When I go to a Mexican restaurant I am usually reminded that there is a whole other world right here in Madison that exists below the mainstream radar. It's like that China Miéville novel The City & the City with Madison's Hispanic population sometimes seeming to exist in a parallel city where English is not the primary language and culture happens out of the spotlight, away from downtown and the gaze of a well to-do middle class.
I exaggerate a bit as Latinos here are not confined to a certain area of town and take part in the life of the city in all ways but a lot of Spanish language cultural events take place more towards the perimeter of the city and out of the spotlight. Last month I ate at El Pastor on the southside and grabbed a handbill for a concert that happens later this week.
Three bands are playing at the Alliant Energy Center this Friday. I've, not surprisingly, never heard of any of them and likely would never have known about this concert had I not stopped to look at the handbill on the counter by the register.
Los Dos de Tamaulipas are the headliners. Led by brothers Rolando and Orlando Zapata, they are reputed to blend traditional norteño with modern corridos. According to Wikipedia, norteño is defined by accordion and bajo sexto, a 12-string guitar. Of course, there are infinite variations. Corrido seems to be less a musical genre than a way to tell a tale set to music in a particular meter.
Kanales is one of the openers and is the stage name of Mexican singer and songwriter Pedro Haros. He seems to be most closely associated with corridos.
The other opener is a band called Los de la Marka who seems to be purveyors of norteño. Their videos tend to feature a lot of pretty señoritas which makes for some fine viewing.
It's been a couple months since I finished The Light Ages so it's not fresh in my mind. We start with the discovery of a manuscript that describes the construction of an astrolabe. Geoffrey Chaucer is attributed authorship but it turns out it was written by a monk, one John of Westwyk.
I thought this was going to be a broad survey of medieval science demonstrating the many innovations during the period derided as the Dark Ages. Instead we let John of Westwyk's life guide us as his wanderings and the people he encounters serve as the launching pads for investigations into medieval learning. The book's emphasis is on the rather amazing mathematics and astronomy of the medieval period. Astrolabes were like the Swiss Army knife/smartphones of their day. Sailors needed to know where to sail, Christians needed to know when Easter was to be celebrated, healers wanted to know where a given planet was at a given time, and so on and so forth.
Mankind has looked to the skies for thousands of years and men created precision instruments like astrolabes and clocks long before the Industrial Revolution. They conceived mathematics that explained what they saw in the heavens long before Newton and Leibnitz.
A fascinating book. While it doesn't cover many areas of medieval knowledge, it does go in-depth into astronomy and mathematics and does good on its subtitle. This was indeed a surprising story and showed that there was much more than superstition capturing the minds of people during the Middle Ages.
I watched Arrival on my flight back from England back in September and resolved to read the short story that it's based on, "Stories of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.
The tale is only about 50-60 pages, if I recall correctly, and it was easy to see how the film's script was forged from the source material. The stories are mostly the same in the broad sense and in much detail. But it's the differences that really count.
Minor ones include the thingies that actually come to Earth. In the movie they're big spaceships that our heroes must ascend into to meet the aliens behind large windows while in the book, these screens come down to the surface and are activated a bit like televisions. Another difference is that the short story has no scene where disgruntled young men who consume the rantings of the likes of Alex Jones try to kill the aliens.
The biggest difference is that Chiang's tale is littered with flashforwards that strongly hint at the linguist's ability to see into the future whereas that was more of a big revelation in the film. (Right?) Not only does the question of being able to change the future if you know it come into play but also what would it do to a person if they could not only mold stories about their lives from their past but also their future?
I saw mention of The Tainted Cup months back but I do not recall where. It wasn't until after I had bought it that I learned that it had won a Hugo award. What attracted me was the murder mystery aspect of the plot, that it fit into the fantasy category didn't sway me one way or the other, though I admit that I am not a big fantasy reader.
The setting is the Great and Holy Empire of Khanum. We get a map of it and can see that it is a coastal domain. Every wet season gigantic creatures called leviathans emerge from the seas and attempt to make landfall which is quite bad for the Khanumians. And so they've erected massive walls to keep out the unwanted visitors and fortified them with various range weapons. If the term "fantasy" gives you Silmarillionphobia and you tremor at the thought of epic creation stories and lengthy family trees, fret not. This is the majority of the fantasy world building that the novel gives us. We get a bit more about the various cantons that the empire is divided into and the various social groups that make up hierarchies but that's about it. We get enough to drive the plot and deepen the mysteries that unfold.
Oh, I suppose it bears mention that magic is alive and well in Khanum. Most important is the use of magic to alter people. Dinios Kol, a.k.a. - Din, has been altered so that he has extraordinary memory and recall abilities. A young man, he has been assigned to Ana Dolabra, a detective with a reputation as an eccentric. Ana doesn't like to leave her residence, much preferring to don a blindfold to sharpen her senses and her mental acuity as she speaks with those who come to her home.
And so she dispatches Din to examine the scene of a particularly gruesome botanical death. An imperial officer, Taqtasa Blas, was found dead in a mansion belonging to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in all the land. Din is surprised to find that the cause of death was a tree that grew from inside his body and sundered it apart.
Blas led the engineers whose work protects the empire from the leviathans and soon after his death, there is a breach in the sea walls that allows a giant inland to wreak havoc. Soon Ana and Din learn that several engineers whose duty it was to keep that section of the walls in good stead have died - in the same manner as Blas.
Since Ana doesn't like to leave her home, Din goes out and does the majority of the legwork. He commits the scenes and interviews to his supercharged memory and returns to Ana where he spills the beans. In turn, Ana uses her experience and nimble mind to make all sorts of deductions and postulations.
Bennett does a very nice job of broadening the mystery, of introducing us to new characters, new regions of the empire at a very deliberate pace. We don't just get a heap of stuff dumped on us, we get everything at a speed that allows us to digest what we've been given before moving to something new.
Din is young and attempts to conceal a secret of his from Ana. He is also from a poor background so we come to understand the decadence and corruption of much of Khanumian aristocracy through his eyes. We get to know a group of others that assist with the investigation with Tazi Miljin standing out for me. He's a war hero, a grizzled veteran who proudly sticks out for his incorruptibility. This is your typical working class guy who shakes his head a lot at the behavior of his superiors but ultimately isn't interested all that much in rocking the boat. Ana too has a past that she must contend with.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Tainted Cup. It was a fine mix of procedural, character study, and world building. The initial death had me hooked and then Bennett drops the bomb that many others died the same way and it was buy the ticket, take the ride. No going back. He masterfully introduced and then deepened & widened a mystery, built a new world, and let us get to know a selection of characters at just the right speed for me. The book is a rich stew that simmers most of the way through until it reaches the boiling point at the end.
The opening scene when Blas' death revealed has some serious Annihilation vibes for me and so remains quite memorable. But the scene that hit me on a gut, emotional level came towards the end of the novel. Our gang of investigators is out seeking a soldier named Ditelus whom they suspect is a collaborator with the brains behind all of the deaths. Ditelus is what they call a crackler, someone whose body and strength has been enhanced via magic. They find him hobbling along far from any town mumbling about going home, though his homeland had been destroyed several years ago. In my head he was this Lennie Small type led by the novel's villain and he just had a ton of pathos for me. He knew he was going to die and just wanted to go home. He wasn't this big, bad guy - more of a big child. The scene just had this dark fatalistic feeling to it that really had me in its grip.
The Tainted Cup is the first entry in what is currently a trilogy and I am looking forward to the digging into the second book. It will be interesting to find out if we learn anything more about the leviathans as they are not simply big, threatening creatures. Their corpses literally become part of the landscape in addition to being the source of some magics. They are more than a simple menace and I wonder if the leviathans as a type of ritual sacrifice will be further explored in the series. Plus characters note multiple times that they have increased in size over the years. Why is that?
Ana's past surely has more to it than we know. Perhaps an explanation for her peculiarities? Plus Din is young so he will surely mature as the series progresses.
First the good news. Lakefront has a new winter seasonal - a Weihnachtsbock - called Krampus Bock.
I look forward to giving this new brew a taste. While I have no recollection what the brewery's previous winter seasonal was, I see that Snake Chaser, their Irish-style stout, has returned for St. Patrick's Day celebrations once again and that the emphasis on IPAs/fruity hops in their overall lineup has been toned down a bit.
And now onto the bad news. Schlenkerla is seemingly nowhere to be found. OK, OK, I've only looked at 2 stores but there wasn't any. The woman behind the counter at Steve's Liquor on University said that she is unable to find it any longer or that it's really hard to get or some such thing. D'oh!
At least Working Draft has a smoked beer of some ilk on tap much of the time. I missed their smoked Märzen, sadly, and also their smoked Dortmunder Export. However, their smoked wild rice lager is on tap now.
Also note that they brewed a Swedish lager in collaboration with Dovetail and the release party is Saturday.
I went into Icebreaker (Jään vangit) thinking that I had another fine Nordic noir murder mystery, this time from Finland, on my hands. As it turned out, I had stumbled upon something very different. And not just because there are no saunas.
It is a rule of Nordic noir that the protagonist has as lousy family life. Here were meet Sanna who is divorced and whose son wants to spend Christmas with his father rather than with her. Cut to the Finnish Coast Guard HQ and we find Sanna and her partner Joonas being tasked with making contact with an icebreaker, the Aura, which has gone radio silent. I immediately took to this idea as it was eerily similar to the Call of Cthulhu scenario" Terror on the S.S. Champagne" which I ran at Gamehole Con this year. And so our heroes head out to the ship in their hovercraft. They find that it is locked in the Arctic ice a la Endurance and seemingly abandoned.
Sanna finds one crewmember tied to a control box thingy on deck. Joonas looks after the guy while our heroine continues her search. She eventually finds most of the rest of the crew, including the captain, trapped in a room below deck with the door having been welded shut. One final sailor is found on the bridge unconscious and bleeding. The remaining crew member, Eemil, has apparently gone mad and his whereabouts are unknown.
A woman, Jaana, is consoling her son Peter in his quarters and speaks in hushed tones about a darkness and how Peter has to fight it. Another couple of crew members, Toni and Martti, do not seem to be on good terms. And so we get an entire cast of sailors whose true motives are shrouded in mystery.
As everyone is recombobulating and plans to get the ship fully operational again are being formulated, it is discovered that one of the crew has taken off in the Coast Guard hovercraft. Oh, and Sanna goes outside and sees Eemil standing over a hole in the ice in which Joonas is struggling to stay afloat and crawl out of. Eemil flees but poor Joonas meets an ugly fate in the icy waters. Sanna is devastated as she and Joonas were romantically involved.
Early on we get introduced to the characters and are tantalized with lots of mysteries and unknowns. Why has Email gone mad? What happened last summer? What is wrong with Peter? When a massive snowstorm rolls in, the ship becomes a suitably cramped backdrop for the action. After enough talk about a darkness and countless scenes of the radio simply not working - they're only 40km from the mainland - it dawned on me that there's something supernatural at play and that this wasn't a more mundane entry in the Nordic noir murder mystery canon.
Suddenly the radio finally comes alive and its the guy who stole the hovercraft. He is calling for help saying that he is lost and can no longer feel his legs. The assembled folks on the bridge see a flare in the distance. Sanna, Toni, and Martti head out on a rescue mission. A fog descends unnaturally quickly and they find the hovercraft covered in frost, the engineer who stole it is found frozen solid, something impossible given the conditions and the short amount of time involved.
Ah, so we now had a strange fog that seems to mess with time and make people hallucinate/have visions.
Icebreaker proved to be perfect Halloween viewing because, in that area of the Arctic, it is the winter solstice during which the veil between this world and the next is opened. And so the show is part ghost story.
We learn that the events that caused Eemil to go mad are related to the disappearance of Sanna's father whom we see in many a flashback.
I appreciated the descent into madness of a couple of the characters as this added some Lovecraftian flavor. Eemil encountered something, a blackness, that disposed of his sanity and I liked how this darkness is never explained away. There are some genuinely spooky scenes such as when Sanna and the crew (minus the captain) attempt to hoof it over the ice to the mainland. At one point they are traversing perilously thin ice and then the fog descends and they find that they are essentially back where they started, not far from the Aura. They are forced to seek shelter at an abandoned home on a nearby island. You know something bad is going to happen when the fire goes out suddenly, a simple but effective way to show that the characters are in deep doo-doo and to take a symbol of hope away.
The show did a fine job of slowly letting me know that it wasn't just a mundane mystery, that things are not as they seem and that there are supernatural forces at work. The isolation, the mysterious fog, and the nebulous supernatural entity here gave the show some LOST vibes. But instead of being trapped in a tropical paradise, these characters are trapped on the Arctic pack ice. The scene in the derelict house brought back the scene in LOST where Ben brings Locke to that spooky cabin to meet Jacob.
One gripe I do have it is that the storytellers went to the Sanna-goes-off-alone well too many times. Once is tense and thrilling but it got silly after 3 or 4 times and just became an ineffective trope. Oh, my other big gripe is that people seemed to recover from what I took to be severe hypothermia in an hour or two. That and recovering from being bashed on the head with a pipe in a matter of seconds.
Nearly forgot. Something else that kind of took me out of the story was that, for the first half or so of it, Eemil, the guy who locked the crew in that room and welded it shut, was loose after the crew had been freed but no one seemed to care that he was below decks doing, well, stuff. No one seemed ill at ease that a madman with an axe was on the loose. It was business as usual. "I'll just head to the engine room, where Eemil worked, by myself to look at the fuses."
I must admit that Eemil reminded me of that water mouth guy from that Doctor Who story "The Waters of Mars".
Not the best screenshots to illustrate my reaction but you get the idea.
It turned out well. Mostly hot Hungarian paprika but with a dash of the Spanish stuff. Next batch will include some serranoes or jalapenos as I have a freezer full of them.
My pumpkin pie experimentation continues apace.
I feel I've gotten the sugar level down to where I want it. No granulated sugar and most of a can of condensed milk. It keeps the sweetness at a nice, mellow level and allows the pumpkin flavor to come through. Next I need to get the clove/allspice flavor at the right spot. I want a little less of those tastes and for a hint of the cardamom to come through. I just have to keep trying.
For Halloween I made quince marmelade. It has been years and years since I've done so.
Now I have to invite people over to eat it with me. A toast party? Maybe slather some on a round of brie and bake it to perfection?
At last night's screening of Soul Patrol (thanks Cinematheque!), I thought about Will Williams a lot and just learned that he passed away this past June. I didn't know the man, although I did chat with him on a couple occasions and heard him speak several times. I also had the pleasure of hearing him sing with his wife, Dot, in the Madison Gospelaires.
Will was a Vietnam veteran who was active in the Madison chapter of Veterans For Peace. During his talks he would chronicle becoming a peacenik, relate what it was like being a black man shipped abroad to fight for the freedom of the South Vietnamese while he and people like him weren't free at home, et al. You can read Will's story in his own words in the book Long Shadows: Veterans' Paths to Peace printed here in Madison back in 2006.
He came to mind as Soul Patrol is a profile of the first all-black Special Ops team in the Vietnam War. It is centered around the final reunion of the remaining members where the men speak about their experiences as well as their love for one another. Director J.M. Harper, who was in attendance, uses interviews, Super 8 footage from a couple members of the team, old stock footage, and newly staged scenes to illustrate the team and the milieu from which it and its members emerged.
Ed Emanuel wrote the book which inspired this movie and he serves as something of a fulcrum around which the stories unfold. It is he who is featured in staged footage that takes place in a grocery store where he sees his younger self as Nietzsche is quoted on the soundtrack.
But we learn about several of the team members. It is the turbulent late 60s. Muhammad Ali refuses military service and the likes of Stokely Carmichael urge black men to do the same. There are riots and assassinations and protests as American society is being wrenched apart. But these men joined the military with more mundane things in mind such as avoiding jail, to get away from an abusive father, to serve their country, and so on.
They go through training and then are assembled into Team 2/6 of Company F, 51st Infantry - a team that would go deep into enemy territory to reconnoiter and bring reconnaissance info back. We get a sense of their routine and of race relations in the Army. One particular incident is described in great detail. While out on patrol with the team hunkered down in the jungle, they encounter a trio of VC platoons who eventually discern their location. But instead of killing them, the North Vietnamese spare the team.
It is a harrowing scenario and it left its mark on the men.
At its core, Soul Patrol is about change, about how these men changed. The movie gives voice to old men reflecting on their youth and how their experiences in the war changed them. They begin as young men full of piss and vinegar and gain wisdom as they get older. They also suffer greatly in the movie, both during the war and after.
Harper uses at least two quotes from Nietzsche to emphasize this theme of change including the famous, dictum "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." The movie definitely portrays these men sympathetically and shows how they didn't get the help they needed upon returning from Vietnam where they had grappled with monsters - evil - and looked long and hard into the abyss.
I don't get the impression that any of the movie's subjects became monsters, they didn't become evil but they were obviously deeply, deeply affected by dealing with the darkest elements of human nature in others and themselves.
Harper gives his audience a sense of the struggles these men have/had with PTSD, such as when Emanuel describes an incident when he flew into a rage on the highway, while at the same time he gives us a poignant portrayal of the fraternal bonds amongst these men forged in the crucible of Vietnam illustrated by the multiple times they tell one another that they've got their backs covered.
Soul Patrol covers a lot of ground from the chaos in the streets during the 1960s to the war, from a group of young men trying to prove themselves to being mature men with a lot of baggage to deal with from their wartime experiences. The emphasis is on the personal but the broader picture is not neglected.
After the screening, there was a Q&A session Harper as well as retired journalist Jesse Lewis who is in the movie briefly as he was a war correspondent and wrote a series of ground-breaking articles about the experiences of African-American soldiers in Vietnam. Sabrina Thomas, an associate professor in the UW's Department of African-American Studies co-moderated along with Craig Werner, Professor Emeritus in the same department whom I know as the co-author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War.
Professor Thomas explained that she had seen Soul Patrol earlier in the year in Denver(?) and agitated both director Harper and the Cinematheque crew to have it screened here. So many thanks to her for her efforts. Harper gave us insight into making his movie and his relationships with the subjects. Lewis talked about his time in Vietnam and elucidated on his role in the movie, namely, as someone providing an antidote to the lilywhite coverage of the war that the mainstream press offered.
Soul Patrol is part African-American history lesson, part inquiry into humanity. Vietnam was such a cultural touchstone when I was growing up but it feels like it has almost been forgotten by the culture at large. Perhaps the movie can help give it a reprieve from the memory hole. There were a fair number of younger folk there so there's hope.
I want to end with a couple quotes from Will Williams that goes to show that the themes of Soul Patrol go beyond its running time.
Vietnam made me. I grew up fast in Vietnam. It made me look at life, at all people, as being sacred. There's the pain that I never shake from it. I know I'll never get rid of it. But I also learned that nothing can make me change the way I feel about myself, what I stand for, and what I'll do. I know that in Vietnam I wasn't myself. I'm not the person now that I was then.
...
It's really hard to talk about Vietnam. A lot of it is really hard when I think of some of the battles. It's hard. Not just talking about it but after just thinking about it. It doesn't go away right then. One of the things that is hard was, a friend of mine, Ellsworth, who died, who I was trying to save.
A friend recently texted me and another friend an article about how long-time drummer for Iron Maiden - now retired - Nikko McBrain turned down a chance to golf with President Trump. My friend replied, "Yes, good on Maiden fuck Metallica." While I didn't find the comment surprising, it was still weird to me.
Earlier this month James Hetfield told the crowd at one of their concerts:
"I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, OK? We are here...no bullshit...we're here to forget about all the outside shit, OK? Metallica's agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!"
So he basically said that they're going to be apolitical and just have a good time. What is so horrible about love, energy, and heavy music?
These comments got Hetfield a triple ration of opprobrium, perhaps most notably from Roger Waters who immediately went ad hominem. He went on The Katie Halper Show and called Hetfield a "prick" what sounds like a gillion times. I think Waters and his ilk are at the point of accusing anyone who doesn't take a shit with fist raised and head bowed in solidarity with Gaza of being Zionists with blood on their hands.
Waters said, "It's a shame this prick didn't have somebody around him to explain that being kind is way more important than all that loud music and bouncing around and whatever." You'd think Hetfield had called for genocide or, at least, for Palestinian kids to have their hair set on fire. How is an agenda of love, energy and heavy music unkind? It seems to me that Waters is the one spreading hate. He is absolutely reliable in that way and that's why he gets invited onto lefty programs - to spew his bilious hatred so lefties can feel good about themselves without actually having to do anything.
Honestly, I have no idea what the politics are of any guys in Metallica. But a couple days ago one of the rock music news sites I read noted that Metallica is asking fans to donate blood at their tour stops - or Vegas residency. The band's charity organization, All Within My Hands, partners with the American Red Cross on this initiative.
I looked into this further and found that AWMY does a lot more than attempt to get fans to part with their precious bodily fluids. They give money to tech schools and community colleges to help people get an education/acquire skills to enable them to get good paying jobs; money from ticket sales gets donated to food banks; they support organizations that assist people affected by disasters. The band and the organization's board of directors pay all administrative costs so every donation goes to people in need of it.
It seems to me that helping people learn how to weld or be a plumber or become a nurse is a good thing. That is practicing kindness. Feeding people, finding shelter for them in the event of a natural disaster, these are good things, these are acts of kindness. It also seems to me that these actions do a lot more good than telling people about Gaza from a stage during a concert.
Lefties:
"All right, but apart from the blood donations, supporting technical schools & community colleges, helping feed Americans by partnering with Feeding America, helping feed people around the world by working with World Central Kitchen, and helping with disaster relief around the globe, fuck Metallica."
Metallica will be here next June for a show at Camp Randall. Tens of thousands of fans will have a good time, hotels and bars will do good business, a lot of blood will get donated that otherwise wouldn't, and Madison area food pantries will get a boost. More power to 'em, I say.
Meddle may or may not have been released on this day in 1971. Sources do not agree though I seem to have Bing's AI giving today's date. Regardless, here's a seasonal song from the Floyd. (OK, it's really evergreen, if you ask me.)
