Answer: roll the car window down sometimes.
(We do have a little nervousness about doing this, with reason; The Pooch gets so excited that she seems to lose her basic sense of or concern about where she is in 3D space. Which isn’t a prescription for keeping the windows rolled up — it’s a prescription for keeping hold of her collar. :))
A great back story, great voices, professional recording job, words and music by Neko Case… and a ukulele! What’s not to like???
[Lyrics]
[h/t to Jules]
[Image: “Extrange shoes,” by user pepel at stock.xchng]
From whiskey river:
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
(William Stafford)
…and:
The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception. If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, one poet would be enough. But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.
(Wallace Stevens)
…and (highlighted portion):
How It Adds Up
There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.
And the day I quit the job my father got me.
And the day I stood outside a door,
and listened to my girlfriend making love
to someone obviously not me, inside,and I felt strange because I didn’t care.
There was the morning I was born,
and the year I was a loser,
and the night I was the winner of the prize
for which the audience applauded.Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can’t forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I’m trapped inside,or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
in a manic-depressive windstorm.Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,
And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leavingwill look like notes
of a crazy song.
(Tony Hoagland)
From Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang:
And then there was Black Ceremony, a recent daytime fireworks exhibition in the desert sky over Qatar, kicking off his exhibit at the Arab Museum of Modern Art:
How do you put together your music playlists — the casual, randomized, no-occasion playlists, the non-obvious playlists (not “Oldies,” “Blues,” etc.) — the ones you listen to when you’re not trying to “send a message” or serve some particular purpose (like writing/editing music)?
Myself, I don’t like to think too much about the decision (other than to pull music from non-conflicting genres). So I tend to gather up a bunch of songs with related words in their titles. I’ve got a “Road Music” playlist, for example — it’s surprising (or not) how many song titles mention thoroughfares of one kind or another. And one of my favorite such playlists is the one called “Water Music.” What’s it include? Pretty much any song, in nearly any genre but classical, whose title references water in any form: oceans, rivers, rain, snow and ice, teardrops…
With no hesitation on my part, today’s selection went straight to the Water Music list. It’s by the Lizzy Ross Band, a North Carolina-based loose-genred group whose first album, Read Me Out Loud, came out just a few weeks ago.
The band is fronted by Lizzy Ross herself, a diminutive early-20s-something songwriter and vocal pyrotechnician. (That’s her over at the right, obviously, belting out something or other at a live performance.) While her voice is capable of great power, she modulates it superbly, mixing up sweet, unforced little grace notes with rocking bursts which channel mature, big-voice singers from other generations. While she doesn’t yet have a Wikipedia page, it’s not hard to find her mentioned online in the same breath with Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Edie Brickell, Joni Mitchell…
I have to admit I was charmed, too, by a little irrelevant detail I found while rummaging about on the Web for information about her and the band: she recently attended a “Beowulf themed Xmas party.” In decades of attending parties of all kinds, hosted by all manner of creative people, I have never seen — never expected to see — those proper nouns in the same sentence.
Given that voice and its magnetic appeal, it’s kind of exciting to listen to Ross’s band: the whole ensemble plays that well together, so seamlessly that they seem to have been doing this for years. They’re perfectly well-suited to one another.
And then there’s “Waves” itself:
I first heard it (not surprisingly) at Beat Surrender. The swinging rhythm immediately grabbed me, and of course there was Ross’s voice skipping above it. But I completely fell for the lyrics. If you read them apart from the music, you might wonder what sort of tune could possibly carry them; they seem almost like free verse, like prose: a peculiar sort of prose, a prose furnished wall-to-wall with metaphor and little stylistic flourishes uncommon to much of rock music. It’s a cleverly constructed song, and (I think) an honest pleasure to listen to.
[Below, click Play button to begin Waves. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:24 long.]
[Lyrics]
[Image: night view of House Attack, a 2006 installation by artist Erwin Wurm — a real house, turned upside down and embedded in the roof at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK). See the daytime look here.]
From whiskey river (which, I think, offered an especially rich selection this week):
Everything That Acts Is Actual
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull meinto December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over
new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn of tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
The beginning of being fine is noticing how things really are.
1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely.
2. If you are alive, that’s good; lower the bar.
3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts.
4. If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate.
5. What you need might be given to you.
6. The true life is in between winning and losing.
7. If you have nothing — give it away.
(John Tarrant [source])
…and:
Time is constantly passing. If you really consider this fact, you will be simultaneously amazed and terrified. Time is passing, even for tiles, walls, and pebbles. This means that every moment dies to itself. As soon as it arises, it is gone. You cannot find any duration. Arising and passing away are simultaneous. That is why there is no seeing nor hearing. That is why we are both sentient beings and insentient beings.
(Norman Fischer)
…and:
I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
(J. B. Priestley)
The Black Keys have been pumping out well-received music for almost ten years now. Critics love it; audiences love it; and to even skim the Wikipedia entry about them made me wonder, a little, how film and TV-show soundtrack producers would have done without them in that decade.
But — true to form — I’ve always seemed to be looking in the wrong direction. When their 2010 album, Brothers, won a Grammy as best alt-rock album of the year… um, yeah… well… [whistling to fill embarrassed silence]
Their most recent, El Camino, just came out yesterday; it already seems headed for the same level of acclaim as Brothers. Metacritic puts it at a composite 84 “Metascore,” vs. 82 for the previous album. Yet reading those reviews, even just their capsule summaries, raises a weird question: have they all listened to all of the band’s music? (Some of the criticism implies that El Camino burns the bridges carefully built by earlier releases; some insists that it’s rehashing history. Go figure.)
Obviously, I’m in no position myself to judge El Camino next to The Black Keys’ other stuff. But I’ve at least listened to this one, and now I’m really embarrassed to have overlooked the band for so long. I couldn’t decide which of several tunes to include in today’s post… and then I saw the video for “Lonely Boy,” the first track: an instant classic in the get-up-and-dance genre.
[Lyrics]
Damn. They never show that guy’s feet, but he may have been told to keep them inside a two-foot-square box — and then followed the instructions.
[Image: “Butterfly Splash,” by Alex Koloskov. For more information, including an “e-videobook” tutorial on creating this sort of effect, see the photographer’s site, which is where I found it.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist
Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.Certain words — these, for instance —
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover’s you
or the solipsist’s I.
Perhaps the philosopher’s willowy it.The concealment plainly delights.
Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.
(Jane Hirshfield)
…and:
I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.”
(Alan Watts)
…and:
In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.
(James Salter)
The bigger some project or product is, the more difficult we assume it must have been to bring off properly. Apocalypse Now is not just a bigger deal literally than a two-minute Looney Tunes cartoon; it’s also more “significant” (by most measures).
So what motivates a legitimate musician decide to specialize in an instrument like the ukulele, its image stamped in popular imagination by OMG-you-can’t-be-serious performers like Arthur Godfrey and Tiny Tim? Singer-songwriter Sophie Madeleine (that’s her newest album’s cover at the right) explains the appeal for her, for the Brighton Source:
Though she started on the piano, before teaching herself the guitar, it was finding that small, four-stringed instrument that made her feel at home. “To begin with I used to play jazz/soul/blues sort of stuff,” she says. “I was doing that for quite a while and then picked up the ukulele and realised that my vocals were better suited to folk because my voice is quite quiet, or delicate or whatever. When I picked up the ukulele the genre I was in changed and everything slotted into place.”
But as someone who considers herself a songwriter first and a singer second (“Singing was just something I had to do to show people my songs,” she reckons), does having four strings make composing more tricky? “I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult or easier,” she says. “It’s just different. Which is why I liked it. There’s only so much you can do so it’s down to the bare bones of the song. If you can make a song sound full and good on a ukulele with just your voice then you’ve written a good song. And because I learnt it as I was going, half the time I didn’t know what chord I was playing so I was discovering new chords that I didn’t know existed.”
The answer to “Why specialize in the ukulele?” sounds a bit like the reason why poets take up haiku: the challenge of using a seemingly simple instrument to plumb unexpected depths — or even to achieve, in the listener, effects not at all possible just by piling on more sound.
Aside: If you’ve ever written tens of thousands of words for a single book, you probably know the difficulty of suddenly turning around and writing short. But it’s not unrewarding, exactly: you’ve just gotten used to (read, maybe, spoiled by) the novel’s lavish canvas of action, emotion, meaning. Nothing about any of those values requires depiction on a grand scale, any more than a jewel requires a grand setting. And it’s similarly difficult: you just have to spend more time in the cutting. Any flaws you miss or let slide will be magnified enormously, not swallowed up and blurred over in a mass of text.
Here’s Madeleine performing her single “Stars” (which appears around the Web, sometimes, as “The Stars”):
[Lyrics]
For a completely different feel, here’s “You Are My Favourite” — in which Madeleine suddenly finds herself joined by a host of other ukulele aficionados from around the world:
I agree with Madeleine that the ukulele’s sound suits her voice, which itself doesn’t qualify as, y’know, a Big Instrument. (It reminds me a little of Lenka’s (featured here).) And generalizations about scale and importance can be a bit tricky: the smallest beauties generally can’t sustain the biggest meanings. I don’t want to ascribe more significance to these pieces than they can hold without bursting.
Still, well, there’s a reason why full symphony orchestras include a triangle. By the same token, I love that music’s stage has room for performers like this, and songs like hers.
When I was a sophomore in high school — this was just a plain old everyday public high school, not a school for high-achieving nerds or anything — our English teacher let us write an end-of-year research paper on any topic we liked. I have no idea why, of all possible subjects, at the age of 15 I decided to research Old English. (And then, a year later, to continue the investigation by focusing on Middle English.)
Whatever the reason, and no matter in how many forms I see it covered, the topic never gets old for me. This was sheer pleasure:
[Hat tip to Jules, via Facebook]
Its style reminds me a little of something which might have appeared scattered throughout several episodes of the old Rocky & Bullwinkle TV show: kidding, but not quite.
