On Friday, we went to see Gordon Lightfoot at the Cullen Performance Hall at the University of Houston. I’ve never seen him live before, but growing up in Canada, he was as omnipresent as snow and moose. The hall was pretty much full (about 1500 people), and there were a couple of people who probably haven’t received letters from AARP in the audience, but they were definitely in the minority. Lightfoot came out exactly on time with his four-piece band (bass, lead guitar, drums, keyboards) and launched into songs without any preamble. He did all the familiar ones plus a number I didn’t know. The guy is 75 years old, so he can be forgiven if his voice is a little reedy in the higher registers. A couple of people in the audience shouted at him between tunes (“We love you, Gordon”) to which he gave his standard response, “I love the work.” They took a 15 minute intermission but played for the better part of two hours. Then they got on a plane and headed back to Toronto. It was a nice way to spend Valentine’s Day.
I finished The Year of the Storm by John Mantooth and started To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris. The latter is a horror novel set in Alabama. Given the number of twisters in the story (and not all in the same year), it might have been called The Book of Storms. It is an excellent novel that I highly recommend. I’ve never read anything else by Mantooth, but I certainly hope to in the future. The Ferris novel just showed up on the doorstep last week. I don’t recall requesting it, though I suppose I might have gotten it via Goodreads. I knew nothing about the author, but I decided to give it a shot and I’m glad I did. It’s been a long time since a book has made me laugh out loud, and this one has several times, and I’m only a hundred pages in. The main character is a dentist, and he should by all rights be unlikable because he’s so self-absorbed, but his observations are amusing and his situation is getting interesting.
Last night’s Castle was a riff on Carrie, perhaps inspired by that viral video that was set in a coffee shop where everything went flying. King is name checked in the episode (Castle couldn’t wait to tell Stephen about the situation) and a copy of Carrie is found among the suspected telekinetic’s things.
There’s a trope in action movies that I despise. The hero (or anti-hero) meets up with his nemesis. The fight to end all fights is looming. To even the playing field, the hero sets down his weapons and they go at it mano-a-mano. He what? Why would anyone want to level the playing field in a fight to the death? I noticed (and objected to) this in Reacher and it happened again in last week’s Banshee. I was wondering why Hood didn’t shoot his adversary when the guy turned around to look at the car trunk, where he had a guy locked up. Instead, no, they had to go at it like macho men. With all the transports zipping past, I figured someone was going to end up in front of one. I was right, but not exactly in the way I thought it would happen. They conveniently didn’t mention how the transport driver felt about that.
People in Banshee seem to have anger management issues. Hood got into two melees this week. “That’s starting to be a thing,” Sugar observed. The young Hood should have listened to Sugar when he said that Lili was all kinds of trouble. Not the good kind, as young Hood claimed. She and Procter have a disconcerting relationship, to say the least. And that Burton character (Proctor’s cleaner) is one weird dude. I wonder who’s at the other end of that whip. I can’t see how he possibly missed the watch, though. And the kicker of the episode: the diamonds Hood went to prison for were glass.
Only three True Detective episodes left and we now have some idea of what it’s all about. The interrogation room scenes have all been leading up to the fact that there’s a new murder in Lake Charles that looks like the old one from ’95, and the cops think Rust was behind it. Rust has been sly like a wolf: he knows about the murder and he’s been trying to see what the cops can tell him about it rather than the other way around. The fact that he’s been drinking beer the whole time makes anything he says inadmissible. Not that he’s learned much. Given that about 20 years have passed since the murder that got this ball rolling, the killer must be getting along in years.
Listening to Marty and Rust describe the scene at the meth lab as it played out was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. They made up a story to cover the fact that Marty popped a cap on the cook after finding the locked up kids. Rust covered for him, so their bond became tighter than ever. Remains to be seen what happened in the future to bust them up. Rust even had a girlfriend for a while, imagine that, and Marty’s wife let him go back home. For a second, when Marty’s kids were playing with that tiara that ended up in the tree, I was worried they were going to go after it and fall, given what Marty was talking about at the time. One of my favorite lines from the episode: Death created time to grow the things that it would kill. Rust thinks that we’re caught in an endless loop of repetition. Now where have I heard that idea before?
For anyone interested in delving deeper into the show’s mythology, The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is free for Kindle. This is a cobbled-together eBook that apparently has formatting issues, so caveat emptor.
