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Sunday, November 9th, 2008
 (Darcy's library includes books about our greatest presidents.)
posted evening of November 9th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, September 29th, 2008
Ellen has written an update for Lola's Diary, about Lola's old age.
posted morning of September 29th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Ellen's article about our bathroom renovation(s) is out, in today's Star-Ledger. With nice pictures of the rooms, and a lovely picture of Ellen and Sylvia.
posted evening of September 10th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, September first, 2008
In comments to NickS's covers post, Matthew links to a fantastic version of "Strawberry Fields Forever", by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. Lovely! And it gives me a chance to remember Ellen's brief memoir "1996", published in In My Life: Encounters with The Beatles,  about playing Anthology 2 for her fourth-grade class in East Harlem. "Draw me what you hear in the music," I say. They show me giant strawberries growing next to an apartment building, the sun's rays as streams of musical notes, the word music in big colorful letters, a strawberry tree identified with phonetic spelling swter breey fealds.
It was Ellen's first full-time teaching job (after many years of adjuncting), and she had a good time with the class, and her students had a good time learning to read and write. "So were you a Beatlemaniac?" Yazmine asks. "Oh, sure, of course," I answer in all seriousness. "I always will be."
Los Fabulosos Beatlemaniacs, below the fold.
posted morning of September first, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, August 30th, 2008
 As I was leaving the theater tonight -- my eyes wide open, my heart still racing -- I heard someone muttering to his date, "A lotta holes..."
And yeah -- the plot was not perfectly formed. There was some implausible stuff if you stop to think about it, some threads that if you spun them out would lead to contradictions or impossibilities. But I had to wonder, when in the movie had this guy gotten the chance to think about the plot holes? Tell No One is a thriller, I thought it was a very well-realized example of the genre. I could not move a muscle for much of the movie, I was gazing rapt at the screen and my head was full of fear and excitement. That seems to me like a well-spent 2 hours. (Well an hour and a half; the first thirty minutes was more confusing than gripping.)
posted evening of August 30th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, August 4th, 2008
Some new pictures are up at the READIN Family Album -- a mix of stuff from the last few weeks including Ellen and Sylvia's trip to Cambridge, our outing to "Playing the Building", and an epic battle between Lola and Pixie. Here is a great shot of Ellen and Sylvia (who is herself the photographer): 
posted evening of August 4th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, August second, 2008
Ellen and I are clearing out dead stuff and overly grown stuff from the fern and forsythia garden on the side of the house, about the state of which the bitchy neighbor has been complaining and which, if the truth be told, is getting a little long in the tooth. Me: Did you see that vine with the pretty blue flowers? I hadn't noticed that before. Ellen: No... Me: It was right over here -- (looks around) Huh, now I don't see it. (A little later, looking under a fern and seeing a bit of plant with a flower attached) See, like this! I could have sworn there were a lot of them over here! Ellen: Oh yeah, those are weeds. I usually pull them, they're pretty invasive.
 (And this afternoon, the neighbor thanked us and apologized for complaining about it. Nice! Back on good terms.)
posted morning of August second, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, July 13th, 2008
That's what Robyn Hitchcock's grandma used to say, or so he told us this evening -- he said nobody ever turned into his grandma, so he dedicated "I'm Only You" to her. This was the second song, after "The Museum of Sex" -- I was happy to hear him open with this song after I had opened my mix tape with it. "I'm Only You" was followed by a long digression on digestion, and whether and under what circumstances we would feel comfortable discussing our digestions, leading into "a digestion song", viz. "The Cheese Alarm", which made Ellen (and me) laugh out loud with its urgency. "Please! Somebody ring the cheese alarm!" Robyn conducted a dialogue with the audience after, asking if WALL-E is any good -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know... Can you all hear this?" -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know -- it's reassuring to think this is all not just going on in here..." and played, with much dancing during the solos, "I Got the Hots for You" and "Glass Hotel". "Thank you --" and as he started playing "Idonia", "This is about someone who left a hole the shape of themselves in somebody else's life." As he was retuning to play his next song, people in the audience were calling out requests, and he said with just enough of an edge to get them to stop, "You know there's a thin line between a devoted admirer and a creep... To be a slave to love -- what a thing!" and sang "The Idea of You". A long digression about the Victorians -- "It's possible that the Victorians were frightened by sex... Victorians wrote mostly in longhand, no e-mail. But biologically they were much the same as us..." reflecting on the possibilities of interbreeding between modern humans and Victorians, getting particularly interesting if the Victorians in question are your own ancestors; "Screw your great-grandparents! Whole empires have been founded on worse. But this song is not really about that:" and launched into the hilarious "Victorian Squid". "Thank you -- it's all true."
The next song, "Creeped Out", went out to "a friend of mine -- it's her birthday on Monday. Happy birthday, friend!" and while he tuned up for the next song, he said: "There's something insanely simple about watching somebody perform songs he's written -- it's like somebody sending you YouTube videos of cats..." and dedicated the song, which was "I Feel Beautiful", to "Michèle and our cat". Ellen thought this was a really smart lyric, and I agree. "How many people find the idea of eternity relaxing?" Not many -- mostly we want finitude. Robyn played "Oceanside", which was maybe the only song of the evening that really had me wishing for a band behind him. "This isn't exactly about Arthur Lee -- it's just around him..." and sings "The Wreck of the Arthur Lee", which I guess I had not realized was about a person. "It's a funny thing about eulogies -- essentially it's sad -- ... what really makes people cry at a funeral is the jokes," by way of explaining why he had written "Underground Sun" so upbeat -- it's about a friend who died, who was "definitely not a dismal person." "When people are dead they don't have an age." "I'll leave you with a blast of folk-rock sound," Robyn tells us as he dons his harmonica, and plays "Only the Stones Remain" with a downright amazing harmonica part. But we clapped and clapped, and he came back out to perform a long encore -- wearing his purple shirt with iguanas rather than his orange shirt with dingbats. "You've Got Heaven"* was the first song in the encore, and Ellen's favorite song of the evening. Then a song I don't know (and can't find at The Asking Tree), with the chorus "I'm gonna see you in the afterlife." And finally, after a long digression about cones (during which he wished us all "an incredibly long rest of your lives"), Olé Tarantula. Nice -- a totally satisfying evening. The level of energy he projects from the stage just takes my breath away.
*Wow! "Heaven" is from the early eighties -- somehow I had got fixed in my head that it was from a recent record. I think it sounds much more like late-nineties Hitchcock than do any of the other songs on "Gotta Let This Hen Out".
posted morning of July 13th, 2008: 7 responses
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Tuesday, July first, 2008
 Another batch of photos is uploaded to our family album! This set includes among other things, documentation of the murals workshop which Ellen and some other local parents taught this term. The final project was painting a mural in the ground floor hallway of the South Orange Public Library.
Also featured, the photo I would like to have on my driver's license, taken by Sylvia:
I think it has a certain quality reminiscent of the Simpsons. And I want to be a cartoon, I do!
posted evening of July first, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 9th, 2008
So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here. Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on. So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
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