Yesterday on our day off we went to Tracy's parents house in the countryside 30 minutes south of here and ate hot dogs and spaghetti, drank beer, lounged on the lawn, whacked golf balls badly, and watched Cooper, her dog, chase tennis balls for about 4 hours straight. It was an idyllic day. The place is secluded and beautiful and, as I gathered up some of the golf balls that we'd scattered, her dad and her brother zoomed off on their Harleys.
We have the night off. Went to see Ute Lemper do Brecht & Weil's The Seven Deadly Sins with the local orchestra, another great European piece like their own Threepenny Opera or Kafka's Amerika about a wholly imagined United States. In this one each song takes place in a different city - Baltimore, Hollywood, San Francisco, New Orleans - as two sisters, both named Anna, take work, earn money and make their careers in order to build the family home in Louisiana. The get demeaned, exploited (naturally), abused, and sometimes succeed. And in the epilogue they return to their Louisiana home.
Ute lives with Todd, a drummer Mauro and I recorded and toured with, but he'd returned to NY the previous day.
After her show I sat at the local bar with the orchestra's percussionist, who told me stories about Buddy Ciancci, the legendary mayor of Providence. Mayor Ciancci’s adventures are legendary, but he keeps getting re-elected. Either the city loves him or the largely Italian community manages to ensure that their boy stays put.
His wife was cheating on him and Buddy broke into the guy's house and caught them - and then reportedly ran a lit cigarette lighter up and down the guy's cock.
Went by the amazing Calatrava designed addition to the Art Museum here. The spines of this architectural sea creature fold down at night and open again in the morning. The temporary show on exhibit is called "American Fancy." Apparently, there was a furniture and decor movement right after the American Revolutionary War (or "the war with George III," as the English museum director preferred to call it), motivated by the new nation's need to divorce itself from its colonial past and have some style of its own.
There were wild, swirly-painted cabinets and dressers, and patterned wallpapers that were just plain loud and insane. Apparently, kaleidoscopes were a big new thing, and they duly influenced the quilt patterns. Very trippy - almost hippy. It's all, yes, a bit like tie-dye. Was there something else going on in the woods we aren't being told about?
Another part of the museum has a vitrine of amazing beer steins — a natural for Milwaukee. One of the companies that made them is still in business; they make toilets now.
I checked to see if there was a polka club happening tonight. We want to hear some REAL Milwaukee music after our show, but they run on Fridays and Saturdays. A club called Al's Concertina was recommended. The Lakeshore, another polka venue, does a deal in weddings ($300 for both minister and wedding chapel!!) and a polka band afterwards, naturally.
News:
The FBI used to infiltrate Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on a regular basis, so the SDS intentionally set up a division that taught sabotage, explosive making, etc. — all the stuff that the FBI was hoping to find out about. But the division was never serious. It was a successful scam to attract the agents, so much so that at one point an FBI agent at a meeting of this division looked around at the others in the room and realized that they were all agents too.
In an interview, Trent Lott says the torture and abuses at Abu Ghraib were justified in order to extract information. (And he wonders why foreigners hate the U.S. Then again he probably thinks they don't hate us, they're just envious.) He also says we should kill everyone in the world who hates the U.S. (If they attack us, he says. But did Iraq attack us? I don't think so.)
This man was the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, a leader of the most powerful nation of earth.
