A live performance of one of my favorite songs off of White Chalk, “Silence.”
January 15, 2010
January 14, 2010
more music: Savina Yannatou
Here she sings one of my favorite songs on Mediterrannea backed up by her own ensemble, Primavera en Salonico, and the Orquestra Àrab De Barcelona. “Balo Sardo” means Sardinian dance, and Yannatou sings it in the original language.
January 13, 2010
November 18, 2009
November 14, 2009
Lou Reed and Mattotti are doing a graphic novel version of The Raven?
It sounds like a book you’d find at the lighthouse in Hicksville. I can’t find too much into about it, but there’s an image at The Comics Reporter, a gallery showing of Mattotti’s art for it announced, and a mention that Reed referred to the book at a reading. I’m really curious.
August 22, 2009
strange siblings and the love child
Is it just me, or do other people think that the Latvian-born Russian pop star Vitas looks a lot like Alison Bechdel?
And the French comics artist Blutch is like a love-child between Dan Clowes and Daniel Auteuil.
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August 7, 2009
keep showing up, part 2
John Wilmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox;
Nabakov wrote on index cards
at a lectern in his socks;
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box;
And Johnny Thunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks.
Well, me, I’m lying here with nothing in my ears.
Me, I’m lying here with nothing in my ears.
Me, I’m lying here for what seems years.
I’m just lying on my bed with nothing in my head.
Send that stuff on down to me…
There she goes, my beautiful world…
So if you’ve got a trumpet, get on your feet,
brother, and blow it.
If you’ve got a field that don’t yield,
well get up and hoe it…
-from “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
July 1, 2009
New on the scene after sixty years
I love stories like this. Naomi Shelton began singing in church when she was 6 years-old. From that time on, her goal in life was to be a singer. So she eventually moved to New York and sang in the club circuit. Just this year she released her first album to huge critical acclaim. She’s sixty-six years old.
So just keep doing what you love. You never know when the rest of the world will sit up and take notice.
Story here.
April 28, 2009
Susan Boyle and the day the music died
So I hear people still talking about Susan Boyle. I finally saw the video. What I was struck by at first was how rude everyone was; people rolled their eyes and mimicked her movements mockingly. Is this normal on television these days? Is it normal to be so disrespectful? Then there was the 360 when Susan Boyle started singing. Suddenly, tears were in everyone’s eyes. It happened a bit too quickly. It felt too much like a TV moment and not enough like a real one. The whole thing seemed so cheap.
But people aren’t talking about the vapidity of a show like Britain’s Got Talent; they’re talking about how amazing Susan Boyle is. Okay, sure, she’s a pretty good singer, but why are people so amazed? Her looks. She doesn’t look like how people expect a good singer to look. And this has had me scratching my head for a few days.
What I realized today is that for most people music is a product. It’s something you buy. Professionals make it and we consume it. If I am right, then this is a sad state of affairs. Music used to be something everyone did. Families sang together at holidays; communities sang together at cultural and religious functions. Music was part of what it meant to be human. And no, not everyone sang well, but occasionally someone did have a good voice, and that person could be a mother of five or the local spinster living with her cat. But if now the only people most of us see sing are plucked and tucked professionals, then we are surprised when an ordinary person can lift us in song. And what this means is that we have given music away. We have denied it presence in our everyday lives. We think the only way to access it is to pay money to the music companies. So, like everything else, we have let music be privatized.
July 27, 2007
