In which we take a little trip

 Journeys: "I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday." — W. C. Fields

Despite being a great fan of Mr. Fields, I disagree with him on the merits of what was essentially his home town. Then again, I think he just liked saying “Philadelphia,” much as he liked saying “cockaleekie soup” or “shades of Bacchus.” I’m disappointed that he never heard of Tuckahoe, but I can’t imagine that one getting past the movie censors of the day.

Anyhow, we just came back from a few years days in Philadelphia, and I must say that I find it a great city to visit. In fact, we’ve been doing so for nigh on to fifty years now. In the beginning it was for the history, and we explored all the crooks and nannies around the Independence Hall and the south side, before and after our daughter was born. Then there were the wilderness years of the Villiger and Penn tournaments, away from center of things, aside from staying in the middle of town for early Penn visits and taking the trolley up to the college. (Once we even stayed at what was, if I remember correctly, a half-hospital half-hotel place within walking distance of the school with a lot of wheelchairs by the elevator.) Lately it’s been for long weekends, this latest one driven by the need to visit the Universal exhibit at the Franklin Institute, and then whatever art we could find in the neighborhood. Given that the strip where we stayed has enough museums to sink a battleship, we had come to the right place. 

First of all, as W. C. would probably have been happy to inform you, everything major is closed on Wednesdays. Fortunately we have a penchant for digging up minor sites and found the Museum for Art in Wood which is, indeed, a museum of wood art objects. Definitely worth a visit, even if it wasn't Wednesday. 

The next day was devoted to the Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia Art Museum (they recently changed the name because the old name was so confusing and the new name just nailed it, which is very Philadelphian of them). This is a spectacular collection worthy of a major city with some great gems. I made it from pre-Renaissance to post-Impressionism, regularly wondering sticky-fingeredly if they would miss some of the smaller pieces no one was paying attention to. In addition to stuff on the wall, there are a lot of recreated rooms, like the Gilded Age one below. I am a big fan of recreated rooms. That is one of my favorite areas of the Met. 

The next morning it was off to the Franklin Institute for their Universal exhibit. It was not bad, but it was all about how they do modern stuff (I get it, it’s a science museum) rather than any sort of historical retrospective, as the Disney exhibit a couple of years had been. I enjoyed it, though. 

And then, the Barnes. 

The Barnes is an interesting place. You can read all about it here if you’re interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Foundation Today it is something of a standard museum, but with walls-full of paintings arranged higgledy-piggledy. 

The picture is of probably the biggest display room in the place. Most of the galleries are small, with dozens and dozens of paintings up and down the walls. But they have this great app that allows you to point at a picture and get the info on it. Better still, when you get home, there is an email in your inbox containing all the pix you took a shot of. 

The Barnes is a place where you go exploring. You could just walk around and look at everything and pick out the pictures you like and study them more closely. Or you can pick one artist and track that one. Or whatever. It’s a far cry from the usual chronological narratives of most museums, but it’s perfectly acceptable. For me, it was mostly tracking down the Cezannes. Between the Art Museum and the Barnes, there are apparently more Cezannes in Philadelphia than anywhere else in the world. Loving Cezanne more and more as time goes on is probably a cliche. I can stare at his work forever. There are probably plenty of other reasons to go to Philadelphia, but none better than Cezanne in both museums. On the other hand, if you can go through the Barnes and not come out wishing never to see another Renoir, your constitution is stronger than mine. Yes, the landscapes. No, the kewpie dolls. Barnes the man was a big collector of both Cezanne and Renoir. I mean, they do each have their unique color palettes that mark most of their work from across the room and down the hall and around the corner. But other than that? Beats me. There’s also a few nice M/a-o/nets hither and thither. You can learn a lot about art history from the Art Museum. You can learn a lot about what you like at the Barnes. And there you are.

One odd note. We had dinner one night at a restaurant called Maggiano’s. There are a few of these in various cities, and they’re very old-fashioned Italian, but pretty good. The one in Philadelphia has a back room for banquets. As we were sitting there over starters, a troop of teenagers marched out of that back room. Ten, twenty, thirty… I reminisced about large groups of debaters at travel tournaments, and still they poured out. Forty, fifty, sixty… By the time over a hundred clowns had exited the VW, we could no longer hazard a guess of who or why. And then the next thing you knew, another army of them came in from the outside and took over where the first army had decamped. As we were leaving we grabbed a couple of this endless stream of adolescence back and forth and learned that California has a habit of shipping it’s teenagers across the country at Springtime to get a view of how the other half lives. They had started in D.C. and would end up in NYC, lapping up all the historical sights along the way. And, apparently , filling up the back rooms of every restaurant they could find that could fit them. Who knew? 

All in all, a nice couple of days. And now it's back to the salt mines and getting ready for States this weekend. Onward!

In which we watch a little television

There are shows I watch alone, and shows I watch en famille. Here’s three of the latter.

The Cormoran Strike series probably shakes all sorts of skeletons in the literary closet, and for that matter just plain skeletons in general. You can’t talk about a Rowling project without addressing the transphobic elephant in the room, but now I just have and we’ll let it go at that. Suffice it to say that I have not embargoed her work, but also have not embraced her cause. Make of that what you will, because I barely know what to make of it myself. I admit to enjoying the Strike books, until they got longer than, say, Dickens, at which point they are decidedly NOT Dickens, and that was the end of that. (Speaking of Dickens and Rowling in the same breath, you have to rank the two of them at the top of character namers; witness Mr. Murdstone or Severus Snape, for example.) But the TV version is spot on. The actors in the leading parts are absolutely perfect. We just finished the latest series on HBO/Max, but I was happy to find that there’s yet another one in the works. Will Strike and Robin get it on before the series ends?

Speaking of HBO and Rowling, the preview of their new Harry Potter series is inescapable. And, from the looks of it, the series couldn’t be any more unnecessary. Given the difference between movies and TV series, sure, there will certainly be a lot that wasn’t covered in the eight movies, but for God’s sake, people, move on! If you must continue in the Potterverse, make new stories, or new Universal attractions, or anything with the word new in it. How many times can you dig in the same hole and still find treasure?

Speaking of treasure—if you know the story you understand the segue—the second of our family shows these days is PBS’s “The Count of Monte Crisco.” It’s not great but it’s far from terrible, and since I have never read Dumas (oh, the shame of it!) this gives me a chance to finally learn what the story is all about. It’s a Masterpiece Theatre production from the get-go. You either like that sort of thing or you don’t. We mostly do. 

And the third show, also Masterpiece T, is “The Forsytes.” Ah, that brings me back. My first real dive into audiobooks, back when they were literally books on tape, was The Forsyte Chronicles, the whole endless cycle of trilogies and interludes and God knows what-all. Books on Tape, in caps, was, if I am not mistaken, primarily a project for the blind at the time. And when cassette players started to appear in automobiles, a project for commuters. I listened, and listened, and listened… For dessert I listened to Churchill’s The Gathering Storm before going on to cover the next 5 volumes on paper.  Which relates back to Forsyte, because the very first Masterpiece Theatre was “The First Churchills,” which I watched at the time, and the whole MT series was predicated on the success of the BBC’s “The Forsyte Saga.” It’s all related. Anyhow, the latest version is on the edge of watchable, because it has too many characters in too many small bites to get any real narrative juice going. We’ve watched the first two and will stick with it for at least one more, but if it doesn’t slow down soon we may not finish it. Galsworthy wrote enough books to take over a whole couple of networks for millennia; downing them all in one Cliff’s Note seems either unambitious or too ambitious, depending on your point of view. Anyhow, as I say, we’ll stick with it a little while longer. The performers are all fine; it’s the writing that’s suspect. 

In which we do not tee off

 I was supposed to play golf today, but we abide by the 50 degree rule: if it’s not over 50 degrees, we don’t play. Golf is supposed to be fun in the sun, not shivering in the damp. Oh, well. We haven’t played yet this year, but I did take a whack at a few balls on the range a couple of days ago, so when we finally do get out there, I’ll be marginally warmed up and ready for action. Meanwhile, if I can’t play golf, there’s always blogging.

Books (audio division): After dumping Bleak House, I went for Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat, which is #7 of the Dresden books. As always, it did the job. In aid of changing the mood entirely, after finishing off the wizard in Chicago, I then went to Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent. I found this to be different from what I was expecting, which was some sort of memoir. Instead, it’s an exploration of Shakespeare by a noted player—not, btw, narrated by said noted player—and as such it’s really interesting and, at the same time, a pretty lousy audiobook. With audio I am on the lookout for fast-paced narratives. I listen while I’m walking, which in its own way sets the parameters of what works or not. Slow-paced simply doesn’t make it; one needs the beating of the drum to keep the galley oars ploughing the waters. (And, as noted previously with Bleak House, some idea that the end is in sight before one shuffles off the Mortal C). So Dame J only got an hour before I turned to The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H. G. Parry, which got off to a great start. I loved her The Magician’s Daughter, although I didn’t much care for her A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, which just goes to show that you can’t win them all. She’s quite prolific, and I’m hoping that in the long run I’ll be falling on the like side more often than not. 

Television: My general evening viewing usually includes an episode of an hour-long series, followed by an episode of a half-hour comedy. This means that I have watched a lot of half-hour comedies. Now, if you’re watching something that is allegedly funny, it is not out of the realm of possibility that you might expect to laugh out loud on occasion. But, sadly, no matter how good a show is, the idea of LOL is way more likely than the reality. But in the immortal words of the Wizard of Oz, “Not so fast. Not so fast!” 

Enter “Vicious,” stage left. This is truly a laugh-out-loud program. It may be one of the funniest shows ever. This week I finished the first season with their Christmas show, and watched the most droll and perhaps longest double-take ever, to which the whole season was building up. Ian McKellen is a gift to humanity. His costar, Derek Jacobi, is no slouch either. I’m mildly reminded of “The Thick of It” as far as the writing here is concerned. The show is available on Prime, and if you don’t start watching it now, you deserve to watch every Trump speech in hell for all eternity. (For that matter, you have watched “The Thick of It”, right? The source of the phrase “as useless as a marzipan dildo”? I mean, seriously, if not, you need to catch up.)

And I don’t think I mentioned that I finished the first season of “The Punisher.” I know I’ve mentioned these second-tier Netflix Marvel shows in general before. They are now part of Disney+, and I’ve been working my way through them methodically, and while I don’t think they’re for the ages, they are perfectly entertaining (if slightly drawn out). I’m now watching the second Luke Cage series (I’m doing them in order, and for the record, already watched Jessica Jones season two out of order before I cottoned to the fact that all the different shows were a set.) I hope to catch up to the recently released Daredevil seasons sometime before the second J. D. Vance Administration. 

Gaming: Having given up on Indy and the Great Circle, I went on to the highly rated Astrobot, which is cute but not compelling unless you’re in the mood for that sort of thing. I had fun with it for a little while, and then went on to Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. I’ve made it as far as having to assemble a crew and collect money by traversing Honolulu regularly fighting, as the game announces boldly, “ASSHOLES!” I got it at a good discount and I might or might not stick with it. I find that if I play daily, games work well for me. If I take too much of a break, they’re hard-pressed to bring me back. But overall, I feel that I get my money’s worth out of them. I know that my granddaughter will enjoy Astrobot when she visits this summer. And I’ve been pointed to a good two-person game for her age group, to wit, Lego Voyagers. This means getting a second controller and, jeesh, they’re not giving away those babies away anywhere. But one seldom weighs the price of amusing a grandchild versus the value. 

In which it is a far, far better thing—Oops! Wrong book.

Books

And roughly a thousand pages later, Bleak House goes back on the shelf. 

I guess my main Dickens fondness is for David Copperfield, which I’ve read the most times. But Bleak House is a better book by far, and could easily be Dickens’ best. (Of course, Our Mutual Friend is up there too, so it’s probably a pointless exercise to attempt to pick and choose.) As I noted a while back, I was listening to Miriam Margolyes' reading of it, which is excellent, but at skatey-eight million hours I needed to pick up the audiobook pace, so I picked up the book in my home library and proceeded to read it for myself. I didn’t recall that much about it from when I first read it maybe fifty years ago. The famous line “I saw my mother…” of course, and Esther’s disfigurement (I doubt if that’s a spoiler because something tells me you’re not going to go out and read it just because your reading my take on it). I remember thinking that, like most of Dickens’ heroines, she deserved getting the pox just to knock her off her oh-so-perfect high horse, but still, she is a sympathetic character in the end, when she starts having less than nice thoughts about everybody. She does indeed change over the span of the book; not a lot, mind you—I mean, she’s always going to heaven on the first express leaving the cemetery—but she does grow up. 

Anyhow, two things that are interesting aside from the plot. First of all, half of it is written in the first person, Esther’s narrative, and half in the omniscient third person. Dickens of course wrote other books in one or the other, but I think this is his only mix and match. And it may be one of the first mix-and-matches ever: if not, it’s close. As a general rule, I don’t like this approach. In contemporary books it always seems like a cheat, as if the author couldn’t figure out how to do the job one way or the other so it ends up just stitched together as both. When I was reading James Patterson books for the Day Job it seemed like he pumped one of these out a month with some co-writer or other, and they all had this lazy approach. Usually the first person was some sort of psychopath and the third person the good guys hunting them down. But then again, Patterson sold enough books to make the Bible jealous, and Dickens at the very least had done it first, so who was I to judge? (Actually, I was the guy who picked the Day Job books, so I guess that’s who I was to judge, come to think of it.)

The other thing is one I don’t remember noting first time around, that the first person narrative is in the past tense and the third person is in the present tense. Present tense writing can be annoying, as we are mostly used to past tense, and it comes across in modern books as an author being consciously arty. (It was almost an instant NO in the Day Job.) And somehow Dickens pulls it off without a hitch. Then again, Dickens is Dickens and most everybody else isn’t, so that may explain it. 

So Bleak House becomes a lot of things. First and foremost it is a big book bursting with characters and narrative, and it’s one of the best by one of the best authors of all time, so while it may take a bit of one’s energy to get through it, it is time well-spent. It’s a damned good read. But on top of that, if you take just one step further, it’s a bit of a marvel in the complexity of storytelling using different narrative voices from different time perspectives, the happening-now third person and the looking-back first person. And, oh yeah, it’s a man writing as a woman in that first person. (The issue of Dickens women is way too deep for this post—or probably any of my posts—so we’ll leave that alone.) The whole thing is, in a word, a marvel. One of the great shames of modern education is that high schools have no idea how to set students up for Dickens. He is ultimately delivered as an author to be avoided at all costs. If they assign Great Expectations they allow that showing a movie version is the best way to grasp it. This is like thinking the best way to teach Van Gogh is to describe his work in rhyming couplets. Or they assign A Tale of Two Cities, the other hardy HS perennial, which is at one of the furthest edges of typical Dickens (he only wrote two historical) and on top of that has virtually no fun in it. Which is why, if I had to recommend Dickens to a teenager, it would be David Copperfield. It’s often funny, it’s engaging, it has great characters, a good story, and it’s maybe among the least amount of work for a great book. But to be honest, I wouldn’t recommend Dickens, or a whole lot of other great books, to high school students. My goal would be to make readers out of them, not make people who watched the VHS movie version of Great Expectations in the classroom out of them, or worse, Dickens haters by default. High schools should, for the most part, teach short, snappy books that kids will enjoy reading. (Which, by the way, categorically does NOT include Ethan Frome, which may be short but which no teenager has ever understood since the day old Edith put the pen down.) Science fiction, mysteries, enjoyable stuff they can actually read as part of their workload. I remember once having some fun with debate colleagues putting together a list of books for teens that they would actually enjoy and which might kindle a love of reading. But, of course, debate people tend to be interested in real education. Sadly, there’s way too little of this to go around. 

Meanwhile, who knows, I may never read another Dickens book again. And then again I might. One never knows, does one. 

In which we consider some moldy oldies

Music

In the news: Two recent obituaries in The NY Times are pretty telling for my generation: Augie Meyers and Chip Taylor. The former was the organist for the Sir Douglas Quintet, and may be most generally known for Sahm’s shoutout at the break in their hit “Mendocino”: “Aw, play it Augie!” This has a special resonance for me because recently my friend the Boomer Manqué recently asked me if I had ever heard of the Sir Douglas Quintet, as he had just apparently discovered them in his endless quest to be ten years older. Needless to say, my reply, which I can’t quite remember, was delivered in an icy tone. No one born in 1948 who owned a radio in the 60s should have to answer questions like this. Ask me about artists from about 1980 onward and I will turn from icy tone to glassy stare. We all have our generations. Anyhow, Meyers did more than just “Mendocino” and I’ve added the Texas Tornados to the queue for further exploration. As for Chip Taylor, the lead in his obit is that he wrote the song “Wild Thing.” When this song was released by the Troggs in 1966 it was widely received as one of the worst recorded songs ever. As it swiftly rose the singles charts, at least one deejay would begrudgingly play it for its fans and, when it was over, break the record on the air in the hopes that it would go away. I mean, let’s face it: at the time, even my grandmother could have played better guitar, and she was deaf, arthritic and slightly batty. Then again, my friend Tom AKA Whippy did a truly emotional “I think you move me” along with the record whenever it came on the radio. Sixty years later it’s still among the most elemental, and popular, rock songs ever—hell, Jimi Hendrix covered it practically out of the gate. And it had a composer, the late Chip Taylor, who, among other claims to fame, was Jon Voight’s younger brother. Sometimes, like this week, it seems that my entire youth is hitting the obits one player at a time. 

Sigh…

Oldies: Which brings me to my Oldies playlist. I’m thinking it might be fun to look at these and see if there’s anything worth talking about. The nature of the playlist is simple enough: it’s primarily songs that were considered oldies already by 1966, and then songs from the AM radio from 1966 to about 1971 that were definitely more AM than FM, although a few AOR numbers are there because they were everywhere. There’s also later songs that are sort of fun to listen to on the imaginary radio of a Spotify playlist while driving to the grocery store, plus songs that weren’t hits at all but they sound like the times, usually R&B numbers. Not all the songs are rock, because I’m working towards nostalgia to a great degree, and, say, “A Summer Place” by the Percy Faith Orchestra makes the list because it brings one back, not because one spent a lot of hours doing the frug to it. This will also give me a chance to clean the list up a bit, as playlists do tend to wander if you don’t keep an eye on them. 

So let’s look at the first 10. 

• “1-2-3” is just a good popular hit. One would never flip this song off if it came on the car radio.
• “16 Candles” is a good example of a song that was never current but was, to the Boomer ear, an oldie from day one. I also managed to include it in my Donald Trump “Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Playlist” on my ConstToonies blog.
• “19th” was one of the songs one longed for to come on the AM radio, as probably the best thing in the top ten at the time. For that matter, the Stones were probably the best thing, period, on the AM radio starting with their first hit. Flipping them off on the car radio was inconceivable, except, of course, for “Satisfaction” at about the one hundred millionth iteration. Even perhaps the best rock song ever gets tired after 50 plays a day. 
• “26 Miles” is definitely one of the songs on the list for nostalgic purposes only. Were the people who made this a hit the same ones who bought “19th Nervous Breakdown”? One wonders…
• The Beach Boys and Paul Simon need no explanation. But “59th,” despite being a Simon & Garfunkel song, was way more of a hit by Harpers Bizarre, hence the latter is here and not the former, but the former is in my general favorites playlist. By the way, it is probably the most famous use of the word “groovy” which, I assure you, was never ever ever a word used by self-respecting Boomers. Not ever, not nohow. 
• I don’t think I ever heard of “The 81” before it came up on some random album I was auditing, and I thought it sounded perfect as an oldie, unheralded though it may have been at the time. Hence, our first non-hit.
• “96” and “98.6” were both hits, simple as that, although they couldn’t be less alike aside from being in the late 90s. ? and the Mysterians—it was not meant to be spelled out—echo our discussion above on the Troggs: garage band perfection. “98.6” is simply sweet and, let’s face it, catchy. It deserved to be a hit.

I don’t know if you find this interesting, but feel free to play along as we go through the scorecard in the future. If you’re of the Spotify persuasion yourself: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ENNoOXIMMQRuoMzSsF2lj?si=c220993f30d845b8

In which we discuss AI in debate

And the CFL Middle School tournament is in the books.

Everything went quite well on the debate side (and, I gather, the speech side). I had fears going in about having one pool of judges for both LD and PF, but to be honest, these judges, 95% of them parents, showed up where they were supposed to time after time, and did the job without a peep, and there we were. We asked them to acknowledge ballots and, lo and behold, none of them were too cool to do it. A few asked to be isolated in either LD or PF, and we obliged, and I have definitely suggested separate pools next time. What we’ll probably do is still use one event but allow people to prefer one or the other event if they are so inclined, as long as their particular obligation is covered. That’s easy enough in tabroom using pools. 

The only issue that came up, albeit peripherally, is the use of AI in debate. The general position of the various major bodies like the CFL is that it is a tool to be used, personal opinions about it notwithstanding, and so it’s okay, but it cannot be used as a source. That is, your evidence can’t be “Claude says 95% of dentists who chew cud recommend cud for their patients who chew cud” but otherwise, well, who knows?

And that, I think, is a problem.

Admittedly, use of AI in schools is an issue that I do not confront firsthand. I am not teaching a class where most of the students, instead of reading A Tale of Two Cities, or even watching the movie of A Tale of Two Cities, or even reading the bloody Cliff Notes of A Tale of Two Cities, tell Claude to write them a report on A Tale of Two Cities and hand it in as their own work. Given that this is still early days for AI, it is not hard to recognize AI writing when you see it. Better still, there is now software that can make the determination for you. As AI becomes better at it, on the other side AI detectors will also become better at it, so I don’t think we’ll be totally at a loss in the long run. Still, this is dramatically early days. We can have all sorts of opinions on what the future will be like, but the wise person keeps their betting money in their pocket. God only knows, and even that may be giving the deity the benefit of the doubt.

I see AI in debate at the moment as a perfectly decent research tool, which I think is where CFL or NSDA is coming from. I remember coaching in the 90s, and telling students when a new topic was released that one good idea for understanding it would be to find opinion pieces by experts and extrapolate ideas from their writings. I suggested searching the Op-Eds in The NY Times. Go out and find what the best minds are thinking on both sides and use their ideas as your starting point for your cases. I would probably say the same thing today, except that instead of spending hours using Ask Jeeves to implement their searches, they would spend two minutes asking Claude to do the job. And a decent job would be done in those two minutes. This is using AI to kickstart your initial research. Using AI as a research tool isn’t a hell of a lot different from using Google as a research tool. When I debated in the 1960s, we used The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature as our initial research tool. Same idea, different means. 

One thing I don’t see as a good idea is asking AI to write a case. In fact, I would ban this on my team. I see debate as an educational process, and part of that education is learning to write, to frame arguments. Can AI do this? Probably. Should AI do this? Probably not. If students come out of 4 years of high school debate as sharp writers able to effectively get ideas down on paper, they’ve learned an unimpeachable lifeskill. If they come out able to get Claude to do it? Maybe a useful enough skill, but it’s the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, to paraphrase Mark Twain. Still, I might want to learn to get Claude to work with me on outlining, say, or maybe there’s other useful aspects of AI that wouldn’t detract from a student’s acquisition of otherwise important skills. That all is on the table at the moment.

There’s plenty of play on this. I could have a case from somewhere, and I could ask Claude to evaluate that case and to suggest rebuttals. This is a step further down the line and needs a steady hand on the human tiller, but I can see it being useful enough. But here is where we get into the dicey area of AI in debate. I am in the middle of a round. An opponent brings up an argument. Can I ask AI, during the round, to provide me a rebuttal for that argument? 

We do allow students to look something up on the internet during a round. We do not allow students to go online to consult with coaches or teammates or anyone else during a round. In this situation, AI is a virtual assistant. Should we allow students to employ virtual assistants during a round? I would say a categorical no. We do allow them to work with coaches and teammates at all other times, and I’m happy to allow them to likewise work with virtual assistants at all other times, but not during rounds. 

Since as of yet we have not determined the best use of AI in education to begin with, being on the conservative side here is probably for the best. So, yes, let’s use AI. More to the point, let’s figure out how best to use it. But during a debate round? I don’t think so. Debate rounds are for students to learn to think on their own two feet, not on Claude’s two feet. 

In which we dress up, listen up, watch a season, and crack a whip

[I don't think this ever got published, so...]

Art: The Met Gala will be on the first Friday of May. Our invitation (which, to be honest, has yet to arrive) specifies a dress code for guests “to express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and celebrate the countless depictions of the dressed body throughout art history.” As soon as we find a famous painting of someone in jeans, tee shirt, and flannel over-shirt (and our invitation finally arrives) we’ll be ready to RSVP as a “You Betcha.”

To tell you the truth, the ensuing spring fashion exhibition looks interesting: “Costume Art” pairing a couple of hundred artworks with items from the Costume Institute. A while ago there was an exhibit at the Met pairing famous paintings with the actual clothes in the painting, including the Manet portrait of Morisot below. More of this? I’m game. It makes things you thought of as ethereal as quite tangible. See that dress? It’s the real thing. That very same thing. Presumably the exhibition will be in the new fashion gallery on the main floor, the one that has thrust the gift shop into the third stall from the left of the men’s room. 

Music (audit division): Speaking of high fashion, those doyens of haute couture The Grateful Dead came up in my audit cue with “Anthem of the Sun,” their second album. Most of it is noodling with occasional stop-offs at recognizable songs. At the time it introduced the uniqueness of the Dead for those of us who didn’t live in San Francisco. It was enjoyable despite its occasional sidestepping into dissonant noise (deliberately, I’ll point out). It was also hard to tell where one song ended and the next one began, except when you had to get up and turn the record over. It’s still enjoyable, albeit as much for its nostalgic value as anything else. It was certainly a step up from their wishy-washy first, eponymous album, but it wouldn’t be until their third album, “Axomoxoa,” where they learned to put together tracks that were both intact songs and Dead music. It’s been said that when all is said and done, the Dead were for live consumption only. Sadly, the one time I saw them, they sorta sucked, which is always a possibility with a troupe of ad-libbers. Sometimes musicians are on, sometimes they’re off. At least a record captures them theoretically at their editable, let’s do another take, best. The joys of live music far outweigh the negatives, though, as most big name live performers are polished pros, and we still do live concerts half a dozen times or so a year: not a record-breaking amount, but enough that, every now and then, you’re in the room when somebody gets off a good one. 

TV: I finished season 2 of “Fallout,” which has to be one of the nuttiest shows on television. Gory, funny, thought-provoking, well-acted, gorgeously produced—what more could you ask for, if you like dystopian SF? I await season 3 with bated breath. 

Gaming: For the record, I probably got through about two thirds of “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.” It’s a good game, don’t get me wrong, but after a while, as with most games, I got sort of tired of it. There’s only so much originality a game can offer before it starts being more of the same. I don’t finish most games I’ve started, with a few exceptions. I finished both Kal Kestis Star Wars games, for instance. The narratives kept pulling me through. And there have been others. But I don’t regret not finishing anything I’ve spent many dozens of enjoyable hours with, such as “Great Circle.” I’m far from an avid gamer, but I consider that the hours I spend / With a controller in my hand are golden / Help you cultivate horse sense / And a cool hеad and a keen eye…

A pourri of pot

 Some updates on this and that while waiting to work the CFL MS tournament. 

TV: Finished the Apple TV series “Down Cemetery Road.” It’s based on a book by Slow Horses author Mick Herron, and it shares that show’s nuttily interesting characterizations. In this one, it’s the bad guys that take the cake, namely Adeel Akhtar, Darren Boyd, and especially Fehinti Balogun, but the two leads, Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, are perfect as well. In all, very likable. 

Movies: “Project Hail Mary” has been garnering mostly rave reviews, and it is unquestionably a fun couple of hours at the movies. I had heard that there were marked differences from the book (which I loved), but aside from the fact that movies are different from books, that’s not at all an issue. This is a fun movie, and on top of that, it’s family-friendly. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

Music (audit division): Catching up on a lot of albums…

Sheryl Crow, “Evolution”—Crow is always reliable for some solid rock tracks, and this recent album is no exception.

The Millennium—Wikipedia pegs this as sunshine pop. Yep. In one ear and out the other. 

Sagitarius—Also sort of sunshiney, but much higher quality. I think that I would have liked this album back in 1967. 

Joe South, “Don’t it Make You Want to Go Home”—1968 Country stuff from the mind behind “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor.” Perfectly good if you want 1968 country stuff. 

McGough & McGear—A comedy album, British music hall stuff, in the wake of Bonzo Dog from Paul McCartney’s brother. This is why McGear is forever known as Paul McCartney’s brother.

Eire Apparent—Directed by listening to "500 Songs" on Jimi Hendrix, this album was produced by Hendrix. That’s its claim to fame, and it does not otherwise stand out. The cover art is emblematic, in any case: these guys look like a 60s rock band, say what you will about them. 

Soft Machine—Frankly, more jazz than rock. So if you’re a jazz rock enthusiast, as good a place to start as any. Mostly, I’m not, so I won't be starting.

Fat Mattress—Still on that Hendrix riff, this band was started by Hendrix bassist Noel Redding. Redding wanted to be Traffic when he grew up, and Chris Wood is even tootling up a storm on one of the tracks, but nothing here really breaks through, and the group did not last very long.

Delbert McClinton and Glen Clark, “Blind, Crippled and Crazy”—I have no idea who Glen Clark is, and I will track down his other music. Like virtually every other Delbert McClinton album (and there’s a million of them), this one has plenty of straight-ahead rock that I immediately threw into my main playlist. 

Santana, “Zebop!”—Another artist with a million albums, all of them with good stuff on them. Santana is one of the most reliable players to emerge from the 60s, from his first album to his latest. If you don’t consider him one of the top rock guitarists of all time, why are you reading this blog?