Take Nicollet out to the ocean

Maybe it's because I got my mp3 player working again so I can listen to the still-new-to-me Hold Steady album Boys and Girls in America that made me think about Minneapolis even though this album seems less about that than the previous two were.

But I think it's the sunshine that left me feeling Minnesota as I stood there waiting for a bus to work on Wednesday afternoon. I just wanted to sit outside with a cold root beer or maybe some iced tea and listen to the Twins play.

For, as I then tried to rationalize, the sunshine seems more familiar than anything else. It travels better. There certainly aren't the blizzards here that I'm used to in the winter. There's rain in both places of course, but it feels different: at home you can see the black clouds rolling across the fields off to the west and think about what this will do to the crops, the land.

Here, it rains so hard it bounces off the sidewalk and soaks my ankles no matter how good my umbrella is, or it just drizzles in a way that permeates everything and leaves me feeling damp even when I am inside. Just misery with no context or benefit that I can see; it's arbitrarily judgmental like some old cranky beardy desert god.

Sunny days, I decided, are the same everywhere. Rainy days are each rainy in their own way.

Adagio

Just as I was thinking of forgoing it in favor of something a little more energetic, in hopes that I might get the laundry hung up or French toast made, Radio 3 treated me to a familiar chord swelling from inaudibility and carrying me along with it into the next notes just as I expected them. I was already excited. I knew this tune.

I listened to it a million times on repeat, when I was studying. Still it reminds me of Blakely Hall, greenflower's and my Christmas-light-festooned room, at the last point in my life at which I was a good student.

I've always been a sucker for strings, though. Ever since a preschool version of me saw some cello players for a few seconds on TV, I've been intrigued. I can play woodwinds (except flute) and fake my way through most brass and percussion, but the strings remain utterly foreign to me, and as intriguing as they were when I was little. I still want to learn to play the cello. Or any of them really; leave it to me to choose the most inconveniently-sized one. But then I think they'll invent anti-gravity jet packs before I get around to owning a cello.

In the meantime, there's Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. I turned the volume up, hoping to alienate the neighbors who are teaching their pet elephant to do jumping jacks, but really knowing I wouldn't because there's nothing harsh about Adagio (the very word is Italian for "at ease"). Besides, its ubiquity would probably just convince any overhearers that I was watching the dramatic bit of a movie or something. (The piece can be heard in films such as Platoon, The Elephant Man, El Norte, Amélie, Lorenzo's Oil and Reconstruction. Only one of which I actually own. But never mind.) But no, this was a single-sense event.

I can find it so difficult to listen to familiar music with fresh ears. But this time I didn't even have to try; from that first chord I was hooked. It takes me by the hand and strolls along, pointing out the first violins, the violas down a fifth, the haunting harmonies, everything playing in its highest register for the fff climax, or, in less technical language, the part that left me literally breathless because I had forgotten to breathe for a while.

Then I heard that this was the famous 1938 premiere of the work, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. No wonder it was so lovely: this time, everybody was hearing it with fresh ears.

(Should you want to, you can hear, or hear about, this performance here.)

I should go to Scotland on a fried-food pilgrimage

I just turned on my favorite Minnesota Public Radio station and they're broadcasting live from the state fair. They're talking about somebody who grew a tomato that looks like a brain.

That is so many kinds of beautiful I can't even talk about it.

It is an actual physical ache for me not to be there now, you know. But still I'm so damn glad it's all there, all still just as it should be. If there's a god in heaven, she eats macaroni and cheese on a stick.

P.S. I was trying to find out what the new food was for this year (there's always a new thing): Batter dipped deep fried fruit on-a-stick in a variety of the following combinations: grapes, honeydew melon, cantaloupe, strawberry, pineapple, apple, banana, kiwi, peaches, cherries, pears, watermelon). Inevitable, really.