Monday, from Weepies to Holiday

Monday again, and the work-week cycle begins anew.  Not that the college is strictly a Monday through Friday sort of place, or even that my work doesn't extend into the evenings or weekends often enough. But, for me at least, my commute-into-the-office scheduled hours are the traditional week days, and Monday kicks of the rotation.  And what a difference one week can make on campus.  Last week, first week of the quarter, even by the early hour I pull in the parking lots were filling and movement was everywhere.  Today, one week in, new routines have been sorted out and the campus was largely still and quiet.  It won't be for long, but at 6:45 AM it still had its housecoat and slippers on, first morning cup of coffee in hand as it shuffled into the morning.

Dark and icy this morning, and while it was too dark and hazy to be certain, I think there is a fair bit of cloud cover hanging over us.  Mostly, streets and sidewalks are just warm enough to be wet, but here and there they are still ice.  It was an easy-but-take-nothing-for-granted drive in.

The television weather-folk have been whipping the locals into a frenzy about the coming "snowpocalypse" that some models (last week and into this weekend) were predicting would hit our metropolitan areas midway through this week.  Not all models showed that, though, and there were some forecasters taking a more moderate view on what the celestial currents might sweep our way.  Small talk, though, replies heavily on weather, so casual encounters were given new energy and breath for the last several days.

This morning's commute shuffle was nicely mixed, and had an unusual number of tunes.  The first tune was really just the last partial minute or so, having started and then paused sometime before this morning, and Epilogue from Grusin's Orchestral Album is a short track. That album introduced me to the Milagro Beanfield Suite, which took me to the movie of the same (if you substitute War for Suite) name.  My reckoning was that any movie with a soundtrack that spectacularly good had to be a very good movie.  Right on both counts.

Billy Holiday was being introduced (sounded like it was Dick Cavett?) as I pulled onto main campus, and was well into the first verse by the time I snaked around to North Campus and parked.  A later recording that reunites her with many of her early recording musicians, the track explodes with the kind of smokey latent emotion that Holiday so uniquely represented.  You got emotion in her singing, to be sure, but you could always feel that you were getting just a sip of the emotion behind her genius. 

• The Weepies: How Do You Get High?
• Seamus Egan: The Czar of Munster
• Tim O'Neill: Red is the rose
• Dave Grusin: Epilogue
• Nils Krogh: Disposition
• Billie Holiday: Fine and Mellow

 - Posted via iPad