How often do you have the chance to have dinner at midnight at an Irish pub in Albuquerque with 15 visitors from the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan? I had that experience just last night!
Joe and I happened to fly into New Mexico on the day our friend Neal was promoting a show by Ordo Sakhna -- their first-ever U.S. appearance. It was sort of the luck of the draw and wouldn't necessarily have been my first choice of show, but I have to say that I was completely bowled over by them and would strongly recommend that anyone who has the opportunity to catch them on the rest of their tour (including dates in Berkeley and Sacramento!) do so. It will be an unforgettable experience.
The huge band features a variety of instruments, including a six-foot-long horn that I'm sure was a lot of fun to take on a plane halfway around the world. Three of the musicians were virtuosos on the komuz, a three-stringed lute. The showstopper of the evening was when all three of them played in unison, spinning their instruments around and playing them from different angles, including over their shoulders and upside down. Several of them also played the jigatch, which looks kind of like a little stick with a string coming out of it -- it's related to a jew's harp and is the oldest Kyrgyz instrument. As with the komuz, it's amazing the variety of sounds they coaxed out of what seemed like a fairly primitive device.
The music is kind of hard to describe -- if you've ever heard Tuvan throat singing, some of the sounds were similar, although played on instruments instead of made by the human voice. The evening's repertoire was evenly split between vocal and instrumental selections. One nice triptych of songs was a salute of sorts to horses, a valued part of the Kyrgyz culture, including clip-clop percussion that mimicked the sounds of hooves. The first song was dedicated to Alexander the Great's horse, the third to Genghis Khan's, but the second was a salute to the mustang and had some touches of American Western music thrown in.
In another nod to the land they were visiting, they did an interpretation of the song "Strangers in the Night" which garnered a lot of appreciative applause.
I always admire Neal for booking this type of show, because it's a hard sell. It's not like there's a ready-made fan base of Kyrgyz music the way there is, say, with music from Ireland or Western Africa. But while the crowd wasn't huge, it was incredibly enthusiastic -- there were three standing ovations. The next afternoon, someone approached Neal while we were out to say that she'd heard some ladies in a locker room talking about what a fantastic show it was. The people who did take a chance and went to see Ordo Sakhna were richly rewarded.
The group's rider stated that they were to be provided with a full meal after the concert, which is how we ended up at O'Rielly's Pub. Lonely Planet declares that "the Kyrgyz are renowned for their hospitality and guests are often treated to fermented mare’s milk and bowls of fresh yogurt," but the Irish fare on offer consisted of fish & chips, shepherd's pie and chicken kebabs. Despite the fact that most of the musicians spoke no English, their road manager helped get everything sorted out and they seemed to enjoy the food.
While their onstage attire consisted of colorful, beautiful folk costumes, offstage, they wore pretty average-looking clothes by American standards, and several of them had digital cameras, iPhones and iPods. Ah, globalization.
If you're near Berkeley, Ordo Sakhna will be performing at Ashkenaz on Feb. 19.
One of the blogs I follow, Foma*, has an annual challenge called National Just Read More Novels Month (it was created as a response to November's National Novel Writing Month). Of course, for me, every month is Just Read More Novels month -- I would estimate that 90% of the books I read are fiction -- but I do try to follow yellojkt's guidelines in January.
I am on hiatus from my book group, so I picked all of the books this time around. None of them were knock-your-socks-off, four-star reads, but they were all fairly solid nonetheless.
1. The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter: A couple of people whose taste I trust highly recommended this novel, which is, like "Up in the Air," one of those works that is very much of its (recessionary) time. Matt Prior is underwater in his mortgage, unemployed, and he suspects his wife of cheating with an old flame. His problems started when he quit his job as a journalist to found a web site called poetfolio, which blended business reporting with poetry. Not surprisingly, the web site was not successful, and while he managed to get his old job back, he landed in the midst of huge cutbacks in the newspaper biz and soon winds up without a paycheck. One night, Matt discovers a surefire way to get out of debt: become a marijuana dealer. (Shades of Weeds!) The author blends some poems into his narrative, which is not as irritating as one might imagine (Walter is an excellent writer). Perhaps because I survived the dotcom boom myself, I guess I could never be totally sympathetic to Matt's plight because his financial-poetry web site was a really stupid idea -- and it's only one of some very bad decisions he makes in the course of the book.
2. The Christmas Cookie Club, Ann Pearlman: My mom suggested I read this, and while my library copy didn't come in until after Christmas, it's not quite as seasonal a read as you might think. Cookie Club might be classified as "hen lit" -- a variation of chick lit for middle-aged women. The book tells the stories of each of the club's dozen members as they gather for their annual cookie exchange. Pearlman based the novel on her own club, and anyone who reads it will no doubt wish they could join such a group (who wouldn't want to go home with 12 different varieties of sweets?). The most noteworthy thing about the book are the interstitial chapters which examine the histories and culture impact of various ingredients, from sugar to chocolate to ginger. Cookie Club has a surprising amount of substance for a book with such a cutesy title and premise. And, oh yes, there are 12 recipes so you can try the cookies yourself.
3. The Enthusiast, Charlie Haas: This was a Chronicle Notable Book of 2009, and when I read the synopsis, I was immediately smitten: Henry Bay works as a nomadic magazine editor, toiling at a wide variety of "special interest" publications from Cozy, the Magazine of Tea to Spelunk, each headquartered in a different small town. The book captures the feeling of being an outsider in a world of hobbyists as Henry attempts to fit in with the ice climbers or crocheters, while seeming to have no passions of his own. The story meanders a bit as it veers into a plot about a Unabomber-type terrorist and Henry's brilliant scientist brother, but Haas wraps it up very cleverly.
4. The Hidden Man, David Ellis: I'm not a huge fan of legal thrillers, but I met Ellis at a mystery event and he seemed like a cool guy with a great personal story (he was former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's impeachment prosecutor!). Most legal thrillers are, of course, written by lawyers, and they don't tend to be known for their elegant prose stylings. Ellis, an Edgar Award winner for his debut novel Line of Vision, is no exception, but he can spin a good yarn and once I got into the story, I was hooked. The protagonist is Jason Kolarich, a lawyer who quit his prestigious firm after a personal tragedy. He is called upon to defend a childhood friend for the murder of a pedophile who is believed to have killed the friend's sister when he and Jason were kids. The "hidden man" of the title is a mysterious figure named Smith who hires Kolarich to take the case and seems to have shadowy motives. At first, I thought The Hidden Man was guilty of one of my literary pet peeves -- the supervillain with seemingly endless resources who always seems to be one step ahead of the hero -- but Ellis smartly allows Jason to keep probing until he discovers Smith's vulnerabilities and figures out how to exploit them.
Both The Hidden Man and Financial Lives of the Poets feature heroes who manage to get by on absurdly small amounts of sleep. I run into this a lot in novels, especially mysteries and thrillers, and wonder if any of the authors have actually tried to go, say, three or four days without sleeping. The characters do sometimes comment on how tired they are, but they still manage to drive cars and work despite their lack of sleep. There are studies showing that even going a couple days without sleep can be harmful and lead to symptoms such as memory loss and lack of speech control. As an occasional insomniac, I can attest to the fact that just one lousy night means I'll be flagging by mid-afternoon.
I'm not a big fan of the NFL -- to me, Sundays are better spent catching up with the past week's worth of Go Fug Yourself posts and doing the crosswords -- but Joe always enjoys watching the games, so they're always on in our house. Yesterday featured a match-up between the New Orleans Saints and the Minnesota Vikings. The winner would go to the Super Bowl.
Logically, I didn't have a horse in this race; I have no connection to New Orleans, and I've only been to Minnesota once. However, I rooted fiercely for the Saints, for one reason: Prince wrote the world's worst song about the Vikings in honor of their playoff run. If the team won, that means the song would get additional exposure. This would result in the death of music.
In case you missed the song, it is called "Purple and Gold" and the lyrics are written in Prince's trademark, proto-text-messaging style:
all of the odds r in r favor no prediction 2 bold we r the truth if the truth can b told long reign the purple and gold
As for the melody, ESPN's Dan Le Batard called it "dreadful," adding that "if anyone other than Prince wrote this song, they would look at it in the Vikings’ offices, begin braying with laughter, and then throw it away." Tony Kornheiser compared it to "the songs they used to play in the old Soviet Union when the tanks marched by."
Ross Raihala at TwinCities.com bravely called his home team's new anthem "decidedly unfunky," stating it "just lumbers along like that musty old fight song your alma mater drags out at homecoming events."
I think it's what "The Internationale" would sound like if it was arranged for a merry-go-round calliope. It's enough to make me nostalgic for the days of the "Super Bowl Shuffle."
Fortunately, the Vikings lost the game in overtime, and it is hoped that "Purple and Gold" will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
On Saturday, Joe and I went to see "Weird Al" Yankovic at San Francisco's Sketchfest. We usually attend at least a couple of Sketchfest events each year, and always wind up wishing we could go to many more. The event was billed as "Sitting and Talking with 'Weird Al' Yankovic," and indeed, it was not a concert, but a conversation (with comedian Chris Hardwick, a friend and fan of Al) about the musical satirist's life and career. The topic of Prince came up -- he is one of the few musicians who has always refused to give Al permission to parody his songs -- and Yankovic regaled the crowd with a story about the Purple One.
In the mid-80s, Al was nominated for an award -- I think it was the Grammy nod for "Eat It," but I wasn't taking notes and can't recall the exact details. He was thrilled to be attending the ceremony, and learned that he was going to be sitting in the same row as Prince. How exciting it must have been for a young musician to be seated in such close proximity to one of the biggest stars in the world!
Then Al received a telegram -- this was a long time ago, remember -- stating that it was very important that he not make eye contact with Prince. How did Yankovic respond? He sent back a telegram announcing that Prince would not be permitted to look him in the eyes. Check and mate, my friend. Check and mate.
I had always heard stories about celebrities requesting that no one may look them in the eye, but I sort of hoped they were urban legends. Anyway, Al is cooler than Prince will ever be, and if he wrote a song for a football team, I'm sure it would kick butt, and make you laugh.
I watched Conan O'Brien's farewell show last night -- more about that on The Other Blog, of course -- but the thing that struck me the most was the really beautiful speech he gave near the end of the show. The whole thing is transcribed here. This is the key passage; Conan is addressing the young fans who rallied for him:
All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.
I almost teared up when I heard that because I am probably one of the most cynical people you could ever hope to meet. Conan would hate me. After I almost teared up, my mind immediately went to, "Well, it's easy not to be cynical when you just got 40 million dollars." And, "If all of those kids had watched you on the TV instead of on Hulu, you wouldn't be having your dreams crushed by NBC right now."
The "don't be cynical" line is turning into an Internet meme, and it's already on T-shirts. It's pretty to think that today's youth will embrace O'Brien's words of wisdom, but unless you are insulated by fame and money, how can you not be cynical? (Conan's message competed with John Edwards' confession, the culmination of one of the most cynical careers in political history, which was released shortly before O'Brien's final show.) Certainly optimistic kids should avoid hanging around the comments section of any political blog or newspaper column; I was browsing through the reader responses to a Bob Herbert column in the New York Times earlier today, and there are plenty of people there who make me look like Little Mary Sunshine:
"I believe the Democrats simply don't care, and neither does the Republican Party. The only thing the political parties are interested in is enjoying the perks of power."
"Corporate profits count. Corporate spending counts. Corporate ability to wreck depredations abroad counts -- and don't worry -- the American people will never hear of these damages and provocations abroad. U.S. corporate interests won't allow reporting on that."
"The Democrats and Republicans are selling exactly the same product: USA of, by and for the big Corps. They just differ slightly in their respective sales pitches."
"We put politicians with the most money, but not necessarily the best ideas, into office. We do so because we are so lazy that instead of taking an active role in our democracy, we take the soundbites given to us by the best marketing campaigns money can buy."
"There is no one now let alone in the future who is or will be the least bit interested in representing 'the voters'. Our voices are ignored now and will be increasingly dismissed in the future as the money begets power."
And those are just a few from the first page; over 550 comments were posted before some editor said "no mas" and pulled the plug. (Now they can all move over to Maureen Dowd's new column and start leaving remarks there.)
The only saving grace in life is that sometimes amazing things do happen, and while I remain convinced that you can't stick your head in the sand and deny harsh realities, I guess it's important to sometimes focus on the good in the world. For instance, when I was raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society through Team in Training a few years ago, Robert Smigel, creator of Conan mainstay Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, made an extremely generous donation. (No, I don't know him. And I've never been 100% sure how he found my fundraising page, though I have my suspicions.) Every time I hear that one of my friends, or even a friend of a friend, is raising money for a Team in Training activity, I donate. I pay it forward. And I think of Triumph.
I need to be very clear about one thing. 99% of the time, this is the way my days go by: People send me work, and I do it. Unless I'm swamped, or if it's an especially time-consuming project, if someone sends me something in the morning, I usually finish it before the end of the day. I have a couple of handwritten notes on my desk that clients have sent me in the past couple of weeks: "I'm so impressed -- and pleased -- with all you've done," says one, and the other, from a long-term (over 8 years!) client, says, "It's always a pleasure doing business with you."
However, there's that other 1% of the time, when, for some reason, I just get stuck. Deer-in-headlights stuck. Inertia sets in. I need to act, but for some reason I can't. And here's the worst part: I obsess over these open loops. Some part of my brain is always thinking about them.* It would make perfect sense for me to just deal with them and get it over with and get on with my life, but I find myself going to bed at night without having done anything about them. Sometimes I wake up and think to myself, "I could deal with them today and it would feel great!" and then another day goes by and I don't.
So I've decided to write about them to see what happens. Maybe if I make my failings public, I'll be able to get unstuck.
1. New project: This person contacted me sometime in the middle of 2009, on behalf of herself and a co-author. I wrote back and never heard anything else, something that happens all the time, so I didn't think too much about it. Then towards the end of the year they popped up again, said they wanted to go ahead, and sent me the material. At the time, I was in the middle of about a zillion other things, and said I'd get back to them; I didn't feel too bad about it, since it had taken them several months to get back to me. But now it's been, like, a month and a half. I need to write back and say, "Hey, I'm ready to work on your project!"
2. Old project: One of my most long-term clients wants a total redesign of her web site, which needs it. I've started it, but keep running into the equivalent of designers' block and have put it off for way too long. I need to stop waiting for inspiration to strike and just come up with some ideas. If I can't, I need to do what I have done with other sites and outsource part of it to a graphic artist, which I've done successfully several times. Immediate action: I should email her and say that I'm ready to work on it now.
3. Interview: This has to do with my Other Blog. A few weeks ago, I requested an email interview with someone and we went back and forth a couple times and then he said to give him a call. That's when I froze, because I have a little bit of phone phobia -- I know that sounds weird, considering that I worked as a journalist for several years, but I actually had to psych myself up before almost every call I made. (I don't have email phobia, fortunately.) I must seem like a huge flake, so I need to either get up the inner strength to call, or email a profuse apology. The interview is still relevant, so I could still do it. I just need to get over my wimpitude.
So that is my confession. Now I need to act.
* From Getting Things Done by David Allen: "You can fool everyone else, but you can't fool your own mind. It knows whether or not you've come to the conclusions you need to, and whether you've put the resulting outcomes and action reminders in a place that can be trusted to resurface appropriately within your conscious mind. If you haven't done those things, it won't quit working overtime... It's a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxieties and what you should be doing and aren't."
I haven't been updating this blog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been blogging -- I have, in fact, posted 23 times this month at my other blog, which has a much larger readership than this one does. Plus, how often does a story like Jaymageddon (or, if you prefer, the Conepocalypse) come along? However, I realized that I never posted a favorite movies list, and even though I saw fewer movies last year (only 20!) than I have in many years, here is at least a token top 5.
1. "Up in the Air": For the way it captured the feeling of the Great Recession, and for failing to follow a predictable story arc. Plus, George Clooney and Vera Farmiga were perfect together. I'd love to see them team up again.
2. "Coraline": Hey, a 3D movie that didn't make me sick! A work of pure imagination and genius.
3. "Up": Mainly for the opening flashback sequence, which was one of the most sublime things I've ever seen.
4. "(500) Days of Summer": Every time a new romantic comedy opens, I hope it won't suck, but then inevitably I see a preview which features the heroine falling into a pit of manure or something like that, and I sigh and realize it's another movie to skip. So I'm grateful for films like this, that put a fresh new spin on old genres.
5. "The Fantastic Mr. Fox": It feels weird to have three animated movies on my list, but I guess that's where a lot of the best work is being done these days. Wes Anderson is back in my good graces.
If I don't keep up with movies, I am definitely out of it when it comes to modern music and What the Kids Today are Listening To, but I have been trying to catch up, thanks largely to indie hipster site Pitchfork.com's best of 2009 lists. Some of it is not to my taste -- who knew there was a genre called "dubstep"? -- but a bunch of it is great and makes me wish I wasn't so old & boring so I could go out and mix it up in the clubs. This song by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Zero," is fantastic, and the New York band shot their video in San Francisco! You will want to skip around town at night like Karen O.
When I was in high school, my class went on a field trip to the Detroit Science Center. One of the highlights was seeing an IMAX film about Mount St. Helens in the center's dome theater. At this time, there were only a handful of IMAX theaters in the country, all of them, as far as I know, in museums, so it was most likely everybody's first exposure to the amazing large-scale format. Much of the movie was filmed from a helicopter zooming around the landscape, showing where the volcano had laid waste to homes, roads and bridges. The immersive IMAX technology caused a couple of students to become motion-sick and they had to leave the theater. I was fine, though, and I found the experience exhilarating; I went on to see a bunch more IMAX movies, mostly the "educational" fare like "Mission to Mir," "Everest," and "To Fly!" I also saw James Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss," which was a 3D documentary about a scientific voyage to the wreck of the "Titanic."
So when Cameron's "Avatar" opened, of course I had to see it in IMAX 3D. There is only one true IMAX theater in the Bay Area showing the film, the one at the Metreon in San Francisco -- beware fake IMAX! -- and as a result, it's unbelievably popular. After one abortive attempt to see it on Thursday, we bought advance tickets to the Saturday morning (9:45 AM!) show. When we arrived at 9, the line was already around the block, and I noted that this and the next three showings were already sold out.
Unlike most made-for-IMAX documentaries, which tend to run about 45 minutes each, "Avatar" is over two and a half hours long. For those of you who have been living on a spaceship for the past month and haven't heard anything about it, the film is about a quasi-military expedition to a faraway moon called Pandora which contains an incredibly valuable mineral that is worth a fortune on Earth. Jake, a paraplegic ex-Marine, is recruited for the mission to replace his dead twin brother; Jake's DNA profile makes him a suitable candidate to take over his brother's avatar, a replica of the Pandorans that allow Earthlings to survive in the moon's atmosphere and blend in with the natives (physically, at least). You are placed into a metal box and your mind is linked to your avatar. Since human-Jake is unable to walk, he's eager to take his new, mobile body out for a spin.
During his first expedition to Pandora, Jake gets separated from the rest of his group after a run-in with some hostile wildlife, and he is rescued by a native named Neytiri. Despite the fact that Jake is supposed to be gathering intel on the Pandorans, he soon becomes infatuated with Neytiri and her people, the Na'vi. They live in harmony with nature, and after seeing the gorgeous landscape, who wouldn't? Pandora is a mind-blowingly beautiful creation, full of glowing trees, lush vegetation and magical jellyfish-like seeds that float through the air. The Na'vi travel by flying around on winged creatures called direhorses, which they bond with by means of their long braids. On Pandora, your hairstyle is not just a fashion choice, it's what literally connects you with the natural world.
After watching Jake and Neytiri run along vertiginous tree branches and swoop through the air on their direhorses in you-are-there 3D, I started feeling queasy. I looked at my watch -- we were only an hour and 15 minutes into the movie. I tried removing my glasses and closing my eyes, but it didn't work. I had to leave the theater and run to the restroom. While I didn't actually throw up, I came close. My skin literally felt clammy. I ran a damp paper towel over my face and leaned against the wall for about five minutes, wondering if I'd be able to go back in. The only other time I'd had this experience at a movie was a few months earlier at a screening of "D Tour," a documentary about a musician with kidney disease who needs to perform dialysis on himself while on the road with his band. There's a fairly graphic demonstration of how he does this, and it just about did me in. However, after a drink of water and a few minutes outside the theater, I went back and was able to get through the rest of the movie. I figured I'd try again and if I couldn't make it, I'd let Joe know I'd meet him afterward.
I'm not quite sure how I managed, because there is lots of flying in the second half of "Avatar," but I felt OK and got through it. The movie is absolutely spectacular, and I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from seeing it in IMAX 3D, but if you think you might be at all susceptible to motion sickness, you may want to take your Dramamine first.
