Let me trace it back to a week ago tonight. I (or whomever it was) caught the Ike Reilly Assassination in concert at Lincoln Hall. Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s boy) opened with a surprising paranoid set of Southern-fried prog-rock-country, and then Ike and his band took the stage. His parents were in the house, he announced, and it was all in all a fine show. Shooter came on stage to perform the wonderful duet, “The War on the Terror and the Drugs,” included on Ike’s most recent album. If you haven’t heard it yet, stop whatever it is you are doing immediately and click on the following video:

The next day was my anniversary, and we celebrated by watching our daughter play Lucy in a middle-school production of “Snoopy! The Musical.” Our offspring performed wonderfully well, and the show itself is great fun, including complex ensemble songs like “Edgar Allan Poe” (see video from another production below) and “Clouds.”

On Saturday afternoon, I was at the Joffrey Ballet, taking in “Eclectica,” their spring program: Gerald Arpino’s 1971 piece, Reflections, plus two world premieres: Jessica Lang’s pretty awesome Crossed , a meditation on religion and spirituality in which the dancers duck around large moving stage sets, and James Kudelka’s Pretty BALLET, also quite striking. One reviewer calls it “the most intellectually engaging Joffrey program in recent memory.” Call me engaged.

I then jumped into the car and drove to Sparta, Wisconsin, where I spent the night in a dive motel that shall remain nameless. Only the sheets have been changed to protect the innocent. The next morning, I drove up the Mississippi River to Stockholm, Wisconsin, to pick up some of my mother’s paintings for a new retrospective exhibition. I’d forgotten how pretty that part of the country is. I spent the rest of the day tracking down more paintings for the show across central Minnesota — Edina, St. Paul, North Branch.

Monday morning I helped set up the exhibit in the Art Gallery at Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, Minnesota–where my mother, my sister, and I were all born. It’s a wonderful collection of 14 of my mother’s best works, many of which haven’t been shown publicly for years. It will be open through June 29, and there are new prints and cards of my mother’s paintings for sale in the hospital gift shop. Details on hours and how to get there can be found here.

Monday evening found me at Target Field, the new home of the Minnesota Twins. While ingesting far too much animal protein, I watched my favorite baseball team clobber the Detroit Tigers. Wilson Ramos, the Twins’ fine young catching prospect, got three hits in his second Major League game, this after he collected four the night before in his debut, thereby setting a new rookie record and sending Twins’ fans into a mild frenzy. It’s a fine new ballpark, too, with many thoughtful details, inside and out. I didn’t mind the raindrops that fell intermittently through the evening, not one bit.

Tuesday, I drove back to Chicago, picking up along the way our oldest from his dorm to haul him home for summer vacation after his freshman year at college. Then yesterday I helped host the great historian Harry Harootunian for a couple of very stimulating talks here at the University of Chicago. The day ended at a restaurant in Chinatown, with good food and lively talk with our visitor and several colleagues.

After all that, I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror, and it was me again. Welcome back, and don’t forget to turn off the lights when you leave again.

McCray also possesses a wonderful voice full of gravel (again, B.B. King comes to mind). In other words, he brings the full package. I have seen the future of the blues, and I’ve just ordered my copy of his 1993 album, Delta Hurricane.

Then, yesterday afternoon, we took Sonia to see the Joffrey Ballet’s Nutcracker at the Auditorium Theater. It’s a nice holiday spectacle with amazing sets and costumes. The stage gets a little crowded during the first half, when narrative dominates. The second half, when the real dancing happens, was lovely (and the handful of crying children in matinee audience actually added to the atmosphere, I thought), though Sonia found it a bit boring. I always think the Arabian dance should be shorter and the Russian dance longer, but that’s probably a sign of my bad taste.

Now it’s back to grading for me. I hope you’re having a fine weekend, wherever you may be.

Then Sunday night we headed down to the Chicago International Film Festival to see Kanikosen, SABU’s new postmodern take on Kobayashi Takiji’s 1929 proletarian literature classic about workers on a brutal crab canning ship awakening to an awareness of their oppression and organizing a strike. SABU is best known for directing loosely organized black comedies that revolve around sight gags and a kind of dream logic, making him an odd choice for this adaptation.

It works pretty well in the first half, as the director appropriates the visual and slapstick mode of Chaplin’s Modern Times, but founders somewhat in the second half, when he has to carry the narrative forward to its resolution. I was hoping he would figure out a way to convey revolution via the surrealism of his best films, but instead he switches over to straightforward Hollywood mode: speeches about individuals needing to live their lives to the fullest, sentimental soundtrack music, and camerawork that stresses close ups on the stars’ faces. He almost redeems the film in the closing minutes, when the style again suddenly shifts: we go into slow motion, blurred camerawork and metal machine music on the soundtrack precisely at the point when the workers realize that the point is not individual heroism but rather mass action, whereupon they launch their second, presumably more effective strike. It’s as if SABU is deconstructing the preceding hour or so of his own film and vowing that, whatever the revolution might be, it won’t be successfully carried out according to mass culture forms of melodrama and bourgeois ideologies of self-reliance.

I’ll keep the reworking-the-classics theme going later this morning as I walk to work. I’ll be listening to the Raveonettes’ fine new CD, In and Out of Control, a creative updating of Phil Specter and other classic pop sounds from the early 1960s. They combine the sweetest melodies with the darkest lyrics: “Boys who rape should be destroyed,” for example, or “Last Dance” in which the language of teenage heartbreak at the sock hop is used to depict the final days of a junkie. Just as with Lubovitch and SABU, they demonstrate that there’s life yet to be found in the tired bones of the canon.

(UPDATE: As Roger Pulvers reports at Japan Focus, a musical by Inoue Hisashi based on the life of Kobayashi Takiji is now on stage in Tokyo.)