Checking kites

Kite pics! Photographic evidence to the contrary, I don't wear my stripey Hot Topic-esque gloves all the time, just when it's chilly and I'll need manual dexterity but can't rationalize wearing my riding gloves, or when I'm being very juvenile. Both applicable here.

I spent a quiet weekend, after a long cafe dinner with friends on Friday, napping and cleaning and mulling over what to do about the situation with Teacherwoman Mk II. It seems increasingly likely that I'll end up dropping her class, which will mean having gone from three hours of saddle work a week to one, unless I find another local barn that suits me. The odds of finding another Western class are slim, but more English work, even jumping, would still let me keep the appropriate leg tone and flexibility. Riding is supposed to be fun, and for the last month or so I've had dressage classes that were fantastic, followed the next night by Western classes that have left me wretched with frustration. That's not to say that dressage has been easy and that everything I've tried has worked, but each time I've come out thinking, "Okay, so that worked and this didn't. Next time we can work on this and make sure not to lose that." (God knows what the horses have been thinking, although for Cappi it's probably some variant on, "Sup-sup-suppertiiiiiime!") In Western, though, I feel like I've regressed; all I can think about when I leave is how many things we couldn't do right. Last week was a low point and is forcing me to reevaluate what I'm getting out of the classes versus what I want. Mk II knows how to ride, and many students really enjoy her classes, but she and I may be too similar in all the wrong ways—we're both acerbic, analytical, impatient, sharper-tongued than we mean to be—to work well together as student and teacher.

But lest I leave on a note of repining: The Dupont Circle Farmers Market gave me something of a boost. Not only were there Stayman apples (hey, if Eve fell for them what hope do the rest of us have), there was a bluegrass quartet singing something oddly familiar. "And if fate/ Should break my stride/ Then I give you my Vincent/ To ride." Why do I know that song oh my GOD I know that song! A girl could feel special.

You got the thorns, babe

So apparently I have no Elvis in my soul, because this weekend I found another country group to like. The Wrights don't even have the decency to call themselves alt-country, a face-saving genre label that allows the good urban child to pretend that she doesn't sometimes like a little steel guitar. Nope, they're the straight-up thing, although on Saturday they didn't have any backup, just their two guitars and voices, sounding less Opry-commercial and more bluesy, with a fine polish to their vocals. I missed the first part of their set, because c'mon, who shows up on time for the opening act? Oops. Be ye not so foolish. There are lots of love songs out there, but slow slinky call-and-response two-steps about the first year of marriage are thin on the ground.

(Him) You’re like some child always playin’ your games
(Her) And I never knew a man who could be so wrong
(Him) I’m warnin’ you honey if that’s your real name
(Her) You can call me whatever you want when I’m gone
(Both) We’re on the rocks
On the rocks

(Him) I don’t know why I made you my baby
(Her) Who you callin’ baby you made me your wife
(Him) Some best man he didn’t even try to save me
(Her) I can’t believe I gotta spend the rest of my life
(Both) On the rocks
On the rocks

We get signal

Main screen turn on! How are you gentlemen.January 15. Until then, "I'm a Vampire" and "Washington, D.C." on constant repeat.

The Magnetic Fields came to the Birchmere a few year years ago. Stephin Merritt has an anti-presence on stage, and after a particularly robust cheer early in the set he also winced and asked that nobody whoop in the higher registers, because it hurt his ears. Deep-voiced and ridiculous woos punctuated the rest of the show. Merritt didn't seem to be enjoying himself much until he and Claudia Gonson teamed up for "Yeah, Oh Yeah." She sang the verses while he twisted slowly around on his rotating stool, orbiting by the mike to deliver the three-word chorus and then spinning on, getting cheerier as the song got darker and the threat of violence more explicit. The most spontaneous reaction from the audience came during "Papa Was a Rodeo," when Merritt demonstrated his ability to sing one of his most romantic and well-loved songs while using an uncooperative lighter to get his cigarette going. "I like your twisted point of view, Mike," flick flick flick, "I like your questioning eyebrow," flickflickflickflick, "You've made it pretty clear what you like," flickflickflick success! "It's only fair to tell you now," inhale, audience applause, "That I leave early in the morning/ And I won't be back till next year/ I see that kiss-me pucker forming/ But maybe you should plug it with a beer."

[ETA: There are no concert dates scheduled in the DC area. Two of the three February shows at NYC's Town Hall are already sold out, and the remaining show is a Thursday night. Le forlorn sigh.]

Frolic? Yes please

Colic? No thanks.

There is one thing that seems consistent with horse-based businesses, which is a certain flaky vagueness in the front offices. I showed up for my one-on-one time with Doc tonight only to be warned off riding him or giving him the usual apple: He colicked up hard yesterday and is still recovering. My irritation at the lack of notice is small next to my relief that he's okay.

It sounds odd that colic is such a serious disease in horses, when it's a byword for nothing worse than chronic fussiness in babies. Well, I say "nothing worse," but obviously it's hell for the sleep-deprived parents. Still, colic in humans isn't generally a fatal condition; in horses, the term refers to a variety of issues that sometimes do kill. Horses' digestive systems are one-way roads, so anything they take in has to go all the way through their GI tracts and out the back. Unfortunately, that long coil of innards isn't entirely anchored in place, and sometimes a bit of food gets stuck or a section of intestine kinks like a hose, and the pressure starts to build. If the obstruction isn't moved along or the twist unflipped, the tissue can lose circulation or gas can accumulate; death can come in a matter of hours, often sooner than the vet. Even the vet is hampered unless there's a surgery nearby; you can't really do a sterile operation in a working barn. Colic is more common in stalled horses, who cannot walk and graze all day the way the animals are designed to do, but it can appear in almost any horse.

Horses have not yet evolved to the point of being able to hold up a sign reading, "Hello, I am colicking," but the indications are usually clear: The horse seems dull or uninterested. It won't eat or drink and may begin to sweat heavily. It may turn to look or bite at its sides to try to find the source of the pain. It may exhibit stretches that look like the flehmen response. Given anything like enough space, it will roll and roll (most horses roll for a few moments to scratch their backs; a colicked horse will thrash around for much longer). Treatments depend on the cause of the colic, but walking the horse and letting it roll once or twice at a time is a basic start.

Somehow or other, with the help of a dose of a muscle relaxant called banamine, Doc got things back to where they should have been, but he's still on what Stephen Maturin would call a low diet. I gave his usual apple to QC, then spent some time in Doc's stall grooming him and disappointing him by not turning into a pile of hay. I had missed the barn's annual Halloween trick-or-treating extravaganza, going to a Last Train Home show instead (Eric Brace? Still one of my favorite singers. IOTA? Still my favorite DC-area club, and made untritely Halloweenly with webs of tiny lights and huge glowing orange paper lanterns hanging from the rafters over the stage. Guy wearing a fake furry spider and a Phantom/Harlequin mask, offering cigs to everyone in the club? Still...not sure what was going on there), but the giant bats, strings of novelty lights, and corn shocks showed that the barn staff did a great job with the decor for the trick-or-treating kids. Among the costumed (sorry, Expat, no dancing) horses, QC had been dressed as an Oreo and Sterling as a plumber. The photos cannot come soon enough.

Not enough free time in the week

Lessons from the weekend:

• Live reggae in a coffeehouse offends the gods, who will soak the surrounding areas in icy rain. Which we need, but possibly could not so much of it have gone sideways?
• If you want to see the face of desperate addiction, the counter of the only coffee bar in the Ren Fest at 10:01, where the victims customers glare at staff who seem unable to keep track of orders, is a good place to look. Or a very very bad one.
• The Mediaeval Baebes' live show is oddly similar to that of the Pipettes: moderately decent singing, excellent backup musicians, and heavy emphasis on the "pretty women doing dance routines" aspect. Without the heavy engineering, they sounded a little thin, which might also have been due to the outdoor acoustics.
  
• There are still people who do not realize that you should know your drink order BEFORE you reach the bar and that thoughts of murder percolate in the heads of those behind you in line if you wait until you are facing the bartender to say, "Wait, what do all you guys want?"
  
• Michael Rosman does a phenomenal juggling routine with cigar boxes, a thing I haven't seen since the Moscow Circus came to town. (Speaking of which, hurray! The feds are keeping us safe from the dangers of international performers! Jesus Christ.)
• If you want to make a new mother very happy, sign her up for a massage appointment and don't let her say no.
  
• My aggro levels go up when I have to listen to an acupuncturist tell a roomful of people that proper chi maintenance prevents cancer, heart disease, and immune disorders. No wonder we are overrun with 900-year-old kung fu masters. Oh wait.
  
• Wong People's lion dance kicks ass. Not only do the young drummers have a "Do not fear, WONG PEOPLE ARE HERE" banner, their lion does cartwheels. Cartwheels! And also, at one point, he appears to lick his harbls, which I have never seen a dancing lion do and find greatly amusant.
• Dumbledore was, unbeknownst to all save the slashers, teh ghey. Hilariously, actor Michael Gambon, who plays the headmaster in the movies and is apparently known for taking the piss out of interviewers, once told a reporter that he has no problem playing gay characters because he himself used to be homosexual but was forced to give it up "because it made my eyes water." Dear Lord how I do love the British.

Ringing down the curtain

This morning I could hear Pavarotti's voice rising from the speakers of a car stuck in traffic outside my apartment. He had had pancreatic cancer, never a good diagnosis, but it was still sad to hear that he had died. Casa 3pennyjane was and is not big on opera, but I remember loving a recording of him singing the "Vesti la giubba" aria from "Pagliacci," and somehow his "Una furtiva lagrima" became part of the family repertoire of jokes and references. You could criticize his populism, his willingness to sing duets with Bono, but you couldn't deny his talent.

"Vanish, o night! Descend, o stars! At dawn, I shall conquer."

Summer isn't lost

The movie list for this summer looks pretty dreary, with the exception of "Stardust" and the trailers for "The Golden Compass" (I didn't like the books' conclusion and I think that Philip Pullman's a sanctimonious twit, but I ask you, how is a woman supposed to resist the appeal of armored polar bears?) PotC3, the only big summer film I was vaguely interested in seeing, would have been bad even if I hadn't read the Aubrey/Maturin books and George MacDonald Fraser's "The Pyrates." As it was, the crane suspending my disbelief snapped early on, leaving me to sink back and wait for it to be over, mostly resigned and occasionally (Orlando Bloom on the beach, with the boots, and the...oh God, I can't look, please make them stop) vaguely nauseated. On the music side of things, nothing particularly good is scheduled for Wolf Trap, the big arena shows don't appeal, and Gogol Bordello won't swing back through until the middle of July.

But enough whining, repine no more, take heart and don't look so pale and wan: Richard Thompson, famously the best guitarist most of us have never heard of, is coming back to town this month to promote his new album. The first single, sung as a soldier's blues about life in Baghdad ("Dad's Gonna Kill Me," and it would help to use an apostrophe in that first word), was released on his site a few months ago and has been getting steadily positive word of mouth for its sharp lyrics and gorgeous setting. The song neatly bookends the haunting and spare "Outside of the Inside" from an earlier album; Thompson condemns the violent fundamentalists who claim to share his religion, but that doesn't mean that the chickenhawks will get a pass. Chewy political commentary plus dysfunctional love songs (he describes most of his songs as having similar plots: "Boy meets girl; blood everywhere"), an enviably eclectic set of cover songs, and astonishing guitar technique, plus the guy coaches Der Gobernator's son in soccer and tells great stories about it? To the 9:30 Club, my people!

Geek rock and pretty girls

The Pipettes show at the Black Cat last night was worth taking the trip down 16th with the single slowest-driving cabbie I've ever encountered. I couldn't tell whether he was stoned, worried about points on his license, or nursing the car through some sort of existential crisis, but he slowed down for green lights, cars stopping two blocks ahead of us, and road seams. Over his cautious reaction to red lights several intersections ahead, let a curtain be drawn.

Once Rock Ninja, Historienne, and I got into the club, the crowd was so dense that we couldn't get very close to the stage, leaving Rock Ninja with a view that consisted mostly of "Pull Shapes" shirts on admittedly nicely built tall guys' backs. At least some of said guys were willing to dance in the limited space, so it wasn't at all a loss.

But that leads me to my next point, which is this: What is the problem with Washington audiences? Why is there so little dancing? I've seen it at show after show, everyone dressed all cool but just standing around nursing their drinks, motionless and slightly hangdog, like freshmen at Homecoming. Do we not know how to time the pre-show drinking? Does the hipster-wonk confluence induce social paralysis? Are we afraid that we'll get in trouble with the guvmint if we have rhythm? And if all of that is true, why does everyone suddenly dance as soon as the band announces the last song? Go ahead, embarrass yourself and your date from the get-go; flail around; show a little life. I promise, the bands would rather see you dancing badly but happily than staring like a group of bowling-shirted zombies.



Now we just need to convince the Flight of the Conchords to play Iota or another small space where we can hymn our new robot overlords.

Serendipity in a small town

Many of Texas's small towns were built around a central business district back in the early part of the 20th century and follow the same model: court house in a plaza and a few main streets around it, with the big-name businesses on those roads. The court houses are often beautiful, showing off fantastic stonework or Lone Stars worked into finials. Unfortunately, now that going to town is a matter of hopping in the SUV, a lot of central districts are dying for lack of parking. The big stores set up on the edges of town, where acres of asphalt desert are possible, and the few small family businesses that try to hang on in town are hurt by the lack of pedestrian traffic. It sucks, not to put too fine a point on it, partly because it's hard to feel much community spirit at a WalMart and partly because the architecture of a big box store will never have the charm of the older two-story places witht their elaborate facades and pressed-tin ceilings. People keep trying, but it's depressingly common to see new enterprises in the town centers set up in a blaze of optimism and slowly wither away.

I'm not the first to lament the woes of small towns, but at least the communities aren't going down without a fight. The weapon of choice? The festival. Luling's got its Watermelon Thump, Flatonia goes for the Czhilispiel (featured sport: hurling), Poteet gets enormous crowds for the Strawberry Festival, and Hallettsville's Kolache Festival was once cancelled for Hurricane Rita evacuations. Tonight La Mere and I grabbed an early dinner and headed downtown for the Fiddler's Frolics, a local event that we had long anticipated never heard of. We figured it wouldn't be a bad way to spend an evening--better than listening to my grandmother and her sister argue out the bad mood they both seemed to have caught--but I wasn't harboring high hopes. I will now admit that the massing of the RVs in the KofC parking lot should probably have tipped me off to the size and awesomeness of the party.

It turns out that the Frolics stretch for an entire weekend and are taken seriously by a lot of people. Food on offer was listed as Cajun a la carte, which translated as $12 for a box lid full of scarlet crawdads, steamed potatos, and corn on the cob; for an extra couple of bucks, you could add a Lone Star or a Shiner bock (cans only; long-necks plus concrete is not a promising recipe unless the EMTs are standing nearby chewing their toothpicks and waiting for the inevitable). Tomorrow there is supposed to be a barbecue contest, and given how important barbecue is to this part of the country, I shouldn't have been surprised by the elaborate nature of the set-ups. One pit was surrounded by a split fence, a fake outhouse, strings of carp lights, and handmade wood signs with the team's name burned into the wood. Another pit was decorated with A&M logos on one side and UT labels on the other; maybe the brisket inside was simmering on a bed of delicious multigenerational hatred. (For the uninitiated: the A&M/UT rivalry isn't some polite Ivy-league grumble. A&M once stole and cooked Bevo, UT's mascot; UT partisans have been known to make slighting reminders about putting the big logs at the bottom of a bonfire. Families have been ruined over a child's choice to go to the other university, and without bowl games to keep the entire state distracted, Texas might be an even bigger pain in the national politics.) Bottom line: can there really be a loser in a barbecue cookoff? And no, the four-feet don't count.

The fiddling competitions take place in the cavernous hall, and after getting ADMIT ONE tickets stapled to our shirts, we grabbed spots to watch the seniors' fiddling competition. Some of the guys were pretty good, and the only one who was actually bad turned out to be 98 years old and suffering from arthritis. He cramped up halfway through a song and had to be massaged before he could continue. I cheered for him, because at that age I'll damn sure want applause if I'm doing anything but turning up for naps. Between players, the emcee chatted to the audience and I watched the crowd, counting pairs of cowboy boots (surprisingly few) and Texas-themed button-down shirts (lots), admiring feed caps and stetsons, and wondering about the combination of jeans and physique that makes so many rancher guys have absolutely no ass (really, you could run a plumb bob from shoulder to heel and not hit anything on the way on most of these guys; how does that work?). Nobody was quite sure what to expect from the next event, billed as the "Anything Goes (As Long As It Involves a Fiddle)" competition. La Mere was disappointed at the rule that pants had to stay on, and nobody took the organizers up on their suggestion that playing in a headstand was allowed, maybe because the mic wouldn't permit it. The crowd favorite was a group family from Minnesota, which was variously rendered as Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota by the emcee, who apparently couldn't be arsed if it wasn't Texas. The two girls, both sweet-looking teens, played fast and clean, keeping in perfect synch even after one of them tucked her fiddle tucked behind her back and the other propped hers up on her right shoulder, and they got the lion's share of the whooping and stomping fromt he audience. A ten-year-old boy from California did a sharp version of a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune, and one of the seniors did a set of mockingbird calls to break up "Listen to the Mockingbird," but most of the other groups stuck with just...playing well. Which was nice, but not terribly wild. Maybe next year they'll ease up the no-nudity rule and we'll get to check out a few G strings. And yes, since you ask, that is the oldest joke in the book.