trusts are usually written to cover all contingencies, but there were a few other things that needed cleaning up.) There were a lot of places where I was changing "the death of the second of us to die" to "my death".

I had been working on the document for quite a while when I thought, gee, isn't there a Jacques Brel song called "My Death"? So I stopped what I was doing and did a quick google search for "my death brel lyrics" and, after going to one dead link, found a site that had a side-by-side comparison of the "official" translation with a literal translation. I printed it out (I'm too old to be able to absorb information on the screen as well as information on paper) and enjoyed seeing how different the two were. (I've got to print it out in French, too.)

Some things got changed so they would rhyme, and some were substantive changes, probably to make the song more palatable to/comprehensible by English-speaking audiences. Both kept the device of ending each verse with the same words, "the passing time".

I think I bought a Brel compilation the last time I was in Paris. Maybe the French lyrics are there. And where's that compilation that has the original version of La Mer? What a great song! Who wrote that one? Better make a note look it up....

Anyway, after that little detour from my lawyerly duties, I roughed out this entry, but I got home too late last night to write it up.

Lucky thing, because this afternoon, when I took a little break to take a look at the news, after checking out the latest developments in Gaza (free Alan!), I read the story about the gorilla escaping from the Dutch zoo. Like Warren Zevon said, gorilla, you're a desperado. I paused to briefly mourn Zevon's death and resolved to read the bio written by his ex-wife.

Then I clicked on a "related" link to some animal story in the Guardian, not for the story, but to take a gander at their latest music and film stories. I read a piece about how tiring it is the way so many bands plan their sets so as to save some of their best songs to play during the encore(s), rather than scrape something up when, surprise, surprise, the audience wants more because they were so good. And then I scanned the 20-30 comments, and someone mentioned a Waterboys show in Liverpool earlier this month where, for the encore, they played Brel's song, My Death.

I hadn't thought about that song for a long long time when it came to mind yesterday, and there it was again.

* * * * *

After work today, I took my father and his caregiver out for dinner and then to the library. I happened to have the last Silkworm record in the car, and I played my favorite tune from it, a beautifully sloppy version of Dylan's Spanish Harlem Incident, as we drove past the site where Silkworm's singer/drummer, Michael Dahlquist, met his maker almost two years ago, in a vehicular homicide. And I briefly mourned his death.

I didn't know Silkworm at all until that accident. But when I saw Bottomless Pit, who are basically Silkworm without Michael Dahlquist, play as the opener for another band last year, I was so taken with them that I gave Silkworm a try. Now I have a new hobby - finding the old Silkworm albums at used record stores. They have a very masculine - but not macho - sound that I find very appealing. I'm sorry I never saw Silkworm live, but I'll go to any Bottomless Pit show I can get to.

On the ride back from the library to my father's house tonight, I tuned in to the beginning of Live from Mountain Stage on the radio, to check out who was on tonight. They mentioned Elvis Perkins (who I saw four times in the course of a few months last fall, as the opening act for World Party, two Okkervil River shows, and one more - I want to say Gob Iron, but I'm not sure). I told Iwona about how Elvis' parents had each died tragically, his father from AIDS and his mother in one of the 9/11 planes. I paused to remember my crush on the father, Tony Perkins, when I first saw him, as the son in Friendly Persuasion, while I was babysitting for some kids on the other side of the block.

After dropping my father and Iwona off and heading towards home tonight, I put the radio back on. I had gotten tired of Elvis' material, hearing it too many times in a short period. But the songs I heard on the radio tonight sounded great, like old friends. They had some lines that really captured some things I'd been thinking about recently. I thought about how I'd work Elvis' tragic story into this blog entry. I really liked all these things about death converging in such a short time.

And I resolved to download Elvis' album off eMusic when I got home. Then the set ended, and it turned out I had been digging, not Elvis Perkins, but Howie Beck. I didn't realize I knew any of his stuff, but I definitely knew the tunes he played on Mountain Stage. And it turns out they're on eMusic, too.

That reminds me. I also need to download a version of Oh Death.

-- 1360

this weekend's movies

2007-05-13T21:39:00.000-05:00

I originally planned a mini-Alzheimer's film festival for myself this weekend.

I was going to watch Memory of a Killer, a Belgian thriller about a hit man with Alzheimer's. I recorded it a few months ago, and I brought the DVD up to the old man's place last night, intending to watch it after he went to sleep.

But I got him started with My Fair Lady on TCM, and it ran an hour after his usual bedtime, by which time I was too tired to start watching anything, much less something with subtitles.

That took some of the wind out of my plan to go this afternoon to see Away From Her, the Sarah Polley film with Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's, which just opened here. Thinking about the several events I've committed to in the coming weekends made me want to seize the opportunity for a nice block of open time this afternoon and evening, so that's what I did instead. I got so into it that I forgot about calling to reserve my father's paratransit ride home from his exercise class tomorrow until after the call center had closed. Drat!

So when I got home this afternoon and scanned the online listings of what was on TV, I was really happy to find that Don't Come Knocking, the latest Wim Wenders was on. Had I known, I'd've recorded it. But I watched the rest, and now it's on again and I'm watching the beginning. (Like All Along the Watchtower, where the story starts in the middle, and the beginning is told at the end.)

Wim made one of my all-time favorite films, Wings of Desire, but I haven't seen his last few, and I didn't expect much from this one. But it's really absorbing, propelled nicely by T-Bone Burnett songs and great visuals (I recognize some of the sites from Wim's shows and books of photography). It seems like it might be (for me) one of those films that can be watched over and over and over. Not because it's necessarily so great, but because the overall vibe is so appealing that it's hard to stop watching. Time will tell.

It's a nice coincidence that, instead of getting to a film by Sarah Polley the director, I'm seeing a film with Sarah Polley the actor.

Now I'll set the DVD recorder for Acacia, by Ki-Hyung Park, another "Extreme Asian" film later tonight on Sundance, and and for House, the first of a trilogy of docs by Amos Gitai about a house in Jerusalem, playing one each over the next three Mondays ("Doc Day" on Sundance.)

Love them doc trilogies. (Hi, AZ!)

Next Sunday, Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain, with an orchestra, a narrator, some Foley artists, and a castrato.

-- 1360

it passed

2007-05-12T15:31:00.000-05:00

My mood, that is, in case anyone read my last post (?) and felt sorry for me (???)

Nothing happened, nothing changed, I just calmed down, at least for now.

-- 1360

special chump, special place +

2007-05-09T19:42:00.000-05:00

Every so often, the caregiving gets to me. Like last night, when I sent the following message to my sisters:

Slice of (my) life

The old man and I ate out at a Thai place in downtown Skokie.

Then I took him to the library and picked out 12 books for him. He'll probably ask tomorrow when we are going to the library.

He had his ice cream a little after 8pm, after I delayed him for about 15 minutes (so he wouldn't be asking for ice cream again after he had some already).

Afterwards, I supervised him brushing his teeth with an electric toothbrush. (The dentist wants him to do it twice a day. He only does it when I'm here, because it's too complicated.) I first have him remove his bridge and rinse it off. Then I put toothpaste on the brush, tell him to put it in his mouth, close his mouth around the brush, and do all surfaces. And I bend him over so that when the toothpaste falls off, it doesn't land on his clothes. I stop and add toothpaste a few times. I remind him to do the top and the bottom, the front and the back, the left and the right sides. Then I brush the remaining scum off the bridge and give it to him to put back in his mouth. Sometimes he forgets how, so I do it.

[One paragraph omitted.]

Now he'll alternate between reading and watching TV until I give him his four pre-bedtime pills. After he goes to sleep, I'll restock the pill dispenser for Iwona to use for the next few days, and I'll reorder a prescription that I'll pick up on Friday morning after I drop him off for exercise.

Tomorrow I'll drive him to exercise in the morning. (I already called today for his ride home tomorrow.) I haven't decided if, before it's time to take him, I'll go to the gym myself to do some cardio (I had a training session this morning, but the traffic was so bad that I was late and didn't have time for cardio) or go to Jewel to buy a few things to fill the gaps in the refrigerator.

At lunchtime tomorrow, I'll deposit his monthly checks at the bank and then withdraw most of the deposit in cash, to cover the "payroll" for the next two weeks. I'll use my own money for the rest of the month. (I'll pay myself back eventually.)

I'm considering going straight home after work tomorrow. I feel guilty about it, but I guess I should do it once a week. It's nice to get home by 6:30pm once in a while, although there's a Cubs night game, so it may take longer than that. Then I won't be back here until after work Thursday, when I will stay over for Iwona's next night off.

I'm sorry you have to read this. (Well, you don't have to.) You help me by me writing this and sending it to you, whether you read it or not.

* * *

I got this response this morning from one sister:

I am serious when i say this.( do I sound at all like the old man?) there must be a special place in heaven for
people who are caregivers in this way.
please dont feel guilty about taking time for yourself. you are so csreful about what you do, you
have already decided it is ok.
i dont know if you would be interested, this sounds like the beginning of a blog. maybe there is such a place on-line. i will check into it.

* * *

I got this from the other sister this evening:

Thank you for painting such a vivid picture. Daddy is incredibly lucky that you take such good care of him.

I’m glad you give yourself an evening off. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it. You have to have some time for you to blow off steam and do what you want to do.

* * *

I don't know what kind of reaction I was hoping for or expecting. I didn't want to be told to hire more help; I wouldn't feel better if I could spend more time at home watching TV while feeling guilty. I wasn't expecting a suggestion that I start a blog.

It's nice that they took the message in stride, as there was a definite passive-aggressive element in it (in case you didn't notice).

In any event, I felt better after I sent it, and today I'm seeing things more in perspective.

This too shall pass.

-- 1360

old men, younger men, and those in between

2007-05-04T09:12:00.001-05:00

(coming soon!)

(or maybe not....)

(probably not....)

the call of the great speckled concertgoer (+)

2007-05-02T21:32:00.000-05:00

I'm too shy to do it myself, but I'm a fan of interesting things shouted out at live shows. (In well-chosen between-song breaks or while the audience and artist are playing the pre-encore game, that is.)

My favorite is "Play whatever you want!" I've heard it a couple of times, not counting when the friend I told about it has done it, too. (Hi, LB!)

I've also heard people call out for the entire side of an album.

I still think asking for Stairway to Heaven is funny, but only if I do it, which I never have and I never will.

I got a kick out of this three-parter (all screamed by one guy) after Richard Buckner left the stage at Schubas last Friday night:

"One more song!"

"Jesus!!"

"ONE MORRRRRRE!!!"

It was so earnest. It made me laugh out loud.

But Buckner doesn't do encores. Or interact with the audience at all. I've got concert recordings where he used to. And I remember occasional remarks from him when I first started going to his shows. But not any more. From what I've read, I gather he's been burned by crappy audiences.

I was a little relieved when this last show ended. Minidiscs hold 80-81 minutes of material. He played a little over 79. This wasn't the first time he cut it so close while I was recording. Whew! Unfortunately, I'd turned off the recorder by the time the cry I reproduced above was emitted.

(I've learned the hard way that if you go over the disc's capacity, you lose the whole recording.)

* * * * *

Now I've going to start implementing my new nighttime routine. Instead of watching the BBC News at 10 (rather than the local "happy talk" pseudonews shows) and then starting to wind down, I'll get into bed earlier and read some of the (non-work-related) articles I printed at work. (I don't have a printer at home.) I think the world will continue turning - or not! - without me monitoring it so closely, whereas I've already determined that the stuff I've printed - reviews, interviews, news analyses - is of real interest.

-- 1360

three weekends, three film festivals (lock!)

2007-04-29T17:02:00.000-05:00

For someone who doesn't get out much, I get out a lot.

Three weeks ago, I saw Dream Havana at the Chicago International Documentary Festival. I almost missed it, as I had gone to the first screening the previous week, and it was sold out. It was made by a guy from Chicago, and one of the two main guys in the film had lived here and worked in the local media, so I realized later that it was kind of a party for a group of local Cuban insiders. Fortunately, I ignored my usual sense of futility and got in at the second screening.

It was the story of a friendship between two guys from Havana, one an award-winning writer (Ernesto Santana) who is still there, and one a guy who left on a boat during that short period in the mid-90s when Castro said, if you're gonna go, go now. I try to read and see everything I can about Cuba, and this allowed me an exciting visit back to Havana. It was a bonus that it was an insightful character study of the two guys, and I especially appreciated hearing Ernesto Santana talk about the connection to Havana that he is unwilling to sever. I also liked how the camera closely scanned his packed bookshelves and his collection of fifth-generation copies of music cassettes (including a few by a past favorite of mine, Jethro Tull). It felt like I was visiting a kindred spirit.

As is often the case at festivals, the director, Gary Marks, appeared at the screening. One of the most interesting things he talked about was how he and his editor cut a completely different film a year ago, weren't happy with it, and made this one. I hope it gets more widely shown.

Two weeks ago, I got to a couple of films at the Chicago Latino Film Festival. One of them, Fiction, by Cesc Gay from Spain, was outstanding. Lots of talk, lots going on unspoken, an interesting depiction of how sometimes something that ought to happen, for some reason doesn't. This might be a top-10er for me.

When I got home, I looked the film up on the internet movie database and was surprised that at least half of the comments said that the lead character was uninteresting and that nothing happens in the film. Like John McLaughlin says --- WRONG!!! I know that, as someone in a Harvey Pekar story says, average is dumb, but why do these people go to these movies and then think that they need to comment on them? OTOH, one commenter mentioned feeling "clobbered" by it coming out of the theater - in a good way. That's what I want from a film - to be clobbered.

One neat thing about the film was that, as the lead character drove here and there through the Spanish countryside, he was listening to some music that I really liked. I wrote down a few lyric fragments and, googling them later, found that I actually had a copy of the album that my favorite of the songs, Nature Boy, was from, namely, Abbatoir Blues by Nick Cave. (My cousin burned it for me a year or two ago, but I'd never gotten around to listening to it.)

I recreated those scenes the following weekend as I listened to the album multiple times while I drove 500+ miles (each way) to Toronto, to see the world premiere of the new Alan Zweig film, Lovable, at Hot Docs, Toronto's documentary festival. The stars aligned in such a way as to allow me to take this short but very sweet furlough from my normal existence.

I don't yet know how to write about Lovable or about my little trip to Toronto. What I can say for sure is that I loved the film, and I spent some time hanging out with Alan and meeting/remeeting a number of other great people there.

And I enjoyed those two 10-hour rides. It's blissful to be rounding a curve, topping a rise, moving at 70mph, listening to the best part of a wonderful song at full blast. The rides felt like a metaphor for my life today: en route, neither here nor there, necessary, rich and meaningful in their own right. I could have used some of the 400,000 air miles I've accumulated, but that would have diminished the trip.

The trip, and the three films I've mentioned, have left me with, among other things, a feeling that I'm not alone in the world. It's sustenance. It will help me cope with the challenges that loom in the coming months and beyond.

Like the old man's quarterly cancer treatment week, which we're now halfway through. Bone scan and blood test last Thursday, Lupron shot and Zometa infusion this Thursday.

-- 1360

sometimes i wonder, do you ever think of me

2007-04-18T19:04:00.000-05:00

That's Fred Neil's line (from his song Dolphins), but I associate it more with Tim Buckley.

I'm old enought to have seen Tim perform live a few times, most memorably in Philadelphia during the summer of 1968, when my middle sister and I rode the 'hound to visit my mother's cousin. I'd call her elderly because she seemed that way at the time, but she was probably not much older than I am now. She was an energetic but difficult old bird.

While we were there, I noticed that Tim was playing at a folk club downtown, and amazingly the woman and her second husband were willing to drop my sister and me off at the club and come back to pick us up later. It was heavenly, not least because Tim was SO good-looking! Unfortunately, the show ran longer than she expected (or maybe she just got tired of waiting for us). So she barged into the club while Tim was onstage, made a lot of noise, and yanked us out of the show.

Looking back, I understand why her son later said something to me like "the word 'mother' is not in my vocabulary". Sadly, the son (my second cousin?) died young and alone, in the mid(?)-70s, after mentioning in a letter something about an illness that in hindsight I realized was AIDS. My little sister did a panel for him for the AIDS quilt and wrote a beautiful essay that was published in one of the more prominent AIDS anthologies. My life is poorer without him in it.

That Fred Neil/Tim Buckley line often comes to mind. I don't spend as much time dwelling on the past as this blog may suggest. (I do it here because my current life is pretty mundane - my real life, that is; I live a rich fantasy life.) But anything can summon up the remembrance of something or someone past. And then I wonder if I come to other people's minds.

I know I do, as I hear from people more often than vice versa. But it surprises me when someone I consider special gets in touch, because I know that, at least to casual acquaintances, I'm very much a nothing. (I don't think I am, but I know that's what the world thinks.)

People don't like you because you're good to your parents. They might respect you. Or maybe they think you're a chump. Or maybe you make them feel bad that they don't much care about their parents and they'd rather not feel bad, so out you go.

When I think about how closed up I've been, I feel regret for all that I've denied myself in life. And I vow to open up once my current circumstances pass. "Hope and Optimism InSpite of the Present difficulties." So says a postcard on my closet door, reproducing a 1984 South African woodcut.

* * * * *

Yesterday afternoon at work, the secretary announced a phone call for me. It was the name of someone I was involved with almost 25 years ago, when we were both working in Berkeley, California, and whom I hadn't been in touch with for maybe 20 years. Someone I think of occasionally. My postmortem on that relationship has long been that I was a minor and forgettable conquest.

I figured I misheard the secretary, and it was an attorney calling about a closing or something.

But it was him.

We had a delightful conversation. He's won some songwriting contests and is supposedly going to send me a CD he recently recorded of his work. (I've still got some hand-written first drafts of his lyrics, one with his notation that "we" had written the song, I having come up with the title/theme/catchphrase.)

We talked about how the gold Gibson Les Paul that I had egged him on to buy for $700 is now worth $40,000. He described the view of lower Manhattan from his office window on Staten Island. I asked if the World Trade Center would've been in sight before 9/11. Yes. I told him how I measure many things by whether they happened before or after September 11, 2001. Just as I measure other things by whether they were before or after November 22, 1963.

I told him about my travels, including my various trips to NYC during which I didn't contact him. Including my Yom Kippur 2000 trip out to Staten Island to the Chinese scholar's garden. I evidently rode right past his office.

Most of all, I'm surprised he ever thinks of me. I guess it's that, like I answered his question, yes, I'm still a "music fanatic", and he wants to show off his accomplishments to someone who'll think it's cool. Still, he was a very charismatic fellow, so I'm a bit flattered to hear from him.

"Sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me?"

* * * * *

This morning, mentally composing this post as I drove to work, I was listening to a Will Oldham compilation. And what should come up but this line from New Partner:

"You were always on my mind."

I'm too tired to figure out if that's the flip side of the Neil/Buckley quote, or the opposite of it. Maybe it's neither. But I love that kind of coincidence.

-- 1360

be for real ... have a warm heart

2007-04-12T20:05:00.000-05:00

I saw that quote about 35 years ago in the Defender, a black paper published in Chicago. They used it, in a little box, to fill up an odd space that wasn't taken by an ad or an article.

I don't remember if I took it literally or ironically back then, but I cut it out and stuck it on a bulletin board. It's been in a cigar box for maybe the last 30 years and I occasionally come across the yellowed, thumbtack-holed clipping. But even more often, I comes to mind for one reason or another.

I thought of it after work today, riding the elevator down to the garage. I don't know why. Maybe it was my subconsciousness mulling over the Imus thing. Or hearing about another family bickering over their mother's wealth. Or the bridge and the parliament bombings in Baghdad. So many mean, cold hearts these days!

-- 1360

using what i already have

2007-04-07T15:56:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I get so sick of all the crap I've got here. Today I found some of it to be of a source of distraction and fulfillment.

When I went to make a pot of tea this morning, instead of using the newest canister of loose tea I've got -- Peet's 2006 Holiday Blend -- I dug a little further and used an old can of Jasmine Pearls -- one of the most wonderful flavors in the world.

There's nothing in the refrigerator. I'd originally planned to go out and do a big shop today, but I'd just have to do it again tonight or tomorrow morning to shop for my father's house so, contrary to my usual pattern, I'll make a concentrated effort to shop for both of us when I go out later. It helps that it'll probably be cold enough to leave my perishables in the car until I get home tomorrow afternoon.

So when it was time for lunch, I dug deep in the cabinets and found a Trader Joe's can of marinara pasta sauce and had some of that with trumpet-shaped pasta. And for dinner, I'll heat up a vaccuum-packed Indian meal -- saag chole, consisting of spinach and garbanzo beans over rice -- I bought for my sister that she's never gotten around to eating.

I made a concentrated effort to find the "lost" overdue library CDs and was, fortunately, successful. I've copied them (and to make room, I dumped a few things from the hard drive, which feels good). And in the process of looking for them, I came up with and started implementing a doable plan for getting my CDs organized once and for all (which I consider, perhaps irrationally, a prerequisite to a thorough weeding of the "collection"). Plus, I found a big stash of articles and magazines related to a 2004 trip to Europe and was able to get rid of the bulk of it.

At some point during this process, I was hit by the urge to play some vinyl. My turntable is sadly neglected, to the point where it's getting hard to rev it up - something oily or rubber is probably dried out. I hereby promise to use it at least once a week. Here's what I played:

- Sides 1 and 4 of Streetnoise, by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & the Trinity. I love finding the stickers from the London used record stores I used to troll through to find this stuff. I'd start at the far reaches of the Notting Hill neighborhood and hit all the shops on Portabello Road as well as the vendors under the flyover. At some point I'd buy a straw basket to tote the loot home in. Now I only buy CDs when I'm travelling, unless something is spectacular. (And in addition to Notting Hill, I've got several London neighborhoods with good pickings.) I'll've usually picked up a new pair of shoes or boots on the trip, and the boxes are great for building a brick of discs that can be packed in a suitcase without serious risk of damage.

Anyway, this particular 2-LP set cost me 75p, probably back in the mid-70s. It's got some great stuff on it (although it could be nicely boiled down by more than half), including Julie's "A Word About Colour", which has one of my favourite lines in any song, "Thinking's a headache, that's why we avoid it/Thought reveals truth and the pain of the facts".

(Which is sort of a cousin to the Winston Churchill quote posted above my TV: "Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.")

- Side 1 of Hounds of Love by Kate Bush. (The marbleized limited edition, bought for $5.50 here in Chicago.) After it ended, I played the first two tracks, Running Up That Hill and Hounds of Love, maybe another 5 times each. What wonderful sounds!

(It wasn't until maybe the 4th time, when I was listening from the toilet, that I remembered an ex making a stupid joke about the "first family's" dog Millie when I once mentioned Kate to him. If not for that, I'd've never noticed that Kate shares a surname with that f*cker.) (I usually only think of that guy when I'm changing the toilet paper roll. I used to have the paper come from behind the roll, but when he was hanging around here, I got to like it coming from the top front. I think of that as his greatest gift to me. So maybe the toilet connection is what brought back his Kate Bush witticism.)

- Smalltown Boy. by Bronski Beat - the 9 minute 12" single version. Another great song. I remember a different guy asking if I could identify the song (I could), saying it had been his favorite song during a trip through the Greek islands. But when I told him what it was about - a gay kid moving to the big city so he could be himself - the guy who'd loved the song seemed to stop loving it. I guess he didn't want anyone getting the wrong impression.

I couldn't believe how much of the vinyl I've been hoarding, I have no desire at all to listen to. Some of it is truly dreck that I doubt I ever really wanted. (Where the heck did it come from? All I can think is that I got some stuff because I thought I should know about it, but I didn't really want to, so I didn't play it. Idiotic, I know.) If I box up the junk, I can probably get all of the good stuff into the one LP-configured unit I've got.

Anyway, it feels like I've accomplished something for a change. (But I just remembered I've got to finish my tax returns soon, what with one of my nephews coming for a visit next weekend.) (I'm wondering if I can drag him to the WLUW record fair....) Now I'm in the 3-hour countdown before I have to leave for my overnight visit to my father's place. So the tube's back on, a 2005 horror film that takes place in Iraq. ("It's a living, breathing weapon of mass destruction!") Looks like we've angered the gods and are going to get what's coming to us.

-- 1360

nine eleven

2007-04-03T20:33:00.000-05:00

Today, after our podiatry appointments, I took my father and Iwona to the Skokie Public Library. They've got good selections of large print books and Polish-language books. (They've also got some good CDs, but I'm not taking any more until I find the two that are due on Thursday with no more renewals and that seem to have disappeared.)

I helped the old man select about a dozen books, consisting of his typical assortment of biographies and mostly crime novels. While my father and I waited in the lobby for Iwona to finish making her picks, I noticed that the cover of one of his books had a picture of the New York City skyline, with the World Trade Center towers covered by concentric circles, like a target. I looked to see the book's copyright - it was 1996. (Was that before or after the first bombing there?)

(I sometimes think about how, when the "blind cleric" was being driven away from the courthouse after being convicted of plotting the first bombing, he turned around to look at the WTC and said something like, Next time we'll do it right.)

I thought I'd share my observation about the pre-9/11 scenario with my father, and I started by asking him if he knew what "September 11th" is. He didn't. I asked him if he knew what "December 7, 1942" was. He said it sounded familiar but he didn't know what it was.

Yesterday, Iwona told me that when she got back to the house on Sunday night, my father didn't know who she was. Uh oh.

* * * * *

Just about as Iwona was reintroducing herself to my father, I was in my apartment going through a box I hadn't looked at for a few years. It had clippings, magazines and books about decorating and gardening. I like going through these boxes. They're kind of like time capsules of what I was interested in at the time they were assembled, even though they're usually just throw together when I've got to do a quick clearing of space for visitors.

I was able to get rid of most of the gardening stuff. I've given up on putting together some kind of Japanese garden in my father's back yard. I just don't have time. At most, I'll put in some flowers, but I can barely keep the hedges clipped enough to let people walk by without taking special effort to get around the overgrowth.

I also got rid of most of the kitchen remodelling stuff. On that weekend (was it 1999?) that they were still looking for JFK Jr's plane and Eyes Wide Shut had just opened, my oldest nephew and I drove to Cleveland to have a look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When we got back on Sunday afternoon, my refrigerator wasn't working right. I thought those stainless steel fridges were really sharp, and, upon learning that the narrowest one would be too wide for the space left by the old one, I decided to remodel the whole room to make room for one. Luckily, over the several months during which I considered my options, I was able to use the freezer section as a refrigerator.

Eventually, I realized that my 60s kitchen, with all the original cabinets and most of the original appliances still intact, was both a well-designed space and a wonderful artifact of those times. (It helped that the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of an enormous show about 20th century architecture, had a fascinating recreation of a tiny utilitarian apartment designed by some East German architect.) By now, most people in the two thousand or so apartments in my neighborhood have gone through several remodellings, and only a few old eccentrics still have the original kitchens. I decided to remain among that elite crowd.

The rest of the decorating box had more general information. I was able to get rid of a lot of it pretty quickly, but I especially enjoyed going through a few old-ish "shelter" magazines. Whenever I come across a pre-September 2001 magazine, I save articles and advertisements that have pictures of the WTC towers, to add to my "WTCB4" file. The pictures don't make me think about terrorism or the war or "why they hate us" or any of that. (Of course I think about those things. But pictures of the towers don't bring on those thoughts.) I'm just amazed and fascinated by the idea that those structures, which should have outlived me and any other creature living on September 10, 2001, are gone.

* * * * *

I happened to be in New York on Yom Kippur of 2000, a little under a year before September 11. My uncle was on a trip abroad, and he let me stay in his apartment, and I was in heaven for a week, going around and doing whatever I wanted day after day. On Yom Kippur, when I should have been fasting and praying, I took the subway down to Battery Park, the Staten Island Ferry over to Staten Island, and a bus over to a botanical garden that has what, at least back then, was described as the only authentic Chinese scholar's garden in the US. (Or was it the only one in North America? Maybe the Chinese garden in Vancouver is not a "scholar's garden"?)

On the way back to Manhattan, I took pictures of the skyline, and I ended up with a nice collage panorama that included the World Trade Center towers. I gave them to one of my nephews a few years ago. I've got to find the negatives, make new prints, and assemble a proper collage. Like those David Hockneys (sort of).

-- 1360

daaaAAAaaaAAAd!!!! i'm 56 years old! i can stay up as late as i want!

2007-03-28T09:12:00.000-05:00

That's what I said to my father last night, at about 10:30.

He goes to sleep at 9, and on the nights I stay at his place, I enjoy having a couple of hours to myself after he's turned in. He gets up fairly often to go to the toilet, but occasionally he comes out to the living room to interrogate me about when I'll be going to bed myself.

That kind of thing used to annoy me. It still can, depending on my mood, but more often I find it touching. He's concerned about my welfare, and one of the things he can do for me is to remind me to take care of myself.

* * * * *

One of our nicest clients died a couple of days ago. He was sound of mind, a few years younger than my father. His wife is still alive, and they have three children, similar in age to me. When the guy died, he and his wife were in Florida, in the last week of their three-month escape from winter. Now his daughter will never know the joys of father-daughter podiatry appointments -- something I'm looking forward to next week.

The father of one of my partners was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer last week. It seems that he's also got Alzheimer's, but in all the times I've talked about my father's condition, my partner never thought to mention that his father was in the same shape.

(Then again, my partner didn't tell me he was divorcing his first wife until after the fact. Or that he was remarrying until he got back from his Hawaiian honeymoon. He had to talk about the split from the second wife, because she started calling and coming around the office in a wild state of mind. And a client who used the same gym as him is the one who told us about the affair with his now-third wife, mostly conducted at the club. So the current partners in our firm - me and two guys - have each been married an average of 1.333 times.)

* * * * *

So I'm lucky to have the old man around to nag me about sleeping enough and eating enough, ask me what day it is and if he can have another ice cream, tell me I'm carrying around too much stuff ("Boy, you're really loaded"), smile and say "Oh, there you are" when I arrive, and look disappointed when I say I won't be back until the next day for supper.

-- 1360

yer buggin me man

2007-03-25T14:20:00.000-05:00

Is it me, or are the people around me really annoying?

Why, when I tell my boss I'm nervous about my cholesterol reading (results TBA tomorrow), do I have to hear him recite a chart of his own readings (broken into HDL, LDL and whatever that third one is) over the past number of years?

Why, when someone calls me from their car to fill up time while they travel, and they have a crappy connection so they get cut off, and I don't pick up fast enough when they call back, do they have to leave me a long message with an "update" about people I neither know nor care about?

Why, when I get to my father's house at 8pm on a Saturday night, do I have to listen to the one-half-day-a-week caregiver who's now off duty tell me in depth about some rich Greek guy who steals her lawn chairs and invites her to live with him so he can have an unpaid housekeeper? And why, when I take the bananas out of the bag I'd put them in to hasten their ripening, do I have to listen to her harangue me about how they ripen faster when exposed to the air? (Wrong, sweetie!!!) I kicked her out when she started in on the bananas.

Why, when the woman who's watching the old man this afternoon arrives, do I have to listen to her go on and on about how there's no change in the eye condition that's been bothering her for a few months? Aw, c'mon, you're on the clock, lady! And why, when I warn her that my father's been asking for eye drops every few minutes all morning and that she should tell him no because they don't seem to help him and maybe too much will start to harm him, and I theorize that maybe his eye thing has a psychological component, do I have to listen to her start her bit about how lousy American doctors are compared to Polish ones, and how we think everything is psychological? When she started up on that, I left.

Christalleffinmighty. (I've learned that bad words can get a blog blocked. )

These people are not worth the effort to try to get through to, much less rehabilitate. Sure I'd like someone to air my petty concerns and grievances to, but I'd rather keep them to myself (or share them with you, my bloggees) than waste the effort on people who have no interest in anything but their own little worlds. If I didn't need to deal with these people, I wouldn't. And some day I won't.

Morissey:

"In my life
why do I give valuable time
to people who don't care if I
live or die?"

-- 1360

The next morning @ 6:30:

I didn't list my father among the people who've annoyed me in the last 100 hours. I've come to terms with his circumstances as well as those of my circumstances which arise from his circumstances. In other words, I know that it's not his fault.

My boss is another story. He's generally a very positive presence in my life. I've come to terms with his quirks, and I can live with them for now, as long as, in moments of weakness, I don't go to him for compassion. Compassion? I don't need no stinkin' compassion.

Now I'm looking forward to what will probably be The Last Scone. Once my cholesterol results come out, clowntime will be over.

-- 1360

ungentle on my mind

2007-03-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

Three things are bothering me a lot right now:

- A client who hired me to do a very limited task sent me an email yesterday afternoon, and I am supposed to get a followup call soon. She has a problem that, had I been hired to do her whole project, I would have caught and dealt with. But I didn't have the overview and, thus, didn't catch it. But I can't help but think that, if I were sharper, I would have.

- One of my father's weekend helpers wants her brother, who's visiting from Poland, to cover for her and her sister (who is the other weekend helper), so that he can earn some money. She caught me offguard with the idea when I called during the symphony intermission on Saturday night, but the more I think of it, the more I don't like it, even though it would free me last Saturday nights, which I deeply crave. The old man is so fragile and vulnerable now that I just can't see leaving him with someone who is a stranger to him. I'm the only family he sees with regularity and this is not the time to take that away from him. I know I've got to nix this proposal, and I am prepared to do so when it comes up again. But it serves as a reminder of how bad things are now, and how bad they're going to get.

- I have an appointment tomorrow for a general physical. I'm afraid that anything that can be wrong with me will be wrong with me. I hope it'll just be high blood pressure and diabetes and I'll just have to go on medication, but I have no special protection from worse things. I've been lucky so far, but no one is lucky forever.

(To be clear: I have no unusual symptoms whatsoever. This is just a routine physical.)

* * * * *

Riding up the elevator to my office just now, I saw my reflection in the door and realized I'm wearing two necklaces. One is of small cube-shaped beads that look like some kind of gem stone (which I bought for cheap from one of the African vendors outside the Museum of Modern Art in NYC some years ago) and one is a tiny harmonica on a cord (which I bought for even cheaper from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra store a few years ago).

I was just wondering a few days ago where the harmonica necklace was, and this morning I noticed it in a drawer.

So I guess I can't really say I'm not lucky, can I?

-- 650

... with a cherry on top

2007-03-18T19:43:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with the widow of my former law partner. She's just about the nicest person in the world (and we're nearing the first anniversary of her husband's death), so how could I say no? The CSO played one piece by Bach and two by Mozart. The most interesting aspect of the concert for me was that the guest conductor, a woman named Mitsuko Uchida, was also the guest pianist, and she conducted from her seat at the piano. AND, unless I'm mistaken, she was wearing clothing by the same Japanese designer as I was, namely, Issey Miyake. To tell the truth, our taste in fashion is more similar than our taste in music.

My symphony companion, who lives one suburb away from my father's house (where I was leaving from), and I had planned that I would pick her up early enough to allow us to first have dinner at a nice Russian restaurant downtown, around the corner from Orchestra Hall. But my father's Saturday evening helper called in the mid-afternoon, offering to get to his house early, and I used the extra time to stick my head in Vintage Vinyl, a shop near my friend's apartment.

It's a record store I don't dare to go to very often, because it's obscenely expensive. It specializes in what I would call bootlegs if they were cheaper. It's mostly live stuff by famous and obscure mostly British bands, mostly from the past. Lots of Beatles and Stones, but also just about any other that someone like me could think of. I once came close to buying a set of live Stones from the mid-60s there, but there was so much to choose from that it was easier to just drop it. (As I wrote the last sentence, I noticed that there was an ad on TV with the Stones singing I'm Free in the background; I didn't notice what product was being pushed.)

Yesterday, as I skimmed across the dividers marking the different bands' sections, nothing seemed particularly appealing. Until I got to Traffic. The selection was tiny, but I was immediately entranced by a collection of their early songs, most of them from BBC radio appearances, with Chris Wood and, of lesser importance to me, Dave Mason.

I loved those early albums of theirs. I remember finding a copy of the British version of Mr. Fantasy for 99 cents in a cut-out bin at the big Woolworth's on State Street, when the album was still current and it would've cost me at least $3 for the American version ($4 for stereo). And I remember sitting at the sewing machine in my parents' basement, making myself a Nehru jacket and listening intensely to 40,000 Headmen. (The jacket turned out so well that I made at least one more from the same pattern, one of which I am wearing in my high school yearbook.)

I wavered yesterday, but ultimately I decided to top off the hundreds of songs acquired in the frenzy I described in yesterday's entry with this Traffic CD. The price doesn't seem so bad if I average it with my Woolworths find of 40 (?!?!?) years ago. Or if I compare it to the cost of those symphony tickets.

(What may have swung it for me is that the picture on the back is of the band, playing next to the withering tree memorialized in one of their songs, outside the Berkshire, England cottage where they lived together and woodshedded before recording the first album. I made a pilgrimage to that cottage, riding a bicycle from a nearby youth hostel, on my first trip abroad, in 1971. The family who was living there by then gave me a nice little tour of the inside of the cottage, plus what the British call a "nice" cup of tea.)

I played part of the disc as I drove home from my father's this afternoon. The BBC stuff seems to have been recorded by someone holding a cheap microphone up to the speaker of a table radio. Presumably on a little reel-to-reel recorder like mine. (I used to sneak my recorder into concerts, including at least a couple by Traffic, under what I wore like a David Crosby-esque cape but was actually my mother's old skirt. I'd turn off the recorder during the drum solos. And when the recorder got old and the reels made a squeeky noise as they turned, and everyone was looking around for where the noise was coming from, I looked around, too, with what was meant to be a curious look on my face. I've still got those tapes, or rather the boxes holding the reels and the disintegrated remains of the tapes. I don't have a reel-to-reel recorder, though, so I can pretend that someday I'll get one and I'll be able to be able to listen to the tapes.)

But the performances on my new CD are charming, and listening to the occasional brushes of static, I can picture my imaginary soulmate back in 1967, sitting in a dingy bedroom in a dingy London suburb, holding the microphone up to the speaker, thrilled to be capturing those beautiful sounds for posterity (and hoping his mother doesn't yell from down the hall and get caught on the tape). That's easily worth 30 bucks.

-- 1360

and then i bought ....

2007-03-17T08:20:00.000-05:00

Circumstances are such that I have been presented with a higher than usual level of music-acquisition opportunities in the last week or so. Here's what I got and where I got it:

Last Saturday, I walked to an AARP presentation about brain function in the aging (I'm now a little less scared than I was before), and Virgin Records was nearby, so I check out their clearance tables:

- Rough Trade Counter Culture 05. Rough Trade is a British label that issues some very good compilations. I've actually paid well over $20 each for a couple that I really wanted. This one, with 50 indie cuts on 2 discs, looks well worth the price of $6.88.

- Works of Jah 2. Three discs of reggae for $3.99. I'll probably end up giving this to my nephew, but I'll listen to it first.

- Over the Rainbow: The Songbird Collection. 39 tracks by women, for $6.88. Another that I'll eventually give as a gift, but I'll give the whole set a spin first.

- Convicts, by You Am I. A "limited edition" 2-disc Australian import for, you guessed it, $6.88.

- N'ta Goudomi, by Cheikha Rimini, "la Diva du Rai". I couldn't resist this import, reduced from $27.99 to $6.88.

BTW, I'm not picking this stuff because it's cheap. I'm picking it because it's cheap and interesting.

- B-Sides, by PJ Harvey. 6 tracks for $.99.

The next day, I had a concert at the Old Town School - Peggy Seeger, who was a delight as a performer and a great role model for how to age well. I went early and had a choice between walking a couple blocks north to Laurie's Planet of Sound or a couple blocks south to Evil Clown. Ha, ha, I chose the latter. They're a little more snooty, but they have a bigger and better selection of used stuff:

- Orkideur Hawai, by Storsveit Nix Noltes. I hadn't heard of this, but I couldn't resist an album of Bulgarian music by Icelandic punks. I played it in the car Monday while I was driving my father and his helper, Iwona, to exercise class ("Muscle Movers"), and Iwona instantly recognized it as Bulgarian, so I made her a copy.

- You've Stolen My Heart, by Kronos Quartet and Asha Bhosle. Bollywood songs. I've kind of wanted this since it came out.

- The Rough Guide to Ethiopia. I've been interested in Ethiopia for a long time (never there, though). As it happens, my sister arrived there this morning. For work! She's staying at a place called the Beer Garden Inn. I wish I was there, too.

- Besterberg. Paul W.'s best. Why was this just $3.99??? 20 songs, including Dyslexic Heart!

- Room to Roam, by the Waterboys. What I really want is the new, expanded version of Fisherman's Blues, which I loved when it first came out. But it's about 30 bucks, more than I spent on the five things I got. It'll show up eventually.

A week ago Thursday, I went to an eMusic "event" down in Hyde Park, a hellish ride from my office in Northbrook. A few of their staff were there to talk with a smallish group of subscribers about their service. It seemed appealing to talk about this stuff, plus they were giving 50 free downloads to each attendee.e to talk with a smallish group of subscribers about their service. It seemed appealing to talk about this stuff, plus they were giving 50 free downloads to each attendee. It was interesting to see who subscribes. The group of maybe 30 included several of my male counterparts - old but still crazy over music. (I'm not sure if I have any female counterparts.)

When the free downloads hit my account the next day, I found myself with 90+ tracks I had to use within a couple of weeks. I'm usually pretty choosy about what I download from eMusic. Stuff I'd buy for $8.00 used, I might not download for $3-4.00. I think it's not wanting to get too much stuff on my computer (even though it's all burnable without restriction) and having to make decisions about what to keep. Somehow, I have no trouble using up my monthly 90-track allotment. (But I stopped buying "booster packs" when they got too expensive.)

So here are some of my most recent downloads:

- Don't Tell Columbus, by Graham Parker. Better than he's been for quite a while. He was once one of my faves.

- A Brighter Beat, by Malcolm Middleton. I finally reached critical mass on this guy, having read good things about him and then someone posting an ecstatic evaluation on the eMu message board.

- Cavalry of Light, by Lavender Diamond. It's just an EP, so what the heck.

- Neon Bible, by Arcade Fire. I had all those free tracks, so what the heck. My impression (from reading; haven't listened myself yet) is that maybe their first album is better.

- A Cat May Look at a Queen, by Franklin Bruno. I've heard his songs by others, plus he's loosely affiliated with The Mountain Goats. The day after I downloaded it, I saw it used at Evil Clown but, atypically, remembered that I had it already.

- Samme Stof Som Stof, by Unter Byen. I thought this would help me decide whether to go see them live earlier this week, but I didn't get around to it. I heard them yesterday on a KEXP live broadcast from SXSW and learned that I can live fairly well without having seen their show.

- He Poohs Clouds, by Final Fantasy.

I took a few hours off yesterday afternoon so I could get home in time to listen to the KEXP broadcast from SXSW, which was to include my favorite band, Okkervil River. I missed the first few minutes of Okk, and then I spent another few minutes setting up my minidisc recorder so I could record their set. (Numbskull should've had things set up before the show.) Luckily, it'll stream on the station's website for a few weeks so I can do it again.

The KEXP headliner was Beirut, whom I've had a vague interest in for a while but hadn't really focused on. But earlier this week, I put the car radio on WLUW for a while, as I've been doing every few days lately. There was something playing that sounded like Rufus Wainwright's voice but not quite his sound. The instrumentation was sort of middle-eastern, so I guessed it was Beirut and I was right!

I think I'm going to like this band a lot. Their sound goes beyond middle-eastern. It's rich, complex, ornate (like Pinetop Seven, or some Okkervil River or Shearwater), not earthbound (one of my latest adjectives for music). I checked to see if they're coming here soon, and there's nothing listed, but their website mentions they'll be recording with Final Fantasy. I googled FF and it seems like they are on the same wavelength as Beirut, so that's what made me download He Poohs Clouds last night.

I've got to download 19 more eMu tracks this weekend (which will involve deciding among a few things I've been eyeing), and my account will "refresh" on Monday. I'm excited that they're getting the new Andrew Bird Tuesday. He's not earthbound either.

-- 1360

the 10-21-06 issue of the economist

2007-03-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

Desperate for something to read while on the elliptical rider yesterday, I picked up this magazine from the floor of my bedroom, where it landed after I retrieved it in the give-away bookcase in the the laundry room of my building last Saturday. I had glanced at the several cultural pages in each of the 10 or so issues that someone had left there, and this issue looked like it might merit a closer examination than the others.

I only had about 20 minutes to do cardio before my training session, but that was long enough to get through the magazine. It was loaded with interesting articles about current issues, written with a non-American perspective, which I'm always interested to hear. But I know that there just isn't enough time for me to follow most current issues with any consistency, and I figure that the world will keep on turning even if I don't have my finger on the pulse. As much as I want to know about Macedonia's prospects for getting into the European Union (I have a soft spot for Macedonia, having spent a week there in the mid-80s) or about the impact of corruption on the lives of Chinese peasants (when I get to China, I'm not likely to spend much time with agricultural workers), something has to give, and I'd rather follow issues with a more pronounced cultural angle.

Like these two articles that I came across today: "Cuban intellectuals fearing crackdown take to the web", featuring a picture of one such intellectual in front of a floor-to-ceiling wall of books, in the Chicago Tribune, and "Art for Putin's Sake", about the absence of a political element in the art exhibited at the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, in the Wall Street Journal. Cuban intellectuals and Russian artists don't need me, either, but I feel more connected to these guys, so they're the ones who get more of my reading time.

Is this elitist? I hope not. I was half-watching CSI New York (wotta buncha krap) when I started this post, so clearly I'm neither an intellectual nor an artist. Maybe I have more in common with those Chinese peasants after all, sucking up the opiate of today's masses: television.

-- 1360

The next morning: not that TV's so bad.

On the BBC News this morning, I've already especially liked two bits - one about how the pieces in Afghanistan's "museum in exile" in Basel, Switzerland, are being returned to the national museum in Kabul, it now being deemed safe enough for these treasures. (I sure hope they're right.) Nice shot of the Bamyan Buddha (before).

And now there's a report on Cuban rap music. I don't understand what they're saying in the song, but part of it was shot in Old Havana. The featured band's on tour in London, and some of them are in the BBC studio talking to the anchorman. One guy's fluent in English, and he's translating for the female singer. (They spent over seven minutes on this piece, compared to less than a minute on Heather Mills McCartney's latest statement.)

Of course, these pieces, like the newspaper articles I mentioned in the first part of this post, all have a strong political element/undercurrent. But I know they'd be considered "soft" news, compared to the analysis of the upcoming French elections. Which I watched with interest but found less compelling because the angle was political rather than "human interest". I wish I had time for all of it!

-- 1360

the 6-6-94 issue of the new yorker

2007-03-08T09:21:00.000-06:00

I've had subscriptions to The New Yorker at various times during my life. The last stretch went for 8-10 years but ended a long time ago - some time before 9/11/01. I still enjoy reading the magazine, and I buy it 2-3 times a year, but I just don't have time to read it regularly. Some day, when I finish all the old issues I have stashed in various places, maybe I'll get it again.

This morning, looking for something I could read on the elliptical rider, I picked up an old New Yorker in my father's garage. I can get as much out of an old issue as a current one - and in some ways, more. Here are the things that caught my attention in 35+ minutes of cardio:

- The cover was nothing special on this issue.

- As always, I took a look at the World Trade Center towers in the sketched skyline at the top of the Comment section that comes right after the table of contents.

- I only took a quick look at the Comment, but it was funny to see the passing reference to the then-in-office "Clinton Administration" and the critical mention of then-Mayor Giuliani's response to a crisis in school funding (what a liberal). They also mentioned the WTC as an example of an edifice with a lot of square feet.

- Interesting letters to the editor on a past article about a psychologist. One had a Will Durant paraphrase of an Immanual Kant quote about the human brain: "an active orgain which molds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought." Maybe the article they were writing about will surface soon. Or maybe I threw away that issue 10 years ago.

- I like the annotated listings of concerts and exhibits, and it's always interesting when I find markings I made when the issue first came out. Here I had highlighted a description of the Wrens ("brings to mind every ragged guitar band that ever read a book, from Television to Mudhoney"0 and a listing for a Yossie Piamenta ("Hasidic hardcore"). I also like looking for listings of shows I wouldn't have noticed back then but would love to go to now (there weren't any in this issue). And sometimes the listings section has an neat drawing or painting of a featured artist; here there was one of Grant Lee Phillips.

- I'd also highlighted a few art gallery listings: one featuring two Chinese artists who created installations "positioning their work according to the principles of Chinese chess", and one of American puppets. I would still go to any show of contemporary Chinese art or of any nationality of puppets.

- There was also a longer entry about a Cartier-Bresson show at the International Center of Photography. The writer did a nice job of describing a particular photograph, which I consider a real accomplishment. Verbalizing about the non-verbal is something I aspire to.

- The film listings often have an artist's impression of a then-current film. This issue had a painting of "The Cowboy Way" (which I'm not familiar with), with one cowboy on a horse chasing another, both of them riding on top of the Brooklyn Express train over the East River, with the Brooklyn Bridge and the Lower Manhattan skyline in the background. The skyline included the WTC towers, so I'll save this page for my "WTCB4" file. (Out of which I intend to some day make a series of collages.)

- The Talk of the Town section had a short article about Woody Allen and his love of the NY Knicks. They mentioned that Woody was working on a made-for-TV version of Don't Drink the Water. I recorded that years and years ago (I haven't watched it yet, but I know exactly where it is, having gathered all the Woody Allen recordings I could find for the first live-in companion we hired for my father back in 2004). (Hi Magda!)

I highlighted this in the Woody article: "You see, life consists of giving yourself these problems that can be dealt with , so you don't have to face the problems that can't be dealt with." He went on to talk about how "meaningful" it was to him to follow certain challenges facing the Knicks. Talk like this always encourages me.

- Finally, I started reading one of the main articles, an essay about the writer's first experience of being flamed on line. He commented about there being "an estimated twenty-three million users connected to the Internet--ten million of which have come on-line in the last nine months". "And many of the new users are not the government officials, researchers, and academics for whom the net was designed; they're teen-agers, scam artists, lonely hearts, people in the pornography business, and the faddists who were buying CB radios in 1975."

I thought back to a day in 1983, riding the subway in Washington, DC, and running into one of my former students from the law school at the University of California at Berkeley. She had a summer job at one of the big firms (probably making 5x as much as me), and she described a project she was doing legal work on, which I later realized was the Internet.

One of the reasons I like to read these old issues is that it's so interesting/amusing/surprising to see how, and how fast, things have changed, or how they haven't changed.

Is it worth keeping the old magazines so I can experience the above? Hmmm. The short answer is no. But it's not that simple. Not much is.

-- 650

what it is to blog

2007-03-06T13:05:00.000-06:00

I often go back to a blog post to add something that comes to mind in the minutes and hours after I hit the "publish" button. I sometimes go back a few times. It can be for clarification, or embellishment, or to just get something out of my system.

For example, following last night's post about shopping for books, I remembered about the Havana shops and the books my friends gave me while I was half asleep this morning. I jumped out of bed to add that to what I'd already written about the open book market in Havana. The market was what I pictured when I first read about the Baghdad bombing, but the shopping and the books from my friends were at least as relevant to the point of the post and to my overall memories of book acquisition in Cuba.

Unless there's something genuinely important (like maybe someone else will get into trouble or be unfairly embarrassed), I won't go back even as far as, say, 24 hours. If I get a fact wrong, I might flag a correction, just so someone doesn't pass along misinformation because of me. But I won't change something to revise a faulty personal reminiscence (and there are multiple instances where I've resisted the urge), cos this is really just story-telling anyway.

Each time I do change a post, I'm afraid that someone will have already read the original post and will thus miss what can turn out to be the best part. I know that's not too likely, but I imagine it sometimes happens. So if you read a post that's been up for less than 24 hours and it's at all interesting to you, you might consider skimming it again later, checking for new gems.

(Don't hate me because I'm deluded....)

I just read this quote about blogging, in a profile of Nora Ephron in The Guardian:

"I learned this is a different way of writing - you have to do it really fast, and if you don't do it fast, you're making a mistake. If I'm working on anything for more than an hour, I say, this is not a blog, I have to stop right now, cos I'm writing a column or something else."

I've already made a lot of additions to this post (between "preview" and "publish"), but I'm still way under Nora's one-hour deadline. So let's hit it now.

-- 650

bombs 'n' books

2007-03-05T16:06:00.000-06:00

This morning there was a big bombing at a book market in Baghdad. Almost 30 dead, over 50 injured.

As disturbing as any attack on civilians is, the targeting of cultural centers - and especially book markets - gets me the most. (I guess if they mentioned an attack on used record stores, that'd hit me even harder.) (This morning the LA Times mentioned an attack on a "music store" in Pakistan, with no further details. Maybe they sold bootlegged songs of religious devotion, maybe they sold Madonna. To the fanatics, it's all bad.)

I love printed matter. I love books, and magazines, and newspapers, and letters, and all sorts of what I believe is called "ephemera" by affecionados. I especially like books about books, and magazines with articles about how to store books (I like looking to see what books are on the shelves in the pictures). I have several pieces of clothing with pictures of books, including a suit, the jacket lining of which matches the blouse. When I wear it, which is rarely (I don't like things that match anymore), I think of that idiotic Crown Books ad with that dork saying "you can call me 'books'".

I have far too many books. I'm trying to get rid of books. So I also like articles about getting rid of books. I try to stay out of bookstores. It helps that my favorite used bookstores in Chicago have closed. Plus, I have very little free time, and I'd rather stay home than do almost anything else. Whatever the reason, there's a lot less coming in than there has been in the past, although I haven't been able to focus enough to make the deep cuts I'd like to.

But I feel a strong connection with others who love books - and the arts in general - especially those who have to struggle to get access to them.

When I travel, places where books are sold are the places I'm most drawn to after used record stores - even if I don't know the language - even if I don't know the alphabet. I like being among the books and, even more, among the people who also want to be among them. I like imagining myself living in that city and coming to that store for my regular literary needs. And once I'm where the books are, I'm usually in an interesting neighborhood.

Some of my most memorable book shopping experiences:

- The book market in Havana. There's a square in the old city where people buy, sell and trade books. I don't think I got anything there (it was a sorry collection of old American paperbacks, dusty pictureless hardcovers (probably good stuff for a Spanish speaker) and Ernest Hemingway bootlegs), but there was a major new book store nearby where the selection was so small I was able to carefully examine every item in the store. Then, down the street, a tourist shop had a tiny stash of modern Cuban paperbacks in English, half of which I bought, including one of erotic short stories. A little further, an old pharmacy had a dream-inspiring selection of dual-language urban planning books about Havana (expensive, so I only got three). But I most treasure the thin volumes about Cuban law and political prisoners in the US that my new Cuban friends gave me.

- Frankfurt. I had a free morning on the way back from my visit-refuseniks-in-Russia trip and found a great selection of film books in a downtown department store, including a couple of Margarethe von Trotta screenplays and a lurid-looking book about the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I kicked myself when I found myself facing von Trotta at the Chicago Film Festival a few years ago without my book to show her.

- Sofia, Bulgaria. This was in 1973, back in the communist era, and the shop I went into had nothing with any appeal at all, but I did buy 12 copies of a fat 1974 page-a-day calendar for about 10 cents a piece. When I brought them to the post office to mail home, they wouldn't let me send them, so I kept one (which I still have) and handed out the others to my fellow would-be mailers. I still remember an art museum catalog I didn't buy there. But my favorite Sofia shopping memory is of a corner in a department store with cheap musical instruments, including a $12 plywood violin (a la Leonard Cohen's First We Take Manhattan).

- Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I hit a few bookstores there and ended up with a nice collection of architecture books, plus Volume II of the Cambodian constitution. The special thing about books in Cambodia is remembering how, among the groups the Khmer Rouge went after were people who wore glasses, the idea being that they must be "intellectuals" (who read too much), and therefore in need of reeducation - or worse.

- Istanbul. I didn't get to the official book market, but I found some neat old architecture magazines at a flea market up in a strait-side suburb, near one of my favorite mosques. (I had the best cheese crepe ever, at a stall in the market.) And a small, glitzy shop in the newest part of the city had a book of contemporary Turkish poetry, in English.

- Jerusalem. I picked up a copy of A.B. Yehoshua's A Late Divorce in a hole in the wall in the old city at the beginning of a trip and reading it forever shaped my perception of Jerusalem. I sought out a copy in Hebrew, thinking I might use it to relearn the language, but it didn't work. When I heard ABY speak at a friend's synagogue a few years ago, I brought both copies for him to autograph, but it seemed show-offy, so I didn't approach him.

- Amsterdam. In the winter of 1973, I found a market where people were selling bound sets of mimeographed lyrics of every artist imaginable. I bought the Dylan and Fairport Convention volumes, and for years I regretted not getting more.

- Bangkok. At the amulet market, I got a few used amulet collector magazines. I loved that someone had cut a picture out of the cover of one and had then carefully taped some pink paper over the hole to prevent further tearing.

So tonight I toast my brother and sister book-lovers around the world, and particularly those who didn't make it out of the Baghdad book market alive.

Here's a link with some pictures of what that market looked like before:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/middle_east_baghdad_book_market/html/1.stm

-- 1360

my pops is ok

2007-02-27T21:31:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, my father called his father "pop", but that never caught on with the next generation in our family.

Speaking to him I say "Dad". In the third person, I refer to him as "my father", unless I'm talking to my sisters, when I sometimes call him "Daddy". Over the least couple of decades, I've also started using the phrase "the old man" when talking about him. (I never say "my dad").

This past Saturday, about an hour before the old man had his spell (after 48 hours of tests, the doctors can't say if it was a ministroke or not), I posted on a Richard Buckner newsgroup about the Buckner show I'd seen the night before, mentioning that I hoped to transfer my recording of the show from minidisc to CD "soon" to offer it to the group.

Later that day, when someone was available to cover for me at the hospital, I went home for a couple of hours and found an email from another group member - a school teacher from deep in Cajun country - offering to do the transfer. The same guy did one for me before, and kind of complained about the quality of that recording (it was at an outdoor show on a very windy day, and the microphone I use is so good that it picked up a lot of wind noise), so I was surprised that he made the offer.

In writing back to say yes, I mentioned in passing that I was glad to get his help, as, with my father ailing, I'd be more distracted than usual for a while.

When I had another break on Sunday, there was another message from the guy, saying "Sorry about your pops". Apart from appreciating the sentiment, I really liked the wording, and I've started thinking of the old man as "my pops". It's probably just a matter of time before I use the phrase when I speak out loud, too.

Anyway, my pops is doing OK. He's home and feeling as good as he was feeling "before". Which is not particularly good, but we're all happy to rewind back to the previous week.

Plus, we now have him on a new anti-stroke medication, we have an updated baseline for his overall condition, and he'll have a few weeks of physical therapy (covered by insurance).

So apart from my "lost weekend", we're coming out ahead.

I'm also coming out ahead on the Buckner front. His show last week was billed as "with full band", but it ended up being a solo show. (I read elsewhere that a show with the band in Philadelphia a few days earlier was a disaster.) But I just got an email from Schubas (the club he played at) saying that Buckner and the club felt "terrible" that he didn't play as billed, so he's coming back, "with full band", in April. No charge for them what paid for last week's show.

- 9501

the phenomenon of spinsterhood

2007-02-27T15:24:00.000-06:00

"Matters which used to be easy and facilitated have now became very difficult and complicated...."

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=130650&version=1&template_id=47&parent_id=27

- 650

bread and roses

2007-02-25T13:27:00.000-06:00

This has been an atypical week. Last weekend was a rare couple of days off from daddy duty, and this weekend is far more on than usual.

Let's look at it from the perspective of what I ate and what I was entertained by.

Bread:

Lamb is one of my favorite foods. If I were about to be executed, I'd consider lamb chops as my last meal. But I can't remember the last time I had lamb before the past week. It could have been a few years - I just don't often get to the kind of restaurants that serve lamb any more.

I had lamb three times this past week:

1. Last Saturday, I had opera tickets from a vacationing client, and a luncheon was included. The featured dish was lamb, in small but delicious slices.

2. Last Sunday, with my sister in town for the weekend, I took her and my father to a casual but nice French restaurant. I ordered the lamb tagine, a North African style stew. The portion was big enough that I had half of it for leftovers on Tuesday, but I'm not counting that as one of the three lamb meals of the week.

3. Last night (yeah, I know, eight days a week), I had lamb chops. They were someone else's leftovers from Thursday. After a long awaited big-ticket real estate closing, the broker took me to dinner, at another French restaurant. (I have a feeling that this was the second French restaurant I've ever been to outside of France.) Despite her small appetite, she ordered the lamb chops and, after eating one, she insisted that I take the leftovers. So I reheated them last night, along with the various side dishes that she also left behind.

Roses:

I also had three musical events in the last week.

1. Dialogues of the Carmelites, by Poulenc, at the Lyric Opera. I'm not much of a fan of opera for the most part, my favorite moment usually being when the curtain raises and I first see the scenery. But this was a surprisingly enjoyable one, with a compelling story (set during the French Revolution, making for some interesting parallels with contemporary times) and lovely, distinctive music (when I wasn't focusing on the supertitles), written in the 1950s.

2. Waterson Carthy, at the Old Town School. British folk music, with a modern sensibility. This was my favorite kind of music in the mid-70s, until the time I woke up in the middle of the night in Springfield, Illinois, turned on the radio (left on a public broadcasting station that had a folk music show every Sunday afternoon), and discovered a parallel universe of music. There was a kind of underground music show on late Sunday (early Monday) after midnight, and I heard, one after another, Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon and Nick Lowe, each for the first time. Luckily, I had the sense to turn on the tape deck, or the next morning I'd've thought I dreamt it all up. I quickly started building my collection of the "new wave" genre (if it can be called new wave or a genre), and not long afterwards, I was doing occasional guest DJ spots for the show.

(Reminder to self: write about my three music renaissances, one of which was the above.)

Anyway, I went to Waterson Carthy mostly to hear the harsh but beautiful voice of Norma Waterson (and also the great percussive acoustic guitar sound of Martin Carthy, her husband), but Norma missed the show due to trouble with her titanium ankle. Nice show (I saw Sally Timms in the lobby during intermission, and I'll bet she was also disappointed at Norma's absence), but I decided to bolt after the first half, in order to get a prime spot for ....

3. Richard Buckner, at Schubas. He was billed as playing with a "full band", namely Six Parts Seven, who were also the support act. I was excited at this prospect, having always seen him in the past either solo or with just a second guitarist. I was surprised that 6/7's stuff is all instrumental (even though they announce what each song is about), but they had a beautiful sound that, it occurred to me, would be enhanced by a human voice and good lyrics -- soon to be supplied by Buckner.

As expected, Buckner came out alone. But the band never joined him, and this was never acknowledged, much less explained. It was a good show, with reworkings of the songs linked by looped instrumentals. Not way different than I've seen him do before, except for a higher proportion of recent material, and an especially quiet tone in the last few numbers.

* * * * *

Less than ten hours after Buckner left the stage, I was at home when I got a call from my father's caregiver. It looks like he had a TIA (transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke), but testing and monitoring continues at the hospital I took him to.

I'm nervous about him groping in the dark for the bathroom in an unfamiliar environment, and skeptical about how much attention he'd otherwise get from the staff, so I slept - surprisingly well, considering - in the chair next to his bed last night, and will do so again tonight. (He'll probably finish his tests tomorrow, after which I can take him home and sleep in a bed.)

It's nice that, after the Buckner show, I found that an album I'd been drooling at the thought of - the new Great Lake Swimmers - had just showed up on eMusic, even though I'd read a few days earlier on the band's website that the album wouldn't be released in the US until May.

I downloaded and burned it last night. Now it's the soundtrack for a weekend of driving through bad weather to take short breaks while my wonderful weekend crew keeps the old man company in the hospital.

-- 1360

Coming back to edit this post, I noticed it's the 60th. Lately I've been coming across profiles of interesting people who are hitting 60 this year - like Marianne Faithfull, John Waters, and a few more really cool ones whose names don't come to mind. I know that they're way, way more accomplished than me, but it still feels good to get reminded that "there's time".

here's what's wrong with this blog

2007-02-21T06:25:00.000-06:00

I've never been convinced by all the talk of how brilliant Lucinda Williams is. I never even really heard her - other than an unimpressive appearance on Saturday Night Live - until, early this century, I caught a few lines from "Out of Touch" that were played as a fade-out on the insipid Satellite Sisters radio show (which used to run at the time I'd be trying to convince myself to get out of bed and do the laundry).

I quickly tracked down the album it's on, Essence - which ended up having only a couple of songs I liked a lot - and I checked out some other albums of hers after that. I think I have them all now, although a few are still undigested by me. She's got at least one great song, "Side of the Road", as certified by Dave Schramm's having covered it and pretty much making it his own, and it could be there's more when I get around to them.

But for some reason, when her new album came out last week, I ran out and bought it. (Actually, the reason is that Best Buy had it for cheap, including a bonus disc. And Lucinda's never on eMusic, so there was no point in waiting for it there.) And I pulled off the plastic wrap and adhesive strip and played it in the car the same day. It's been there since, played multiple times, more from inertia (and my having removed most other CDs from the car in anticipation of my loaning it to my sister last weekend), but I've gotten familiar with it faster than I usually do.

It seems to be her usual stew of good and mediocre, with some interest added by more unique instrumentation, thanks to Hal Wilner's participation in the project. I've found a few of the cuts going through my head at various times. The track I'm currently fixated on is "Words". I'm in that phase where I love hearing it but I'm still working on getting exactly what she's singing about. (By coincidence (?), it's partly about the process of writing.) It might be a brilliant song, tho' it does have some clumsy bits. That song alone is almost enough to make me go to one of her shows here this spring, but I don't like the barn she's playing at. (I've read there's a demo version circulating, which I hope I can find.)

I've been reading the reviews, and I've been surprised at how negative they've been. I can't help but think that the people who were going nuts over her when she got big with Car Wheels are still doing a backlash thing. But I also think that maybe, at age 50+, she's just not connecting with the reviewers in their 30s. (I could go off here, theorizing about why, but that's not my point this morning.)

But one thing I've read a few times is that she's telling rather than showing, and she's not being specific enough about feelings and events. I have no comment on that. I don't listen to music with a critic's ear. I listen to enjoy the sound and to hear what the songwriter has to say (if anything).

And it just hit me, in the shower, that that's why I'm so dissatisfied with my recent posts here. Except for an occasional line or thought, they're lazy and shallow and boring. They report events, but they mostly don't go beyond that. (How was that other lawyer a jerk to me? It's sort of interesting, but I'd have to explain to you what a power of attorney is, and I don't think you'd want to hear that.) These posts serve a purpose for me, as I've previously mentioned. But they mostly don't make it as "writing".

"Write what you know." What I know is how it felt to drive my father up to his house and, the last two times, he asked me where we were. (Yes, it was dark, and he was riding on the other side of the car than usual, so he could get around the snow drifts. But I don't think that's the whole explanation.) And I could write about getting a call from the skin doctor yesterday, reporting that the old man's biopsy they took last week was positive. Or how his house is falling apart and I can't decide what to do about it. Or how I'm further behind than usual in finishing up tax returns for the trusts we manage this year because the IRS was late with the forms and there's suddenly a rush of real estate deals to whip into shape. Or how the traffic just stinks these days.

I don't want to write about those things. I want to deal with my phantom "real" life here. The life of art and people and travel and fun. ("I want to be strong, I want to laugh along, I want to belong to the living.") I know that there are some kernals of content here, if anyone's reading closely, which I somehow doubt. I just don't have the time or energy to do much better these days.

But now you know that I know what's wrong with this blog.

-- 1360/650

the human zoo

2007-02-20T20:29:00.000-06:00

I did a real estate closing today. It'll be memorable for a few of the people involved.

I had to deal with a real jerk attorney on the other side. A few days after he first came off as a jerk to me, he realized that he had messed things up for his client, and he had to come begging to me for help. He even said something like, "I'm sorry if I acted like a jerk, although I don't think I was". I couldn't help but answer, "Why would you think I thought that you acted like a jerk?"

Well, actually, that's what I wish I said, but I was pretty happy just to hear him grovel. And, in the course of serving my own client, I saved the guy's butt. In the end, he didn't come to the closing. He supposedly had a toothache, but I think he was afraid to face me.

One person who did come to the closing was the listing broker. When she walked in, I was stunned by her hair. It was long, straight, full, and the reddest red I've ever seen. Sort of a parody of Jane Asher back in the day. I couldn't stop looking at it for the whole closing.

Talking to her, it turned out that she had gone to the same high school as me. I stopped myself from asking her what year she'd graduated, because I wasn't in the mood to be 20 years older than everyone else in the room. Which I always assume I am.

But as I drove home, I became convinced that she was in the same year as me. I realized she was older than I'd taken her for; there was something artificial about her, and it wasn't just her hair. Her whole face seemed to be kind of a mask (coincidentally, there was a radio segment on in the car, about using masks to cover facial injuries on war casualties). And something about her overall presence seemed kind of familiar, plus her first name matched someone I vaguely recall. I'll have to check the old yearbooks when I'm at the old man's place tomorrow night.

* * * * *

On my trip to Milwaukee the weekend before last, I was sitting and talking with the friend I went with - someone I've known almost 50 years - and I realized she must be using botox on her forehead. No creases, no movement. Ugh.

* * * * *

After all the interesting posts I've recently started and not finished, I can't believe I'm posting something as lame as this. But I'm too tired to flesh it out. Or delete it. And I've gotta go program the remote control that came with my new cable box. The one I had to chase down after they shut off my service a month before the announced deadline for trading in the old boxes.

-- 1360

i was like

2007-02-16T14:41:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted for a while because (a) I went to four concerts last week and fell way behind in general, (b) I haven't been able to sign in without switching to the new blogger set-up and I was squeamish about doing that, (c) I've been getting ready for my sister's visit, which began yesterday and affords me a little time off from my normal dutiful agenda.

My imaginary conversation with you, my blogee, hasn't stopped, and maybe I'll follow through on some of those ideas over the next 48 hours or so.

For now, having just disembarked from my ride home on the CTA (my sister has my car), I have to recover from sitting behind some girl who spent the whole trip on the phone, using the phrase "I was like" multiple times per minute.

My instinct was to loudly sing one of the songs that come to mind when I have reason to summon up a tune (as opposed to listening to whatever is already running through my head). These are Leonard Cohen's The Sisters of Mercy and Roger Miller's Do Wacka Do. But I would have come off as one of the crazies who live on the train, rather than the social critic I am. So I was like just quietly muttering and stewing.

Back in the days when I regularly rode public transportation, I hated hearing the sound of cymbals bleeding out of everyone's Walkmans. I looked forward to the day that they all went deaf and had to stop listening. (I knew it would get worse before it got better.) But the use of cell phones in contained environments is far worse.

-- 1360

an open letter to a friend who doesn't know about this blog, and never will

2007-02-07T06:30:00.000-06:00

So my friend I'm going to Milwaukee with this Saturday set up something for early Saturday evening and I'm stuck with arrangements to pay someone to be with my father for a few more hours than I'll need. Maybe I'll go to a movie or something. I don't like to jerk people around, so I'm not going to take those hours from the helper. And I'll get a kick out of telling my friend I need to be back by 5.

Well my friend also wants to leave later in the morning so she can maintain her usual Saturday morning routine and go get a free breakfast at the car dealership where her husband-who-can't-keep-a-job bought his expensive luxury-car-so-he-can-feel-successful-anyway. My friend is always looking for something free, and she's so angry at her husband for having bought the car and not getting rid of it when she tells him to (which she often does) that she especially wants to get his money's worth, dammit, by schnorring up a free breakfast every week. I'm sure she sticks extra bagels in her pocket and chokes them down later in the day. Or saves them for her Sunday breakfast.

I haven't decided how to deal with this. My first thought was offering to buy her the same breakfast in Milwaukee so we can get out of town at a time that allows us to do something up there besides a hit and run on the art museum (like a used record store...), but I don't really want to stoke her hunger for freebies. (Actually, I've already sent her an email suggesting we have brunch after we get there, but I didn't offer to pay. And I won't!)

(I'm not that good at confrontation. As you may know if you've wronged me and have not been called on it.) (You know who you are....)

IIRC, the last time we went to that museum together, I bought a membership and got her in for free. I already decided I wouldn't join this time, since I can't get up there often enough to break even. She'll probably be disappointed at having to pay her own admission fee. (Hahahahahaha! Vengeance is mine!)

I guess this is what I get for asking her in the first place and not going alone. OTOH, at least I'll get to hear her bitch about her husband and her mother-in-law for an hour and a half each way. And maybe socializing will help immunize me from the kind of alzheimer's that is supposedly associated with social isolation.

BTW, this is meant to be kind of funny. Even though I mean it all. And it's a nice distraction, falling in the middle of this frigid, snowy cancer treatment week.

And I just noticed that this isn't in the form of an open letter, but I like the title, so I'll leave it alone. (Maybe I'll add an open letter later.)

-- 1360

ceci n'est pas un diary

2007-02-04T20:06:00.000-06:00

I've told a few more people about this blog recently, and it's probably not unrelated that I've thrown out three or four first drafts in the last couple of weeks. Even though, whenever I first finish a post, I think, gee, that's interesting and well written, after the echo dies down I get the sense that maybe I should put a little more effort into this endeavor.

Well, sorry, I just don't have the time or energy for that. Although I like knowing that these pieces are read at least occasionally by at least a few people, I do it mostly for myself - to get things out of my system, to experience the feeling/illusion that I'm communicating with another human being, to create a partial record of what I'm thinking these days. It'll be fun (?) to reread this blog after this phase of my life is over. It'd be fun to go back and reread all the blog posts I'd've written at earlier times and see who I was when I wrote them. But, alas, there weren't no blog back then, so I'll have to piece it together with the scraps and notes I've kept. Hmm, maybe I can do a retroactive blog....

I went to a concert last night - Bottomless Pit, f/k/a Silkworm before their drummer was killed with two other local musicians in a vehicular homicide at an intersection I pass through often. Like this morning, picking up lox and bagels for the old man. (Actually, the would-be suicide who killed them hasn't gone to trial yet.) I never paid attention to Silkworm when they existed, but the Pit opened at a Jason Molina show I went to about a year ago, and I was very impressed. I still haven't heard much Silkworm - just an EP I bought a month or two ago, which includes a charming live version of Dylan's Spanish Harlem Incident, sung by the dead guy. All I remembered from the first Pit show was that they were extremely loud, and I got it in my head that they were something like Blue Cheer, but I realized last night that they were more like Jefferson Airplane, at least in their great jangly guitar work. (They really weren't at all like either of those bands.)

This was my first show in a long time, and it took some effort to do it. Fortunately, I had bought a ticket already, or the below-zero weather would have convinced me not to go. But the moment I walked into the Empty Bottle, with two sweaters but a light jacket (so I wouldn't get too hot in the club), I felt great. The music was just starting, there was a Bottomless Pit CD-R for sale at the merch table, and my favorite pole was available for leaning on.

I realize that getting out to these shows is an effective (if temporary) antidote to the horrifying spectre of my father's accellerating decline. I'm ticketed for two more shows this week - Peter Himmelman at the Abbey Pub on Tuesday, and James McMurtry at the Old Town School on Friday. Plus, I've arranged my father's caregiver's nights off this week so I can also go to Rhett Miller at the Chicago History Museum on Wednesday (unless I decide that I need time to relax a bit). The latter is an odd venue, but I've been to another show there, and it was fine. And it's a couple of blocks from my apartment.

There's more shows in the coming weeks, too, including one night when I'll go to Waterson: Carthy at the OTS and then hie on over to Schuba's for Richard Buckner, my first show seeing him with a full band. And next Saturday, I'm going with a friend for a day trip to Milwaukee for a big Francis Bacon exhibit at the art museum. I feel a bit guilty about leaving the old man with hired help more than I've done in the past, but I know that in the coming months I'm going to need the emotional sustenance that these cultural pursuits give me.

-- 1360

enough with the skirts (for now)

2007-01-31T20:08:00.000-06:00

I made it through all-skirt January. Luckily the super-cold weather waited for me.

The project was worthwhile, although I never got around to excavating large closet areas for skirts and dresses that have not been worn for years. But I think that when I do go through those accumulations (which I plan to do "soon"), I'll be able to let go of a lot of things that I just don't want to wear again and that have no archival value. Like suits (despite some of them being of gorgeous fabrics) and bland, bland skirts (i.e., dull fabrics, boring shapes).

I'm considering starting up a different clothing scheme - maybe a minimum number of skirts per week, or a minimum number of things I haven't worn for a long time but still purport to like enough to keep - but I'm not going to make any decisions at least until after the weekend.

-- 1360

my day, my life, my new magazines

2007-01-25T21:16:00.000-06:00

I like Thursdays. It's the only weekday on which I don't have a standing obligation to do something early in the morning. I drive the old man to an exercise class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and I do personal training on Tuesdays. Not every Thursday brings something special, but at least it's a possibility.

Last Thursday I took the day off, as kind of a pre-birthday treat. I'd slept at my father's house, but after his helper arrived, I made a quick stop at the dentist and then chose from several appealing cafes to relax and contemplate how to best use the coming day and the coming year. I knew that the Kopi Cafe was a good choice when, as I walked in, they had just started playing Joni Mitchell's Hejira album. I haven't really heard it much after writing a review for it when I was in law school, and it was perfect, thematically and soundwise, for my mood that day. And I knew it was time to leave when they started playing one of Elton John's middle-period albums.

Today I didn't have the luxury of a day off, but I started it by acting on a plan I'd concocted with friends to occasionally meet for an early coffee. I had court business, and there was plenty of time before the courthouse opened, so I walked the mile round trip to our meeting place despite the cold weather, and I enjoyed catching up over tea and a chocolate scone (which one of my friends, an English woman who's been here for over 30 years, hastened to tell me wasn't authentic. I thought it was quite good for a Mexican bakery's version of an American-style scone).

It's always fun to wander the streets of downtown Chicago before heading back to the office. The sky was clear, and the buildings were beautiful. And maybe it's because the clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court wants to run for mayor, but everyone at the courthouse was atypically pleasant and, in one instance, downright accomodating.

The real treat was stopping off at Border's between stops. I had hopes for finding some bargain-priced 2007 calendars, but they were all gone. (I'll check this weekend at the art museums.) I had some discounts and credits coming, so I did one of my occasional magazine binges. I didn't get my favorite - a British textile arts magazine, just too expensive at $20 -but I got:

- The February issue of Harp, for the Lucinda Williams articles that were raved about on one of my music bulletin boards

- The January/February issue of Foreign Policy, for the cover story "Was Castro Good for Cuba?" I'm excited that the decline of the Bush administration may result in a loosening of the vise that makes it so difficult to go back to Havana. (Hi, T!)

- The January/February issue of Film Comment, for pages and pages of 10-best-of-2006 lists

- The Winter issue of Film Quarterly, for some interesting-looking articles about film analysis and criticism. I like reading about film and I want to know why. (Theory: I have no one to talk to about this stuff, and reading what someone else has written about it is a substitute for a conversation.)

- The January/February issue of Rock n Reel, a new British magazine about "roots, rock, blues and beyond". Shane MacGowan on the cover, an appealing CD attached - here's hoping it lives up to the promise - and here's hoping that, at $9.99 a pop, it doesn't

- The Winter issue of Objekt, a design magazine I've noticed but have never bought before. Istanbul (where I was eight years ago today) on the cover, and it'll either inspire or distract me

- A women's fitness magazine that looks like the comprehensive reference I'm looking for to enhance my training sessions.

The phrase "imitation of life" comes to mind. Thank goodness the concert scene is heating up again. (Just as my father's medical appointment scene heats up, too.)

-- 9501

... and i don't care ...

2007-01-24T21:20:00.000-06:00

Sitting here watching TV, I just saw a commercial I've seen before. It's one of the phone companies (don't remember which) where they're claiming "fewer dropped calls" (don't remember if this was the company that actually uses that phrase or if they were making the same point with different words).

A teenage boy is nervously talking to his girlfriend's father, trying to gain his favor, calling him Jim, Jimbo, the Jimster. The picture shows the father smiling and responding, but the phone service is crappy and the kid can't hear him and thinks he offended the father by crossing some line into bad taste.

I've seen that commercial before, and when the kid was riffing on the father's name, he also started singing "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care", but that phrase was dropped when I saw the ad just now.

The song that that line is from is a "happy slave" song (the next line being "The massah's gone away"). (I see that Wikipedia calls it a "blackface minstrel" song.) I assume that complaints were made for using a slave song in a television commercial. People were offended.

You can't tell people not to be offended by what offends them. Maybe they're over-sensitive or humorless. They may be wrong to be offended, but if that's what they feel, then that's what they feel. I guess a holocaust song would offend me. Is there a difference here?

I grew up occasionally hearing slave songs (but not nazi songs). I think we were even taught them at school, including the Jimmy song. I thought the commercial's use of the Jimmy-crack-corn line was funny in a goofy way. I didn't think about where it came from when I heard it in the ad before.

I don't think I'm wrong for thinking it was funny. I can't see everything from every possible perspective and anticipate that someone might be offended by any particular thing. If someone's offended, it's their job to speak up. And if an advertiser wants to sell its product, it has to listen.

(A few years ago, a grocery store had a dumb TV ad, in which human faces were superimposed on different vegetables, and the resulting beings sang about food and shopping. An eggplant had the face of a black woman, and it turned out that eggplants have some kind of racist connotation, so they had to drop the bit.)

I also don't think they were wrong to cut the line from the phone ad. It's pretty gross when you think about it. It's not about lynching, and it doesn't glorify slavery, but does it somehow imply that it's somehow OK? Does a lack of malice excuse it?

I hate that we can't say certain things that are funny. And I hate that this country is still so screwed up about race. And I hate that we can affort to make wars but we can't afford to educate people, which I suspect is the only way get past the repercussions of slavery once and for all.

(Although there seems to be a basic human need to feel superior to some other group of people, whether it's the French with Arabs, the Australians with Aborigines, the light-skinned Cubans with dark-skinned Cubans, etc.)

I'm not sure if I've made any sense here. But I thought it was interesting that they dropped that line from the commercial. I'm going to google to see if anyone else is talking about it.

-- 1360

Next morning:

Just found these:
http://cbs13.com/national/local_story_352232207.html
and
http://www.freedomlist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=178118

And I finally figured out where else I've heard the "don't care" line: God Save the Queen, by the Sex Pistols.

-- 650

cool people stay young forever

2007-01-22T19:13:00.000-06:00

At least that's what Christian McBride, a jazz bassist, said on a radio essay tonight on NPR. Link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6946089 He's talking about the calm kind of cool more than the hip kind of cool, but maybe they're pretty much the same thing.

I've been thinking about the different ways to get old, having just passed another anniversary of my birth.

One extreme is the Judi Dench character in Notes On a Scandal (although she had some other pathologies going on, too) - pinched, humorless, etc. Or that 66-year-old Michigan Supreme Court justice whom her 65-year-old male brother on the bench described as a sad, angry old woman (although the guy who said that also seems to be sad and angry and old).

Another extreme is to pursue eternal youth, through cosmetic surgery, fanatical gym-going, giving up the joys of eating, etc. I'm surrounded by people like that. At the office, for my birthday, my boss brought in one brownie for the four of us to share. To be honest, when I was asked what I wanted, that's what I told him, as the two men in the office generally won't eat what they consider "crap", and I didn't want to entertain them with the spectacle of my chowing down as they watched. Plus, I'm not responsible around sweets, so I knew I'd be better off without the remains of a whole cake. So, in my typical passive aggressive manner, I ate the tiniest sliver of the brownie at our little party, and more than half of that one piece was left over.

I haven't been a David Byrne fan for a long time now. I enjoyed the first two Talking Heads albums when I was living in Springfield, Illinois for a few years after law school. "My building has every convenience. It's going to make like easy for me" was right on the mark. More recently, I've mostly found him to be rather irritating (which says more about me than about him) - but I read an interesting profile of him in the New York Times last week. They described his various pending projects, but what I enjoyed most was reading how "Any concert-goer in NYC is apt to spot him regularly, hanging out near the back of the room, generally without an entourage.... 'He'll just ride his bike to a venue, go in, check out the band and ride home.'"

Still quoting the article: "Mr. Byrne doesn't seem to think there's anything particularly remarkable about it. 'Sure, I go out a lot,' he said. 'I'm in New York, and I'm a music fan. But sometimes I go to these shows and I go, Where are my peers, you know? Where are the musicians from my generation, or the generation after mine? Don't they go out to hear music? Do they just stay home? Are they doing drugs? What's going on? Or maybe they're just not interested anymore. They're watching Desperate Housewives.'"

Cool. But most helpful to me, sentimental archivist that I am, is his explanation of why he doesn't deal with the other Heads these days. "I can't go to that place anymore. Progress and evolution are more important, at any cost."

Carpe diem. Seize the day.

-- 1360

woody v. dalai

2007-01-13T13:04:00.000-06:00

I had today all planned out. This is the last weekend of a show at a newish art museum in downtown Chicago, of art inspired by the Dalai Lama.

I've been interested in the Dalai Lama ever since the first boy I had a crush on did an oral book report on a book about him, back in the late 50s. I don't pretend to know much about Buddhism, but some of the basics have been of great help and comfort to me in difficult times. And a few of the most memorable moments of my life - I could use the word "awesome" here - have occurred at Buddhist sites in Southeast Asia.

This art exhibit is one that previously was shown in New York City - Staten Island, to be exact - and I remember feeling sorry that I wouldn't be able to see it, so I was excited to see that it was here. I also thought I'd stop in at another place to see a show of American Indian art. And I'd comb through some stores for end-of-the-season bargains. Maybe stop somewhere for an expresso and a scone.

But then, while my laundry was happening downstairs a little before 7 this morning, I browsed through the TV listings online and noticed that Celebrity, a Woody Allen film I'd somehow never gotten around to seeing, was on IFC in a few hours.

I came late to Woody, not usually having the patience for straight comedy. Back in my last year of law school, to be sociable, I went along with some friends (hi, RLW!) to see a new film they were excited about. It was Annie Hall.

It's funny that my primary film education occurred when I was in law school. I was in a small college town, so it was easy to get around and there were multiple venues where geeky people screened the films that they wanted to see and/or show to their friends. I remember telling people that my priorities were, in descending order, seeing the movies I was interested in, getting enough sleep, and studying. I remember that I saw seven films the week before second semester finals.

I recall the first film I saw down there - O Lucky Man, which I probably picked for the musical connection, namely Alan Price serving as a sort of Greek chorus for the story. And I remember and summoning up the energy and courage to go out alone into the cold that night, wearing, for the first time, the Irish fisherman's sweater I'd bought in County Donegal three years earlier, and being just blown away by both the film and the experience of seeing it, being among other film lovers, walking home in the dark mulling over what I'd just seen.

So after I first got into Woody Allen - this spring will be the 30-year anniversary of that event - I kept track of when his new works would be released, and I'd usually go see them the first weekend they were out. But somehow, when he got back into what I would call "caper" films, I drifted off, and I started missing them until they showed up on TV - or missing them completely. I'd still watch his "middle period" stuff almost any time it showed up on TV - I'd tell myself I'd just remind myself of the film's tone, and how it got going, and I'd get sucked in after the first few minutes. But I guess I've missed more of his recent films than I realized.

Nevertheless, this morning I was in the mood to give Celebrity a try, and I realized soon after it started that there was more for me in that film than there would be in the Dalai Lama art show. Of course, I could do both, but getting absorbed in a decent Woody film took away all my momentum for going out, walking around and looking around. It was jarring at first to watch Kenneth Branaugh play the Woody role, using the same mannerisms and inflections, but something resonated in the film for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So, having decided to stay in until I've got to go up to the old man's place this evening, I started going through some old VHS tapes, looking for four hours I could record over so I can tape the start of the new season of 24. I found a few. One of the tapes had two hours of the 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame "induction ceremony", followed by a couple of films I haven't watched but can live without, at least until I'm tempted to record them again.

I thought I'd take a look at the R'n'R show, so I put the tape on in the bedroom while I did a little excavating through the debris. It was actually quite absorbing, from the opener of Isaac Hayes doing Shaft with a mini-orchestra, to Brenda Lee. (I'm on a break now, but soon I'll go back to watch the grand finale.) But I still can't help but think that John Lydon had it right when he declined to accept the induction of the Sex Pistols and wrote a nasty letter saying what a bunch of crap it all is.

One good thing about watching things on tape is fast forwarding through the commercials. Another good thing, if the tape is old enough, is watching the commercials, some of which have aged in an entertaining way. I also like the promo spots for the evening news, complete with weather-related teasers.

I don't often use the VCR in the bedroom, so the batteries in the remote control are dead. Or at least they were when I last tried to use it. Its current whereabouts are unknown, but the batteries are probably still dead. I just hope that they haven't leaked into the innards of the remote and ruined it.

So I had to get up and walk over to the set to run the FF. On one of those little trips, my eyes fell on a few books that were propped up against the TV.

One of the books is called "Buddhist Art and Architecture". I'm quite sure it's got the real thing in it, rather than westerners' impressions of a contemporary Buddhist icon. (One of the pieces at the show I'm missing - a 40-foot inflatable reclining Buddha with the artist's face - was shown at a gallery here a few years ago.) I guess I'll go take a look through the book now.

- 1360

n.b. In legal writing, we shorten "versus" to "v." rather than "vs."

frybread, with swedish lemonade

2007-01-07T18:09:00.000-06:00

One of relatively few TV shows I make a special effort to see is CBS Sunday Morning, which has a lot of interesting segments but mostly avoids the obnoxious "happy talk" that is a key ingredient of most morning shows. (Although there's a pattern in tone some reporters take that I find a little annoying.) Somehow, even topics that I would think are of no interest to me are covered in an appealing manner.

This morning they had a segment about Kit Carson and his involvement with various travesties perpetrated on American Indians in the century before last, including the Long Walk of the Navajos to what amounted to a concentration camp. In the piece someone talked about frybread, described as the most popular food among Indians. (BTW, I've read that they prefer to be called American Indians rather than Native Americans, a term which is considered to be the product of liberal guilt.)

I don't believe I've never had frybread, but the first thing I always think of when I hear about it is that sweet guy, a character in the film Smoke Signals, talking about how much he loved his mother's frybread (or was it his grandmother's).

The person who mentioned frybread described its origin, which was the Indians' concocting it from their meager allotment of foodstuffs, which included flour and salt. This combination was fried in what she referred to as "animal fat". The salt made me think of those fresh-baked pretzels you can buy in malls. (On the Wikipedia site, they mention flour and lard, but not salt.)

What got me was how something that was created by oppressed people with minimal resources under dire circumstances became an enduring favorite of those people. They took what was given to them and they made it their own. As in, when God gives you a lemon, make lemonade. (But here, they didn't just make lemonade, they invented it.)

I always appreciate being reminded that a bad thing sometimes leads to or turns into a good thing. And I lived it yet again on a small scale this afternoon.

On one of my little mental breaks at work last week, I took a look at the Reckless Records website. Noticing a search feature, I plugged in the name Kjellvander. Christian Kjellvander is a Swedish singer-songwriter a friend recently turned me on to. He's at the folk side of the rock spectrum, with a major twang. (He's so great that I'd put Sweden at the top of my travel list if I could be assured I could get to a show of his there. But I think I'm more likely to see him here in Chicago.)

To my surprise, the Reckless search resulted in a hit: one of his albums was available at both Reckless locations - Songs From a Two-Room Chapel - an import, and for the amazing price of $4.99! I checked again on Friday, and they were both still there.

I wanted to go pick it up during the week, but somehow the time and the energy never converged, so I looked forward to stopping at one of the branches on the way home from my father's this afternoon. I went to the one in Bucktown, as the clerks are nicer there, and dove straight through the Rock "Ke-Ko" bin. It wasn't there!!!

I went to the counter, and a clerk looked it up and told me: (a) they had sold their copy earlier today (wow!), (b) the Lakeview store still had one (great!), and (c) it was in the soul section (yikes!). He called the other store and asked them to hold it for me. I had a bad feeling as I drove over there. It's a tough neighborhood to park in, and actually getting the CD seemed too good to be true.

I got to the second store (having parked my car without damaging its newly rehabilitated spendor), stepped up the counter, and they didn't know what I was talking about. (Is that the power of negative thinking?) So I headed over to the soul section, and, eureka, one of the last covers in the bin was what I wanted. I browsed around the store some more, finding quite a few of the things I wanted, for good used prices. (For once I had a list, which I had made the night before while browsing around some online best-of-2006 lists.) And I picked a couple of new things I wanted to hear enough to pay a few bucks extra for.

While I was looking around, I heard a clerk tell someone he had $135 worth of stuff and did he know that there was 10% off once you hit $150. I didn't even try to reach that amount. I'm trying not to buy stuff that's not really special to me, or that is readily downloadable, and by then I was in the mood to get out of there anyway.

I did a rough total before I went to pay, and it was around $75.00. It took the guy about five minutes to get the discs from the shelves behind the counter, and then he said he had to go to the back. While I waited, I noticed that they had the John Cassavetes 8-DVD box - which I've been wanting for quite a while - for the pretty fair price of $79.99. Hey, that'd get me over $150!

When the clerk returned, he said there was one disc he couldn't find. And he held up the cover of the Christian Kjellvander disc I'd come for. What kind of god allows something like this to happen? I felt like walking out immediately. I told him that that was the only thing I really wanted in the whole pile. That wasn't exactly true, but I hoped that a bit of drama would motivate him to keep looking.

I mentioned how the other store had called and asked them to hold the disc for me. He looked and looked and looked (there's a lot of counter space in the store). I asked him to show the cover to the other clerks and see if anyone remembered getting a call about it. Someone did. And there it was! Whew!!!

Walking out of the store, thrilled to have gotten the Cassavetes box for the net price of $64.00 (mentally applying the entire 10% discount to that item), I thought about how, if the first store had had the record I came for, I wouldn't have found all the other stuff I got at this one. I'm sure I would have found something interesting at the first store, but I can't believe I would have done as well there.

And I'm very happy for Christian Kjellvander that he has at least one other fan in Chicago. (Or was someone just taking a chance on some unknown blue-eyed soul?) (BTW, the disc I got came with a second disc - a single that I played a couple of times in the car on the way home. Did the other guy get two discs, too?)

Now I'm going to check my cookbooks for a lardless frybread recipe.

-- 1360

a: that's NOT funny!!!

2007-01-04T19:02:00.000-06:00

I try to bunch up my suburban errands into a single mid-day break from work about once a week, and while I'm out, I often listen to a bit of Fresh Air, the National Public Radio interview program. (Even though I'm annoyed at our local NPR station for announcing a format change right after a pledge drive - that I didn't contribute to anyway - I'm excited that they're going to start rerunning Fresh Air in the evening, when I can consider listening to it.)

Today at lunchtime I went out to do some banking and grocery shopping for my father, and en route I turned on the radio and found that the Fresh Air guest was Sasha (oops: he spells it Sacha) Baron Cohen, the guy who made the Borat movie. To me, he's the guy who made the Ali G TV series, but Borat is what he's best and most currently known for, of course. (I haven't seen Borat, but I'll watch it when it hits cable.)

He and Terry Gross, the interviewer, were discussing Borat's song "Throw the Jew Down the Well", which, as they mentioned, is not in the film but, rather, is a segment from the TV show. I've seen that bit a few times and, at least the first time or two, it made me scream with laughter. The song itself is funny, as is the context: Borat, supposedly a visitor from Khazakhstan, announces it to an audience of middle-aged white people in some western state as a popular song from his country, and he turns it into a sing-along, with the audience quickly picking up the words and clapping along.

I imagine that there is an intellectual explanation for why that's funny. I could probably make a little list of reasons. But to me the explanation is just that it IS funny. (Horrifying and funny.) I guess there are contexts where I wouldn't find it at all funny, but on that TV show, it was side-splitting, at least to me.

Another line I remember from the show was by the Ali G character. He plays the obnoxious would-be hip-hop East Asian host of a British TV show for young people and, until he became known, he got real interviews with people like Ralph Nader, Boutros Boutros-Ghali (who he introduced as Boutros Boutros Boutros Ghali), various American politicians and other public figures, supposedly to explain current topics and issues to Ali G's young audience. The interview subjects usually end up looking as ridiculous as Ali G.

In the bit I remember, Ali G says something so ridiculous that he is berated by the interviewee, to whom Ali G responds, "Is it because I is black?" (Yes, that's how he says it.) And he so obviously isn't black, much as he would like to be. I think something about the earnest tone in which he says it was what really clinched it for me.

(Sorry. I can't tell jokes, and I can't describe bits of movies and TV shows.)

There's also a very funny bit in which Andy Rooney kicks Ali G out of his office. (AZ: have you seen that?) (Come to think of it, the I-is-black line may be from the Andy Rooney segment.)

Anyway, the Fresh Air interview with Sasha (which I heard several bits and pieces of as I made my rounds) was super-interesting, in part because it was so bizarre to hear this soft-spoken British guy discussing the film, the character, the public reaction to the film, what it all means, his career, his Jewish background, and then occasionally switching to the Borat voice.

Often when I hear bits of a good Fresh Air interview, I resolve to listen to the whole thing online, and this is the first time I think I'll actually doing it.

(After that, I'll try to get to the Leonard Cohen interview they replayed on Xmas. I especially want to hear his full description of the decline of his grandfather from an influential rabbi to a senile smearer of feces.) (Please, God, don't let it come to that.)

I highly recommend finding the Fresh Air website and listening to the Sasha interview. And the Leonard one. Think Cohen.

Roughing out this post in my head as I drove home tonight, I recalled another piece of deeply offensive humor that broke me up in a major way. In the mid 80s I lived in Washington DC for about a year and a half. I shared a house with a woman who happened to be one of two I've known who each believed herself to be the only Jewish girl ever to be named in honor of Paul Robeson. Her previous roommate had left so he could travel leisurely through Asia (I still want to go to Burma based on the slides he brought back). After I'd been in the house for some time, his brothers came to stay with us for an extended visit. They were talented musicians, on a national tour, handsome, charming, funny and a real pleasure to hang out with.

I don't remember the topic, but in some conversation, I happened to mention that I thought the phrase "Shut up" was just about the funniest I knew, and that it got funnier the more you thought about it. One of the guys said he knew a funnier phrase: "Shut up, nigger". I imagine I was stunned for a moment, but, to our little group of Jewish liberal types, it was just hysterical at the time. (Horrifying and hysterical.) So, of course, for the rest of their stay, that phrase was used over and over in countless variations and contexts.

And now, 20 years later, I wonder if any of the others remember it. Maybe it came back to them hearing about Michael Richards last month. I wonder if the brother would think of our catch phrase now, or if he'd say it aloud, or if we'd allow ourselves to laugh as hard. I think it'd be just as funny as before. But we can't say stuff like that these days. Assholes can get away with all sorts of horrible deeds, but certain words cannot be spoken.

(I'm stifling the urge to try to explain all this. And I'd rather watch TV anyway.)

- 1360

nw: navy marithe + francois girbaud dress, a sort of poor girl's (make that middle-class girl's) comme des garcons. asymmetric, with some odd angles. fun to wear!

q: how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

it's the first annual all-skirt january

2007-01-03T21:24:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, girls weren't allowed to wear pants in certain places. In high school, a few rebellious girls got sent home for wearing pants to school. (But they changed the rules right after I graduated.) And in the job I had between high school and college, shelving library books for $1.40 an hour, kneeling and bending all day, they refused my request to be allowed to wear pants. I wasn't asking to wear "dungerees" or anything sloppy. But the answer was a resolute "no".

Maybe as a reaction to that, nowadays I almost always wear pants and, as I think I've mentioned here before, I've descended into mostly wearing black jeans, even to the office (but not to court - I don't want to be cited with contempt). Everything else seems pretentious and pointless. I don't really mind (most) other people dressing well - it's just not for me.

But I am very interested in fashion, and over the years I've collected some wonderful pieces. This fact was brought home to me when I went through a show-and-tell for an artist friend who visited me for a few days last November.

So, in sort of an experiment - and a dare to myself - I resolved to wear only skirts and dresses to work this month. I mentioned it to my partners at our little holiday party, just to make sure I couldn't back out of it.

Maybe it'll help me feel better about myself. Maybe it'll help me weed through the stuff to keep and the stuff to get rid of. Maybe it'll complement the personal training sessions I just started. (BTW, my trainer looks exactly like Joanna Newsom.)

So last weekend I took some time and gathered up all the slips and tights I've hoarded, unused, for years, and went through part of one closet to pull out wearable dresses, skirts and appropriate tops. I will try not to cheat by just throwing on a plain black skirt, one of the tops I usually wear with jeans and my favorite shapeless, oversize black jacket.

Yesterday was day one. I wore a skirt and top by an avant garde French designer (I'll insert the name here later) - an outfit that I liked so much in a store last year that I paid full price for it (in the four figures, including pants in the same series). When I arrived at my father's house yesterday morning to take him to his exercise class, I got a good reaction from the woman who stays with him, and that made me feel good.

(When we made our usual stop for coffee en route to exercise, I quickly realized that, without the jeans pockets I usually keep a wallet, phone, keys and walking-around money in, I'd have to gather up some purses, too. No problem - I've accumulated an ample supply of ones I like.)

Today I wore a great two-piece dress by Issey Miyake, my favorite designer. It was a lucky find at the late Marshall Fields' a few years ago - absolutely wonderful, and reduced to about 20% of its original price to boot. (The kind of shopping experience of which dreams are made.) Favorable comments from our secretary, and - amazingly - even from my boss, who is perhaps the most critical man on the face of the earth. (I've got a theory that I'm taking the place of the younger sister he never had.)

Tonight I went through a closet here at my father's house, and I set aside a few more dresses for the next couple of days that I go straight to work from here.

Both here and at home I also found things I won't even try on, either because they're just not me anymore (if they ever were) or that I know there's no way they'll fit me (if they ever did). That stuff will be given away ASAP. I promise you.

The one thing I'm hopeless with is shoes. Fortunately, the way I live makes it possible to get away with clunky flats. And I know there are a few pairs of interesting boots somewhere in the various places I stow stuff. Like this really, really cool green pair I got at an outlet store in Berlin a few years ago.

The adjustment has been much easier than I expected. I often think, when I see someone dressed in an appealing manner, that such people perform a public service by making the world more interesting. So I guess, for this short period of time, I will make the world a slightly better place in this tiny way.

But even more important is how this is shaking things up, getting me out of my comfort zone, making me feel different in my own skin.

(This morning, after starting this post at home - while I was getting dressed, as a matter of fact -I drove out of the garage, and for once the radio was on instead of the CD player, and what should come on first thing but The Staples Singers, singing the line "If you don't respect yourself ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot". Hmmm.)

We'll see how the month progresses. Maybe I'll even extend the program into February. Or weekends. For now, at least I don't have to do a jeans load every week.

-- 9501

new year's eve soundtrack

2006-12-31T19:19:00.000-06:00

I took the old man to a production of The Mikado this afternoon. He's pretty familiar with Gilbert & Sullivan's stuff, so it was great to see him fully engaged in the production. And for once, he wasn't the oldest and slowest person in the room.

Afterwards, I took him to Old Country Buffet for dinner. We usually go to one in the northern suburbs, but this time we went to one on the north side of Chicago (it was my first time there), and it was fun to find that they carried some different, "urban" foods. I especially liked the smothered chicken, and I have a feeling that the collard greens have some nutrients I don't get up in Niles. I also suspecct that I was the only one in the room to recognize The Turtles doing "You Showed Me" through the din.

On the ride home, I played the radio, as I haven't yet restocked the car with CDs after getting it back from the body shop yesterday. A tune came on that I thought sounded like the Decemberists, who I gave up on some time ago. But, yes, it was them, and it sounded good enough for me to plan to get it. And I think I'll get the new Damien Rice, a piece of which just came up in a TV promo for - I think - CSI. Sometimes I'm in the mood for overwrought, and Damien is good at that. Neither of these is on eMusic, so I feel a visit to a record store coming on. Too bad Tower's gone - I never got too much there, but it was nice to hit the place occasionally.

It's hard to believe it's almost 2007. All that hoopla over 2000 seems a lot more recent than that. I liked the international TV coverage that some of the networks had on 12/31/99. I recorded all 24 hours of one network at home and all of another at my father's house (Have I watched them? Be nice! Don't ask! Occasionally the VHS cassettes float to the top. I wanted to take a couple with me to watch here at my father's today but I didn't leave myself enough time to find 'em).

I've got an A/B switch hooked up at my apartment, so, eight years ago tonight, I watched a third network's coverage on and off when I got home from work. I remember (and, consistent with my pathology, wish I had a recording of) a piece that came from a refugee camp in Eritrea. It was just a reporter in the night, a camera operator (presumably), and a few wretched souls standing around. As the reporter said, New Year's and 2000 and all that crapola meant nothing to the people in the camp, most of whom were asleep as midnight approached. Are some the same people still living in that camp?

I don't have any Eritrean music here at my father's house, but there's something in the bedroom by their neighbor, Aster Aweke. Maybe I'll play it after the old man turns in, before I head out to a nearby party.

TTYNY

-- 9501

i read two books over xmas!

2006-12-27T06:29:00.000-06:00

Saturday morning, I decided it was unlikely I could accomplish much at home before I headed off for a three-night stand at my father's house, so I thought I'd take a walk and hit the Museum of Contemporary Art before its much-publicized design show closes.

I brought a Border's coupon, too, even though I rarely use them. I go to the store, full of hope that I'll find a book or magazine that'll change my life (their CD and DVD selection is so erratic and overpriced that I never expect to find any of those), and then there's nothing. Well, there's probably plenty, but something about the store just turns me off as soon as I walk in. Especially at the one that's kinda near my office. The ones downtown, near my home, are somewhat more appealing. But the last thing I need is more books.

This time, at the big store on Michigan Avenue, I took a glance at the wall of new selections as I pavlovianically headed towards the magazines. There was an interesting book of short stories by some guy I'd never heard of. Fourteen bucks. A small but worthwhile start towards using the buy-$100-get-20%-off coupon, especially since, for once, it didn't exclude magazines.

But, no, no magazines. I couldn't find the interior decorating magazine I wanted (with a great 25th anniversary supplement), and I forgot to look for the Asian art mag that has a special Cambodian issue I want. I could go upstairs, to the CDs, DVDs and art books, or downstairs, to the fiction. Something beckoned me to the fiction.

I ended up finding maybe 10 items, and I chose the best 6 or 7 from among them to just hit the $100 mark. (I can't remember any names now, except for the one non-fiction but still-literature-related one, Bookless in Baghdad, the author of which I heard a fascinating interview with a couple of months ago. It seems to be about what people will go through to maintain a literary life there these days. Just hearing the concept, I feel a solidarity with those people.)

I know it'd've been cheaper to get this stuff at Amazon. But there's something about browsing around, discovering stuff, and walking out with it. And now that I'm spending $120-150 on a typical weekend to have someone spend time with my father so that I'll have a few extra hours to myself, it just didn't seem like such a splurge. An hour with a therapist would cost just as much. (Would it do me as much good? Hard to say.)

Another thing that helped me justify this indulgence was that I resolved to read one of these books a week until I finished them all. That'd get me pretty far into the winter. And pretty far through the upcoming xmas weekend, for which I'd given my father's helper three nights off.

Somehow, though, Saturday ended, and most of Sunday passed, and the books were still in the trunk of my car. I knew I'd have to get them out, as the car went into the body shop yesterday to undo the damage I'd done in a couple of misguided maneuvers. (But that's another story.)

Sunday night, I went to a dinner party. (I found a "sitter" to stay with the old man for a few hours.) I know these people through an ex, who was also there. It was nice to be among people for a change. And the ex brought me a present, from him and his brother, announced as an early birthday present. (He never ever remembered my birthday before.)

The present was three new Harvey Pekar comic books - new American Splendors! I had read that Harvey had some new stuff coming soon through one of the big comic publishers, but I'd forgotten to follow up, and I rarely go into comic stores unless I'm walking past one. Supposedly there'll be a fourth new book soon, and the boys will send it to me, but I know better than to assume that anyone will do what they say they'll do. (But maybe they will.)

So I read one Sunday night and one Monday night. I wish Harvey would do a new book at least once a month, for the rest of our joint lives, which would, I hope, cover a long, long stretch of time.

And maybe I'll start reading the other $100 of new books over the upcoming holiday weekend.

-- 1360

memorium

2006-12-21T21:20:00.000-06:00

My mother died 14 years ago tonight. At about this time of day, at the beginning of the longest night of the year.

I had been told a few weeks earlier that she had another six months. And, dunderhead that I am, as I rode with her to the hospital in an ambulance, it didn’t occur to me that she’d be dead in less than an hour. God protects the feeble-minded.

She had been out of her mind that day, in a way I had never seen before. I had stayed with her that afternoon while my father went to his own medical appointment, and then I went back to work - there was a lot to do, with the end of the year approaching and my boss in Egypt. My father called me at the office in the early evening, frantic and not knowing what to do, so I went back to the house.

I thought she was having a psychiatric episode – as she had had multiple times over the previous seven years or so – and that, after a few weeks of ECT, she’d come back home to die. I realized later that the blood-brain barrier (is that the correct term? And its proper usage?) had just broke. During a bone scan a couple of weeks before, I had seen a large bright area in her head and, even though I never got a straight answer, I had figured that the cancer had spread throughout her brain.

She had pretty much been starving herself to death in the preceding weeks – ironically, at the same time that famine in Somalia was the media’s crisis of the month, so the newspapers were running articles about the science of starvation.

That night was the only time I can remember hearing my father cry. I was planning to light a candle here at his place tonight, but after mulling it over all day, I finally decided not to even mention it to him. He wouldn’t remember it a minute later, but why make him feel bad for even 45 seconds?

What I remember from the day after she died is going to the office to finish writing some trusts that some rich clients needed to sign before they left for their cruise, and then going with my father to make the funeral arrangements.

And over the next few days, watching It’s A Wonderful Life on TV with my one sister who came to town for the funeral. We’d watch a bit, and the phone would ring or someone would come over. Then it’d be on again and we’d see some more. We eventually saw the whole thing, in bits and pieces. I guess someone finally renewed the copyright or something, so now it’s on only once during the “holidays”. Thank God!

(Back in the days that I listened to Top 40 radio, my favorite day of the year was the day after Xmas, when they’d finally stop playing The Little Drummer Boy every 15 minutes. I haven’t heard it once this year!)

It feels like this is all starting to wind down. The sick parent thing, that is. But I’m not ready for it to be over yet. It’s a good excuse for a lot of things. So I guess I’m lucky that it’s still going to drag on for a while. Lucky, lucky, poor, poor, pitiful, mad, mad me.

-- 9501

Coming attractions: act like nothing's wrong, i’m my own hobby, what’s that sound.

ge-ner'-ic

2006-12-06T20:04:00.000-06:00

As I get older and my memory declines and I have occasional bouts of aphasia, I find that my analytical skills are improving. I'm more precise, and I think about what I'm saying (at least some of the time).

(Please stop laughing please.)

It's not always an easy path. Often, as I question the merits of a thought or the way it's expressed - mine or someone else's - I find that I can't define a word that's being used. It happened a few times when I was going around with my niece and our exchange student, when a word one of us used wasn't in one or the other's vocabulary, or when the exchange student (for whom English is not even the second language) asked about exactly what a word meant - and I found I couldn't properly explain it.

But these days I usually follow up by either checking out the definition or discussing it with someone else who's into that kind of conversation.

Most recently, I've been having some trouble with the word "generic". I used it in an e-mail conversation, expressing the fear that the work of a particular musician (whom I'd had limited exposure to) might be generic. And my correspondent sent me some samples of the guy's work. And I listened to it and liked it. And I asked myself why did I assume it would be generic? And was it maybe generic after all? And if it was, so what?

And, what does "generic" mean anyway? I guess I meant it was a mundane piece of work. (Gee, what does "mundane" mean?) But the dictionaries say it means "relating to or descriptive of an entire group or class", or something like that. What's wrong with that? The derogatory element seems to be missing. Unless representing an entire class is bad. Like a stereotype. Is being different for the sake of being different a noble goal? Is just being different enough to make something good?

One of the lines I think of most often from Alice in Wonderland is Humpty Dumpty saying "When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean". I don't know about that. But I believe that my correspondent knew what I meant, without necessarily agreeing that the musician in question makes generic work. Maybe the dictionary is missing a second meaning of the word that indeed intends something negative. Like "formulaic" (dictionary: "An utterance of conventional notions or beliefs; a hackneyed expression"). (Yeah, that's the ticket!)

Last night, when I was thinking about this and going through some old newspapers, I found a couple of blurbs using the word the way I meant it:

- Jim DeRogatis in the Chicago Sun-Times said that, on Gwen Stefani's new album, "the backing tracks are largely generic, overly polished, soulless and mechanical dance grooves".

- Then in the Onion, there was a tiny review of a band I kind of like, and they described the sound as the generic alt-country crap that some people like. (I set aside the page it was on, but I can't put my paws on it to use an exact quote here, and I don't even remember who they were writing about.)

CORRECTION 12/9: It wasn't the Onion. It was a posting on Postcard 2, an online newsgroup. Someone said about Pete Yorn's music: "Generic half-baked americana rock crap that so many people do these days."

But even if we agree that "generic" is, at least in these contexts, a term of derision, should it be?

I've been listening to the new 56-track Tom Waits set. Every song, you know it's Tom Waits. Is Tom Waits generic? Are the individual songs of Tom Waits generic? That's not a word I'd associate with him, but maybe in some sense, yes, he is generic.

* * * * *

At the office today, I opened the top drawer of my desk for some reason and got distracted by an almost-empty perfume bottle. It was given to me by an ex-boyfriend more than 15 years ago. It's there because I occasionally dab a bit of the perfume on. When I think back to that relationship, my sense is that he was in the market for "a girlfriend" and I happened to be around at that moment. And this was the first sort-of-serious romantic relationship I was in that did not naturally develop out of a pre-existing friendship or acquaintanceship. I was kind of caught off guard by his having that kind of interest in me, and it seemed like letting it happen was the right way to go.

In other words, I decided that I'd try having a generic boyfriend and being a generic girlfriend.

I must say that had its moments, this getting gifts, being taken to dinners and cultural events, being referred to as "my girlfriend", etc., but something about it never seemed authentic. We never had the kind of connection I was looking for. Maybe it's that the guy had no real rough edges. He lacked complexity. He was smart and nice but bland. And generic.

(I made up for this in my next relationship, in which the poor guy was, I'm convinced in hindsight, genuinely mentally ill, not just the good kind of nuts I find so appealing.)

* * * * *

For a time, I've been thinking that my blog entries are getting generic and formulaic. I find myself thinking about something, and then something else comes up and there's a parallel. And then yet another thing happens, and it's somehow related to the first two things. And, bingo, there's another blog entry.

It's a little disheartening to recognize that I do that over and over here, and yet, I get a kick out of finding similarities in unrelated things, and I like recording them in these little half-baked essays.
I don't have the time to really develop the ideas I write about. Or the energy. I fear I also lack the intellect. (But I don't have the time or the energy to worry about it.)

But it's better to write what I write than to write nothing. Maybe I can do better someday. And in the meantime, maybe I sometimes hit the mark and someone gets what I'm going on about.

* * * * *

What's the opposite of generic? I came across these quotes today:

- "We go to songs for the truth, to hear timeless verities that we do not express in our day-to-day lives." Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker.

- A New York Times quote by Orhan Pamuk (Turkish writer, just won the Nobel), that the point of literature is "the pleasure of seeing the inner depth of being in this world."

My favorite little generic songs accomplish this. Maybe in the lyrics, and maybe in the melody. Or in the tone of the voice, or the overall sound. Or maybe some element just happens to resonate with me at a particular time.

So it's OK with me if some or most of the music I like is generic or formulaic. (Or films, or people, or thinking.) If I like it, I like it. And my generic stuff is way better than Gwen Stefani.

-- 1360

they brought the summer with them

2006-12-03T19:49:00.000-06:00

The title is a paraphrase of We Bring The Summer With Us, a song (was it an instrumental?) by Horslips, an Irish band who did a pretty good job of melding rock and traditional music back in (I think) the 70s. I'm pretty sure that that song was a traditional tune. The title comes to my mind relatively often, not so much in connection with weather - more when someone's presence (sometime even mine!) brightens up the atmosphere somewhere.

I thought of it the week before last, when my niece and the family's exchange student (from the Ukraine, via Germany) came for a visit to Chicago, and again during the week after they left. The weather here was especially nice during their trip. And spending a week with two 17-year-old girls made for a very enjoyable vacation for me (I took most of the week off work).

It was kind of like visiting another country. I had to keep reminding myself what it was like to be that age. From my current vantage point, they're so young, but I know that at 17 I was already quite far along in becoming who I am now. The girls were both very sharp and fun and funny, and this old lady had a ball with them. (I really liked being assumed to be their mother.)

Three memorable bits:

- My niece and I had gone through some of my drawers, looking for treasures, and I had shown her some small notecards I had bought in Istanbul. A few days later, when I got home from taking the girls to the bus station for their ride home, I found one of them on the table next to my bed. My niece had written me a sweet little note, thanking me and telling me that my messy apartment was OK, as it surrounds me with things I enjoy. (I had apologized a few times for the clutter.) And on the envelope, she reproduced a funny piece of grafitti we had noticed earlier in the week.

- The exchange student told me I didn't act my age, but rather like someone in their mid-30s. I thought of saying, gee, kid, thanks, so I only seem twice as old as you, not more than triple your age. But instead I accepted it as the complement it was meant to be.

- One evening, hanging out in my apartment, my niece took out the little collection of burned CDs she had brought along to listen to on the bus ride here and back, and as she flipped through them, she said "Maybe I can introduce you to some good new music." She's not the fanatic I was at her age, when I was importing Who and Move singles directly from England, but she has a generous spirit.

(It took a few days after she left for the Gnarls Barkley tune that starts up whenever she logs onto her MySpace page to stop running through my head.) (Uh oh, there it goes again.)

We had lots of fun driving and walking around the city, and it was especially nice to go shopping with a girl, after years of clothing three nephews. (No book or record stores, but I guess I can do that by myself.)

* * * * *

Not long after they left, so did the summer. The weather turned bitterly cold. A major snowstorm hit, and it'll be days before it melts away - assuming it does. (I remember winters when, once the snow came, it stayed until spring. I have a feeling those days are over.)

I'll get used to winter being here, but my father is having a hard time with it. His balance is kaput, and it's scary for both of us when he has to go outside. But I think that staying inside all winter would accellerate his decline. So out we go.

-- 1360

deferred maintenance

2006-11-28T20:51:00.000-06:00

Man oh man oh man.

It’s always something.

I was going to write about my week with my niece and nephew and their friends. (I will soon.)

But then the computer at my father’s house went dead. I was able to resuscitate it a couple of times, but it finally seems to be gone for good. I’m there (I should say here, as I’m there now) a few nights a week, and his hired caregiver is also a heavy user of the computer. My father used to use it too, but he can't remember how to log on, and he's not interested when I offer to show him. But its not working created a real gap for me and Iwona.

By some miracle, tonight I was able to crank up the old computer that the dead one replaced over four years ago, so now we’re back on line in Skokie, Illinois, albeit with older software and its associated quirks, no burning capability, and all the music that was on the dead one gone. (Not to mention bookmarks, etc.) That shouldn’t matter much, as virtually all of it was unimportant, replaceable, or both. The important stuff is on the computer in my apartment. I guess I better start backing that one up.

The old man’s house is one big heap of deferred maintenance. It needs a new roof, some major weatherproofing, some concrete work, and on and on and on. I keep thinking it’ll be a teardown when he's gone, so why put big bucks into it. I’m so afraid of getting ripped off that it’s easier to do nothing.

But the old man keeps on ticking (no deferred maintenance there), and I wonder if I should be getting all this stuff done.

Then again, after a rather lengthy plateau, his decline seems to be accelerating. I’ve been pretty good at focussing on current issues rather than worrying about what might happen in the future, but I think I will have to start giving more thought to contingency plans for him.

What I have been giving serious thought to is to stop deferring my own maintenance over the winter months.

 I’m going to go for personal training once a week through February.

 I’m going to turn down most social invitations and other distractions (other than live music) and instead focus on clearing out lots of the crap I’m surrounded with. Like books and music and clothes that I have no desire to read or hear or wear. The money I spent on them be damned.

 I’m going to eat better. (My knee started hurting this morning. My first thought was that I had finally gained enough weight that my legs could no longer support me. But then I realized that I was wore different shoes yesterday and today, and that’s probably the reason for the knee pain.) (I honestly believe that.) (Really.)

 I’m going to cook (as opposed to heat or assemble things) at least once a month. (It doesn’t sound like much, but I made and broke that resolution a few years ago.)

 I’m going to rearrange my furniture and finally design my wall of shelves.

 I'm reluctantly dropping the idea of Marrakesh, Mexico, etc. for now. I'm just not in the mood to handle all of the logistics that a trip like that would entail - not so much my own arrangements, but more the taking care of the old man's needs while I'd be away. I'd rather put the energy into making the other 51 weeks of the year better.

I know I’m unlikely to accomplish all my goals, but I’ve promised myself to do enough to make a major difference.

And now you’re all witnesses.

-- 9501

it's all right pa...

2006-11-15T19:39:00.000-06:00

... It's life and life only.

Or is it?

* * * * *

This is cancer treatment week. The dignity with which my father deals with all of the indignities of his various conditions is touching. And inspiring.

* * * * *

After his pre-treatment blood test yesterday, we stopped to pick up lunch at Whole Foods in Evanston. As I was putting my father’s lunch together at their expanded salad bar, over the PA came the great Big Country song, In a Big Country. With the line at the end of the refrain, “Stay alive.” Which the frontman of the band, Stuart Adamson, didn’t do. He hanged himself.

(For me the song is very evocative of the period I worked in Washington, DC, as a lobbiest. I shared a rowhouse on Capitol Hill, and in the two summers I was there I spent a lot of time working the garden in our tiny front yard, with the stereo speakers pulled up to the front door so I could listen to Big Country and Dexys Midnight Runners over and over.)

And the Big Country story brings to mind Phil Ochs, who wrote the great song, Cross My Heart. With the line at the end of the refrain, “Cross my heart, and I hope to live”. Which Phil failed to do. He hanged himself.

That one still hurts a lot.

* * * * *

Last week a guy named Malachi Ritscher, set himself on fire just off the bottom of the Ohio Street feeder ramp of the Kennedy Expressway, where I pass almost every day. A couple of days ago I read more about him online. I think I know who he was. He was known for, among other things, recording lots and lots of live shows in Chicago, so I feel a kinship to him. (It seems his taste was more sophisticated than mine – avant garde and progressive type genres.) His autobiographical obituary is at http://www.savagesound.com/gallery100.htm

He left an anti-war sign at the site of his death, and his mission statement at http://www.savagesound.com/gallery100.htm says that he killed himself to protest the war in Iraq.

There’s a big debate as to whether his act made sense. His family says he was acting out of depression or other mental illness, but in the forum I skimmed, lots of people responded - some in an ironically nasty tone - that what he did was noble, in the tradition of the Vietnamese monks and nuns who took similar actions in responses to that war.

I tend to think that everything anyone does has some personal psychological explanation(s), even if no one - including one’s own self - knows for sure what the true explanation is. And I tend to believe that, yes, survival is the first human instinct. There’s so much we can do while we’re alive, to enjoy the experience and help others - through service or through the creation of beauty (in the broadest sense of the term), that it’s a waste to give up the opportunity any sooner than we need to. But did those monks and nuns waste their lives? And is a depressed guy in Chicago less entitled to make the same protest?

I guess that I just don’t know.

* * * * *

Last week I went to a show by Todd Snider, an American singer-songwriter. I’d never heard him before the show, but I’d heard favorable comments on him by people whose opinions I respect, and the logistics were such that I was able to do a favor for my newest friend, a Costa Rican artist, by taking her to the show. (Thereby shielding her for one night from her ill-tempered hostess.)

Todd is a fine performer, and his songs are interesting and insightful and clever (and sometimes funny) if more the product of a craftsman than of an artist - the kind of songs I’d like to think that, if I had the time and the mental energy, I might be able to create. (“Man has an endless capacity to deceive himself”. Who said that?)

Anyway, at one point during the show he quoted the Dylan line, “It’s all right ma - it’s life and life only”, and said that if he only had a few seconds on stage, that’s what he’d say. I liked that he did that.

* * * * *

When I got back to the office after our medical errands yesterday, the first order of business was to relax a bit in front of the computer. I came upon a New York Times profile of a guy named Robert N. Butler, an almost 80-year old doctor who specializes in the health of "older persons".

He wrote a book, which the NYT described as "his meditation on aging", called "Why Survive?"

Well, why not?

-- 1360

the child is mother to the woman

2006-11-04T21:15:00.000-06:00

[BTW, that first Blood Sweat & Tears album is a big favorite of mine, although I haven’t played it for at least a couple of decades. But once Al Kooper left, they were of no interest at all to me. They were actually downright annoying.]

This afternoon, there was a rare opening in my schedule, and I was able to go see the film 49 Up at the Music Box. I believe I’ve seen each of the films since 7 Up, and it’s fascinating to watch these people grow, develop and age before our eyes. It's a good reminder that being smart or attractive is no assurance of happiness. But maybe the biggest lesson in this edition is that women must under no circumstances let themselves get fat.

Of course, the person I most identified with was the misfit of the group, Neil, although with the big role religion plays in his life, it wasn’t a perfect fit. The guy who dropped out after 21 Up might have been more my type, not because he dropped out, but because he looked to be a counter-culture sort in the bit he appeared in. No one in the core group has died yet, but one woman said 49 Up would be the last in the series she'd participate in.

At the end of the film, they quoted from 7 Up, something along the lines of, give me a child when he is seven, and I will give you the man. (I'm quite sure that's in turn a quote or paraphrase from someone else.) I had just said something similar to my visiting friend, although I told her – and I believe – that people CAN change, it’s just that most people don’t want to. And don’t think they need to. Or if they say they want to, they’re not really willing to make the effort to do so. I’d like to think I can change, and that I am changing. (Or at least that it’s a possibility.) Actually, after spending more than my usual amount of time with people during the last 28 hours, I feel like I need a lot fewer fundamental changes than many.

Maybe just thinking that shows how deluded I am.

And yet, last night we watched I, Curmudgeon, the second film in Alan Zweig’s trilogy of personal documentaries, and although there were a few bits of me I always cringe over, seeing myself in such good company - and knowing that somehow I made it past the critical eyes of Alan and his editor, Chris Donaldson – makes me feel pretty damned good. As does my friend giving the film thumbs up. That may qualify her to be told about this blog. I know I should. I don't know why I haven't. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe someday.

* * * * *

Last weekend, getting my apartment ready for my friend's visit, I found something I’ve been looking for for the last few years. It’s a caricature of me, drawn as a party favor at someone’s Sweet Sixteen party about 39 years ago. If I say so myself, it still looks like me. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I am now a caricature of what I once was.

Where will we all be in 39 more years? I'm sure we're better off not knowing.

- 9501

i NEVER get to do ANYTHING I want to do!!!

2006-11-01T21:34:00.000-06:00

Infant that I am, that’s what I thought, momentarily, when I realized that I couldn’t go to the concert by Stuart Staples (singer for The Tindersticks) tonight. I’m just too sick and too busy to go, and it’s so cold and dark outside. (I’d’ve gone anyway if I weren’t sick with bronchitis, but it’s been going on too long, and I’ve just got to kick this.)

And it’s not like there’s not a lot a music in my life this coming week. Friday afternoon: The Hoyle Bros @ Empty Bottle (this is a weekly event that I’ve never gone to, but with a friend visiting from out of town, it seems like a nice way to kick off the weekend); Saturday: Micah J. Hinson @ Schubas; Sunday: Gob Iron (Jay Farrar and Anders Parker) @ Park West; next Thursday: Pernice Bros @ Schubas (or maybe Todd Snider and Jon Langford @ a museum a few blocks from my house) (or maybe Atom Egoyan @ University of Chgo).

But I’m very much earthbound by my various obligations these days, and I’m currently in a phase when I’m more conscious of it. I accept that that's the way it is for now, but it's still disturbing when I allow myself to think about it.

What’s bugging me most is my limited ability to travel. My sister just came back from Phnom Penh (for work!), and I vicariously enjoyed her trip, as I know that city pretty well from my own olden days. I haven’t been to Asia for almost six years, and if I had my druthers, I’d be going at least every other year, before I get to decrepit for that kind of endeavor.

I think of Asia as requiring at least two weeks (I’d rather go for two months, but it seems that one has either time or money, not both), and I just can’t get away that long.

All I can manage is an occasional weekend, and maybe a one week trip every year or so. In the last two years, I’ve had my first significant experiences with Latin America, and I’ve got someone who’d go back to Mexico with me at a moment’s notice. But if I went again this coming winter, I’d feel like I was repeating the trip I took last year (Oaxaca), even going to a different city. Cuba’s too hard for the time being. The other islands hold no appeal for me. (Well, I'd go to Haiti, or Kingston, Jamaica.) Europe isn’t beckoning me for a winter trip. (Maybe it will after I get acclimatized to the cold weather here; I’ve had some wonderful trips there in darkest January/February.)

This time last week, I was pretty much ready to drop the idea of a week-long trip to anywhere this winter. But at dinner with my friends last Friday, they urged me to find a way to go somewhere. (“Your eyes shine when you talk about it.”) (I guess that non-glare coating on my glasses is wearing off.)

I woke up the next morning with a plan. Morocco! I had mentioned it to someone once before as a vague notion, and I had been vehemently discouraged from going there, as an American, a Jew, a woman. But Saturday morning it just felt right, and the more I read about it and think about it, the more sure I am I will do it.

The Lonely Planet guidebook has a detailed paragraph about how difficult it is for a woman to travel alone there, but at the end they say something like ‘older women will not have these difficulties’. I think back to how scared I was before I went to Istanbul, and it was pretty much OK for this grand dame.

At first I wasn’t sure where to go in Morocco. (I’m so clueless that, the first time I went to Israel, I didn’t know the difference between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.) But now it seems that Marrakesh will give me what I want – atmosphere first and foremost, plus architecture, food, shopping, music - maybe with a side trip to Essaouira on the Atlantic, and/or a dip into the nearby mountains (or is it desert?) (I’ve still got a lot of research to do).

And if I can get a free flight on British Air with my vast accumulation of miles, I’ll spend a few nights in London on the way back. Even though I think my favorite record store in the world, Minus Zero, no longer exists.

I like planning these trips almost as much as I like going on them. So, somehow, the winter is looking up. And spring is right around the corner.

But first I have to summon up the courage, for the first time in my life, to use an inhaler.

- 9501

stupid? mwah? (plus update)

2006-10-28T06:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was fired by a client.

The same client had fired me a few years ago. The problem then had been that he was trying to do something that couldn't be done. I did my best for him, trying to shoehorn his plan into something doable, but ultimately my inability - and unwillingness - to aid and abet him in doing something I found inappropriate got in the way. He continued as a client of the office, difficult and a "slow pay", but I guess his subsequent projects were nothing out of the ordinary. I still recoiled at the sound of his name, though. He's a megalomaniac, and not a very nice one.

Recently I worked on something with which he was peripherally involved - he was mostly taking a big finder's fee - and did a quick, competent and creative job. I don't know if he realized I was involved, but when he had a supposedly similar job this past week and both of my partners were out of town, I got stuck with it. The only information I was given was in an email from him, and it was a rush rush job. I had a lot of questions about the structure of the transaction, and some of his answers were cryptic and raised additional questions. (His first email said someone was buying a very valuable item. It turns out that that person was buying it from one place and selling it to another, and it was the sale transaction that he wanted documented.) Everytime I sent him an email I told our secretary that his next message to me would be that I was too stupid to work on his matter, so stop. But because it was a rush job, I worked on the elements that obviously needed to be done.

Yesterday, when I arrived at the office, I saw that I hadn't received any emails since the previous afternoon. I knew I had forwarded something to myself and that I was on a few daily lists that sent stuff out overnight, so it was clear something was wrong. Neither of my partners had any messages, either, and I knew I had sent something to one of them. After a few calls to our domain provider, I finally figured it out. And when messages started to trickle through a few hours later, there was one from Mr. Jerk, sent the previous evening, saying he had found someone who understood the deal and I should stop work. Gladly, f**ker!

It didn't bother me that his original belief that I'm stupid is now confirmed in his mind. (It's an honor to be on the s**tlist of someone like him.) It bothered me that I had neglected other matters to try to accommodate him.

Last night, I had dinner with a very interesting couple, one member of whom is very clearly a genius. We had a wide-ranging conversation about what was going on in the world and in our own lives. The thought that I couldn't keep up with them, or that I had to try to, never entered my mind. It's not that I'm so smart. (But Mr. Genius, whom I've had a mild crush on in the 15+ years I've known him, doesn't flaunt his brilliance.)

But I'm not stupid, either. When I went down to put in three loads of laundry this morning, I noticed that almost all the washers were in use, and none of the dryers were. So I started to dread one of my worst laundry nightmares: lots of wet clothes, and nowhere to dry them. It's happened in the past, so that's why I do my laundry at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning or not at all.

Quick thinker that I am, I soaked two t-shirts I don't need to wear soon, and put them in a dryer for 40 minutes, by which time my wash will be done and I'll have a dryer to use. It'll be the best 50 cents I've spent in a long while. Unless some jerk who sees just two tops flopping around decides to hijack the dryer. Gotta go....

One hour later: My little dryer scam worked! Everything is clean and dry! (Well, those t-shirts I sent out on the front line are dry.)

-- 1360

eureka!

2006-10-23T06:41:00.000-05:00

There's weekend construction on the route I usually take to my father's house on Saturday afternoon and, having experienced it on Friday night (after taking his helper to her first American rock concert, Magnolia Electric Co.), I decided to take surface streets last Saturday. I went via Evanston, an interesting suburb just east of his (Skokie). A suburb with three used record stores is a good one. That morning, I had come upon the computer bookmark of one of them, so I headed on up there.

For once, I had made a note of something I was looking for: Trembling Blue Stars, whatever album has the song The Mountain Goats covered, Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise. (I'd already checked eMusic, where downloads run about 30 cents per track.) Making note of where the store kept the new arrivals, I went straight to the rock section and, just behind the Tp-Tz divider, there it was! For $6.99!!!

There was a lot of good stuff in the new arrivals section. I don't buy a lot of physical CDs any more, what with most of the new stuff I want coming out on eMusic, not to mention my big, big backlog. But once the pump is primed, I tend to just keep on going.

For some reason, I'm more likely to try a tangible used CD for $6.99 than to download it for $4.00. I'm not sure why. I know I can sell a tangible CD back and come out even, but that's not my reason. I guess I just like going into a store and making a little pile of finds.

Here's a list of what I've acquired from various sources in the last 10 days:

Sat. 10/14 - An old You Am I CD, Hi Fi Way, at a thrift store near the film festival. One of the guys on a music mailing list I'm on is nuts about them, and though I have something else of theirs (gee, it better be something else) that didn't grab me on the first hearing, I grabbed this one for the price.

Sun. 10/15 - I found four Russian CDs, coverless, lying on the sidewalk outside the dive I took my father to for breakfast. They're sliding around in the trunk of my car.

Tues. 10/17: (I took my father to the Skokie Public Library, and found a few things at least worth burning)

- Alejandro Escovedo - The Boxing Mirror
- The Replacements - Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? (a best of compilation)
- Tom Petty - Highway Companion
- Nick Drake - Way to Blue (an introductory compilation). It breaks my heart that I can't find most of my ND LPs, each of which I pounced upon at one or another used record store in London, most if not all before he died. I absolutely wouldn't have gotten rid of them, so either they were stolen/borrowed or they're down in the Black Hole of Skokie (my father's basement). I probably won't burn or even listen this one, as that act alone could render my LPs forever lost.

Thurs. 10/19 - A few eMusic downloads, before my monthly allotment refreshed and I would've lost the few tracks I hadn't used:

- Jeremy Enigk (new one)
- from More Oar: one track. I'm gradually dl'ing this V/A cover of the Skip Spence album.

Fri. 10/20 - I ordered the new Bonnie Prince Billy from amazon, to top off an order and get free shipping. It should arrive by the end of this week. I get more excited about hearing this the more I think about it. I missed him play here last week owing to bad logistics.

Sat. 10/21 - At that used record store in Evanston (the ones in bold are the ones I kept in the car to listen to first):

- Trembling Blue Stars - Broken by Whispers . Interesting to hear Bruise in situ. I don't know if I'd've noticed the song if John Darnielle hadn't flagged it for me, which would have been my loss. This version is a bit too mild for my taste, but I want to listen to all the songs more carefully.
- The Walker Brothers - After the Lights Go Out (the best of 1965-1967). There were a few Walker Bros compilations in the Friday arrivals bin. Someone must've had'em all before experiencing some kind of catastrophe.
- Snow Patrol - Final Straw. I heard a song of theirs on the radio a week or so ago, and it was interesting enough to stay tuned until they announced who it was. I've learned through experience that one must proceed with caution on these young buzz bands, but at least there'll be that one song I heard.
- I Am the Resurrection - A Tribute to John Fahey
- Grandaddy - Concrete Dunes. I hear good things about him, and I don't know where to begin (eMusic seems to have 10+ albums by him), so when happenstance picked one for me, I went with it.
- Golden Smog - Another Fine Day . I have a few of their earlier albums, and each has one or two songs I love (all by Gary Louris). I've wanted this for a while but couldn't bring myself to pay full price.
- The Byrds - Younger than Yesterday (expanded edition). One of my favorite albums ever, with some interesting-looking alternate versions.
- Bright Eyes - Noise Floor (Rarities 1998-2005).

I also got a used DVD of Bicycle Diaries at that same store. I can't resist the combination of quality extras, a Cuban element, a good price and a friend asking me to supply Spanish language films for her upcoming Guatemalan visitor.

And a bag. Really neat (I'd call it amazing if I were 30+ years younger). Those of you lucky enough to know me will probably see it some day. Unless I give it to my sister for her 50th birthday.

This coming Friday, I have a dinner date around the corner from Tower Records. I'll try to take a look in there, but I suspect that their liquidation sale is still stingy with the discounts. What I want is great box sets of CDs and DVDs. I'd better do some pricing on amazon first. To quote another store, "an educated consumer is our best customer".

-- 1360/9501

melody haunted my reverie

2006-10-19T21:41:00.000-05:00

A song went through my head all day yesterday. I couldn't think of the lyrics, and I couldn't hear the voice -- just the melody, and the basic tone of the song (somber). I had no idea at all what it was. I wrote the melody down in musical notation in case it disappeared, but it didn't. I was afraid I'd never place it. It just didn't "feel" like anything I'd been listening to recently.

It started up again this morning. Then, I was sitting at my desk at the office, eating walnuts, when it hit me: it was from The Mountain Goats' Australian EP, which I bought about a month ago and first played last week. The song had really struck me then, but I hadn't played it for at least a week, so I knew I had liked it but I couldn't "play" it in my head. So I put it back on -- over and over -- when I went out on some errands at lunch. Man, what a song!!!

It's Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise. I won't trivialize it by describing it. But, hearing it again, I thought, gee, this is the best new Mountain Goats song in quite a while. And it's got to be one of their five best (which is saying quite a lot, considering the size and quantity of their -- John Darnielle's -- oeuvre).

I couldn't quite catch all the lyrics, so I googled them back at the office. And, to my great surprise, it's a cover song! It's by Trembling Blue Stars, who I hadn't previously heard of. (I've gotta find a copy of the original.) And TMG's version was a National Public Radio "Song of the Day" back in May. Not that I listen to NPR (or anything on the radio) much any more.

It was happenstance that I came upon the EP a month ago. And if the Goats hadn't covered that song, I'd probably never have heard it, as important as it now is to me. That brought to mind how I love the song Tarmac, by Hazeldine, which I know only from an "Americana" compilation disc that came with a British magazine almost a decade ago, and which I first played maybe six years after I got it.

There's so much great stuff out there, buried under the far more dreck and mediocrity, but it's scary to think I could have easily missed some things I really love -- and that I'm surely missing other stuff I would love. So it takes constant vigilence and listening and openness to find as much of the great stuff as is possible. While giving the known great stuff the time and attention it merits.

-- 9501

finishing it off, korean style

2006-10-18T22:20:00.000-05:00

I keep reading how politically influential bloggers are these days, so I'd thought I'd test that notion by sharing with you my views about the North Koreans testing a nuclear weapon and the world reacting to it....

WHAT??!??!??!

No, not really. But the final two of my ten films at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival were Korean. Both were near the bottom of the ten for me, but each was worth seeing.

Last night, I saw Host and Guest, about the friendship between two very different guys. My favorite part was when the wild, artistic one dragged the jesus freak to see a film, which miraculously happened to be Distant, or Uzak, by the same Turkish director who made Climates, my favorite film at this year's festival. And the scene that played in the background was even the one I was wanting to see again. One of the lead actresses in Climates is the wife of the director, and I read that she had had tiny parts in his previous two films - and her tiny part in Distant was the one that the Korean guys were shown watching.

(Interesting that, in Distant, which had its own odd couple element, the wild, artistic guy made his bumpkin cousin watch a Tarkovsky film on video - but when the cousin, bored, left the room, the first guy switched to a porn film.) (I didn't remember that myself, but a Spanish guy mentioned it in his review at Amazon.com.)

It was also funny, in Host and Guest, the several times when Bush made a peripheral appearance. Once some noodles fell on a newspaper picture of his face, another time, a post-coital tissue landed on him. Subtle, huh? And in another scene, his second inaugural address was playing in the background. That would have been on my 53rd birthday. (I'd be willing to turn 57 tomorrow if it meant getting rid of those f**kers.) (I'd be willing to turn 87 tomorrow if it meant getting rid of half of the damage they've done. I feel safe saying that, as it'll take a lot longer than that, if it can be done at all.)

Oh yeah, the film itself. Not particularly moving, though, again, I was tired, and missed at least one stretch that may - or may not - have had some important expository material. The director was there - making a total of three of my ten.

Tonight's Korean film also had an anti-American tone. It was The Host, a horror movie. A few jolts, but not very scary - it had a big, slimy, carnivorous monster, and I never find that kind of thing as scary as the evil that men really do. It also had a lot of humor, and much metaphorical representation of the cruelty of the American government, the ineptitude of the Korean government, and the ultimate strength of the Korean everyman.

So that's that for the film festival. I'm proud that my total transportation outlay for the ten films was 25 cents for a parking meter one night, plus gas and wear and tear on the car. (I learned a lot of tricks for parking in the neighborhood.) I've never gone to more than a few films a year before, and I've often blown it off completely. This year, the whole experience was worth all the running around, the stress of getting to the films on time, and the exposure to some rather obnoxious people. (One of the Korean girls next to me tonight seemed to have had a bean burrito for lunch. But that's better than the loud sophisticates at the French film.)

Next up: There's a very appealing series of Iranian films running through October at the Siskel, and an American-Pakistani (if I recall correctly) film playing for a week at the Music Box. I can feel my resolve to ready my apartment for my November visitors beginning to waiver.

- 1360

i lost it at the movies

2006-10-16T21:04:00.000-05:00

Nine of my ten film festival screenings are on the north side, in a neighborhood where it's difficult but possible to park. This is vital to my being able to fit this many films into my schedule. The tenth - my only must-see - was downtown, where it's very easy to park if you're willing to pay ten bucks for a few hours, which I'd rather not. So I walked there yesterday. It's just a couple of miles and it was a nice day. The bus would only go 2/3 of the way, so it's just not worth the bother under normal circumstances.

On the way I passed a park where I used to see Gene Siskel with his child(ren?), before he moved to the suburbs, and long before he died of cancer (in his 40s?). As always when I go that way, I thought of him. And of his partner, Roger Ebert, who seems to be coming out of a fight for his life, from cancer and its complications. He may be in his early 60s, but these days that doesn't seem so old to me.

This was another reminder that, even though I'd like to think I have a few more OK decades, that may well not be the case. And it's just as scary to think of all the people I care about and how they'll be dropping one by one.

So I was in a more-melancholy-than-usual mood when I saw Climates, the newest film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It was a beautiful, beautiful movie. He's evidently known for how lovingly he shows off Turkey, especially the eastern portion, but he also succeeds in portraying something about what it is to be human. I don't know how to convey this, but the following quote (which appeared in my little zen calendar this morning as I tore off the pages from the weekend) makes me feel a little less inadequate about my inability to articulate what I think he's doing:

- Plucking chrysanthemums along the east fence;
- Gazing in silence at the Southern Hills,
- The birds flying home in pairs
- Through the soft mountain air of dusk ---
- In these things there is a deep meaning
- But when we try to express it,
- We suddenly forget the words.

--- Tao Ch'ien

(I'm not trying to show off - I just want to make you not think poorly of someone who wants to explain something but can't.)

Anyway, it kind of built up until, in a scene that had both the landscape and the humanity, it just really got me.

Some hours later, I saw Barrio Cuba, by Humberto Solas. I loved the immersion into life in the shabbier parts of Havana, and the three intercut stories were absorbing, but I felt like there was something kind of manipulative in how the main characters hit bottom, and then things worked out for everyone. Who can resist a motherless child, raised by his grandmother, being reunited with his drunk but good-hearted father? Not me!

So I thought on and off during the day today about how it'd be interesting to write about the difference in the quality of the tears wrought by these films. Well, I can't write about it; I can only say that there seems to be a difference.

I just got in from a Thai film, Midnight My Love, by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. It didn't take long for me to identify closely with the lead character, a Bangkok cabdriver who drove at night. He was a bit of a Billy Liar kind of guy, drifting off into cinematic fantasies and composing letters to a DJ. (A little reminiscent of The Science of Sleep, which I saw on Yom Kippur - but way more moving.)

Then once in a while something unexpected would be revealed - he'd been married and had a kid, he'd killed someone (or was that one of his fantasies?). There was just something very touching about the guy. Then he fell in love with a call girl who he drove home every night, but they were separated by a few extremely violent mishaps he suffered. And, at the very end, by a stream of coincidences, they were reunited. So this film brought on both kinds of tears - the honest and the pandering.

Don't get me wrong. I was happy that things worked out for the Cuban and Thai characters. But there was something more real about the ambiguity of the Turkish film that connected with me the most.

And I loved, loved, loved being immersed in Istanbul, Havana and Bangkok, three cities I've enjoyed a lot. A film with a sense of place doesn't have to be very good at all for me to appreciate being transported somewhere special. But best of all is feeling like part of the world, both literally and figuratively.

-- 1360

cultural pursuits, or, i'd rather do anything than stay home and clean

2006-10-14T09:12:00.000-05:00

Saw the Ian Anderson show w/ "orchestra" last night. After two nights of Okkervil River last weekend, where I'm quite sure I was the oldest person in the crowd, it was very, very strange to find myself among the gray and balding, the paunchy and the drawn. (I'd guess I brought the average age down a bit.)

Ian remains a phenomenal entertainer, although he's not got much of a voice left. He still does the standing-on-one-leg thing, as well as the phallic flute thing - much to the amusement of the girls in the orchestra. For me, the best parts were a couple of odd little numbers that featured the accordian, flute and acoustic guitar, like Cheap Day Return and Life's a Long Song. The worst were the medleys featuring the perky young female violinist who, it was made a big deal of, has turned Ian on to bluegrass. Example: "America", the Leonard Bernstein song from West Side Story that, as Ian acknowledged, Keith Emerson (and The Nice) did a "rock" version of. The Tull version went on and on, bringing in quotes from all sorts of "Americana" (Ian said that) and pops. (The crowd especially liked the few measures from Orange Blossom Special.)

And they actually did a pastiche of jazzed up Mozart that Ian put together for an Italian concert. He called it "Moe's Art". Which was ironic, considering that, with the black pirate style schmatte he had tightly wrapped around his head, he looked (from the 12 yards away I was) like Moe's older brother. That's Moe of the Stooges.

The whole thing was very polished and accomplished and entertaining but not moving (except the aforementioned "little" songs). Interesting to contrast it with the Okkervil River shows. The bands actually have a lot in common - vibrant instrumentation and a high level of musicality. So it made sense to me that I'd've liked Tull so much 30+ years ago and I live Okkervil now.

The Okk boys are just plain brilliant these days. I don't know how to characterize the experience, other than to say it was exhilarating. Two shows in two nights, with maybe 25% overlap in the set lists. I'd go see them every few weeks if they played here that often. The music friend I mentioned a few months ago is in NYC this weekend for two more Okk shows. And she went to Madison, Wisconsin (by bus!) to see their show the night before they got to Chicago. I've got way too much other stuff going on for that.

What's going on now is the Chicago Int'l Film Festival. Last weekend I saw:

- The Yacoubian Building, from Egypt. Nothing too special. I enjoyed the immersion into Egyptian life, but I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. (I'm still not sure if certain plot lines were about two different women or just one.)

- Syndromes and a Century, from Thailand. The press is going nuts about this one. I actually was ticketed for a different Thai film, one that sounded kinda Buddhist Noir, but that got stuck in customs and was replaced with some dreadful-sounding American indie thing, so I switched to Syndromes - it was a miracle that there was another Thai film playing in the same slot between the Egyptian film and the second Okkervil concert. So I went in with a bit of resentment. It's too bad I didn't pay attention to the blurb, as, with my cold and my fatigue from the previous night's Okk show and my mental preparation for the one right after the film, I didn't quite follow it. The blurbs would have told me that, yes, the film told some stories about the filmmaker's parents, from different times and perspectives. I saw that there was repetition, but I didn't catch the parent thing. Maybe they never spelled it out, or maybe it was revealed during one of my several naps. I suspect, though, that there's some kind of bandwagon effect going on with the multiple rave reviews.

- Suzanne, from France. Surprisingly good. I learned a little something about the human heart, which could come in hand some day.

Six more films in the next five days. My cold is mostly gone, and I've got no concerts until next Friday, so I can focus on the films, troubled only by the fact that I've got a few sets of overnight guests coming in November and my place is technically uninhabitable.

- 1360

thicker than water

2006-10-07T11:43:00.000-05:00

Thicker Than Water is the first of the 10 films I'll be going to at this year's Chicago International Film Festival. It's a 2005 production from Iceland. The director's name is Arni Olafur Asgeirsson. The Icelandic name of the film is Blodbond. (The names in the last two sentences are missing little pieces that I don't have easy access to the fonts for.)

In a nutshell, the story was of a man who finds out that the boy (8 years old?) he and his wife have been raising is not his biological son. It follows him over the next few weeks as he reels from this discovery.

It felt very real, and I could identify with the guy's situation and how he worked through it. It was thoroughly absorbing. I enjoyed the flavor of Iceland. And from some angles, the lead actor looked very much like someone I've got a crush on.

At the Q&A afterwards, one person complained that she didn't know why the guy did what he did. She wanted voiceovers to explain what he was thinking. Someone else wanted to know why the film didn't reveal who the "real" father was. The director said that many different films could have been made from this story, and choices had to be made, and this was the film that came out of those choices.

My thought, which I didn't vocalize, is that I don't always know why I do what I do, or what I'm feeling at the time that I'm feeling it. Making the film character neatly describe his feelings and motivations would have been neat and clean and, most likely, superficial and unreal. That's what they'd do in the American remake.

Anyway, it was a beautiful, touching film that I won't forget.

I'm pretty sure that, when the credits rolled without translation from the Icelandic, the person acknowledged for "klipping" was the editor.

No films today, and hopefully tonight's late Okkervil River show won't negate my efforts to overcome a cold I've had all week. Tomorrow: two more films and another Okkervil show.

- 1360

masterpernice!

2006-09-26T20:04:00.000-05:00

I'm fading fast after my night of clubbin and bloggin, but I feel compelled to call to your attention that "yours, mine and ours" by the Pernice Brothers is a masterpiece. It's got words, melodies, sounds, everything. (And I remember listening to it again and again on an overnight bus ride a few years ago, watching the full moon rise as we rode through the north woods.)

I'd been planning for a while to put it back into rotation, and when I went to retrieve a particular Pogues disc to burn for my nephew's birthday, there were the Pernices next to it, waiting for me patiently. I must have played it three times today, what with the traffic and a midday errand. I'm very excited to hear their next album, which I've preordered from their website to take advantage of their offer of a bonus disc of demos. (I'm trying not to get too excited, to avoid disappointment.) And they're playing here in early November.

Here's a favorite line or phrase from each song on yours, mine and ours:

1. The Weakest Shade of Blue -- I'm as lonely as the Irish Sea and as willing as the sand.

2. Water Ban -- Be the same, though we've severed every courtesy we made.

3. One Foot in the Grave -- So long, Marianne, an intense night of fake sleeping.

4. Baby in Two -- Sometimes this sweet life feels like it's never been as bad as it is tomorrow.

5. Blinded by the Stars -- So familiar that it feels too strange.

6. Waiting for the Universe -- If I was the only one and you were the last alive, would we sit there like the amateurs and watch our days go by, waiting for the universe to die.

7. Judy -- I won't always mind the certainty it leaves in doubt.

8. Sometimes I Remember -- And her eyes as kind as the morning rain.

9. How to Live Alone -- Keep a foot out of the blacker end.

10. Number Two -- It would feel so good to see you cry. /// It would feel so good to see you.

Some of the other lines are so spot on that I'd be embarrassed to quote 'em here.

-- 9501

a fine end to a fine weekend

2006-09-25T22:27:00.000-05:00

I often bitch about how I don't have a weekend. I go to my father's on Saturday afternoon, and I come home on Sunday afternoon. So I generally get just Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon and evening to myself. I can do a lot of different things while I'm up there in the suburbs, and I often drive into the city for a concert on Saturday night after I've got the old man set up for the night, but no matter how much freedom I have while I'm up there, I've still got to structure the weekend around him.

It bothers me less and less in one way - I know he needs and deserves the attention, and I've mostly surrendered to it, and I know it won't go on much longer, relatively speaking.

It also bothers me more and more in another way. Geez, I never ever ever have a day to myself. On the rare occasion when one of my sisters is in town, I want to spend some time with her, and I feel guilty about stranding her up in the suburbs watching an old man. I shouldn't feel guilty, because, heck, I do it all the time and no one seems to feel guilty about stranding me up there. Bottom line, BFD.

But I've also adapted in a sort of perverse way. I think of myself as having a four day weekend, every week. Yeah, I have to go to work on Friday and Monday. But there's something different in the air and in my gut, and it almost feels like freedom. I usually wear black jeans to work those days. (To tell the truth, I often wear black jeans to work on Tuesday, Wednesday and/or Thursday, too. I Cannot Believe That I Get Away With This!!!) (And, man, do I need this little escape valve.) (And it's amazing how many clients seem excited that their lawyer is wearing jeans!) (I do put on a nice black jacket when someone comes to see me.) (And if I get into much of a conversation with my boss, which I do maybe seven times a day, I try to sit down on the other side of the desk from him, or stand partly hidden by the doorway.) (Someday the fit will hit the shan, as another boss used to say, and that will be the begining of the end of that.)

And I always go home on Friday night (thought I often bring dinner in to my father's house or take him and his helper out before I go home), and I only very rarely stay at his place on a Monday night. Somehow, Friday and Monday feel different - and special. I guess in the concentration camps, a purloined crumb felt special.

So I'm not being sarcastic when I say that tonight, a Monday night, was a fine end to a fine weekend. I just got in from a wonderful concert - Lambchop. It was an amazing juxtaposition of beauty and dissonance. Then, Kurt Wagner (Mister Lambchop), making the rounds through the audience, actually spoke to me, probably drawn by my great new hat.

And I had a really nice weekend, too.

Actually, the weekend would sound quite pathetic to anyone who has real weekends, but I can't let myself dwell on that fact. It was nice because, after a few weeks of isolation, with everyone seeming to have forgotten I exist, I heard from almost (but not quite) everyone I currently care about. (This even though I stopped myself from doing something passive-aggressive with this blog to try to stir up some action.)

It was also nice because I spent part of it like I would have in the good old days of freedom. I wandered around in a neighborhood I don't have time to get to much, stopping in bookstores (I only got two books! And three magazines! Just one of the magazines had a CD!) and record stores (I only got four CDs! Three used Pinetop Sevens! And the Mountain Goats Australian tour EP!). I picked up nine tickets for the Chicago Int'l Film Festival. The only thing missing was actually seeing a movie, but I guess those nine ought to satisfy me when the festival opens in another couple of weeks.

And, so I could satisfy my picky cousins and their delicate stomachs, I picked up fancy cupcakes for our Rosh Hashanah dinner - chocolate for my father and me, non-chocolate (the only other flavor) for the cousins. (And I haven't yet eaten the extra cupcake I got for myself!) (Even though it's got merlot frosting!) (I'm going to wait for the weekend!)

All that shopping was on Saturday. On Sunday, I took a long detour to walk along Lake Michigan while I was out on some errands. It was a gorgeous day, but cool enough so I could enjoy the lake without being the only fully clothed person on the beach.

And the icing on the metaphorical cake is that the woman who I hired a for a few weeks last spring to spend extra time on the weekends with my father but who then got another job, lost her other job and is again available. So I'll probably give her extra hours this coming weekend and use the time to catch up at home. A little more freedom. As long as I don't let myself get too used to it....

It gets even better. Our office is closed next Monday, for Yom Kippur. I long ago gave up even pretending to fast or otherwise observe the holiest day of the Jewish year. Maybe it's a copout, but I feel like I attone for my sins every day. Well, actually, I will observe in my own special way. Last year, I saw A History of Violence on YK. I remember going to see Natural Born Killers on YK in the early 90s. (I remember slinking to the theater that year, hoping no one would see me, so as not to be noticed as a sinner.) I'll try to get to something on the coming Monday. Maybe I'll uphold my own tradition with something kinda on the violent side - but with redeeming social value and artistic merit, too, of course.

And I'll wear black jeans to work next Tuesday, a week from tomorrow, and make it a five-day weekend.

-- 1360

crossroads

2006-09-15T19:37:00.000-05:00

My last post had a bad word in it. (It appeared twice, if I recall correctly.) A few days later, the blog became inaccessable. I assume that the former was the cause of the latter. Certain words are verboten.

This morning I edited the post to delete the bad word. (Sorry, Bill.) Now, having just won the battle to get home, I see that the blog is back.

I'm a little disappointed. In the car this evening, I had decided to let external forces determine if the blog will continue. If it stayed blocked, that'd be that - unless someone actually noticed and asked about it, in which case I'd reconsider. If the blockage dissolved, I'd continue posting. Even though I've got a feeling that I and some kind of scanning-for-bad-words program are the only ones reading this. Is that worth it? Could be. It's kind of a journal that I don't need to physically carry around.

I don't know what I'll end up doing. I'm too tired to think about it now, having gotten home from Buckner after 1 this morning, leaving for work 6 hours later, and getting back home 12 hours after that.

-- 1360

i must not think bad thoughts

2006-09-09T20:48:00.000-05:00

[The original 9/9 title was a quote from Smog's The Well, as...]

... both a tribute to Smog, who I'm seeing tomorrow night, and the phrase that went through my mind the most at my cousin's birthday party tonight (and continues to resonate through those caverns). That and Kishnev, which is where my father and I were seated. The set-up was in the shape of a banjo, and I was up by the tuning pegs.

It's not like I'm a people person anyway, but I've never felt less of a rapport with any group than I did with these people whom I have the pleasure of seeing a few times a year. At one point I got a phone call, and I enjoyed talking to a friend so much that soon after ending that call, I called one of my sisters to catch up on things. She was 50 last week, and her wife will be 50 next week, so they're going to Vegas to meet the wife's twin bother, who, as it happens will also be 50 next week.

I also made some progress on a track list for a compilation I'm doing. I've got to remember to retrieve the napkin with my notes before I blow my nose on it.

My father seemed to have a good time, which is the only reason I go to these functions. On the ride back to his house, I vented a little of my contempt for the event, minus the Smog quote. The good thing about telling him stuff like that is that he won't remember it five minutes later. I don't want him to think that his daughter is miserable.

The Smog show is the first of five I've got in the next seven days. When I leave Smog, I'll head over to Shearwater. That show starts two hours later, and they've got two openers, so I don't anticipate any trouble getting to the second venue in time. Tho' I imagine I'll have to forego my favorite perch at this less-than-my-favorite club.

Thursday, I've got two Richard Buckner shows. He's the opener for Eric Bachmann at the 6:30 show and the headliner at the 10:00 show. I've seen him on consecutive nights, but not two shows in the same night. It's really interesting to see how some acts (American Music Club, Okkervil River) make it a point to do two very different shows, knowing that a few crazies will go to both. Someone sent me a pre-release copy of Buckner's new album, which comes out on Tuesday. (I'll buy a legit copy at the show, perhaps putting my money directly into the hand of the man himself, like last time he had a new album coming out during a tour.)

Then, a week from tonight, The Mountain Goats, who can always be relied on for a great, great show. Like at Pitchfork.

BTW -- smogquote....

-- 9501

damn stats

2006-09-05T21:07:00.000-05:00

As bloggers' interests go:

-- Cacophony -- 0 women : 4 men : 2 unspecified

-- Annoying people -- 29 women : 11 men : 1 unspecified

(There's no way to tell who's using "annoying" as a gerund, who's using it as an adjective, and who's being intentionally ambiguous.)

I thought about making some lame-ass comment about these figures, but we've had enough of that already, don't you think?

-- 1360

ima gonna tellya how its gonna be, or, shut up you whiny little thang

2006-08-31T20:45:00.000-05:00

I thought of the first title while I was driving from work to my father's house this evening. I thought of the second half an hour later as I walked past a horrible little girl at Old Country Buffet and realized we weren't so different.

For the last few days, I've been thinking I know exactly how my life will proceed from here. But I also keep asking myself, am I thinking this because I really know what the future will be, or do I "know" because I think this way? If someone else brought this up, I'd tell 'em it was the latter, of course. Self-fulfilling prophecy, etc. And I'd mean it.

For now, I'm caught in a trap and I can't walk out. So I might as well relax, enjoy this era as much as I can, and put the time to good use preparing for the day when things are brighter. I've got to shake the notion that there's nothing I can do to shape my future the way I want it.

On a little break this afternoon, I read a few articles about Okkervil River in the Australian press, where they're about to tour. This quote from Will Sheff, about what their next album will be like, spoke to me:

"I always feel that if I tell too much about it in advance then I close myself off from hearing what's actually happening. I have some ideas, but these will change, and I try and hold those ideas apart from the subconscious thinking so that I'm more open to whatever happens."

I can't help that it's pathetic, me looking for guidance from a 30-year old kid, however brilliant he may be. But these days I take whatever I can get, wherever I can get it.

* * * * *

Earlier this week, I printed out an article titled "Let Your Blog Posts Marinate". What a good idea! That's why they offer the "Save as Draft" option. But I don't feel like it.

- 9501

not quite halfway there

2006-08-28T20:49:00.000-05:00

The supposedly oldest person in the world died a few days ago, at age 116. If I can hold on that long, I've got a long way to go. Too bad I'm already considered to be far over the hill. Actually, I expect to die in a fiery crash any time now. So even a couple more decent decades would be nice.

I don't know why, though. My frame of mind is such that, when the phrase "vale of tears" entered my consciousness at work, I stopped what I was doing (namely, eating lunch) and googled for the source. Had I been on a desert island or a quiz show, I'd've guessed Shakespeare. But it seems to have come from James Montgomery (1771-1854) (do the math: he lived to 82 or 83), from "The Issues of Life and Death".

Finding that, plus going back to the Chris Ware show at the Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday have made me feel better. Thank goodness the concert season is revving up.

* * * * *

New acquisitions:

The Tree & other stories, by Abdalla al-Nasser - Saudi Arabian short stories.

UK Elle Decoration (September 2006 issue) - lots of stuff about color. I'm going to paint soon, and this is to help me make some decisions. I'm thinking something green for the living room, turquoise for the kitchen, maybe something from the purple family for the bedroom, and something complementary for the entryway.

Ticket to Lambchop + their new album (from eMusic).

Ticket to Ian Anderson w/orchestra. I hope it's not too horrible, but I've skipped so many of his shows and the logistics for this one are very appealing.

Downloads of Beiruit and Devotchka (and last week, The Mountain Goats and Magnolia Electric Co.).

Plus five books via Amazon, including the new A.B. Yehoshua (which I was shopping for when I found the Saudi stories, but Borders' paltry 10% coupon just didn't do it for me), "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel (recommended by my sister and Harvey Pekar) and a book of Wim Wenders' photography (including his wonderful shots of Havana, which, as inspiration for my trip last year, were second only to a friend's lucky 3-peso Che coin).

(It's so neat to read that Wim clerked at both Reckless Records stores here a couple of weeks ago!)

- 1360

doo wacka doo wacka Doo Wacka Doo Wacka DOO WACKA DOO WACKA DOO!!!!!

2006-08-24T19:42:00.000-05:00

Any comments?

down so far i never quite made it back

2006-08-18T11:19:00.000-05:00

(the title is from Richard Buckner's "Surprise, Arizona", which comes up a few times on the MP3 disc I've written of.)

This morning, as the Buckner CD went into the 11th folder (with an average of 15 cuts per folder), I remembered how I wrote last time that maybe it would never end.

Then I thought about how neat it'd be if it really never did end - if it somehow had every Buckner concert from the beginning of time, in chronological order and, as it continued playing, even the shows he plays after you first got the disc were there.

Next thought was, could I turn this idea into a short story? (Probably not, at least not me, but maybe a piece of "flash fiction".) (Or is this entry already a piece of "flash nonfiction"?)

That brought to mind a science fiction story I read, maybe in the early 70s, called (I think) "Descending". It had a guy in a department store (I pictured Marshall Field's on State Street), riding down the the escalator from an upper floor, engrossed in something he was reading, transferring at each floor without thinking about it. He then realizes he's gone beyond street level and there's no one else around. And there's no "up" escalator in sight. He goes down another level, thinking he'll find the up there, but it's not there. So he keeps descending. Eventually, he realizes he's trapped, and starts freaking out, and at the end he's feeding his hand into the place at the bottom of the escalator where the steps go behind the surface, to kill himself.

It's not like my memory is good. I can read a story in an old issue of the New Yorker and not realize I've read it before until some tiny detail rings a bell. Same thing with a mindless made-for-TV type movie. I usually remember quality films, although I often forget how they end. So I can watch 'em again and still wonder what's going to happen.

(On of my favorite movies, Midnight Cowboy, I know the end very well, but every time I watch it I hope it'll end differently. So far, it hasn't.)

But that story, Descending, made a big impression on me. There was another in the same anthology (or maybe another year's anthology from the same series) in which a guy who rode the same commuter train every day saw something (I don't remember exactly what, but I'm picturing a rag) in the same place every day, but it changed form each time he saw it, eventually turning into something horrible. I was riding the CTA downtown every day at the time, and it felt very real.

I've gotta find those stories again somehow. I guess they would more accurately be called "fantasy" as opposed to sci-fi. I'm not really a fan of sci-fi. I don't much care for stuff that takes place in the future, or the past, for that matter. The here and now is scary enough.

BTW, as I drove into the parking garage at work this morning, the Buckner disc started over on the first track. The spell is broken.

- 650

music is a constant positive

2006-08-16T20:58:00.000-05:00

I've been in a mood that's not conducive to a post of substance, so I'll write a little about my current musical life.

I've been doing some trading of live Richard Buckner shows with some guys on a Buckner board. One of them converted a show I recorded a few months ago, from my original on minidisc to CD. The show was outdoors, on a very windy day - the next act had to stop for a while, it was so bad - and I was surprised at how much the wind noise comes through on the recording. (I talked to Buckner after the show and he said he was afraid the stage would come down on him. I told him I'd been thinking that the flapping blue tarp behind him had enhanced the drama of the songs.)

The guy who did the conversion is some kind of purist, and pretty much said the recording was worthless. So when I got the CD he made, I was expecting the worst, and it was actually pretty good. I was most concerned that I had sung along with some favorite lines, but I can't really hear myself, which was quite a relief.

But Mr. Converter did send me a disc of MP3s of Buckner shows. I'm currently on the 10th show (all on the same disc! - must figure out how to do that - and how to convert my minidisc backlog myself), and I'm under the impression that there are more than 150 tunes on the one disc. It's really exciting to hear different versions of the songs, most of which are pre-Impasse. But I was very happy to find that the disc includes one of the shows from the tour Buckner did with his then-wife on drums (a little more than a year before I got turned onto Buckner). It's a very raw, stark sound, with just the two of them playing. There's also a radio interview on the disc, where he confirms that his singing style is majorly influenced by bluegrass and hillbilly music. And there's a great show with Alejandro Escovedo.

I sent copies of my show and the MP3 disc to another guy. He loved my disc, and was thrilled by the MP3s (he said it was good to know that, if there was ever a fire, he could rescue a lot of Buckner by saving just that disc). He sent me a package that arrived today. It looks like two Buckner shows on four discs, including a show from the fantastic tour earlier this year with Doug Gillard on guitar. I'm looking forward to seeing Buckner in about a month, again with a guitarist. He's doing two shows in one night, and it's always interesting to see a favorite act do two shows in a one or two night period.

I was planning to listen to the new Bottle Rockets album this week, which I recently downloaded off eMusic, to help me decide whether to go to their show this Friday night. But I'm so digging the Buckner, and there are so many great shows coming up in the next couple of months, that I think I'll skip the B-Rox. I've got to save a little energy for other things, like shopping for food and doing laundry.

I do plan to go to World Party next Tuesday, William Elliot Whitmore the week after that, and Paul Burch a few days later. I just downloaded his new album last night, and I think I'll listen to it when I get to the end of the Buckner MP3 disc (assuming it has an end).

I bought a ticket to Smog and Josephine Foster on September 10(?), and, of course, a Shearwater show was subsequently announced for the same night. I think I can do both, missing a bit of Shearwater if they don't have an opening act, which is unlikely. I think I'd've done this even if I'd known about both shows before I made any decisions about which to go to.

Somewhere I have an article that ran (in the Village Voice?) a couple of decades ago, titled "Music is a Constant Positive". 'deed 'tis. It's gotten me through a couple of tough weeks, and now I think my mood is winding down, some big projects at work having been finalized yesterday. Someday, when I whittle back my collection of printed matter to a single file, that article will be in it.

On the flip side, I heard a preview of a piece on NPR about why people lose interest in learning about new things as they get older. The teaser gave the example of my generation being the ones ordering those crappy reissues off of TV. I've got to remember to listen to the piece online, so I can feel superior to someone.

Now I must turn my attention to Project Runway. I've already missed some important developments. It's a good thing the show runs about 17 times a week.

- 9501

siege!

2006-08-13T17:50:00.000-05:00

For a period of time a while back, I often thought about being under siege. Not just me, but also my father, my country, my civilization, my planet.

I don't any more. The only thing that's changed is, I decided to stop using that word to describe my own life. I'm under siege if I think I am, so I stopped thinking I am. It has helped. (I almost had a relapse this week, but it didn't take hold.)

But apart from me --

My father is under siege from the plaque that's growing in his brain.

My country is under siege from the Bushites. (Geez, what am I supposed to call them?)

My civilization is under siege from the fundamentalists.

My planet is under siege from greed (I think just about everything people do - good and bad - comes from greed for one thing or another).

I'm too tired and lazy and busy and sad and inarticulate to develop this theme. (Like it matters....)

* * * * *

Shit.... Just saw this on the CNN crawl:

"Among the dead soldiers this weekend was Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman, the 20-year-old son of renowned Israeli novelist and peace activist David Grossman."

Now we're talking siege for real....

- 1360

shopping away the despair - part 827

2006-08-06T18:59:00.000-05:00

I don’t buy much stuff any more. I have way too much (as some of you know), and getting more doesn’t do myself a favor. Unless it’s something useful or really special.

Yesterday, I needed to kill time between picking up a lamp I’d brought in for rewiring, and taking my father out for dinner. The last time those two activities converged on my to-do list, we went to a shoe store, a library and a used record store between those two stops. He waited patiently at the former and the latter, but I dislike the feeling that someone is waiting for me, and I’ve never liked my parents looking over my shoulder to see what I spend on music, books, and similar items, so it wasn’t as much fun as it might otherwise have been.

Anyway, yesterday the time was passed at one of my favorite used bookstores. I know, I just implied I didn’t like to go to bookstores with my father, and I don’t, but that’s the way it worked out this time. I didn’t think I’d find anything, and I figured that with his poor hearing, my father wouldn’t hear what I spent, even if I did find something. It turn out that I did find three things I deemed worth taking my wallet out for:

1. A 2006 guidebook to Palestine. Attractively put together, with lots of pictures, and lots of introductory material about history, the Jews, the new wall and other serious topics. Back when I was living in Israel, the places that were the most interesting to me were the "mixed" towns that had both Jewish and Arab presence and history, and those places are all covered here.

(This book reminded me of a story that one of the guys on my kibbutz told. He was travelling in Europe some time after the 1967 six-day war, and one afternoon while he was waiting in line for a youth hostel to open, he got into a conversation with a couple of guys from Japan. When he told them where he was from, they had never heard of Israel. But they happened to have a map of the world. They all unfolded the map, and it turned out to be an old one - from before 1948. So Israel was not on the map. But Palestine was.)

2. "Flash Fiction Forward" - an anthology of stories that run 2 or 3 pages. I’m pretty sure I have an earlier book from what is now a series.

3. "Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction" - essays that mostly run 2 to 8 pages.

At this moment, the nonfiction book is more interesting to me than the fiction. One of my goals in doing this blog is to practice writing and try to "find my voice" and to make a stronger connection between my mind and my fingers. So I’ll read these books - or, more likely, random pieces in them - partly to see what can be done and how.

(By the way, I know my latest postings are not so great.) (Have I said that before?) (I'm still not completely into this.) (So why do I post so often?) (Damned if I know.) (Can we ever really know ourselves?)

Something I didn’t buy (yet): This afternoon, poking around on line, I looked at some of the entries on Wim Wenders’ forum, and learned (or was reminded?) that his Tokyo-Ga film is an extra on a two-disc DVD of Ozu’s Late Spring. I came very close to ordering it from Amazon, but thought maybe I’ll find it for less somewhere else. I won’t let this one sit around too long on my wish list, though - it’s something that I’d actually watch. I’ve seen the Ozu, but these days stories about elderly widowers and their middle-aged spinster daughters are more interesting to me than ever. There was a very interesting customer posting about the DVD, comparing its aesthetics to those of the VHS; either the guy’s insane or there are some amazing differences. I’d like to get both eventually and compare them myself.

Wim’s forum replaces his previous forum and drops all the old postings. There used to be a lot about one of my favorite movies, by him or anyone else - Wings of Desire. I had posted about how I’d gone to see the film - again - when I was in Berlin. It was at a tiny theater, in what had been East Berlin, and I was hoping that people in the audience would dress up like characters in the film, but, no, none of the three or four of us in the theater did that. (Maybe you need to go to a weekend screening for that?) Anyway, as we were in Germany, there was seemingly no need for English subtitles. I’d known from the listing that there wouldn’t be subtitles, but I had watched the film a few weeks earlier at home, scouting for sites that I could keep a watch for when I got to Berlin. (I saw some! And I made a little pilgrimage to the public library where some great scenes were filmed.) So not knowing any German did not interfere with my enjoyment of the film. But any comments that might have been made to my posting are now lost forever.

And now, Mexican leftovers and a Japanese beer.

- 1360

(did you ever take a ride on a) roller coaster

2006-08-04T21:24:00.000-05:00

My day today had its ups and downs.

6a Approximate wakeup time, despite having gone to sleep after 1am, following Vetiver show at Empty Bottle. DOWN!

7:20a Left home, stopped to pick up Reader. UP! Light traffic. UP! Called Toyota dealer from car for appointment to have horrible noise checked out. Got one for 11am. UP! Noise was there, albeit less loud, a few weeks ago, when the technician who took it on a drive with me claimed to hear nothing. I regretted getting the oil change they pushed at that time; I think it distracted them from diagnosing the noise. Brooded about this a while. DOWN!

8:45a Picked up coffee and pastries for my father and his helper, plus my cousins who live nearby, because one of them was recuperating from surgery yesterday. Didn’t get anything for myself, wasn’t even tempted, having had some weight-loss success of late. UP!

9:15a Following a 15-minute report about the surgery, it was mentioned that the ex-husband of a different cousin died earlier this week, age 57, lymphoma. I’d heard about him having a bone marrow transplant a few months ago, so I knew it was pretty bad, but this was kind of a shocker. DOWN! He was a nice guy - though I’d had to give him the brush-off some years ago when he expressed an interest in your blogger. Apart from the odd family entanglements (I’d given them amateur marriage counselling), I just wasn’t interested. No ascertainable complexity - just earnestness.

11a Brought the car in. They found no record of my appointment, told me it’d be an hour. DOWN! When I mentioned how I’d already waited an hour a couple of weeks ago for the same problem, they brought out the same tech almost immediately. This time he heard the noise (UP!), wanted to keep the car to diagnose it. All his initial theories sounded expensive to fix. DOWN! My hope was it’d be not much over a thou. Got a ride back to the office.

4p Having heard nothing, called to check on the car. I wanted to be sure they didn’t wait to long to get to it before the weekend.

4:30p They called to say they’d pick me up at 5:10.

5p The driver called to say he was downstairs waiting. I raced out, leaving behind the Chinese menu I’d wanted to call for dinner from in advance. DOWN!

5:10p Turns out, the problem was an almost complete absence of power steering fluid. I said I thought fluids were checked as part of the oil change I’d had 2 weeks before. They said they were. But obviously they weren’t. Enjoyed making some sarcastic suggestions about quality control. UP! And nice not to have to spend lotsa bucks to keep the car going. UP! It "runs good" now. UP!

5:20p Drove to the restaurant, ordered the food there. Took a look in a discount shoe store to kill time. A song started coming over the PA. Sounded like Leave Me Alone, but not the Pernice Bros version. Could it be the original New Order version, which I’ve been dying to hear? Yes it was! UP! I celebrated by buying a needed pair of nice looking shower clogs, instead of cheaper drugstore ones. UP!

5:45p Driving the food to my father’s house, I stopped to take a quick look in a shop I’d passed a number of times, with a "CD Sale" sign in the window. I figured it’d be nothing, up there in the suburbs. I walked to the door, it was a dry cleaners! I figured someone there was getting rid of crap, but stuck my head in. Yes, it was a dry cleaners. The door I wanted was a few steps further. The first thing I see in the shop is lots of picture discs by the early Rolling Stones, imports with different song combinations. It turns out it’s a collector’s store that opened just a couple of months ago. They want the kind of stuff that I want to (partly) deaccession. And they have some stuff I’d love to trade for. And they claim proficiency in ordering imports. (Hey! I can order this Italian compilation that has a rare Great Lake Swimmers track I’ve been wanting! UP!) I took a real quick gander at a bin of sale things, and the first thing I saw was an American Music Club CD single I don’t have, for just three bucks! UP! I told the guy this is the kind of store I find in my dreams. I’ll definitely go back (but not until I’ve pulled some things to trade).

7:15p Home! My time is my own for the next 20 hours. There are a few museum exhibits and galleries I’d like to see tomorrow, but I’ve decided to stay home instead. My father’s Sunday caregiver, who finally got back from more than a month abroad and worked for us one week last month, got a more substantial job and so is not available any more, but her sister can come, at least this week. Later than I’d like, but I’m grateful for anything. So I get a half-day to myself on Sunday too!!! I’ve got to make tonight an early one, to catch up on the sleep I missed out on last night. And I think I won’t go to hear the Drams (f/k/a Slobberbone) tomorrow night. I d/l’d their new disc off eMusic and played it today. OK, but not a must, and after a whole weekend devoted to Pitchfork last weekend, I’m going to cut back on less-than-primo shows at least for a while - maybe forever.

7:45p Found that Great Lake Swimmers track on a music blog! UP!!

8:45p Just took a glimpse at a short playing on the Sundance Channel, called Ryan. Stunning visuals, including the title character who is "not all there". Literally. Parts of his face and body are missing. It’ll run again on the 16th, when I’ll be ready to record it for the archive. UP!

9:00p Just started a fresh DVD-R for J-horror. I’m recording Kibakichi off one of the newly discovered Showtime channels I’m getting without paying for. UP! At first it looked like too much of a period piece, but now someone's chewing on the neck of a severed head, and I like the furniture and architecture in the background. And the music's not bad. I'll turn it off now, and while it’s recording I’ll read until I drop off. UP!!!

Hmm.... That doesn’t read like a roller coaster. The downs and ups are too clumped. It felt like one during the day, though, but I’m too tired to fill in the gaps merely to justify the title. (Which is from an old Ides of March song, in case you didn't know.) And it’s not like anyone is still reading this entry....

- 1360

two really neat things i saw last month

2006-08-01T22:18:00.000-05:00

I think I’ll always remember these experiences, but just in case....

I went to a play in downtown Chicago one weeknight, and I parked in my secret free space on the other side of the Loop, as usual. Walking back to the car after the play, I cut across the plaza in front of the courthouse. I hadn’t heard about it in advance, so it was a surprise to come across some full-size yurts, with recorded Mongolian throat singing coming out of the largest of them.

The place was pretty much deserted, except for me and my theater companion. I’ve long wanted to go to Mongolia, and I’ve even imagined setting up a yurt in my apartment. (Nomadic high-rise living: it's the latest thing.) This could be the closest I ever get to either of them.

* * * * *

Last week, I was driving home from work. There had been a brief but powerful rainstorm before I left the office, and I had dreaded the sluggish traffic that even a single drop of rain usually results in. But with the day getting late (“as the sun settled in the west” is one of my most often thought-of movie (TV?) lines), I had the pleasure of watching a rainbow for more than half of my 22-mile trip.

I usually get off the expressway a mile past where I have to, because that allows me to take a ramp that provides an especially good view of downtown Chicago, which always reminds me why I live down here despite all the driving that that entails. At one point on the ramp, I was about 3/4 of a mile north of the Sears Tower, which I believe to be the tallest building in this hemisphere. I was keeping one eye on the rainbow and one eye on the road. Amazingly, when the rainbow and the Sears Tower aligned, the rainbow was in front of the building, translucent, so I could look right through it at the building. I always thought rainbows were far away. I would have liked to drive in that direction until I got to the point where the rainbow disappeared, but the road curved, and that was that.

-1360

i hope we all die (and i mean it in the best possible way)

2006-07-30T09:42:00.000-05:00

The title of this post is a tribute to The Mountain Goats, quoting from a sing-along version of No Children yesterday on the first day of the Pitchfork Music Festival. Despite the heat and the crowd, I was completely engrossed in the performance, stunned anew by John Darnielle's brilliance. (Thanks, AZ!) At most shows, I applaud in part out of duty (this is after decades during which I never applauded anyone, based on some foolish now-forgotten principle), and I usually count out the claps, always doing an odd number, not 13 unless I have some perverse reason under the prevailing circumstances. (I guess I'm a little nuts.) (Guess???) This time I applauded long and hard out of a pure desire to say, man, that was GREAT! (But no one and nothing can get me to join in on a sing-along.)

What a combination of utter vitality and utter desolation! Those songs have to have come from a truly dark place, and yet the shows are so joyous. I was especially struck by a song about driving a few hours to a Texas post office to pick up postcards from a lost love, and coming home afterwards. (I don't remember hearing that one before; I wonder if I've got it). I'm very excited that their new album will be out in just a few weeks, and I'm glad I've already bought a ticket for their show here in September. I don't know how it won't sell out in the next few days, after yesterday's show.

No one else touched the Goats yesterday, although the day was overall an enjoyable experience despite the intense heat. I was expecting the worst, so of course it wasn't that bad, but I did ask myself how it compared to the hottest I've ever been, which was in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in June, 1982. I was taking a bus from the center of town to the youth hostel, and when the bus turned off the street the hostel was on, I got off, planning to walk the rest of the way. (I didn't know that the bus was just taking a little jog over to a parallel street.) Everyone I asked said the hostel was just down the street, but it must have been a couple of miles, and it was very hot, and I was carrying a number of books as well as all my other stuff. (Luckily the full-size Elvis Costello poster I'd found on the street in Paris during a garbage strike had been accidentally left behind in the overhead rack on a rural bus on the Isle of Wight.) I felt pretty close to collapsing that day. But not at Pitchfork, I'm relieved to say.

I also thought about the coldest I've ever been, which was waiting for a bus outside a giant apartment block in Leningrad in late January, 1986 or 1987, and the second coldest, which was on the Staten Island Ferry in February, 1978. Maybe it was thinking about those experiences that kept me on my feet yesterday.

The other bands I saw yesterday: Band of Horses sounded great in the descriptions, which invoked Uncle Tupelo and Neil Young, but were only OK (I'd like to hear their recorded work). I was excited about Destroyer, but they got kinda monotonous, so after a few songs I got in line to refresh my water supply. I enjoyed their last few songs when I got back, and I want to get back to their new CD. Art Brut - I have an EP, found used in London after getting a kick out of their song We Formed a Band, but I wasn't moved by them yesterday (it's hard to follow the Goats). Ted Leo - nice sound, nothing special - I need more than "great showmanship". The Walkmen - yeah, the guy does sound like Dylan, but the material wasn't distinctive. The Futureheads - I stayed for 4 or 5 songs in hopes of hearing their cover of "Hounds of Love", but they were nothing special. I would have been really excited to see the Silver Jews had I not already seen them in April, which was enough.

Now I'm getting myself mentally prepared for the second day of the festival, where I'll arrive earlier and stay later than yesterday. I'm most excited about Jens Lekman (all week his nothing-special line "My mother told me I was born a liar; my mother told me I was born with a belly to lie on" has been going through my head, and the melody often comes out whistled), and The National. (Thanx, AZ!) But lots of the others are also very promising. I just have to remember not to expect too much.

I'd much rather see a band in a small, dark, smoky club than at a festival context, but this is pretty darn great.

- 1360

that's our show tonight folks

2006-07-25T22:04:00.000-05:00

I’ve looked forward all month to seeing "El Mago", a 2004 film that, based on the blurb I read, looks like a Mexican version of one of my absolute favorite films, "Ikiru", by Akira Kurasawa, injected with some magic realism. I scheduled my week so I could go tonight at the Siskel theater downtown. But in the end, I decided to just come home and [try to] relax. This is an unusually challenging week for me (mostly family stuff), so instead I’m watching one of those cheesy rock-style talent shows on TV, cooking some broccoli and trying to get things under control here. Anyway, the movie will probably show up again somewhere, and I’ll get more out of it after I learn some Spanish and get diagnosed with a fatal illness. (Not necessarily in that order.)

I recently noticed that, in addition to the HBO channels I pay the cable company for, I'm also getting all of the Starz, Showtime, Movie Channel and Cinemax channels. I wonder how long that’s been going on. It turns out that StarzCinema gives the Sundance Channel some serious competition. (Wow! I just saw that tomorrow they’re showing all 6+ hours of "The Best of Youth" (Italy 2002), which I didn't have time for when it played at the Siskel a few months back. I won’t be here to change the disc, but I think it’ll all fit on one.) I only hope that I -- and DVD-R technology -- live long enough to watch half of the great stuff I record overnight, while I'm at work, and while I'm watching some other mindless thing. (Through the miracle of an A-B switch, I'm recording "Stryker", a 2004 Canadian film, right now while I keep an eye on the aforementioned dreck.)

In the meantime, it’s just so great that the judges on these TV shows are such experts in the art and science of rock music and so generous with their insights. There’s a lot to learn here, for the contestants as well as me. What I’m learning tonight is how to tell these shows apart.

* * * * *

I’m tempted not to post this clump of lameness, but I’m not sure how soon I’ll have time to get back here, what with the Pitchfork Festival coming up, so wtf....

-1360

55.5

2006-07-20T21:32:00.000-05:00

It's my half-birthday. All the excitement has me too pooped to get introspective.

But it doesn't take an event of this proportion for me to occasionally enjoy the solitary parlor game of where was I on this day in ....? Here's something from each decade I have lived in.

1956 - My youngest sister was in utero, and I was enjoying my last summer of freedom before beginning grammar school. It was my first summer in the suburbs, and I was enjoying the empty lots on the block (I wasn't allowed to cross the street without asking, and it never occured to me to do it without permission). I never wore shoes. I remember putting on shoes when school started and thinking how horrible it was that I'd have that closed-in feeling until the next summer. I had no idea how much worse that closed-in feeling could get.

1964-68 - These summers were mostly spent in the basement, where our record-player was. Or in my room listening to the radio. Or babysitting so I could buy more records. Mono albums were $1.97, and there was no point in popping an extra buck for stereo. Was it 1964 or 1965 when I heard It's All Over Now by the Stones on the radio and thought it was the ugliest thing I'd ever heard. An hour later, they played it again - same reaction. Once an hour for a couple more hours and I rode my bike over to Polk Brothers to pick up 12x5. I still love that album and especially that song. Those summers, I spent so many hours half-sitting, half lying, poring over every corner of the album covers while I listened to the records. Sometimes I sewed while I listened. Somewhere, I still have the Nehru jackets I whipped up for myself.

1973 - I was living on a kibbutz in Israel for 5-1/2 months, to stretch out my money on a long trip to Europe. The kibbutz was an old one, with an art museum, and grapefruit groves, and storks hanging out by the fish ponds. On the hill behind the kibbutz was rubble from an Arab town left empty in 1948. An abandoned railroad track that once went from Tel Aviv to Damascus ran through the valley below the kibbutz; man, how I wished I could ride that train! We were just north of the West Bank and not far from the Jordan River. At night I could see lights twinkling in Jordanian villages across the river. I went almost everywhere, with friends and on outings the kibbutz put together for the volunteers. In late July, there were still a few weeks to go until we went down to the Sinai peninsula and slept on the beach during the meteor showers, waking up to watch the sun rise over Saudi Arabia. The kibbutzniks drove us through the West Bank like they owned the place - we poked around in abandoned refugee camps and in the half-built palace King Hussain had left behind in 1967. I wanted to go to the city of Gaza but was strongly discouraged and no one would go with me, so I never got there.

On the kibbutz, there were old guys who'd walked to Palestine from Russia 50 years earlier. I was especially fond of the elderly bookbinder who had an endless supply of old books to restore. There was a clump of old ladies from Germany who'd moved to Argentina in the 1930s and much later to Israel. They spoke German and Yiddish and Spanish but not Hebrew. Some of the kibbutzniks had fought in the six-day 1967 war. They laughed about how dumb the Arabs were, how their boots were so heavy that they'd removed them in the desert and run home barefoot across the Sinai to Egypt. And how, when the sands shifted, you could still find those shoes. Some of my favorite places - Safed, Nazareth, Akko - are in the news these days.

I spent my last few months in Israel months considering exit strategies: A boat to Ethiopia? Fly to Teheran and then go overland to India? Helsinki? In the end I stuck it out until the end of the program, then sailed to Athens, zigged and zagged through Eastern Europe, and was working as an au pair in Paris when the Yom Kippur war started a few months later.

1985 - The first summer of my current job, and the last summer before my mother took ill and I was introduced to the joys of aging parents.

1992 - My mother's last summer. One day, after months of staying home except for chemotherapy, she demanded I take her for a ride. I figured she'd be up for a several-mile loop in the neighborhood, but, no, she wanted to go into the city to my apartment. Then she wanted to stay over. We had a lovely evening together, but when she woke up the next morning she was frantic and I had to take her home immediately. Over the next few months, she withered and then died. Yes, I'm thinking of the Richard Thompson song.

2001 - Planning the last trip I'd go on with my sister and all four of her kids, as the oldest would be flying the coop after the coming school year. We drove up the northern shore of Lake Superior to Grand Marais, Minnesota. We spent one day in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We had wild rice pizza. We bickered as usual. We had a great time. But whenever I think of that trip I remember that it was just a few weeks before September 11.

Yesterday - The ophthalmalogist can't find anything wrong with my eyes, and said that the "baby cataracts" couldn't possibly be affecting my vision. I'm going to try to stop looking at things so closely.

- 9501

why i carry three wallets

2006-07-18T07:10:00.000-05:00

Watch this space!

youthful's just another word ...

2006-07-12T21:18:00.000-05:00

... for old.

I've gotten used to - and fond of - getting remarks about how young I look. For my age, that is. It happens a lot. Really!

Maybe it's because I don't do a lot of the things that adult women are supposed to do, like makeup, hair color and, these days, cosmetic surgery (which, to me, includes non-surgical procedures like botox, etc.). Some days (OK, lots of days), I don't even comb my hair - although I do make hair adjustments with my fingers, sometimes preceded by hanging my head down and getting everything to fall in mostly the same direction.

I guess I feel like trying is not going to make a difference except to make me look (and feel) foolish for trying. And it seems that not having a slick or refined look is often confused with looking young. It's not like I'm trying to get away with anything. I don't think I care too much about looking young, but I don't want to look slick or refined. It would feel pretentious.

When people exclaim how young I look, I'm very quick to point out the crevices and other "signs of aging". But they insist. It's not like I go around announcing my age, soliciting flattering comments. But I've gotten so used to expressions of surprise at my age that I halfway expect them when the situation makes the issue come up.

A couple of weeks ago, I was signing up at a new health club, and when the boy-salesman (turns out he's 23) who was putting my info into their computer system asked me my date of birth and I told him, he said "My god, that's amazing!" I had been leary about the kid, figuring he'd do anything to get me to sign up so he could meet his monthly quota. So when he said that, I thought, jeez, kid, you've got to do a better job at feigning sincerity - turn it down a bit so I can kind of believe what you're saying.

But it turned out that I have the same birthday - including the year - as the kid's father. I sometimes tell people I meet casually "I'm old enough to be your mother". I told that to my Shearwater/Tim Easton friend last week, although it turned out she's only 11 years younger than me. But with this kid at the health club, I couldn't have been more right. I'm old enough to be his father.

* * * * *

There are times when I think I shouldn't be against plastic surgery. But the whole american attitude towards aging - as compared to what I understand to be, say, the european attitude - truly sickens me. And no single procedure would make enough of a difference for it to be worth the bother anyway.

Sometimes I think of being alive as a performance piece. There's a piece of art I've seen at the Museum of Contemporary Photography here in Chicago as well as at the Tate Museum in London (in the Memento Mori room), by a young British woman named Sam Taylor-Wood, called "Still Life, 2001". I had to google for her name, but in doing so I found the MCP blurb, which describes it as "a three minute film showing a still life composition of peaches molding within seconds". There's a still from the film in an article at getunderground.com/underground/features/article.cfm?Article_ID=1542
(it's the third picture from the top). Quoting from the article:

" the fruit ... looks lucious as a still life by Caravaggio ..., but as our eyes roam over the peach-bloom, the light alters subtly, and a pear stalk droops downwards. Everything, suddenly, is on the move. .... The peaches sprout a pale grey mould, the cherries are assailed by a bilious green growth, and soon everything seems about to be smothered in a frost-like blight. Once piled high and swollen with ripeness, the fruit now sinks lower and lower, until an annihilating black substance creeps across everything."

I hope it never gets that bad, but if I'm lucky, I'll live long enough to watch myself go through a parallel process.

* * * * *

A few weeks ago, it was a dark and stormy night, and I was up in my apartment, with the shades up. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing flashes of lightening over Lake Michigan, but whenever I looked out to see the bolts, the atmosphere just didn't seem quite right for lightening. At some point, it occurred to me that the flashes were happening in my eye, not out on the lake. I'd known for a while that I needed a new glasses prescription (I'm at the point where my near-sightedness is actually getting better), and I also had been noticing that there was sometimes a sort of film in one of my eyes - something I kept trying to blink away but wasn't always able to. I figured I needed more sleep.

But the flashes were a new thing. I looked around online a bit to see what they might be. It started to seem that there could be a problem with my retina. Usually associated with aging, the websites said, but possibly serious, conceivably leading to blindness. OK, I'd get my eyes looked at soon. The next morning, I looked at the websites again and started to get more concerned. So I called an ophthalmalogist who's in my firm's medical PPO, and when I told the receptionist my symptoms, she told me to come right in.

On the drive over to the doctor's office, I remembered how I'd always said that I'd rather go blind than deaf. I'd rather sit at home, listening to music and reading in Braille, than go out, reading people's lips, enjoying the vibrations in the floor at an occasional concert. That would still be my preference between the two options, but I'd rather not have to choose.

I'll cut to the chase. The doctor looked and looked and looked. I told him what I'd read, but he said he saw nothing wrong with my eyes. He thought what I was experiencing was floaters. Doctor, I know floaters; these aren't floaters. I kept him talking, but I wasn't getting a satisfactory explanation. He said I should come back in three weeks to see if there was any change. We talked some more. Then he said that there was nothing there, just some "baby cataracts".

Yikes!

I usually think of follow-up appointments as revenue-generators (and lawsuit-preventions) for doctors. But I'll go back next week. A new theory is just that my eyes are dry, and with more tears I really could blink away that film. But, thinking about it, I'm scared that it IS cataracts. So I keep checking and testing my vision. Then I forget about it for a few hours, and then I check some more. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world if, some day, I get the cataracts (if that's what it is) taken out and lenses planted in - and then I won't need glasses.

Cataracts 'fore the 'pause? That's F**KED!

Somehow, cataracts don't seem youthful. Here's hoping it's just dry eye. But I don't think it is.

- 9501

music and people

2006-07-09T16:35:00.000-05:00

I guess you’re all wondering about that Shearwater show I mentioned – the one where I left the venue because they were running late and I didn’t want to hang around for three hours until Shearwater came on. Being neurotic about getting a good parking space and a good spot to watch the show from, I went back about two hours later, and it’s lucky I did. As I walked in and took a glance at the merch table, I realized Shearwater was already on. (The first of the four acts had been completely cut out.) I had missed a couple of songs – including what might be my favorite of theirs, Mountain Laurel – but what beautiful sounds they emitted! I can’t comprehend the source of such brilliance, but I thank whatever-there-is-to-thank that it exists.

During the show I noticed a woman videotaping the show, and I suspected she might be one of the people who posts a lot on the Shearwater/Okkervil River message boards (which I often read, especially because they post links to a lot of concerts that can be downloaded), so, high on the wonderful show, I swallowed my usual shyness and approached her, and yes she was the poster. It turned out we have some major overlaps in our musical interests, so we had a very nice conversation. I asked her who else she liked besides Shearwater and Okkervil, and she mentioned The Beatles, Billy Bragg and Fred Eaglesmith. For some reason, I thought about her and her list a few times in the following week – the list is kind of odd to me, but people like what they like. And when her setlist and review appeared on the board, she mentioned our meeting. It seemed likely I’d be running into her at future shows. That’d be nice, since I usually go alone, which is OK with me, but I’d be more likely to have something to drink if someone would watch my place when I go to the ladies’ room.

I stayed around after Shearwater to check out The Court & Spark, the headliners. When they first when on the stage, all dressed completely in white, they fumbled around with their equipment for about five minutes. One of the guys looked like Harry Nilsson, another like Roman Polanski. A third member of the group – the tallest -- was unidentifiable in gender. He/she looked like a young Pete Townshend with a nose job – and turned out to be a woman when she spoke. (This morning, one of the TV news shows had a brief clip from a 60s Who performance, and Townshend in his white jumpsuit looked just like the chick in C&S.)

I ended up feeling embarrassed for C&S, because coming after Shearwater, they were quite mediocre. They’ve got some really good songs on their albums (only two of which I’ve heard), but maybe they were disheartened, having to follow Shearwater.

A couple of nights ago, I went to see a Tim Easton show. I had long assumed he was one of those country music hat guys, but he’s actually a very fine singer-songwriter. Sweet songs with enough sadness to be real. (I hereby credit AZ for curing my earlier misconception about Easton.)

It was a very early show, and I was coming from work in the suburbs, with a dinner stop at my father’s, so I arrived after the support act had gone on. The venue is usually just standing room, but some quieter acts get rows of folding chairs. I have a theory that they do this when not many tickets have been sold, as a way to hide how empty the room is, but I’m not sure this is correct. Anyway, I slipped into a seat in the middle of the second row.

When the lights went up and I started writing some notes, the girl next to me spoke my name. It was my new music friend from the Shearwater show! I was able to tell her, truthfully, that on the way down to the show, I’d been thinking about her, not sure if I’d recognize her in some context other than videotaping Shearwater or Okkervil River. So it was lucky she recognized me. I also told her I’d been trying to think about my own list of five favorite acts. Actually I’d been thinking about which acts I’d go see over and over and over again, which is not necessarily the same list. But I recited my list, which includes Okkervil River (5), Shearwater (3), Richard Buckner (6), Mark Eitzel (7) in any context, and Warren Zevon (3). (The numbers are approximately how many times I think I’ve seen them already.) It’s possible I’m forgetting someone. And there are a few more artists who may force me to expand the list.

There’s actually a moral to this ramble. Namely, can that shy girl routine, LSG! Some of the most special people in my life are ones I was so drawn to that I overcame my fear and made the first contact. If I’ve ever been blown off or humiliated, I can’t remember it now. (Well, I can think of one time maybe I was. But I'm not sure. And if I was, that's OK.)

I wonder if my new music buddy is going to The Handsome Family on Thursday. I don’t even know if I will.

There are some Big Topics bubbling up in me, but I’ve got to let them percolate some more. (Have I mixed metaphors?)

- 9501

it's life and life only

2006-07-07T06:11:00.000-05:00

Sad, just now seeing the faces of some of the people who died at King's Cross Station, London a year ago today.

- 1360

doing well - i mean good

2006-07-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

I keep thinking of things I want to write about here, but I'm a little cowed by the prospect of anyone reading this. I've had some positive feedback already, but I don't want to fall into the trap of trying to give my readership what I think they want to read. So I'm trying to just let it flow, and I figure I'll find my voice over the course of time.

I don't believe in omens, but I enjoy noticing things that could be taken as messages from beyond. Driving to work yesterday, I listened to an album I'd just downloaded - Crooked Fingers' Dignity and Shame. I found it when I was poking around online for news about Richard Buckner, one of my very favorite musical artists.

Crooked Fingers is one of those bands that's really just one guy - like The Mountain Goats or Destroyer - and the guy, Eric Bachmann, is going to be touring with Buckner in the fall, as RB told me (she said casually) a few weeks ago. So I thought he'd be worth looking into. It helped to see that he's unanimously rated five stars by the eight people who rated him on eMusic.

Almost without exception, when I start to listen to a new album or a new artist, I first listen to the sound rather than the lyrics. The first exception that comes to mind is Warren Zevon. I remember taking his Life'll Kill Ya album home the first day it came out, lying down on the couch with the lyrics, and following them along while I listened, just drinking it all up, in awe of its brilliance. A few years later, when my mohawk-headed nephew was living with me, we both listened carefully to My Ride's Here the day it was released. (There's a clever little wordplay thing in the song Genius, and every time I hear it I remember how impressed I was that my young nephew noticed it.)

But generally I can go for weeks or more, listening to something and being so taken by the overall sound that I don't really know what they're singing about. (Lots of my favorite stuff I never completely figure out, but the sounds of the words and the voice still mean something to me.) (On a radio special about The Beatles' Revolver album this week, someone talked about how Lennon thought of a new way to write lyrics - making collages of words and phrases and thoughts rather than telling a story. Is that what these guys are doing?) But phrases stick out here and there.

On this Crooked Fingers album, one line in the fourth song popped out immediately:

"Why does everybody try to hide the heart that hidden has no use"

(It's printed that way on his website, but it sounds to me like he's saying "the heart what hidden", which I actually prefer.)

Ever since I started this blog, I've been thinking about how open to be here. So coming upon that line, just short of randomly, seemed to be a message from somewhere, telling me to just do it - write without worrying how anyone will take it. I'm really not ready to do that yet, but I hope I will be sometime soon.

In the meantime, I've got a lot of introductory material to get through. I'll try to make it fun to read.

- 1360

logistics (spoiler: dull!)

2006-07-04T15:11:00.000-05:00

As usual, I'm between doing a few things and therefore can't quite relax.

I'm in the second half of one of my 48-hour days. My father has a live-in caregiver who got married last fall and wants this job but, not surprisingly, wants to spend as much time as possible with her husband. Before she got married, she was off-duty from late Saturday afternoon to early Sunday evening, so I'd be up at my father's for much of that block of time. Every bleeping week. I'm not happy with this situation, but my siblings live out of town, and I feel very strongly that my father should have time with someone who's not paid to be there. He's not an invalid, and he doesn't need help with basic functions, but he shouldn't be alone for long periods of time, and someone has to help him with meals and medications.

It helps that my current interests are not completely incompatible with this schedule. I do a lot of sitting-around things, consuming culture in various forms - music, movies, books - and I can do some of that at his place, although I avoid movies with too much sex or violence until after he goes to sleep.

I also go out to concerts. Lots of the stuff I want to go to starts at 10pm, so I can hang out with the old man for most of his evening and then go out. And so far, even if something starts earlier, I can have dinner with him, get him set up so he can put himself to sleep, and then leave. I may not be able to do this much longer, but so far it's been OK. I'll worry about the future when (and if) it arrives.

I know I can hire more people to be with him. For a few weeks, I had someone in for 8-hour blocks on Sunday, so I could leave mid-morning and know he had company and help until close to the time the regular person returns. But then that temporary person had to go out of the country, and although I was expecting her back by now, I haven't heard from her. Most likely, she is staying away longer, but I occasionally wonder if maybe she just doesn't want to work for us. We were paying her a LOT, so she'll probably be back. I'll wait a few more weeks until I call her, and if she's not coming back, I'll make other arrangements. I think of those three weeks she worked as a taste of honey for me.

When I was negotiating the return of the regular caregiver a few months after her marriage, the agreement was that she'd have three nights off each week, including Saturday. I always keep Friday for myself, and usually Monday, but there are a couple of days a week on when I leave for work in the morning, stay at my father's overnight, then go back to work, then go home. That's what I mean by a 48-hour day.

These days, that's just the way it is. I've gotten pretty good at toting around projects I can work on wherever I am, although I usually am too busy vegging out to accomplish much. One of the appealing things about this blog is that I can post at home (1360) or at my father's (9501). I could also post at work (650), but I'm already appallingly unproductive there, so I'm not likely to do so very often. I'll be more likely to jot down some notes and work out my thoughts while I try to work, and then write a post later, assuming I have not yet gotten sick of the topic.

Anyway, this is the second half of a 48-hour day. I worked yesterday, stayed overnight at my father's house, and left after lunch. (His caregiver will be back mid-afternoon; her holiday is that she didn't have to come back at 7am.) So I have a few more hours to myself today - a little independence on Independence Day.

BUT, I'm going to go to a movie later this afternoon, so I feel like I'm in transit. I was originally going to leave my place earlier so I could swing past a big free concert downtown before the movie, but instead I'm listening to the concert on the radio, because some time alone, trying to relax, was more appealing than standing at the edge of a several-hundred-thousand-person crowd.

BTW, the concert I'm not at is of Mike Doughty, My Morning Jacket and Ray Davies, each of whom I would be interested in seeing under different circumstances. I found Doughty last fall when, on the way to a gas station, a terrific song of his came on the radio and I had to pull to the side of the road to wait until they said who it was before going into the gas station and having to turn off the radio. Subsequently, my music guru, AZ, sent me a disc of some of his songs - including the one that trapped me in the car - so I was eager to hear him.

I haven't really heard My Morning Jacket. There are four or maybe seven southern alt/indie rock bands out that I don't really know the difference between, and they're one of them. And Ray Davies I saw earlier this year and really didn't need to see again.

There's another topic for the future: which bands I'd go see at every opportunity.

Another topic that maybe I'll write about tonight: movies I've gone to lately. After not going to any for months, today's will be the third in 10 days. I won't pretend to "review" them. I'd rather talk about why I picked these, and the circumstances surrounding my going to them.

In addition to the movie - which sounds like Mexican noir in the blurb - I'm looking forward to the two-mile walk to get there. I'd like to think about this blog and how to do it and just generally try to calm down and get ready for the rest of the week.

And waiting for me when I get home, is some Indian food I picked up on the way back from my father's house. I stopped off at a place that mostly caters to Pakistani cab drivers. I used to go there more often, but the last time I went, I felt very unwelcome as a western woman, and I'm quite sure it wasn't just me projecting something.

But today I really wanted that kind of food (and the cupboard is bare here anyway), so I put on a jacket to cover my bare arms and went in. The counter guy was OK, and he actually smiled when I said that, yes, I wanted my food spicy. Another one of those little meetings of the minds that I so appreciate.

(Mike Doughty just finished his set, saying let's hear it for the super-grooviness of america.)

- 1360

to the point

2006-07-03T05:27:00.000-05:00

This entry's title is the name of a radio show that's on public broadcasting. I'm using it to remind me that I want to listen to it this afternoon. I've never listened to it before, mostly because it's on while I'm at work, as I will be this afternoon.

But the topic they've been announcing in promotional spots this morning is one of major interest to me - is the US in a decline? They even mention the decline and fall of Rome in the promos, as a basis of comparison. I've been thinking for a while that this is the case, and I was even thinking about it this morning - when I woke up ridiculously early - before I heard the first promo.

BTW - it's still very early, and when I came into the living room a few minutes ago, the sky was (and still is) yellow. I haven't looked down at the street, but from the sound of cars going by in the street below, it must be raining. I usually keep the window shades down, because so much of my stuff is getting faded. Up here on the 23rd floor there's quite a glare, even though my windows face north and therefore I get direct sunlight for only a very short time of the year, and even then only late in the day. But the shades are up this morning - I raised them last night even though it was already dark when I got home, so I could look at the illegal fireworks going off across the horizon, as July 4 approaches. It's really an amazing sight.

Don't know much about history, but it seems that things go in cycles, and civilizations tend to rise and fall. And the US seems to have been falling for a few decades now. I guess it's a natural process, just as humans rise and fall and then die - it's just one of the rules of the game. But what gets me thinking about this these days is how the process is being accellerated by what's going on in Washington.

On an optimistic day I wonder how many decades it'll take to repair the damage they've done and are doing. But I don't really think it can be undone. I wonder if any other nation will be able to pick up the slack in western civilization or if we are heading into another Dark Ages. (I remember thinking on September 11, this is the beginning of the new dark age.) I don't expect to be around when the definitive results are in, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.

I'd like to believe that Islam is not inherently defective, but any system that tells me, a woman, that I'm something less than a man, can't be right. I know that not all Muslims are fanatics, but I'm under the impression that even a moderate would think I'm some kind of beast. (I hope I'm wrong.) But for that matter, the fanatic Jews, including the ones I sometimes walk past (or drive past on the Sabbath), probably think someone like me is an travesty, and maybe not even a real Jew.

I should probably just delete this entry, but I'll keep it for a while at least, to remind me to listen to that show. It's embarrassing how undeveloped my thinking is, but it's not like it matters. There are enough bloggers writing about politix - I just want to write about life.

- 1360

this blog's name; warren zevon

2006-07-01T20:25:00.000-05:00

Actually, I first used this blog's name as my little motto for the Warren Zevon bulletin board, where I browse a few times a week but have posted only a couple of times.

It's part of a line from a Zevon song, Empty Handed Heart. The full line is:

"Will I fall in love again? It's a possibility."

Actually, I don't think it's very likely, but I'm comforted by the fact that I don't know everything and it is indeed a possibility, however remote.

And I like the line because, even though I'm definitely not young any more, I feel like everything I want to do really is still possible. Or almost everything.

A little delusion can be a good thing.

* * *

I went to a David Lindley concert last weekend. He did three Zevon songs, including Seminole Bingo, Indifference of Heaven and Play It All Night Long. I wish Lindley would do a whole album of Zevon covers. Heck, I wish everyone would do a whole album of Zevon covers.

Actually, I'd rather Zevon himself be doing albums of new stuff. He should be releasing an album around now, following one a couple of years ago. He should be touring with his new material.

Instead, he's been gone a few years, and those last two albums don't exist. Talk about the vast indifference of heaven....

- 1360

encounters with classy black ladies in supermarkets

2006-07-01T20:01:00.000-05:00

I was bummed that I'd have to arrive at the aforementioned concert late, even though the band I most wanted to see, Shearwater, would be up third, because the descriptions on the venue's website of the first two bands sounded interesting. But when I got there about half an hour after the scheduled start and learned that the first band would go on an hour late and Shearwater would be on in about THREE HOURS, I couldn't face hanging out there for all that time.

So I went home and will hang here for a couple of hours and then head back out. All day long I've been thinking of things I want to write about here anyway, so it's a good use of my time even if I'm wasting a half gallon of gas.

A sweet little thing happened to me this morning. I had gone on a long walk to do a few errands. I could have put them off until during the week, but my new policy is to try to be more physically active, especially on the weekend. If I'm willing to walk a mile and a half or more on a treadmill, why not walk the same distance in the real world?

My last stop was in a big grocery store about a block from my building. The walk must have relaxed me, because I wasn't as annoyed at the world as I often am. I had checked out and was redistributing my purchases for the walk home, and as this very elegant older black lady approached (she was wearing some kind of shawl or cape and (I think) a hat), I swung my cart out of her way and smiled at her. She said something like, "You have the most wonderful smile". And it was nice to hear that, especially from someone I had picked out of a crowd.

It also came after a longish walk during which, as I passed different people, I tried to put in one word or phrase what was wrong in their appearances. Not to be petty, but to entertain and educate myself. I was especially looking for middle-aged women with some kind of flare -- people who I wouldn't mind looking like. Most of the ones I passed were frumpy, or overweight, or trying to look young, or just plain unappealing. It's hard to be this age. I actually felt like, with my wonderful hat that I bought in New Orleans a few years ago, my black jeans and my not-baggy black T-shirt, that I didn't look too bad, all things considered. The not-baggy T made me less frumpy than I often look, and the hat was downright cool.

And it seemed like the classy lady in the grocery store "recognized" me as a kindred soul. Thinking back to that moment and writing this, I could cry with relief.

- 1360

printed matter about recorded matter

2006-07-01T16:17:00.000-05:00

I used to buy a LOT of magazines. I guess I thought I was being good to myself. I liked buying something that had an item that caught my eye, and then scouring through the mag to discover things I wouldn't have been drawn to. I was "getting my money's worth" and learning a lot of new things.

The trouble is, there is too much to know, and in trying to know as much as possible, I was leaving myself with no time to actually DO anything. All that information gave me the illusion that I was part of the world. But now I see it as sort of an excuse for not doing anything. It's not that I really want to be a part of this shitty world. But I do want to be alive in it. (Unless and until I find out how to get to a better one.)

That being said, I was in a big newstand with my father this afternoon, and I came upon quite a few mags I wanted, so I got 'em. (I wouldn't say "mags" out loud, but obviously it's easier to type.) They're all about music.

What I got and why I got it (I like lists):

- Mojo (July 2006). I used to buy every issue, but it got to be too much (too much money, too much storage space, too much information), so I only get it if there's a very special CD attached. I'd also get an issue that had a major article about one of my absolute favorite artists. This time, I couldn't resist a whole album of covers from the Beatles' Revolver album. It'll be a while before I actually play it, but I'm especially interested in Eleanor Rigby by The Handsome Family, and She Said, She Said by Mark Mulcahy. I've got a few Mulcahy albums, and I really want the rest of them, but I can't quite get myself to pay $18 each from Amazon. He's the kind of artist that is likely to be on eMusic, but he's not.

- No Depression (July-August 2006). I buy every issue. I intend to subscribe some day, but they give a free CD with new subscriptions, and I keep seeing offers for CDs I already have (and treasure). Some day it'll work out.

- Magnet (July-August 2006). I get this maybe once or twice a year. They mention Okkervil River, one of my very favorite bands, on the cover, and even though it's not a lead article, I was just in the mood. BTW, I just ordered tickets for their two Chicago shows in October. That seems so long away, but I know it'll be here before I know it. At least it won't be so hot out.

- Believer (June-July 2006). I've been keeping my eyes open for this issue, 'cos it's their annual music issue, with an interesting CD included. The CD has new cuts by Calexico and The National, plus tracks by some others I'm interested in.

I can't follow a rigid rule like, for every magazine you buy you must throw one away. But maybe I can get rid of some old fashion, travel and news magazines, after cannibalizing them for the most important articles, of course.

I'm hopeless....

No I'm not. Which reminds me, I've got to write up an explanation of the blog's name.

But not right now. I've got to get my minidisc recorder set up for tonight's Shearwater/The Court & Spark show. For a while I couldn't find the mic and felt kind of relieved that I didn't have to tape the show, but then, there it was, right in front of me. The show's at a venue I've never been to, so I'm kinda nervous. And it's an all ages show, which probably means that, in addition to being old enough to be the mother of most of my fellow concert-goers (and the performers!), I'll be old enough to be the grandmother of some of the more precocious ones. But it'll be dark, and I'm almost invisible anyway.

- 9501

dvd-r #1

2006-07-01T12:10:00.000-05:00

Pretty mundane, but one very useful thing I can do here is list what I've set my DVD recorder to record in the next 36 hours. I've got so many unmarked DVDs and videotapes and cassettes, and even a few CD-Rs, that it's ridiculous. If I make even a partial log here, I can go back later and take less time to mark after the fact.

Here's what I just set the recorder for, all on Sundance:

A Snake of June - Shinya Tsukamoto. Japanese extreme if the blurb is right.

Dolls - Takeshi Kitano. I've seen this before, and I'm almost sure I've recorded it before, but I can't resist putting it on the same disc as the others here. Even though it's a different genre. But it IS Asian, and the director can be "extreme" (as in the Sundance series title "Asian Extreme").

H - Lee Jong-hyeok. I think I've seen this mentioned in one or more round-ups of Asian Extreme, and this is the only one of the three that's officially part of the Sundance series. Not that that matters.

I'm not sure when I'll get around to watching these, but I'm more likely to watch this kind of thing than almost anything else -- other than music-related documentaries. (The Townes Van Zandt doc is on on Monday!)

I once had a VCR that could change the channel on the cable box, but my current machine does not have that capacity. So if I want to record more than one thing while I'm out, it all has to be on the same channel. That's usually not much of a problem, and it's actually good that there's something that makes me be a little more selective in what I record.

Hey, I kind of like writing this stuff down. No one wants to listen to me talking about this kind of thing, but I feel like I'm telling it to someone now.

- 1360

yikes!

2006-07-01T11:08:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure what I'll use this blog for, or even if I'll really use it. I've got to change my life, and maybe this can be a tool for doing that.

But now that it's set up, I can start thinking about where to go next.

- 1360