chicago to nashville

impressions after a seven hour drive:

Indiana has a big big sky, lots of cornfields, many semi-trucks on the highway, fluffy clouds, straight roads, not a single mountain - no, not a single hill in sight. it is VERY flat.

kentucky has rolling hills, more trees, just as many semis, curvier roads. we skirted around Louisville and saw it only from the freeway. at Bowling Green we pulled into the National Corvette Museum 15 minutes before they closed. we may go back tomorrow because it is 1 hour from Nashville, and there is an assembly plant there that we can tour.

Nashville: excellent restaurant - Bricktops - which i read about in Blender magazine and all the country music stars swear by it and they were right. great, great food. then we went to the old downtown which is all honky-tonk bars and a live band in every bar. these are right next door to each other. we couldn't go in with rylan (21 and older) but we could stand in the street and listen, and even watch. we heard a lot of good bands (well, good in a country, western or bluegrass kinda way). i thought it was really cool, and would like to have picked a bar, gone in and listened for a while. but ry couldn't go in, and didn't want to stand on the street, so we just walked around and listened until his teenage moaning outdid the music. so we are back at the hotel. s'okay. it's almost 11 p.m.

end of chicago

well, we walked Michigan Avenue, went out to the end of Navy Pier to look at the lake, toured Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio, ate some really incredibly good Mexican food, shopped at my favorite designer outlet store and visited relatives. We also drove past Wrigley Field while a Cubs game was being played. Wrigley Field is SOOO cool, because it's a tiny ballpark, and it's semi-open on two sides. The buildings that face the Field set up bleachers on the roof and people sit up there to watch the games. Even just driving past, you can see the fans in the lower stands inside the Field. You could go to Wrigley Field while there is a game, you could not buy tickets, not go in, and yet still feel like you are part of the experience. It's really quite wonderful.

Tomorrow we are driving to Nashville and will enter country music territory. it's kinda scary!

la to chicago

okay a flight really isn't worth talking about. except that, for us beginning this "music trip" - well, there was a band on the plane! not anyone hugely famous, but it was a band called Sweet. They are famous for one song people might know: Ballroom Blitz. if you know this song, it will now be stuck in your head. i can say with certainty that the one band member who sat near us was blitzed - he had quite an array of tiny bottles of whisky on his table.

we also snuck into O'Hare through some very bumpy clouds and landed and retrieved our luggage . . . and then, just as we got outside to find the rental car bus, the skies opened up, it started pouring rain, and we watched the most magnificent lightning storm! rylan had never seen a midwestern display of lightning and this was really incredible. because the terrain is so flat, the sky is huge and the lightning bolts race across the sky from one side to the other. and, yes, we were glad our plane touched down just before all this happened!

dinner was our one extravagance - we ate at Morton's steakhouse, right next to our hotel (the Hard Rock Hotel, in keeping with the music theme of the trip). we had salmon, steak, ahi tuna - but the very best thing was this giant round pouf of bread they bring to the table at first. I could only sample a bite, but richard and rylan ate the entire thing. it was soft and fluffy and hot, with onion bits sprinkled on top. the best thing ever!

today - friday - we walk, shop and take photos while it's sunny. saturday is supposed to rain so that will be an indoor day, with the Frank Lloyd Wright house and possibly a museum or two.

on the road again

tomorrow is our summer holiday!

we fly to chicago, we rent a car, we drive to nashville, to memphis, to tupelo (honey), to new orleans and then back up highway 61 (revisited) to the crossroads at clarksdale and the follow the blues highway back to chicago.

i will attempt updates here, along with having to do my online writing class homework and keeping up with my favorite blogs.

According to the Dogs

According to the dogs, Aunt Isabel could do no wrong. She would lie on the floor and let them lick her hands and feet, nibble at her ears, spread themselves across her belly and take naps. Sometimes we’d come into the living room and there they would be, all of them asleep: Aunt Isabel and the three mutts. The sun would be slanting in through the window and they would all have their eyes slammed shut, smiles on all their faces, and slow regular breathing filling the space around them. When Aunt Isabel woke up, the dogs woke up too and they all stretched. Aunt Isabel would stand up and we would say, Aunt Isabel, you are covered in dog hair. She just laughed.

According to our great-aunt Sassy, Aunt Isabel has always been “muy loco” which may be a compliment because we are never sure with great-aunt Sassy. What we do know is that Sassy is entirely white and doesn’t speak any Spanish except for, we guess, muy loco. Sassy raised Aunt Isabel when her mother – Sassy’s sister – walked away. This was right after she injected the Mexican strain into the family by having relations with a very nice Mexican boy in the back of his car down at the end of the block where the vacant lot awaits all kinds of illicit activities. The Mexican boy was sent home to Mexico and Aunt Isabel’s mother gave birth and walked away. We are convinced she walked to Mexico, but we don’t know anything for sure.

According to our great-uncle Howard, Sassy and her sister were the ones that were muy loco. He adores Aunt Isabel and ever since she was a little girl he taught her everything he knows. Great-uncle Howard doesn’t know very much, being brain-damaged from something that happened in Vietnam, but still he taught her bird songs, folk songs, five chords on the guitar, whittling, composting, vegetable-garden growing, and sitting in a rocking chair to study the world. That’s what he did best and he told us that even as a little girl, Aunt Isabel could sit and watch the world as good as any man he knew. He told us this whenever we tried it, mainly to chastise us since we couldn’t sit still for any length of time. “How you gonna see the world change,” he would snort, “if you don’t sit still and watch for it?”

According to Aunt Isabel, the best way to be in this world is to dive in like it’s one big swimming pool and feel the sensations – warm or cold or salty. Aunt Isabel likes to dive into the neighborhood trash cans and come home with her treasures that we find meaningless, but she will cut the sleeves off a sweater and sew lace doilies on the shoulders and wear it proudly. She will return with several pieces of a rocking chair and reassemble it into a low-slung lounge chair that sort of rocks if you balance on it just right. Which she does, leaning back on it while she sits next to great-uncle Howard on the porch.

According to the police, Aunt Isabel is diving into things that are not trash cans, has taken to diving through kitchen windows or cellar doors that are not locked and roaming through houses to find more interesting treasure. According to the judge, Aunt Isabel will have to spend some time in a jail cell watching a limited part of the world go by and deprived of any treasures to refurbish. According to the guard that meets us during visiting hours, Aunt Isabel sits in her cell whistling bird songs and refusing to meet with us. Refusing to eat jail food because it is not freshly grown. According to the county’s lawyer, Aunt Isabel will have to be placed in a jail hospital bed and fed via tubes to keep her alive. We all know that no one can make Aunt Isabel do a single thing she doesn’t want to do, because she is muy loco. Great-uncle Howard shakes his head and says, “You can always see death in a man’s eyes just before the bullet hits him.” According to the county coroner, Aunt Isabel did not die of starvation or a heart attack. She just stopped living, he told us.

We lie down on the living room floor and let the dogs drape their furry bodies over ours so they can feel what it is we know and although it makes them sad, at least the dogs understand why Aunt Isabel won’t be coming home.

oh, no.

moar funny pictures

man, the caption does't fit.

second line -- "we are woofz"

one line poems

Nightfall

Foxes wait for sound beneath dark blue fire.



Rain

For a long time, raising skyward.






on itunes: violet hill - the new coldplay single. followed by pork and beans, the new weezer single.

selling your soul

i am reading Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. i've never read any Marlowe and i have to say that i'm really enjoying this - his sense of humor and the intensity of Faustus in his big mistake.

Faustus asks Mephisophilis how is it that he (M) is out of hell. M replies, "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."

so hell isn't a place to go to (and from) but if you are in hell, hell is where you are. a portable hell.

this reminds me of the gospel of Thomas, who reported that Jesus said something along the lines of "the kingdom of heaven is right here, but men do not see it."

so both heaven and hell are not elsewhere. they are here and now and it just depends on you to ascertain which one you exist in.

not that i believe any of this! whoa. no. but i find it all so fascinating and wouldn't have minded taking religious studies classes in college. from the philosophical perspective. yes. anyway, i have to get back to the play to see what happens of Faustus. last i read, he had just about destroyed the Pope.

on itunes right now: wickhead, an alt-rock group from south africa trying to make it here in LA/USA.

music, creativity and ticket sales

radiohead tickets! AARGH. okay, so i couldn't get tickets on the WASTE presale. I can try again on the KROQ presale and try again on the ticketmaster sale. but i'm supposed to get VIP tickets, although i was told they aren't confirmed until the week before the show. The week before? how can you be sure you will get to go?? now i have to buy tix and just hope the vip tix come through (better tix) and one way or another go to the show. jeez.

songs in my head. i have songs that i think about, my own melodies and random words, nothing that would stand up in the light of day, but it's an interesting creative endeavor, different from writing stories. i love the feeling of these original (i hope) melodies circling my head. it's such an ethereal art (music is) compared to the hard-copy of fiction, the words on the page. i wish i could really write music. i think it must be the very best thing in the world.

on itunes: well, it's crap, but "before he cheats" by carrie underwood. gotta nice hook.

bad title, good movie

"snow cake." if i had not seen a clip from this movie on tv, i never would have rented it. alan rickman is seeking redemption. sigourney weaver is a functional autistic woman who inadvertently provides that redemption. the music is mostly by broken social scene, although weaver dances in happiness to a 70's japanese song from a comedy show and it's like the best scene in the movie! i found the song through some difficult google work, and can now dance to it myself.

intrigued? it's called "notteru ondo" -- go for it in google!

however, on itunes right now: gram parsons (i'm re-living a musical genre i ignored at the time)