Friday Relaxed Random Ten

Well, the first part of our "rest in Maine" time is just about up. We have things to do in NYC from tomorrow to Tuesday, so we schlep back for a while. Don't know how long yet. Depends on what I have to do over at the theatre -- The Brick has a few things coming up that we may be needed for: our week in the 365 Days/365 Plays event, the WPA Free Fest (that's the Williamsburg Performance . . . Alliance? Association? I dunno . . .), and the Clown Theatre Festival.

Meanwhile, I've been slicing away at the dross on the iPod, and it's now at 20,474 songs, 71.57 gigs. I'm making some space on the thing. Of course, I've added around 500 songs to it while dropping 1,200, but that ratio is okay. I just heard they're coming out with a 160 GB iPod, too . . . no, that would be madness. Here's what comes up random this morning:


1. "California" - The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys
2. "Your Quimby Dollars at Work" - Mike Keneally - Hat
3. "Rockin' Shoppin' Center" - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
4. "Third World Man" - Steely Dan - Showbiz Kids: The Steely Dan Story
5. "Waiting for Mary" - Pere Ubu - Cloudland
6. "The Will of God" - Keith Bradford - MSR Madness 4: I'm Just The Other Woman
7. "You Me" - Procession - Oceanic Odyssey Volume 12
8. "It's Gotta Be a False Alarm" - The Volcanos - Northern Soul: The Cream of 60's Soul

Okay, this is from a comp I've never listened to in its entirety, and it's beautiful and weird -- it's an uptempo R&B/Soul song, with some orchestration, but prominently featured are a trombone (maybe a tuba?) that sounds like it should be in a oom-pah band and a clarinet that sounds like it should be in a klezmer band. Very odd in an R&B song . . .


9. "Mr. Tenor Man" - Lou Christie - Spazzy Answer Songs
10. "Please Hurt Me" - The Crystals - The Best of The Crystals

This may be the single most cheery, lighthearted and smile-inducing random ten I've ever had (with a slight drop on #10). How nice.

Ah, well, one more day of vegetating and watching TV - we don't have TV at home in Brooklyn so our time up here always involves vast amounts of "surfing the zeitgeist" as Berit calls it (though that winds up being primarily the watching of shows on Animal Planet and Discovery and reruns of C.S.I.). Yes, our idea of a vacation is hunkering down in a dim, cave-like room and not dealing with anything. {sigh} Sounds great to me a lot of the time . . .

Stuff n Nonsense

From elsewhere in this odd world we calls the internet:


1. Dan Trujilo points out CNN's knowledge of the way Comedy works. Ha. Ha.


2. from I Can Has Cheezburger?, a cat that shares its quotational skills with World Gone Wrong:





3. Which reminds me, I'll be posting photos from my recent shows here soon, but I won't take up space by posting all of them. So some other favorites can be seen in the Flickr sets for them (like the one for World Gone Wrong 2007 here), or here, when I feel like it. Here's a favorite photo that won't make it into the post of photos from World Gone Wrong, of Iracel Rivero as Theresa Malone, the newspaper reporter who "doesn't mind a reasonable amount of trouble:"





More soon.

Time

Madeleine L'Engle has passed away.

I haven't read any of her books in about 20 years, but for the 10 years before that, I read whatever I could get my hands on, including the classic A Wrinkle in Time which I read many many times (I identified with Charles Wallace a bit much, I think). Oddly enough, I don't think I've ever actually owned any of her books - I recall always having them from school or public libraries. Looking over her work now, it appears I read only a tiny fraction of her published work.

I was pleased and honored to have met and spoken to Ms. L'Engle briefly in 1987 (CORRECTION: 1984) and had dinner with her at her home in 1991 as result of being a classmate and later a friend of her granddaughter, Charlotte.

Recently, Berit and I had a mildly heated discussion with some friends regarding the Harry Potter books - which B & I both enjoy somewhat, but feel are just a bit overrated - I do feel they've gotten much better as they went along, and Rowling's writing skills caught up more to her imagination. However, B & I were making the point that yes, these books are enjoyable for adults to read, but they are still children's books, no matter how dark they may be. This is not a pejorative statement, I think, but just the way it is, but it was taken as a putdown by the people we were talking to, and we were challenged to name other children's books as deep and rich as the Potters.

Well, just thinking of the ones I still keep on my bookshelf and occasionally pick up and read for pleasure, I was able to name Roald Dahl's wonderful books, The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards (aka Julie Andrews), Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, and (especially for my money) the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper (I enjoyed the Philip Pullman books the one time I read them, but I need to spend more time with them to see if I'd put them up there, too).

Once upon a time I would have included the Narnia books as well, but I reread them a couple of years ago in writing about them for the UGO.com Narnia hub, and discovered (having not touched them in almost 30 years) that they are definitely written for children (and written down to them, annoyingly) and not all that well. Very annoying books now. The other ones I've mentioned all hold up for me as an adult, not Mr. Lewis' annoying allegory. Ugh.

I didn't think of it at the time, but I should have included The Time Quartet. I think I'll check them out again - I may never have owned them, but Berit does, and they're on our shelves now. I have a tiny fear that they'll wind up closer to Lewis rather than Dahl or Cooper or Rowling, but only tiny.

And if you think that children's books that could be read with pleasure by adults (and which show that "children's books" should not be thought of a a negative term) began with Rowling, take a look at L'Engle.