The “capital region,” as only government planners and hospital executives call it, is treated generously by musicians. There’s no matching southern California, where a lot of the people you want to see actually live; the semi-retirees who don’t want to tour beyond Santa Barbara anymore, the up-and-comers with good reviews in The Quietus who nobody in Madison or Chapel Hill has heard of.
This week we got Sparks, who I’d seen before, and Herbie Hancock, who I hadn’t. We built a whole night around Herbie, and the s.o. spent days listening to his catalogue. I didn’t join her, for the valid reason that I was listening to the entire Pet Shop Boys catalogue in preparation for an episode of “Political Beats.” Lots of keyboards for both of us. Lots more when Herbie and his band went onstage, a six-song set that lasted 100 minutes.
Hancock walked onstage last, and started introducing his gear, showing off the “prehistoric” sound he’d programmed into one of the keyboards. The band started with “Overture,” mostly improvised, with a quote from “Chameleon” if anyone in the crowd was feeling antsy. His saxophonist walked to the shadowed back of the stage whenever he wasn’t playing. Only when the song was over, and Hancock introduced the band, did I realize this was Terence Blanchard. The crowd perked up after Hancock talked about seeing Blanchard on the tour bus, working on the score for “The Woman King” on his laptop. But I knew Blanchard from his frequent Spike Lee collaborations, which stuck with Young Dave, who hadn’t heard really challenging jazz compositions until he put in tape one of the two-VHS “Malcolm X.”
When Hancock played “Footsteps,” he quoted his old collaborator Wayne Shorter’s last words: “It's time to go get a new body and come back to continue the mission.” Great show, highlight of the week; the work, as usual, is right here and in the newsletters. (People sometimes stop me and say something nice about my work, which I appreciate, but these people don’t often enough subscribe to the real newsletter. They should. I’ll tweet the important stuff, too, but who knows how long that’s going to last.)
If I overlooked the poisonous air, it was a good week to be on this side of the country. I celebrated Wes’s new book, at a club where the screen that originally misspelled his name was corrected before he got there. I celebrated two friends’ engagement, held right after a rainstorm cleared some of the particulate matter out of the air. We were at one of those houses where half the point is enjoying the garden, manicured to look like a Merchant Ivory backdrop.
I missed just one story that I’d wanted to cover: The Moms for Liberty conference in Philadelphia. I’d put in a request for credentials 10 days out, and was told that the window had closed already. This was unusual, and I wrote it up as a function of the new security jitters they’d been getting, since the Southern Poverty Law Center designated them a “hate group.” I talked to the co-founder for a story, I watched a stream from afar, but I didn’t get to mingle.
Instead, I read more books, pausing when I had to listen in to what was happening in Philadelphia. Let’s start there.
The Best Thing I Read: “Kitchen Confidential” had been on a bedroom bookshelf for about two years, waiting for its weekend. It was from the first paperback run, after the hardcover had become a hit (there’s an ad in it for “A Cook’s Tour”) but before Anthony Bourdain developed a Dead & Company following — the Terence McKenna of umami. It held up, and got finished in two sittings, one at home and one during an unexpected 45-minute wait at the barber shop. (You’d think they’d give a discount for that. No chance.
The style here is exactly what Bourdain did for “The New Yorker,” in the essay that got him the book deal. Direct, swaggering, self-effacing when the swagger got too lopsided, very good at building scenes with lists of items. I loved it, even more than the book I quickly read right after, Dante’s “La Vita Nuova,” where the exposition around the poems drew me in more than the poetry. (Remember, this was a 45-minute wait. Nobody explained why. I think the original barber got lost in his first project and no one had the power to stop him.) I finished the epic of Gilgamesh, too, the breezy Gerald J. Davis transition, and had a good time thinking about the implications when the god-hero stumbled up on “ancient cities.” What did ancient mean, a thousand years before Rome? Haven’t been disappointed by the canon yet.
When not sitting in waiting areas, I kept ripping through the books I need to give away. Left cold by “Protectors, Inc.” and “The Liberty Project,” two c-tier projects by writers who’ve done much better work — J. Michael Straczynski and Kurt Busiek. Both have excelled, actually, in the drained-dry genre of superhero revisionism. Straczynski anchored Marvel’s grim 21st century reboot of “Squadron Supreme,” each six issues built like a thriller, and Busiek made “Astro City,” an anthology series with an uncanny hit rate.
These projects didn’t have the magic. “Protectors” is a riff on the superhero detective story which has also been played at much higher levels; “The Liberty Project” is a sort of DIY “Suicide Squad,” criminals banding together to shave time off their sentences with superhero-ing. “As a Cartoonist,” Noah Van Sciver’s latest autobiographical collection, was better when it stuck to what happened, and dragged during an ambitious, mirthless “19th Century Cartoonist” b-story. I devoured “This Will End in Tears,” a guide to “miserabalist” music, and appreciated the obsessive playlist-making. One hundred songs in a loose ranking, which I tried to make into a playable list; top 10 lists for each artist profiled.
The Best Thing I Heard: Inspired by that miserabalist book, I listened to every unfamiliar song in it, making a note when one could be a favorite. Competition isn’t over, but “Der Abschied” was the Sunday night point leader.
The Best Thing I Saw: The most fun came from a slow-motion double feature we ran on Sunday, after errands were finished and there was no reason to head into the thick air. She wanted to see “Waterloo,” a lumpy, themeless, and visually impressive 1970 epic with three hams in the big roles: Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington, Orson Welles as a Louis XVI who moves as if each step is agony, and Rod Steiger as the big guy. It’s got one of those “greatest hits” scripts, where you get all the lines you want your Napoleon action figures to have loaded in the voicebox, like “I found a crown lying in the gutter” (uttered 10 years before it’s used in this movie’s timeline). But she pronounced it “one of the top 10 movies of all time” and then, after a break, put on “In the Heat of the Night,” to continue her journey into the Rod Steiger.
We saw “The Wedding Banquet,” the early Ang Lee breakthrough, a Lubitsch-ish comedy about a gay Chinese immigrant with a boyfriend who enters into a sham marriage. She left the room while I finished “The Light at the Edge of the World,” a survival adventure starring a middle-aged Kirk Douglas, who must wage guerrilla war on the pirates who seized his lighthouse. Slow-moving, melodramatic, with an early taste-test scene in which a pirate splits a monkey open.
The Best Thing I Played: Last time, we briefly got into my “Bioshock” rediscovery. I’d played through “Bioshock Infinite” when it was new, but couldn’t remember if I’d finished it; I’d played “Bioshock” when it was old enough to be discounted, got stuck, and dropped it. “Bioshock” is now in my past, and I twiddled between the sequel and “Infinite” when I wasn’t doing something useful.
These are era-defining games, with clunk that didn’t get fixed in the transfer to a next-gen remaster. Each is plot-heavy, set in an impossible art deco city rules by a social darwinist. The first one, set in the 1950s, sends you in a submarine down to Rapture, an underwater city; the second, set a decade later, lets you inhabit a Rapture resident from the jump; “Infinite” puts you inside a rugged adventurer in 1912, as he teams up with a damsel who can pull objects from alternate realities to liberate a cloud city run by a racist evangelist. (There’s a good early shock in each, and in “Infinite,” it’s walking into a stately mansion and seeing a 20-foot gold-plated statue of John Wilkes Booth.)
In each game, you navigate little arcologies, armed with a set of firearms and with metaphysical powers you obtain with injections. (Toss fireballs; move objects with telekinesis; send a swarm of murderous insects/crows.) It’s a nice little distraction, the week before we do something monumental. That’ll be over, the next time I write this.
(I’m getting married. That’s what I’m referring to. Sorry, trying not to share too many personal details here while marking the important things in the public diary.)
As an FYI, I believe Blanchard is a trumpeter.