Bookish Gardener

25 characters in search of a vast wasteland

Time for a silly blog list, yes? Here are my 25 favorite TV characters ever (originated by James Gunn, via Whedonesque, including a list from Joss!). I've broken some of Gunn's rules (whaddya mean no cartoons?), and arranged these somewhat chronologically:

1. Morticia Addams (Carolyn Jones), The Addams Family. Wife, mother, gardener...who says you can't have it all?
2. Chet Kincaid (Bill Cosby), The Bill Cosby Show. Noteworthy ep: "A Christmas Ballad." First season just released on DVD(!).
3. Dr. Bombay (Bernard Fox), Bewitched. The cranky quack was the only thing that saved this show from the switch from B&W to color and from York to Sargent.
4. Arnold Ziffel ("Arnold the piggy"), Green Acres. Some pig!
5. "Nanny" Phoebe Figalilly (Juliet Mills), Nanny and the Professor. Noteworthy ep: "A Letter for Nanny"...the one where Nanny cries. 
6. Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk), Columbo. Noteworthy ep: "Try and Catch Me" with Ruth Gordon.
7. Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), The Night Stalker. Goofy, scary, perfect.
8. Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), The Mary Tyler Moore Show. At her best before she got skinny. Noteworthy ep: "Love Blooms at Hemple's."
9. Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx), Sanford and Son. Favorite mixed drink: Cranberry juice and Ripple: 'Cripple'.
10. Sergeant Foley (Bruce Solomon), Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The inexplicably irresistible almost-love interest of the pigtailed Louise Lasser.
11. Assistant Crown Attorney Heather Redfern (Janet-Laine Greene), Seeing Things. The buttoned-up lawyer whose teenage crush was not Paul McCartney, but Glenn Gould.
12. Detective Ron Harris (Ron Glass), Barney Miller. Dapper and literary...I'd always hoped to be set up on a blind date with someone just like him.
13. Bradley Raines (James Rebhorn), Guiding Light. The indelible soap opera role. (District Attorney Norwalk in Carlito's Way? That's evil stepfather Bradley! Dr. Bowman the psychiatrist in Far From Heaven? That's evil stepfather Bradley!)
14. 'Coach' Ernie Pantusso (Nick Colasanto), Cheers. To whom thanks are owed for teaching us that Albania's chief export is chrome, and for (as director Nick Colasanto) the two best episodes of Columbo ever, "Etude in Black" and "Swan Song".
15. David Addison (Bruce Willis), Moonlighting. If you ignore the smirking, the "singing" and the bogus final chase scenes, there's actually something to see here. Noteworthy ep: "Knowing Her," with Dana Delany and the Isley Brothers' "This Old Heart of Mine.".
16. Dana Scully (Gilllian Anderson), The X-Files. Held her own even after this show jumped the shark and skidded down to the bowels of hell. Noteworthy ep: "Beyond the Sea."
17. Sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), American Gothic. The perfect role for the always awesome Jeffrey MacDonald-Mike Brady-Bill Lundbergh-Cotton McKnight Gary Cole.
18. Executive Assistant DA Benjamin Stone (Michael Moriarty), Law and Order. The first and the best.
19. "Sideshow Bob" Terwilliger (Kelsey Grammer), The Simpsons. Noteworthy ep: "Cape Feare".
20. The Chief (Lynne Thigpen), Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Authoritative and soothing, she was the first talking head that got a smile out of my colicky first born.
21. Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Noteworthy ep: "Once More, With Feeling."
22. Hal (Bryan Cranston), Malcolm in the Middle. Noteworthy ep: "Rollerskates". Please tell me that was not a stunt man skating to "Funky Town".
23. Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), 24. Let me get this straight: Tony is dead, and Audrey is alive? 24 writers got some 'splaining to do...
24. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Firefly. Coming back to TV in reruns next month, in high-definition (!), if you get Universal HD on cable.
25. The Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who. My other car is The TARDIS.

Slouching toward Parnassus

Commemorating one full, wonderful year of piano lessons.

Piece: Debussy's "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum"; instrument: Yamaha P22 upright acoustic piano; recording device: Samsung YP-MT6 (aka the cheapskate's iPod surrogate). (Kindly forgive the bobbles; more takes would have done nothing to improve my performance anxiety. Trust me...all that background hiss is a good thing.)

Download DGP.WAV

And you?

I am a Violet What Flower Are You?

No time to blog? No time to breathe? Still time to take this fun, lovely and legal quiz created by Hanna at This Garden is Illegal.

I am...tagged

I am [see above].  Thanks, OGIC!
I want spring to be like this year's, always.
I wish there were 48 hours to each day.
I hate having to shoot the look of the death ray at people who talk during performances.
I love these 50 things.
I miss holding a sleeping infant snuggled against the crook of my neck.
I fear heights and speed, especially when combined.
I hear the hard drive of this laptop revving up for no apparent reason. Uh-oh.
I wonder when, oh when, Audrey will meet her overdue end on 24.
I regret letting the lisianthus seedlings dry out (Mistah Eustoma, he dead).
I am not voluble.
I dance whenever asked, and sometimes even when not.
I sing in the pews at church, and otherwise only in my head (why, you're most welcome).
I cry so seldom that my children ask me, "Mom, have you ever cried?" Until they saw me turn into a soggy mess watching the Doctor Who episode "Father's Day". Cried at the show, cried at the rerun, cried at the recap.
I am not always as punctual as I mean to be.
I make with my hands (or, made with my hands) fingerless shiny red gloves for my first-grader to wear while she dances to "Supergirl" .
I write slowly and with undue anxiety.
I confuse David Anthony Higgins on Malcolm in the Middle with Michael Badalucco on The Practice.
I need black coffee, dark chocolate, chili peppers and garlic.
I should fold the laundry.
I start Beethoven's Op. 27 No. 1 (piano sonata no. 13) this week.
I finish dessert, always.
I tag anyone who wants to play...

Today is fantastic Friday

The sign in the first-grade classroom reads: "Today is fantastic Friday."

My seven-year-old tugs at my sleeve and asks, "Eight o'clock tonight, right?"

It's our new Friday night routine: me and our new little Whovian watch the revived Doctor Who (the "first" season, which originally aired last year in the UK), with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor—thrilling, smokin' hot, and, (as this Doctor would say,) Fantastic!

We're already more than halfway through this incarnation of the Doctor, whose 13-episode lifespan will turn out to be shorter than that of a Firefly.

In the episode "Rose," an obsessed amateur who's been investigating and tracking the Doctor shows Rose (the Doctor's companion in this series) photos with evidence of the Doctor's time-travelling appearances in pivotal scenes in history: the JFK assassination, the launch of the Titanic, the eruption of Krakatoa. If he had dug deeper, he might have also unearthed evidence of the Doctor's influence in the history of popular music:

If you wanna feel groovy, give the Doctor a call:


Called the Doctor, woke him up:



Doctor! Doctor! Can't you see I'm burnin', burnin':

Doctor, Doctor, gave me the news:


I got a bad case of lovin' [Who].

Love sweetens every sorrow

Today, anniversary 15; this weekend, The Magic Flute.

Pamina
Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen,
Fehlt auch ein gutes Herze nicht.

Papageno
Die süßen Triebe mit zu fühlen,
Ist dann der Weiber erste Pflicht.

Beyde
Wir wollen uns der Liebe freun,
Wir leben durch die Lieb allein.

Pamina
Die Lieb versüßet jede Plage,
Ihr opfert jede Kreatur.

Papageno
Sie würzet unsre Lebenstage,
Sie wirkt im Kreise der Natur.

Beyde
Ihr hoher Zweck zeigt deutlich an,
Nichts edlers sei, als Weib und Mann.
Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann,
Reichen an die Göttheit an.
An die Göttheit an, an die Göttheit an.

(English translation here; scroll down to "No. 7 Duet".)

Driving while

Flashing lights from an unmarked black sedan; sudden short blare of a siren out of nowhere. I pull over, but the police car doesn't move on. Those lights, for me? For me?

I'd been tooling along John Nolen Drive, lost in Ligeti's propulsive first Étude. Is that what it was about the throbbing blue Beetle, swimming along in a sea of cars going just as fast, that asked for special attention?

I was still befuddled as I waited for the patrolman to walk over. The soundtrack moved to the questioning, ethereal strains of the second Étude. It had been so long since my last (and first) speeding ticket at age nineteen (for those keeping count, this would have been during the Carter administration), that I did not know that the Socratic method is now employed to enforce moving violations: P: Do you know why I pulled you over? C: [Racks brain. Brake light out? I just put the new license sticker on last month. Jumped the gun on the green light? What? What? What?] I'm sorry, officer. I don't know. P: Do you know what the speed limit is? C: [Heart sinks. Uh, oh. This is not a friendly stop. And I have no clue what the speed limit is.] I'm sorry, officer. I don't know. P: Do you know how fast you were going? C: [Well, I was keeping up with traffic. What that translates into as a number...I have no clue.] I'm sorry, officer. I don't know.

Busted! For the failure to keep under 35 miles per hour on an 8 lane boulevard that feeds into the freeway. The portentous, ominous finger-drumming of the third Étude wound tighter and tighter as I waited for the patrolman to weigh my fate and render his verdict. It seemed like forever, but he finally returned from his vehicle with, sigh, a ticket. I accepted it, meekly embarrassed, while the fourth Étude played on in a right hand-left hand colloquy of all the things that I imagined I could have said:

- "You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow!" (But then, I didn't have Beethoven's Seventh in the CD changer, and I'm no Oscar Levant.)

- "I was in a rush to get to my daughter's middle school to pick her up from the nurse's office!" (This was true, but inaccurate as to the connection between my state of mind and my foot of lead.)

- Last ditch musical plea:
"I've been having a bad, bad day /
Oh won't you put that pad away /
I'm asking you please /
Noooo...it isn't right, it isn't fair..."

And so, our business wrapped up, the music moved to the fifth Étude, the soundtrack to the dejected retreat of the loser, as I waited for an ebb in the mass of cars whizzing past at 65 miles per hour to ease back on the road. When you next see a downcast blue Beetle, stolidly hugging the speed limit while traffic backs up behind it, that'll be me.

The lesson

It was one of those days: get the kids to school, run to the office, run to a business lunch, run to the office, get the kids from school, run to a board meeting straddling the dinner hour, drag my carcass home to congealing leftover takeout pizza. I was tempted to slump in an easy chair for the rest of the evening, but there was that one more thing left on the day's calendar. After the kids' bedtime, it would be time for my piano lesson. It had been a full month since my last lesson; my twice-a-month schedule had been disrupted by a bout with the neighborhood flu two weeks earlier. Right on schedule, I could feel the low buzz of pre-lesson anxiety: I need more practice, I'm nowhere near being able to play without making mistakes, I'm going to be fumbling around the keyboard like Jeffrey Jones's Emperor Joseph. But I warmed up for a few minutes at home with Hanon (Queen of the Scales, that's me), then headed off to the piano teacher's.

Every single time this happens: I walk up to the door in a tense knot of performance fright, but as I cross the threshold, my teacher is greeting me warmly, nearly beaming, and I begin to beam too. I sit down at the Kawai grand, its tone and touch as bright and rapid as quicksilver, and begin to play. We've been working on some of Debussy's Book I preludes, this month No. XII (Minstrels). I had no idea that I would enjoy playing Debussy, but I've been open-minded about my teacher's suggestions, and I am having a blast with this piece, which is exhilaratingly silly without being in the least bit frivolous. And then we move on. After wrapping up many months steadily working through the Schubert "little A", we're starting a Beethoven sonata (No. 9 in E major). Her teaching style is direct, specific and musically intuitive, as we unpack the beginning of the sonata's first movement, measure by measure, and sometimes note by note. I feel more relaxed, engaged and happy than I've been in, well, a while.

My teacher and I have been trading recordings of the complete Beethoven sonatas: this time I'm taking home Wilhelm Kempff, teacher of her teacher. I like some of the performances better than others, but I can't think of a better morning reveille than his Appassionata, and I'm hypnotized by how he plays the D minor second movement of Beethoven's "Pastoral" sonata (No. 15, Op. 28), where for six elongated measures in andante toward the end, you're moving underwater in deep, steady breaststrokes through the length of a deep, clear pool, almost forgetting the need to breathe.

Absent without leave

Missing? Not really...just in a frightfully prolonged tongue-numbed state which would really be improved if the sun were to choose to come out for more than just a few minutes. But I'm sensing some gaseous bubbles of inspiration, bloggishly speaking, working their way up through the tar pits. Hope to be back in action soon.

Four what

Girish's Meme of Four, via OGIC:

Four jobs you've had in your life: art gallery security guard, convenience store clerk, shopping mall clothing store dressing room attendant, scientific manuscript typist.

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Third Man, Holiday, Galaxy Quest, Baby Boom. (I am embarrassed to report that Dodgeball has come perilously close to making this list.)

Four places you've lived: Hempstead, New York; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Merced, California; Seoul, Korea.

Four TV shows you love to watch: 24, Firefly, Columbo (the '70s series only), The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Four places you've been on vacation: London; Ashland, Oregon; New Orleans; Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.

Four websites you visit daily: Too many worthy candidates from the blogroll for this, so I'll go off-topic and off blogroll: WGN Weather Blog, The Stalwart, The University of Chicago Faculty Blog, and Eduwonk.

Four of your favorite foods: coffee, dark chocolate, homemade potato chips, my mom's kimchi jjigae.

Four places you'd rather be right now: Nowhere else. Really! But I might be tempted by: a garden in New Zealand, a used record store with lots and lots of Bach, a cozy chair next to a roaring fireplace, on the piano.

Not part of the meme:

Of the wonderful things that you get out of life
there are four
Baby, and that may not be many
but nobody needs any more,
Of the many facts makin’ the list of life,
truth takes the lead
And to relax, knowin’ the gist of life,
it’s truth you need.
And the second is honor,
and happiness makes number three,
If you put them together
you’ll know what the last one must be,
Baby, so to truth, honor and happiness
add one thing more,
Meaning only wonderful,
wonderful love that’ll make it four...

    Jon Hendricks (lyrics), "Four"