What a decidedly dreadful day!
First it was Bob Uecker and then David Lynch and now Christopher Benjamin, a.k.a. - Henry Gordon Jago.
I am going to bust out some Jago & Litefoot this weekend and revel in his prolix palaver and confounding confabulations.
First news that Bob Uecker had died appeared and then it wasn't long before word came down that David Lynch had joined him. So many great memories of enjoying his work. I think his films fostered a deep love of the uncanny in me. There's a nice tribute by Brian Tallerico up at rogerebert.com.
As far as I can remember, I first heard of Lynch when I was in college from a friend who was a bit older than me. We were hanging out at his apartment at Johnson and Bassett and he remarked that he was excited for Lynch's new TV show, On the Air, to debut. Upon learning that I was not familiar with Lynch, he went on to extol the virtues of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, etc.
Another great memory is binge watching Twin Peaks while I was house sitting for a friend out in rural Edgerton. A shiver went down my spine as the Giant intoned, "It's happening again..." I was perplexed yet couldn't help but be intrigued when the horse appeared to Sarah. Surely it was all those scenes in the Black Lodge that gave me such an affinity for the uncanny.
It was freezing outside when the Frau and I went to Chicago to see Inland Empire at The Music Box. If memory serves, it was on Super Bowl Sunday with the Bears playing the Colts. The Kennedy Expressway was as dead as I'd ever seen it and we made great time.
Watching Lost Highway at Cinematheque here in Madison a couple years back was just fantastic. I got to hear the soundtrack as it was meant to be heard for the first time and it was incredibly unnerving.
Tone Madison published a nice article a couple years back that detailed Lynch's affiliation with Tandem Press here in Madison called "The art life of David Lynch in Madison".
I raise my coffee mug to him! Got a light?
A Milwaukee original.
When I heard the news, I immediately recalled listening to a Brewers-Expos game back in the late 90s when Uecker related a lengthy tale about a previous visit by the Expos to County Stadium when their showers failed. 10 glorious minutes of improv.
This is How you never get older pic.twitter.com/sdJtq4TQpg
— Enezator (@Enezator) January 14, 2025
(Listen to the prelude.)
(late April 2024)
It wasn’t long after March had given way to April that we got a snowstorm. Nature was not quite ready to breed lilacs out of the dead land.
Since the temperature hovered around freezing, we ended up with a real slushy mess out there. Still, I rather enjoyed it as I love snow and knew that I’d be sweating and uncomfortable in 80+ degree temps soon enough. Besides, I don’t drive to work, so I could let the bus drivers deal with my commute.
Within a week the snow was gone and we had a lovely sunny day for a solar eclipse. While we weren’t in the path of total blackout, Madison would see something like 85% of that refulgent orb in the sky obscured. Some co-workers and I wandered over to the south side of the building to catch a glimpse as it started. I was equipped with a shiny new pair of solar glasses that I had bought last month on my visit to the planetarium. After putting them on and gazing upwards, I felt a bit like I was in Sunshine staring at the sun from that viewing room.
I saw this:
Or rather my phone did. But that is a fair representation of what I was able to see through my glasses.
A co-worker without special spectacles did the old pinhole trick.
It was rather creepy just how dark it got at midday and I can imagine that it was very scary for my ancestors to witness this without friendly astronomers around to explain what was happening.
Another co-worker who had a much more expensive phone caught this image as close to totality as we got:
Someone remarked that they thought that the birds that would normally be seen on the parking ramp were missing. Perhaps all those Mourning doves decided to lay low as the sun dimmed. I wondered if Piper was reacting to the eclipse. More than likely she was sleeping and hadn’t noticed. Otherwise she was simply annoyed that the big heat source outside the window had been turned down.
********
Just a few days later I was to be found getting set to head down to The Big Easy. The purpose of the trip was ostensibly to visit The National WWII Museum but, as you can imagine, more hijinks ensued.
It was one I had hoped to take with my brother but it never came to fruition. My father was a huge World War II history buff and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in my brother's case. Although I am fairly well-versed in the history of that conflict – certainly better than most people – the apple fell a bit further afield in my case. I am not able to give precise casualty numbers for both sides at the Battle of Guadalcanal, for example, while my father and brother could. There were many times when I was watching a war movie with my brother and he’d note that the tanks onscreen had not yet been introduced at the time being portrayed.
“There were no Panther tanks when Germany invaded Russia in 1941!” he’d rant before helpfully concluding, “They weren’t introduced until ’43!”
This is the level of history nerdiness that I had to contend with in my fraternal relationship.
I really don’t recall why we never took the trip. There may have been financial reasons or perhaps we were just too lazy to actually organize things. In addition to not visiting the museum, I found a story that my brother had been writing that lay unfinished amongst his things when we were clearing his stuff out of his apartment.
Vita brevis.
After my brother died, I took the adage carpe diem to heart. More to heart, anyway. Do it before it’s too late. Putting something off more than likely means it will never happen.
At some point, I broached the subject of the museum visit with a couple of friends, T and P, whom I got to know through my brother and who are also big World War II buffs. Together they formed a triumvirate of history nerds who could spend hours arguing over the strategy of German General Heinz Guderian during Operation Barbarossa or discourse on the effectiveness (or lack of it) of the Japanese kamikaze pilots. What better people to go to The National WWII Museum with? We hemmed and hawed for a bit but finally decided we’d take the trip this spring. And so plans were laid. P, T, and T’s wife, L, would join me on the Official Memorial Trip for my brother.
L is not particularly interested in World War II history but my brother was her companion on the couch to watch many a tennis tournament.
It was also a trip I'd hope to take with my Frau but her chronic pain issues continued to plague her and hoofin' it around The Big Easy was out of the question, sadly. While I understood her decision, it was still a great disappointment.
********
We were to fly out of O’Hare on a Thursday morning and so the plan was that I’d drive down to T and L’s place in suburban Chicago on Wednesday after work and spend the night as would P. Wednesday evening rolls around, I throw my luggage into my car, say goodbye to my Frau, and I am off. I make a quick stop at my credit union’s drive thru where I get some cash.
The interstate was fairly busy as the stretch between Madison and Janesville gets a lot of use at rush hour. About 10 miles outside of town the podcast I was listening to suddenly stopped. I glanced at my phone and saw that I had an incoming call. The number looked vaguely familiar – I thought that it was my credit union. What could they possibly want? Well, they’d have to wait as I was driving.
I made pretty good time and got to T and L’s place just as dinner was being served. The four of us spent the evening chatting away and P, who has a 3D printer that is never idle, presented me with this hideous Cthulhu dice tower:
Instead of rolling my dice the old-fashioned way and chancing some kind of unnameable carpal tunnel injury that only people who roll a lot of dice get, I just put them in the back of Cthulhu’s head and they tumble down into the tray. I am sure to fail every sanity check.
The next morning we had a little breakfast, gathered our luggage, and called an Uber (or was it a Lyft?) to get us to the airport. L watched the vehicle’s progress on her phone. At one point, it just vanished from the map and the little messages saying our ride was X minutes away stopped. The driver apparently decided that they didn’t want to drive us to the airport after all. The worrying thing is that the app never gave an alert that the driver had bailed on us. Luckily L had been keeping a close eye on the map. So she ordered up a new ride.
With the new Uber just a few minutes away, we start chatting about the upcoming changes in travel rules, e.g. – the requirement to have a Real ID in order to board a plane. I remarked that I had gotten one and pulled my wallet out to show folks my driver’s license bedecked with holograms and other funky mechanisms to prevent ne'er-do-wells from forging fake IDs.
I was quite surprised to find that my license wasn’t in my wallet.
Immediately I looked in my car thinking that I perhaps didn’t put it back in my wallet after my stop at the credit union and that it had fallen into a crack somewhere. My search proved fruitless and then it hit me. I can only imagine the look on my face when it dawned on me that my credit union surely called me yesterday because I had left my ID in the drive-thru teller machine’s scanner.
Oh *$@#!!!!
Missing a plane was not a big deal but missing this trip was unthinkable.
I threw my bags into my car and told my friends that I’d see them later. My brother was no doubt looking up and shaking his head at this point.
To say I was pissed off at myself on the drive home was like saying Chicago had a little fire back in 1871. Still, I somehow managed to either drive at a reasonable speed or just not encounter any state troopers. Getting pulled over without a driver’s license would have only piled Pelion upon Ossa.
My first stop upon getting back to Madison was the credit union where someone kindly returned my driver’s license to me. Not long afterwards I was home and walking in the door where my Frau was quite surprised to see me. I explained what had happened or rather how I had f*cked up. Then I set out on the Internet and scrambled to find another flight. My brother was no doubt laughing at this point.
About 3 hours later my Frau dropped me off at the airport here in Madison. While MSN is nowhere near as large as O’Hare, it was rather busy and fairly hectic, as things go for a small regional airport. The security line was jam packed but soon enough I was on a plane bound for Chicago where I’d catch a flight to New Orleans.
Once at O’Hare, I made my way to opposite end of the terminal with steely-eyed determination. Nothing short of an act of God would prevent me from missing that flight. I texted my friends with an update on my status and, in return, got pictures of them wandering the French Quarter and relaxing at a tavern enjoying refreshing cocktails without me.
“We wandered the French Quarter…”
“…wish you were here…”
My plane touched ground at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport at around 9:30 that night. I grabbed my luggage and stepped outside to find that it wasn’t blazingly hot yet was still much warmer than home. We had an Airbnb across the river from downtown in the Algiers Point neighborhood which made for a moderately lengthy cab ride. Not much to see on the way there in the darkness and the cabbie wasn’t very talkative. I arrived at the house around 10:30.
This was my first Airbnb and I found that it was a nice place.
The decorations were chosen for tourists like us with Mardi Gras colors strewn about, a lot of fleur-de-lis’s, and all the symbols of the city represented including jazz and shrimp.
There was a porch out back that overlooked a small yard while a freeway bridge lingered in the distance although I wasn’t sure which freeway. It was nice to be able enjoy the outdoors in shorts once again. The neighborhood was quiet but it was Thursday. Perhaps all the drunken debauchery would start tomorrow night.
My friends were happy to see me, doubly so because they had had a few drinks and were in a jolly mood. They were attempting to order a pizza but we discovered that there were no pizzerias nearby on this side of the river and the delivery areas of the others in close enough proximity stopped at the shores of the Mighty Mississip.
Oops.
Their munchies went unsated and they learned their lesson: go easy on the Sazeracs unless you absolutely positively have a food source at hand.
And so we sat around outside and chatted in the cool night air. I relayed to them my hastily revamped travel plans and they, in turn, chronicled their strolls about town that day. Also, we talked a bit about tomorrow’s itinerary. We were not far from the Algiers Ferry Terminal so we decided that’s how we’d get across the river and to not hire any taxis. Any taxis with wheels, that is.
My experience with New Orleans until that point consisted solely of driving through it on I10 back in 2002 when a friend and I were on our way to Breaux Bridge, about 2 hours to the west, to attend the crawfish festival there. I knew folks who’d been there, of course, and had heard tell of the fun to be had there. Another friend had attended a conference in New Orleans many years ago and returned to Madison with a black eye, the result of an encounter his face had with one of the city’s sidewalks. While he fessed up to having drank a Hurricane or 3, he noted extenuating circumstances: New Orleans’ sidewalks were in dreadful shape.
I knew the typical northerner kind of stuff: it’s on the Mississippi and has a major port, the New Orleans Saints are the football team, it was part of the Louisiana Purchase. There’s Cajun food and music, jazz, Hurricane Katrina, Bourbon Street, old-timey streetcars – you know, the usual stuff everyone knows.
My goals for the trip were rather simple. Enjoy the company of my friends, honor my brother’s memory by visiting the World War II museum, sample local beer, and eat as much gumbo as humanly possible. It’s what my brother would have wanted.
We awoke the next morning, showered, and were out the door to catch a ferry for downtown. Algiers Point had an odd mix of homes. Not the architecture, necessarily, but rather condition. Our Airbnb had obviously been renovated recentlyish but there were other homes on the block that were in less than ideal shape.
As you can see, the street on our block was pretty rough. So were the sidewalks.
I could now fully grok how my friend had tripped and fallen. They would be fun traversing in the dark. I presumed/hoped that there were no wheelchair users or old folks who used walkers living in the area.
We ran across an empty lot that still had the tile floor and mosaic entryway of the building that had been there.
A disused commercial building sat uneasily next to a church.
But there were also stretches of houses in good condition that made you forget the blighted blocks. For example, there were beautiful homes such as these that I assume are in a French colonial style.
The flora provided a lot of wonderful sights and smells with a lot of trees and bushes that were unfamiliar to me such as this tree with the helix trunk.
I recognized the sight and smell of magnolia trees but we wandered through spots that were sweetly scented and I would bend down to take a whiff of the flowers responsible without any idea what variety they were.
We discovered The Crown and Anchor Pub which had a TARDIS at the entrance.
There was a coffeeshop a block or two away from the pub, Congregation Coffee, and it became our first stop in the morning for the rest of the trip. Well, maybe not our last day in town but definitely the rest.
I got a cup of joe and a couple bags of coffee to take home including their coffee/chicory blend.
On the way out, one of the feline denizens of the neighborhood ambled on by. I tried my best to get it to come to me for some pets but it ignored the Yankee tourist.
We discovered that there is a Louis Armstrong memorial at the ferry terminal. Satchmo has a lock on public transit terminals in this city, it seems.
I felt like I had come full circle having seen his house in Chicago last year on my Bronzeville tour and now here I was in the city of his birth.
Algiers Point was, as far as I could see, a Janus-like place. Dilapidated houses where nature was slowly reclaiming the land stood next to gorgeous homes in excellent repair and with well-manicured yards. Coffeeshops are usually a sign of gentrification and Congregation appeared to draw a typical middle-class crowd. On the other hand, The Crown and Anchor looked to be something of a dive bar.
I wondered how much of the neighborhood’s condition was due to Hurricane Katrina. As it was, Algiers Point seemed to be a mix of working- and middle-class residents and majority white. The owner of the Airbnb had left a note indicating which parts of the neighborhood we ought to avoid at night but I didn’t see any spots on our morning walk which looked particularly sketchy.
We paid our fares, boarded the ferry, and were soon off to the other side of the river.
********
Bonus photo. I may have used this one already but I ran across it recently and it never fails to make me smile. This photo reminds me of my grandmother and all of my great aunts.
(On to the vernal postlude.)
A couple prog heavy weights have announced that they'll be releasing new albums come March.
First came news that Steve Wilson will release The Overview on the 14th.
I’m thrilled to be able to officially share with you that my new album, The Overview will be released on 14th March. The album is based on the recognised phenomenon of the “overview effect’’, whereby astronauts seeing the Earth from space undergo a transformative cognitive shift; some experience an overwhelming appreciation and perception of the planet’s beauty, but others see the Earth truly for what it is – insignificant and lost in the vastness of space.
Next came news that Jethro Tull's latest album, Curious Ruminant, would be released on the 7th. Andy Giddings returns on some tracks as new guitarist Jack Clark makes his debut.
After two consecutive new Jethro Tull album releases in 2022 and 2023, a new studio record – ‘Curious Ruminant’ – is unleashed on the 7th March 2025. Consisting of nine new tracks varying in length from two and half minutes to almost seventeen minutes, this is an album of mostly full band music. Amongst the musicians featured are former keyboardist Andrew Giddings and drummer James Duncan, along with the current band members David Goodier, John O’Hara, Scott Hammond and, making his recording debut with the band, guitarist Jack Clark.
Seen at Marcus Palace. Someone is out there transforming children's stories into horror movies as those responsible for that Winnie the Pooh slasher flick have now turned their attention to Peter Pan. Uff da! Was Super 8 footage of the mud shark incident dug up for the Led Zeppelin documentary? Maybe an AI recreation?
Seen at AMC Fitchburg before a screening of From Ground Zero. I am tempted to see Rule Breakers but am weary of Angel Studios. Is it a story of hope, hard work, and perseverance or do they find Jesus?
Trailers from the screening of Nosferatu I attended at Marcus Palace. Generally speaking, the trailers are getting worse. Or, rather, the movies are getting less interesting to me.
Some new footage of Genesis on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour has emerged. 11 minutes of the 13 December 1974 show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey captured by Irene Trudel has been digitized by The Genesis Museum and put online.
It appears to have been synched with the soundboard recording of the show. The Slipperman section is great stuff.
I had my first Winter Skål of the season a couple days ago.
While I wish it were a bit less sweet, I still loved it. There's a great toastiness to the caramel flavor. And is it me or is it hoppier this season? It tasted like more than 17 IBU's with a sharp Noble spiciness.
I stopped in at the Fitchburg Hop Haus outpost earlier this week and was surprised at just how many IPAs they had on offer. Add in other styles with trendy hops or with genuine fruit and the beer menu was bloated with sweet flavors. I jumped on the tropical bandwagon and went with their New Zealand pilsner which featured Nectaron hops, a variety with which I was unfamiliar.
With a strong pineapple taste, there was no way I could drink more than one but it wasn't bad. The pilsner part tasted pretty good, from what I could tell.
This marks my final review of a NessAlla Kombucha kombucha that comes in a bottle.
I don't know how they determine which flavors are bottled and which ones go into cans. Perhaps ones that have ingredients that degrade more quickly when exposed to light are canned...? Looking at the list of canned kombuchas, most of them incorporate the name of a cocktail or some other blended drink that isn't normally associated with tea, e.g. - "mimosa" and "sangria". Maybe these canned kombuchas are aimed at folks with a more refined palate. Or some such thing.
Onto Peach Blush!
It was a hazy yellow with a slight orange tint that had more than a passing resemblance to my archnemesis in the libation space, the American Hazy IPA. The aroma had a strong vinegar tang to it along with the expected peach and a little somthing floral which, after looking at the ingredients list, I figured was the hibiscus. I surmised that it was these flowers that gave the liquid its orange tint.
Ooh! This stuff was heavier on the fizz than the last few kombuchas I've sampled. It had a nice tang too. A tea-peach combo was at the fore with a hint of hibiscus and just a touch of citrus which proved to be tangerine. A peachy sweetness lasted on the swallow.
I really loved the combination of the tanginess and the fizz. It kept the sweetness in check. There didn't seem to be much in the way of tannins so the sugary taste could have easily gotten out of control.
One thing I've encountered making my way through NessAlla's offerings is that I get a gently cloying sweet tea taste even though there's really not a lot of sugar in these kombuchas. I suspect it's just a bit of gustatory conditioning from having visited my Frau's family in Alabama and being surrounded by sweet tea and it is weird. Some of these kombuchas taste rather sweet but don't have that thick, syrupy mouthfeel. I don't know if my tongue is especially sensitive to sweetness or who. What would my tongue register if there had been more tannins? Only The Shadow knows.
In the end, this was tasty stuff, although I believe there was natural peach flavoring added. Not sure why that would be necessary or what that is exactly. Still, I eagerly lapped this stuff up.
Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix, will be doing an online lecture with The Aldo Leopold Foundation tomorrow called "The Nature Fix: The Power of Nature Immersion in Stressful Times". More info is here.
From my review:
The gist is that we evolved in natural environments, not cities, so our brains are wired in a certain way so as to flourish best in certain respects in fields and forests instead of urban canyons and office cubicles. In general, people tend to be more at ease, less stressed, and focus on the positive when out in nature as opposed to being in cities.
