Category Archives: Entertainment

Rachmaninoff & Tchaikovsky on a March Evening

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Here’s an argument that not everything of historic or archaeological significance should stay in its place of origin: “ISIS destroys ancient site of Khorsabad in northeastern Iraq.” Had the University of Chicago left everything in place, some of the artifacts you can see at the Oriental Museum would be rubble about now, thanks to barbarians.

ESO3.15Yuriko and I made it to far suburban Elgin on Saturday for the Elgin Symphony Orchestra, which offers high-quality performances. The ESO, besides being good at what they do, has a number of other advantages for people who have the temerity to live in the suburbs. It isn’t that far to drive; it’s easy to park there; and tickets don’t cost as much, say, as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All reasons the ESO sells most of its seats.

On tap this time: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, and “The Tempest” and “Romeo and Juliet” by Tchaikovsky. A Russian-born American, Natasha Paremski, was the guest pianist, displaying an astonishing amount of skill and energy at it. Unfortunately, we were sitting on the right side of theater, so it was hard to see her (and the conductor) during the performance, because of the bulk of the piano. I have a hard time warming up to Rachmaninoff — I can’t really say I try that much, though — but her rendition kept my attention.

A casual search doesn’t show Paremski playing any Rachmaninoff, but this is her having a go at Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, displaying a similar intensity at the keyboard.

Speaking of Tchaikovsky (sort of), this early TV clip also has a lot of (maniacal) energy to it. Such was Spike Jones. Stay to the end for an appearance by Jim Backus and an impersonation of a certain well-known figure on the world stage at the time.

Phil Plait at the Cernan Center

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On Saturday evening, we – all of us but Lilly, who had other things to do – went to the Cernan Earth & Space Center to see “Bad Astronomy,” a show mostly narrated by Phil Plait. It pretty much encapsulated what he has to say: there’s a lot of bad astronomy in movies, astrology is nonsense, of course men went to the Moon, and so on.

Ann Feb 10, 2015Not much new for me, though Ann probably got something out of it. In fact, she said she did, but also that she already knew there’s no sound in space. Not many movies or TV shows set in space bother with that, usually for sensible dramatic reasons – imagine the Enterprise passing by without that swoosh — though I can think of a few exceptions: 2001, Firefly.

Plait also mentioned in passing, without naming it, that there’s a place on the Moon where the Sun (almost) always shines. Never heard of that before, and it intrigued me. He must have been talking about the Peak of Eternal Light, which besides sounding like a cult, is an actual place near the south pole of the Moon.

We also got Ann a shirt from the small gift shop (which has no postcards): a map of the constellations.

Execution of Justice

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Execution of Justice was the first play I saw in Chicago after moving here in 1987. I’d seen a number of plays in the city before, such as Vicious, Rap Master Ronnie, and All My Sons, because it was a good thing to do when visiting town. Chicago’s got first-rate theater. Once I came to live there, I went to the theater every other month or so.

ExJustice87The play, by Emily Mann, is about the trial of Dan White, assassin of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and the reaction to his absurdly light sentence. White had been in the news again not too much earlier, in late 1985, for committing suicide.

The “Twinkie defense” was part of the play, but I don’t remember if it was treated as the myth it is or not. As Scopes puts it, “better to believe the jury was hoodwinked by some pseudo-scientific nonsense about junk food than to acknowledge the fact that our legal system sometimes absolves defendants of responsibility for the most heinous of crimes.”

I best remember the depiction of the White Night riots, with a dark, quiet stage suddenly exploding with light and noise and the motion of actors. You could tell the audience was startled.

The Going Away Party

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In January 1987, I moved from Nashville to Chicago to change jobs and my surroundings. It was also the only time anyone’s ever held a going away party for me. (I went to a pre-deportation party in Osaka for a gaigin once, but I wasn’t that gaigin.)

DaveStephDees1.16.87Anyway, on January 16, 1987, Stephanie — she’s the one in the middle, flanked by Dave and me — hosted my going away party. There was actually a theme: sleepwear. Some people came dressed that way, some didn’t.

PaulSteveJonPaul, with his eyes closed; Steve, whom I don’t remember much about; Jon up in the corner; and way in the back, Raggedy Ann. Some of the attendees were coworkers of mine, others were part of a poetry reading group that I attended from time to time in Nashville. It was an informal group that met in members’ apartments. After all this time, the only verse I remember from those events was ahead of Christmas one year, when one of us (not me) recited some of Walt Kelly’s “Boston Charlie.” First verse below. It’s not as easy as you think.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

SusieLibbyOne the bed, Suzie, and on the floor, Libby. Others in attendance were Wendy, Mike, Barbara, Donna and Tanya, and maybe more I’ve forgotten. Note that someone brought doughnuts, and not just any doughnuts. Krispy Kreme, back when that treat wasn’t available at every gas station from here to Timbuktou.

Also, on the right side of the picture, a blue strip. That was part of the design of the movie guide that Sarratt Cinema at Vanderbilt published once a semester. Remarkably, because of my pack-rat nature, I still have some of them, including Spring 1987, which was hanging on the wall. The movie we weren’t seeing that night was Aliens.

Even more remarkably (but not really), I used to record the movies I saw at Sarratt in the Day Minders I used to use. The last one noted before I left for Chicago: My Beautiful Laundrette, January 8. That’s probably the last movie of many I ever saw there — all of which formed part of my informal collegiate and post-collegiate education.

Thursday Stew

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A bit of meltage today, with temps around freezing, and the sunshine doing the melting where it hit snow directly. Compared with last week, the air felt good. But hard winter will be back, count on it.

Started working my way through Deadwood around New Year’s. When the show was still fairly new, the profanity put me off it. Not the profanity itself, but the fact that I considered it grossly anachronistic. Now I understand it as an intentional anachronism, done for good reasons. The show’s impressive: one that helps make the argument that now is a golden age of television, or at least the 2000s were.

Ann’s been reading Through the Looking-Glass lately, and looking for our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has gone missing. Not long ago she read The Wizard of Oz. And she’s asked me to find our copies of The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book, so she can read them. The kid’s got some kind of bug.

I have an ambition to scan more coins, specifically those I’ve encountered lately that don’t feature any Roman letters or even Arabic numerals. In the old days, it was a chore figuring out the origin of coins like that, so much so that for some time as a youngster I had a 1 yen coin that I thought was a 1 yuan coin. These days, all it usually takes is a focused Google search.

But I’ve alternately been too busy and too indolent to do much coin-scanning. I did get around to this one. Forgot to check the box that would correct for dust (the scanner’s got some impressive features for a cheaper model; guess the tech’s improving).

Ethiopian 10 SantimIt’s a well-worn brass 10 santim piece from Ethiopia. 100 santim = 1 birr. The lion, I suppose, is the Lion of Judah.

First Night Parade 92/93

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Back on the last day of 1992, Yuriko and I found ourselves in Boston. I don’t remember exactly where the First Night parade was – along one of the streets next to the Common, probably – but we were there, ahead of dinner with friends and a gathering in Cambridge to see ’93 in.

Like the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, First Night featured rod puppets of various kinds. Figures of people:

firstnightboston92-2The camera had an annoying feature that we forgot to turn off for that picture. It would time stamp the images at the bottom. The camera had been set to do so in Japan, so remarkably it stamped 93 1 1, which would have been correct had the camera still been in Japan. (We used it, and film, until 2007).

firstnightboston92-3Costumed participants paraded by as well.

firstnightboston92-1Not sure what this was supposed to have been, but it was colorful.

firstnightboston92-4My urge to go out on New Year’s Eve has flagged over the years (though usually it was to a gathering of friends, not a public event). This year, Lilly was out. In a few more years, Ann will be out.

Hard Day’s New Year’s Eve

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Snow today, after a rain-ice mix yesterday that made slush. December ’14 was remarkable in that not a bit of snow fell here in northern Illinois, none that stuck anyway. That suited me, though mostly it was cold, especially as the month ended. Everyone who was out after midnight on New Year’s braved temps around 15 degrees F., with some wind.

I stood outside for a short spell to capture the sounds of the early ’15, just after midnight. It’s faint, but if the volume’s all the way up, you can hear the steady pops of technically illegal fireworks. Not sure what the loud pop is at about 10 seconds.

 

Before midnight I watched A Hard Day’s Night. Fun movie. Somehow or other I’d never seen it before, except for the famed opening, in which a mass of screaming girls chase the lads through a train station.

One amusing line — which must be understood less and less as time goes by — involved “Paul’s grandfather.” (Wilfrid Brambell played Paul’s grandfather, sometimes stealing the show. I thought he looked familiar. Turns out he played the father in Steptoe and Son.)

At one point, Paul’s grandfather sneaks off and runs up a tab at a posh club. The Beatles and their manager show up to collect the old man, and the club manager says, “There’s the matter of the bill.”

The Beatles’ manager looks at it and says, “180 pounds?”

“180 guineas!” answers the club manager.

Mid-December Salmugundi

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Persistent cold so far through mid-December – that’s no surprise for December – but only cold rain, no snow to speak of as we approach Christmas. The girls fret about it. Don’t bother me a whit. A cold but snowless and especially iceless winter? Sounds good to me.

Ah, Cuba. Not in the U.S. news as much as it used to be, but now it’s back for a moment. Listening to some of the reportage, you’d think Cuba’s been isolated from the world since the early ’60s, but no. Just isolated from the United States.

When I was very young, I remember hearing the character Ricky Riccardo talking about coming from Cuba, and I was confused. I was pretty sure I’d also heard that no one was allowed to leave Cuba. Speaking of TV, I seem to recall an episode of The Twilight Zone in which Peter Falk plays a character that’s Castro in all but name. Yes, indeed.

Dreams are peculiar. Someone I haven’t seen in nearly 25 years appeared in one recently, and the subject of her ancestry came up. “Swiss and Wren,” she said. It made sense at the time. Only when I woke up did I think of the kind of bird.

Al Stewart ’14

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I went to St. Charles on Sunday to see live music at the Arcada Theater, which is on Main St.

Arcada Theater Oct 5, 2014Al Stewart again, with right-hand man Dave Nachmanoff. I hope Al has more years as a touring musician, but he’s 69, so there’s no guarantee. I won’t drive to, say, Saskatoon to see him, but if he plays nearby, I’ll make the effort. No one else in the house was interested, so I went by myself.

The Arcada Theater is a mid-sized venue, seating about 900 and dating from the 1920s when it was built as a movie house and vaudeville stage. Lester Norris – that’s the husband of Dellora Norris – developed the place. According to Wiki at least (I’m not going to chase down another source), the act at the grand opening in 1926 was Fibber McGee and Molly, which would have been when they were known locally in Chicago as radio players.

These days, a fellow named Ron Onesti, president of the Onesti Entertainment Corp., owns the theater. He’s a hands-on kind of impresario, to judge by his talkative, enthusiastic introduction of the act, and the give-away of tickets by random drawing during the intermission that he presided over, asking the audience questions such as who came here from the furthest? (Someone claimed to be from England.)

He’s got a niche: shows for people roughly my age (10 years either side, I’d say). Note some of the upcoming acts: Asia, Gary Wright, the Fifth Dimension, Tommy James and the Shondells, Kansas, BJ Thomas, America, Little River Band. Onesti was also out in the lobby after the show, talking to patrons. “Good show,” I told him.

I talked for a moment to Dave Nachmanoff, for that matter, before the show. He was standing next to a table of his CDs, and another table of Al Stewart merchandise. I told him I’d seen him a number of times, and enjoyed the shows. He seemed to appreciate the sentiment.

Al Stewart was in fine form, expertly playing his guitar and singing with pretty much the same voice as 40 years ago. I doubt that I’ll have half that much energy, should I survive to his age. The set list was mostly mid-period Al, with numbers from Past, Present and Future, Modern Times, Year of the Cat and Time Passages, but also some later songs, such as the especially good “Night Train to Munich” and “House of Clocks.” Not much this time from his early records, if anything, and nothing from Last Days of the Century.

No “Roads to Moscow” either, which is one I’ve yet to hear him play live, and would like to. Of course, it clocks in at more than eight minutes, so maybe he doesn’t play it often. Truth is, the man has a large opus. He could stitch together three or four entirely different set lists and they’d be just as good.

Essential to his show is the patter between the songs, and he didn’t disappoint, either telling stories about swinging ’60s London or the historical context of a particular song or something autobiographical.

For instance: “I decided when I was 11 or 12 that I wanted to play guitar and write songs. But I realized something when I left school at 17. Although I loved rock ’n’ roll, Little Richard and Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran – I loved Eddie Cochran – I realized when I started trying to do it, I couldn’t do it. I can’t explain how terrible that was. The only thing I loved in the world, and I couldn’t do it. It was a tricky period. Then Bob Dylan came along. He couldn’t play or sing either. [enormous laughter] But he sounded like he’d swallowed a dictionary. [more laughs] That was it. That was my ticket, right there.”

Introducing his song “Warren Harding”: “Pretty much everything went wrong while he was in office, and he followed the cleverest president, Woodrow Wilson, who was fiercely intellectual, and the most idealist president – he believed in world peace, and that he alone could sort out all the troubles in the world after World War I, and it killed him. None of the things he wanted actually happened. Warren Harding: Hey, let’s party! He stayed up drinking with the press corps and playing cards. He was the anti-Wilson. Who was best? Actually, neither of them.”

Al mentioned at point that he was sorry the Bears lost that day. “He follows American football,” Dave said.

“I do, actually,” Al answered.

“He doesn’t care a whit for soccer.”

“I can’t support any game played for 90 minutes, where the score is nothing-nothing. [laughter, applause] That’s not sport, that’s torture.”

Jazz Fest and Big New Head ’14

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While I was eating lunch on my deck today — the opportunities for that will be rarer as the weeks ahead pass — the dog took a sudden interest in one of my lower pant legs, sniffing and snorting with gusto. I noticed a small black ant crawling on it. The dog had too. In a moment, she’d eaten the ant.

I’ve seen her chase flies and bees (and lucky for her, never catch any), but this was a first. It didn’t seem to be a biting kind of ant. Ants on the hoof, snack food for dogs.

Did some gadding about in Chicago over Labor Day weekend. On Saturday, Yuriko and Ann and I went to the city and met my nephew Dees, his girlfriend Eden, and an old friend of theirs, and eventually ended up at Millennium Park. Dees and Eden were visiting from Texas, staying with friends here. That reminded me a bit of the Labor Day weekends of my youth, when I usually went out of town — to Chicago (before I lived there), New York, Boston, and Washington DC — though one year (’85) my old friends came to me, and we gadded around Nashville.

There’s a new face near Michigan Ave.

Millennium Park, Aug 2014It’s called “Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda,” by Jaume Plensa, the Spaniard who did Crown Fountain, the twin towers of alternating faces that spit water in the warm months, which isn’t far from the new sculpture. The Tribune says that “Awilda is 39 feet tall, made of marble and resin; the internal frame is fiberglass. She arrived from Spain in 15 pieces, then was bolted together.” It’ll be there until the end of 2015.

The Bean was as popular as ever.

Aug30.14 035We spent a while at the Chicago Jazz Festival at Pritzker Pavilion. The last time I went to the Chicago Jazz Festival was – 1996? Maybe. This time we left fairly early, but were around long enough to hear Ari Brown, Chicago sax man of long standing. At 70, the man can blow.

Ari Brown, August 2014Still hot in the late afternoon, and a bit humid, but it was a good place to sit and listen. It helped not to get rained on, which was a distinct risk over the weekend.

Millennium Park, Aug 2014Behind the stage rise the skyscrapers of the East Loop. I’ve always liked the view.