Missouri Wine Country

Did you know that America's first officially recognized wine district was in Missouri?
Ok, the Augusta apellation was first approved in 1980, but it still beat Napa by at least eight months.

In actuality, Missouri has a long history of wine production and still has a number of beautiful country spots. The wine itself is a bit sweet, but the setting was perfect.

The Norton is the official grape of Missouri and they also have a lot of unusual varieties that I haven't seen before, namely the Cythiana and Vignoles.






Rob "San Diego" and I enjoy some tasting.

Zoo Station

This post is dedicated to Laurie who kept urging me to see the zoo. I imagined it was because she read how impressive the grounds are and how innovative the lay-out is. In actuality, I suspect it has something to do with the overwhelming numbers of babies in strollers.

In any case, the zoo was quite remarkable; you can really get quite close to some of the animals. A particular highlight was the penguin exhibit where one friendly Humboldt penguin came right up to me and posed for pictures.

http://www.stlzoo.org/yourvisit/thingstoseeanddo

















For more on my thoughts about giraffes in zoos, see: "The Communist Secrets of Animal Husbandry" on Roxborough Lyric Poetry Association.

Jazz in Japan: Music used in the novels of Murakami

Here is a abridged sampling of jazz titles that appear in his fiction:
Please note: Page numbers refer to Vintage Paperback editions, except Kafka on the Shore, in which case the page numbers refer to the Knopf hardcover edition.

Kenneth Alford
"Colonel Bogey March"
The Elephant Vanishes, p. 56

Kenny Burrell
"Stormy Sunday"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 344

Frank Chacksfield Orchestra
"Autumn In New York"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 376

Nat King Cole
"Pretend"
South of the Border, West of the Sun, pp. 12, 177

"South Of The Border"
South of the Border, West of the Sun, pp. 15, 175, also pp. 93, 171

John Coltrane
"My Favorite Things"
Kafka on the Shore, pp. 339, 357

Miles Davis
"Bags' Groove"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 362

"Airegin"
The Elephant Vanishes, p. 138

"Kind Of Blue" (Album)
Norwegian Wood, p. 218

Duke Ellington
"Popular Ellington"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 344

"Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 387

"Sophisticated Lady"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 387

"Star-Crossed Lovers"
South of the Border, West of the Sun, p. 94, 168, 205

"Embraceable You"
South of the Border, West of the Sun, p. 107

Stan Getz
"Getz/Gilberto" (Album)
Kafka on the Shore, p. 232

Woody Herman
"Early Autumn"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 376

Antonio Carlos Jobim
"Corcovado"
South of the Border, West of the Sun, p. 89

"Desafinado"
Norwegian Wood, pp. 162, 280

"The Girl From Ipanema"
Norwegian Wood, p. 162

Thelonius Monk
Honeysuckle Rose
Norwegian Wood, p. 171

Roger Williams
"Autumn Leaves"
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 376

Lester Young
"I Can't Get Started"
After the Quake, p. 74

Annotated Reading: Jay Rubin and Haruki Murakami

Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London, UK: The Haverhill Press, 2002.

Author and professor Jay Rubin has had a long relationship with the works of Haruki Murakami, having translated the very popular Norwegian Wood, the masterpiece Wind-up Bird Chronicle and the most recent release After Dark. In this scholarly work that resembles both the insights of literary critic and the praise of an impassioned fan, Rubin points out a number of interesting observations that may be useful to those who are interested in jazz abroad, particularly in Japan, and how jazz influences the writing of fiction.

Haruki Murakami first encountered American jazz as a teenager when he attended a concert featuring Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers. Later, before embarking on his writing career, he owned a popular jazz club called Peter Cat in a western suburb of Tokyo. As one of the most popular Japanese writers in the world, he continues to use jazz in nearly all of his work. Whether it is using a particular song to evoke a mood—essays have been written that attempt to offer a complete discography of works referenced in his stories, mix CDs have been compiled by fans, even his publisher’s web site streams clips of songs alluded to in his work—or using jazz clubs as a setting, as he does in South of the Border, West of the Sun and A Wild Sleep Chase among others, or actual musicians as characters as he does in the short story “Tony Takatani,” Muraki infuses all his writing with jazz music.

Rubin opens his introduction with a quotation from a speech Murakami delivered at the University of California at Berkeley where he examined the relationship between his prose style and the beat of jazz: “[T]he sentences have to have rhythm. This is something I learned from music, especially jazz. In jazz, great rhythm is what makes great improvising possible. It’s all in the footwork. To maintain that rhythm, there must be no extra weight. That doesn’t mean that there should be no weight at all—just no weight that isn’t absolutely necessary” (2).

For those who are unfamiliar with Murakami or uninterested in reading literary criticism, the book does have an appealing feature. It contains, to my knowledge, the only English version of his short story “The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema.” This early, slim (only five pages) story contains many of the themes—“loss and ageing, memory and music, time and timelessness, reality and the wells of the unconscious, and melancholy longing for a special time and place”—that mark the best of Murakami’s more mature work.

Recommended Titles (in order of my own preference):
Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Norwegian Wood
Kafka on the Shore
After the Quake (Short stories)
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart

Battle of the Bands: Japan vs. the Republic of Georgia

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Natsuki Tamura on trumpet!
Satoko Fujii on the piano!

(not pictured: Satoko Fujii's piano solo featuring a glass and hammer played strings)

Zurab Ramishvili on piano!

And keepin' the beat on the stick bass, the one and only Tamaz Kurashvili!

Special thanks to Zurab Karumidze, Director of the U.S.-Caucus Institute in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia (who appeared in earlier entries concerning the Georgians).

The Old Courthouse and Dred Scott

Dred Scott is one of those names I hear and remembers vaguely from high school history but I can't conjur up any specific details. It came up again during the last presidential debates as some kind of inside code for the abortion issue. At any rate, the trial had its origins in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis.

From the PBS site: "Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry -- slaves as well as those who were free -- could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott, needless to say, remained a slave."