take me to the river

Thursday:
Too Many Numbers, The Scarlet Number 
Creative Source, Creative Source...And More



Friday:
John Lee Hooker, Sittin' Here Thinkin'



Saturday:
Etgar Keret, Suddenly There's a Knock at the Door
Merry Clayton, Gimme Shelter



Sunday:
John D'Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact
Paul McCartney, RAM
Mad Men 





Monday:
King Floyd, Choice Cuts
Lyn Collins, Mama Feelgood
Baby Charles, Baby Charles
Kings Go Forth, The Outsiders are Back
Darando, Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions
Various Artists, Street Sounds From the Bay Area



This is a non-chronological walk from my office to the Mississippi river, as well as a self-imposed Photoshop exercise. You will find the following above: 1) artist model through a screened studio window in Tiger Stadium, looking a little like the Hall of Doom, 2) thistle by the river bank, 3) a once definitive but now discarded refusal in the parking lot, 4) Tiger Stadium supporting itself, 5) the practice facility getting its Pop Art landscape on, and 6) the river peeking through the trees.

It's hot already, but not as hot as it will get and this little "take me to the river" summer humidity baptism is a way of embracing it before it swallows you whole, which is also what everything I read and watched this weekend was about. The Lifespan of a Fact is maddening and luminous, the multi-year back and forth between a prickly author and a laser-sighted fact-checker. Blessed be the fact checkers. Bless the dogged little hearts of those who just want you to get it right. I'm relieved when a magazine assigns one to me because while I could go on about the Truth like any other writer (I typed "righter"! Subtle...) that Truth is made solely of facts. A pretty cathedral isn't worth much if its strained glass ceiling suddenly rains in shards down on its congregation. Unless you are a journalist. The story in Lifespan around which the authors duel is about a suicide in Las Vegas, which gets submerged into the barrage of notes and the bobs up, persistent as death. Facts'll do that.

Somebody must have really broken Etgar Keret's heart. His collections of short short stories are a thousand points of hilarious perverse light, as are those in Suddenly, There's a Knock at the Door, but the light is dimmed, the twilight of love glowing through the cracks around the curtains, a golden shower of the whole world out there framing a condensed ball of misery. I want to give his Kafkaesque ass a hug before he turns himself into a worm or something.

I don't want to care about stupid TV characters like I do the ones on Mad Men. You see bad things coming like a train on the tracks but when it gets there your are all, "OH SHIT TRAINS ARE BIG AND CAN'T STOP IF THEY WANT TO!" I'm not going to spoil it, but dammit, Lane, you made me want to go out and do something corrective and if all it was was a sweaty walk to a river instead of getting some of that pie in the conference room next door, I'll take it. I might still get some of that pie. It is just a TV show.