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?

Socks, Be Gone With You!

There’s much I’d like to share with you (or at you) though I’m finding the miserable state of my sock collection to be the most pressing. This caught me completely off guard, as if, huddled together in the dispiriting corners of my sock drawer, they made a collective agreement to simultaneously go threadbare in the heels and hollow in the toes.

So I’ve gone about throwing them away. On any given day you can find a discarded pair in our trash atop banana peals, coffee grounds and various Abby related discharges. Initially I felt that odd maudlin regret you sometimes get when parting with articles of clothing (“Oh, I’ve had some mighty good times in those socks!) though this has quickly given way to a late spring-cleaning resolve to rid myself of as many cheerless socks as possible.

Filines Basement, here I come.

True 'Dat

From Kevin Drum:

CONGRESS WAKES UP....I'm a little late on this, but let me join the bandwagon of mockery directed at members of Congress who have finally decided that the executive branch has overstepped its congressional boundaries. After six years of signing statements, domestic surveillance, habeus corpus violations, torture of prisoners, and secret overseas prisons — all done with no oversight from Congress — what finally woke them up was a raid on a congressman's office. That can't be tolerated. Not for one second.

Well, maybe not. But at least the FBI got a search warrant signed by a judge. Congress should feel lucky they were treated with such sensitivity.

Could you imagine what dirt lies under all those Congressional rugs?

Now We Send Flowers

Back in the yonder halcyon days known as the mid-70’s (the Ford and Carter years for those of you using Presidents as the preeminent distinguishable feature on the time line) I bought my Mom cheap perfume for Mother’s Day. My best friend and I had each been given $5 to purchase gifts that declared our budding recognition for all our moms had done for us. But then we eyed a frisbee we both decided was very important to have. The perfume was $2.95 a bottle and smelled vaguely of Formica. With what money remained we were able to pull our resources together and purchase the frisbee for ourselves. This is how Moms sometimes continue to make sacrifices for their children without ever knowing it.

For many years this bottle of perfume remained wisely neglected in my parent’s medicine cabinet. Then it disappeared.

Happy Mother’s Day to my Mom and my baby’s Mama and to Mom’s everywhere who are unknowingly giving even when they’re receiving.

The Eternal Feminine Is In Opie’s Hands

As the ads for Opie’s big screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s bewilderingly popular The Da Vinci Code become more conspicuous, I recently found myself feeling unmistakingly squirrelly (which is to say nuts) concerning my failure to read a book, no matter what its merits, over 30 million others already have. There’s an odd anxiety that comes with being unenlightened by something dominating the best-seller list for so long. Cathy, too, had read it back when we lived in Berkeley after a professor recommended it. “I couldn’t put it down,” he enthusiastically blurbed to her. So she bought the hardback at Cody’s for 30% off. And it seems like oodles of folks in my orbit have read it. Its ubiquity was/is disquieting. So I finally picked up our copy the other day and am currently half way through. It’s awful. Not such a surprise. But I’ll finish it because it asks so very little. (And seeing as how we are, as a country, decidedly estranged from books, especially books that ask for reflection, this may be the crux of its popularity.) I also keep wondering how Opie, competent Hollywood hack he is, will make it better. Well, for one, she’s in it. We’ll gladly pay $9 to watch Audrey on the big screen and sigh.

But really, what’s with this book? It’s all Chiclet chapters, warmed over Golden Bough (though all this talk of the sacred feminine makes me want to pull Camille Paglia’s swaggering Sexual Personae from the shelves and see how it holds up 16 years after it hypnotized me), hackneyed scenarios and gems of heelarious dialogue such as this:

(Note, if you haven’t read it, this excerpted scene joins our hero, the eminent Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, as he dishes on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with a group of inmates as part of one of those ever popular prison outreach programs.)

“…Because Da Vinci was a big fan of feminine principles, he made Mona Lisa look more majestic from the left than the right.”
“I heard he was a fag,” said a small man with a goatee .
Langdon winced. “Historians don’t generally put it quite that way, but yes, Da Vinci was a homosexual.”
“Is that why he was into that whole feminine thing?”
“Actually, Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed that a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements.”
“You mean chicks with dicks?” someone called.”

Ha Ha! Whoa, Daddy! Here’s hoping Opie had the good sense to keep the script churning with dick jokes aplenty! In the very least, we’ll have that. I’ve heard that in the film this scene ends with Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, and the inmates kicking back with some spud juice and tossing the old salad. Just squeaked by with that PG-13.

I’ll let you know when I’m done.

Surprise Kiss On Demand

Watched way too much tv yesterday. It’s all this on-demand magic I’m finding on my in-law’s cable. Since they subscribe to HBO I can dip into big taster displays of the on-demand content the network makes available for those occasional afternoons Abby and I come to the Heritage (I love that name, so regal and old world refined) and she takes 2 hour naps on my lap. Most of the movies HBO offers aren’t ones I’d want to spend any more time with let alone watch a first time (She-Devil, anyone?) though I did watch Vacation again a couple weeks ago and found myself almost waking the peanut up numerous times with ripples of suppressed laughter. (When Clark falls asleep on the road…the camera pans from the Griswald kids asleep in the backseat to mom snoozing in the passenger and then pauses just ever so slightly before panning over to Clark with this head thrown back over the seat happily snoring away. This is sitcom goofy, but Ramis was slaying with this stuff back in the late 70's and early 80's.) And watching Rear Window again early last month came with the revelation of Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart’s first kiss, one which happens unexpectedly--in Hitchcock’s celebrated interviews with Francois Truffaut he called it a “surprise kiss.” The first time we see Kelly’s face it practically blooms onto the screen while moving languorously in slow motion downward to Stewarts awaiting lips. She’s like some enchanted current drifting onto the screen and offering the surprise of something unexpectedly sensual.

Yesterday I watched the first 6 episodes of HBO’s Entourage and really enjoyed it. It’s got a sweet harmless center surrounded by a white noise of fatuous dick jokes, rabid pussy philosophizing and copious smoking of the herb. Jeremy Piven’s rapacious agent, Ari, is the scene stealer so far, but I also have a soft spot for Kevin Dillon’s sweetly dumb and desperate Johnny “Drama.”

Listening To Arthur Lee Records

As if I didn’t already want to carry Tracyanne Campbell’s books home from school, she’s gone and named the lead single from the upcoming Camera Obscura album, Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken. This, of course, a perfectly coquettish homage to Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken, only one of my most favorite songs ever from the still utterly awesome Rattlesnakes album. An album that's all of 22 years old at that! Sheesh! You can hear the Camera Obscura song here. If this is any indication, Camera Obscura just keep getting better and better. Gives me that old teenage feeling.

Disco Delicious

This really is a terrific compilation of creamy and delicious disco goodness. Even great to hear Situation again from that cassette bargain-bin classic, Upstairs at Erics. And other then Once In A Lifetime it's all sparkling new to me. Springtime is Larry Levan time.

Wildfire Virus

According to this article in the Tribune, Chicago has recently been experiencing an outbreak of the Norovirus. According to the spokeswoman for the Cook County Department of Public Health, “[I]t's really such an easy virus to spread. It really takes off like wildfire.” That’s for sure.

It’s been way too long since I offered up such a hearty abundance of foodstuffs to the porcelain god and I liked it that way. Vomiting—its nauseating encroachment, attempts to avoid and the final elemental heaving—well, it’s fucking awful, isn’t it? The spadmodic inefficiency of it all. 11:00 pm. 2:00 am. 4:30 am. The primal contractions and acid tinged expulsions. And when the Norovirus is done with the stomach it sets to work on the intestines. I’ll spare you those details.

When Cathy called our pediatrician to find out what this meant for Abby (if you’re showing symptoms, stay away, otherwise wash hands thoroughly before handling the wiggliest and cutest baby in the world), the nurse who answered said that half of all calls coming in that day were regarding “stomach flu.” Folks at Cathy’s office were absent because of it. It visited me for a few days. But I’m much better now.

Out On The Wiley, Windy Moors

One of last years most welcome and pleasant surprises was Kate Bush’s lovely and heartfelt Aerial album. Over the last 20 years Bush’s music has managed to carve out a very specific and cherished niche in my music listening universe. Albums like The Kick Inside,The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, the best-of The Whole Story and The Sensual World all managed to swooningly fill that niche. I think one of the most endearing and enduring qualities about these albums is their fierce romanticism, the murmuring undercurrent of something vaguely misty and mythological-- a fairytale whiff of unicorns, witches and rainbows. All is forgiven when you hear what she's done with this. Kate Bush was and continues to be the coolest lady at your local Renaissance Faire-- she knows a little about the black arts and she plays a mean harpsichord. And she won't be handing out Elephant Ears, golden and delightfully doughy though they may be.

When her debut album, The Kick Inside, was released in 1978 she was just a wee 17 years old. Its first single, Wuthering Heights, was a big hit on the International charts, another way of saying it didn’t make much of splash in the U.S. Still, the Germans and various other European countries were hungry for expressive dance in soft focus, so Kate made a video for it.

Now, I honestly adore the video. Really, you should too. Did you check it out? You honestly should. You don’t have to watch it all, just try to make it through first minute to the chorus when things call for a few cartwheels. There’s a Talent Show histrionics about it that I find incredibly charming. There’s also a sweetness and light in witnessing a dreamy teenager bursting onto the scene with a song as odd and rich as Wuthering Heights. It moves her this way.

My Own Private Hanami

This article from last week’s Economist caught my eye. I really liked this:

When the saura (cherry blossoms) bloom, Japanese people sit in parks getting raucously sloshed and contemplating the transience of life, as symbolized by those briefly spectacular flowers. Everybody agrees that alcohol heightens the experience.

It’s 75 degrees out. I have the windows open in the living room for the first time this year and dappled sunlight is giving everything a becalming golden luminescence. Since grandma has Abby for the day the incredible Remikks Potpourri is enjoying some highly audible time (“a little bit of drums, a little bit of bass!”) on the stereo. And I’m drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, “alcohol 5.6% by volume.” Everybody in Japan agrees it heightens the experience. I’ll probably have another.

Viva Sweet Spring

Abby is a constant. She’s there in the woozy minutes before dawn, nestled in the cradle of my arms while my head is still thick and confused with sleep. We shuffle down the hall and up the stairs and are comforted by the first outlines of blue creeping through the blinds. She’s smiling up at me. I stop to look down at her and she’s looking right back, her eyes wide and stunned with prospects.

She talks to the fan. What must it be like, to have spent nine months, as our pediatrician told us, “in a liquid environment,” where all your insatiable nascent needs were met and encompassed by the fine tuning of one of evolutions most exquisitely calibrated vessels, only to arrive into a world where you’re suddenly dependent on two people of good intentions who are unable, however much they fumble and attempt, to fully understand the outburst of your newfound desires? Only the fan knows. We walk into each room and turn them on their lowest settings, the better to make out the contours of their solacing blades and becalming revolve. Afternoons we’ve lounged on our backs side by side watching them turn while we waved our arms in delight at their rotary charms. I don’t pretend to be learning some secret lesson from the innocence of her untainted infant wisdom—the fan is as dumb an inanimate object as our lamps and toaster, but I am prepared to indulge her for the joy it offers, the solace it provides…all the laughter it sends rippling from her and washing over me.

There are many cries. They vary in duration, intensity, emotional affect and histrionics. They roughly translate as, “I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” “I’m bored,” “I’m sitting in a deluge of my own uncontrollable making and it truly sucks,” “I’m overwhelmed,” “I’m frightened and so very sad to find that I just woke up in my car seat alone in this dank room and I’m terribly sad—why, oh why did you see fit to abandon me this way like some unoffending gypsy cast asunder and destitute?” While each elicits a pacifying response on our part, it’s that last cry that gets me the most. It’s how when I open the door and allow the hallway light to slant in and brush aside the shadows and crouch down to where my face hovers just a few inches from her own and I see the fullest manifestation of a doleful expression I’ve ever witnessed. It’s how it reverberates and tugs and sends precision pangs tumbling through me. It’s how I pick her up and she curls into me with her legs tucked up and her head warm and pressed against my neck.

A while back I wrote about how having a baby was one of life’s great quotidian events, simultaneously mundane and irresistibly astonishing. We recognize that our own aura of astonishment naturally advances as far as the grandparents, the grandmas in particular, who share and cheer along with the minutia of our excited reports on the latest Abby astonishments. There’s also an abundance of mundane here too. It took us a while to admit that it’s okay for parenthood to occasionally have fits of dullness. There are the doldrums, for example, of Abby asleep in my lap while I sit unable to stir myself to read another line of whatever book or magazine lies before me and a fog settles along my brain. This is when we praise the genius of the iPod shuffle setting. These waves of the mundane are minor struggles and tundra soon gives way to blossom.

Abby has been with us for a little more then three months. Born fast, furious and spindly while most everybody else slept that early December morning, I remember how I first walked over to where the pediatrician and nurse were tending to her with my hands held tentatively behind my back. I remember she was awake, as most newborns are for the first couple of hours, her face turned away from me, and how when I spoke to her she turned her head, her eyes blinking against the heat lamps, and looked right at me. I remember how much I hoped she recognized my voice from all the nights and mornings I had talked to her. "Hello, my little girl," I told her, "I'm so happy to see you. I'm so glad you're finally here."

Smile (Or the Joy of the Mutually Reinforced Pattern)

Abby had been smiling in her sleep for some time now, but never while awake. That all changed a few weeks ago. Now, with each day, she smiles more often and for greater durations. With that "social smile" she's also become far more interactive, swiping at the odd little creatures dangling off her mobile, making sustained eye contact and chattering away. It's giddy stuff for us. We thought we should share some of it with you. There is video posted here. It's pretty compressed, and while that translates into a grainy picture it does have the benefit of downloading fairly quickly. We'll try with future video posts to toy with making the quality of the image better without making it so it takes too long to download. No fancy editing here either-- maybe in the future we'll try to make some more creative short Abby films available.

Missed the Shore

Bopping along to my Best of 2005 mix on the way to catch the El this morning, I politely declined somebody handing out political flyers by the Bryn Mawr entrance. It wasn't until I was halfway up the stairs to the platform that her introduction had registered through the batter of my musical biscuits. "Hi, I'm Debra Shore!" "No thanks," I had mumbled as I walked into the station. But wait...Debra Shore?! Wasn't there an article about her in the Chicago Reader a couple months back? Didn't Cathy tell me more about her? And, in fact it was her.

Shore is running for office, one of those offices that you usually don't give much thought about (if you're like me, you find an organization you trust who has already vetted the qualifications of such mystery candidates and offers their recommendations-- this is particularly useful when it comes to judges) but one that's incredibly important nonetheless. She's running for the office of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Water District (or MWRD, which I've heard my fair share about through Cathy) and she deserves your vote. You can read more about her here. Here's a little taste of what makes her so worthy from her campaign site:

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District is a vitally important and altogether overlooked public agency. With an annual budget of more than $800 million and as owner of more than 7,000 acres in the region, it deserves more scrutiny. Its responsibility to treat wastewater and to manage storm water for the five million residents and many industries in Cook County makes it an essential contributor to our quality of life.

Yet few people know what the agency does and it has virtually no benchmarks with which to measure performance. With your help I intend to bring environmental accountability and leadership into the MWRD. I believe we cannot be merely users and abusers of natural resources but must become caring stewards.

Two With Jeff Bridges

Lightfoot
Originally uploaded by chrisbreitenbach.

Watched Fat City and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot this weekend, a couple early 70’s films with Jeff Bridges. Has there, in the last 40 years, been a more amiable American actor, one more nonchalant and consistently likeable? I dig the dude. A couple years back (!) when I placed these films in my Netflix queue I had recently watched K-Pax, that supremely inane film, and marveled at how, even when surrounded by such cloying ontological piffle (his film career is studded with ridiculous but ephemerally pleasant crap like this) Bridges was still singularly entertaining, keeping his distance from the shark-jump hamming of Kevin Spacey and keeping the film watchable.

Back in the early 70’s Bridges excelled in playing rascally, ingratiating good ‘ol boy characters as both his supporting roles in Fat City and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot nicely showcase. He’s good in Fat City as a young boxer with potential, playing wholesome against Stacy Keach’s (surprisingly good—I almost got the taste of Mike Hammer out of my mouth) gone to seed former pro. But he’s really really good in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a big hit when it was originally released, in full ingratiating rascal mode and playing Eastwood’s sidekick. The film itself veers a bit too widely from comedy to tragedy but there are a ton of rewards along the way to make it worthwhile. Eastwood, for one, is great here in one of his first comedic roles- laconic and graceful and already a legend. And most of the film takes place in Montana, something the director, Michael Cimino, takes full advantage of by including various shots that languorously take in the big sky and the rolling landscape adding a gentle, reposing texture to the film and its strange mix of the zany and tragic. And perhaps most importantly, it also stars Geoffrey Lewis, who will forever be a part of those early days of cable when I must have watched Every Which Way But Loose a few dozen times over the course of a couple months.

My Pretty Little Snowflake

Abby at 4 days.
Originally uploaded by chrisbreitenbach.

Over the past couple nights it’s rained in our living room for hours. As part of our newfound duties as placating guardians of our newborns uncompromising wee small hours of the night whims, I’ve taken to setting her Moses basket (I’m thinking of adorning it with stills from the Ten Commandments) in front of the stereo speakers and playing one of my favorite ambient recordings of rain. The hope here is to give my weary but welcoming arms a brief respite and to maintain a small measure of Abby sleep stasis. It seems to be working like a charm tonight as there’s been nary a peep from her. Ha! There we go, as if on cue-- just as I was writing that last sentence she grunted (or is it a snort? sometimes her collection of barnyard grunts, Mesozoic chirps and satisfied soughs collude in potent ways) a small protest- almost always evidence that awakening proceedings are being launched.

I’m still not entirely sure how this is affecting Abby though I’m certain there have been more then a few studies regarding how music or ambient sound influences a child’s well being-- the common sense consensus being something along the lines that white noise, whether it’s a washing machine, the steady hum of tires on pavement, waves curling onto a shoreline or Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon-- all are all genuinely healthy tools for pacifying newborns. The recording is from Ryko’s Atmosphere Collection and is called Summer Rain: A Day On Cape Cod. Given my fondness for ambient sounds (my 3 favorites: 1) Summer rain 2) the misty hum of an old-school vaporizer and 3) a three way tie between morning birds, crickets chirping and the distant and singularly nostalgic sound of children’s voices on a playground) I’ve long enjoyed this recording because it’s just straight up rain falling, a becalming pitter patter (I have no doubt Abby is in need of a diaper change)as captured from the porch of a summer cottage.

Wait! Wait a second. I’m a Dad. I’m a parent. I have a kid, a baby girl and she’s here and wiggly and gorgeous and when I look at her I can sometimes see hints and expressions of a dozen different family members—how when she flutters her eyes, makes a milky smile or pouts her bottom lip there’s this uncanny (and entirely lovely…yes, I’m gushing) new merging of identity and genes introducing itself. Watching her face you see the fleeting mimic of a grandparent now gone, a nephew, my wife, me. What, we had wondered over the last 9 months, would she look like? Whose eyes would she have? Whose nose? Lips? How would we recognize ourselves in her and how would she be uniquely herself?

She’s too much. I had to have a t-shirt with her picture on it. This post’s accompanying photograph is the one I used. She’s our beautiful bundle of domestic anarchy and we love her something fierce.

We have pictures. Go here. The password is:

wigglegirl

Bean in Winter

Bean in Winter
Originally uploaded by chrisbreitenbach.

Baby, It’s Time

No, she’s still not here. Well, she’s here, of course, but she’s still veiled by the belly and clearly content to remain there biding her time. There’s been an abundance of “warm-up” contractions and other signs of impending parturition but such manifestations can coast along for days, sometimes weeks without advancing. So we’ve waited. Her due date has come and gone, and like most babies and their respective due dates, she decided to skip it. We talk to her and tell her it’s time. “Come on out, don’t worry, you don’t have to celebrate your birthday on Christmas!” We get anxious and don’t quite know what to do. “It’s time,” we say, and “Soon.”

So, tonight, in a couple of hours, we’re checking in to St. Francis. For the sake of the mom-to-be we’ll spare you the details of our current birth plan, but needless to say, chances are good that our daughter will be with us in a day or two—the very thought of which causes me to feel something justifiably hyperbolic.