The week started out with a very unique experience and not one that I would have ever planned. Any guesses?
Don’t think you would ever guess correctly. After an all day work meeting, Mc D and I were invited to attend WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Monday Night Raw. I remember my Grampa watching wrestling on TV on the weekends and have briefly watched some WWE on TV but never imagined being one of the 
rowdy nuts that watches it in an arena. It honestly seemed even more fake live and there were long periods of downtime between bouts for the adverts on the live TV broadcast. That being said, it was good, silly Monday night entertainment. The highlight was John Cena making a speech about how disappointed he was that the Undertaker hadn’t answered his challenge for a fight at WrestleMania.
On Tuesday it was time to get packed up for another trip to New York. This time some extra packing was needed (hat, gloves, boots) as 12 to 18 inches of snow was forecast for Tuesday night into Wednesday. Diana thought I was nuts for taking a flight when Nor’easter Toby was forecast.
Turns out I caught the last flight from DFW on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm. All remaining flights for the next couple of days were canceled. LaGuardia airport was like a ghost town on arrival since most departing flights had been canceled too. All of this made for a quick ride to the hotel.
Snow came down heavily all day on Wednesday but temperatures stayed above freezing and the snow was extremely wet and so there was minimal accumulation.
My boss and I decided to be adventurous on Wednesday night and brave the snow for a show at the Blue Note jazz club. The subway was a great way to avoid too much snow and we made an initial navigation error, heading to Brooklyn instead of Greenwich village. A quick trip under the East river and back and we were on track. The show was Eric Krasno and friends with the special guest of the evening being the pedal steel guitar wizard, Robert Randolph. I’ve seen Randolph a few times before with Eric Clapton and Anders Osborne and so was looking forward to the show.
Eric Krasno is a guitar player best known for founding the bands Lettuce and Soulive. You might remember that I went to see Lettuce with Alicia and her friend last year. He has also won a couple of Grammy awards as a producer for the Tedeschi Trucks band (one of my very favourites). The show was very good with highlights being a cover of Blind Faith’s “In the Presence of the Lord” and the Grateful Dead’s “Sugaree”.
I felt sorry for the folks queuing up for the late show in the cold and snow outside the Blue Note. We hadn’t quite had enough music for the night and so headed around the corner to Bleeker Street and the Red Lion pub which has had good live music each time I’ve visited. There was a duo of guitar/singer and drummer playing classic rock songs very well that we enjoyed for a while. Things picked up when one of the bar tenders joined to cover a couple of Janis Joplin songs.
Flying home on Friday afforded me a 40 degree temperature change by leaving New York at 40 degrees and arriving to 80 degree plus in Dallas. You can see by this picture from the plane leaving New York that most of the snow had melted and it was a nice sunny day.
Saturday was another nice day and after workouts we sat out by the pool for most of the afternoon and got some extended reading time in.
I finished Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan and would give it a B+ rating. The first 100 or so pages were a solid A but I started to lose interest a bit in the middle. The beginning was enough to convince me to try another Egan 
book, “A Visit from the Goon Squad”. This held my attention much more effectively and I read the full book out by the pool on Saturday. The book is centered around the music business and the change in the economic and distribution methods over the last decade. I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in music – the story telling is innovative, interesting and creative.
On Saturday night we watched “Lady Bird”, a movie that was nominated for several Oscars. The film is good and stars Saoirse Ronan as a high school senior in Sacramento trying to decide where to attend college. The interactions between her and her mother had me laughing because they reminded me so much of the conversations that I hear in my home.
If you’re a vinyl lover like me, you might enjoy “Why 
Vinyl Matters” by Jennifer Bickerdike. This is a coffee table style book that I received as a Christmas gift from Diana and has chapters from musicians and people involved in the music business relating why they love and appreciate vinyl records. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Nick Hornby who wrote “High Fidelity” that was the basis for the John Cusack film.
Speaking of vinyl, I revisited an album that I haven’t listened to in close to 20 years this week – “Toward the Within” by Dead Can Dance. This music gets very mixed reviews from people that I’ve shared it with – some really enjoy the unique Middle Eastern style instrumentation while others (most) can only stand a few minutes – which camp do you fall into?
Here’s something a bit less controversial from Professor Longhair – one of my favourites from his New Orleans style piano tunes. I’ve been practicing my scales and receiving commentary about how far I have to go to get back to reasonable speed and accuracy. It was interesting to discover that, similar to most measurements, there is a difference between the terms used to describe the length of musical notes between the United States and United Kingdom. What I know as a crotchet is a quarter note, a quaver an eighth note, a semi-quaver a sixteenth note and so on. This is all well and good but quickly falls apart when one moves away from 4/4 time and a crotchet is really a third note in a waltz etc.