First day tomorrow at the new gig. Excited but a bit jittery. Digging all the "work clothes" out of the dusty closet and polishing 'em up. Strange to return to the realm of wage earner after nearly a year off. First time since early 2004 both the wife and I have been working at the same time! 
...So I stayed up till a bit past midnight last night with my friend Harry, diving deep into "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows" to see how it all ends for our man at Hogwarts. I won't spoil anything here, but it was a fine, speedy 600-page read and a pretty fitting conclusion to the saga. Although J.K. Rowling desperately should include recap pages for those of us who don't have every line of the series memorized, after a couple of chapters I got back into the Muggles groove and was captivated by a book where the stakes are insanely high, the body count startling, and the sense of onrushing doom quite tangible. If you listen carefully this weekend you can hear the gentle rustle of millions of pages being turned worldwide at the same time – how cool is that?
The first time I heard Neil Finn's voice was on a mix tape an old high school girlfriend made for me, nearly 20 years ago now. She put together a tape that was one half Finn's group Crowded House, one half Elton John. It was the Crowded House that stuck with me – a selection of tracks from the band's first few albums, songs like "Better Be Home Soon," "Something So Strong," "Into Temptation." 
Finn had been working on a new solo album, but in the wake of Hester's death he asked founding Crowded House bass player Nick Seymour to join him. After recording the entire album, Finn decided it should be a Crowded House project. The duo went back into the studio with multi-instrumentalist Mark Hart, who performed on Crowded House's last two albums, and drummer Matt Sherrod, who's worked with Beck, to record four more songs. The result became Time On Earth, the first Crowded House record since 1993's Together Alone.
• "Helvetica" (director, Gary Hustwit). A documentary about a typeface? Egads, you say. But this 80-minute feature on the world's most ubiquitous font (you see it everywhere from the Target logo to American Airlines' logo to most street signs) is fascinating work. Director Gary Hustwit started with a premise – why is one particular typeface so common in this modern world? – that spins into a sweeping discussion of typography design in general and what the shape of a letter can do to our mind. Helvetica, which is 50 years old in 2007, has become the script of city life. Besides giving us many montages showing how Helvetica is everywhere these days, Hustwit stuffs his film with interviews with a wonderfully eccentric crowd of type experts. Trust me, some of these guys are quite bizarre, such as the German who lustily denounces Helvetica or the avant-garde magazine designer who once laid out an article he disliked in the utterly illegible Zapf Dingbats font – and it saw print that way. There's a lot of humor in Hustwit's exploration of this insular but very influential world of design. The screening I was at seemed to be full of graphic designers or people involved somehow in the art of type. As someone who's worked in newspapers for over a decade and had my share of dealings with Helvetica I found this a really interesting movie, one that adeptly fulfills the documentarian's desire to show us a hidden facet of the everyday world. Hustwit himself was at the screening and gave an informative Q&A talk afterwards about how and why he did this film. It's a very "niche" appealing film I suppose, but I loved it, and can't wait to pick up the DVD. 
• "All In This Tea" (director, Les Blank). How much do you know about the history of tea? I got offered a free ticket a friend couldn't use to this one, despite not being much of a tea drinker. And it certainly left me thirsty – a quite interesting, short documentary that follows David Hoffman, a Californian tea importer whose life is devoted to finding the best, purest Chinese oolong teas in remote parts of the countryside. Director Blank splices Hoffman's wanderings with a look at the meaning of tea, its growing popularity in America and what the differences are between organic tea and factory-farmed alternatives. It's a quite neat little film that is best when it focuses on the small details, such as Hoffman's penchant for sticking his nose into bags of tea leaves to gauge their quality. When it starts to speechify a bit on organic farming methods it becomes a little dull, but rallies nicely to become a meditation on quality of food in general. "All In This Tea" also features lots of lovely footage of the rural Chinese countryside and its people. Hoffman is a nicely charming lead character, a kind of capitalist hippie whose love for the "good tea" is infectious. The kind of small, spunky movie film festivals are made to showcase. 
• "Rescue Dawn" (director, Werner Herzog). This is the most "Hollywood" I've seen of German director Herzog's films ("Grizzly Man," "Fitzcarraldo," etc), but it's also a tremendously captivating war story, based on the true story of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who was shot down and captured in Laos in 1965. Christian Bale stars in a story of survival, as Dieter plans an escape from a prison in the heart of the jungle. Herzog's movies often feature man against nature in gritty scenarios, and "Rescue Dawn" is no different. It's on the conventional side, by Herzog's standards, but still spellbinding, particularly as Dieter spirals down into despair and faces impossible odds. Herzog makes the malevolent Asian jungle like another character in this film – you can taste the humid air, smell the fetid jungle scents. It's the small details that Herzog adds that give his distinctive tone to this movie – it could've been a Steven Spielberg movie, but instead it's something tense, heartbreaking and haunting. Bale is excellent, playing a can-do hero who has to confront his own limits, but even more dazzling is Steve Zahn as a fellower prisoner. Zahn is best known for kooky comedies like "Saving Silverman" or "Happy, Texas," but he is utterly fantastic here as a prisoner whose spirit has been nearly crushed. His intensity really should be remembered come Oscar time, and I hope it is. 
• Quite sad to wake up this morning to the news that cartoonist Doug Marlette has died in a car accident at the relatively young age of 57. (And strange enough, he was killed in an accident in Holly Springs, Mississippi, right around where I used to live.) He was one of the finer editorial cartoonists of the time and for a while I was a big fan of his comic "Kudzu," which was an endearingly Southern-fried take on life that I felt captured the true voice of the South these days far better than hillbilly stuff like "Barney Google." He even dared to include a preacher as a main character but made him startlingly humane and non-judgmental. There was a gentle good humor to his work that wasn't spectacularly flashy, but it was insightful and witty. In an increasingly bland comics page, his strip was usually one of the few I kept up with. RIP. (Edit to add: A very fine appreciation over at The Washington Post.)
• In other comic-related news, I was recently reading "Popeye: I Yam What I Yam" Vol. 1 by Fantagraphics books. Everyone thinks of spinach when they think of Popeye, but didja know the original newspaper comic strips Popeye debuted in barely even mentioned spinach? Popeye bounded on the scene in the late 1920s in E.C. Segar's "Thimble Theatre" comic, as a colorful cast addition to the ongoing tale of wisecracking, height-challenged adventurer Castor Oyl (and his soon-to-be-more famous sister, Olive). But Popeye soon took over the entire strip, his oversized personality crowding out many of the characters in free-wheeling, high seas comic adventures as he battled characters like the Sea Hag and the Goon. 
Today kicks off the final week before Peter enters day care as I prepare to start my new job... P starts day care next Monday on a part-time basis (I don't start work until the 23rd, and we wanted to ease him in the first week). It's a strange feeling, and I have to admit I'm both regretful and relieved at the same time. I quit my last job Aug. 31, 2006, and in the past 10 months or so I've spent far more time with Peter than I did the first 2 1/2 years of his life. That's something I'll never forget, being able to enjoy the kind of "quality time" that far too many parents just can't swing in the hectic modern world. 
Everyone gets the blues. But for many of today's listeners, the blues might evoke a dreary, dusty sound that has little to do with modern times. That's a mistake – give them a chance, and you'll find that 70- or 80-year-old tunes by the likes of Big Bill Broonzy or Blind Willie McTell have an authentic human voice that can't be faked. Listen through the haze of years, and the roaring power of Howlin' Wolf or the deadpan swing of Muddy Waters still have the power to transport you. The blues reeks of history, but it's a past that's still very much alive and kicking. A new book and CD Rough Guide To The Blues is your ticket to delve into this world.
The meat of the book is an enormous A to Z encyclopedia of the blues, profiling dozens of famous and obscure musicians and labels from throughout the years, including many recommended playlists of tunes. You've got the big names given nice capsule biographies, like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Bessie Smith, but equally as fascinating to me were the tales of forgotten bluesmen I'd never even heard of, like Daddy Stovepipe, Bo Weavil Jackson or Speckled Red. Some died young in knife fights or froze to death in the cold; some lived long into their 80s or 90s, long enough to get some of the acclaim they deserved.
The companion CD of The Rough Guide to the Blues, compiled by Williamson as well, offers an excellent survey of the blues over the years. Obviously the hundreds of names in the book can't be included on one disc, but over 22 tracks Williamson takes us from the scratchy, mysterious early sounds of acts like Mamie Smith or Charley Patton all the way on up to the postmodern blues-techno hybrids of the late R.L. Burnside or the Mali-meets-blues sound of Ali Farka Touré. The spare and lonesome sound of those early acts explodes into the big-band showmanship of the later Chicago blues. 