Back from nearly a week in Eilat, during which we tried to take in the whole of the Jazz festival. Pretty exhausting. Although we left early on the first night, didn’t really get to see the Mingus band, and missed a few of the Israeli acts, I think we saw most of the shows. Hmm.
I guess I’m not that keen on Jazz, and some of the stuff was, well, boring: there’s only so much improvization and free Jazz you can hear in a week, I guess (Suzie would have liked more standards – stuff you can identify). Overall, I enjoyed the vocalists (Tina May and the Swingle Singers) more than the Saxophonists and Pianists, and some of the Israeli acts we good (we both found Dori Ben Zeev a lot of fun, and I liked Piamenta’s Mystic Flute compositions).
The undisputable highlight, for us, was Ute Lemper. People complained (as is their want) that she was not really Jazz – she can do Jazz like nobody’s business, but by genre, she’s a Diva (not a cabaret singer, really), or that she was too political (she sang in German, English, French, Hebrew, Arabic – “Arab”, she called it – Russian and Hungarian…), or that her renditions were too sweet or too something other. They are fuckinw philistines: the woman is a goddess.
I read American Gods in Eilat: it goes down very smooth and nice, but the plot seems to get bogged down somewhere in the middle, and I finished it with a keen sense of anti-climax and loss. Perhaps because the hero, Shadow, is such a damn non-entity, as his dead(-yet-still-active) wife – a classic Linda Fiorentino casting if ever I saw one – points out. Or perhaps I miss Odin: Gaiman calls him Wedensday, and his version is both much more chilling and more human than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s take – a gallows god in the form of a Jack Daniels-drinking grifter (One of the gags is that Wedensday hates Mead, which’s taste he describes as like the piss of a diabetic alcoholic
). Despite Shadow’s adventures and heroic acts (including a somewhat pointless IMO journey into the underworld), he basically plays straight man to the more engaging characters, like Wedensday and the dead wife. And in the end, he leaves the book with little more than what he started it with. I think.