Consortium of Seven: Year 4

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Best of luck to everyone who got hit by Idalia this week.  We get a very small edge of it here in Virginia (and it's part of the reason it's only 70 today).  So let's look as a distraction at what I've found recently. ____________________________________________________ I keep pushing 2018's  A Simple Favor  at people; it's a smart, funny little weird thriller from writer-director Paul Feig that has a really fun cast led by Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively.  If you liked Knives Out  at all, this is for you.  It's just weird enough (Linda Cardellini shows up in a small role that's a great use of her) and it also looks amazing (there should have been a Best Costume nomination for it). Seriously, the looks in this movie are amazing.  Plus, a fantastic soundtrack of French pop songs. A Simple Favor  is streaming on Prime, Fubo and MGM+. ____________________________________________________ The classy stuff this ...

    Welcome my Lovely Readers! You are in for a very very special column today. I put a lot of love into this one, and I hope it shows. Let me take us all back to October 2005. I was a newly-wed and completely oblivious. I was hard-core into Harry Potter-land. With the release of Half-Blood Prince (on my wedding day) I couldn't have asked for more.  I didn't know that a new god had been born to my pantheon.   Fast forward a few years and my hubby had joined a horror book club that offered him 3 hardcovers at ninety-nine cents apiece.  Now, I had become aware of this phenomenon going on the book world that had teenage girls and their mothers screaming at book releases the same way they would for a Generic Boy Band concert (no shame, just facts) and I felt I wasn't allowed to join them. So I ignored it. But then, Hubby, with this book club... y'all he didn't get anything for himself. He got the htree Twilight books that had been published at that p...

  Sure do love songbooks, especially the compilations with the words to all the verses, plus the guitar and piano parts. The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs , published in 1952, is one of favorites, not least for the charming illustrations by  Aurelius Battaglia .     This great graphic-arts blog has biographical information on Battaglia, an amusing photograph of the arts, and more examples of his wonderful work. But I'll also just post a few pages from the Fireside Book so you can look for yourself.        Next week, more about the people who pulled the whole book together. 

 For about ten years, I’ve been involved with the musicians at our local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, playing keyboards or harmonica and sometimes offering one of my own songs during our weekly services. We’re a small group – maybe about sixty – and we’re lay-led, so things are pretty informal. We take the summer off, so August finds us preparing for the first few meetings of our year.  And that’s what I was doing yesterday morning with my fellow musicians, working on two Paul Simon tunes – “The 59 th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” and “Homeward Bound” – when another one of our members, who’d been at a different meeting, told us that he was downsizing his household and had a number of music books that he wondered if we would like to have.  We were interested, so Doug went to his nearby home as we practiced, and a few minutes later, he brought in about ten books. There were some guitar instruction manuals and collections of songs by Tom Paxton, Utah Philli...

It is odd to be shivering under blankets when it’s very hot and humid out. But that’s what an I’ll rss can do. I found mysrlf waking up on the 4th day feeling very good because duddenly my arthritic neck hands and feet were pain and stiffness free. I can schievr this with a dairy free diet, which I’ve struggle to do the past 9 months out of laziness and poof planning. Must’ve bend the fever and fasting this time   I hope to maintain this. Silver linings. But while ill, I found a few photos I’d like to share. I’ve probably included them in previous blog posts but here they are again. I had  time to think while I was healing and recuperating. I hope to keep the stress low returning to work. Very low. That’s my wish for everyone. Find something beautiful today. 

There’s a lot to like about Frans Hals. Even if we don’t know or remember his name, we know his works. He often elicits a smile, mirroring the smiles in his paintings. He’s so important, he has work hanging in the Louvre & there’s a statue of him in the town of Haarlem, where he lived, worked & died. He was chiefly a portraitist & made enormous group portraits as well as intimate paintings of single sitters. We know him best perhaps for “The Laughing Cavalier” but he was truly gifted – perhaps peerless - in the art of depicting humans as they really are, in all their proud folly, earthy wit & savage vulnerability. Complete with bad teeth. Sure, he could produce highly polished, phenomenally accomplished commissioned portraits, but his ability to believably portray a wide range of emotions & unguarded human states is so unusual that his work vaults out from that of other Dutch Golden Age painters. He perfected the depiction of that almost indefinable human quality – ...

      The professional event I'd been tied up in knots over in recent weeks technically went very well, though one person's bureaucratic power-trip continues to threaten as of this writing. I sincerely hope she will be made to see the light, this threat will fade, we can take our accomplishment in stride and move ahead into a brightened future. If nothing else, there has been much in recent weeks that has gone into my mental Things I Will Not Miss In Retirement file. Among the things to remind me of reality when  inevitably memory will go selective and I'll catch myself missing the good aspects of the job. All that, at least as plans currently go, is still a few years off, though.       Back to more entertaining and immediate things.     A couple of the ongoing FX series that I catch weekly on Hulu continue to move through their latest seasons.       Reservation Dogs is in its third and final se...

 Strap in folks.  We've jumped forward to the '80s and we need to talk about a movie that feels like it was made for TV (and I seriously thought it was) but apparently somehow  got a theatrical release. Hooooooo boy.  Do any of you remember the terrible movie Zapped!  from 1982, starring terrible person Scott Baio?  He gets telekinetic powers and just uses them to make women's clothing fly off?  It's creepy and weird and no one comes off well in it.  This is a very slight improvement with a kid named Grover (Jay Underwood, and forget this and see The Boy Who Could Fly  instead) trying to replicate his dead father's toilet bowl cleaner and, of course, accidentally creates an invisibility formula.  He has a best friend, Milton who is played by very veteran character actor Wallace Langham and out of respect for his long career I'll use his current picture. But BOY is he terrible in this.  There's actually good actors trying there best ...

    Ever been to the website Public Domain Review ? You should go check it out. Here are links to some of the man articles I've found there: As A Lute Out of Tune: Robert Burton's Melancholy All about wuat homeopathic physicians ingested during "proving" The memoirs of English clown Joseph Grimaldi   Victorian Occultism & the Art of Synesthesia James Tilly Matthews and his "air loom" -- madness or genius? To finish up, we have a link to the Fancy Turnings article for the illustration at the top of this post:      

Last week, I began a new series with a post about writer/editor Martha Foley .  This week, I'm looking at what happened to journalist and novelist David Graham Phillips.       This Wikipedia article has a pretty good overview. And here's a link to a New York Times article called "The Deadliest Book Review." This is the novel that inspired someone to shoot David Grzham Phillips on the street outside The Princeton Club:      While David Graham Phillips may be best remembered for his untimely, violent death, to me he is the author of Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Ris e, which became a film of the same name. It starred Greta Garbo and Clark Gable.

 Somewhere, about six weeks ago, I saw a reference to a book with what seemed like a promising premise: The Best Of The Blues , subtitled The 101 Essential Albums . Now, I love lists of almost any type. When I see online a teaser for an article titled “The 14 Cities To Avoid In The South,” I’m in, even though I’m not heading to the South anytime soon (though a few places in that region remain on my bucket list). Lists, especially when they’re accompanied by competent commentary, are generally great reading.  I checked the catalog of our local multi-county library system, but the book wasn’t listed. So I clicked to the inter-library loan catalog, and there it was, in the collection of the Hennepin County Library. (Hennepin County is Minnesota’s most-populous and is basically Minneapolis and its surrounding suburbs to the north, south, and west.) A few weeks later, the book, written by blues historian Robert Santelli and published in 1997, showed up in St. Cloud.  I hav...

sun·dry /ˈsəndrē/ noun plural noun :  sundries various items not important enough to be mentioned individually. "a drugstore selling magazines, newspapers, and sundries" Is there anything better than weekends, or days off work, when you can relax and attend to your own needs? Having time to sit and think, mend things or wash things, organize things; this is balm for the weary soul. I love these small chores. Right now I’m thinking about wallpapers… Scenes from my busy week: