buffalo bill, gabriel byrne, neko case

lately my brain resists all my best efforts to drag ideas together. makes it hard to write. anyway, cohesion be damned, here's a smattering of the week's stuff.

- the weather has been beautiful. let me say that again: the weather has been beautiful. not hot, not humid, not nebraska in june. so we've been eating outside, weeding the weeds, playing t-ball with ben's new set, blowing bubbles, and watching construction projects go on in two neighbor's yards. indoor chores have suffered.

- on the weeks when we don't meet to discuss books, my reading group watches documentaries. yes, you can laugh, we love documentaries, especially "american experience." this time we watched a film on buffalo bill (closest we could get to what we really wanted, a film on annie oakley). it was a fascinating study of how our collective concept of the "wild west" was constructed and passed around in the nineteenth century. and those nineteenth century showmen had some serious pantene hair. i'd kill for shiny, bouncy locks like bill. maybe i should give up hygene altogether and see what happens.

- i'm newly and fiercely hooked on the hbo series in treatment with gabriel byrne. as with the hbo shows we've watched in the past (the sopranos, deadwood), this one is a brilliantly produced, disturbing tour through the complicated psychologies of it's characters. byrne plays a psychologist, and each episode is a therapy session with one of four patients, followed by an episode in which he goes to therapy himself. the concept is simple and the cast is small, so it's like a poem composed within a strict form. the restriction on scope forces a concentrated, potent quality with nothing extraneous. sometimes it's hard to watch the characters and situations, but the show's illuminated an addictive side to my personality i may have been suppressing. :) oh yes, and like everything in the hbo catalog, this show isn't for viewers with scruples about language and situations that depict people doing bad things.

- just downloaded the new neko case record, middle cyclone, and what can i say, i love her yelling. i love the reverb. i love the loosely swinging tempos that call to mind telephone wire strung between poles, passed in an old car heading west. she's like a swift, reverb-drenched, energetic lucinda williams. with red, red hair.

- i'm dispatching this from the back yard, early in the morning. i'm going to have about a million mosquito bites. but ben's asleep and andrew left early for bible study and i woke up with a loud, chatty brain and a quiet hour to burn. so happy.