A week of tunes, ships, wildlife and some Looks at Books....

Work wasn't that busy, but somehow I've managed to stay away from updating.  The "week," as it was, began Sunday afternoon, with the first of four supporter-only live shows at Abilene, the Rochester venue supporting the music community and, thanks to its owner, a crisis nursery project serving families there. 

There was a bit of confusion because we hadn't received tickets or a confirming email, but the owner quickly confirmed, no, names are at the door, just come. By the time I got there, they weren't even checking names- after all, who would crash a charity concert?- and I bellied up to the bar and merch table for about 90 minutes of this remarkable group:



That's Eilen Jewell- she pronounces it "ee-linn"- with a speaking voice as sweet as Nanci Griffith's and a singing style rivaling something between Janis Joplin and John Fogerty. Some is straight-out country, but blues, folk and even straight-on rock'n'roll come out of those five.

I briefly said hello to the owner- like the fifth Rutle Leppo, he mostly stood at the back and out of the spotlight- but did get to thank this couple for providing the photo of what I had to term the Abilene mosh pit-



- and got to thank Eilen afterwards for supporting this cause. She signed her just-released new CD, which, as we will see, is something of a bonding experience for me, but not everyone;)



When I played the whole album the next day, I immediately fell in love with this track; she didn't play it for us, but it needs to be heard:
 

"Eilen Jewell and Hillfolk Noir sing "79 Cents"" (Watch on YouTube)

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No court Monday morning, but I did have some errands to run downtown, so I detoured to Canalside for a going-away shot of the previous week's Very Big Deal.  Our waterfront has been a work-in-progress since before I first moved here, with little progress in those almost 40 years until just the last couple. Prompted as much by private development (including by the Sabres' owners) as by government planning, it is now filling in as a year-round tourist attraction. A childrens' museum has recently joined the public spaces, concert venue and historical markings of the original Erie Canal opening, and this year Buffalo was deemed worthy of a visit by a fleet of Tall Ships making their way from Canada to Cleveland.  From the 4th through last Sunday, they were open for touring and the place was packed, but Monday before their departure, anyone could get this close:



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That morning was fairly pleasant, as the Sunday before had been, but by midweek the humidity was back up and we weren't out much except for walkies and for checking on our backyard population.  On one of the former, I caught a monarch fluttering around a neighbor's yard during one of Pepper's sniff stops.  Closest I could get to it for a photo was this-



- but, just using the zoom feature on the phone through a couple of rounds, it turned into something that almost looked like I had painted it (trust me, I didn't;)-



Meanwhile, the two bunnies in the back nest continued to hang out- the dog eventually paying little if any attention to them- until Friday night, when I went out to check and saw that either Bugs or Esther Bunny (yes, I'd named them) had amscrayed, and this one was also venturing outside of Mom's basement and exploring things:



By the next morning, they were both gone. Circles of Life being what they are, Facebook brought up a memory from exactly a year ago this past week, which was of the previous year's wabbit nesting in our back yard.  Maybe one of those bunnies was this year's mama. And then she'll have two bunnies, and so on and so on and so on.....

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Only one road day this week after the Sunday night music trip. I would have loved to have seen another band in Rochester on Wednesday night- a Webster native singer named Kate Lee, accompanied by guitarist Forrest O'Connor (son of legendary sideman Mark) and another harmonizing with them. They did a live-in-studio performance on Rochester's NPR music station the previous week, and I was hooked. But I was also tired, so decided to save it for another tour, but when I had a free moment after court on Thursday, I stopped at Record Archive to see if I could grab one of their CDs.  Nothing in the L's for Lee, and plenty of Mark O'Connor (we already have some) in the O bins, but none of their band. However, I did see a recognizable name on a tab in the Americana bin for Davey O.  I've been a Facebook follower for years- he opened a few years ago at Buffalo Friends of Folk Music for at least one show I saw there, and he plays in the upstairs cafe at Eleanor's store from time to time. They had only one of his albums, and I had none, so I brought it home:

 

I paid all of five bucks for it. Mark (or Mark's ex left with it) maybe got two for trading it in. But it's mine now, and it's quite good.  Next time I see Davey, I'm going to ask him to autograph it again. And so on and so on and so on....

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Finally, it's time for Ray's Reviews of Ancient Books:

One of my errands on Monday was to pick up a book from the central library.  A friend made a legal reference to something a week or so earlier that I didn't recognise, and it reminded me of just how foreign all of our terminology was when I first started out.  For me, at least, one preview and quasi-guide to that was the first book ever published from future novelist Scott Turow. It's called One L, and was a mostly biographical account (with some anonymizing and blendings of real people) of his first year at Harvard Law School. I remember reading it the year before I decided to take the law boards and start down this bizarre path. (The title refers to the Hahvahdspeak classification of its three years of students into 1L/2L/3L; that terminology was not used at UB when I went there a few years later, but it's now standard there and throughout the country.) Despite Turow's later novelist success, this book is surprisingly hard to find; our 37-branch library system has only one copy. But it does include an afterword from 1988, 10 years after Turow graduated and had been a federal prosecutor for many years, and not long after Presumed Innocent, his first novel, was published. Among other observations at that time, even then he was very troubled by devoting the resources of federal prosecution to going after immigrants. After seeing the movie El Norte, he said, how could you want to do that?  One of my coworkers is starting law school next month, and I decided to find a copy of the book for her, a bit of an easier task. Eleanor suggested I provide a cheat sheet of some of the obscure terms in his book. Like “res ipsa loquitor.” And “mimeograph.”

Then, an even older read came back into my mind, and for sadder reasons:  word came Wednesday that former major league pitcher Jim Bouton had died at the age of 80, after a battle with dementia.  Although he had some good seasons with the Yankees at the end of their first dynasty in the early 60s, he was best known for his book Ball Four, which chronicled his journey in 1969 with the expansion and terrible Seattle Pilots and the older but noncontending Houston Astros.  (Oddly, the Astros and the former Pilots-turned-Milwaukee Brewers became the only major league teams to switch leagues, at different times.)  The book was funny, good-hearted, but extremely controversial when it came out in 1970, because it peeled layers away from the mystique of the sport's heroes, particularly that of Mickey Mantle, who he revealed for drinking, womanizing and not signing baseballs for fans.  The Yankees banned him from Old Timer's events for years until Steinbrenner finally forgave him after Bouton suffered the death of one of his children; even the Mick made peace with him before his own death.  I read, bought and still have a later copy of that book, and it's deserving of every accolade placed upon it.

Ball Four was written in calendar style- much of it from notes he took on or after the day of each event- and ironically, the entry from 50 years before the day of his death finishes one of the funniest stories in the whole book. A few other former Yankees wound up on the sinking ship that was last-place Seattle; one was a fellow pitcher named Fred Talbot.  Back then, pitchers in both leagues batted for themselves, and Talbot had somehow not only hit a homer in a game, but won a major prize for a lucky fan who benefited from the batting.  Bouton concocted a prank where the adoring fan promised to share $5,000 of the $25,000 prize (big sums back then, even for baseball players who mostly wouldn't break even six-figure salaries for another decade). In another sign of how old this was, Bouton decided to inform the victim by telegram.  And so, the entry for July 10, 1969:



That screencap is from a baseball writer and beloved to another baseball writer friend of mine, named Jay Jaffe, who since Wednesday has posted numerous memories of his interactions with Bouton over the years.  He ended one of them with the same five words that first came to my mind (Bouton's nickname and another frequently joked about trope in the book):

RIP, Bulldog. Smoke 'em inside.