[Image: The Beginning of Everything: Remembering Distance
(oil on linen, 90 x 180 cm, 2010), by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox]
“Basking in the Glow of an Imagined Future”
[Image: illustration from a December 20101 post, “The Time Travelling Brain,” at the Neuroskeptic blog. The orange-highlighted region of the brain is apparently used both in remembering the past, and imagining the future. See also this article in Discover.]
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds— before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.
(E.E. Cummings)
…and:
Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.
(Mark Strand)
Midweek Music Break: Ciara Sidine, “Take Me Down”
[Image: “Ciara and Conor [Brady], acoustic set, Shadow Road Shining launch at Sugar Club, Dublin,
13 May 2011″ (from her FB page)]
The [mostly imaginary] scene: Dublin, Ireland, in the offices of a large publishing firm, sometime in the still young twenty-first century. An experienced, highly respected editor sits looking dreamily out a window of her office. Only in her 30s, she’s done the successful-professional thing and she’s also the mother of small children. She has no desire to give up those things. And yet… and yet…
From the streets below, voices whisper to her. A few moments pass. Then she realizes: they’re not speaking but singing softly, some from half a world away and some just a few blocks distant, many of them muted by the passing of decades and others still very young…
From Ciara Sidine’s Facebook page, on her influences:
I am inspired by the beautiful vocals and at times ground-breaking recordings of Emmylou Harris, by the raw vocal energy and gut-wrenching lyrics of Lucinda Williams, by the braveness and vulnerability of Beth Gibbons and the rare and ethereal sound of Portishead. The voice of Elvis Costello never ceases to make me want to lie down and surrender to its beautiful calling.
Listening to the voice of Dolores Keane always made me feel that something true and unalterable was unfolding. From Mary Black came something equally true, pure in tone and melody; from Sinead O’Connor something otherworldly, at once raw, honest, violent and soothing. From Bob Geldof, ass-kicking, rocking music that put its money where its mouth was. I’m inspired by the folk revival from the fifties on, by blues and country. Hearing Hank Williams’s voice is like a fresh awakening every time. Van Morrison speaks directly to the soul, finds his groove there and works his spell. Let the healing begin.
Johnny Cash, well I can barely even go there. His voice brings me to a different place, and it is his later American recordings that I most often revisit and find myself at home in, almost akin to being a child in those warm sing-song evenings where the night was infinite possibility and song was a democracy all of its own. Johnny’s voice reminds me of rolling thunder — rumbling, spine-tingling, exciting. How close is the lightning to where you’re standing?
Joni still reveals something fresh and lasting in every new recording, and I don’t think there’s anyone to whom I owe more in terms of inspiration. When I listen to the immediacy and singularity of records she made well over forty years ago, every strum, every chord, every harmony still goes straight to the heart.
Every generation thinks it has reinvented the world, but we only have to listen to the music of the fifties and sixties to know that our hold over any such notion is at best tenuous. What unfolds from the rock ‘n’ roll revolution has all manner of inventiveness. But rock ‘n’ roll paved the way. And its way too was paved, by roots, gospel, jazz, blues, country. It just comes around again, anew. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings make the best case for this of any contemporary performers I can think of and they, too, inspire me.
That’s quite a bit of ambition wrapped up there, hmm? But she did more than dream. She did it. Her debut album, Shadow Road Shining, came out last year to great acclaim, and you can find echoes of all those voices — and all their poetry — in every song.
Here’s “Take Me Down”:
[Below, click Play button to begin Take Me Down. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:30 long.]
[audio:takemedown_ciarasidine.mp3|titles=’Take Me Down’|artists=Ciara Sidine]
[Lyrics]
I don’t know if she’s still editing, or plans to return to it (if indeed she has left). But the verbal dexterity is all there on open display, not just in her songs’ lyrics but in such of her prose as I’ve succeeded in digging up. Here’s an excerpt from her Web site:
At the moment, I feel that to be Irish is to have just emerged from your teenage-hood, having wrecked your parents’ gaff in a massive drug-fuelled party. Great fun, no one’s arguing, but they’re due back any minute, and you’ve woken up to an almighty hangover and an unbright future. The beautiful chick/dude from last night is nowhere to be found. Tomorrow you’re about to discover that you failed the leaving. There’s a queue stretching around the corner for a Mac-job. It’s time to sink or swim.
There’s always choice, always possibility. Maybe I’ll write a song about that.
An almighty hangover and an unbright future… You failed the leaving. It takes a real writer’s confidence with the English language — and in her choices — to fashion such cadences.
Update (2012-02-15, 2:00pm): See Froog’s comment, below, for a bit of a balloon-puncturing about one of those presumptively imaginative phrases.
A Face Only a Mother Could Love
We’re thinking of physically reconfiguring our network equipment here at the house. Currently, the DSL modem and router are upstairs in my office — at the far end of the house — where they’ve been since we moved here ten years ago. Since then, things have changed:
- The Missus no longer has a desktop computer. She has a laptop, which can use either a wired or a wireless connection.
- We have new smartphones, which can connect to the Internet either via our carrier’s own network, OR through (much faster) WiFi if available.
- We have a streaming-video device connected to our TV which lets us download movies and TV shows (etc.) — unavailable through our satellite-TV provider — via services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and so on. Or rather, it would let us do so, if (a) we had a reliable wireless connection at that location, or (b) the wired connection there weren’t already devoted to our satellite DVR.
- Our newest Kindle, like the smartphones, can use either WiFi (faster) or Amazon’s own 3G “Whispernet” network, depending on which is available.
Ready (or Not) for Surprise
[See the note at the foot of this post for information about this video.]
From whiskey river:
I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. There’s a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don’t have any strategy or plan to get through the day. It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on. These are staggering problems. I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery. He’s been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime. I expressed my admiration for him and he said “Leonard, I’ve been here twelve years and every morning, I have to decide whether I’m going to stay or not.” I knew exactly what he was talking about.
(Leonard Cohen, 1988 interview with Jon Wilde in Blitz [source])
…and:
Solitude (I)
I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.My name, my girls, my job, all
slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
further and further away. I was a nobody:
a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.The headlights of the oncoming cars
bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
The seconds grew and grew — making more room for me —
stretching huge as hospitals.I almost felt that I could rest
and take a breath
before the crash.Then something caught: some helpful sand
or a well-timed gust of wind. The car
snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
spinning away in the darkness.And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt
and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
to see what was left of me.
(Tomas Tranströmer [source])
…and:
There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.
(John Green [source])
Midweek Music Break: Hayes Carll, “Another Like You”
It’s probably easier to describe the opposite of roots music — the stuff which falls outside the Venn diagram. Among the exclusions: techno-electronic dance sounds, bubblegum-pop production values, things metal (as opposed to things wood), sampling and remixing of other artists’ work.
I’d never even heard the name “Hayes Carll” until a couple months ago, when his “Another Like You” topped American Songwriter‘s list of the best 50 songs of 2011. I mean, just look at the top ten to see some of the company he’s keeping: Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Gillian Welch, Tom Waits…!You can get a pretty good sense of what to expect (and what not to expect) from him just by glancing at the photo topping this post. His music seems to fall generally into the country/western valley of the roots landscape. On the other hand, his new album straddles categories like they don’t exist. From his Web site:
Fiery rock, twangy country, pensive folk and even a touch of gospel comprise KMAG YOYO‘s sonic palette… Rather than enter the studio with a batch of completed material, Carll and his band picked up where they’d left off onstage — jamming on riffs they’d developed on the road. “I wanted to challenge myself musically,” says Carll, “and see if I could capture that live dynamic. A lot of the songs came with the music first, with the music calling the lyrics.” After completing the instrumental tracks with the band, Carll set to work, his witty wordplay matching the temper of the instrumentation.
That album title, pronounced kay-mag yo-yo, is (says the site) a military acronym (in the same sense, I guess, as snafu). It stands for Kiss my ass, guys. You’re on your own. And its sense is captured in the title track, which tells the story of a disillusioned American soldier in Afghanistan. (The album itself has been well-received. The one review which most stands out in my mind is the one from about a year ago at No Depression.)
So, you think: Carll’s a political songwriter. Well, yes and no. In today’s Midweek Music Break selection, he paints a highly entertaining portrait of a hot romance born of hot disagreement between left and right. (With a surprise cameo at the end, featuring Mr. Left (even more pebbles-in-his-mouth than usual) and Ms. Right themselves — the poster children of political mismatches.)
[Lyrics]
Answers in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
[Image: xkcd #936, on password strength. Click image to enlarge; see xkcd itself for the full six panels and the punchline.]
From whiskey river:
This accidental
meeting of possibilities
calls itself I.I ask: what am I doing here?
And, at once, this I
becomes unreal.
(Dag Hammarskjöld [source])
…and:
Ch’ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
“For” and “against” are forgotten.No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.
(Chuang Tzu [source])
Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda”
[Image: the valley of the Rhondda]
I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily featured in the section or chapter on which I was working at the time. Two characters, for instance, were World War II veterans, so (naturally) they listened regularly to Big Band/swing music… and so did I.
Actually, I took it further: one of the two preferred the smoooooth sound of Glenn Miller; the other, the more raucous Benny Goodman Orchestra. They argued about it periodically, one sarcastically, exasperatedly, and the other with gentle good humor.
Anyway, a handful of chapters scattered throughout recount the story of an eighteenth-century Welsh brewmaster named Emrys ap Rhys, and how he came to brew a particular ale which plays a significant part in S2F‘s storyline. Even Emrys had his own “My Music” sort of playlist, which may sound like a tall order… unless you know about the history of music in Wales.
Briefly, the Welsh love music, particularly choral music — and further particularly, choral music performed by men. The tradition goes back centuries, with much of the music composed and sung in the performers’ native Welsh language rather than English. As it happened, then, it wasn’t hard to build a good soundtrack for the Emrys chapters.
One tune in particular stands out.
“Cwm Rhondda” (Welsh for the Rhondda Valley, in South Wales — the Rhondda being a river there), like many tunes, isn’t in itself a song to be sung. It has no words of its own. Instead, the melody which goes by that name is used as a scaffold for the lyrics of a hymn: several hymns, in fact. Although the tune is sometimes described as the unofficial national anthem of Wales, the hymn has no lyrics of a typically national-anthemic sort. (Given the title, for instance, one might expect a praise song about Nature’s beauty on display in the countryside of South Wales.) Instead — at least in the versions I know of — the supplicant just asks God for help on his or her journeys through life and the world. Nowadays, the tune also underlies the chants of You’re not singing anymore! which erupt among Welsh fans, from time to time, when their football teams are on the field.*
(The specific circumstances calling forth this chant, apparently, are a form of Schadenfreude: delight in someone else’s troubles. If one’s culture encourages one to burst into song when things are going well, then a sudden turn in fortune tends to shut one up.)
My favorite writeup about “Cwm Rhondda” is the one on the h2g2 site. (This is the pre-Wikipedia and often much more informal online encyclopedia originally established by Douglas Adams as the Earthbound counterpart to the one described in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.) It’s tempting to quote the entire piece, but I’ll offer just this:
‘Cwm Rhondda’ is a belter of a hymn that defies one to sing it quietly… It is the very embodiment of hwyl, the Welsh love of homeland and of culture, and as such has come close to supplanting the official Welsh national anthem. This is especially the case at rugby ‘internationals’, where the faltering, bathetic, falsely-devout Land of My Fathers [JES: that’s the actual Welsh national anthem] is soon dispensed with in favour of something far more robust. England fans often respond with their own countermeasures, often the Negro spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, but soon buckle under the sonic onslaught of ‘huge gangs of tough, sinewy men… terrorising people with their close-harmony singing.’
Ha!
Anyway, here’s the Pendyrus Male Choir (Welsh-language version of their home page here), and “Cwm Rhondda”:
When the group hits and holds those high notes, it makes me wish I could join them in song. (Not a reaction I commonly have, which many people would consider a mercy of the gods deserving a hymn in its own right.)
Tracking down the lyrics to the above is complicated by my not recognizing spoken (let alone sung) Welsh. This page (about which I know pretty much nothing) suggests that it’s the hymn called “Lo, Between the Myrtles Standing,” which you can find in Welsh and English translation at Wikipedia.
(By the way, yes, I know: the tune “Cwm Rhondda” was actually composed in the early twentieth century, and thus would have been unknown to a real Emrys ap Rhys. So would his late-twentieth-century creator. :))
___________________________
* Videos of these mass outbursts constitute almost an entire sub-genre… and given the context (cellphone and other handheld video cameras; the natural rowdiness of crowds at sporting events; mass quantities of brew), their quality is, well, all over the map.
The Kindness of Every Split-Second
[Image: display window of “mini-prints” taken with the Fujifilm Instax camera (originally from the Photojojo store). See note at bottom of post for more.]
From whiskey river:
You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, “Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.”
That’s what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it — or my observation of it — is temporary?
(John Green [source])
…and (italicized portion):
In the Storm
Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowinghard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,and settled
in a row
behind the ducks—
whose backs were alsocovered with snow—
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but underthe roof of the ducks’ tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown awayout over the water,
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came backand again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
stoop there, and live.If someone you didn’t know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned,
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn’t a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness—as now and again
some rare person has suggested—
is a miracle.
As surely it is.
(Mary Oliver [source])
Midweek Music Break: Loreena McKennitt, “Down by the Sally Gardens”
Loreena McKennitt seems to love anything which hitches the adjective Celtic to the noun music. She’s traveled the world to record music both Celtic and Celtic-like, often (even on brand-new songs) using instruments which might have been recognized 2,000 years ago across the whole range of the Celts’ distribution. She’s certainly traveled farther afield than many performers nominally in her genre; with its odd but infectious rolling rhythms of ancient woodwinds and percussion instruments, her music often sounds more Middle Eastern or even sub-continental Indian than conventionally”Celtic.”
But her 2010 album, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, had her returning to the recognizable. Recorded at a historic temple in Ontario, it includes classics like “Brian Boru’s March,” the title song, and a RAMH favorite, “The Parting Glass.” Among them: “Down by the Sally Gardens.”
William Butler Yeats first published his poem called “Down by the Salley Gardens” (that’s “Salley” with an “e”) in 1899. Per Wikipedia, he claimed inspiration from the singing of an “old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo,” who apparently sang two or three lines, repeatedly, which stuck in the poet’s head.
About that one odd word in the title, at a site called, simply, The Irish Page, I found this information:
A salley is a willow tree. It was once common to have gardens of willows for osiers (willow rods). These gardens were kept to have material for basket-making and for thatch roofing of cottages. The Gaelic for willow is saileach, which comes from the Latin, salix for willow tree… One more use for willow is the bark, which contains salicylic acid from which aspirin is made. Use of willow bark as an analgesic was known since ancient times.
With one exception, McKennitt’s arrangement keeps it simple; the accompaniment (if I’m reading the track listing correctly) includes just harp, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, and uilleann pipes (okay, that one’s a stretch — Wikipedia: “the characteristic national bagpipes of Ireland”).
But McKennitt’s voice — wow. Whatever Yeats heard back in that Sligo village, however much inspiration he drew from the old woman’s words, I bet her voice didn’t raise the hair on his arms.
[Lyrics]
As an aside, this song’s lyrics — and of course Yeats’s poem — seem awfully close, up to a point, to those of an old Irish/Scottish/American folk/country/bluegrass song, “Down in the Willow Garden.” But as you can see from its Wikipedia entry, the story’s outcome, and the overall message, is quite different:
“Down in the Willow Garden,” also known as “Rose Connelly”is a traditional Appalachian murder ballad about a man facing the gallows for the murder of his lover: he gave her poisoned wine, stabbed her, and threw her in a river.
Part of wants to laugh out loud at the contrast between the songs, and part of me— Oh, hell. It’s just bizarrely funny in an Edward Gorey way. Or a Coen Brothers way, come to that:
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