19 posts tagged “music”
In honor of World Teachers' Day today, tell us about a teacher who had a positive impact on your life.
John Abram Bubb, d. 1993, sculptor in stone, dearly remembered: the coolest art teacher who ever was.
Sister Patricia Binko, the Nun of Suzuki Strings. I play the violin because of her.
Bruce Weigl, poet, critic, essayist, memoirist, translator, and fucking cool guy. I had his English 213, Intro to Poetry Writing, pretty much by accident -- it fit my schedule that fall. I thought, "Oh, poetry. That should be easy" -- words which haunted me as I sat down to write my 4-hour master's-degree candidacy exam in 1997.
Carolyn Forche. My guru. I love Carolyn forever.
Peter Klappert. Peter is another poet under whose grad-school strictures I blossomed.
Chris Thaiss was the first instructor to teach me how to teach, way back in the TA days. Now, everybody I work with teaches me more about all that.
Okay, so you want to do something to make a birthday shinier. Naturally, you think, "Aha, I'll create the perfect mix CD." So what do you do when the playlist you assemble in your head turns into a trainwreck? Consider:
1. Weird Al Yankovic, "White and Nerdy"
2. Cream, "Tales of Brave Ulysses"
3. Rush, "Rivendell"
4. Annie Lennox, "Missionary Man"
5. The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"
6. Bob Dylan, "When I Paint My Masterpiece"
Six tracks in, and already the playlist is like being violently slammed around on a musical rollercoaster for most of it. And then you realize that "The Ballad of Jayne Cobb" needs to fit in there somewhere, and you just groan in despair.
... G, A, and D -- all of which require either a guitar small enough for my hands, a capo, or some really clever Django-fication. Even so:
Yes, I’ll dance and I’ll sing and my life shall be gay
I will banish this weeping, drive troubles away
I’ll live yet to see him regret that dark hour
When he won and neglected his frail wildwood flower
10 am: We're underway in A's Mommy Van, with Cam quizzing us about our favorite birds and favorite animals generally. His are seals, otters, wolves, and lions. Nothing you'd perform dentistry on without trepidation. We park at the Bryce Jordan Center and take the shuttle bus to town.
First: up the campus mall. The guy who makes custom sandals is here again. It would almost be worth it if they had any arch support. At a booth of wooden toys, we talk Cam out of a rubber-band pistol with some difficulty, but finally come up with the uber-logical argument that neither of us has any rubber bands with us! Phew -- a million potential liability suits averted. Ceramicists and leatherworkers seem to predominate this year.
We stop at a booth with some really amazing decorative brooms. I always think of "The Muckin' o' Geordie's Byre": "The graip was tint / The besom was deen / The barra widna row its leen." Cam discovers a bucket of bent twigs, some stout, some long, labeled as wands! Well, then! He finds one that fits his hand, and I ask him, in a moment of whimsy, which he'd pick for me. He selects one with a twist to it, very like my cane (and my damn spine, come to that), and when I pay for it, I'm told it's box elder, shaped by having had a honeysuckle vine round it. This broom maker, an awfully nice man, does in fact have a broom labeled "Nimbus 2000" hanging directly above the register, and will be appearing with it at a book party for the release of ... and the Deathly Hallows later this month.
Up further: the booth of Susan Soleil, Bookbinder to the Gods. She's no longer in Rochester, NY! She and her wife have packed up and moved operations to the Chapel Hill, NC area. They are astounded by the heat, but according to Susan, the studio situation she's in is much friendlier. I blow most of my discretionary budget for this event on a hardbound blank book with either daffodils (which have personal meaning beyond my tiny smidgen of Welsh ancestry) or jonquils (which would go with The Glass Menagerie) on the cover. Temptation to buy something from her booth for every one of my writing friends is as strong as my wallet is weak.
Around the corner. All sorts of things, including a leathermaker, Ron Musser, who is from Lancaster and who makes leather games boards, everything from traditional sorts like backgammon to more contemporary things like Monopoly. And, ohmuhgawd, frickin' SCRABBLE. I do not have the $140 it would take to buy a leather Scrabble board, but I do have the $4 it takes to buy a small black leather pouch with my bird totem on the outside. I do challenge him: if I can beat him at Scrabble, could I win a board? He laughs and says I sound awfully confident. I just smirk. A. tells him I'm pretty good. She refrains from mentioning that pretty much nobody, even Doug, will play me because I can mop the board with the faces of basically anybody I know. I'm not that aggressive, really, but get me across the board from someone and the game is on.
Down Burrowes. Lots of stuff: a ceramicist who uses Japanese motifs, including cranes; a maker of fine, fine wooden toys. At this point, Cam has to pee, so we go inside the Deike building (pron. "dykey" -- which is odd, because I really look quite femme today) -- Earth and Mineral Sciences. Apres-restroom, we have a look at the small exhibit of fossils and geodes and the like. There is a tiny, tiny vial of my dad's jet fuel in the coal exhibit. Cam is impressed, but really enjoys the prehistoric-animal bits -- mammoth vs. mastodon teeth; a hadrosaur-footprint cast. We rest on the benches across from all this, and Cam plays with his wand a bit. A. coaches him a bit in how to say Expecto Patronum, and asks him what his resulting protector animal would be. He says elephant, then quickly switches to woolly mammoth. I coin a new spell: Expectoratio Pastrami. This would cause deli sandwiches to fall out of the target's mouth unexpectedly. We realize we're all hungry, so press on toward Allen Street, passing an instrument maker who has The. Largest. Banjo. In. The. World. It's the size of an upright double bass, if not taller. In the same booth, you can buy a mandolin made of three different woods, with an antler... I forget, peg head? and moose-bone bridge, for a mere $3,000. Gee, what a bargain.
The food court is less diverse (except Polacks in da hizzouse!) and more expensive than last year. Blah. Luckily, Smart Auntie packed her own water and has hand sanitizer for everyone. We pass through Central Parklet, with a small ensemble of youth flute players on the stage, and see this year's sand sculpture, which is frankly crap. I mean, the Mr. Potato Head is well-rendered, but otherwise, meh. Cam plays a bit, and makes a friend: not a Campbell, like him, but a Cameron. Touchingly, they try to exchange phone numbers.
On Fraser, we see Mom's cousin's wife Vinnie, and a booth where a woman makes exquisite knotwork necklaces to complement jade pendants, many of Kwan Um (aka Kuan Yin, Kanzeon, Chenrezig, Avalokitesvara-bodhisattva). I resolve to bring Dad and his wallet. Dad calls then. A. and C. want to see a comedian downtown, so we all agree to meet up at the West African drum-and-dance performance at 4:30.
I press on alone past my old high school. A few fiber artists; still lots of ceramicists and leatherworkers, one of whom makes amazing, amazing journals -- your choice of watercolor or hemp paper. Renew resolution re: Dad and wallet. A center for runaway and troubled youth is offering water and snacks, and seeking donations. I gladly stuff a buck in their box and pour myself a cup of icy water. I sink to my knees on the shady grass next to the booth; drink half the cup straight down; pour another quarter of it over my head, nape, and cleavage; and drink the rest. A bargain, for those of us whose migraine meds overheat us.
I take few pictures here or on Allen St. because of the whole intellectual-property thing, but one artist, who works in found metal pieces and does a lot of birds, is just amazing. Some of his brilliantly realized birds, the ones I like best, are perched on antique binoculars. That's just what a bloody rare bird would do -- elude you all day, and then perch right on your fecking Zeiss the moment you set them aside in frustration! Someone I see near here looks so much like Linda K-B it's bizarre.
At Webster's, I duck in and retrieve one of the unsold copies of my book. Back on campus, I present this to Susan and Karen -- they're good people whom we know from way back, and it's absolutely true that many of the poems in that book were handwritten in Soleil blank books first. I must look a right mess, because Susan gives me her chair and darts off to refill my water bottle at Willard! This is a woman still wearing a compression sleeve from a mastectomy two years ago! She also walks with me over to Old Main lawn and lends me the chair for the concert. I mean, I should be used to having my disability accommodated by a cancer survivor by now, really, but -- of all the couples in all the world to give a book to, these two, I swear.
The West African drum-and-dance ensemble, Barafo (bara, drum; fo, to play) is so good that, when the musicians enjoin the crowd to dance, I do -- overheated and sore though I am by this point. I try to further memorize a lot of the African moves for the other five minutes of the year that my body will let me dance. Good times.
On the way back to the shuttle bus stop (since Dad's car is farther away), A. and C. and I run into Blane Bates, best hairdresser in Pennsylvania, and also a longtime friend. He's hitting on some hippie chick. Typical. But he's a sweetie.
After dinner, we recreate the famous Diet-Coke-and-Mentos experiment on the front sidewalk. I'm handed A's camera with which to take video, which is fine, because it gets me out of the blast radius.
No sign of the Predator today, and by that measure alone a success. He'd better not cross me on Friday the 13th, either. I feel very sorry for him if he does: I have a little baggie of dirt from the graves of my very own ancestors. Granted, it's not made up into goofer dust yet. I still require sulfur and the kitchen ingredients. But we buried my grandfather with his cobbler's hammer, and although he was a sweet and gentle man, there would be no faster way to make him angry than to hurt one of his children or grandchildren. Just sayin'.
In the London Review of Books 29:6, dated March 22, 2007, Mark Greif's article "The Right Kind of Pain" reviews a book called The Velvet Underground (which is, not too shockingly, about The Velvet Underground) by Richard Witts.
If you are like me, and you like both the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead a whole lot, or you are a VU fan and you know a Dead Head or vice versa, hie thee to a library and read this article. Greif makes a provocative comparison:
Yet when you look at the state of both bands at their contemporaneous founding moments in 1965-66, you find that the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead started out, in an odd way, as basically the same band.
Greif makes good on this comparison, which, I know, is initially a head-scratcher, given the legendary antagonism of punks toward hippies. But both groups, for example, got their break as house bands for large multimedia events; were arguably best heard live, where their long improvisations could unfold; were tightly associated with drugs to start; and, bizarrely, were both originally named the Warlocks until each figured out that a third band had already recorded under that name.
I don't often jump up from Sunday brunch and demand that people read a LRB
article, but this one is really interesting. I've liked VU since high
school, and the Dead since college, and both a great deal, but I could
never fit both into my mental schema of "what music I like, and
why" until just now. Seriously, though, musicophiles, go to the library
and sing "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant" ask for the newest LRB, because this article is cool.
Who the hell let Prince out of the house in that fugly-ass suit -- and, at the top of the act, a do-rag that looked like he might have had curlers beneath it? I mean, his backup vocalists and singer weren't doing so well either. Pretty much the only people looking close to good on that field just now were the glowing marching band. And maybe it was just the lighting; potentially the retro pale-blue suit and coral shirt might have played okay had the Big Damn Football Game been in Miami. But I don't think so. The cut wasn't flattering; neither color flattered his complexion; the black embroidery on the suit coat looked almost cowboy-ish and therefore just wrong. I'm not saying the Purple One needs to go back to the days when he was apparently sharing a closet with the Cat. I'm saying maybe some purple, which has a history of looking good on him, wouldn't go amiss.
A bit of OCD and a long memory combine to wake me up sometimes with song lyrics in my head -- lyrics to songs I haven't listened to, consciously, in weeks or months. This morning, it was Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," written in 1979 when he was already thinking hard about mortality. I wondered why this song, and then I remembered the day. (Shades of "I have been to the mountain.") The refrain goes:
These songs of freedom?
All I ever had:
Redemption songs;
All I ever had:
Redemption songs --
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom.
I'm kind of hoping my stepsister hasn't found this blog, because this has to do with her.
Maybe you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, etc. My younger stepsister is really into Christian pop/rock, to the extent of having gone to an entire festival of artists in that genre. I don't know if Jars of Clay are among her favorites; I've heard that their quality has dropped off in recent years. Anyway, if any of you happen to know of recent releases in that genre, especially if they're on a smaller label and not the kind of thing you'd be able to find in a Barnes & Noble, Borders, or small college bookstore, please let me know. I'd be getting her iTunes cash, as kind, kind souls like my Cari do for me on occasion so that I may buy Dead shows I don't already have, except I don't know whether she has an account, and I'm not certain either my dad or my stepmother would know what iTunes is. Yes, my dad is a rocket scientist, literally. No, this does not mean that he knows anything whatsoever about the Internets. Go figure.
Anyway: Do you have to have a MySpace account to download tunes from there? I've never had any success doing so, maybe because I've never had an account with them, despite easily having enough piercings to qualify. Because if it's in her preferred genre, but so new it squeaks, and thus I have to d/l and burn it for her, that's perfectly okay. I like messing around online sometimes... hence my blog.
What's your favorite music for a Sunday morning?
Submitted by Nick.
Duh -- Velvet Underground, "Sunday Morning," from The Velvet Underground and Nico, a/k/a "The Banana Album," whose banana peel, in the original printing, really peeled back. It's just so delicate and spooky and magical, that simultaneous sense of dawning and doom, which really was the mix that made the Warhol era so erotic.
No, La Loca is not old enough to have been there herself, thank you. She is giving you her impressions from visual, film, musical, and other types of art of the period. Kthx.
This Sunday morning, after doing basically nothing else yesterday, I finished the book. National Novel Writing Month, a winner is me. They don't start official validation until the 25th, where you get your certificate and winner's icon and all those downloadable goodies, but I've done it -- and now I'm sad because, although the story arc is concluded and the various plots are resolved or left deliberately open, I've just spent a lot of intense time with these characters and I miss them! Where will I escape to now, if not their little world? Nevertheless, I do feel as though I've cleared something out of my head by doing this, and can move on to some other projects (work and otherwise) that I need to tackle. I mean, doing this every year guarantees you an output of 50,000+ words that you can then rearrange, cut up, mine, and rewrite if need be, but you can't do any of that stuff if it's not on the page in the first place. I keep telling my students what Anne Lamott says: that you have to give yourself permission to write crap first drafts. You certainly can't do NaNo any other way -- you're padding things out to make the word count! You don't just have a spooky castle; you have a spooky, bleak, rain-dripping castle whose Gothic architecture puts you in mind of the house of Usher, blah blah blah. But you can't bring out the editorial pencil until next month.
Some years I've gone plotless, doing extended freewrites in a sense, very silly indeed but fun picaresque fantasies. This year, I actually set myself up with a situation, a plot, a problem, and characters who would have to deal with the problem with limited resources. It went much faster this year. I don't have enough of a sample size to infer a statistical correlation, she said academically, but it's interesting.
The "Psychic Radio" also was depressingly perfect during the last part. My iTunes turned to the Grateful Dead's American Beauty during the part where I needed to kill off somebody's father. The first song on the album is "Box of Rain," written for Phil Lesh's dying father. It wasn't until the album hit "Brokedown Palace" that I actually wept, of course:
Goin' home, goin' home
By the water's side I'm gonna lay my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul
So today was definitely a recovery day, as if I'd been on an extended psychedelic trip. Back to reality! (If you want a copy of the silly thing in .doc or .pdf -- and if you use the solecism "PDF format," I will reach through my computer and strangle you; what do you think the F in PDF stands for? -- comment with an email address. It helps if you like birds, and the requirement is that you are not the guy who raped me when I was 16. Fortunately, the majority of the world's population is free of the affliction of being that guy.)
Right now I'm listening to the Dick Spottswood Show on WAMU.org; it's a show with a lot of bluegrass, blues, zydeco, and other old-timey (as the host calls it, "obsolete") music -- if you liked the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? then you stand a good chance of liking this show.
A bit ago, Mr. Spottswood recited the titles of the songs in the set he'd just played. Only he claimed that the title of a bluegrass hymn was "Don't You Want God's Pillow to Be Your Bosom?" (He got "bosom" and "pillow" backwards.)
I regret that I must decline this kind offer. My bosom is too big already. Indeed, if it could be done in some minimally-invasive manner -- or could be done at all -- I would be out there donating breast tissue to those who feel slighted by nature. And I'm sure God's pillow must be very large.
I needed this laugh. I just really needed to titter away like a booby, so I'm glad I chose to keep abreast of my old hometown's radio shows today.
