The places we went back then...

(that sounds a lot like the title of a Raymond Carver story, dunnit?)

The post immediately below, with its coda about Benson's in Hudson, brought to mind some of the trips in the days when gas was 15 cents a gallon. Sometimes there were "gas wars" going on and on Sunday afternoon Dad would put us all in the '41 Mercury and drive south on US 5, along the river, down into Connecticut, (usually no further than Windsor Locks) and fill up the tank at eight gallons for a buck. Then we'd get ice cream, and it was a recreational experience. We lived in what's known as The Forest Park neighborhood, "Forest Park" for short. This is (or was, I've no idea what it's like now that Springfield is on its uppers) a lovely, huge park, mostly built on land donated by Everett Hosmer Barney, an industrialist who made a fortune in clamp on ice skates (who'd a thunk it). His family Mausoleum is still in place on the grounds of the park, and is a well-known Springfield landmark. His house, alas, was sacrificed to Interstate 91. We lived within walking distance of the park, and it was a frequent destination for the family when I was very little, and when I got a bit older, a destination for pals & self though under the tutelage of older brother. There was a zoo (still is, I think) and gardens and miles of trails. Dr. Seuss's father was in fact in charge of this zoo once upon a time, I think.

Just up the street (Sumner Ave.) from the Main Entrance of the Park was a shopping district known as "The X" which sounds weird until you look at a map and see that Sumner Ave and Dickinson Street cross there at an acute angle (though I guess it's an obtuse angle if you look at it differently) and form, ayuh, an X. There were Mom & Pop stores there as well as some national outlets, back in the day when a national chain didn't require that the market population be in the millions and the stores take up city blocks. There was, at the X, the Phillips Theater, a "nabe" and many a Saturday afternoon we spent ensconced in its gum-encrusted, popcorn-scented womb. The Phillips had a balcony, whence I learned how to wing an empty popcorn box such that it sailed straight up the middle of the path to the screen, then banked 90 degrees just before it made contact.
Further up Sumner Ave, away from the Park entrance and out of the X, was another nabe, of later construction and smaller capacity, called The Bing, named after the crooner (so legend has it anyway). The Bing was slightly closer to home and didn't require crossing as many major streets, so it was our venue of choice on our 50-cent Saturday expeditions (a quarter for admission - two features, three cartoons, previews, newsreels, usually a sports short, a good full afternoon out of the Parents' hair - plus a dime for a coke, a dime for popcorn, and a nickel for a candy bar - Three Musketeers for me) - but after 1953 the Bing became problematic for mass outings to the movies.

They ran a movie called "The Moon is Blue" in spite of said flicker being denounced by the RC church, which was a major social and political force in the neighborhood (Holy Name). It wasn't a problem for us (we didn't go to ANY church much less the RC flavor) but some of our pals did, and some of their parents were more involved in paying attention to Monsignor's pronouncements than others. So when Monsignor said "Don't go to the Bing" a number of our cronies' parents acquiesced and denied permission to their offspring to frequent said cinema. So we either went to The Phillips at The X, or we went without Smitty and Choochie and Whatzisname with the runny nose. The offense of "The Moon is Blue" by the way was its use of the word "virgin."

Honest to god. Apparently the RCC figured they owned it.

More places later.

Once a week or so, ("or so" meaning more often when I can arrange it)

I stop into a little store in Hudson, New Hampshire, on Route 111 just outside of Nashua* called "The Drink Shoppe" and wander through their collection of microbrews from all over the place, and select something to bring home for spouse & self to try out, ostensibly over pizza, but most of the stuff is good enough to sip on through the rest of the week. Once upon a time there was a micro out in Milford called The Pennichuck Brewing Company, that put out a brew called Bagpiper Scottish Ale that was amazing. And then of course they went out of business.

So last week I grabbed a six of something called Storm King Stout, from Victory Brewing Company in Downington Pennsylvania. It was tasty, lots of body, etc. but the next morning (I had exactly one bottle) my head was fuzzy and uncomfortable. I thought it might have been something else, but the next time I had some of this stuff - a day or two later - the same thing happened.

Now I don't mind having a wee hangover if I've had a dram too many (not that it's happened all that often... lately) but it doesn't seem right that one beer should do that kind of thing to one. Especially at a sawbuck a sixpack. Bluefin Stout, from Shipyard Brewery in Portland, btw, is quite excellent. Almost everything from Shipyard is. Smuttynose puts out some terrific stuff too, especially Old Brown Dog.

* For folks of a certain age and a certain familiarity with this particular part of the world, The Drink Shoppe is diagonally across Route 111 from a large chunk of derelict blacktop that was, in days of yore, the entrance to Benson's Wild Animal Farm. Somewhere, I have a very old photo of self atop an elephant at Benson's. When my grandmother lived in Lowell, it was a special treat for us, as kids, to be driven up into what seemed to be the backwoods at the time (and I reckon it was pretty backwoodsy back then) and visit Benson's. Apparently a GREAT many other folk remember Benson's fondly - http://www.bensonsanimalfarm.com/

Not sure exactly why, but

I signed up for gmail, finally. Initially I stayed clear because of privacy and "content ownership" issues, but it occurred to me that no one is really likely to give a flying fart about my puny little emails. And then I was introduced to "Buzz" which is clearly Google's answer to Twitter, and their bid in the "social networking" sphere. So naturally it got me to thinking about Twitter and social networking, and Droid phones and text messaging, etc. and it further occurred to me that I suppose I should have an opinion about all of this, or at least should say something about it even if I don't really have a fully formed opinion. Which I think I don't. Or at least, I'm not sure if I do, and if I do, I'm not really 100% sure what it is.

One side of my head is very much attuned to technology, and making use of it - I think having all the digital stuff we do is ultimately a good thing for the species and will continue to differentiate us from reindeer and wildebeests, though maybe not so much from chimps if they get hold of iPhones anytime soon. I think this sort of mass communications technology will quite possibly help lift huge chunks of humanity out of their only-slightly-post-neolithic existences more quickly than any other set of tools to date. This will (I think) be a good thing.

On the other hand, the same mass & instant communication capabilities are in the hands of people who wish me ill, not because of anything I've ever done to them, but simply as a result of where I was born & grew up & how I live. I'm enough of a happy idiot to believe that there aren't millions of these people out there who wish me ill, but the downside of our modern age is that there don't have to be millions of them in order for them to potentially do me & my ilk grave harm. And they are indeed working on it, with greater diligence than I'm spending on my day-to-day activities.

But the real "final question" that I suspect I'll spend more thought on, since there's nothing I can do about those bad guys in the paragraph above - nothing much to be done, really, I think they're probably part of the fabric of human life from here on out. They've always been around, of course, but now they're much better armed, in touch with each other over long distances (only a few years ago most of them would have been unaware of the existence of most of the rest of them), and they know where I live, so to speak. But my point, back at the beginning of this paragraph, was that I'm wondering whether we are in fact really seeing something evolutionary taking place. Some years ago we used to joke about teenaged girls having phones surgically implanted. We are not far from that capability (not far hell, I'm quite sure the technology exists, and is in the plans of more than one organization of some kind or another in the real world. And not all of those organizations wish us sweetness and light). But in a nutshell, my ponder is this: are we seeing the beginning of the Borg?

What is it that makes us decide we want to see a movie, and order it in,

and then let it sit on the coffee table of the family room for days on end ("bogarting the queue" we call it) until we either decide we don't want to see it after all and send it back unwatched, or else we decide we're in the mood for it and finally devote a couple of hours away from Cops and World's Dumbest to actually watch something at least ostensibly artful, or else we decide "Geez I'd better at least put it in the DVD player" and we do, and give it 20 or 30 minutes, and like as not walk out on it, and sneak it into the mailer and back to the post office with all due stealth. I think there shoulda been a question mark up there after "stealth" but I"m too lazy to go back and see if that was really all one sentence. Good for me if it was.

I think it's because Netflix gives the impression of being free & unlimited. But bogarting the queue is a bad thing, especially if more than one person feeds it, and tastes are not shared. I gotta cut that out. So I"ll watch The Road and Transsiberian over the weekend. Honest...

If it weren't "One damned thing after another" it would

be everything all at once. A'propos of bupkis, of course, it just occurred to me this morning. It actually re-occurred to me this morning. A while back my wife - in the throes of the sort of concatenation of events that's typical for lots of folks our age & socio-economic bracket - uttered the classic "One damned thing after another" remark, purely as a conversational deadair filler, and the response above just sorta popped out of my mouth. It made her laugh, which was a plenty gratifying result. Of course it's the converse, or contrapuntally moebius or whatever the logico-rhetorical descriptor would be, of the old "Time is just nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

Summer is almost over, at least notionally if not calendrically. I always point out to the captive audience of family that - technically - Summer lasts well into the school year by which we all seem to be bound when it comes to seasonal milestones, but in general, no one is having any of it. Summer is over on Labor Day. And it didn't really start 'til the Fourth of July, in spite of the fact that Commercial Summer runs from Memorial Day to Columbus Day (at least in New England. I realize Columbus Day - historically 12 October - is not universally observed).

More important than Summer being almost over is the fact that Foliage Season (or "Leaf Peepin' as we like to call it) is about to begin. This was brought home to me just yesterday when I noticed that the big shade tree out in the garden is beginning to shed its trashy little dull yellow leaves. We have no attractive trees on our property, that I know of. There may be one or two out in the Wayback, but mostly those are poplars and pines. I don't go out there unless I have to, there's too bloody much poison whatzit. So the poplars will dump their gnarly, leathery leaves all over the place, and the scrub maples will turn sickly yellow, while down on Main Street, toward the center of town, the stately oaks and maples that have lined the right-of-way for about 150 years will turn glorious gold & crimson, and burn themselves out in October, which will warn us that dismal November follows to be endured until at least we get a little pretty snow to distract us for a while. And as soon as the year is over we'll be sick of that and wish for spring.

One damned thing after another...

So last Friday was the thirteenth of August.

And it only just occurred to me that it was a notable day in the chronicles of who I used to be and how I'm not anymore, and how I got to be who I am now (which is somebody else).

So on the 13th of August, 1969, a new cluster of 2LTs (USAF) were created (by gosh & by golly & by act of congress), down in San Antone, at the old USAF OTS campus known in those days as "Medina" which was sort of an annex to Lackland AFB (more properly LMTC or Lackland Military Training Center, which was the main tenant of Lackland AFB). It was a hot day, and we marched all toy-soldierly out onto the bigass parade field, and stood while some buncha brasshats uttered the usual outrageous bumph, then we were commissioned and all of a sudden transformed from snot-nosed, wet-eared, greenhorn mewling & puking recent college graduates into the Air Force's version of Trained Killers. Well, maybe soon-to-be-trained-killers. If at all.

We threw our wheel hats high in the air, and somehow actually all managed to find our own (at least I did, I dunno how many lost theirs), and then glad-handed each other and got first salutes from various folks, fetched our gear from the barracks, and hauled ass out of San Antone with all possible haste.

I was a couple months shy of 23 years old. Hoping not to be sent to Southeast Asia, where there was a nasty shooting war underway. Many of my pals from Basic Training and OTS (I was one of the twice blessed who got to participate in BOTH levels of indoctrination) did indeed go to SEA - Vietnam & Thailand mostly. As far as I know they all came back. I lucked out & went to Korea. Some pals went to Alaska. After remote assignments, we ended up in places like Syracuse, Duluth, Petersburg Virginia, Seattle, etc. I ran into a couple of my Basic and OTS compadres later on at Syracuse. After leaving the service, we all pretty much left it & each other behind, though recently I've been in touch with a couple of the guys, quite by accident - one's a professor of something wet in Florida, and one's a golf pro.

Military service seems to stick with you; it plays a huge role in shaping who you turn out to be - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but always, it seems to me, for keeps. It's the classic "wouldn't want to do it again, but wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Saw Eliza Gilkyson & Cheryl Wheeler Friday night (the 13th of August)

They were each superb in their own ways. Great music, much laughter - if you've heard Wheeler's music but not seen her stage set, you're missing about half of her talent to entertain. And that's saying something, as her music is top notch. I had not heard Gilkyson's music before (though have heard her name around quite a lot) - she too is very versatile, very talented and put on a very enjoyable set. And of course the setting (literally on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee, on the grounds of Brewster Academy) is picture postcard, and the weather could not possibly have been better.

I watched "The Lion in Winter" the other night

The one with O'Toole and Hepburn from '68. It is a monumentally good film. The language is amazing, the characterizations phenomenal (Anthony Hopkins' film debut as Richard I the Lionheart), the photography stunning (and to my eye at least VERY historically accurate).

Favorite lines:

Eleanor, when John (the pustule) whines that Richard has a knife: "Of course he has a knife. You have a knife, I have a knife, we all have knives, it's 1183 and we're barbarians."

Henry, when, upon learning that Henry has decided to have the Pope "annul her" and get a new batch of kids, since his sons are such putzes, Eleanor asks "To Rome?" and Henry says "That's where the keep the Pope."

The script is rife with lovely gems, but those two have always stood out for me. And their final exchange, as Eleanor is back in her barge and headed back to her imprisonment:

Henry: I hope we never die!
Eleanor: Me too!
Henry: Do you think it might happen?

and they both laugh, and laugh, as Eleanor's boat heads down river toward the channel.

First of June, Random stuff glimpsed through the smoke from Quebec afire

Whatever happened to the Indy 500? Or is it me?

It only just occurred to me that the race was yesterday. It used to be ALL over TV, and other media, but I don't recall seeing a single item about it. Not that I watched very much TV over the long weekend, but it seems to me that there woulda been mention of it during the "run up" during which I watched my usual glom of worthless nonsense. Is it just me, or has everyone's interest in Indy flagged over the past few years? In favor of NASCAR maybe? Interestin' ...


So this 13-year old climbed Mt Everest with his Dad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Romero

It's to be expected, I guess, that there are folks carping about it. Recently, a 16-year old Australian girl became the youngest person to sail around the world solo,

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/15/australian-teen-youngest-person-sail-world/


I think it's great, and would be the last one to criticize; I do however wonder what they're gonna do for encores.


I got sick of hearing about the Gulf oil this morning, so on my way to work I listened to Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

The Wreck of Old '97 -

He was coming down that slope
doing ninety miles an hour
when his whistle broke into a scream
They found him in the wreckage
with one hand on the throttle
scalded to death by the steam.

This song was based on another, The Ship That Never Returned by Henry Clay Work (who also wrote "My Grandfather's Clock" and a lot of us Great Scare Folkies know the tune of this old chestnut better as the Bob Gibson's fun "Super Skier" (which the Chad Mitchell Trio ended with "Get poor Charlie off the MTA" which of course is a reference to ANOTHER song that uses the tune - ain't the Folk Process grand though?)

(Oh they called him Super Skier,
as he sat around the sundeck,
he swore that he would never take a spill,
when they finally got him down
they had to use three toboggans
to carry all the pieces off the hill....

He was coming down that slope
doing ninety miles an hour
when he caught an edge of his ski...)

Seemingly on a roll with railroad songs, Jack follows this with The Wabash Cannonball, a song done so many different ways by so many different artists it's practically a genre in itself (my favorite cut of it is by the Limeliters, on a live album, where Glen Yarborough crescendoes & glissandoes a whistle leading into the chorus)

Later on the side he returns to the Age of Steam with Hobo's Lullaby & Rock Island Line, so the side goes from trad to early country/bluegrass to straight country to Lead Belly via Weavers and Lonnie Donegan. Ramblin' Jack would be the last one to claim himself as a great singer or guitar picker, but I have never heard him when it didn't sound like he was having fun doing what he loved to do, and that always makes entertainment - he's fun to listen to. I plan to get to see him before he leaves us.

Gowf Chronicles, 4 May 2010

Great Zot I've fallen behind again. So anyway… I spent Tuesday morning (4 May) in the company of 9 other superannuated wannabe duffers, in a "Senior Golf School" conducted on a gorgeous course (Stow Acres) in East-Central Massachusetts (Stow, Mass (surprise, surprise) - Johnny Appleseed country). The Golf School at Stow Acres sets aside a number of two-half-day sessions for "Seniors" leaving a day off in between to let us old farts recover. Instructor-to-student ration is one-to-five, so one gets a fair amount of attention. I let our "teaching pro" know that I was a rank beginner and he was delighted – "no bad habits to unlearn" – well, maybe, maybe not, I cautioned. At any rate I figured any bad habits I have after Thursday can be laid at his doorstep.
So I learned the proper way to approach the ball, pick a target line, align one's elderly self vis-à-vis the ball, grip the stick, swing the booger, etc. etc. Tiger needs not fret, of course, but I had the feeling that I walked away from the session somewhat less a rank beginner and slightly more informed about how this thing is supposed to be done. If nothing else I have a routine for lining up on the ball correctly, and I will say that by the end of the morning fewer of my shots sucked entirely. I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Guilty Pleasures Dept - Ken Russell adaptations of Bram Stoker novels

ok, ok, so it was a boring TV night, even for the desultory drill I peruse. So I went to On Demand, and browsed the free movies, and there was "Lair of the White Worm" (1988) starring Hugh Grant and other people no one's ever heard of, at least I haven't. It rang a bell, and not just because of the obvious "white worm" gag, promising sex. The other bell it rang had long black hair and went by the name of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark." I was pretty sure I'd seen this flick back in Elvira's heyday, so I looked it up & sure enough it was as I'd remembered, a cheesy Ken Russell (is that redundant?) adaptation of one of the many novels that fall into the category of "Bram Stoker's work that isn't Dracula"

It's a cheesy flick alright, but the allusions to genuine British folklore are pretty comfortable (look up The Lambton Worm for pretty much the entire backstory), and there are some funny bits (well it is Ken Russell, so there were bound to be some funny bits, but some of them I think were even intentional).

I don't recommend this film if you've a better idea, which includes a "My Mother The Car" marathon of all eleven episodes. But barring that, if you've nothing to do with your evening and you have access to it, what the hey, I've spent more on worse.

Dream Journal 3/16/2010

So I was off in the hinterlands somewhere, driving a '72 Datsun that we used to own, that we bought for $200 from my sister (it was cheap because she got upset when the engine quit in right-hand turns).

I dunno why I was off where I was, but it seemed to be on some sort of business. I'd been there a few days and had to leave the tired old Datsun parked on a country road.

Getting ready to head back, I called home because there was a local eatery that was famous for its wieners & sauerkraut - it was in a barn. A real barn, not a kitschy kit-building made to look like a barn. I think it was named "Ray's."

Anyway I called home and for sure I was to bring home a bunch of weenies & a ton of kraut. On returning to the poor old Datsun in its roadside berth I discovered that the glass in the driver's door was shattered. Worse, on inspecting the front passenger door, I discovered that it (the whole door) was missing entirely. But it started up ok, so I figured it would get me home. I have NO IDEA how far home was in this dream but it appeared to be a bit of a trek & I was worried about arriving home with the car in such a nasty state.

(Here's where is gets good) - then my dreaming self - the one conscious of the state of things in the dream - realized that the Datsun has been gone from the scene of day-to-day reality for, oh, 30 years or so. So then it realized it was dreaming. Which led to the realization that since it was a dream, the broken window and missing door were ephemera that could simply be realized away. And THEN (the REALLY good part) it - my dreaming self - realized that since it was a dream it could ditch the Datsun altogether and drive home in the Highlander. Which it did. Then I woke up.

Jeezus.

It wasn’t a bad afternoon in southeastern New England,

a little warmer than it’s been, a little less dim & grim. It was, in fact, a good day to take an afternoon off, drive to the Alewife T station (northwestern end of the Red Line, the subway line that goes through Harvard Square and Kendall – where Charley handed in his dime – and into Park Street – the heart of Boston’s public transportation, and connects with other lines), get off at South Station, and take the “Silver line” which is a nifty bus system that runs underground in subway-like lanes, and get out at Courthouse station, and amble to the Seaport Trade Center (World Trade Center – Boston), where the Gold Expo was in full swing (yuk, yuk).

So that’s what we did, my bud & I. The golf show was ok, but how many putters & tees & golfballs can ya look at, after all, so a little over an hour later, we were pretty much done with that. So that made it lunch time, and neither of us in the mood for pub grub, nor packaged junk from a chain outlet. Nearby options were Chinatown, Quincy Market, and The North End.

Chinatown was tempting but I’m not a huge fan of Asian food. Quincy Market tends toward near-fast food aimed at shopping-tourists. But the North end…. Ah, the North End, where you can’t swing a piece of pasta without running into an intriguing – and possibly delightful, possibly not – trattoria or ristorante or bistro. Problem with all those places is that you can more or less tell by the name that they’re aimed at tourists too. So you have to leave Hanover St. and wend your way up a couple of back streets that look a LOT like alleys to a lane called Thacher St (sic, only on ‘t’ in Thacher) to a sorta nondescript corner place with a fairly simple sign announcing Regina Pizzeria, “world famous since 1926”

Lots of us who grew up in the greater Boston area remember fondly our first Regina’s pizza. The place looks a lot like it was designed by a movie set designer – if your script called for “a classic old neighborhood pizzeria” you’d hustle to Regina, though they probably wouldn’t let you shoot there. (I’m guessing of course, for all I know dozens of movies have been shot there).

My first pizza there was something like 50 years ago, my big brother, who was a man of the world and knew his way around Boston (sorta) took me there in a fit of charity toward the little bro.

My most recent (‘til today) pizza there was probably 40 years ago, shortly after college. Not a bloody thing had changed except that they didn’t used to have Sam Adams, and they DID used to have PBR on draft. But the pizza was exactly as I remembered it – thin, slightly soggy crust (a little too heavy on the oil), generous cheese, heavenly pepperoni, overall a perfect, perfect pizza.

The walk back to Park Street station was enough to work off the second beer. There was a talented busker (classical guitar) in Park Street Under (where the Red Line runs. Park Street has two levels, one for true subway (Under) and one for the trolley LRVs that go over & under. As the train for Alewife rolled in I put a buck in the busker’s guitar case, we hopped aboard, made the trek through Charles St/MGH, Kendall Square, Central Square, Harvard, Porter, & Davis Squares, and hey-nonny-nonny back out on the highway.

Once upon a time Huz & I spent a fair amount of time in Boston & Cambridge, what with school, as well as just general hanging out. It was nice to revisit.

Judy Collins at Tupelo Music Hall, Salisbury Beach MA 2/21/10

For folks who have even (only) a casual acquaintance with The Great Folk Scare (or folks who have no use for it like Jerry), the name Judy Collins is instantly recognizable, and more often than not probably thought of in tandem with Joan Baez. They were, at a couple of levels, the First and Second ladies of the GFS, and which was which depended a lot on personal taste. I leaned toward Baez myself, but enjoyed Collins very much also.

Watching Golden Agers of The Folk Era (in both senses of "golden age") has become a national pastime lately, what with all the PBS fundraisers with the wheezers of the Wobbly era, and the various tributes to people like Seeger and Baez and Dylan (Scorsese's film on Zimmie a couple of years ago was quite good, I thought), and I have all too often found myself wincing (and whingeing) at the sight of either old farts on the verge of decrepitude croaking out sad echoes of their glory tunes, or groups that have nothing in common with the Scare but their names, totally without connection to the original Kingston Trio or Limeliters, etc. And I recently found myself picking a nit over the fact that - at the age of 68 or whatever it is - Baez's voice seems to have lost a fair amount of the supernatural vibrato that made her such an object of veneration in 1962.

Well, this Judy Collins is the real thing, not a substitute or contractor who bought the right to use the brand for promotional purposes. The billows of silvery hair are as they have been for 20 years or so, the 12-string guitar strumming is pretty much as good as it ever was, and here's where I diverge from some popular opinion, her guitar work has never been distinguished, she limits herself to a journeyman flat-pick strum on the gorgeous signature Martin 12-string; it seems to be more a tool to help her stay on rhythm and something to hold onto than an instrument on which to demonstrate virtuosity. But as I said, it's as good as it ever was, so this is an observation rather than a criticism.

Her voice is absolutely gorgeous, as it ever was. If she's lost any vibrato, it must have been excess to begin with, her tone is crystal clear. She did seem to have a couple of instances of control problems - a crack here or there, and once in a while she seemed to have to sneak up on a note, but no matter, there was more than enough glory in her pipes to justify driving to the beach to watch a 70-year-old remember and re-enact.

More troubling to me was a recurring difficulty with remembering the words to some songs. I assume that when you've sung as many songs as many times as Judy Collins has, there are necessarily some that get relegated to the mind's attic and aren't always right on the tip of the tongue. S'ok, it didn't hurt anything, nobody minded (one thing that was clear from the instant she hit the stage was that - of course - there was no need to win over the audience, we were hers from the outset).

She opened with a couple of Scare standards, Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and Ian Tyson's "Someday Soon" both signature tunes for her in the glory days. They were creditable renditions, but rushed, as if (understandably) she wanted to get them out of the way.

She did more chatting & storytelling than she did the last time I saw her onstage, and seemed more comfortable; the jokes were flippant and funny but clearly planned rather than offhand. For me the highlight of the songs was an absolutely rip-it-up rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire" with a raucous, rowdy up-tempo piano backing by Russ Walden (her accompanist/music director). She finished with some of the long, slow, meditative stuff that she's done a lot of over the past decades, and which is not my favorite of her work. She gave us the Arlen/Harburg "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" for an encore, and it was perfect.

Kenny White, a NY artist unknown to me, opened and he's a very talented musician and writer. He's also very loud and uses WAY too many words in most of his songs, but check him out, he does what he does extemely well.

I watched "A Serious Man" the other night.

Someone characterized it as "the movie you get to make after you make "No Country For Old Men." Probably true, though having made "Fargo" and "O Brother" didn't hurt either. I suspect no one but the Coen Brothers could have made "Serious Man" because only they wouldn't need to pitch it, and who could pitch "Well it's like the story of Job only in suburban 60s America and funny."

Maybe the point was in fact that the husband in the parable was a mensch, and so what did it get him? Bupkis... but you can bet he went on being a mensch anyway (and his wife went on being a wacko, no doubt) A couple of sources I've stumbled across indicate that the prologue* of "A Serious Man" - according to the Coens - isn't intended to correlate directly to anything in the film itself. It was a faux Yiddish folk tale, concocted by the filmmakers, to get them into the mood for writing the main movie.

I'm damn glad they decided to stick it on the movie, it could have been a throwaway, and I think it adds to the movie quite a bit.

At first I assumed it was directly connected - these people were ancestors of Larry. Then I wondered if they were more emblematic Ashkenazim. Now I dunno what the point was either, especially since it was left unresolved whether the old reb was in fact a dybbuk or maybe the wife was a wacko.

The more I think about it the more I think they were another anecdote in the long history of Yiddish wisdom that finds its outlet (in this film at least) in Rabbi Nachtner's "who knows; who cares" parable of the goy with the letters on his teeth (I loved that - and it only got better when the Adam Arkin character asked Larry about whether the rabbi told him the story of the goy's teeth.)

But it is all those things, as well as sad and disturbing and about as nonjudgmental as only the CoBros can be. The things that beset us aren't mad at us, there's nothing personal really - like Anton Chigur in "No Country" or Gaer in Fargo (or Margie in Fargo, for that matter) it's just the force of nature - the way things are. Shrug it off, move on.

*for those who haven't seen the film it opens with a story in Yiddish, set in an old-country shtetl, with some Ashkenazic Jews, an old reb who might be a dybbuk and a wife who stabs the dybbuk/reb with an ice pick.

I recommend "A Serious Man" a lot; lots of great actors you recognize but can't quite put your finger on like Richard Kind, Adam Arkin and George Wyner.

Roadkiller (thanks for the challenge, Cork)

A pal and I once drove from here,
clear across to over there,
sea-to-shining-sea, as it were.
This was in the seventies;
a long time ago from the Aught-Single-Digits thence.

To this day we both recall
the carnage of the Poconos:
ten dead deer littering the highway,
in a space of but a few miles.

In the darkness of November Saturday,
returning from a mild domestic errand,
peaceful in the warm evening air,
enjoying the pastoral environs I've chosen
intentionally, to enjoy these many years
part of the bucolic scenery leapt alive
across the picturesque wall and
into the two-lane-blacktop inches
from my unstoppable bumper.
The blur became a faun,
the faun became roadkill,
and I a roadkiller.

And it's still the same
woods-cradled two lane blacktop
and my bumper's trash
but the car will soldier on
(and my insurance company will pay
all but $100 to get it fixed).
But the little deer is dead,
and I'm not quite as comfortable as I was.
Which might be good.
I don't really know.

Copyright D. Quarrell 2009

Well, yet another segment in the busted dryer saga

so I took a couple of loads to the laundramat, couple towns to the south, 15 or 20 minute drive. Loaded up the big commercial dryer, popped the plastic token card in, set it off for 45 minutes, yatta yatta. Forty-five minutes later pulled out the fluffy-dries, loaded them back into the car and headed north. Just south of Atkinson (NH) center there's a lovely early-19th century house with humongous barn attached, that looks down onto NH Rte 121, and across it to a lovely meadow, once populated by grazing ungulants and other herbivores back in the days of our agrarian past. This big meadow (east of the two-lane blacktop that is Main St Atkinson, Stage Road and Main Street Hampstead, and up into Chester and Auburn, etc.) slopes down away from the right-of-way, and is separated from it by one of our ubiquitous stone walls. There are woods surrounding the meadow. It is an ideal place for wildlife to hang out - especially at night. So there I am headed north with me clean laundry, doing the speed limit (35, I make it a point, often just to piss of the guys behind me who want to do 50) and I see out of the corner of my eye, a greyish brown blur, and it hops the stone wall and is off my right front fender as I slam the brake pedal but it's not enough and not soon enough and the faun took the full impact of the front of the Highlander in the process of slowing down. He sort of bounced off my bumper, then managed to drag himself (or herself, I don't really know) into the path of a southbound Taurus wagon.

The deer's dead, I called 911 and waited, waving southbound traffic off to prevent the poor critter from becoming bloody pulp, it was entitled to that much dignity. I guess it was a good thing too for the safety of the southbound drivers, but some of them were driving like assholes and didn't deserve the courtesy. The local cop came, took my details, commiserated ("I hate this shift at this time of year, there's so much of this. They're pretty to look at but a danger.") and told me I was good to go. I'm fine, the front bumper of the Highlander is a disaster but it did its job nobly and that's why we have insurance. I won't lose any sleep over the poor critter, but I feel badly and I wish it hadn't happened.

Gowf Chronicles 8/27/09

Played nine holes on a local course. Played horribly, but I still have beginner's status to fall back on for consolation. My game is pretty much summed up by "whack, 'dammit', trudge, whack, trudge, whack, 'dammit', trudge." I try not to let the golf spoil the "good walk" and the fun of being with a friend. Nice little course though (in Pelham NH) sort of backwoodsy, obviously a "neighborhood course" if there's such a thing, I'm sure there's a gowfish term for it, there's one for everything else. The fairways were kinda narrow & constricted. I suspect that "it's not an easy course" carried less consolation for me than was intended, but while not terrifically satisfactory as a golf outing, it wasn't the one that will make me decide not to play again. Nor did "the shot that'll bring you back" happen, so next time depends entirely on camaraderie & fellowship, I guess. That's strong enough.

Drove up to Salisbury Beach last night; pilgrimagically.

For certain folks of a certain age living in a certain part of New England, Salisbury Beach was always part of summer. Not necessarily the best part, but the greasy pizza (cheese extra at Cristy's) and fries and onion rings, followed by ice cream and a walk up the midway was a necessity of summer. When we were kids, there were rides and lots of games and arcades; when our kids were kids there were still a few rides & arcades, still some hurly-burly, noise and of course the dirty sand. Salisbury Beach midway was never a place to actually go "to the beach" though, at least not for us. Beach-sitting (or prowling & ogling when we got a little older) was for Hampton or Plum Island or Rye. Salisbury Beach was for honky-tonk and horrid food and chintzy games & rides.

Salisbury Beach is not quite dead & gone; the rides are all gone, and most of the game booths, there's a couple of arcades left, as well as Cristy's and Tripoly's pizza stands and a few ice cream stands, and fried dough, and some really sleazy bars (there have always been sleazy bars of course, but they weren't part of my growing up so they're sorta wallpaper to this little reverie). But last night there weren't any people there. In the middle of the last week in August, we expected stragglers galore, as in summers of yore, wringing the last drops out of the summer before Labor Day rang the gong. But there were very few folks around, and they were indeed clearly stragglers, some of them may even have been fall move-ins, the folks who live at the beach in the winter because the rents are very cheap in some of the older "cottages." I make no comment about the new, year-round condos that developers have slapped up in attempts to cash in on a longed-for gentrification. But Salisbury Beach is pretty much gone - no Frolics, no Normandy Hotel, no rides, no people.

Hampton Beach, on the other hand, was exactly as we'd expected - as rowdy as ever but cleaner, and with slightly less honk to its tonk, crowded with people sucking the last juices out of August-by-the-sea. Good to know. And Cristy's Pizza now has a stand in Hampton. Old Sam's heirs & assigns have obviously seen the writing on the wall. Adios Salisbury Beach.

I played golf with my best bud today

and my first point of insecurity has nothing to do with golf but with whether the guy I've known since 1962, and have been pals with since 1964, and who has in fact been my "best bud" since about 1966, should be referred to with more capitalization. I dunno. Played golf with Huz today. I haven't played golf since about 1963, when Dana Parker and Mike Robinson and I hiked (literally) to the Sagamore course in Lynnfield and whacked balls around mercilessly (and totally unproductively, in golf terms). I was about 16 or 17, and we played about five or six times, it being summer and we being headed into our senior years in high school, and more or less unemployed, and it was something to do. I sucked at it, as I recall, but no one was any good, so who cares.

So today I was a duffer wannabe out on the course with another slightly more experienced duffer wannabe, and another somewhat more experienced (and talented) duffer and his teenaged son who was doing his best not to embarrass Dad (and he succeeded, he wasn't horrible). Somewhere around the middle of hole two I realized we weren't really counting strokes so I stopped counting strokes and it instantly became more fun. I have no idea what my final stroke count might have been ( I do know that on more than one hole I said "Ah fuckit" rather than keep trying to putt the ball into the cup) but I had fun, and at the end of nine holes there was a place to have a snort of Jameson's.

What could be bad? I suspect I'll play golf (or as Wodehouse has it "the gowf") again.