Catching up

A few brief notes on recent things, for lack of a better word, that I haven't written up in a more timely manner

Céline
Finally finished Céline's Death on the Installment Plan. A slog if ever there was one. It had its moments, no doubt about it. The English boarding school, and especially its headmaster, were exquisitely chilling and powerful. Some characters, too, are priceless, or almost - in addition to the headmaster, De Pereires was downright cinematic. Every scene that involved him I could imagine on screen. On balance, however, the book got to be too much too quickly - when I've had enough, I realized I still had several hundred pages to go. Celine pushes the envelope, then pushes it some more. After a while, you just want to say, "Ok, I get the point. Let's move the story forward a little now, shall we?" But he spends a dozen more pages pushing the same envelope. Yes, when the book was first written, this was innovative, sensational, even scandalous. Perhaps this, like Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (albeit for completely different reasons) is another example of a good book that did not age well.

Dogfish Head Grau Dunkel
J. and I go to the beach at Cape Henlopen, DE once or twice every summer, and like to stop at the original Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth afterwards. They usually have one or two beers that are difficult, or in some cases impossible, to get anywhere else. This time, I tried Grau Dunkelwessenberg - a German-Belgian mongrel of a brew made with a mixture of wheat, rye and barley, some of which is smoked. Really smoked. I was not taking notes, so I can't give a formal review here. Suffice it to say that it had a serious bacon thing going on. Unique, but not necessarily delicious.

Dogfish Head Sah'tea
Another one of their exotic limited edition brews, I brought this one home in a bottle and opened it with my friend C.M. a couple of weeks later. It appears to belong to the series of reproductions of ostensibly ancient recipes that they started a few years ago with Chateau Jiahu. This one apparently takes its inspiration from an ancient Finnish proto-beer called Sahti, and Dogfish-Heads it with the addition of spiced chai tea. I did take some notes on this one, so:

Appearance: Slightly reddish caramel color. Murky. Thin head, dissipates quickly.
Nose: Nutmeg, allspice, overripe fruit.
Palate: Bananas. Bananas. A bit of tartness on the back palate, but not enough to balance things. Oh, did I mention bananas?

C.M. gave it a qualified endorsement by saying it was kind of like a hefeweizen without the bad parts. Another beer I am glad I tried but probably would not seek out again.

Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen
I really waited way too long to write this one up, and it really deserved a proper entry of its own. The Embassies of Sweden, Finland and Iceland held a week-long Nordic Jazz Festival in early June, and one of the shows featured Norwegian trumpeters Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen. They both hardly ever play in the US, so of course I had to go hear them. It was absolutely riveting. The show was long and featured two other bands, both led by young unknowns, so both NPM and Henriksen were sandwiched into the middle hour, which I thought was weird, because both musicians are masters of the long form, so to speak, and because NPM at least is a mega-star in Norway, and I was frankly surprised that he condescended to play for a half-hour in the atrium of an embassy. Henriksen went on first with his long-time collaborator Jan Bang, who worked the electronics. Henriksen would play, or sing, a phrase, which Bang sampled in real time (onto something that used floppy disks - I saw him swapping floppies throughout the performance), then altered it electronically, also in real time, to provide a background for Henriksen's subsequent phrases. It was breathtaking. NPM went on half-way through while Henriksen and Bang were still on stage and matched a long droning note of Henriksen's for a few seconds, allowing him and Bang to walk off. NPM, with two other guys accompanying, then proceeded to play a few typically NPM-esque tunes - heavy drum-n-bass beat and loopy electronics supporting an absolutely ethereal trumpet. I did not recognize the tunes, but it was sublime nevertheless. Musical experience of the year.

Henry Louis Gates

Glad to see someone is paying attention to the important stuff, although I kinda disagree with him on Red Stripe.

Rant: Michael Jackson

I'm sorry, but I do not get it. 17,000 people for the funeral of a pop singer, and one who hasn't recorded anything in years, busy molesting kids when he wasn't screwing himself up in a plastic surgeon's office? Ridiculous, don't you think? Only Elvis probably got something on the same scale, and unlike Jackson, he almost deserved it. Frank Sinatra didn't get 17,000 at his funeral -- and that was a pop singer! What is that? Sinatra wasn't innovative? Well, neither was Jackson, but fine -- how about Miles Davis? He didn't get 17,000. And Sinatra wasn't Black? Miles was, as was James Brown, who didn't get 17,000 either. Messed up childhood and adolescence? Try Billie Holiday. She didn't get 17,000. So what gives?

Artomatic

Went to Artomatic - the giant annual exhibit of local artists' work - the weekend before last. I've been meaning to go for several years now, but for one reason or another, haven't made it until now. This year, two friends were exhibiting, and although I've seen the work of both before, I went partially out of a desire to show support.

The exhibit was absolutely enormous - nine floors of a giant office building-to-be, filled wall to wall with displays. There was absolutely no way we could see everything in a single visit, so I focused on photography, partly because one of my exhibiting friends is a photographer, partly because I just love a good artistic photo, but mostly because even among no-name local photographers, the quality tends to be far higher than among their painting, drawing or, worse, installation-creating brethren.

Our group managed to cover three of the nine floors, and even there I could not mention every photographer worth mentioning. Some highlights were Jeffrey Boodman's Ansel Adams-esque balck and white landscapes, Chris Campbell's digitally tweaked mix of shiny, colorful exteriors and decaying interiors, and - perhaps my favorite - Barry Schmetter's series "Memory and Forgetting" - shot with vintage medium and large format cameras, it was dreamy and chilling at the same time. It put me in mind of W.G. Sebald's book The Emigrants.

Of the non-photographic material, though I wasn't paying attention, Amy Combs' charcoals definitely jumped out.

Next year - several visits, no question about it.

Happy Independence Day

I don't have anything even remotely interesting to say about Independence Day and its significance this year, so let me wish everyone a safe and happy Fourth of July weekend by saying that I am conflicted about how, and even whether, to celebrate it. On the one hand, even the slightest display of nationalism is repugnant to me, especially the empty, flag-waving kind. On the other, I do feel very strongly that this is the absolutely best country in the world in countless respects and that I would not want to live anywhere else, and surely the creation of such a place ought to be celebrated, no? Happy grilling, everyone.

Ikea, Slight Return

I guess I should have expected the filing cabinet I bought at Ikea a couple of weeks ago to have been designed for A4 hanging folders. Not for nothing are they known for selling the same exact products in every country in which they do business.

Ikea

In a blurb in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Ellen Ruppel Shell exhorts us to demonstrate responsibility in the face of economic difficulties by resisting the disposable nature of many of today's products and instead buying lasting quality. Her whipping post is Ikea -- the world's largest furniture retailer -- whom she takes to task for selling essentially disposable, low-quality crap under a thin veneer (pun fully intended) of striking design, while engaging in environmentally and ethically questionable business practices and being otherwise ungreen, all in the name of meeting a low price point. Well, having moved recently, and never really having owned any decent, or even coordinated, furniture, J. and I have been shopping at Ikea, and I can report that while relative to other stores, Ikea's prices are indeed somewhat lower, they are by no means cheap. Which brings up a side question -- why is furniture so expensive, anyway? Even $500 for a sofa seems excessive to me, and that's the low end, in the grand scheme of things. I mean, some wooden planks and polyester stuffing with some fabric stretched over it all? How difficult can it be?

But let's grant Ms. Shell her premise that Ikea is cheap. I've seen some gorgeous, heirloom-quality, artisan-built furniture. I have also seen its prices. Is that what we're supposed to buy during a recession? Well, both J. and I still have our jobs, have not had to take any pay cuts yet, and we live in a part of the country that seems to be weathering the recession better than some others. And even at Ikea, we have to be very careful not to overextend ourselves, buying one large item every month, if that. And The Atlantic wants us to spend five times the money in this economy? Thank you, Mr. Bennet, for demonstrating yet again how utterly disconnected the lifestyle coverage of your magazine is from the everyday reality of your readers' lives. There are far more egregious examples of the abiding cluelessness of the self-appointed cultural elite in the same issue, too.

But all that made me think of something else. Could we not say that the disposable nature of most of our personal belongings, especially furniture, however unsatisfying it may be to own, in fact contributes to the dynamism of the American economy? From an economic standpoint, we want our workforce to be as mobile as possible, right? The easier it is for people to get to where the work is, the more quickly the work will be done, increasing productivity. Americans move seven times in their lives on average, and we want to make all that moving as painless as possible. This is especially critical in a recession, when you should be far more willing to go where there is work than normally. So go ahead and leave all that low-quality, cheap furniture behind and go forth unencumbered. When you arrive, there's probably an Ikea there.