Troy Smith Just Won the Heisman

I was not a fair-weather fan this season. This afternoon made it all worth it. Very nice.

Kicked to the Curb

As one of the 13.3 percent of the city that actually participates in the city’s crummy blue bag recycling program (if only out of principle), it’s great news to hear that Daley is finally considering throwing in the towel and moving to curbside bins. Of course, there’s always this:

Late Tuesday, the mayor's office again sought to insert some wiggle room, saying through a spokesman that officials will review the pilot program before determining whether to roll the blue carts out citywide. But the mayor's comments just hours earlier showed he was finally giving up on a program he had so ardently defended.

This pilot program that will be under review is actually an expansion of an existing program in the Beverly ward, where participation rates were 80 percent. The city will now try curbside pickup in seven wards and continue to review, one supposes, how much better it works.

Anyway, particularly exciting is the fact that the curbside pick up is single-stream, meaning all recyclables will go into a single container. With the current blue bag program you have to separate paper from plastic and glass which, for some reason, Cathy and I continue to observe though both bags will, inevitably, be torn apart by the sweep and slide compactors found on most garbage trucks.

Just Like Mom Made

Cathy and I thought this is a great idea:

If you’re already having pumpkin-pie nightmares and sweet-potato panic attacks, hand dessert duty over to Flourish Bakery’s Family Traditions Recipe Support. Though you could order right off their menu (the carrot cake is delish), they are also happy to make your Grandma Ebbie’s chocolate pudding cake or Mom’s famous lemon bars. All you have to do is provide Flourish with thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe recipe (or a rough approximation if you can’t read Nana’s handwriting). Their pastry chefs do the rest.

I'm still holding out for Flourish to really wow me, but this is a very cool-- I hope people actually do bring in archaic recipes for their consideration.

Old Content

I know, it's time for a new video, but bare with me as I test this new fangled Youtube/Blogger synergy.

The Lefty Frizzell anthology I picked up a couple years ago has turned out to be one of my favorites. Besides being my introduction to Frizzell’s unimpeachable style of honky-tonk, it also serves as one of the best reasons yet for my headlong crush on country music. One of the great lateral pleasures to come out of my Lefty love was the discovery that Willie Nelson recorded a tribute to Frizzell back in 1975. Nelson cut an album of Frizzell covers just months before Frizzell’s unlucky passing (he was 47, died of a stroke) that same year. Not wanting to look like he was taking advantage of his death, Nelson held off from releasing the album until 1977. Frizzell’s own sublime barroom swing and twang is beautifully distilled into Willie’s own sweet-tempered saunter. I’ve listened to it twice tonight—its mellow mood a perfect accompaniment to my own. Even better, it’s mood has subtly altered own. Perfect mid-October music.

The Language of Flowers

Ed Valauskas, the curator of rare books at the Chicago Botanic Gardens and current holder of the Follett Chair at Dominican, gave a great talk in my Digital Libraries class this morning. It lagely focused on how the Garden went about digitizing and marketing their many rare volumes, one of which was a small book that described the language of flowers. In Victorian Europe it was very popular to send a message in the form of a flower bouquet. Upon receiving your boquet you'd fetch your language of flowers book and decode it. Here's an extensive decoder.

Why not send the love of your life some Syrian Mallow and your mom a handful of moss? If you're with enemy, don't hesitate to send them a Wild Licorice and Tansy smackdown!

But I Don't Want To Write A Paper

Oh, the hilarity! You know you want to make one.

Musings

I’m glad Cat Power sobered up. The song that quite possibly has meant the most to me so far this year is The Greatest, the first cut on her album of the same name. I first heard it late last December, just before Abby was born. It surprised me, the first time I heard it, lush with Moon River strings and cottony smooth Teenie Hodges soul.

Abby is talking. Or mimicking. Probably both. Words are coming out of her mouth anyway. “Daddy” last Monday. “Dora” last Wednesday. “Grandpa” on Thursday. Then nothing quite so crisp and intelligible for the past week. She's letting her teeth grow. And she’s moving. Insatiable needs to climb legs, roll, tumble and climb again. She sees many things that she must, absolutely must, get a hold of and she zeroes in on them with great singular purpose if not an accompanying patience. And she’s dancing now, too-- with an excited wiggle whenever the rhythm catches her.

If I were to write an autobiography, this particular chapter of my life would be titled: “Crushed Cheerios Underfoot.”

In one of her New Yorker reviews Pauline Kael called a film (and I can't seem to find or recall just what film this was) "pleasantly bananas.” That’s exactly what I thought of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz when when I managed to check it out (Comcast On Demand, under “Free Movies,” offers a healthy dose of old classics, crap and Hollywood curiosities such as this one) a couple weeks ago during Abby’s morning and afternoon naps. It was completely, pleasantly bananas. It ends with its protagonist (Roy Schneider, just a few years post-Jaws) performing a deathbed musical with Ben Vereen (just a few years post-Roots) as the MC. Hollywood didn’t make another musical as completely and pleasantly bananas until Moulin Rouge 20 years later.

I adore a lot of vocalists who’ve multi-tracked their voices. But none of them has so consistently emotionally walloped me over the years like Marvin Gaye’s multi-tracked vocal masterpiece, What’s Goin’ On. It’s my favorite vocal performance of all time. In fact, when the Motown marketers or the Gaye estate are planning the next reissue it should be requisite that an a cappella version of the entire album be included. This way we can luxuriate in his heartbroken doo-wop meditation. I think the party chatter that begins the album is still one of the coziest, funkiest and downright coolest slices of introductory ambience ever committed to magnetic tape.

It’s hard not to care when Ohio State finally has a great quarterback in Troy Smith. And is ranked #1. I usually don’t care at all this early in the season. I am truly a fare weathered Buckeye fan. While reading for school last Saturday I found myself moving incrementally—from checking in on the score via Yahoo to feverishly watching most of the third and then all of the fourth quarter on TV. At the beginning of the fourth quarter Troy Smith had one of those plays that cause excitable, tension prone viewers like myself to spontaneously uncoil from our chairs and leap into the air while manically pumping fists in the air and shouting boasts and brags. Here’s how Joe Drape described it in last Sundays NYT’s:

Smith, who came into the game as the nation’s third-most efficient passer and had not thrown an interception in 152 attempts, was struggling as the Nittany Lions’ defensive backs consistently bumped Ginn and company out of their routes.

Two minutes into the fourth quarter, on second down and 9 on the Penn State 37-yard line, Smith dropped back to pass and immediately felt pressure. He rolled right, and then did what Ohio State Coach Jim Tressel tells him never to do: he reversed field.

Suddenly, Smith was on his own 47-yard line.

“The first read wasn’t there,” he said. “I tried to come back and look to the other side of the field, but it was kind of clogged and crowded, and I just tried to improvise and keep things going. The Penn State defender was making ground on me.”

Robiskie, a sophomore and the least heralded member of the Buckeyes’ receiving corps, had run a hitch route to the sideline and recognized Smith was in trouble.

“I just wanted to work to get open because I know he can always make a play,” Robiskie said of Smith.

As Robiskie angled to the middle of the field, Smith launched a rocket. The ball split Penn State defensive backs Tony Davis and Anthony Scirrotto, hit Robiskie in the shoulder pads and carried him into the end zone.

“Smith made a super play,” Paterno said. “You can’t give up big plays in a game like this.”

Troy Smith, who was 5 years old when I was a Buckeye freshman.

Digital Libraries

One of the benefits of taking a class in a computer lab is that I can toss interesting links my professor shares with us into my blog to take a gander at later. My understanding of digitizing issues, especially as they apply to libraries, is minimal at best, so any chance to expand my understanding is a good thing. Maybe you're interested too?

Sensemaking

Center For the Study of Digial Libraries

Scrolling Forward

Information Ecologies

Open Content Alliance

Boogie Music Time, 11:57

I’ve been slowly dilly-dallying and tidying about on the follow up to my last self-released album, Bomba Charger, for almost 5 years now. I never intended on it taking so long. It’s been recorded in dollops, a scattering of evenings here, a sad Sunday afternoon there. I did it the Quaker way and recorded only when the spirit moved me, an animating force that I reckon would look a lot like this.

I began recording new tracks for it in January of 2002, back when Cathy and I had been living in Berkeley for about 5 months and we used some holiday financial largesse to purchase Pro Tools in the form of a Digi 002. Pro Tools, for those who don’t know, is one of the most popular and widely used pieces of music production gear around. Chances are that any music you’re hearing these days has been recorded, edited and/or mixed using Pro Tools. I have one of their home versions. So, in any case, by the time we moved back to Chicago in February of 2004 I had accumulated roughly 45 songs in various states of maximalist disarray, most constructed using the sounds found on my trusty Yamaha CS1x, or sounds I fed to my equally steadfast Akai S20 sampler. Most were in need of some heavy tailoring.

And I’m close to finishing it now. But there’s still editing aplenty- and I’m still hoping to rope Dennis into a few more vocal bull-sessions- and then there's the frequently distracting addition of Reason to my arsenal-in addition to school, Abby and other bits of deliciousness vying for my time- all of which means that, realistically, I’ll probably have the whole thing completed and in folks hands by late Winter, early Spring of next year. Really.

Here’s why. Reason. Love it. Can’t wait to start jacking the beats, tweaking acid runs and dropping low frequency oscillations. And a bed of sequenced samples whispering in the breeze. It’s been my crush a long time now. Ever since Blue Monday on WMMS and my walkman. It’s time to boogie with the soul of the new machine.

Why Isn't the Pentagon Reporting The Good News?

From today's Washington Post:

Rising sectarian bloodshed has pushed violence in Iraq to its highest level in more than two years, and preventing civil war is now the most urgent mission of the growing contingent of 140,000 U.S. troops in the country, according to a new Pentagon report released yesterday.

But why aren't they reporting the good news?

No, wait! George is hot on the trail of some much better news! Things could be far worse, you know, and it's not really quite a civil war. Just bloody ups and downs. We just need to buck up and sacrifice more of that deficit spending and some soldiers lives before all will be made whole again. Otherwise Iraqi terrorists, who hate freedom, might kill your children.

One positive thing I've seen of late is that some polls are beginning to show, at long last, a slim majority of the public beginning to view Iraq as separate from the war on terror. Over the next two months, the administration and its lackies will be doing all they can to subdue that skepticism.

Back to school tomorrow. I went out and got all my supplies today. Very curious to see what we’ll be using all those Ziploc storage bags for!

One class will be held at the Harold Washington Library and the other will be at Dominican proper in River Forest. Like most things these days, heading back to school snuck up on me. My parents were here this weekend and I found myself having several conversations about Thanksgiving plans. We discussed turducken, which contrary to popular belief, wasn’t invented by the supremely avuncular John Madden. Where did August go? Where did the summer go? It seems only natural that having a child would cause time to pass with even greater rapidity. How is Abby already 8 months old tomorrow?

Mama

Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s current Minister of Culture, recorded his album 1971 that very year while living in exile in London. I’ve only given a couple close listens to the album (I wish I had more time for close listens. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate during commutes to and from River Forest for school are the opportunities they give me to closely listen to a couple albums) so I’m still connecting and familiarizing myself to the songs (his cover of Windwood’s Can’t Find My Way Home is nice standout) but I’m really enjoying the supremely relaxed feel of many of its cuts. The track, Mama, for example, is a gorgeously breezy ballad that, like the rest of the album, comes soaked in a warm bath of silky reverb and casually saunters barefoot under a late August moon while Gil strums his acoustic (accompanied by the subtle bass playing and backing vocals of Chris Bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifonett) and laments Mama’s (Brazils?) desire to hold him too close to her apron strings. How else to read lines like, “I wanna kiss your face again/Am gonna go my way, mamma/ Don’t worry, don’t cry, don’t complain/Don’t try to hold me down”?

I wish I knew more about the specifics of the anti-government hi-jinx Gil and Velosa were up to that originally got them thrown in jail and eventually led to their exile. What little I do know about the military’s rule of Brazil from 1964 to 1985 was that there were, at least in the late 60’s and early 70’s, many within the military, especially during the time of Brazil's enormous economic expansion, who believed they had to strongly curtail any cultural/populist sentiment that questioned their authority. This included torture, disappearing and indiscriminate arrests. I’m guessing that they saw in Gil and Velosa, already hugely popular Brazilian pop stars, a couple of cocky upstarts who were not so covertly looking to subvert the authoritarian rule they found themselves and their music living under.

You can listen to every single one of Gil’s albums here on his amazing website.

How Is It I Extract Strength From the Beef I Eat?

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself back when I first read it for a class I was taking in the mid-90’s. I’m currently reading Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems and it’s 17th. After each poem (Song of Myself, at 1,346 lines and 52 sections, is excerpted) Paglia offers clear and engaging insight into the poems meaning all but neutered of her patented Italian grade of high octane, exuberantly combative prose. There are no gems like “Women’s latent vampirism is not a social aberration but a development of her maternal function, for which nature has equipped her with tiresome thoroughness” or “In film, popular music, and commercials, we contemplate all the daemonic myths and sexual stereotypes of paganism that reform movements from Christianity to feminism have never been able to eradicate” as found in the archly playful introduction of her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In fact, there’s a refreshing pedagogic simplicity to her brief essays- they’re primers or refreshers (most of the 43 poems found here include numerous heavy hitters from the Western canon and, as such, have been anthologized out the wazoo) , introducing or reminding us of the poems merits. About Leaves of Grass she asserts that one of its central themes is “not war or moral struggle but expansion of consciousness. ‘I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass': like Wordsworth rejoicing in a field of wild daffodils, Whitman finds meaning in the random and commonplace.” And it’s in the poems many odes to the commonplace and its potential for consciousness raising that he gives us gems like this:

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stop for me,
I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good
time;
You should have been with us that day around the chowder-kettle.

or this physiological question,

Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

or this orgasmic couplet

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

The key words being “upward” and “juice.”

Photo taken from Walt Whitman Archive

American Movie: An American Folk Art

I’m just now beginning to edit together on iMovie some of the footage I took with our digital recorder last summer in Hilton (Yes, but does it have enough arch support?) Head. When my Mom turned 60 back in January of 2005 she had already made it known that what she wanted most was for all her children and their families to stay under one roof for a week on Hilton Head. My parents had owned a place there for over a decade, a cozy two floor condo with a late 70’s vibe and conveniently located across the street from the beach, before recently selling it and buying another, with a better view of the Atlantic, in the warmer climates of Tarpon Springs, Florida. Over those 10 years their condo in Hilton Head had served as the hub of numerous Breitenbach vacations, though the last time we had all been together, the last time we had all spent a week heading out to the beach or pool together for lazy afternoons and out to dinners in humidity swamped evenings was in the summer of 2002 when we all came together to celebrate my Dad’s own 60th.

So I filmed about 50 minutes of footage last summer- Cathy and I packing, my nieces and nephews playing in the pool, all of us singing Happy Birthday, a sunrise, sand castle building on the beach. I’m not too good at premeditating what I’m going to shoot or why, though I’d like to be. I’m still learning how to keep the camera near and how to reflexively take it up and begin filming. I’m learning about how cameras can steal the spirit of some and bring out the rascal in others. I’ve got a lot to learn. But mostly I’m still enthralled by how what ultimately is filmed, edited or not, can accumulate a kind of mythic resonance within families and become part of family folklore.

So, given that I’m prone to thinking about such things, I was especially excited to see that Joe had a link on his blog a couple months ago to Folkstreams.net, a site whose mission includes building a “national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures” and “to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet.” And not just that! When browsing through their catalog of subjects, under the heading "Arts and Crafts Traditional" I found a link to the 19 minute documentary “Home Movie: An American Folk Art,” made in 1975 for a Smithsonian Institute festival. The filmmakers (Ernst Edward Star and Steven Zeitlin, then graduate students) had put out a call to the public to send them their home movies and photographs with the goal of then studying and editing them into Home Movie. According to the documentaries accompanying blurb, after sifting through all these family movies and photographs, Star and Zeitlin “began to see that, just as certain categories of stories recur from family to family, certain kinds of images recur in home movie archives. Scenes of holiday celebrations, birthdays, picnics, and vacations dominate these collections, and children, from infancy through high school graduation, at the mercy of their parents, are favorite subjects for the home photographer.”

The documentary itself is priceless. Not simply because the filmmakers interests helped to give my own inchoate fascinations with this subject some glimmers of coherence but because the documentary itself, now over 30 years old, has taken on and accumulated its own patina of funky nostalgia. Watching the documentaries first few minutes, where one of the filmmakers (Zeitlin, I’m guessing) appears sitting next to a projector dressed in what now radiates a kind of grad student geek chic and soulfully, earnestly pontificates (he seems to be reading directly from his thesis) about what lies at the heart of our need to record these moments, these holidays, birthdays and vacations, I was struck by how much it resembled a scene or an outtake from a Wes Anderson film. I thought, if Wes Anderson is one of the current masters of mining a very specific kind of Americana quirky, then this introduction was one of his templates. I also really liked what Zeitlin was saying. Speaking about what makes home movies a “unique folk art” he expounds that,

…where the art comes into it is in the act of selection. Why, for instance, did my parents film that particular scene? I figured out that I must have spent close to 150,000 hours at home before I went to college. How many of them could have been spent playing in the pool?

Clearly homes movies are not a random sample of our past but an idealization based on how we chose to preserve, remember and be remembered. From one perspective, home movies reflect the ideals of a particular family. For my parents, it was their home, their kids, their puppies, their little yellow pool with the 4 horses on it. It was what was distinctive and what was memorable about their own family that they sought to preserve on that sunny afternoon. I watched hundreds of home movies and saw hundreds of water sprinklers and planted pools. I began to realize that on another level, homes movies are an American tradition and as such they tell us something about American values and ideas. In that simple scene of youthful parents, happy children and a backyard swimming pool we catch a glimpse of an American dream.

What follows is a montage of scenes demonstrating this American dream—of children mostly-- children running through snow, jumping in leaves, playing on beaches, taking baths, newborns wrapped in swaddling, having birthday parties, enjoying Christmas morning, dancing-- all accompanied by a delicately mournful Eric Satie piece for piano. Theres a strong whiff of melancholy to it, these seemingly random moments that have been conferred a special kind of meaning simply because they were privileged with having been filmed. Soon our graduate friend Zeitlin returns to get all elysian and informs us that home movies are endowed with, in fact, a third and “universal level” of values depicted in home movies, the first two being the values “important to individual families” and “America as a whole. “ But what are these so-called universal values? Thankfully, Zeitlin throws it down for us:

By attempting to preserve that which is most beautiful to his life, the home movie maker might be seen as partaking in what seems to be a universal desire to create a golden age. From Shangri-La to Eden man has always needed visions of peace and harmony to guide him through the inevitable complexities of his present world. The home movie maker may be no more aware of the fact that he is filming a golden age then Adam and Eve were that they were living in paradise. But to an individual family, the world depicted in home movies might serve as their own golden age.

For the remainder of the documentary, Zeitlin and Star visit members of three of the families who had responded to their open call for footage and have them provide commentary as they watch their home movies together, a precursor to the director/actor commentary now found on so many DVDs. The filmmakers don’t ask too many questions that would support their thesis of home movies being conduits for a lost golden age, choosing instead to let the families randomly enthuse about how somebody always sits in the sun in just such a way, and how this or that uncle still has the same hairstyle 20 years later and how it hardly seems like a decade has passed since that wedding. birthday or graduation.

Now that simple editing software comes bundled with home computers, I’m interested in how many people are using these tools to construct narratives out of the more or less random footage they’ve taken. How do you create an additional layer of meaning or thematic structure to this footage and make it something more then a collection of disparate shots? How do you arrange it in such a way, edit it, so that it tells an engaging story? It's time for some new folklorists to step up and make a documentary about how children of the digital age and their parents have and will continue to create folk art by what they select to film and, more importantly, what and how they chose to edit.

My friend Julie told me yesterday afternoon that her daughters love to watch footage of themselves taken over the years. “It’s like a Disney movie for them,” she said, “you just put it on and their happy as can be.” And I find myself wondering how these movies and their repetitive viewings of them help (or hidner?) to shape memories and identities. How will they come to know themselves, their childhood, through these videos? How does video, as film critic Jonathan Romney once wrote, become a “prosthesis for human memory?” How rich and strange to think of the multitude of raw footage taken of their lives they’ll have to look back on when I compare it to my own archive of footage-- a fleeting 2 or so hours of super-8 my Dad filmed from roughly the late 60’s to the late 70’s. Footage, I might add, that languished for almost 20 years in various closets and attic crawl spaces before my Mom had them converted to DVD.

Ross McElwee, whose work I love, is probably the foremost purveyor of this personalized cinema verite I find myself so interested in. He’s certainly one of its most eloquent elucidators. A few years back when Cineaste interviewed him he had this to say:

McElwee: I think it’s going to be very interesting, by the way, to see what happens with this digital generation of parents who have recorded their kids’ every footstep. People were shooting a fair amount of super-8 film in the Sixties and Seventies. But it was expensive and difficult to load, and editing it was extremely time-consuming. Most people didn’t edit their footage; most footage was not viewed more than once. Digital video, or video in general enables parents to keep a constant record of a family as it grows up. So that very question you raised- “Am I remembering this correctly?”- needn’t be an issue. People can just go back to the data bank and see exactly how little Jimmy spooned his peas into his mouth at age four. There’ll be a record of it. And how strange is that?

How strange is that?

Cheney In Undisclosed Location Growling

This paragraph from an article in yesternays NYT's concerning Thursday's 5-3 Supreme Court ruling on tribunals caught my eye:

In the courtroom on Thursday, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year old Justice Stevens, winner of the Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer in World War II.

First, what a relief this ruling was. This was the last chance to reign in one of the more odious and inhumane elements of Cheney's runaway executive power grab and, thankfully, Kennedy swung with the more loveable bloc of justices because, obviously, you know where Roberts would have sat had he not recused himself because of his ruling in favor of the administration on the appellate panal last July. The above quote is one big old dollop of vicarious, well deserved comeuppance.

Second, Stevens is 86. He was born in 1920 (in Chicago) and if you're the praying kind I'd imagine you'd want to put in a request to the almighty, whoever that may be, to keep him blooming until there's a change in the political winds.

Thirdly, as if we didn't already know, Roberts and Alito will be joining Thomas and Scalia as card carrying members of the less lovable bloc of justices. Kennedy, more often then not, bears their stench and yet, partisan as this court is (and can we simply drop the pretense that the Supremes are or ever have been impartial arbiters of justice), his infrequent deviations may be the only favorable rulings we get for many years to come.

Lastly, yes, it really is 4:30 in the morning. Sleep training y'all. Sleep training, crying and adrenaline. Are there studies on this-- there's gotta be. That little peanut's cry affects me something fierce.

The Greatest Thing That Ever Came To Kansas

This poem by James Dickey destroyed me (still does) when I first read it 10 or so years ago. It details the awful falling of a stewardess who is accidentally sucked out the door of an airplane somewhere over the midwest. Dickey once said this about the stewardess in Falling:

"Falling" is a record of the way she feels as she falls; panic at first and then a kind of goddess-like invulnerability. She discovers that the human body can actually fly a little bit. She tries to find water to fall into, but in the end she can’t and falls into a cornfield and dies there. She undresses on the way down, because since she’s going to die she wants to die, as she says, "beyond explanation." She would rather be found naked in a cornfield than in an airline uniform. So she takes off everything, is clean, purely desirable, purely woman, and dies in that way. I also tried to think of the mystical possibility there might be for farmers in that vicinity, under those conditions.


It's rather long but worth your time, especially the poems end, which is perfect.

Hello, I'm Adorable

Just a little super cuteness before we head off to do a little reading. More later, especially concerning the showing of a new 35mm print of Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, one of the most beautiful and poetic depectitions of childhood I've ever seen. I watched a well-worn VHS copy of it a few years back when we were living in Berkeley, so an opportunity to see it on the big screen is really exciting. It's showing at the Music Box July 7-13th and I can't recommend it highly enough. If I have my way, all Chicagoites will be joining me to watch it.

London Summer

With all this peculiar late-September like weather we had this weekend I think this song needs to come to our rescue. It's from the wonderful compilation London Is The Place For Me 2: Calypso & Kwela, Highlife & Jazz From Young Black London and it captures some of those elements that exemplify summer-- the lilting quality of the gently looping bass that introduces the song, the soothing splashes of percussion and muted horn that nicely merge along with the balm of weaving vocal chants and a lovely daub of flute all conspire so that I can practically see that big old fat summer sun quietly slipping into a pair of swim trunks for a dip in the pool. Gorgeous. Thanks, Joe!

Yolanda: Ambrose Campbell

Update: Yousendit seems to have been having some problems with the original download link. They sent me a new link, so please let me know if you want to download this (you do!) but are still having problems.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to my Dad! Like Paul McCartney, he's turning 64.

Movies I Saw Numerous Times Over the Three Months My Parents Subscribed to Cable Television in the Early 80's

Ice Castles
Taps
Hawk the Slayer
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
Cannonball Run
Chomps
Any Which Way You Can
The Black Hole
Urban Cowboy

What am I forgetting?