Solitairy Weekend and the Record Palace



I finished reading Susan Wheeler's "Record Palace" on Sunday mostly as a way to justify avoiding doing some work (for work) and to not feel like I was entirely wasting my time having the second football game on.

I'm going to write something here, make dinner, and then get to that work. The plan is to have a good focused 90 minutes before the Boondocks at 10.

Football-wise, my picks going into this weekend were Pittsburgh and Seattle.

The weekend was quiet. I stayed out of sight most of the time. Stopped in at the Apple Store on Friday afterwork to check out the new iMacs and the new version of iLife, then suffered through another late-game loss by the bulls.

Saturday was a Lincoln Square Day. Library, Garcia's for Lunch (mmm, nachos), back to the library, cd shops. Got home in time to watch the bulls put it together for a night. If Tyson Chandler could ever give them a consistent double-double they'd be a legitimate play-off team, instead of being entrenched on the fringes.

Sunday was a domestic chores kind of day. Laundry, groceries, watched all of the Steelers-Broncos game, read, am about to do some web-stuff for work.

I picked up Wheeler's "Record Palace" because it was in the new local books category at Sulzer library (and it was short). Wheeler is not from around here, but her story takes place in 80s chicago, mostly the south side, and her main character is a uchicago student. I'm a sucker for any story that involves more than one trip to Valois for food (FYI: Wheeler takes it up a notch by adding a Harold's Chicken Shack reference). I guess you could say that there are a few stories going on within the narrative of "Record Palace" -- a "fish out of water" story about the girl Cindy who is dealing with the difference between Chicago and where she was from, dealing with not really being academic enough for uchicago, and then finding her personal life being entirely disjoint from all this as a white girl running with a seedy black jazz / record crowd. There's a "coming of age story" here too. It's Acie - the record shop owner - that puts the "race dimension" in focus, as his shop is a nexus of sorts, and his son who adds the "bizarre relationship" story to the mix. Harold Washington even makes an appearance at the shop (before he was the mayor)! There's at least one "hustle" in the works as well.

The more I think about this book, the more well-crafted I believe it is.

It made me wish that I was more of a jazz aficionado. Wheeler's characters reference many jazz performers in the story, and I frankly don't know more than the obvious jazz names. It's a shallowness in the depth of my cultural literacy.

Posted: Sun - January 22, 2006 at 07:22 PM      

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