Word of the Week - 61

Word of the Week:  MIXTAPE

Not sure what they call them anymore since we, meaning they, don't use cassettes.  I still prefer CD to digital and I still have mixtapes from decades ago and they haven't (or hadn't) lost their shape or sound.  I also continue to believe that a mixtape is an accurate representation of (a) the moment, (b) a very finite number of our favorite songs or (c) our ability to use other people's words to deliver our message.   For my (b), the problem if there was one would be how to keep it from being Van Morrison-heavy.

Here are two non-Morrison samples from my potential (b) mixtape:


To be known, is there any part of life less easily conquered?  First to be known to ourselves, not confused nor self-deceiving, then to find the means of communicating that, either by living it, writing it, speaking it, acting it out in pantomime, to significant others.  Our human ability to misconstrue is without limit, as though existence were a cinema noir classic in which we each play a protagonist of limited vision who only dreams of the big score.  Yes, I have recently been watching and thinking about noir.  I can tell you this, the cartel always wins.

With the discovery of Pinterest, I found knitting artists who produce non-matching socks by the pair.  They are jewels for the feet, rare and beautiful and, it seems, frequently made from last small bits of yarn leftover from other projects.  I know I am one of those pair, not one row like another, disparate parts scattered all over the landscape.  I believe most of us are.  Our songs will be as divergent as our thoughts and favorite foods.  A mixtape can be the microcosm, the linear presentation of peaks and valleys, a map of preferences in a way the brain can process it, us as a medley of our greatest hits which we feel no compulsion to explain.

Source unknown.

It might have to be a video mixtape, what with Lou Reed and all.

Two mixtapes, one video, one audio.  For now.

Word of the Week - 42

Van Morrison sings "Caravan" from the Martin Scorsese documentary THE LAST WALTZ.  Van the Man.  Wholehearted.  Not a lukewarm performance to be found in the whole blessed movie. 

Word of the Week - ARDENT

It is the Solstice night as I write this, time of the new moon, beginning of the return of the light.  We have been reminded throughout the day about setting our minds to new ways of being, of doing.  If we remain or become ardent, how can we go wrong.  Ardent, fervent, passionate.  Aflame, unbounded, electric, aglow, burning.

Music and musicians, color and color and color.  Tepid is not the temperature we require to carry us across winter's dark expanse.  Caliente, all spice and tang, flavor and, again, color.  We cannot find our way by candles too dim.  What we need is emphatic, even extreme.  We will not melt our own frozen beliefs without turning up the heat.  Our rigid joints will not loosen without a glow that matches the sun.

If luggage can be ardent, here it is.

Yes, I covet this vintage English watercolor box.  I covet it ardently.

Oh, fortunate possessor.

Oaxaca pillows.

On the longest night of the year, even Los Angeles yearns for a hearth with warming flames.  Heat in its dazzling manifestations expands us, will not let us shrink nor be less than we are.

"Let your soul and spirit fly"

Discover Fresh Start Gum, while Gloria decides to keep it simple

In case you fell asleep under the rhododendron and woke up thinking all the original ideas had been taken, please pay a visit to Fresh Start Gum at this amazing post.

Yes, there really is a bright side of the street.  Be subversively attentive.




Episode 6: Gloria Decides to Keep It Simple

It starts when what used to fit - socks, shoes, underpants - no longer does.  You become a wicked stepsister whose enormous feet cannot be greased, stuffed or otherwise installed in those low-cut red flats that could have come from Audrey Hepburn's closet.  Then the rosy flowered socks, too cute with the cropped olive linen pants, right? now fit like a child's anklets and leave your aging, bared limbs looking like cold oatmeal.   Whatever has befallen the underpants, still new enough that their label can be read with the human eye, they now, even when put on the right way, feel as though they are on backward or your ass has become something so much greater (in a manner of speaking) than it was the last time you wore them.

The poor fit extends to every object that your critical gaze catches, try though they may to become invisible or pull on a quick disguise.  The voice in Gloria's head screams, "Tea SHOPPE?  SHOPPE?  Was I mad?" as she begins to dismantle her sign and discard every business card, menu, coaster, postcard and catering brochure with the offensively-spelled word.  Refinement, Gloria reminded herself, is an outgrowth of simplicity.  Too many flourishes mark one as, if not an amateur, at least one who has not given sufficient thought to the problem.

"I may have to go home and cut my hair off with the red-handled knife," she muttered.  "Everything has become too much."  She stopped herself just short of pitching all of it - furniture, dishes, baked goods - into the sea.  "Even in simplicity," she noted, "one must maintain a sense of proportion.  Damn you, Noel Coward.  It all used to work just fine."  For an abbreviated moment, Gloria forgot that Mr. Coward was part-owner of the map to the bright side of the street.

Clarity - not as easy as you might think

For all that YouTube offers, could there not be an original album version of Bob Dylan's "Oh Sister?"  Could the covers perhaps be categorized separately?  No disrespect to those musicians, just the sincere yearning to hear, on demand, the song as it plays in my head.

So having said ix-nay to that morning jukebox tune, and wherever it was taking me, I landed instead on a Van Morrison original in which my favorite part, and they are all grand, is the spoken-word segment..."I didn't know you stayed up so late..." and "...gotta play this Muddy Waters..." and more.   The surely not-by-chance encounter he depicts stirs personal memory of a late-night caller in another century, another incarnation.  A Dorianne Laux poem, "Antilamentation," posted by Elizabeth a few days ago, begins with the admonishment to "Regret nothing..."  It is some piece of writing, enhanced by her inclusion of a recorded reading.  I saved it as an ideal, the exercise I practice in hope of coming close.  I took as its message that I must pay even more attention, make (and write down) the connections of this to that, not settle for anything less than the perfect word, the searing image, the truth.  I've learned that, even in conversation before it becomes writing, clarity is my most reliable sidekick, a precision about what was, the straight razor cut that leaves nothing befogged.   There is my assignment for today, for the rest of my days.  And before the mail is collected tomorrow, I also have an art commitment to be completed with the same fervent intention.  Not doing things by half-measures take a lot out of a girl.  Let me rest a while in the music.

Rave on words on printed page

For some of us, to be without means to put words to paper would be the worst sort of exile, separation and estrangement from our core. In recent musings on type and ink and paper and they ways by which we feel more connected to the act of extracting what is spoken in the mind and allowing the hand to give it form, I heard this resonating like an anthem.



Van Morrison - Rave On, John Donne Lyrics

Rave on john donne, rave on thy holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down through the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on down through time and space down through the corridors
Rave on words on printed page

Rave on, you left us infinity
And well pressed pages torn to fade
Drive on with wild abandon
Uptempo, frenzied heels

Rave on, walt whitman, nose down in wet grass
Rave on fill the senses
On nature’s bright green shady path

Rave on omar khayyam, rave on kahlil gibran
Oh, what sweet wine we drinketh
The celebration will be held
We will partake the wine and break the holy bread

Rave on let a man come out of ireland
Rave on on mr. yeats,
Rave on down through the holy rosey cross
Rave on down through theosophy, and the golden dawn
Rave on through the writing of "a vision"
Rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on

Rave on john donne, rave on thy holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down though the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on words on printed page