I continue to make progress in my recovery from wrist surgery. What I’ve discovered is that I love physical therapy. I’ve only been twice, and already there’s noticeable improvement. For instance, I can open a beer bottle again. I could open a beer bottle before, of course — if I held the bottle between my knees, and pulled the cap off with my right hand. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. There are still plenty of things I can't do with my left hand, such as pump gas. Or cartwheels. Oh, wait. I never could do cartwheels.
The amazing thing about physical therapy is how simple it is. Everything we’ve done at therapy — with the exception of dipping my hand in hot paraffin, which helps soften the scar — is stuff I do at home, three times a day. My therapist gave me a bag that I filled with five pounds of rice, and I heat it up in the microwave and wrap it around my wrist for 10 minutes. Then I do things like turning my palm up and down, making a fist and moving it back and forth and bending each finger at every joint. I especially like how my therapist refers to the metal plate in my wrist as “hardware.” As in “your ligaments have to learn how to move over the hardware” or “the hardware is holding your bones together.” In any case, I like having hardware in my body. It sounds superhero-ish.
SON VOLT
I caught alt-country/Americana band Son Volt at The Egg the other night, and I’m glad I did. Son Volt’s lead singer and founder, Jay Farrar, played in Uncle Tupelo with Jeff Tweedy, who eventually formed Wilco, one of my favorite bands. Like Son Volt, Wilco started off as a pretty typical alt-country band, though with a slightly sunnier sound, before becoming one of the more unpredictable and experimental rock bands out there. (Listen to Wilco’s second album, “Being There,” then the band’s masterpiece, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” and then their second-to-last album, “Sky Blue Sky” to get a sense of this evolution.)
Tweedy is a dynamic and charismatic performer who engages the audience and tells amusing jokes and stories. Farrar, on the other hand, is reticent and serious, preferring to tell stories of heartbreak and hard times with his plaintive and somewhat mournful voice. He isn’t particularly charismatic, and doesn’t try to be. At The Egg, he spoke to the audience once or twice, mostly just to say, “Hey, Albany. Thanks for coming.”
Son Volt put on a fine show. I have a copy of the band’s first album, “Trace,” in a box somewhere in my downstairs hallway, which means I probably haven’t listened to it in about five years. Unlike Wilco, Son Volt just didn’t evolve for me — I liked that one album, but didn’t feel the need to acquire any of the band’s later work, which is good, but very much the same as everything on “Trace.” But the band’s tight and powerful set reminded me why I liked about Son Volt in the first place. It didn't inspire me to run out and buy any of their other albums, but at some point I’ll probably get “Trace” on CD. It just seems like something I should have.
RENSSELAERVILLE FALLS
I also made it out to the Edmund Niles Huyck Preserve and Biological Research Station on Saturday, to see the Rensselaerville Falls and walk around the lake with friends. I’d never been here before, but it is worth a trip. (Click here for a picture of the falls, which are pretty impressive, and information about the preserve.)
I’m still not able to go for real hikes, and so I try to get outdoors to walk whenever I can. And this particular excursion had a purpose: For Rosh Hashanah, we threw objects — pine cones, leaves — into the water to represent our sins for the past year. I’m not Jewish, but it seemed like a good idea.
JEAN PAINLEVE
I’m off tomorrow, and will not be filing a movie blog. But last week I saw something pretty cool at EMPAC at RPI: eight short undersea documentaries by Jean Painleve, a French documentarian whose work was surreal and mysterious, accompanied by a score by Yo La Tengo. The films are old — Painleve made more than 200 documentaries, many of them in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s — and you can tell that Painleve was using fairly primitive equipment.
Even so, the documentaries contain some fairly remarkable sights — a male seahorse giving birth, octopi mating, sea urchins scuttling across an ocean floor. Earlier this year the Criterion Collection released a three-disc Painleve collection that includes the eight films screened at EMPAC and the Yo La Tengo score, and they’re available through Netflix. When I got home, I moved the first disc into my already crowded queue. Those eight films just whetted my appetite for more. Click here to watch “Le Vampire,” the seahorse documentary.
Got a comment? E-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.
