throbbing light machine

--I always find myself wanting to tell someone about, or write about, the times when I experience intense overlays of affect or signification. For me, this is what it's all about, what I read for, what I listen for, what I live for. But they're always so deeply obscure and personal that I'm never sure if they're worth sharing, if the frission of it is something that can be conveyed to people outside of my head.

I'm going to anyway, because this is my journal, and I can be self-indulgent.

The bit from The Dark Is Rising with "Good King Wenceslas" has always been important and central for me. Part of that is that I was a choir girl whose peak event of the year was the holiday concert with the local symphony orchestra; part of it has to do with my general Thing for traditional carols. But it was also about Will and Merriman, alienation and community unlooked-for. Will loses the support of his brother's voice, sings alone as he goes forward, and just as he's wondering what he's going to do to keep the song going by himself Merriman comes in on the joyful king's verse, lyrically offering protection and restoring harmony. The Old Ones aren't always good community for Will - there's a darkly funny way that I think of DiR as the opposite of Harry Potter, where becoming a wizard on your eleventh birthday means leaving your abusive family for a wonderful world of magic, because in his waking Will loses his family, his humanity, and his future, and only gains a set of crochety old absentee mentors. Will Stanton is the eternal graduate student. But in that moment, singing "Good King Wenceslas," Merriman comes through for his pupil. In that moment, at least, Will isn't left alone.

And it means something to me that this is all framed in terms of poverty, generosity, honor, and snow.

So, on the opposite side of the collision--

I keep drawing the Fool card in my tarot, shall I or shan't I, and one of the questions pulling at me now is how much I want to keep fighting to wodge myself into the world versus how much I want to just go be the crazy witch lady at the edge of the woods. And I've been reading a lot of pieces like this one at the Atlantic about reclusive or in-revolt artists who start letting the madness through; the link centers Blackness, touching on Kanye West, Dave Chapelle, Lauryn Hill, and Nina Simone, but Courtney Love and Tori Amos are also artists that are part of this for me, in addition to badgal Rihanna. I grok that there are racialized aspects of this subject position that I can't legitimately lay claim to, but it's been giving me language for the simultaneous turn-away and aggressive-visibility impulses I've been feeling.

Well.

I've had a rough few days, dealing with an unusually nasty menstrual period, handling unfamiliar work that I'm less fluent with, and also doing first talks with a new therapist that I'm checking out. So yes, I was watching What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix looking for catharsis; but I really wasn't expecting the doc to open with her coming onstage, pushing the edge of her alienation, and sit down at the piano and start playing "Good King Wenceslas." God. The footage is from her 1976 return concert in Switzerland. She casts this beautiful incantation - she draws her limits verbally, hard, and it's awkward, and she does the throw-away gesture over her shoulder, and tells them they have to go with her to the beginning, girlhood. And this is still before the title card.

I recommend the doc, fwiw. It bothered me sometimes that her songs were used so heavily in the soundtrack; it especially nerdled me that "Put A Spell On You" underscored the section on her experience of marital abuse. It's too specific and too general all at once; those songs are standards, not confessional contemp-style singer-songwriter pieces. The civil rights music is different, it belongs in the context.

The new Leonard Cohen album is everything. It's like, as the years wear him away, he just gets closer and closer to divinity.

streaming link

I've been trying to think since I woke up this morning how to communicate what Peter Seeger, flights of angels sing him to his rest, means to me. And I don't know if I can. My whole life, Pete's voice has been like air: so omnipresent that you almost forget how deeply necessary and important it is. I grew up with Abiyoyo and his banjo method books; "Lonesome Valley" and "Hobo's Lullaby" were my cradlesongs. In a way it feels surreal for him to have gone just now, although heaven knows he'd served his time and trouble here, because I've been listening to his music about mortality a lot since my uncle passed a few weeks back. S'what I always end up doing in grief or sorrow.

In some ways Pete's voice is for me an avatar of my father's: a voice of deep and gentle wisdom, but also burning underneath with righteous anger. Maybe that's something I can tell, that Pete's voice taught me how to be politically angry without being hateful, that political anger is properly rooted in compassion and solidarity even when you see folk being wicked or foolish or just plain wrong.

One of the most important ideas I picked up in college was the difference between having awareness and having an analysis. That awareness of oppression and injustice alone can be counterproductive, overwhelming, disempowering, but once you can get hold of analysis you can start to work toward change in strength. I listen to Pete Seeger when I feel like I'm losing my grip on my analysis, because it seems like he always understands.

the Republicans don't know what they want, the press is misrepresenting petulance as gridlock just as frequently as they can, and nobody seems to know how we're getting out of this. I quite liked the idea of Louise Slaughter as temporary Speaker, but nope. So, some musical reflection: what the hell is this country we've made, and what are we to do with it now that it exists? Apart from shutting it down, that is.




download at sendspace

( tracklist behind the cut )

Halftime show: oh my god Madonna ilu. Seriously, I heart her so hard, with such unironic fervor. And, like more than half the internet - yeah, I'm wondering about the Luminosity link.

Avengers preview: oh come on, is that all we get?! Fucking explosions and Portentious Voiceoverage from Fury? I am disappoint, y'all.

commodorified seems to have started something with her mix for the union revolution We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years - this morning sara posted her fighting-the-man playlist.

And as I am never not happy to wallow around in folkways music, here's my iteration, which ended up being one part union/antiwar/folkways and one part contemporary social justice songs.

Download "Oh Freedom" at Sendspace; tracklist & lyrics behind the cut
( oh, freedom, over me )

The new Lady Gaga single made me remember just how much I love Madonna's "Express Yourself"; I spent all night writing papers to 90s Madge. (not that I dislike Gaga or anything, but "Born That Way" is even more of a Madonna homage than the rest of her body of work, and I'd rather listen to the first iteration! Plus, I am of the opinion that Madonna is the bomb, yo.)

I think that part of what I love so very much about Miyazaki films is that they use symphonic music the way I remember it from going to concerts as a child. Ordinary movies use symphonic scores, but they're always kind of John Williams-esque. They work in their own particular way. They're meant to underscore, not to lead.

Miyazaki could almost be using classical symphonic compositions unrelated to his films as scores. The instrumentation is free and unconventional and empowered. It really does make me feel like I'm back home, going to symphony concerts with my father, and telling myself stories about the music. The instruments matter just as much as the vocal performances do - sometimes even more.

Also, I love Miyazaki's tendency to draw big, capable women with massive bustlines. It makes me all happy inside.

As it's rainy and I'm going to be alone all night, and as I don't have any classes tomorrow, I'm going to mainline Miyazaki, and then maybe watch Fullmetal Alchemist. Safe warm lovely things, with pretty music. It took me a few years, after I moved out, for me to realize how much I needed orchestral music. As a kid, it was always playing around me, and so I played my own stuff. Without daddy to provide the Bach and Copeland, I have to remember to play those things myself. They make me so awfully happy.

So, I have discovered that I can play really good Bach when I'm all tired and tranced-out, but I can't read Plato. Perhaps this needs to be my Bach-playing strategy more often. I bet you could replicate the feeling with drugs. Somehow, though, I don't think that he'd mix very well with alcohol.