Late at Night

There was a lot of flooding here last week, and all weekend breakfast places were closed, streets impassable and the electricity off for a lot of Chicago. Oddly, the house was untouched, the cats lay around with nothing out of the ordinary for them. The weather became beautiful by last night, and tonight is perfect, one forgets our own fingerprints on the earth in this kind of weather, the earth seems so perfectly attuned.

I'm listening to Miles Davis's Ascenseur Pour L'Échafaud, specifically this amazing track that sounds like the perfection of 1950s jazz all by itself, "Générique." A lot of the jazz purists (those not wetting themselves), insist this is not one of Miles's better moments; it's for Louis Malle's first film, and it's actually, I think, pretty perfect. It's amazing how it changes and deepens the movie. So maybe it's not Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue, but it's amazing and it has this edge to it that kind of sounds like the beginning of the French New Wave to me: that combination of Paris and America in this uncomfortable embrace, all in love with each other but not sure how it's all supposed to fit and what it all means. This is a very imperfect description of it, but regardless, "Générique" I think is required listening for anybody interested in Miles Davis. I seem to be a bit more each year.

Otherwise, my life is still vaguely on hold, which is cool. I wish it wasn't, but I think Billy Bob got at that best in Bad Santa, so whatever works will.

It's hard to worry when the crickets are as beautiful as they are, when the Lake reflects the moon in a million places: one shimmer, and the air is brisk and has, for the first time really, the slightest tastes of autumn about it late at night. No phone, no reason to rush off, and cats lounging and skulking about. In a bit I'll read for just a chapter or two and call it the end of the day, but regardless of what's happening, like so many others, it's a day to store up against other days not so beautiful or perfect.

I read through this book, They Marched Into Sunlight, which really gets at a lot of things that made 1968 much easier to understand for me. It takes place primarily in the autumn of 1967, and looking at the microcosms the way he does really beautifully traced some of the macro-thinking that was going on in Washington, Vietnam and in the Anti-War movement. It's weird to look at all these pictures of Madison, Wisconsin, to see places I've hung out around just totally transformed by belief and conflict. It makes me wonder how people from the 1870s and 1880s would look at Union Square or Tomkins Square Park now.

Off to read and enjoy the way the night feels.