Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Well, I missed the Big Storm Of 2006, holed up in Milwaukee until late Friday night.  As I read accounts of suffering, privation, death and generosity, I had this feeling of deja vu that I couldn’t quite place: the pattern of sudden, chaotic natural upheaval followed just as suddenly by deceptive normality.  Then this afternoon, I realized that the situation was (very faintly, for sure) echoing the Indonesian tsunami.

Chez Perils lost power for about 15 hours between midnight Thursday and Friday afternoon.  The only lingering effect was the loss of internet access due, as I eventually diagnosed, to the fact that our wireless router got fried when the power came back on.  A couple of clicks on Craigslist, a liaison in a QFC parking lot, a furtive cash transaction and I now have Wireless G (an upgrade), and everyone is happily surfing again.

Others have not been so fortunate, and many are still waiting for power to come back on.  As folks try to ward away the chill, some unwisely bring fossil-fuel-burning appliances indoors, with tragic consequences.  No matter where you live, it proves that you should engage in some level of emergency preparedness.

Heading home from Milwaukee - last trip of the year, I believe.  Had to pause in my rush through security to video these kids bravely playing near E Concourse in the Milwaukee airport:

I have missed a horrific week of rain and wind in Seattle, it sounds like.  I watched a bit of the Seahawks game last night that was played in Seattle, and even though you could see the rain coming down and water on the field, there was little hint of the absolute havoc that was occurring elsewhere in the city.  When I called home today, I learned that my house had been without power for 12 hours.  Their (our) power came on about 3, but the cable is still out, so Mrs. Perils has not made her rounds to your blogs yet today. 

I hope the cable comes back soon.  I have a dialup account, but…  Actually, I could just hang out here in the Northwest Worldclub in Minneapolis until I hear for certain that the cable is back on, couldn’t I?  There’s free WiFi, free drinks and nibbles, even an espresso machine, although it serves wretched coffee (Egbert & Douwe or something like that - they took out perfectly lovely Acorto machines that ground real coffee beans).  But, nah, I’ll board my Seattle-bound 757 at 9:40, and hope my landing at Seatac doesn’t go like this one:

Update:  Seatac’s been closed off & on today as they’ve had power outages and wind damage.  I just checked my flight, and it’s delayed a half-hour “due to airport conditions”.  Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

I think I remember how to do this…

I’m travelling again - Milwaukee, where else? - and dropped into Perrysburg (Ohio) over the weekend to visit my mom.  As a matter of unwelcome deja vu, she’s nursing a case of shingles (deja vu for me - I had a case of them last June).  I’m glad I was able to distract her from them a bit.  I hung a couple of wreaths, repaired a couple of issues with her computer and we got out for a couple of walks in the unexpectedly sunny, mild weather.  We also put up the Christmas tree that we bought last year, a surprisingly (because it’s artificial) lovely one.  (sorry we’re in the way):

Click to enlarge

Then Sunday night saw me hopping Lake Michigan for a the work week.

Actual conversation at Chez Perils:

Mrs P: Have you seen the Britney Spears photos yet?
Me: (Quickly calculating the various consequences of “yes” (true) vs. “no” (bald…faced…lie)):  Um, Yes?
Mrs P: Can you believe that?  What a skank.  Besides that, she’s a big Bush supporter.
Me: Not according to the photos I saw.

I started reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith last weekend, and I’m having trouble ranging very far away from the book.  It’s been on my tbr list since we heard her speak and read a year ago.  On Beauty has the same wry humor and ability to confer genuine humanity on all its characters as White Teeth; however, where I think White Teeth was a whitewater raft ride for her, she seems much more in control of this novel, and it’s a pleasure so far.

I made the mistake of taking it into a cafe to read with lunch.  That was a dangerous preposition (I meant that), as I could easily have sat there gnawing on my burrito and savoring On Beauty for the rest of the afternoon.

As for the play itself - I reiterate that I am 2+ decades removed from my last exposure to the Gatsby story - my feeling is that, if you’d read the book recently, you’d feel a bunch of “clicks” as parts of the stage presentation interlocked with your recollection of the novel.  Taking the play as a separate entity, however, may require, if you haven’t read the novel recently, that you actively aspire to reconnect to the story and are willing to fill in the gaps with your imagination.  I think that there are themes in the novel that the play simply does not “sell”.

For instance, you have to take on faith the adulation of Gatsby for Daisy, as we don’t get to see their comparatively uncomplicated pre-war dalliance, and the Daisy on stage doesn’t make you want to commit felonies for her.  Yet this is the shaky bedrock upon which Gatsby’s entire edifice of accomplishment, illusion, imagination and (when all of those fail) will is built.  What we get to see is a fairly wan and unconvincing siren of whatever it is that Gatsby remembers and now aspires to.  The light on the dock may be green, but we’ve ignored a lot of red channel-markers to get there.

The Meyer Wolfsheim character, Gatsby’s alleged “fixer” if you’ve read the book, skulks around the stage without any stated reason for his presence, and no action or dialogue of his own to explain him.  He should either be useful, menacing, or absent.

What does convince is Gatsby’s overweening drive to will into existence the happy ending to his fairy tale.  He allows doubts to be stated about his academic claims and the provenance of his wealth, but the one thing he won’t allow to be de-mythologized is his avowal that Daisy has always loved him exclusively, despite her marriage to Tom.  He challenges her to confirm this most fervent dream of his, but she demurs.  It may be the only honest thing she does during the time we observe her.

One other thing that clunks a bit in this production: it seems that one of Nick’s theories was that the social disconnect between him, Gatsby and Daisy/Tom was an east/west cultural dissonance (in this case, “west” is still east of the Mississippi - probably Minneapolis/St. Paul).  None of this is evident throughout the performance, but they have Nick speak a line about it at the end of the play, and it simply doesn’t wash.  If we’re talking “rustic” vs. “sophisticated”, I’m sure you could find all the bumpkins you wanted to in the New Jersey of that era.

So, to summarize, I found Nick (the narrator) and Gatsby to be nicely drawn and acted in this production, and worth the ticket price.  And, if you’ve read the novel recently, a lot more of the play will undoubtedly resonate with you than it did for me.

As we left the theater Wednesday night, snow was falling in cotton-boll sized gobs, so large and dense that when I inhaled one, I thought I might choke.  It was as if the clouds knew they only had a couple of hours to snow, and they were unloading the greatest volume they could in the shortest possible time.  Here’s a video I took after we got home.  It’s large, so it’s easier on you to stream it from Youtube than to make you download it, though the quality’s not as good:

I’ve loved the soundtrack I put in, “Snowfall” by an old big band dude named Claude Thornhill, since I first heard it on a big band compilation that my dad gave me in high school when he was trying to deflect me from rock music.  I’ve always liked big band music anyway.  This song has this air of urban sophistication that is muffled, maybe willingly distracted, by snowfall whose loveliness catches its nonchalance by surprise.  The leisurely piano notes have always conjured an image for me of snow floating past streetlights and neon signs.

We’re braving the snow beast tonight to head to the Seattle Center to see Seattle Repertory Theater’s production of The Great Gatsby. It was a last-minute suggestion by a friend, whom we’re meeting there. It’s odd, but this will be our first visit to the Rep in years, and our first Seattle theater in the last year. Odd, because we’re members of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and have been engaging in week-long theater orgies in Ashland for the last 12 years. We spend that week being dazzled by live theater and promising ourselves to keep the momentum when the fall seasons start in Seattle, and somehow we never get it done.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, we had ACT season tickets for several years, but encountered a particularly weak season and decided we’d bag the season tickets and cherry-pick from the various theaters instead. Predictably, we never saw anything ever again. I read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby When I was about 25, and I don’t remember it making a great impression. Probably because I wasn’t old enough, and, as someone who didn’t yet own furniture, didn’t really comprehend the nuance of nouveau-riche angst. I won’t, then, be able to make a credible comparison of this production to Fitzgerald’s novel. Usually, though, when I see a movie based on a book, I try to divorce the two, and evaluate the movie as film and not as an attempt to recreate literature on film. I believe I’d rather approach this play the same way.

I’ll let you know.

Carroll taunted me in comments for not having my camera along to document the snow-dusted palm tree, so I did a walkabout today in the few minutes of daylight allotted to us in this arctic latitude.

In a park near the house, I was startled to see a pair of golden delicious apple trees bereft of leaves, but with apples intact:

Click any photo to enlarge

Even though the sun had shone for most of the day, it did little to remedy some dicey driving opportunities on the residential streets:

Our local pseudo-Polynesian Trader-Vic clone restaurant, The Luau, seemed to figure, “if life deals you lemons, turn them into Lemon Drops“.  The tiki god or whatever looks a little underdressed, and wondering if REI can supply some down hula skirts:

And, finally, here’s the Christmas palm.  O Tannenpalm, O Tannenpalm:

If you were watching the Seahawks-Packers game on MNF last night, you’ll know that the snow referenced in my Sunday post continued on Monday.  Actually, it started just before the evening commute, like 4:30, and the combination of that and the MNF traffic handed me a commute home from Redmond on the east side of Lake Washington that lasted almost 2 1/2 hours.

Once home, the aroma of turkey soup suggested persuasively that I skip my trip to the gym and hunker down with some comfort food, even though I’d skipped my scheduled session there Sunday.  A hopeful call to the gym to see if they’d closed early disclosed instead that they would be open as usual, so I bundled up in double-layers and gingerly trotted down there.

As I did so, conditions on the streets seemed to be worsening rapidly.  The so-called invisible “black ice” was all over, but especially on the streets.  I was amazed, however, by how many people were riding bicycles.  A gaggle of bikes, in fact, was parked outside the cheery-looking Latona Tavern.  The concept of “designated bicyclist” is hard to get my lobes around.

 Another sight that was a little jarring on the way home: a 3-ft palm tree strung with Christmas lights, its fronds weighed down by snow.