Workplace Trick Or Treat

As I did last year, I spent the holiday in the workplace, where I played my two CD set of Bach's Great Organ Works by the incomparable Peter Hurford, as well as my Halloween Hits compilation. Beauregard Van Horn was working, too, and he would occasionally get on the intercom and tell mini spooky ghost stories as the customers were browsing ("It happened long ago on a night just like this..... " "This store was built on an old Indian burial ground..."). It was great fun.

The costumes were pretty great this year. We had a wonderful Marilyn Monroe, three obese clowns (Beauregard's clown costume even came with an internal fan to keep him cool!), a great martial artist with killer contact lenses, a fabulously hideous cafeteria lady, Dorothy and Toto, The Bride of Dracula, Obi-Wan, a ballplayer, a banana (!), a pirate and a pirate lady, a Gypsy ( could have been a extra from Heart's Little Queen photoshoot, or a cross between a 70's Cher and Rita Coolidge), Mr. Whipple, a Food Cop, and keeping in the holiday spirit, a pimp and their trick. That was a treat.

The funniest costume of all was one of the older employees, a motherly type, came dressed as one of the younger employees, complete with tie-dyed scarves, jewelry and dreadlocks. It was hysterical. MyFriendJason came in his jammies, robe and with a towel wrapped around his head. He said it was the most comfortable work day he had ever had. I reprised my role as the stylish Vlad in the tux, cape and top hat.

I love Halloween.

I've Been Framed!

Wow. What an occasion! After getting up for a store meeting, bright and early on my day off, I drove clear across town to visit my optician friend, who hooked me up with an eye exam and a new pair of eyeglasses.

Not a big deal you say? Well, I last had my eyes checked right before I moved to Seattle. In 1995.

The doctor asked me what brought me in to see him. I replied, "It's my 10 year fashion upgrade."

Then he informs me that "at my age" I won't be able to go so long between visits.

Whippersnapper. And anyway, my prescription hadn't changed so what's the big problem?

But it sure is nice to have some stylin' frames again!

This Just In From The NYT...

So I'm reading the New York Times this evening, and while I am hastily discarding the useless sports page, a headline catches my eye.

Swoopes Says She Is Gay, and Exhales

Yes, Sheryl Swoopes, ranked in 1999 as the 87th greatest female athlete of all time, and three time MVP winner. What are the chances that a member of the WNBA should turn out to be gay?

Next thing you know they will start saying female golfers and tennis players are gay, too.

Oh, wait...

Well, anyway, not that I care, but the truly disturbing part of the article was that apparently Swoopes made the decision based on an endorsement offer from Olivia Cruise Lines. The Times article further chronicles her money problems. I guess that Nike shoe just wasn't cutting it...

Selling that part of yourself out had to hurt. That's all I'm saying.

New Music Tuesday - Good Night & Good Luck

Well, The Captain has not made it out to the movies in some time, so I wasn't too interested inthis soundtrack, until I noticed the peculiar sticker on the case...

This is no soundtrack, it is a new Dianne Reeves CD and it is incredible! Great jazz, though we expect nothing less from the great Ms. Reeves. The lone instrumental track, When I Fall in Love, is deadly romance, be forewarned.

From what I have read, she performs all of these tunes in the movie, so now I really want to get out and see it! That being said, this is no cobbled together soundtrack, this CD stands alone as a wonderful listening experience from beginning to end.

Baby Baby I Hear A Symphony

Oh Santa Baby, slip an Olive Symphony under the tree for me...

What is that you are asking? Well, I'll tell you a little about it.

At first glimpse, we have a CD player. When you insert a CD, the music begins, and the face panel displays the artist or band's name and the song title courtesy of the machine's built-in two-million-album database of album and track names.

Press a button and copy the CD (about 45 seconds per track, or nine minutes per CD). Now, loading up your library onto the machines hard drive could get a little tedious, so the folks at Olive have made y'all an offer: it will preload all of your CD's onto your new Symphony's hard drive, you just pay for shipping them. And, it can directly copy analog such as cassettes and LPs right onto its harddrive for future CD archiving. (The new machine, the Musica, holds 40,000 songs, that's about 4 straight months of music, and is a much more groovy silver...)

You can search your collection, make playlists and burn shiny new CDs at will. And you can load and update your iPod, without even owning a computer.

Then there is the built-in WiFi (ethernet router as well), enabling home networking with your PC's throughout your home. So you can also listen to internet radio through the Symphony.

The folks at Sound and Vision wrote a glowing review of this baby here. Their bottom line: "An intelligently designed, easy-to-use music server that puts sound quality first."

Damn You VH1!

If I were a superhero......I would have one debilitating weakness. As Kryptonite is to Superman, so is the I Love The... series on VH1 to me. This week they have been showing I LOVE THE 80s 3D, and I have been physically unable to remove myself from the couch. It doesn't even matter if the new episode is a repeat of the one that just ended...I'll watch it. And I am just a sad shell of myself, cocooned on the couch, staring with deadened glazed eyes at the TV while all around me Gotham crumbles....

Let Us Eat Cake:The Real and the Representation

So I come across a reproduction of one of Wayne Theibaud's paintings. He's the guy that does the "pie bar" paintings, paintings of cakes in pies displayed in windows, deli counters, sandwiches...that sort of thing. As I am looking at the painting, because I do have a good deal of appreciation for his work, I notice something is odd. Gone is the gorgeous texture of the paint that is teasing the viewer as icing. The colors are bright and sharp where Theibaud uses a more nostalgic pastel palette. Hmm...

I discovered the amazing work of pastry chef and photographer Sharon Core, whose new body of work, Theibauds, are meticulously staged recreations of his paintings.

But my torturous hours spent doing battle with Jean Baudrillard were not all for naught as Core's photographs raise the issue of which is more real? The real, textural painting of an idealized memory of a cake, or her intentional duplication of it? And it is twice removed, as we are not presented with a showing of her pastry artistry. The cakes and pies and sandwiches have long ago met their demise. But we have the perfectly staged moment, captured forever.

What is real? What is hyperreal? The poetic, the duplication, or the image of the duplication?

Says Wayne: From when I worked in restaurants, I can remember seeing rows of pies, or a tin of pie with one piece out of it and one pie sitting beside it. Those little vedute in fragmented circumstances were always poetic to me.

Painting The Town

I spent the greater part of the day with MyAdoringPublic, helping her prepare her new home. This involved my expertise "cutting in" around all of the baseboards, trim, windows, doorways and ceiling in her bedroom. She had chosen a great Craftsman-y yellow/gold for the walls, and it was very cheery color to be working with. While I was set about onto that task, MAP completed the fireplace and built-in bookcase in the livingroom.

I work cheaply - this is well-known and MAP got me going with a steaming Starbuck's Triple Grande Latte. But, sadly, it did not last, and it was soon time for PIZZA! And the pizza arrived just in time to help celebrate a major event in MAP's life - the delivery of her very own washer and dryer! There was much excitement in the "House With The World's Largest Picture Window", which in reality is not unlike a small theatre's proscenium...

After our refreshing meal, MyAdoringPublic rolled the walls in the bedroom, and I did the trim and the window in the dining room.

With the singular exception of her CD player malfunctioning so that I could not play DJ, we had a great day and accomplished a lot.

Congratulations on your new pad, MAP! And really, keep the "artistically distressed" look in the spare bedroom - it's very elegant!

New Music Tuesday - Adapt Or Die!

The name of today's CD reminds me of my senior Honors colloquium, The Theme of the Alien Woman in Literature. By reading Medea, the biblical Book of Ruth, Bronte's Jane Eyre, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and my all-time favorite classic, Hardy's Tess of the D'Uberville's, we determined that a woman taken from her native land and thrust into a new environment had but two choices: to adapt or to die. Happy, cheery discussions ensued.

This had absolutely nothing to do with the day's CD, unless we consider Ben Watt's mysterious and life-threatening illness chronicled quite well in his book, Patient.

So, we have Everything But The Girl's Adapt Or Die: Ten Years of Remixes to talk about.

I have loved Tracey Thorn for such a long time. (Going back to the days of hours and hours spent in Chamberlain's Restaurant, for you Faithful Readers going back THAT far...)Not as much as this poetic reviewer, but still. I loved the obvious depth of feeling the writer has, and curbed the urge to plagiarize him, so check it out for yourself...

While this disc is a welcome addition to my vault, as anything graced by the dulcet tones of Ms. Thorn are to my ears, as collections go I would recommend the exquisite Like The Deserts Miss The Rain over this one. This is definitely for a limited audience, and to me, more of a curiosity than a listenable CD.

(ps - on their website, under LATEST is a great little article Tracey wrote regarding the unfortunate legalities of the recording business. The bottom line being that HUMMER is using their recording of Love Is Strange without their permission. As they are not the songwriters, they have no control of how the song is used, or what it is used to promote, even if it is a product that they do not endorse....good reading, folks)

Everbody Wins - A Story of Housesitting

For the past week, MyFriendJason has been vacationing in Seattle. Because the thought made me so sad, MFJ offered up his home to me for the week, which cuts my commute to work in half.

Now not only is his home perfect (for my idiosyncratic tastes), it comes with a superfast internet connection. So, not only did I get to update my beloved blog, he even set it the computer with a personalized screensaver and wallpaper just for me.

I think I did pretty good job as a housesitter - I didn't set off the alarm, the plants are still alive. I just forgot about trash day. And I am posting this publicly so he can't kill me when he gets home tonight.

I adore his whole house but his shower is the best. I'm in love with it and his wonderfully thick towel. I told him I was having the locks and alarm code changed and just moving in. He said that was fine because he was staying in Seattle.

Everybody wins.

RE New Orleans

Need a new T-shirt? Of course you do. And, it only comes in basic black.

The fine folks at Ropeadope Records have come up with this wonderful, to the point T.

C'mon, it's one little Andrew Jackson, people.

As If Bumpas Emporium Wasn't Bad Enough...

It is with great sadness that I learned Saywell's Drugstore in downtown Hudson is closing.

Saywell's was one of the few remaining authentic soda fountains still in operation. It was founded in 1909 and has been a Hudson landmark for longer than their signature clock tower. Frommer's states:

Saywell's makes its own chocolate syrup for its popular chocolate sodas, and turns out an egg cream even a native New Yorker would love.

Practically Perfect In Every Way

My day. I left the house about 6 o'clock in the evening to get down to Playhouse Square early enough to get a parking space right near the enclosed walkway, and a ticket to see Bonnie Raitt. So far so good, minimal traffic, all is going well, even with the $8 it costs to park where I like to park.

So I get to the ticket window and ask what kind of seats they have left, and I get:

SECOND ROW, DEAD CENTER.

So, I go outside to have dinner at Otto Moser's, a place I chose because it was relatively deserted and quiet, unlike its neighbor, the much more trendy, fashionable and expensive, Star, which was standing-room only and noisy. So at Otto's, which is decorated with ancient photos of theatre folk from the early nineteenth century AND several mounted heads from the deer family wearing baseball caps, I was presented with a servicable strip steak, baked potato and applesauce by a genuine broad (for less than $20), the folks next to me were smoking (imagine that - inside a restaurant!) and it was the perfect, low-key, unpretentious meal I was looking for.

So I go in to the Palace, and survey the libations. The whiskey tonight was Jack Daniels, which I am officially not fond of, but if you are listening to blues, it is the drink of choice.

As I was being led to my seat, I noticed that there was no orchestra pit...the front row was literally next to the stage, so my seat was at most, five feet from the stage edge, meaning I was going to be less than twelve feet away from Bonnie Raitt.

It made my stage-managing heart swell with pride when at 7:30 EXACTLY (oh, yes, I checked), the lights dimmed and they announced the opening act, Stephen Bruton. Stephen seems like real nice fellow, had immaculate and beautiful guitars with very idiosyncratic string flourishes at the head, and he wore a most attractive multi-patterned shirt and great Levi's.

Then, Bonnie Raitt came out. Folks, she is magnificent. She wore a burned-out maroon velvet, deep V neck belled sleeve top and tight black pants and boots. I was close enough to her to see her cuticles and her eyelashes, and when you go to see Bonnie Raitt, most of the joy is watching her play, and I had the best seat in the house for that.

The stage backdrop was one of the coolest things I have ever seen and probably cost a $1.98. It was like 100 yards of clear plastic that were gathered and swagged, and then when lit in various ways made the greatest visual inpressions of texture and color. Blue, green, red, steel gray - many moods, and all of them rich and evocative. Way cool.

Bonnie seemed to be having some trouble with her monitors and quickly ripped the ear monitor out, and asked for a floor monitor to be set up. There were many problems with levels throughout the course of the show, and Bonnie showed herself to be in command of every aspect of the stage. When folks started yelling out requests, she handled by saying softly, "Oh, yeah, that's a GREAT song........but so is THIS one."

At one point she looked out into the audience and announced,

Well, I'm throwing a curve ball at the band and the crew, and changing the set list, because like Bobby Brown, it's my perogative.

Then she kicked the piano player off of his chair and sat at the keyboards, murmuring, "I hope I remember this, I wrote it after all...I just feel like doing it tonight..." and out came Nick of Time.

There were three standout performances in my mind. The first one was during a set when she sat on a black leather stool, with her hand on her knee and performed a gorgeous, jazzy version of I Can't Make You Love Me (which garnered a standing ovation). Her fragility and depth of emotion, and her presence in the performance were truly breathtaking. It was a beautiful moment. After she surfaced, she said,

When you go that deep you gotta pick yourself up with something like this

and literally threw a guitar around her shoulder and strutted arrogantly around the stage, just like Mick Jagger, exuding sensuality and power. That immediate dichotomy was truly impressive.

The second favorite moment was the mind-blowing Mighty Tight Woman by Sippie Wallace, which appears on Bonnie's first album, recorded in a garage when she was 21. This one was a sultry, deep blues groove, with long, excellent solos by Bonnie on acoustic guitar, Jon Cleary on piano and Stephen Bruton on lead guitar. It was steamy. And much like her soul-sister, Maria Muldaur doing Bessie Smith's Empty Bed Blues, tonight's performance was much richer, truer and filled with experience in comparison to that early recording (which is still impressive in itself).

The final song of the night (the last of the three encores) was Robert Palmer's Bad Case of Loving You, which she did an outstanding version of - hard rockin' and very fun.

The show had it all - a treat for the eyes and ears. Jazzy, wrenching ballads, slow old blues, pop, rock and the pleasure of seeing a true legend, comfortable enough in her own skin to be completely real and present.

She is a wonder.

If You Need To Waste Some Time...

Back in the day, I spent a good amount of time playing the Kevin Bacon game, trying to get a Bacon number of more than 3, to no avail.

Now I have found an equally useless and engrossing toy: GoogleFight.

The point of the game is to choose two terms you wish to pit against each other and press the "fight" button. Then you watch two stick figures fight for a few seconds, and then the results of the battle are displayed. The results are based on the number of "hits" found by Google.

Here are the fruits of my ill-spent afternoon of GoogleFighting:

Cowboys vs. Indians winner: Indians
Pen vs. Sword winner: Sword
Pros vs. Cons winner: Pros
Cher vs. Barbra Streisand winner: Cher
Bush vs. Katrina winner: Katrina
Laura Nyro vs. Joni Mitchell winner: Joni Mitchell
Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford winner: Bette Davis
Burmese Python vs. Alligator winner: alligator
Burmese Python vs. Siamese Cat winner: Siamese Cat
Immediate Gratification vs. Long-Term Goals winner: Long-term Goals

PETA Folks - Don't Read This Post

I met a most interesting fellow yesterday. His name was Sandy, and he was 83 years old. He used to manage a small grocery store that specialized in meat. He said that back in the day, he had as many as ten butchers working for him (which made him popular with the local hospital - he had to go to the hosiptal but once in his long career and, as he said, "It was a clean cut at least...").

While he had nothing to do with the slaughtering of the animals, he told me a little bit about the day-to-day operations of his store - things I never really stopped to think about.

For example, if he had a customer who wanted brisket, he would cut that from the "swinging beef" ( a whole cow)...then he said briskets got really popular, so to satisfy the brisket customers, he had to keep ordering whole cows...and then...what do you do with all of the rest of it? You have to sell it...

Ordering for and running a shop back in the day had a whole lot of considerations I never thought of. I can imagine the stress of looking into a locker full of hanging cows and wondering how in the world you are going to move it in a timely fashion.

Beef. It's what for dinner, I guess. But I think they missed an opportunity with not capitalizing on the "Swinging Beef" phrase...I'm seeing Sinatra, rakish fedora hats...cool, man.

Learning From the Past

An exercise in logic.

Let's say you live in Florida and are the owner of a Siamese cat that has been missing for a couple of days.

Then you discover you have a visitor in your backyard - a twelve foot long (yes, that's right Clever Readers) Burmese python. A python with a rather suspicious lump in its belly. Officials said they could feel "cat limbs" inside the snake, but could not positively ID the victim...one report states that the python is to be X-rayed.

I think that would still be rather inconclusive proof - sure it might be a cat but is it the missing cat? Where are the people from CSI:Miami for cripe's sake?

The snake has a new home at the Sense of Wonder Nature Center and Trail...and, in a peculiar coincidence they state:

We're calling him Hollywood

Hmm...might this have something to do with MY Hollywood's recent disappearance?

Welcome to October - the month of the Burmese Python.

Like A Day Without Sunshine

Well, okay, it's true - after my years in the great Pacific Northwest, I've come to actually enjoy days without sunshine.

However, Hollywood Stafford seems to be under the misguided idea that he was authorized to take a week long vacation.

He has not been around, and the world is a little duller. And so am I.

He better return with some excellent music tips.

Maybe The PR Is Wrong

How can Mars be the God of War ?

What A Wonderful World

The Femmebot is declared cancer-free following her six month check-up.

Now I Understand...

I got an email this morning that affected me so acutely that I actually had to leave the library and go sit outside for a moment. While that helped, the effect lingered with me all day long.

Some sentiments and words are very powerful, and it takes awhile to really process them.

Thank you, Scout. I will treasure that one forever.

A Lesson From The Seven Deadly Sins

Today's sermon is on the topic of gluttony.

Simply put, gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires. However, Thomas Aquinas adds that it is ...an inordinate desire ...leaving the order of reason...

Today's sterling illustrative example comes from deep within the Florida Everglades.

A 13 foot Burmese python (not an indigenous animal by the way) decided to have a six foot alligator for dinner. No news source I've found can give an estimate on how long that feat might have taken, nor, sadly were there any witnesses to the epic battle. However, park rangers did come across the grisly scene of the python's burst open body, with the hindquarters of the alligator exposed.

It is worth pointing out that the glutton's punishment in hell is being forced to eat rats, toads, ... and snakes.

New Music Tuesday - Road Less Traveled

I lament missing the much-raved about performance by Joss Stone and Melissa Etheridge at the Grammy Awards on February 13, 2005. It was Melissa's first public performance following her bout with breast cancer, and it seems that the song they performed, Joplin's Piece of My Heart, was bit of music history.

So, I read that Melissa was releasing a greatest hits CD, which would have the song on it, so I waited patiently. Much like a Burmese python.

So I got the CD.

And the version of Piece of My Heart rocks, but it is NOT the live version. Which I have yet to hear and it is killing me.

The opening tune, Refugee, is outstanding, and the final tune, I Run For Life is very affecting.

And the hits in between are great.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is great compilation, but I already own all of her CD's - I just wanted that ONE SONG, which is not here. Now I'm whining. Sorry.

Flash 'Em For A Good Cause

Today begins the 4th annual Blogger Boobie-thon.

The Boobie-thon invites folks to submit pix of breasts of all makes and models to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

As a gifted, talented and good friend of mine is a survivor of breast cancer, I take this one very seriously.

Check out the pix, submit your own bare (or covered) breast photo, and toss in some quid, okay?