I'll take mine with smoke

Last week I discovered that one of my downstairs neighbors works for Working Draft and I was inspired to stop in over the weekend after a nice bike ride.

It was lovely out on the patio. I was delighted to find that they still had the rauch hefeweizen on tap so you know I ordered that first thing.

It was delicious! More bubble gum and banana than clove, which is my preference. With its light body, it was most refreshing after my first bike ride in ages on a sunny day.

Happy Midsummer!

Happy (belated) Midsummer! Yesterday was a busy day as I caught a bus for Chicago early and spent the day down there with my ladyfriend. We attended Theater of the Mind, the interactive art experience co-created by David Byrne and then dined at the home of some friends of hers so I didn't get home until late, hence this belated post.

Still, it was a nice way to spend the solstice.

Happy (mid)summer, everyone!

Happy Juneteenth!

Today we celebrate the end of slavery in the United States. Juneteenth is a combo name for June 19, 1865 when Union soldiers freed the enslaved people of Texas shortly after the end of our Civil War. It's a federal holiday but not a state holiday here in Wisconsin. Not yet, anyway.

The "offical" Madison Juneteenth celebration will be tomorrow beginning with a parade down Park Street which starts at the Madison Labor Temple and ends at Penn Park where people will whoop it up.

Song of the day, 17 Juni 2026

Earlier this morning I submitted a time off request for September as I am going to go see Iron Maiden - for the first time. I am getting excited as it appears they'll be doing some songs from the album that got me into them back in 1989 or so - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

Up the Irons! 

R.I.P. Dee Palmer

Former Jethro Tull keyboardist/string arranger Dee Palmer died earlier this week and Ian Anderson penned a tribute which is at Tull's website. I think of all her string arrangements, I like those on Minstrel in the Gallery best so I'll have to fire up the stereo soon.

One of the neat things about the Tull box sets (in addition to the plethora of music pulled from the archives and dusted off) are all of the interviews and behind the scenes details. For decades all we knew was that Dee (née David) had contributed "additional material" to supplement Ian's on Songs From the Wood but for the wonderful box set, she gives details of her contributions, most notably for "Velvet Green".

On the Stormwatch box, in addition to her composition "Elegy", which made it to the album, it features an early take of "Dark Ages" where she gets a writing credit. Plus there's this song which is credited entirely to her.

Coming soon, 14 Juni 2026

Seen before a screening of The Furious at Point.

I saw the trailer for this and it reminded me a lot of The Raid. The plot is fairly simple here: a mute gentleman's daughter is kidnapped and he endeavors to rescue her. He meets up with another fellow who is looking for his wife who was investigating the abductions of children and they team up as they have common cause and both are exceptional martial artists.

And so there are lots of lots of fights that seem to go on for hours. Don't get me wrong, they're fun, at first, but I get lost quickly with all those quick cuts and a bit bored as the fights reach the 10 minute mark. They're just interminable.

One fight scene takes place in a refrigerator factory and our heroes seemingly put down one of the bad guy's henchmen, Ho, who is built like a brick shithouse. Towards the end of the movie Ho quite remarkably regains consciousness and makes his way to the police station where the two heroes are locked in mortal combat with two really bad baddies. Thus we get this five-way conflagration that was chaotic fun until it wasn't.

I knew what I was getting into here and went because I wanted to spend time with my friend. And these types of movies aren't torture. The theater was, I think, the smallest at Point but it was fairly well populated.

 

  

Coming soon, 7 Juni 2026

Seen at a screening of Backrooms at Flix Brewhouse.

I enjoyed Backrooms quite a bit and intend to watch the web series it is based upon. No doubt it has led to the word "liminal" being added to the vocabularies of millions who missed Exit 8.

The movie's strength was the mystery of the backrooms and all the unheimlichy goodness therein. But I suppose it needed some kind of plot, some kind of hook so that it didn't go too far down the path of Inland Empire obscurity. And so we open with scenes demonstrating that scientists are investigating the titular spaces before we are introduced to Clark, who runs a furniture store, the basement of which has a door to the backrooms. Clark also has a failing marriage but a good relationship with the bottle, the latter much to the chagrin of his therapist.

Clark investigates the backrooms and lures a couple of his employees into helping him. As you can imagine, things go wrong and Clark descends into madness. His therapist, Mary, investigates and discovers the backrooms. She eventually finds her patient and learns that, while he may have been right about the seemingly impossible liminal space he rambled on about in his therapy sessions, he has also lost touch with reality, however weird it truly is. There's a hideously perverted Alice in Wonderland tea party type of scene in which we come to understand that Clark has completely lost it and we also learn the identity of the monster we've only heard and seen brief glimpses of until now.

Mary eventually escapes and is captured by researchers from the Async Research Institute. In a Lovecraftian type of scene ("The Statement of Mary Kline"?), Mary is seated across a table from an Async scientist who offers her some modest explanations to complement her own experiences.

The whole Async angle seemed superfluous to me. It broke the spell a bit. People wandering the (non-Euclidian?) backrooms was spooky and unnerving, their madness when confronted with such an enigma understandable. Clark's explanation of the space as a faulty copy of reality was enough. Knowing that experts are on the case takes the edge off things. Now, if, like in the Southern Reach series, the Async investigations had all ended horribly, that would preserve the mystery, maintain the enigma for me. But their investigations seem to be far-reaching and ongoing.

Still, it should be said that Backrooms kept most of the mystery alive. It, thankfully, didn't have the Async boffin offer a thorough explanation. Creepy, uncanny, some potential non-Euclidian geometry, and descent into madness when confronted with the unknowable, Backrooms has all the trappings of a Lovecraftian tale - it just moves the setting from early 20th century New England to 1990s suburbia.

 

 

 

 

Jeff VanderMeer is a diabolical villain and other fun things

Last month I finally went to see Ivy Ford at the North Street Cabaret.

Holy cow, can she play a mean guitar!

I'd been meaning to go to a show of hers for a few years after seeing her on a bill at the Red Rooster and other joints around town. She plays blues in an Albert Collins/B.B. King vein - more or less - with forays into something more like blues-inflected rock, perhaps a bit Hendrixy.

Great stuff.

Maybe a week ago I finished reading Absolution.

The first thing I thought upon reading the final words was "I should have re-read the first three books." I think a lot of what happens here is mentioned in the original series but I have forgotten so much as it's been years since I took them in.

Absolution has 3 parts. The first section is called "Dead Town" which describes the fate of an expedition in the Forgotten Coast some 20 years prior to the formation of Area X and serves as a prelude to the horrors to come.

"Dead Town" is as chilling and uncanny as anything in the original Southern Reach books. The carnivorous rabbits made the simple act of mastication into a nightmare and were disturbing enough on their own but then they are slaughtered with ruthless efficiency via flame throwers making for a genuinely horrific scene in which I could almost smell the burning flesh and fur. Just when I thought it was safe to take a breather, we get the scene wherein the Rogue visits the biologists and it was simply disturbing and twisted - diabolical even. I could just see Jeff VanderMeer twirling his moustache and laughing as I realized that there was no going back, that I'd been beset by an uneasiness that I would not, could not shake until days after having finished the book. When that scene was done, I had to stop and think about it. Recover, in a way. I wasn't quite sure what had happened to the expedition in it but it was all bad.

The biologists had reached the white rabbits and did not care or notice that they trampled blackened corpses and living creatures both, weapons slack at their sides like a muscle memory that was amnesia, this onrushing surge toward the Rogue behind his veil of silver. Nor did the living rabbits care if they were trampled.

...

Now the Rogue kept opening his mouth wider and wider and the words came out louder and more brutal above the downpour. Those words could not be extinguished by the rain. Those words rose and permeated and cascaded outward and around the Rogue - even as the first wave of biologists surging against that "fey weaponry" crumpled, fell to their knees, slid down on gurgling mud as if they could evade the fire "that called our names"...except it kept calling and each time the desolation within became more final and complete.

The second section, "The False Daughter", concerns Old Jim, a retired(?) Central operative who is lured back into service for one last job. He is estranged from his daughter and, quite disturbingly, Central casts a younger agent to play the role of his daughter which makes for a weird plunge into Old Jim's psyche. For his part, Old Jim has been sent to the Forgotten Coast to investigate the strange happenings there which are related the expedition from "Dead Town". He is obsessed with finding the Rogue and encounters the Tyrant, an alligator that the biologists let loose nearly 20 years prior to his mission. The Tyrant has grown quite large and seems to have become sentient. The mere potential of the gator still being alive is enough to loosen the veteran agent's grip on reality.

This section ended with a Solaris (the film) vibe for me with Old Jim seeming to return to the "normal" world of the Forgotten Coast but I wasn't convinced. The camera could have pulled back and shown Old Jim at the Village as merely some twisted diorama sitting alone amid alien corn. It reiterated what "Dead Town" revealed to us: whatever alien or intelligence or force is loose in the Forgotten Coast, we humans are unable to divine its purpose or makes sense of its methods.

The book closes with "The First and the Last" which takes place a year after the border that defines Area X has descended. We witness the first expedition into Area X from the point of view of Lowry who drops hundreds, if not thousands of f-bombs. I found his dialogue to be annoying but eventually got used to it.

We know the mission failed and here we get a glimpse of madness settling in and members dying one by one as flesh melts into hazmat suits and other dreadful and bizarre happenings befall the crew.

Absolution was a great read. VanderMeer nails the cosmic horror thing perfectly as people descend into madness before an incomprehensible presence.

Last weekend my ladyfriend and I went to see The Claudettes, Chicago's premier band who does what The Claudettes do. It was the Madison release party for their new album Garage Glamour and the show was sold out. Also there was Hannah, The Leaf Queen, who shared her photos with me. She was seated right up front while I was off to the side and so her pics are better than mine.

Liz Ele is the new drummer having replaced Michael Caskey earlier this spring.

She seemed to be more of a rock drummer and she drove the songs forward with her steady push. She added a controlled manic energy to the music.

It had been a while since I'd seen the band perform and singer Rachel Williams has settled into being the frontwoman. Her performance that night had more energy and, for lack of a better way of saying it, she put on more of a show. When I last saw the band it was shortly after she had joined and she seemed to be reacting to the music onstage then but now she is part of it, as if the beat was emanating from the movement of her lithe figure, her singing tacking a course for the melodies.

The new album really puts her range on full display. There's the pleading of "(You Are My) Whole World", the sultry seduction of "Touch You Back", and my favorite at the moment, the Zack de la Rocha-like delivery on "Don't Give It Up to the Thieves".

Johnny Iguana's piano was as bracing and melodic as ever while Zach Verdoorn effortlessly alternated between bass and electric guitar. Plus I think he sang more that night as well.

A great show.

Also thanks to Rachel for helping me clean up a spilled beer.

I have visited the planetarium a couple times recently. The first was for a screening of Beyond Our Senses: Bank Swallows.

Directed by Wisconsinite David Andrew Busse, it portrays colonies of bank swallows who migrate to the shores of Lake Michigan just south of Milwaukee. We witness males on the prowl for mates, the youngins hatching and growing quickly to become fledglings.

Busse was on hand for the screening and he talked about how the idea for the movie developed from observing the birds on walks and wanting to know more and to document what he was witnessing.

Not only was this a fascinating look at an animal that I knew nothing of until watching this, it was really neat to see the birds in action on the full dome of the planetarium. There's much more happening there than just stars in the night sky. (Which are really hoopy, don't get me wrong.)

More recently I was at the planetarium to take in a screening of Sounds of the Oceans.

It's not really a documentary and is more of an immersive experience. We are shown footage of orcas and whales and dolphins as they glide through the ocean waters. Their calls are mixed with music and the combination makes for a relaxing journey beneath the waves.

While there was definitely a New Age vibe to be had, I found it an interesting impressionistic ride. What were the animals' calls about? Were they having a chat or trading insults about the diver with the camera?

The movie ended with suggestions for how to be kinder to the oceans and their inhabitants. Is chilling out your audience to the graceful movements of some ocean life the best way to build empathy for them and to lead folks to action? I don't know. Nonetheless Sounds of the Oceans is a serene getaway from the workaday world that invites viewers to seek kinship with the life beneath the waves.

My ladyfriend and I went to see Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Comic Mystery last weekend down at the Bartell.

It was great fun and, truth be told, I was surprised at how old fashioned its comedic attitude was. I know nothing about the history of this play but it felt very old school to me. Its humor was for all ages and there was lots of Watson making faces at the audience and faux mistakes that let the audience know the characters knew they were in a play.

Fun was the watchword instead of grand themes.

Last weekend a friend and I went to the Gamma Ray to see Souled American, a pioneering alt-country band from Chicago. I heard about them briefly on Sound Opinions shortly before seeing that they'd be stopping here in Madison and figured we had to go.

Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff were joined by an unknown (to me) guitarist and they proceeded to play some stripped down, country-inflected balladry. 

I thought the tunes had strong Townes van Zandt vibes. (It's snowing on Elston. Ha!) They seemed to have a fatalism to them. The music may have been sparsely arranged but the bare bones aesthetic combined with gritty performances for an achingly genuine experience.

I watched Errol Morris' latest documentary, CHAOS: The Manson Murders. It was really neat for me as I knew only the barest of details of the Manson Family and their deadly exploits.

In classic Morris style, the truth behind the Manson madness and the hideous murders is called into question. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who was a resident of Hibbing, MN at the same time as Bob Zimmerman) put forth the idea that Manson wanted to start a race war in his book Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders. Here Tom O'Neill's book, which gave the movie its title, calls that into question and throws in CIA involvement along with a mind control conspiracy.

Bugliosi's hypothesis is further brought into question by former Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil who paints a more mundane picture of Manson. It's one of a scorned wanna be musician turned maniac and not a fiend bent on bringing to fruition some crazed apocalyptic vision of interracial strife.

The movie does a good job of giving the details of Manson's life and the sordid, murderous affairs he was involved in. Plus it ponders just how a crazy man who lived on the fringes of society when he wasn't in jail could command a commune and convince his followers to commit those sadistic murders in the summer of 1969.

I also appreciated the use of Manson's music. It fits into the narrative, yes, but it had been a long time coming for me. Guns N' Roses covered one of his songs on their album "The Spaghetti Incident?" and I recall well the uproar that caused. And so it was just interesting for me to finally hear Manson performing his songs at long last.

I'm gonna fire up the Quattro and ave oops

It looks like I'll be going to Manchester, UK later this year so I've dusted off the book I bought the last time I had plans to do so.

I will walk in Ian Curtis' footsteps, see where the Peterloo Massacre took place and the sites of the Industrial Revolution that inspired Marx & Engels; evensong at Manchester Cathedral and a full English breakfast. Tour Life on Mars filming locations. Will I find a Bakewell tart? A pub that predates Columbus? Have a run in with Manchester United fans?

A ghost sign in two parts - Watertown

Galvanic Soap! I saw somewhere on the web that it was the precursor to the Palmolive company.

Scenes from Eken Park

Just a couple snaps from my walks to the bus stop this week.

Moar feline cuteness

Maisie looks like she's trying to portray a sense of dignity here despite being caught in flagrante delicto licking certain parts.

Here George looks possessed. Your mother eats kitty litter!

The cuteness overload continues unabated

Coming soon - music!

A couple shows have been announced by artists that I've been waiting to see for a while/again.

First I heard that Valerie June will be at the Stoughton Opera House in September. I've been looking forward to seeing her again ever since I attended one of her shows in 2022. When I looked at the date, I realized that I won't be able to go. Drats!

A day or two later I saw that North Mississippi All Stars will be here in the autumn.

I've never seen them live but have been wanting to for years and I got really excited before remembering that I am otherwise engaged on the day they're here at the Atwood. D'oh!

Song of the day, 12 Juni 2026