Henry Mancini is an idiot
Dave and I flew back on Southwest together. At the airport Dave went to get the car, which was parked at Digidesign, and I went to get the luggage, much diminished by the amount of giftware we had unloaded on Elaine’s mother and sister for distribution to her family. On the way home we got a phone call from Lucas and Annika thanking us for the loot but the reception was bad. Their generation will grow up expecting conversations to drop out unexpectedly, just like my mother’s generation did. Only the baby boomers experienced a society where you picked up a telephone (black) and could reasonably expect to call another person sitting next to a telephone (black) in America and talk to them until the hourglass timer ran out.
We met Cyndi for dinner, and were joined by her friend Gayle from Motorola. While waiting for a table to open at Tamarine, Dave drifted over to her piano and played from the score, “Moon River”. I remembered that Dave can actually sight read. He’s not great at it, but his occasional unintended haltings and reassessments were a lot less rubato than you get from Old Blue Eyes.
I also remembered that Henry Mancini is an idiot. MAD Magazine made fun of him in the 1950’s and rightly so. He stirs his treacle in a safe and sane arc on the circle of fifths and cues every emotion with a soaring sting. It’s catchy; so is gonorrhea.
Speaking of sweet, Tamarine. When I first went there, I thought it was nice that it wasn’t as cloying at Three Seasons, but now it seems that everything is fished from a vat of simple syrup and what must Three Seasons be serving? Grilled Scallops on peppermint candy canes? I don’t even dare google that. I’ll have the Roquefort taffy and the Cadbury’s Chicken Mole and the Tofu Skins in Red Bull, Cherry Coke, nuoc mam, and lemongrass. It’s not just McDonald’s who supersize and drown iceberg lettuce in mustard flavored high fructose honey.
But for $300 you get to call it Fusion.
And so to bed, at home. Not until the next day will I discover what an alien creature has left on the laundry room floor. And I will get to meet the goat, who is terribly shy. And I’ll get to think of next summer. It seems we are going to skip the eclipse. The cruise ships are all full and the flights to small islands do not have a lot to recommend them and it is best not to be a total pervert about these things. I asked Howard Barney after 1977, if he was going to 1979, and he said if he did that he’d have to go to all the rest. I go to about half of them.
But there are other places I’ve heard about. Criminy, I have never even been to the Amazon before, or Socotra.
There’s such a lot of world to see.