new winter coat!

For the past twenty years, I have been wearing a winter coat with a broken zipper that I think is ugly and not very comfortable (static!), just because I bought it on sale, and I could still wear it using the snaps. It's not my everyday coat until the weather gets to be in the single digits, but lately that has been all the time. It is ugly,  your basic sleeping-bag-with-a-hood coat, but it is long enough to keep my legs warm down below my knees. My frugalista/cheapskate/re-user mentality instructs me to keep wearing it, even though it does not please me, because it works well enough.

However, with my recent weight-gain (from the new meds), it has no longer served its purpose (of keeping me warm on the coldest days) because if I exhale, all the snaps pop open, and I can't keep it closed! That's funny for about two seconds, then it's a pain in the ass. So I did some research of the after-Xmas sales, and was able to find a very warm, well-made coat on sale (about $75 off) on-line. I hate buying clothing over the internet because I want to know if it fits right away, and I get anxious about making returns. But it arrived today, and it fits perfectly: I got petite for my T-rex short arms, but I needed it to be wide enough to zip up over my womanly hips. Yes! and when I lose that weight, it will not be too big.

New Year's intention: make room in my life for things that work and are also nice: I deserve a well-made, nice-looking winter coat that fits and actually closes in front while living in Minnesota, especially when we are about to experience the POLAR VORTEX of doom.

Nina, toujours

Méconnaître/méconnue

The Nina Simone Estate posted this documentary film, Nina Simone: La légende to Vimeo.
Nina Simone - The Legend from Nina Simone on Vimeo.


This song was written for Nina Simone (although it was the Animals' cover that charted, to her disgust. ):

Neko Case

Who am I?  (The first meditation). 

Neko Case is interviewed here on NPR about her latest album.

 "Man"

I'm a man
That's what you raised me to be
I'm not an identity crisis
This was planned

I'm a man
There's innocence in all mankind
It's what kind of animal I am
It's that simple, oh

I'm a man
And not just casually
I pull the sparks full time
The tree house cannot support me

I'm not the runt of the litter
The fat finger bullies were no match for me
So taste them in my teeth
I'm a man

I'm a man's man
Always been
Make no mistake
I've invested in
A woman's heart
It's the watermark
Of which I measure
Everything

I'm a man
That's what you raised me to be
I'm not your identity crisis
This was planned

I'm a man
You'll have to deal with me
My proxy is mine
You'll deal with me directly

And if I'm dipshit drunk on the pink perfume
I am the man in the fucking moon
'Cause you didn't know what a man was
Until I showed you

New Moon in Capricorn: setting intentions for the new year

The new moon is when we set intentions, and the first new moon of the new year is on Jan 1! It is in Capricorn, an Earth sign, and is in conjunction with all kinds of urgent and important energies. As usual, I find the words of Mary Pat Lynch, at Rising Moon Astrology, to be a rich source for meditaton.

I followed her link to Julie Dembowski's site: she looks at this new moon as a dénouement of this year's hard lessons. I certainly have been dragged through some hard lessons this year.

Another link she suggests leads to Molly Hall's post on this new moon, in which she gives us this set of suggestions:

• Revisit the dreams that have been constant, and feel right and true in your bones -- take a curious stance toward how to live aligned with that sense of life mission.
• Find the music, art, cinema and books that inspire a sense of possibility, not dread.
• Don't give up! This New Moon proves that you never know what's around the next bend.
• Experiment with conscious intention setting, and asking for guidance.
• Trust and move with the thrill of the wildly creative, free, unusual, extraordinary.
• Release destructive attitudes, and see the best in others.
• Firm up your resolve to lovingly let go of people and situations that keep you operating below your true awareness level.
• Conserve your energies for what matters most.
• Make full use of all the resources right there around you.
• Apply your new sight to old issues -- coping mechanisms, family patterns, areas where you've conformed at expense of your soul.

Visiting the chickens

Up north for the holiday

-20, yes, twenty below, and a lovely sunset up in Bemidji. The horses are Percherons.

Year-end gift of songs

Said the Gramophone has posted their 100 favorite songs of 2104. Each year, I really appreciate learning about new music from this tradition. For a brief time you can download the individual songs, or the whole playlist.

"The trumpet shall sound," two versions by Samuel Ramey

Sam Ramey,  1991, live.


Same aria, recorded in 1986 with Andrew Davis conducting.

File under: holiday songs

This story asked musicians about their favorite Christmas carols. Some of the answers were familiar to me, but these three were not.

For the solstice today, "In The Bleak Midwinter" a song based on Christina Rossetti's poem and here performed by Annie Lenox:


A 17th century French carol, "Quelle est cette odeur agréable?",  here sung by Chanticleer: 

Paroles (lyrics)

Quelle est cette odeur agréable,
Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?
S’exhale t’il rien de semblable
Au milieu des fleurs du printemps?
Quelle est cette odeur agréable
Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?
Mais quelle éclatante lumière
Dans la nuit vient frapper nos yeux
L’astre de jour, dans sa carrière,
Fût-il jamais si radieux!
Mais quelle éclatante lumière
Dans la nuit vient frapper nos yeux.
Voici beaucoup d’autres merveilles!
Grand Dieu! qu’entends-je dans les airs?
Quelles voix! Jamais nos oreilles
N’ont entendu pareils concerts.
Voici beaucoup d’autres merveilles!
Grand Dieu! qu’entends-je dans les airs?
Ne craignez rein, peuple fidèle
Écoutez l’ange du Seigneur;
Il vous annonce une merveille
Qui va vous combler de bonheur.
Ne craignez rein, peuple fidèle
Écoutez l’ange du Seigneur.
A Bethléem, dans une crèche
Il vient de vous naitre-un Sauveur
Allons, que rien ne vous empâche
D’adorer votre redémpteur
A Bethléem, dans une crèche,
Il vient de vous naître-un Sauveur.
Dieu tout puissant, gloire éternelle
Vous soit rendue jusqu’aux cieux.
Que la paix soit universelle
Que la grace a bonde en tous lieux.
Dieu tout puissant, gloire éternelle
Vous soit rendue jusqu’aux cieux.

Chanticleer also sings "In The Bleak Midwinter" with words by Christina Rossetti and arrangement by Gustav Holz


Imogen Heap, "Just for Now" from the album Speak For Yourself:

 lyrics

Just for now, just for now, just for now
Just for now, just for now, just for now

It's that time of year
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside
(If just for a little while)
Dear, stop right here
I know we'll follow the bumpy ride
(I'm secretly on your side)

How did you know? It's what I always wanted
Could never have too many of these
Will ya quit kicking me under the table?
I'm trying, will somebody make us shut up about it
Can we settle down please

It's that time of year
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside
(If just for a little while)
Dear, stop right here
I know we'll follow the bumpy ride
(I'm secretly on your side)

Bite tongue, deep breaths
Count to ten, nod your head

I think something is burning now you've ruined the whole thing
Muffle the smoke alarm
Whoever put on this music had better quick, sharp, remove it
Pour me another, oh, don't wag your finger at me

It's that time of year
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside
(If just for a little while)
Dear, stop right here
I know we'll follow the bumpy ride
(I'm secretly on your side)

Get me out of here
Get me out of here
Get me out of here

Just for now

Handel

I attended a performance of Handel's Messiah with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Chorale at the Basilica in Minneapolis. I appreciated many things about the performance, but the space swallowed up any vocal nuance and rendered the sound mushy. Too bad, because it was well done. I made sure I didn't bust out and sing along, although it was hard to resist.

It is true that "my Messiah" is shaped by the recording I've listened to so many times, with Sam Ramey and Kathleen Battle, and Andrew Davis conducting the  Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

The mezzo part was sung by a counter-tenor, who had a lovely voice. This sent me searching for Messiah performances by the amazing German counter-tenor, Andreas Scholl, interviewed here by The Guardian.

Here are some excerpts sung by Scholl:

"But who may abide?"



"O, thou, that tellest good tidings from Zion"


"Behold the lamb of God/He was despised"


and something by Handel that is not from the Messiah: "Ombra mai fu" from the opera Xerxes:

a few Cloud Cult favorites

"Everbody Here is a Cloud"
And everybody here is a cloud
and everybody here will evaporate
you came up from the ground
from a million little pieces
have you found where your place is
have you found where your place is
have you found where your place is

you've been spending your time
thinking about why you think so much
if there was ever a time
now would be the time to see
your time here is limited

and everybody here is a crowd
we all walk around with a million faces
somebody turn the lights out
there's so much more to see
in our darkest places
in our darkest places
in our darkest places

certainly certainly certainly certainly
certainly certainly certainly certainly
SO
So So so so

certainly certainly certainly certainly
certainly certainly certainly certainly
SO
So So so so
 


"Running With the Wolves"

Running with the wolves.
It's time for us to go.
Left all our clothes.
With the car left by the road.

And we were running.
For a reason.
For the burning, in our veins.
And we were running.
For a reason.
We just need to get away.

Running with the wolves.
We're screaming at the stars.
Left all we own.
In a hole in our backyard.

And we were running.
For a reason.
Left our cubicles in little flaming piles.
And we were running.
For a reason.

I need to feel something different for just a little while.

I'm not coming home.
I'm staying with the wolves.
They can burn all my mail.
And disconnect my phone.

Tell my mom I'm sorry, sorry for leaving.
But I'm staying.

Now we're running to find meaning.
We're gone, and we're never coming back.

Cloud Cult tonight!

We have tickets to see to see Cloud Cult tonight, performing an acoustic show at The Southern Theater. They will be recording all three nights of their run and making an album.
We love their music, and they are a great live band.

Here's a sweet song from one of their most recent albums:

Just a few Kinks songs

I'm reading Ray Davies' 1996 memoir X-Ray: The Unauthorized Biography, about his life and the band The Kinks up to 1973.. If you don't like the frame-story he invented in order to get some distance on his struggles, you can skip it and read the ravings of his unreliable persona. Then listen to some of the early songs, pre-Lola. The Kinks had several #1 hits in the sixties, and played continuously around the UK, in Europe and in the US. Like so many other bands, they mistakenly signed contracts at a very young age that made it so they saw almost none of the money they earned during that time, and spent acrimonious years embroiled in lawsuits and quarrels over management and publishing rights.

"You Really Got Me" (live 1979)

TV appearances were always lip-synced.

"All Day and All of the Night" (live 1979)

Ray Davies, lead singer/songwriter; Dave Davies, lead guitarist; Pete Quaife, bass; Mike Avory, drummer.

"So Tired of Waiting for You"


A lovely song, "Celluloid Heroes," performed live in 1977

seven months old

Oh my, look how big he has grown!

Marlowe, Blake, Ray Davies

Without intending it, I've been reading memoirs that approach their subject through place. I just finished The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs. Somewhat heavy slogging for the non-academic reader because it must wear its scholarship on its sleeve, but a thorough New Historical approach to its subject. One especially learns how grinding was the work and how dreary the life of poor scholarship boys who won, against great odds, the few scholarships at Canterbury and later, to Cambridge that had been made possible by Protestant King Henry. A few boys of non-noble families, if they were brilliant and hard-working enough, could experience a form of class deracination and ascension, even as they saw the sons of the minor nobility move on with a minimum of effort or accomplishment.  Those who were not content to follow the path of obedience and conformity into minor clerical posts were good candidates for recruitiment into the feverish espionage activities of Catholic and Protestant plots; they might enjoy some escape from grinding poverty and drudgery but also were also in great danger, and could end up stabbed in the eye like Marlowe, or gruesomely drawn and quartered, like other spies who were not saved  by their spy-masters. Not much on the plays themselves, but then I'm not a fan.

I have just begun Peter Ackroyd's book about William Blake. I know next to nothing about Blake's poetry, never having found congenial the glimpses of a visonary poet as presented in the usual literary histories, but Ackroyd does a wonderful job of weaving in the details of London then and now with the story of Blake and his world, and gives more weight to his work as an artist and engraver. I might still not want to read Blake the way I read the Spanish mystic poets, but with Ackroyd's books, one sees a deployment of erudition rather than scholarship, and the reading is much more agreeable. Alas, I think I stopped writing in part because I could do a very good job as the first kind of writer, but not so much as the second, and my standards and internal censorship were too strong to overcome the fear of professional punishment that came when I stopped the academic writing.

Today, I'm going to the library  to pick up two more books I have on hold, both by Ray Davies, lead singer and songwriter for The Kinks. The first one was published ten years ago, and is called "an unauthorized biography" although it is Davies himself who wrote it. The second just came out this year, and is more straight-up memoir/recollections of the music business. 

In this BBC documentary on The Kinks, someone Damian Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz,  makes this great observation: "The Stones were pornographic and The Kinks were geographic."


Many people love their song "Waterloo Sunset" for its melody, but it also such an evocation of a place.

Ray Davies voice isn't the most dramatic, but he can actually sing his demanding vocal lines with great fidelity to pitch. Respect.

DIY holiday challenge: paper snowflakes

There are lots of tutorials out there. It's harder than it looks.

How to make six-pointed snowflakes: