(no subject)
Sep. 9th, 2017 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferret1) Tuesday night, at Le Poisson Rouge I saw a pretty amazing set of musicians.
I first learned of Doveman (stage name for pianist Thomas Bartlett) from a weird downtempo cover he did of the complete Footloose soundtrack years back. Super slow "Holding Out for a Hero" is strangely wonderful, like the singer is literally *holding out* for that hero. Five years ago he did a set of concerts at Le Poisson Rouge called the Burgundy Stain Sessions, with a rotating cast of musical collaborators including some pretty big names. I never made it to any of those shows, but they always sounded neat.
This was billed as a revival of the Burgundy Stain Sessions, but it was actually a birthday celebration for his mother, full of her favorite songs and some of her favorite performers that Bartlett, an accomplished session musician who seems to know everyone in pop music, happened to know.
Musicians who performed included, in addition to Bartlett: Norah Jones, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vivian Bond, Joan as Police Woman, and John Cameron Mitchell. And a bunch of other talented musicians with less name recognition. But holy shit, getting to see that many amazing musicians for 20 bucks?!? It was an incredible set- relaxed and casual and goofy- and absolutely precise and lethally effective. I jokingly put up a 9 truths and a lie concert meme on facebook using exclusively 9 performers from this one concert, and I think it's more impressive than some of the lifetime 9 truths and a lie lists I saw when that meme was doing the rounds.
2) On Only Connect, that brutally difficult British quiz show I occasionally post about here to deaf ears, Gail Trimble is captaining a team this season! She showed up in this past week's episode with her husband and brother, no spoilers about whether she'll be returning in future episodes, but it was great fun to see her again. (Trimble was a famously brilliant captain of a University Challenge team some years back, that other [not quite as] difficult British quiz show I occasionally post about here to deaf ears. She nearly singlehandedly led her uni team to a championship, until the championship was taken away due to an eligibility scandal involving a teammate that still confuses me. I think the closest analogy for Americans is to say that Trimble was a British Ken Jennings.) Anyway, I just wanted to be sure everyone knew. GAIL TRIMBLE ON ONLY CONNECT, EEEE!!!
3)I recently did a rewatch of the complete series of Parks and Recreation. The first season and the first half of the second season are still frustratingly tonally off- they thought they were making fun of Leslie, it's weird?!. And the remainder of the show is still utterly brilliant and cheering and hilarious and inspiring. But it was interesting... I caught up with the show in a binge about midway through season 3, and watched the rest mostly in realtime as it was airing. It was interesting to binge and see my feelings about different episodes change in ways that seemed to have to do with rapid exposure to multiple episodes in sequence. Ann's pregnancy storyline made sense this time! In realtime, the clues they dropped for several episodes in advance slipped past me, but watching at speed, I saw how they'd set up Ann's emotional evolution, her realization that kids gave life value for some people, and she might be one of those people, so that episode where she randomly starts interviewing people to be a sperm donor actually didn't come out of nowhere. Jamm was also more endurably annoying racing through, because you got past him faster. Tuning in every week and realizing that there was going to be yet more Jamm to meaninglessly mess with our heroes was always a disappointment. But seeing him instead as this meaningless obstacle that our heroes would overcome with patience and wit made him fit better into the weave of the show.
But most of all, Leslie Knope is the greatest person ever. I think I used to complain about 'backslide episodes' of Parks and Rec where suddenly Leslie seemed unaware of the fact that just last week she'd learned a lesson about how she tended to steamroll people and it would cause problems later, but in the binge rewatch Leslie seemed like a much more continuous character, more self-aware of her own faults than I'd remembered, and stunningly competent in all directions. It's really telling, as I listen to The West Wing Weekly podcast afterroga's urging, that people on the podcast keep comparing things to Parks and Rec. There is a lot of continuity there in the sense of aspirational but pragmatic idealism. Government will fail its constituents, but as long as it consists of smart people working hard to try to serve the public, it has value in spite of its failings.
4)I think I've given up on Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus books, about six or seven books into the series, because in spite of the fact that they continue to be billed as Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mysteries, they seem to almost always turn out to be Peter Decker mysteries with a little background Rina Lazarus, often with Rina as a shell of the brilliant, difficult woman who makes The Ritual Bath such a delight. I like Peter, but I'm only interested in the series for that interplay between Peter and Rina. I might check out one of the later books in the series that star Peter's daughter Cindy, to see if they're any more satisfying.
On the other hand, I got through the troublesome L is for Lawless and I'm now back on the rails with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series, which is once again a delight now that I'm up to P. Grafton's dedication to not writing the same book twice is admirable in a series as long as the Kinsey books, but L was a little too far off from what I was looking for in a story about Kinsey, with Kinsey's dips into lawlessness seeming unjustified by what we'd seen of her character. (Her bouts of lawlessness in O is for Outlaw felt more of a piece with her character- not something you'd have seen from the person you meet in the first few books, but something you could believe she'd do given the circumstances and her evolution as a character. Her break-ins in O spoke really effectively of a newfound desperation for answers.)
I continue to love how Grafton uses the most vivid secondary characters to obfuscate her plots. You never know if a character is just there for two pages to deliver a piece of information, or if they'll turn out to be central to the mystery, because either way Grafton writes them as real people with lives before and after the page. I had meant to nominate the series for Yuletide, since there is shockingly little fic, but then I remembered that all my nominating slots need to go to all the fandoms I watched for Might Lead to Mixed Dancing and desperately need fic for now. More about that later.
I first learned of Doveman (stage name for pianist Thomas Bartlett) from a weird downtempo cover he did of the complete Footloose soundtrack years back. Super slow "Holding Out for a Hero" is strangely wonderful, like the singer is literally *holding out* for that hero. Five years ago he did a set of concerts at Le Poisson Rouge called the Burgundy Stain Sessions, with a rotating cast of musical collaborators including some pretty big names. I never made it to any of those shows, but they always sounded neat.
This was billed as a revival of the Burgundy Stain Sessions, but it was actually a birthday celebration for his mother, full of her favorite songs and some of her favorite performers that Bartlett, an accomplished session musician who seems to know everyone in pop music, happened to know.
Musicians who performed included, in addition to Bartlett: Norah Jones, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vivian Bond, Joan as Police Woman, and John Cameron Mitchell. And a bunch of other talented musicians with less name recognition. But holy shit, getting to see that many amazing musicians for 20 bucks?!? It was an incredible set- relaxed and casual and goofy- and absolutely precise and lethally effective. I jokingly put up a 9 truths and a lie concert meme on facebook using exclusively 9 performers from this one concert, and I think it's more impressive than some of the lifetime 9 truths and a lie lists I saw when that meme was doing the rounds.
2) On Only Connect, that brutally difficult British quiz show I occasionally post about here to deaf ears, Gail Trimble is captaining a team this season! She showed up in this past week's episode with her husband and brother, no spoilers about whether she'll be returning in future episodes, but it was great fun to see her again. (Trimble was a famously brilliant captain of a University Challenge team some years back, that other [not quite as] difficult British quiz show I occasionally post about here to deaf ears. She nearly singlehandedly led her uni team to a championship, until the championship was taken away due to an eligibility scandal involving a teammate that still confuses me. I think the closest analogy for Americans is to say that Trimble was a British Ken Jennings.) Anyway, I just wanted to be sure everyone knew. GAIL TRIMBLE ON ONLY CONNECT, EEEE!!!
3)I recently did a rewatch of the complete series of Parks and Recreation. The first season and the first half of the second season are still frustratingly tonally off- they thought they were making fun of Leslie, it's weird?!. And the remainder of the show is still utterly brilliant and cheering and hilarious and inspiring. But it was interesting... I caught up with the show in a binge about midway through season 3, and watched the rest mostly in realtime as it was airing. It was interesting to binge and see my feelings about different episodes change in ways that seemed to have to do with rapid exposure to multiple episodes in sequence. Ann's pregnancy storyline made sense this time! In realtime, the clues they dropped for several episodes in advance slipped past me, but watching at speed, I saw how they'd set up Ann's emotional evolution, her realization that kids gave life value for some people, and she might be one of those people, so that episode where she randomly starts interviewing people to be a sperm donor actually didn't come out of nowhere. Jamm was also more endurably annoying racing through, because you got past him faster. Tuning in every week and realizing that there was going to be yet more Jamm to meaninglessly mess with our heroes was always a disappointment. But seeing him instead as this meaningless obstacle that our heroes would overcome with patience and wit made him fit better into the weave of the show.
But most of all, Leslie Knope is the greatest person ever. I think I used to complain about 'backslide episodes' of Parks and Rec where suddenly Leslie seemed unaware of the fact that just last week she'd learned a lesson about how she tended to steamroll people and it would cause problems later, but in the binge rewatch Leslie seemed like a much more continuous character, more self-aware of her own faults than I'd remembered, and stunningly competent in all directions. It's really telling, as I listen to The West Wing Weekly podcast after
roga's urging, that people on the podcast keep comparing things to Parks and Rec. There is a lot of continuity there in the sense of aspirational but pragmatic idealism. Government will fail its constituents, but as long as it consists of smart people working hard to try to serve the public, it has value in spite of its failings.4)I think I've given up on Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus books, about six or seven books into the series, because in spite of the fact that they continue to be billed as Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mysteries, they seem to almost always turn out to be Peter Decker mysteries with a little background Rina Lazarus, often with Rina as a shell of the brilliant, difficult woman who makes The Ritual Bath such a delight. I like Peter, but I'm only interested in the series for that interplay between Peter and Rina. I might check out one of the later books in the series that star Peter's daughter Cindy, to see if they're any more satisfying.
On the other hand, I got through the troublesome L is for Lawless and I'm now back on the rails with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series, which is once again a delight now that I'm up to P. Grafton's dedication to not writing the same book twice is admirable in a series as long as the Kinsey books, but L was a little too far off from what I was looking for in a story about Kinsey, with Kinsey's dips into lawlessness seeming unjustified by what we'd seen of her character. (Her bouts of lawlessness in O is for Outlaw felt more of a piece with her character- not something you'd have seen from the person you meet in the first few books, but something you could believe she'd do given the circumstances and her evolution as a character. Her break-ins in O spoke really effectively of a newfound desperation for answers.)
I continue to love how Grafton uses the most vivid secondary characters to obfuscate her plots. You never know if a character is just there for two pages to deliver a piece of information, or if they'll turn out to be central to the mystery, because either way Grafton writes them as real people with lives before and after the page. I had meant to nominate the series for Yuletide, since there is shockingly little fic, but then I remembered that all my nominating slots need to go to all the fandoms I watched for Might Lead to Mixed Dancing and desperately need fic for now. More about that later.