Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Midweek Music Break: Joni Mitchell, “All I Want”

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Although I’d been aware of Joni Mitchell for some time, I didn’t really plug into her music (so to speak) until 1971, when she released the Blue album.* The first track is the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.

Mitchell, as I thought I knew at the time, was quote-unquote just a folk singer-songwriter. I mean, you just had to glimpse her to “know” that — the slight build, the straight blonde hair, the long, plain flowered dresses… she looked like Mary Travers’s younger and rather anemic sister. And her voice was strange, too: idiosyncratically flute-like, ethereal.

So then why did I first latch onto Blue? Easy (and perhaps not so surprising): it came at the recommendation of a girl with whom I’d been “friends” for far too long — and who had mysteriously, stubbornly resisted my awkward charms as I tried to move nonexistent “us” to a nonexistent “next level.” That girl had suggested that I attend to the poetry of the lyrics, which (she assured me) were almost as unbearably heartbreaking as they were simply epic.

It still took me a while to warm to the lyrics (even though Mitchell had printed them on the album cover — a primitive form of closed-captioning I always appreciated). But jeez, the music…

The album is stripped down instrumentally; aside from Mitchell’s acoustic guitar, most everything else just sort of pulses in the background. It feels like it’s just her and the guitar (even though she had several other backing musicians). More than the acoustic properties or the lyrics, though, what moved me from the start about “All I Want” was the rhythm. It’s complex, almost like the rhythm of a Trinidadian street-corner steel-drums musician. It rolls and stutters, lunges forward and back and stops cold for a split-second here and there, beautifully.

Eventually, of course, the lyrics penetrated the fog (of various kinds) I’d been listening in. Just for starters, it does that thing — whatever the term — which I’ve always loved encountering in a song: it overstuffs the lines with verbiage, in a way which almost makes it impossible to believe that it all fits.

And what a great song in general: a flirtatious tribute to the joy of joy, y’know?

[Lyrics]

Today’s Joni Mitchell’s 69th birthday. I’m so honestly happy to have “met” her, and hope she has a great day.

______________________________

* I knew she’d written Judy Collins’s Top 40 hit, “Clouds.” But I think my first exposure was actually the summer of 1969, at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, which preceded Woodstock by a couple of weeks. As the Wikipedia article says, JM came onstage following a performance by a blues-rock band named Mother Earth who’d completely energized the audience. Few people seemed to be paying attention to the considerably more mellow, fragile blonde beauty trilling — ye gods — was it folk music?!? After trying gamely for a few minutes in the face of all that discourtesy, she just broke down and more or less fled the stage. Even though I didn’t (as I say) know much if anything about her, I do recall feeling mildly ashamed of us all.

“Wipe Your Wheels Before You Come In — You’ll Get Sand All Over!”

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Whoa: now that just might be (as Bad Astronomy blogger Dr. Phil Plait calls it) “the single greatest vacation picture ever taken.” The setting: somewhere in Gale Crater, on the surface of Mars. The subject: the Mars Curiosity rover… in a self-portrait. My first thought: the rover must have set up a camera on a tripod, and backed up a bit before triggering the shutter remotely. (Hey, if an engineering team can plan and execute a landing like this one, such a shot would seem to be small potatoes.) But no: the camera which took this photo is actually mounted on a mast arm which can be held out away from the rover’s body and aimed in any old direction — including back at itself.

So where is the mast arm in the photo? It’s there, all right: 55 times. That’s the number of separate images combined into one final shot; the mast has simply been cropped or otherwise edited out of the images wherever it appeared.

(A blogger at the Planetary Society also notes that if you view the full-sized image, you can see reflections of the mast arm camera in a couple of spots — essentially making this one of those classic “this is me, taking a photo of a camera taking a photo of me” gimmick shots.)

You can view or download a larger version of the photo here (1280 x 1780, 599KB) here, or the full-sized monster (5463 x 7595, 7.7MB) here. Either of those will allow you to see much more detail in small areas.

People, people: how cool is it to be alive at a time when we can see such stuff?

Everyday Sights, Never Quite Seen or Remembered

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[Photo: “If they’d only realized that the killer was right there in the crowd,” by Christopher Boffoli (from his book/exhibition, Big Appetites)]

From whiskey river:

I once had a friend. He had been teaching a long time when I was just starting. He liked telling his students he’d seen them before. In another life, at another school, the same hairline, the same kid brother back home in eighth grade. In class, he gave them obituaries to read. And though we’re no longer close, here is consolation: I still believe in what he was up to: seeing if he could make them dizzy. Suggesting they write their way into or out of the disquieting facts he offered up. Offering the chance to find themselves breathless, to consider themselves a point on a circle falling and rising, falling/drawn up, as the wheel moved, moves, is moving relentlessly on. He wanted them to feel conveyor beneath their feet, when all along they’d assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site…

What does my friend want his students to say, what does he want them to stumble into, considering those obituaries? “Nothing in particular,” he’d answer, meaning “I have no plan.” No one thing in mind. Only for them to skid to a halt, to go breathlessly forth, for here is their chance to see: the patterns keep coming, all the lives theirs resemble — in the newspaper photo, the deceased at age twenty, the jaunty tilt of that head so like the tilt of their own. That they share the same name, the same birthday and interests. That the most basic, seismic events daily converge and include us.

(Lia Purpura [source])

…and:

In the Christian calendar, November 1st is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas — saints — who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one — who annoys you so — pretends for a day that he’s the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday.

Imagine a hectic procession of revelers — the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind’s eye, these old friends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints: but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or noticed, the feast, indeed, of most of us…

(Mary Rose O’Reilley [source])

…and:

All Hallow’s Eve

In the great silence of my favorite month,
October (the red of maples, the bronze of oaks,
A clear-yellow leaf here and there on birches),
I celebrated the standstill of time.

The vast country of the dead had its beginning everywhere:
At the turn of a tree-lined alley, across park lawns.
But I did not have to enter, I was not called yet.

Motorboats pulled up on the river bank, paths in pine needles.
It was getting dark early, no lights on the other side.

I was going to attend the ball of ghosts and witches.
A delegation would appear there in masks and wigs,
And dance, unrecognized, in the chorus of the living.

(Czeslaw Milosz [source (2MB PDF)])

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Midweek Music Break: Water Music

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[Image: “The Death of Diarmuid, the Last Handful of Water” (1945), by Jack Butler Yeats.
The title alludes to the ancient Irish tale known as The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne.]

One of my favorite playlists is called “Water Music”: songs about and/or titled in such a way as to emphasize good old H2O — rivers, oceans, rain and snow, teardrops, wading-swimming-surfing-and-diving… It’s also one of my biggest, most wide-ranging playlists (if burned to CD, it would span several disks). It amazes me how much music, across all kinds of genres, references the stuff in a non-peripheral way — not always literally, but often as metaphor for something else.

This week, with Hurricane/Tropical Storm/what-have-you Sandy on my mind, bits and pieces of that playlist keep jumping out at me. A great many of those songs could fit quite nicely with the headlines of the week, and I thought of songs that hammered at the literal (if not — haha — littoral) use of “water” and related terms. Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”; the Doobie Brothers, “Black Water”; the Sons of the Pioneers, “Red River Valley”; “Bridge over Troubled Water”… “Tracks of My Tears”… our old friends “Cry Me a River” and “Wade in the Water“; and — whoa — Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising.”

But you know what? It’s kind of tacky to go that way: almost jocular, almost making light of what Sandy has wrought. (For much the same reason, I’d imagine, CNN has reportedly banned the term “Frankenstorm” from its broadcasts.)

Instead, let’s turn to Warren Zevon, who grabs for much more than the literal in his “Fistful of Rain”:

[Lyrics]

The Haunting

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[Video: scene from 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise,
starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn. More below.]

From whiskey river:

In This

In this house you would come to believe
in ghosts and lives beyond the grave. Here
noises configure themselves into the voices
of those who’ve gone. “Cyril!” calls a wife
lost to cancer; a dead dog’s nametag chinks
against the brass of her collar; the creak
of an opening door, a footstep
on a warped floorboard, and someone
you’ve loved comes to breathe your name
once again, and now in Autumn the wind
moaning beneath the eaves, and the small tornadoes
of leaves lifted in frenzied gusts
scratch against the window late at night
like the feeble clawing of all our loves
wanting to come back, wanting to make us
believe that we can ever be reunited.

(Mikey Fatboy Delgado [source])

…and:

Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment.

That is why we often fear to open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much.

(Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment [source])

…and:

There is the sound of dust heard over the telephone.
There is the sound of a piano with a faint heart
coming from below, a hell where people are happy.
There is the sound of someone standing on the grave
of someone they do not know and do not care about.
There is the sound the same person makes
standing on their own grave.
I love the sound of the iron on the ironing board
turning on and off, waiting for someone to come.

(Mary Ruefle, from “Refrigerator” [hear her reading the whole poem here])

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Midweek Music Break: Jimmie Vaughan et al., “Six Strings Down”

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Bonnie Raitt was playing nearby this weekend. We didn’t get to see her, sadly, but I thought this week I’d feature a selection from her most recent album (Slipstream, released in the spring).

Unfortunately, in the process of looking at videos of her music I fell down a very deep rabbit hole. (I’ll feature Slipstream in a later post.) I gotta tell you: the woman has played gigs with an unbelievable range of fellow performers, including this gem from the mid-1990s.

Blues-guitarist great Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash in 1990. In 1996, a pantheon of fellow blues artists got together for a tribute concert, later released as a DVD; the emotional high point was the number below, “Six Strings Down,” written by Jimmie Vaughan (who also does the lead vocals) in honor of his brother. Playing and singing with Jimmie Vaughan are Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Dr. John, Art Neville (on keyboard), and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s own band, Double Trouble.

Whoa.

[Lyrics]

Shadows Over Stuff

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“It’s me. I was just calling to tell you that there is a big white cloud coming.”
Cartoon by French cartoonist Voutch, from his 2007 collection, This Is as Bad as It Gets. (Click to enlarge.)

From whiskey river:

From Here to Eternity

One day you wake up
and your life is over.
But it doesn’t mean
you have to die.
It means last October was yellower
than this, and this the yellowest
anyone can remember.
It means you have produced enough tears
to fill, to one-eighth of an inch
of the top, Lake Baikal,
and now someone would like to swim.
It means what it meant
to listen to the teacher
tell the story of Dante and Beatrice
and break down crying in the middle,
because his wife was taken away by the police
last night, you so happy
to be dismissed early
you and your pals broke out
a pack of cards on the tram.
It means you are more interested
in the shadows of objects than objects
themselves, and if asked to draw anything
you would only need charcoal
to convince the world
it is waiting, in the shadows
of things, and you will wait back.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living.

(R. H. Blyth, from Haiku, Vol. 1)

…and:

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,
And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,
Acquire their forms before we do.

(Osip Mandelstam, from “Octaves: 7”  [source])

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Patterns: The Pi Man

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This is the first of an occasional series of posts centered around my fascination with patterns: visible patterns, audible rhythms, simple habits of being.

How I first came to read science fiction is anybody’s guess. I don’t think any of my friends read it, and I can’t remember any adult steering me in that direction. Possibly, the main draw was that the town library (as I recall) maintained a completely separate section for fantasy and SF — completely separate, that is, from the age-defined “children’s books” and “adult books” sections. Unlike those in the kids’ area, the F/SF section’s books weren’t big-format with lots of pictures. They had lots of words, like the inch-thick (and beyond) monsters of the adult section. But, unlike with the adult section, the librarians didn’t care how old you were. No one took F/SF seriously enough. How could anyone, even a child, possibly come to harm of even the psychological sort by reading about adventures in science, space, and time?

Of course there was plenty of conventional SF available — space operas, mad scientists, that sort of thing. But every now and then, especially in the SF anthologies of short stories, you’d come across something which really made your little pre-high-school brain jump to its toes, throw its arms wide, and turn inside-out. One such story for me — one of the most disturbing stories I’d ever read, remaining so for a long time — was Alfred Bester’s 1959 tale called “The Pi Man.”

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