No Jive In 2005

Happy New Year! Soulfish Stew is finally back after an extended hiatus for the holidays. I’d like to thank all of my readers especially mo28, zoomga, shrub, hugs, ddblank, spacefink, mosquitohead, bmarkey, the duke, markeydave, and kp. There ain’t no jive in 2005! I am feeling stoked about this year. I’ve started a morning regimen to get each day going right and my energy levels are starting to respond. Plus it’s just awesome to be jogging around the neighborhood before sunrise. Everything’s quiet except for a few morning songbirds and lowing cows from the pasture behind my home all anticipating the lifting of the darkness. Before I head in for some breakfast a half an hour later the sun has broken the horizon’s plane and the sky is as light as my heart.

I didn’t do much over the holidays, which is possibly why I’m in such good spirits. I really took some time to just relax and act like a poet from Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”. I read some Faulkner books: The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses. I listened to some jazz CD’s from the kind folks at Fantasy Records: Benny Carter, Bobby Timmons, Nat Adderly, and Art Pepper. Expect some reviews of these soon at blogcritics. Mainly I just hung out and enjoyed the fun and fighting that is family life.

I had the house to my self yesterday afternoon so I watched some movies I normally can’t view when the kids are around. First I dug out the video of Trust by Hal Hartley. Man, when this first came out I was obsessed with it. I even made an audio tape of the dialogue. A quick summary for those who have never seen it: A high school girl tells her family she is pregnant. The father keels over dead with a heart attack. A twenty something guy (brilliantly played by Martin Donovan) walks off his computer assembly job after putting his supervisor’s head in a vice. He meets the girl and they build a relationship based on respect, admiration, and trust. Her mother is psycho as is his father. He carries around a hand grenade “just in case”, won’t watch television as “it gives you cancer”, and makes the local bar play Beethoven. The black humor of the movie used to really amuse me, but I’m finding it does so less with each passing year. After that I watched Ghost World on IFC. Steve Buscemi is just great as Seymour. I knew guys like him from the days when I worked at the record store – those totally obsessive collector types are such oddballs they make me look totally conformist. Thora Birch is also fantastic as the aimless and disenchanted Enid. I don’t know if I buy the theories I’ve read at IMDB that getting on the bus at the end is a way of committing suicide, but it is a way of imparting a deeper meaning for a film based on a comic book. Like so many indie films there are lots of keen observations on society and conformity included, but much of it comes across as mere “playa hatin” with no solutions offered.

Seymour’s blues collecting did make me wonder how much of the old public domain blues recording were available on the web. I haven’t made any in depth searching, but I did find this one decent site right off the bat so go check it out if you want to hear some incredible sides. I’ve also wanted to hear some old Cajun music of late – I was exposed to Cajun styles when I lived on Grand Ol’ Opry star Jimmy C. Newman’s farm back in the 80’s – so I found this awesome site too. I can’t attest that all of this material is public domain, but it’s probably safe to check out.