Mysteries Abysmal

Day of the Rabblement, pt.2

(First installment was two years ago.) I'm always happily shocked when I spend a few days outside Chicago, as I did last week in Cedar Falls, Iowa.  The women there smile at you and it even seems like they want to.  I grabbed a bite at a Taco John's and the young lady even struck up a conversation with me.  In those few minutes as I waited for my 3 hard-shells, I felt as if I had known her for years. A young lady (friend of a friend) I had never met even offered to give me a tour of the town while the person I was visiting finished a workshift. To Chicago's credit, the rabble Trixies aren't everywhere, but limited to 'hoods like Lincoln Park and Lakeview.  And let me not get ahead myself here: rural sweethearts still prefer a strapping trucker. And even though they're wearing attitude shades more and more these days, it's nice to know that the fairer sex is out there, somewhere. 

New York, NY

Very good news today.  I got a call from Andras Szanto informing me of my acceptance to Columbia University's NEA Institute workshop for classical and opera critics.  It'll be fun to be back in New York for a few weeks.  As a freshman in college, NY was the place where I first began exploring classical music. I bought my first recording there: a super cheap Vox recording of Mahler's 1st and 4th symphonies, conducted by Harold Farberman.  I took up the piano too and became a resident loafer at Patelson's and the Steinway Hall. I saw my first classical concert too, which was an Alfred Brendel recital at Carnegie (Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert sonatas).  I'll be the youngest member in the program, with the age bracket going all the way up to 70. 

Big science

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading--the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth." --James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

What I'm watching - a new feature

Netflix appears to be the finest invention ever.  Here's my current queue, and I'll add my ratings once I get around to seeing them.  With super high ratings, like I've given Country Priest, I hope some will see what all the fuss is about.  I am always looking for recommendations myself, so please take advantage of my comments section. 

Diary of a Country Priest, dir. Robert Bresson  9.5/10 

Why does Herr R. run amok? dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 9.5/10

Gates of Heaven, dir. Errol Morris   8.5/10

Touch of Evil, dir. Orson Wells

Medium Cool, dir Haskell Wexler

L'Argent, dir. Robert Bresson