On the way back from the NC Transportation Museum, we stopped in Greensboro to have dinner at Elizabeth's Italian Restarant, which is less than a mile from Edward McKay's used books, CDs, and other things. We couldn't resist.
However, we had a 20 minute time limit, which younger son strictly enforced, even though one of us spent all her time in the CD section and never got to the book section at all...
Here's what I found (all $8 and less):
Diana Reeves sings jazz
Four part harmony jazz
My Amazon order also came today, including:
I'm happily listening while waiting for the guys to get home for dinner. The taco parts are ready, the chairs and tables are set up outside, and the sun is still up at 6:30!
We often spend Super Bowl Sunday out hiking because the woods are so peaceful and deserted. This year, we spent it at my mother's house having a wonderful time celebrating older son's birthday. I totally forgot that the Super Bowl was going on.
However, when people started debating Madonna's performance in long conversations yesterday on Facebook, I knew I had to go check it out.
I've been a longtime Madonna fan and also a longtime not Madonna fan. I enjoy her catchy pop tunes, and we have her Immaculate Collection CD. However, as a performer, she seems very cold, even in her sexy performances, so I'm never really drawn into them. I wasn't predisposed to either like or dislike her Super Bowl performance.
After reading all the comments yesterday, I went to look up the YouTube video today.
Verdict: It was a very enjoyable spectacle. She had a good selection of songs,** good guest artists, fantastic dancers, and she still holds the stage as commandingly as ever. As usual, I found her very distancing, but she's performing in front of millions of people, in person and offline, so I certainly wouldn't expect her to be more personal!
Really, the first time I got emotionally connected to the performance was when the LMFAO*** guys appeared. I've found their videos very funny and over the top (possible future Friday Fun Songs) so I giggled when they came on. Okay, and when the gospel choir started singing, I got chills up and down my spine because I love gospel singers - so, for me, it was a better Madonna performance than usual. She really seemed to be enjoying herself singing Like a Prayer - more than in the rest of the performance.
Responses to specific criticisms I've read:
She's too old to keep doing this. I actually watched the video with this in mind. She's three years older than I am, and I certainly wouldn't do that kind of a show (of course, I wouldn't have in my 20's either). If you didn't know she was 53, and you just watched her performance, how old would you say she is? You can use this photo for reference. Was she too saggy? Certainly didn't show in that outfit - and it would have. Her face doesn't show many lines. The only criticism that makes any sense is that her dancing isn't as sharp as it used to be. Her dancing isn't the main point of the spectacle, though, so that's not so important. There were plenty of good dancers in the spectacle. Which leads to...
She couldn't do everything the younger dancers could. No, she can't. That's why they're there, and they were wonderful. They can't be Madonna either, which is why they aren't headlining a Super Bowl performance.
She lip synced. So does everyone in the Macy's Day parade. Maybe Sir Paul McCartney didn't lip synch his Super Bowl performance, but did he do cartwheels (assisted or not?). Madonna's act is not one designed around singing, it's designed around motion and spectacle. As fit as she is, very few singers can move that much and sing their best at the same time.
[By the way, spectacle and distancing don't have to be mutually exclusive. Bette Midler can put on quite the spectacle, but she still seems personal.]
She should have ended with a dance floor classic for an upbeat finale rather than Like a Prayer. I As much as I enjoyed that section, I thought it was surprising to finish with that. The more I watch it, though, the more that turns out to be my favorite part.
Predictable, boring and narcissistic. Predictable? You expected the Roman theme? Boring. No, there was too much going on. Narcissistic? She's a pop star. Isn't narcissism part of the job description?
She was wobbly in the four inch heels. She had a hamstring injury from a recent rehearsal. Short of redoing the choreography and costume in the last few days before the Super Bowl, they just had to deal with it.
I don't want to see someone my mother's age flashing their panties! Sigh. I didn't notice the panty flash until the third time I watched it. I guess I was too busy watching other things. People disapproved of Madonna's conical bras and sexuality in the 80's. They disapproved of her book, Sex, in the 90's. Why would she stop being controversial now? She paved the way, pop music-wise, for the display of sexuality from current singers. When Lady Gaga flashes her panties in a performance in 2039, it will be because Madonna did it first.
The Twelve Musical Days of Christmas sounded good when I put the list of music together on Christmas Day. However, yesterday, I realized that very few people would still want to hear Christmas songs after New Year's so I'm not going to continue.
It's been a weekend of festivals. Saturday, older son and I went to the Pride Parade in Durham (more about that in another post if I get to it)(If I don't, photos will eventually show up on our Durham blog). Today, younger son joined us for the Carrboro Music Festival. Younger son and I only stayed for a few hours. Older son was there for about seven hours!
I won't blog about everyone we heard. The festival had 25 performance venues and over 180 groups. When you walk down the street, one band fades into the distance as another grows louder. Some of the setups are quite simple. The Auto Logis/Peck and Artisans/Carrboro Music stage is just the parking lot under a tarp:
We enjoyed hearing Eminent Smith here. This was the first group that younger son wanted to stop and listen to (we met up with older son later).
Here's Hamlet's Dead, one of the songs we heard them sing:
After listening to them for a while, we headed back to meet older son at the Town Commons stage to see Stranger Spirits perform their show Rock Laboratory. Stranger Spirits has been a favorite of all of ours since older son introduced us to their music a few years ago.
After thoroughly enjoying their performance (and keeping myself from dancing along - this didn't seem to be that kind of a crowd), we headed on to the Open Eye Cafe to hear Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands. They were the opening act for the first Paperhand Puppet Intervention performance we went to in August (it got rained out halfway through). You have to like a band that titles a song Corpus Callosum:
The Open Eye was far more crowded than I've ever seen it (I have no photos of their performance because I hardly saw them), and I can only stand crowds for so long. Younger son was getting tired so we headed home. I took the long way to a further bus stop so that we could hear more bands on the way.
Those are just the mixed folk/jazz/Broadway tapes. There are about 2/3 as many mixed classical tapes. Much of the music I also have on CDs, but not all. I also like the way the tapes are arranged. When I put each tape together, I vary the songs as to female/male voices, tempo, style, etc. Because putting a mixed tape together is a slower process than putting a mixed CD together, I live with the music more as I put them together. I usually use only new music that we haven't listened to a lot before. I have a stack of music waiting to be put on mixed tapes/CD's - probably about 1/5 of our CD collection. I've made about half a dozen mixed CDs, but they haven't turned out as well as the tapes did.
We also get used to the order of music on these tapes, and, if we hear a song out of order somewhere else, older son and I can usually start singing what comes next.
This is part of what I've been busy with recently. Daughter played lots of music when she was here for the summer. We had almost totally gotten out of listening to music at home last winter (the winter/spring of sick), and I don't want to get out of the habit again! We've been trying to arrange things so that the music is really easy to get to.
This wonderful tape/CD cabinet (thank you to my sister!) had been in the far corner of the playroom. Being a playroom, things tend to get cluttered, and I was getting tapes out less and less because it was hard to get to the cabinet, and there was no room to squat down to look in it. We've moved the cabinet to the upstairs hallway and added a stepstool to sit on. The video cabinet which had been in that space is now in our closet. We listen to music far more than we watch movies or TV. Actually, the only things we've watched in the last month have been Darkwing Duck while I'm stretching (one episode is takes about as much time as a good set of stretches) and Star Trek: DS9 - younger son and I watch it at lunchtime when dear husband is out of town. I've cut Netflix back.
[To the right: The classical and folk/jazz/Broadway tapes.]
My next project will be the CDs. We've got them scattered in a few different places. We're moving the books from one of the bookshelves in the library into a new bookshelf we're putting in the playroom (where the tape cabinet had been). We're going to put some not-read-as-often books* in the back of the library bookshelf, and put the CDs in front of them. I counted recently, and we have between 600 and 700. That's not as expensive as it sounds because we are well acquainted with used CD stores in a few different cities.
It's 11:15 pm on a Friday evening, and younger son is happily doing his homework (with a cat on his lap) in the living room. He currently has two books that I've assigned as homework. The first is The Way Things Work, which he's read parts of, but he hasn't ever read through the whole thing. He's very mechanically minded so this is a wonderful book for him (have you ever thought about how many levers there are in the human body?). The second is the Usborne Book of World History - reading the parts we haven't already covered. Tonight, he's reading the first one - his idea. I was doing dishes at about 10:30, and he gave me a big grin and said, "Look! I'm doing my homework!"
I've been able to do more homeschooling this week than last, when I had a fever, but I haven't felt mostly normal until today. It's nice to get through the day without having to take two naps! This morning, he had a homeschooling class about flight (Do you know how often the Bernoulli principle has come up recently? Lots!). After we got back from a picnic/wander at Duke Gardens, he spent a large part of the afternoon making paper airplanes from the instructions at Paper Airplane Designs, a website which his flight teacher sent out.
It was our second time at Duke Gardens this week - this time without photography. We talked a lot about the gardens and also about the history of flight. On Wednesday, the two of us had spent the afternoon there taking pictures for our Duke Gardens blog and our Durham blog. He's really gotten interested in photography lately, and he took more pictures than I did! His favorite things to photograph are animals and birds. He's very patient and likes to see how slowly he can sneak up on them so they don't run/fly away. Sunday, he, dear husband, and I went to Duke's East Campus (below) to take photos and sketch for the Durham blog. The weather has been beautiful this week, and the fall colors are at peak so we're trying to get out and enjoy them as much as possible.
Duke East Campus walking trail panorama photo by younger son - the right and left walls are actually perpendicular to each other.
I love how easy it is to look things up on the internet while we're homeschooling. Instead of having to look through CDs for music, we just go to YouTube to listen to a fugue,
hear some four part harmony (older son sang the bass part ("I don't sing, young man!" in this quartet a few summers ago in the community theater's perfomance of The Music Man):
listen to Vivaldi's Spring,
look at a mosaic, and get a good look at HagiaSophia (which we also discussed at dinner tonight with dear husband bringing more in from his Art History classes and older son doing the same from his Design class).
Although I enjoy all the things we do, I love weeks that are calmer and can be very focused on homeschooling. After Thanksgiving, things get busy as I try to homeschool somewhat normally while running around shopping like crazy and then give up somewhere halfway through December.
I want to be more organized about it this year. Last year, I ended up with the most "running around like mad" part after older son was done with exams. :P This year, I want to be done shopping by the time daughter gets back from college (Dec 14 - I'll have two weeks). I don't want to be all stressed out when everyone is finally home!!
I'm not the sort that gets to know Very Important People. The only one I think I've ever talked to was the current Chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill (for about a minute - back when he was heading the Planetarium, not the University). I've talked to his wife a number of times (she's lots of fun!). He doesn't seem to be the sort I'd expect as a Chancellor - from what little I've seen, he doesn't appear stuffy or political.
Here is Chancellor Thorpe learning the dance to "Thriller" from dance students promoting the Eve Ball. He's to the right (our right) of the teacher, with the light hair and blue striped tie. I think that's the mayor to the right of the Chancellor (dark hair, no tie). The Chancellor's wife is to the left of the Chancellor (light hair, light jacket, red shirt), and she appears to be having a great time!
Not only is he a good sport to do this, he also posted it on his blog!- which is where I got it.
Because we know her better, we're probably the only household in Orange County who refers to the Chancellor of UNC-CH as "Mr. [his wife's name here]."
The Knight Arts Foundation is helping to produce 1,000 Random Acts of Culture - unexpected artistic performances out in the community. They're all documented at the Knight Arts website. I found out about them today when WCPE had a Facebook link to the Hallelujah Chorus:
The Opera Company of Philadelphia led 650 singers from 28 performing groups in this unexpected performance at Macy's in downtown Philadelphia.
