We're all waiting on a harvest of some kind or another, no?
Your beloved Negress has been absent from her little corner of the bandwidth universe because she is getting Uncorked weekly, glorying in a new job and preparing for a convoluted solution to an ongoing health problem. She’s also been digging some tunes and reconnecting with pals old and new.
So, the new job. It’s a good one and it lets the Negress work as hard as she wants and enjoy the gains from that work. She can also help people, advocate for a company culture that has no peers in a business usually awash in short-term thinkers and brain-dead leadership. Thanks to some Federal regulations, she’s not going to say more than that here, but she’s very happy.
As for wine, a 21-day course of Augmentin has put almost all of her alcohol consumption on hold. This particular antibiotic leaves a metallic taste on everything. Add Prednisone and inhaled steroids, and wine is no fun. Woodford Reserve slices through the effluvia like a well-sharpened knife, but the Negress is too busy and happy to slip into an uncontrolled stupor. Also, she’s about to put her debilitating allergies where they belong. These drugs are a prelude to an effective protocol that should allow her to go outdoors with less agony.
However, she is still writing about wine. Thanks to the generosity of the folks at Nomad Editions, she executes a weekly column for Uncorked magazine, which is designed for tablet consumption, but can be viewed on any screen. You can get the app from iTunes, and view sample issues. Going all in costs a budget-friendly $9.99 annually. Read. Comment. Drink. It’s all to the good.
As for the tunes, the Negress caught both halves of the annual Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Festival. The first, headlined by David Grisman and Del McCroury, was satisfying, especially when the old “dawgs’ teamed up on a tribute to Bill Monroe (McCroury, now 72 with hair as immobile as Mitt Romney’s, was one of Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys). The Negress also gives big props to the Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University, which is beautiful and acoustically perfect.
While she does appreciate that Jerry Garcia’s love of American string band and acoustic music led a lot of Deadheads to embrace the bluegrass way, she fervently hopes they learn how to behave. This is not to say they have to go all Bluebird Cafe solemn and silent, but all that hairy-footed Hobbit dancing accessorized by patchouli and Hacky Sacks is hard to take. The Negress almost screamed, “The last train to the Shire is leaving in 15 minutes. Haul it, friends.” But she demonstrated the restraint they seemed incapable of.
The next weekend was another story. The Negress headed to the Congress Theatre to check out theDrive-By Truckers, Joe Pug and Dawes. Pug and the Truckers were transcendent and fine, with Pug winning points for doing Joe Ely’s “All Just to Get to You,” and making the original recede in memory. The Congress sounds like shit, unless you stand in the back under the balcony, but it had the right ramshackle fin-de-siecle feel for the proceedings. The Negress loves the Truckers unconditionally and thinks the songs about the frayed seaminess of the “New” South capture a sense of place and time like few others. As for Dawes, color this colored unimpressed. Everything felt watery and mellow in a way that makes you wish that the worst Chicago winter would descend on everyone you hate who lives in tropical climes and you have all the windshield scrapers and shovels. The Negress is sorry she’s been gone so long. It won’t happen again. Next up musically: Lez Zeppelin (March 9) and Rodrigo y Gabriela (April 12).
