Glen Campbell Documentary, "I'll Be Me"

Available through Netflix streaming, this is a very poignant documentary about Glen Campbell's farewell tour and his Alzheimer's diagnosis.  It's sad to see his decline but inspiring to see his family rally around him.  His music was part of my life as a teenager and later, so I have a musical fondness for Glen Campbell. The amazing thing is that once he is on stage, while he might forget the words to the songs, he never forgets how to play the guitar.  That physical memory of kicking ass on the guitar comes back time and again. It seems to never fail him.

To me, this documentary isn't as good as "Muscle Shoals" which I wrote about last month but it is definitely worth watching. Glen Campbell's struggle with Alzheimer's is a struggle that many of us will witness in family and friends. For that alone, it's good to see.  Add in his music, and it's a powerful tour of one man's road through a debilitating disease aided by his love and knowledge of music.

After watching this, I went on youtube.com and watched some old Glen Campbell clips. He was a handsome dude. But, and this is a digression, if you go that route, watch Glen singing "Gentle on My Mind" with John Hartford, the guy who wrote that song.  You can see it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bon3WIhDq4
I remember Hartford, he was on the Smothers Brothers Show often and he was friggin gorgeous and sexy as hell. As you can see in the above clip.  And then, of course, you can scroll through dozens of videos of Campbell and of others covering his (and Hartford's) songs.  Thank goodness for youtube, really.  Such gems are preserved there.

OK, good night.  And good luck.

What a cute galette!

For last evening's repast, which was mostly just snacky stuff, I made two galettes and some other things.  Now, to me (and to Stacey) the word "galette" is just fun to say.  "Oh, is that a fez you are wearing?  No, it's my new galette!"  Or "Are you running the marathon this year?  No, but I am running the galette in Spain this summer!"  Or even "Is that a galette I see near the moon?  No, stupid, that's called a cloud. Duh."

Galette. Basically a nice flaky crust that holds together something tasty.  (Or a hat, or a running course, or a kind of cloud, who can really say?)  The cool thing is that everything tastes better wrapped in a pastry crust and thus one can put anything in there.  Someone last evening said "you can put Cooper's food in that crust and we would love it!"  That is an exaggeration, only because Cooper's food is dry and tasteless, but the sentiment was correct.  When it comes out of the oven, it looks like this: 

only shinier (because I put an egg wash on the crust)  and bubbly and so, so good.  I made a caramelized onion and butternut squash galette and a caramelized onion and mushroom (with a tiny bit of bacon) galette and they were both outstanding.  I think a sautéed leek and apple galette would be good, or caramelized onion and Italian sausage and mushroom galette would be excellent as well.  Or toss some sugar into that dough and it is now dessert!

Yum. And yes, there is butter in that flaky crust but who cares?  I am  not the "it's the new year, I must do a cleanse and eat only water and air and tiny bits of kohlrabi" sort of person so I like gluten and butter.  And I love caramelized onions (who doesn't?) and other veggies all wrapped up in a glowing crusty goodness.  (And yes, my belly will attest to all of that and I don't care.)

Find a good, sturdy, easy dough and make yourself a galette.  Or wear one on your head.  Or try to fly one with a string and a nice wind.  Galette. Galette.  It's sort of like saying something simple in French (which it is, I suppose) and smiling at the same time.

more galettes:

  and that one is with fruit, how nice it looks.

OK, happy galetting!

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Slacker

Yes, I am. Slacker. Huge, and in more ways than just metaphorically.  (Is that a word, really?) I have not written in some time, as has been pointed out to me in no uncertain terms, and about that I must admit I like.  It means SOME ONE PERSON or persons is reading this. (Oddly, in French, the word "personne" means 'no one' and that is who I think reads this most times: no one.)  But someone is and I thank those two peeps for pointing out to me that I have not written anything in a while.

More writing won't happen tonight. I had my daughter, her girlfriend, my additional daughter and a friend of mine from the hotel over for wine and some snacks..... the six of us made my roommate run for cover.  We had fun, laughed and drank a bit and now that bit has caught up with me and my alarm rings very early tomorrow morning. Work is relentless, esp on the weekends.

I will write more tomorrow, Saturday.

bonne nuit.

Some past due book reports

The nice thing about "forced" vacation (i.e. when the business you work for closes for three weeks) is that you get to be slothful and do nothing except visit friends and read books.  I could add "watch TV" but for some reason I never really watch much TV, only in the evenings. Some people can turn on the box in the morning and watch an entire 12 part series in one day.  Maybe it's the shadow of my mother saying "go outside and play" but watching television during the day always seems way more lazy, slothful, wasteful and indulgent than I have the need to be.  It isn't, of course, but it just SEEMS that way to me, sadly.  So unless it's a baseball game or some earth-shaking news story, my TV normally doesn't get switched on until the sun has set.

Books, however, are another matter entirely.  I have often spent one entire day reading an entire book and have never once felt slothful or anything but happy.  I can read from sun up to bedtime and feel like it was a good day.

Jane Smiley has released the third in her American trilogy series.  The first, "Some Luck" was excellent, a great look at life in the Midwest, beginning in the early 20th century and ending after World War Two.  Great characters, a wonderful sense of the land, descriptions of Iowa and farm life that read as true and as real as a corn stalk. There was pride in farming, in living hard, in simplicity.  I devoured that one.

"Early Warning" was the second one, and it ended in the mid 1980's. More offspring, more marriages, lots of cousins to keep track of, much busier. I liked this one a lot as well, especially because the life was one I could identify with, at least the age of the country if not the setting. 

Today I finished the third novel, "Golden Age."  It ends more than ten years from now, in 2019.  This was my least favorite of the three.  Part of the problem, for me, was that there were simply too many characters to juggle. Thank goodness there was a family tree in the beginning of the book, I would not have remembered who was who without it. At times I felt like Smiley had a list of events that had occurred in the past 65 years and she had to get each one in, no matter how obscurely.  Nancy Reagan, check.  Bill Clinton and Monica, check. Monsanto, check. World Trade Towers falling, check. Yes, one could argue that so many of these things shook the structure of America and couldn't be ignored, even in a fictional account, but it was a bit much.  There was a lot more greed in this one as well, characters that were simply mean, cold, self-centered. I didn't mind that, it was a definite contrast with the hard-working farm ethic, but it made for a sadder tale.  And that's undoubtedly what the author had in mind: America is not what it was in 1920.

I recommend all three, of course.  How could a reader not like Jane Smiley, even if that reader didn't like a few of her characters?  Simple sentences such as these keep you reading long after you have tired of a rehashing of the mortgage fiasco in the early 21st century:  Was it strange that he had given so little thought to the future, that he was so engrossed in the next few steps that he had forgotten about the cliff at the end of the path?  It felt good, possibly, to be dismissed and given up on.  He thought, Being given up on is the nature of freedom, isn't it? And then thought that maybe this was the first real thought of the rest of his life." 

I also read the latest book by James Lee Burke, "House of the Rising Sun."  I have mentioned him before.  Burke writes a sort of detective fiction but that makes it seem trite and unimportant.  To me he is one of the best fiction writers alive right now, no matter what the subject.  If you read him, you know about his love of the south and of Montana and how that love translates to the written word.  If you don't read him, you are missing out. 

And for a true dose of junk food in the form of a book, the latest Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child is totally satisfying.  I have read all the Reacher novels and the previous one, "Personal" was very disappointing.  With hesitation, I picked up the new one, "Make Me" and was relieved to find it as preposterously entertaining as his earlier novels.  There is no merit to this series except entertainment; the writing is average, the characters are repeated (with new names and faces) quite often, the plots are similar.  But I can read one of these books in two nights and I don't feel like I have wasted the time. (Many people would feel that, however.) A bit of entertainment stirred into the pot of really good writing is like a dollop of sour cream on top of that bowl of really good chili: not necessary but hey, why not?

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Watching TV! What an invention!

Since I am in SF at Gabe's house, there is a gigantic television and tons of cable stations to watch.  (The fact that there still isn't much to watch belies that entire cable TV thing, but that's another story for another day.)  One of the stations is called something like "All Movie Trailers" which is what it is.  Movie trailers, over and over, on and on.  Comedies, dramas, tragedies, (much like Shakespeare), horror movies, Jesus movies, stupid movies, (unlike Shakespeare,) sports movies, tear-jerk movies, chick flicks, Disney movies, everything including movies that I think no one would ever want to see but I am often wrong in thinking that. Movies about fake zombies?  Aren't we over that genre by now?  Guess not. 

Movie trailers are fun to watch for about 30 minutes.  And on this TV station, there is no break, it's just one after another.  In 30 minutes you might have seen 25 movie trailers and thus the ones you saw in the first ten minutes have been totally erased from your brain.  The only ones you remember are the ones that have so much blood in the first ten seconds of the trailer that you have to avert your eyes and try to fast-forward through them.  Even then you don't remember the name of the frigging movie, you just know that you will NEVER see that movie, no matter what it's called and no matter how great the critics and your friends think it is when it is released, which could be a year from now.  First impressions, and all that.   

But still, I like movie trailers.  I have learned, in the past 30 minutes, that there is a movie coming out about the "Coast Guard's Most Daring Rescue"  and about Jesus helping a kid who was dying from a disease no one could recognize or cure until he fell out of a tree and hit his head (seriously) and was then cured and that you can learn to ski jump if you really try, even if you have no money and no talent and how someone who is an idiot can save a person's life if they are in a car at the same time another car drives by and someone is choking.  Well, gosh, how cool is all that?

And as I scroll through channels on this TV I see channels that are focused on "Cash, Coins and Pocket Watches" (who knew?) and Jesus channels and a channel called "Idiots" but I didn't investigate that one.  Shopping, sheets, shutterbugs, there are TV channels devoted to those and every other thing you can think of.  Of course, most of you out there already know this. I am in awe of the possibilities.  In AWE!  Seriously.  Gotta love TV. America does and as an American, so do I.

I guess.

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