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captainsblogI'll get back to them after some quick updates beyond the workplace.
We headed out early yesterday morning for Eleanor's weekly PT appointment. Think Spanish Inquisition, only without the comfy chair. As everybody expected, there was some medicating to follow. Overall, though, she's increasing her range of motion, decreasing her dependence on assistive products (I haven't seen her resorting to the walker in over a week), and ever so slowly getting back to doing things, at least within the house, that she's used to and used to do. I even got her out this morning for her first haircut outside the bathroom in months.
I've tried to keep active myself now that I have a little more time for myself, now that we're past the two weeks of heavier caregiving and then the following two weeks of heavier court stuff. Somewhere in there, I attended my 700th class with my current gym. We're not entirely sure which one it was, because their tracking system picked up a five-minute practice workshop as a "class." It was either an intense session two Sundays ago where I broke a personal record, or the first time ever I showed up at 6:15 in the morning (one of the original trainers is going out on maternity leave and it was her last pre-bebbie coaching session). I'll be in there even more next week, since they rolled over the classes I missed due to Eleanor's surgery in early March, but I've got until the 15th to work in five more, so that'll be fun.
We're also close to resuming entertainment activities outside these walls. While I passed on the overpriced Bruuuuuce appearance in downtown Buffalo a few weeks ago (I was offered a last-minute seat for under 100 bucks and turned it down), we do have tickets to an even cooler Bruuuuuce in a much smaller venue in just over two months. Canadian legend Bruce Cockburn, with just-as-beloved singer Dar Williams opening, in a former church sanctuary in downtown Buffalo turned into a concert hall by Ani DiFranco. Just over $100, but for both seats. Still waiting to see how Eleanor's doing before a longer trip I may make solo: Natalie Merchant returns to her home Chautauqua County on her first tour in ages in early July. This online New Yorker profile came out last week; it talks relatively little about her days with 10,000 Maniacs, but offers insights into her work,both her own as an artist and supporting others.
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As for those who have passed: two notes from the past week or so.
Political satire, often set to tune, has been an influence all my life. Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers, and Tom Lehrer all came to prominence before my own sentience about such things; I knew a few Lehrer songs from a junior high math teacher sneaking in a record player with one of his 60s albums, but only came to appreciate his full catalog when I was much older. There were also comedy bits to introduce the genre to me. Our family had The First Family album parodying JFK's presidency; I discovered David Frye's spoofs of Nixon on vinyl from the local library; and there were novelty singles about Watergate from Dickie Goodman and Don Imus, among others, getting airplay on AM radio.
Yet the biggest such influence on this kid from Lawn Guyland was a satirist and pianist who showed up on PBS playing to a studio audience near Buffalo. Mark Russell, who died last week at the age of 90, became the Lehrer of the 70s for me on these several-time-a-year comedy specials, mixing stand-up routines with sit-downs at his piano keyboard for riffs on the events of the day.
The first time I think I ever heard of my future alma mater here was watching one of these specials in the mid 1970s that "came to you live from the Katharine Cornell Theater on the campus of the State University of New York at Buffalo." That little pit in the round in the Ellicott complex was the only thing resembling a Center for the Arts on the whole campus in those days, and it was the broadcast's home for years before all of Goldie Gardner's pledge-break begging built their palatial studio on the waterfront. They moved there and continued until early this century, when corporate funding for them dried up.
Produced by WNED-TV and sent nationwide, they starred Russell, by then a DC resident but forever a Buffalonian. Some of those songs I remember from those 70s shows were too tied to their time- does anyone else remember Jimmy Carter's gaffe about "ethnic purity" that Mark worked into a "Modern Major General" parody?- but many are as relevant today as when I first heard them in the 70s:
♫Buy a gun, buy a gun, there's enough for everyone, they're as plentiful as apples on a tree,
Come'n'get'em!, that's the word, they need not be registered, help to make the streets unsafe for you and me....♫
Or his riff on the then Paul Simon hit, changed to a politician screed called "50 Ways to Fool the People"-
♫Take a free trip, Rip, tell a few lies, guys, launder a buck, Chuck, and get all you can....♫
Why channel 17 never box-setted these into a premium for joining, I've never known. Maybe now they will. There is at least a highlight reel of them in this WBFO link.
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The other recently deceased is one I did not know by name until now. Last weekend brought the death, at the age of 80 of a music industry mogul named Seymour Stein. While I didn't know him, he certainly brought much influence to me in that same era as the Mark Russell specials:
Seymour Stein will be remembered for the talent he spotted. Stein was a music company executive. He died Sunday at the age of 80. He signed Madonna, the Ramones and Talking Heads to his label. The recording industry followed his lead.
While Madonna didn't really emerge until the 80s, I was listening to Talking Heads in early college years and attended a Ramones show on New Years Eve of 1980-81.
Other icons of the 80s and beyond would follow: Pretenders. The Smiths. Ice-T, even. His name even showed up in a film we just discovered that is a Canadian variation on Spinal Tap.
Hard Core Logo showed up on a list of mockumentaries for April Fool's weekend, and was one of the few on it that we'd never seen. It was billed as being in the same vein as Spinal Tap (also on his list), but with a much lower budget and larger slice of Canadiana. From that review:
Bruce McDonald does Reiner’s film one better-it’s got some real substance. Now, obviously I love Spinal Tap (otherwise it wouldn’t have been included on this “Top 10” list), but McDonald’s film mixes humor with genuine drama and poignancy, particularly in its portrayal of the complex, mercurial relationship between the two main characters, Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon) and Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie.) Joe and Billy front a “legendary” punk band called Hard Core Logo, who hit the road for a belated reunion tour. McDonald plays himself, a director who is documenting what could turn out to be the band’s final hurrah. The film is full of great throwaway lines (“I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m eating corn chips and masturbating. Please leave a message.”). There are also obscure references in Noel S. Baker’s screenplay that rock geeks (guilty!) will delight in. This is part of a trilogy (of sorts) by McDonald that includes Roadkill and Highway 61.
Dillon is now cleaned up and starring in Yellowstone and Mayor of Kingstown; Rennie's been in Star Trek: Discovery and Umbrella Academy. It's only 90 minutes or so, and we made it halfway through it on first watch. "Joe Dick" is as eponymous as the name would suggest and it's hard to stick with the language or the lyrics at times, but it IS a good slice of the low-rent touring-reunion band scene. It was pretty bizarre, just after learning who Seymour Stein was (important) and how he was (dead), that the characters tell the director-interviewer about how the band blew their big chance by pissing off (literally) Stein when he was president of Sire Records:
We were a band for 12 years. We were simply a band for 12 years. And then we stopped being one. That's it.
And money caused a lot of tension.
Well, it was like, we were playing New York City. It's our last night, right? Last gig, we're playing New York.
Joe always had a thing for the grand gesture.
President of Sire Records is sittin' there, right in front of the stage.
We're halfway through "Something's Gonna Die."
Joe jumps up on the table, drops his fuckin' pants...
It's personal. You had to be there.
And then pisses into Seymour Stein's gin and tonic...
and then yells into the mike, "Hey, see if you can sell that, you corporate weasel!"
I mean, talk about game over, you know what I mean?
I do. And with that, post over.
Hey
Date: 2023-04-11 11:45 am (UTC)