The Long Good Memorial Day Weekend
Now Playing: Mick Jagger--"Memo From Turner," from the Performance (1970) soundtrack
Well. It turned out to be a pretty blasted fab Memorial Day weekend after all.

Saturday: The afternoon after the last entry, I sleeved and carded a host of fiction titles in the WRAP library--James Kirkwood through John Rechy. I left a message with Emily's mom--she probably had Memorial Day plans or something, so I think I'll try again later this week. Last but not least, "Saturday Night Live" was showing "The Best of Alec Baldwin." It was rather a poor selection, all told--there was no "The Mimic" or "I'm a Handsome Actor," but they did have his appearance on "Inside the Actor's Studio" as "The Master," Mr. Charles Nelson Reilly (may his greatness never end).

Sunday: I walked about ten or twelve miles, all told. Beginning in the Arboretum, I ended up a third of the way towards Ypsilanti before I'd finished, going through Gallup Walkway, Furstenburg Park, and Gallup Park itself. The morning was glorious and the place positively crawling with geese, both adult and cygnets. Afterwards, I had breakfast, as I'm now accustomed to pretty much every Sunday, at the Fleetwood Diner, which is one of my favorite places in this town, despite its detractors.

Cinema Guild showed March or Die (1977), an old-fashioned French Foreign Legion adventure with Gene Hackman, Catherine Deneuve, and spaghetti western fave Terence Hill. It wasn't all that great, although the beginning was magnificently conceived and shot, and it had an historical importance of its own as it was the first movie ever produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Many of the themes that would become integral to the later movies he oversaw were there: cocky kid learns the meaning of obedience/ honor/duty, women have no place in a "man's world," etc., etc. I remember reading an interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker where they discussed how Team America: World Police was a satire on Bruckheimer movies, and I saw a lot of the stuff they talked about in this movie. It was certainly entertaining, I'll give it that.

I also saw Wet Hot American Summer (2001), by some of the same people who were in "The State," the awful, overrated MTV comedy show of the early 90s. The only good thing there was Michael Ian Black, but everyone acquitted themselves wonderfully in this hilarious, unexpectedly twisted parody of "camp movies" like Meatballs and Gorp (both 1980--it's too bad they didn't throw in Friday the Thirteenth for good measure, although there is one reference if you look closely). I won't say anything else about it but that Paul Rudd's comic genius is, in my opinion, woefully underappreciated.

Monday: The centerpiece of Memorial Day was the show put on by Brandon at the Madison House. I had thought about not going, but then I decided on going. Very complicated, to be sure. I met a whole bunch of people, including another blogger, found some great free books at the house next door (including William Morris' The Sundering Flood, a novel he apparently wrote after The Well at the World's End), rediscovered the delights of Washtenaw Dairy, had my quadrennial cigarette, got to tell Fred Thomas how much I enjoyed his music, and just had a wonderful time. Most of the music was whimsical and introspective, with Nick Dykert (whose demo CD I got to listen to after I got home that evening--his music sounds even better supported by a piano, as he himself pointed out) and Fred Thomas (who made creative and entertaining use of a set of bells lying on the ground and any number of "found" percussive instruments and surfaces) offering miniature ballads of various degrees of heartbreak and longing, and some deceptively acid social commentary from Emily Powers and Dustin Krcatovich (the former sang of various down-and-outers whose lives she imagined in Chicago, and the latter delivered a wonderful song called "Middle Management"--which, as a former Barnes and Noble supervisor and one who has no car, I was in a great position to appreciate). The shows played in the tiny backyard, nestled between the house and a rug store on South Main. The latter was graced with a forbidding cement wall with a sinister door in the center. If anything, the setting enhanced the evening, with all manner of birds flying above us against a clear blue sky and the sun growing older behind the trees. Memorial Day was wonderful.

So I guess the bottom line is that I had a wonderful Memorial Day. Thanks, everyone.