“Argus turns 50”
I got my D back on Tuesday – picked her up at the airport just before 9pm on Tuesday. She seemed happy with my house cleaning and her welcome home flowers.
We caught up on several weeks of “This is Us” episodes with popcorn on Wednesday night. We’re going to miss this show – I think there are only four episodes left in the final season. I can sense that eye-roll Brent!
Finn came over for dinner on Thursday. He was in good spirits as he told us about his work as acting produce manager – he submitted the order for all the produce to be delivered, taking into account what was on special in the mail flyers. I hope he didn’t order too much or too little of anything – but he seemed confident. We enjoyed the regular ready made dishes that Finn likes from Market Street – salmon, parmesan crusted chicken, stuffed mushrooms and green beans. Diana put together a belated Easter bag for him and we made sure he didn’t eat it all before he left – such a sweet tooth.
We signed up for memberships at the local fitness center, Apex on Friday afternoon. It’s just around the corner and has a very large pool, as well as indoor running track and machines. I took advantage of this on Sunday morning with my first swim in many months. I’m sure I’ll be a bit achy in my shoulders tomorrow.
On a long walk earlier in the week, I saw Wishbone Ash advertised on the sign at the Guitar Sanctuary in Adriatica. This is a band that I first enjoyed in University, 40 years ago. I still play their Argus album on a regular basis. Could they really be playing within walking distance of our home? Some research indicated they were indeed – on Friday, and tickets were still available. Done!
We walked to the concert, and enjoyed chatting with the folks in line – the majority of whom had seen the band many times – they have a very loyal following. The couple next to us were from Motherwell, Scotland and have lived in Austin for 30 years – it was nice to hear a Scottish accent in McKinney. Bo and Jim from the local radio morning show introduced the band. It’s been a while since I heard radio personalities introducing a band – used to happen pretty regularly. Those two have been doing the same morning show, with all the crazy characters, since before I moved to Dallas in 1986.
Andy Powell and the band served up a treat – the first part of the show was Argus from start to finish, a celebration of the album turning fifty years old the day before. Here are my three favourites:
What a great evening of twin lead guitars and nostalgia. Thanks to Diana for putting up with the guitar noodling and music that she didn’t know at all. It was so nice to have a quick walk home rather than a long drive home from downtown Dallas.
Rachel joined us for dinner on Saturday night and regaled us with stories of her work and dating lives.
At some point during the week, Clorinda made a visit to Costco and got to drive a buggy around, chasing Caroline down. She really loves these outings:
I just left Diana outside, watching Season 1, Episode 5 of “Somebody Feed Phil” on Netflix – an excellent tour of New Orleans restaurants. She’s going to be ready to go back again when she finishes the episode, featuring Shaya several times.
I enjoyed three relatively short books this week.
The first was “Pops” be Michael Chabon, one of my very favourite authors. This is a collection of short stories, published in various magazines, and all on the topic of raising his children. I thoroughly enjoyed this quick read.
I enjoyed the introductory quote:
“I’ve been there and back
And I know how far it is”
Ronnie Lane
From “Introduction: The Opposite of Writing”:
“At a literary party the summer before my first novel was published, I found myself alone with a writer I admired, on the deck of our hosts’ house along the Truckee River. People came and went with blue Mexican wineglasses and bottles of beer, but I sensed that, for whatever reason, I had the man’s attention.
“I’m going to give you some advice,” he told me, a warning edge in his voice.
I said I would appreciate that. I was curious to hear what he had to say, not because I felt in need of advice but as a clue to the mystery of the great man himself. He presented a smooth surface without chinks or toeholds, the studied amiability of someone unaccustomed to giving himself away. Advice might be the only clue I was going to get.
The great man said that his advice was going to be painful – or maybe that was just his tone – but he knew what he was talking about, and if I wanted to make a go of it as a novelist, I would do well to pay attention. The guy was nearly twice my age, but he was not old. He was young enough, for example, to wear black Chuck Taylors. He was young enough to smile ironically at himself, laying the Polonius routine on some raw hurler of metaphors our of UC Irvine.
“Don’t have children,” he said. “That’s it. Do not.” The smile faded, but its ghost lingered a moment in his blue eyes. “That is the whole of the law.”
From “Little Man”:
In a story about accompanying his son to Paris fashion week (in a bout of synchronicity – I was listening to Rush while reading this – D doesn’t care for them, and I overdose on the complex, progressive time changes and the like while I’m alone):
“It takes a profound love of clothes, and some fairly decent luck, to stumble on somebody who wants to converse about cutting-edge men’s fashion at a Rush concert, and yet a year before his trip to Paris, in the aftermath of the Canadian band’s last show at Madison Square Garden, Abe had managed to stumble on John Varvatos.”
From “Be Cool or be Cast Out”:
“In seventh grade, at Hanukkah, my son asked for, and received a peacoat. It was a classic number, navy blue, double-breasted wool, great big plastic buttons stamped – oh, the coolness! – with little anchors. We got it from an online army-navy store. It had a quilted lining, and when he wore it on a gray East Bay afternoon, with an extra-long scarf striped in muted colors wrapped around his neck, and his hair cut in a late-’65, early -’66 Small Faces shag, he looked terrific. Stylish and lanky and handsome; and warm. over Christmas break he wore it constantly, and to everything he said and did, with that scarf blowing out behind him, there was a whiff of oracular Blonde on Blonde cool. He did not so much walk around in it as lope.”
My second read was “Let me tell you what I mean” by Joan Didion, another big favourite of mine. This is a collection of twelve essays from 1968 to 2000, that showcase her unique reporting style.
From “A Trip to Xanadu”, reminding me of visiting with Mum and Dad years ago:
“It has been for almost half a century a peculiar and affecting image in the California mind. San Simeon, “La Cuesta Encantada,” the phantasmagoric barony that William Randolph Hearst made for himself on the sunburned hills above the San Luis Obispo County coast. California children used to hear about San Simeon when they were very small (I know because I was one of them), used to be told to watch for it from Highway 1, quite far in the distance, crested on the hill, the great Moorish towers and battlements shimmering in the sun or floating fantastically just above the coastal fog; San Simeon was a place which, once seen from the highway, was ever in the mind, a material fact which existed in proof of certain abstract principles.”
From “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice”:
“The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the Committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The Committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education. Sincerely yours, Rixford K. Snyder, Director of Admissions.”
I wonder how Rixford feels about that decision in the years after. Here Didion gets her own back:
“The next year a friend at Stanford asked me to write him a paper on Conrad’s “Nostromo”, and I did, and he got an A on it. I got a B- on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rixford K. Snyder was exorcised.”
From “Pretty Nancy”, the essay that I enjoyed most, for its somewhat scathing and sarcastic portrait of the former First Lady:
“Pretty Nancy Reagan, the wife of the governor of California, was standing in the dining room of her rented house on Forty-fifth Street in Sacramento listening to a television newsman explain what he wanted to do. She was listening attentively. Nancy Reagan is a very attentive listener.”
And my last book is quite a bit different. “Whereabouts” by Jhumpa Lahiri was originally written in Italian and translated to English by the author. Here’s an online summary:
“Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.”
In a typically grumpy mood, from the chapter “In Spring”:
“In spring I suffer. The season doesn’t invigorate me. I find it depleting. The new light disorients, the fulminating nature overwhelms, and the air, dense with pollen, bothers my eyes. to calm my allergies I take a pill in the morning that makes me sleep. It knocks me out. I can’t focus, and by lunchtime I’m tired enough to go to bed. I sweat all day and at night I’m freezing. No shoe seems right for this temperamental time of year.”
From the chapter “On the Couch”:
“She was an attractive woman with dary eyes and a space between her front teeth. Behind a set of doors was he life she led with the rest of her family: the pantry full of food, dirty dishes to wash, the laundry drying on the rack. All I knew was the space dedicated to curing her patients: an individual sanatorium that hosted one anguished soul at a time.
She always started by saying the same thing: Please begin. As if each session were the first and only time we met. Every session was like the start of a novel abandoned after the first chapter.”
And finally, from “In the Pool”:
” I swim for about forty minutes, maybe fifty, before I get tired. I’m not a strong swimmer, I can’t do a flip turn, I never learned how. The idea of being on my back underwater scares me a little. I typically do the crawl, with a weak but decent stroke.
In the pool I lose myself. My thoughts merge and flow.”
I loved this article about the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans that I came across in Relix magazine, “Preservation Hall @ 60, Culture is a Verb.”
https://relix.com/articles/detail/preservation-hall-at-60-culture-is-a-verb/
Keeping with the New Orleans theme, there’s a new Trombone Shorty album out (I’m awaiting delivery from Tipitina’s record club) and here’s the title track:
We hadn’t heard this song from an episode of “This is Us” that we watched. Turns out it’s an original composed by Mandy Moore’s husband, singer in the band Dawes:
Lastly, a great outtake from Bob Dylan’s Infidels recordings – featuring the world’s best rhythm section (Sly and Robbie) and Mark Knopfler on guitar:
Stay safe, kind and patient!