Kay and I saw WALL-E on Saturday night. Then on Sunday after having our tastebuds dazzled by Maxwell Street Market tacos (fresh from the border) and our eyeballs seared by the inanity of the last day of the Taste... we biked home and decided to see it again.

It's that good.

Frank Rich wrote a column about it Sunday in the NYT. He manages to talk about all the "adult" aspects of the film — at one point a video of a previous president urges the listeners to "stay the course" — without making it seem, in his words, "juvenile or didactic".

Thomas Newman's score is beautiful and compelling, and rises to the challenge set out for him: An ongoing premise of the film is WALL-E's interest in/devotion to/obsession with "Hello, Dolly!" It's his main source of information about the humans mysteriously absent at the movie's opening.

So Tom's got to weave songs from the musical into the score for the film. Right from the beginning, in fact!

Here's an example of what it means to be a pro: He does it completely, artistically, and creatively. I imagined myself in a production meeting, hearing this idea from a director, and decided I'd probably think it was the dumbest, least-musical idea ever. Newman makes jokes with the music, makes us leave humming it, puts the tune over different chords to give it a new feel for a different scene...

Genius. That guy's great.

The second time there was a problem with the projector, which mostly impacted the sound. I don't think anyone else in the theater the second time would have been impressed by the score. On the upside, I have two more free passes the next time I come back. Tempting as it is to see WALL-E a third time, I'll likely opt for something new. Anything but Space Chimps (gag).

(Not included among artists who properly use an orchestra are Eric Clapton and Smoky Robinson, who basically use 40 strings to do the movin' they don't feel like doin' anymore onstage. Also to lend an air of "class".)

Highly recommended! Too bad I'll miss it.

Pick Terrace Left for this one, if you don't have a box.

(If you do have a box, please invite the rest of the band)

Lower Balcony is good too, but only in the first five or so rows.

Songs to be recorded, current titles/working titles:

1. The Meadow/11ses/Elevenses
   
2. Dennett's Last Stand/Mediaventures
   
3. [our not-so-secret, secret '80s cover]
   

And it reminds me of this xkcd

Click here

I couldn't make it stop auto-playing, and I hate it when pages do that.

Know how to make the XSPF player stop autoplaying? (It's not responding to "autoplay=false" or "autostart=no" or anything like that.)

For the past week and a half I've been part of a program called Open World, which is a sort of US gov't-sponsored cultural exchange.

We've been taking them to an impressive list of Chicago restaurants including Rhapsody (at Symphony Center— great scallops!), The Billy Goat Tavern, Chicago Firehouse, Bongo Room, Opera, and Oysy Sushi.

I'm not used to eating so much.

Today's the final recording session. A full orchestra is gradually making its way into the studio, setting up under a forest canopy of $2000 mics, and beginning to warm up.

I got here around 9 am to see our engineer helping to carry timpani up the stairs to Studio 4. My job was to bring in a firewire drive with "Alsihad" sessions pre-set-up with click and video, and make sure they all work right.

Turns out the video was in the wrong format, but that was easy to fix. Re-export, re-import, done.

I checked the clicks with Cliff Colnot, our conductor (and conductor of the Chicago Civic Orchestra) to make sure there are no surprises once all the musicians are sitting there ready to go (and being paid.)

Right now everything looks good, and I've eaten a cinnamon roll. I'll post back when we're done— with a mix if I can get one.

I lied.

(I keep doing this. I'm such a blog liar. But these are all so funny. It seems like all the Charlie Williams in the country are spread out geographically and occupationally so much that I can't resist posting about this inadvertent cross-section of the population...)

On "Corvette Forum" out of South Florida: "I recommend Charlie Williams of RPM Motors for all your mail order tuning needs. Charlie has tuned 3 of my massive Whiplash cams via mail order for some of my DIY customers, and the cars run beautifully."

Further adventures in the vein of last week's blog post. (And then no more, I promise)

"Charlie Williams drinks a Bud in the tavern called On the Rocks. It is noon. He looks out the window at the haunted old pier whose denizens included the memory of himself as a boy."

The story from the Orlando Sentinel, is a profile of an old fisherman.

Really, the whole thing is worth reading. If you've met me, the cognitive dissonance will keep up with you all the way through the piece. But regardless, it's a well-written human-interest story that touches on overfishing and the collapse of global fish stock, which sits right around peak oil in the list of things that totally freak me out about the environment and what we're doing to it.

"He nurses his Bud and says, 'I could tell you stories.' He has stories about massive mullet schools, decent money at the fish house, and, of course, the grizzled commercial fishermen who wore rubber slickers, kept their Pall Malls dry in the rain, watched the moon, waited for the mullet to move."

Meanwhile in Chicago, another Charlie Williams nurses his, erm, foret and waits. He swirls his glass and says,

"What about putting the post-chorus in 11/8, and modulating to f#m in the outro?"

Maybe someday I'll sit on a boat, waiting for mullet fat with roe.

I originally set this up a year or so ago in order to track reviews the band was getting. Since both "mira mira" and "charlie williams" are impossible to Google (though Mira Mira less so since we started this blog, and the UK writer sharing my name retired. The Korean pool player is going strong, though, or so it would seem from the search results)

So I had these alerts going:

1. "mira mira" and "charlie williams"
   
2. "mira mira" and "chicago"
   
3. "charlie williams" and "chicago"

This stripped out most of the false "churn" associated with things like people tagging their baby photos "MIRAAAAAA MIRA MIRA MIRAAAAAA!!!1" on Flickr. (Why always baby photos?)

But then I got curious.

So I set up individual alerts just for

1. my name, and for
   
2. "mira mira".
   

(link to actual story, although it's not nearly as entertaining as the clipped version.)

P.S. We're still not on wikipedia...

We're up again, on a new server. The random images should load faster than ever! That is, the ones we're not stealing from other sites. Those will load at the same speed.

- W. Timothy Gowers "Bridging the Cultural Divide"

They do free tastings, which is pretty much heaven for a Zymurgophile... Cerevisaphile... maybe an enophile? like me...

I've been intending to share some of my finds... so... here, finally, are the two best beers I've had in a long while:

1. The top choice, possibly the best beer I've ever had, is

   Foret.

   It's a Belgian organic beer, rumored to be in fact the only Belgian organic beer. Apparently sold outside the US as Moinette Biologique, and according to the internets I am not alone in my enthusiasm for this beer.

   It's crisp and peppery and complex, and comes in a green wine-type bottle with a cork. Which might put off some of you who like beer 'cause it's cheap and unpretentious, unlike that stuff that normally comes in wine bottles. (What do you call it again?)

   This, though, is $7-8, which for (I think) two pints' worth is what you'd pay at a bar for a couple Mass Market Beers.
   
   
   

   
   

2. Flossmoor's Brown Ale, a local beer, is the other beer I'll mention today. They've been getting a lot of hype lately, partially because of this fact, that they're local and you can, if you want, actually drive down to the brewery in Chicago's south suburbs ("on the way to Grandma's house") and pick up some fresh stuff if you want. Also because it's quite delicious. I mean, we've got local beer: Goose Island and so forth, but this is BEER. It's rich and creamy, dark without losing its character the way some beers do... And it's about $10.

And berries.

And yeah, I know it's basically summer, but what does it feel like? Early spring. Spring beer. Drink up.

(from A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, ca. 1838.)

Art by Tiffany Bozic. Lots more at link.

Also, it's Fibonacci time. Happy Mother's Day!