Making Pies

I haven't blogged for a while about the music I'm listening to on my iPod. How about Patty Griffin's Making Pies, a heart-breaking novel in the span of four minutes:

It`s not far
I can walk
Down the block
To TableTalk
Close my eyes
Make the pies all day

Plastic a cap
On my hair
I used to mind
Now I don`t care
I used to mind
Now I don`t care
Cause I`m gray

Did I show you this picture of my nephew
Taken at his big birthday surprise
At my sister`s house last Sunday
This is Monday and I`m making pies
I`m making pies
Making pies
Pies

Thursday nights
I go and type
Down at the church
For Father Mike
It gets me out
And he ain`t hard to like
At all

Jesus stares at me
In my chair
With his big blue eyes
And his honey brown hair
And he`s looking at me
Way up there
On the wall

Did I show you this picture of my sweetheart
Taken of us before the war
Of the Greek and his Italian girl
One Sunday at the shore

We tied our ribbons to the fire escape
They were taken by the birds
Who flew home to the country
As the bombs rained on the world

5am
Here I am
Walking the block
To TableTalk
You could cry or die
Or just make pies all day
I`m making pies
Making pies
Making pies
Making pies

(For my pie-obsessed online buddies, Jason and Michael Hasenstab.)

Commenter Michael Hasenstab asked for a link to a possible video and, like him, I came up empty-handed, though Foxfires music service thingy did give me this:

Patty Griffin

Patty Griffin, born March 16 1964, is a singer/songwriter from Old Town, Maine, next to the Penobscot Indian reservation. Two of her first four albums were unreleased by A&M Records. more...

[via href="http://www.foxytunes.com">FoxyTunes / Patty Griffin]

Hope it's useful.

Wil Wheaton Thinks Games Are Important

Who am I to argue?

When you play a game - any game - you’re using your imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time. When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn Diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. I suspect that for many gamers of my generation, that’s equally true ... and I know that my kids will be saying the same thing in 20 years about people they’ve never met face to face, but interact with almost every day in an online game that will make Call of Duty look then like Pong looks today.

An interesting take on the social aspects of gaming.

The Turnaround - Book Review

I'd said I'd give Pelecanos another try and I'm a man of my word. Of course, picking up The Turnaround at a rock bottom price at Waldenbooks' going-out-of-business sale helped spur me on and takes some of the sting out of working my way through one of his lesser attempts of the few books of his I've read.

An incident 30 years prior ties the main characters together as they seek redemption today. Pelecanos' attention to pop detail is admirable but ultimately his prose seems rushed and skates over the surface of these things, giving them shout-outs as he moves along rather than really digging in and giving us a sense of the past era or the current one. The Iraq War plays a part in the plot and Pelecanos does a good job capturing the worries of the family at home and dealing with the aftermath of the soldiers who wounded and treated at state side hospitals. A violent sub-plot finally leads to a rather static ending scene which ties things up too nicely for a book that seems to take pride in its gritty realism.

Not a knock out punch for me for Pelecanos. I'll give him another chance or two before moving on.

The Princess and the Frog - Movie Review

Though the girls are past the age of demanding to catch the latest Disney release, we're not and so we saw The Princess and the Frog. Forget the hype about this being the first Disney to feature an African-American princess; I suppose that's an important point to those who think that race matters. Like all good Disney animated films, you'll enjoy it for the characters, story, and wonderful animation - nobody does it better. But this one's an exception to the rule; Randy Newman's score and songs fall flat. They feel forced and crammed into the story, as if Disney, wanting to replicate its past successes, felt compelled to include music and songs, any kind of songs, regardless of their quality.

In some ways, the movie is derivative. Sure, we've seen this story before, where the plucky heroine sticks to her belief in herself to overcome the odds. But the setting is different and imaginative and conjures up an alternative reality that's interesting, so I'll give it that. Not Disney's best by any means but a solid entry in their canon.

Home Base for The Flaming Lips Leader and His Wife

Let's dial up the coolness factor for OKC just a notch. Dig this about the cool, cool home of the Flaming Lips' lead singer, Wayne Coyne, and his wife:

Some call it “Wayne Manor.” Others know it as “the Coyne Compound” or simply “that house where that guy from The Flaming Lips lives.” Regardless, Wayne Coyne and his wife, J. Michelle Martin-Coyne, just call it home. The Coynes have lived in their Central Oklahoma City house for nearly two decades. In that time, it has served as their residence, a crash pad for Coyne’s Flaming Lips bandmates and friends, a place to rest and relax after months on the road, a de facto movie set, a rehearsal space and, most recently, an innovative architectural project.

The online article is woefully lacking in photographs - pick up a paper copy of OKC Biz for some really good pictures of the Coynes' house - but I managed to glom onto this:



That's their house in the background. I don't think the mirrored balls are really part of the landscaping but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

Theft at Koss Blamed on Relaxed Attitude, Lax Oversight

My online buddy, Michael Hasenstab, updates me with the latest on the Koss Corporation saga:

It was a family operation, where top bosses mingled with workers on the assembly floor, where the chief executive juggled five major titles at once, where the board of directors barely changed in 20-plus years.

And where the company's vice president of finance could move around millions of dollars without approval from above.

In this unquestioning environment, authorities say, then-Koss Corp. executive Sujata "Sue" Sachdeva was able to spend more than $31 million in Koss funds on a lavish lifestyle and extravagant shopping sprees.

Grant Thornton, the company's auditors, accept no blame; audits aren't perfect and if the financial controls of a company appear to be appropriate and in place, an audit won't necessarily catch fraud. Though you'd think Grant Thornton would have tripped across an embezzlement of $31 million in a company with assets of $28.5 million and gross sales of $38.2 million. Still, it's a textbook example of the shortcomings of the accounting profession. We can only do so much. The rest is up to the company.

Appetite for America

My grandmother had once mentioned she had worked as a Harvey House girl and though she had seemed quite pleased with that little fact, I have to admit I never really knew what a Harvey House girl was. Stephen Fried was written a book which tells me all about Fred Harvey and his restaurant and the role they played in the lost era of railway travel:

In 1946, when Judy Garland starred in a movie called "The Harvey Girls," no one had to explain the title to the film-going public. The Harvey Girls were the young women who waited tables at the Fred Harvey restaurant chain, and they were as familiar in their day as Starbucks baristas are today. . .

It was a brilliant formula, and for a long time Fred Harvey's name was synonymous in America with good food, efficient service and young women. Today, though, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone aware of the prominent role Harvey played in civilizing the West and raising America's dining standards. His is one of those household names now stashed somewhere up in the attic.

I'm not clear on where or when she worked at a Harvey House restaurant. My memory is that it wasn't too far from her birthplace of Bokchito, Oklahoma, but that little town is, and was, so out of the way that I doubt any railway came through. This list of locations shows Hugo may have been a possible work location - it's the nearest small, big town - but likely she worked in Okmulgee or Muskogee when she was beginning to make her way in the great wide world. I can imagine her in a setting much like this one:


(The picture is from the linked book review.)

If my grandmother seemed pleased about her stint as a Harvey House girl, it seems she had good reason to be, claiming her not-at-all small part of a vanished America.

The Blind Side - Movie Review

Why wait for The Blind Side to come out on video when it's still playing at theaters and it's just about the only thing worth seeing right now? So we did.

Smart move, too. Oh, you know the movie's story by now so no point in me re-capping it. I'll just note here that Sandra Bullock's Academy Award was well-deserved in a movie that turns out to be quite subversive by Hollywood's standards. Did they know they were making a pro-Christian, pro-gun movie? How'd that slip through? And why did I find myself on the verge of tears throughout much of it? I can't explain other than to say the movie did what it set out to do - tell a compelling story about interesting characters in a way that didn't draw attention to itself which is all that a movie should do. (A positive storyline is helpful, too.) This movie did all of that and did it well.

The Damned United - Movie Review

You don't ever know what you'll come across at Redbox when all the popular titles are gone. We chose The Damned United because there was little else available and I'd remembered hearing not-bad things about it. Good enough, then.

It didn't disappoint. It's about Brian Clough's 44 days as head coach of Leeds United, a popular soccer team in England. Yeah, I know, so what? Well, it was a pretty big thing in England back in the early 70s and this movie does a good job showing you why. I'm not a big sports fan so I don't quite understand the obsession but in England soccer's as big as football. No surprise there, I guess but what was interesting was to see working-class England in all its late 60s and early 70s shabbiness, with the bad hair and loud clothes. Clough rose through the ranks and was chosen to lead a popular team when that team's thuggish coach moved on but hubris got the best of him and down he crashed. It's a story that obsessed the sports world while it was occurring but little known to me, so it was fascinating to learn.

The movie has a gritty look and feel which matches perfectly what appears to be actual footage from the era. Look for pictures of the real players in this drama at the end; the movie makers did a fine job matching the actors to the rolls. (And Michael Sheen, who's seemingly making a career out of playing Tony Blair and David Frost, does another great job here.)

A good choice.

Surrealistic Windshield - Part 2

Not that I'm making this a series but sometimes you see some extraordinary things through your windshield. The early morning frost and the rising sun the other day made for an interesting pattern on my windshield while I was warming up the Sequoia:

The sun's rising in just a few moments accounts for the slight difference in color in the second picture.