Ice, Ice, Baby….
I’d vote for January as the “cruelest month”—not April—but mid-winter in Milwaukee is hardly a wasteland. On a morning walk recently, I discovered an otherworldly landscape of ice formations along the Lake Michigan shoreline. From a distance, it looks like your usual winter detritus, but look close and you’ll find smooth ingots of crystal clear ice. Click on the image to enlarge it to full size.
Shelf Life
I don’t know about you, but I plan on spending a lot more time over the next four years curled up in a warm corner with a good book. I’ve still got plenty of “I’ll get to that someday” books on my shelves, but that stash will likely grow bigger now that I’ve rediscovered the joys of the used book store.
Downtown Milwaukee’s creatively named Downtown Books has been there for years, but searching for some second hand Balzac recently brought me to its divinely musty environs. It brought back sweet memories: Paul’s Books in Madison, a State Street institution since the mid-’50s and Renaissance Books, that crumbling monument to literary hoarding that closed a few years ago (its stall at Milwaukee’s airport stall is still going strong).
Ahoy matey! Fathoms of books about ships.
These days, the book you want is just a few keystrokes away. But what about the book you didn’t know you wanted? Here, search engine efficiency gives way to fruitful meandering through old and new, current and long out of print. Curious about Virginia Woolf? Peruse collections of letters, essays, diaries, biographies, collections of criticism, and, of course, her own novels.
But you need not be a member of the Bloomsbury set. Turn the corner and find shelves and shelves of books about ships—from the H.M.S. Bounty to Kon-Tiki to the exploits of Captain James Cook. Hang a left and dig through the gardening section to plan next year’s vegetable patch. Around the corner is the music room, filled with juicy biographies (a solid row of Sinatra), opera librettos and—can you believe it—used LPs!
It’s exhaustiveness is exhausting. But leave your Google behind and wander. You’re among friends.
Saturday Night
The familiar looking cast of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night.
Is it a documentary or a commercial? Whatever it is--probably a well-knit combination of the two--Jason Reitman's Saturday Night is a wild ride. Reitman's script (written with Gil Kenan) hews closely to the time-worn backstage story ("I know we're just a bunch of crazy kids, but hell, let's put on a show!) But what it suffers in cliche and eyebrow-raising invention, it makes up in pure energy.
Reitman's camera careens around Studio 8H and its dressing rooms, shops and offices, chronicling the final hours before Saturday Night's premiere episode (later called Saturday Night Live) fifty years ago. I'll leave it to the behind-the-scenes people to confirm that the stage's brick-and-mortar floor was actually finished just minutes before the 11:30 pm airing. Or if a programming exec (a smiling and sinuous Willem Dafoe) had a rerun of Johnny Carson cued up and ready, deciding to go live with seconds to spare. Saturday Night is such a zippy blast that it doesn't matter.
We are, after all, watching icons in the making. And Reitman's actors find the familiar without overdoing the mimicry. Nicholas Braun (of Succession fame) pulls a charming two-hander, playing both overearnest Muppeteer Jim Henson and wide-eyed Andy Kaufmann. Matt Wood is a dead ringer for a cantankerous John Belushi. Cory Michael Smith puts Chevy Chase's ego on vivid display, particularly in a verbal brawl with Milton Berle, wherein Uncle Milty decides that revealing his legendary male member is the best way to assert his comic superiority.
After watching Saturday Night, I did a frantic but vain online search for a video of the actual debut episode. You won't find it on YouTube. But NBC is airing it in its entirety on Saturday, February 15th, ahead of a three-hour tribute special. I'll be watching.
Fallen Leaves
How do you say "acquired taste" in Finnish? I'll confess that I fell asleep during my first pass through Aki Kaurismäki's latest, Fallen Leaves. (Was it the comfy recliner, the late-ish hour, or the spirit of Scandanavian hygge getting the best of me?) But I decided to give it another go the next evening and I'm glad I did.
Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen meet sort-of-cute in Aki Kaurismäki's, Fallen Leaves.
Fallen Leaves is a sort of meet cute where the "cute" is doled out in teaspoons rather than poured on like pancake syrup. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are two very lonely people working brutal, industrial jobs. Their paths unwittingly cross a few times as Kaurismaki's sparingly offers glimpses into their lives. They glance at each other across a crowded bar. She walks past him drunk and asleep at a bus stop. They are in a crowd of passersby to watch the police cart away the owner of a local bar (she works there, he's a customer). Eventually, a “romance” starts to bloom—coffee, a dinner, a movie. (They see Jim Jarmusch’s “quirky” zombie flick, The Dead Don’t Die. Kaurismaki loves to pay tribute to his favorite auteurs.) But the road to relationship is full of substantial potholes and their journey is both bleak and hilarious.
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram
I’m a little late to the party for this dazzling 26-year-old blues prodigy, who released his first album at the ripe old age of nineteen. Thanks to one of my regular Substack reads (the always interesting Ted Gioia), Ingram has been lifting my spirits all week (as only a great blues player can). Hope it lifts you up as well.
See you next time.