▢ Mile

Working in―and thus spending time in―Central Falls is interesting. I'd had no direct experience of the city until very recently. I knew that it was physically very small, even by Rhode Island standards. It's also had a reputation as a hellish slum town. Some sincerely try to promote civic pride there as well.

To me it just looks the way a city should. Dense with a lot of small businesses. It seems to have kept its flavor even as some parts of Providence haven't. 

Xaos

This is a musical tidbit I found recently. From Albert Ayler, a saxophonist who had an apparently very short but productive life. It's antsier than I usually like my jazz to be, but quite interesting. Partly because there's a harpsichord buried somewhere in there, still a rare instrument in jazz. Also it uses the space where it was recorded in an intriguing way. Like, there's real echo, not just studio reverb.

Pawprints

Tonight I saw a flier for a lost cat. These always sadden me, because as capable as they are, cats are also tiny. Dogs, especially dogs midsize and up, strike me as having a better chance of being found. Which got me to wondering how many lost cats turn up later.

According to this source this source it's about three quarters. Less often than dogs, yes, but at least it's a majority of cases, even if the keeper of a lost cat may be expected to fret. So, that's something of a relief.

Vintage sleaze

I've read a little James Ellroy before. A short story collection based around his novella "Dick Contino's Blues." Contino was a real musician and actor, one of his movies having been immortalized on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Speaking of movies I've also seen the 1997 adaptation of LA Confidential. And I once read an interview with him where he kept bringing the convo back to how much manly heterosexual sex he was having with his girlfriend, which tends to make one wonder.

The Big Nowhere shares the Confidential format of jumping from the POV of one protagonist to another, three in all. Danny Upshaw is a sheriff's deputy investigator, and the most ethical of the three. Mal Considine works for the DA's office and is marked by ambition and being in an ugly custody battle. Buzz Meeks has connections to both Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen, and has a certain laid back rogue appeal.

Between them and other figures in LA's, um, justice system, they follow two cases. One is a Res Scare investigation against a film industry union that does have Communists leading it, but which is mostly under fire so that studio bosses can stiff them on contracts. (It's more timely now than you might expect.) The other is a sex-murder case with a jazz musician as victim, a crime the details of which break the Yikes Meter. Upshaw is initially the only one interested in the latter, which is why I'm calling him the most ethical, but there are signs the two cases might not be completely separate.

It's a dark and cynical story, but in an engaging way. There's a sense of things always moving in the background. And a lot of fascinating if none-too-sweet minor characters, like Terry Lux, an alleged doctor with a clinic and maybe not the strongest set of morals.

Wlking déjà vu

Ever see someone you think you know, start to say hi, and they just look at you weird because it turns out to be someone else, a stranger? Weird that this is something you almost have to apologize for. Like greeting someone you don't already know is some kind of act of aggression.

Then there are times when it is someone you know, they just don't remember you as well as you remember them.

Language

I speak English, in case you hadn't guessed. I work with a lot of people who speak Spanish. Which I'm slowly but surely reacquainting myself with. It's interesting to note that if Julius Caesar came back he might hear the Spanish as a distant rustic strain of his own tongue. The English would be barbarian gibberish to him. Interesting and humbling, in a gentle way.

Toying

There's an early Peanuts strip where Schroeder is noodling away on his piano, rapt as always. Charlie Brown comes up to him and asks if Beethoven ever wrote anything for cigar box banjo. Charlie Brown is actually holding a cigar box banjo when he says it.

John Cage actually did write serious―albeit not overly serious―music for an equally unlikely instrument. Decades later, concert audiences sit in an auditorium watching a young woman play his instrument on a toy. That's an accomplishment worthy of respect.