Traverse City + currently reading + The Dan Band

I went out to Traverse City this afternoon for some local, non-Starbuck's coffee shop time and a good meal. There's a great french bistro downtown called Amical that serves crazy good food.
















I had the eggplant lasagna. Fresh out of the oven...oh so good.
















Cheers! I'm not a fan of Chardonnay but this stuff was awesome (and cheapish).
















The Weed Man even showed up outside to make a delivery. He's pretty quick so this picture is a little blurry.
















I'm currently reading John Adams's's autobiography, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.





















It's totally different from other composer tomes I've cut into lately (John Tavener, Dominick Argento and Ned Rorem to name a few). This is mostly because his language is so erudite. But not in a bad way. For instance:

Another cemetery, only a short distance up the road from our house, featured a large gravestone with the name "Pecker" on it. It commemorated the family of Jeremy Pecker, a local from the nineteenth century, whose name would surely have delighted Charles Dickens. The Pecker pedigree had died out by the time I arrived on the scene, but the gravestone continued to provide inexhaustible fodder for jokes. My school chums avowed that East Concord had originally been known as Peckerville, and that it even had played host to a baseball team, the Peckerville Moles.

I love how he makes a dick joke sound incredibly smart. I would never be able to do that.God bless you, John Adams.

I'm in the "Here's How I Grew Up" section at the moment so I can't wait to get into the actual musical stuff (especially Nixon in China...ohmygodIlovethatopera). Right now I've got JA learning the clarinet and playing with the local orchestra as a boy. It's pretty interesting stuff, actually.

So, for a little low-brow contrast, I'll quickly mention that I'm in love with The Dan Band. If you've seen Old School (or, more recently, The Hangover) you'll remember them as the wedding band that puts their own unique spin on Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart". Their live album on iTunes is hilarious and you should totally buy it. Here's their interpretation of Wilson Phillips's's hit, "Hold On" with a little intro from the band's namesake.