zirconium

During last night's Tony Awards, a friend mutter-tweeted about the genre of movies-turned-into-musicals, where some results are brilliant and others "rely on spectacle & giant showy numbers & maybe nostalgia." It came to mind as I was mulling over a comment someone had made about the Mika-Whitney duet I linked to in my previous entry -- that of the coach-finalist duets Mika had participated in over the years, this was the one with which he seemed most engaged.

It certainly is the finest acting-storytelling I recall seeing him do. It helps that the song works really well as a duet -- and that it hasn't been done to death on the show. I am as guilty of loving the familiar as much as most fans, and there was an article making the rounds after the Voice US finals that suggested (IIRC) that Voice judges and fans respond more instinctively to good covers than good originals since the show is largely cover-based. The French edition doesn't incorporate originals at all, other than riffs the contestants might work in during their blind auditions -- Drea Drury's Spanish rap in the middle of "Rude Boy" was a standout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rhw9OSYZUQ

Here's the thing: there are thousands of good songs in French and English. The BYM and I have discussed before how, with covers, he wants them to be different enough from the original to be worth the listener's while, as opposed to making the listener simply wish they were listening to the original instead.
The Voice France cover of "L'Aigle Noir" has felt most right to me is Frederic Longbois's take in Season 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPQa88KK140

The song is a bit like "Send in the Clowns" -- the singer needs to be old enough for the yearning of the words to make sense. In Frédéric's case it was also an inspired choice because it fit his voice well, Mika coached some pacing and restraint into the delivery, and it provided an excellent contrast to the screwball presentation of "Bécassine": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4ikkqhOLwA

In comparison, Mika and Kendji's duet fails to move me (even though Kendji too went on to win the whole thing) -- their voices and faces don't convince me that they inhabit the world of regret that Barbara and Frédéric are familiar with. And this season, when Théophile Renier attempted it, I ended up recoiling from his smile. Dude, it's so not a happy song.

(Being a performer myself, I do get that some smiling happens involuntarily -- nervousness, ingrained habits of trying to connect with the audience, etc. [I have not managed to forget one scene from Madame Bovary that I not once managed to get through without giggling, even though its over-the-top desperate declaration of love pulled at the same heartstrings that vibrate today in reaction to the Mika-Whitney duet] -- and sometimes it can't be helped, because of diction or other technical demands. That said, I was totally in agreement with Théophile getting axed that round.)

I was on edge when I read that Leona Winter was going to cover "Kid" during the KO round, because Yoann Casanova's take (with young Leo) last year knocked off my socks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2opBne9hCGA

But, because Leona is a drag queen, she and the scene designer were able to tell a different story than either Eddy or Casanova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTnZ3jrgWoY

It's a hell of a song. Voice France is my gateway to many songs in both English and French [I tend to become acquainted very late to most Top 40 tunes, with dancercise classes (Pound, Zumba, Dance Blast, Balletone, and the like) being my other main channel], and part of the fun is checking out the originals. In part because, good as the contestants are, it is at times very audibly clear how the coaches have more stage presence/awareness and more experience with interpretation. Sometimes the new voices/arrangements are more pleasing than the source (I can't say that I care for either Bon Iver or Birdy's versions), and sometimes they send me screaming back to the start. (Mano's audition with "Enter Sandman" was hilarious. His follow-up with "Beds Are Burning" was one of the worst second-round clips I've tried to listen to. It doesn't help, of course, that it was the favorite song of a college classmate and thus embedded deep enough in my emotional history that probably even a better singer would have little chance with me.)

All that said, the music that made me happiest yesterday afternoon? The tracks being played at Charming Charlie's at the mall, including Dagny's "Backbeat." (Praise the Lord for Shazam.)

Today's subject line is from "Fanfare in D Major (Come, Come)," by Grant Hart, who died of cancer a few days ago. I'm listening to a bunch of his songs as I prepare dinner, and damn if his voice doesn't take me back to being 17, to one of the few aspects I care to remember. Warehouse: Songs and Stories holds a special place in my heart as one of the two record reviews I published (and earned checks for!) that summer. (The Replacements' Pleased to Meet Me was the other.)

Depeche Mode performs less than 3 miles from my house in about 24 hours, and 15 years ago I would have been raring to go, deadlines and sleep deprivation and budget notwithstanding. Instead, I'll go to a dance lesson if I can wrap up work in time, and hope to hit the hay before the concert's even over, and if those things don't happen, maybe I'll crank up "Where's the Revolution?" to an unseemly volume while I crunch through whatever needs to be catapulted through its hoops.

But, grumpy as I feel about not feeling up for things (this !@#%@ cough: !@#@!#!% it!), small pleasures abound. I spent part of my afternoon writing to the childhood friend who introduced me to Depeche Mode, and I had a baseball stamp to use on the envelope. I have a new batch of bread dough rising, and snipped thyme from my yard for fried rice. It is far simpler to contact public servants now that my phone plan has unlimited long distance. (The calls themselves don't rate as a pleasure, but it is nice not having to faff with Skype and other workarounds, or -- going further back -- constantly calculating how much each call was going to cost.) The rosebush is still blooming, as are the zinnias. There is a huge pile of ironing, and there is Italian wine in my glass. :)

["Under the oak leaves" - a line from "Au clair de la fontaine" (By the clear fountain)]

The senior minister at my church is on sabbatical, and Rabbi Rami Shapiro is visiting monthly as a guest preacher. On September 11, he brought with him a shruti, which he played as the congregation learned a new round:



Longtime readers/friends may recall that I do have a thing about fountains... though this past month my scant spare time has been more on lake and river. My Labor Day getaway plans having fallen through twice, I decided to get on a paddleboard four out of my five days off, and last Friday I watched the full moon from my lantern-lit plank on the Cumberland.

Elsewhere and elsewhen: Paying work. Housework. Homework. Paperwork. Footwork. Speaking of--
Dancing: hip-hop, flamenco, Afro-Cuban (orishas), English country.
Friends: Visiting from France and elsewhere. Running for office.. Organizing campferences. Selling taco + lesbian farmer buttons (coupon code here, btw). Preparing for High Holy Days. Coding. Cajoling. Caretaking. I could go on ... in short, inspiring me.
Harvesting: peppers.
Deadheading: zinnias.

Recently published:

At unFold: "Spacing for Sky," with typography by J. S. Graustein

At Folded Word: "O Margaret, Here We Are Again"

At 7x20, a weekful of polished micro-poems: 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

There is more to say and write, much of it off-blog, but a guest arrives tomorrow, so for now it's back to cleaning. Onward!

It took time to harvest the Christmas (aka Prairie Fire) peppers, some of which were hidden behind and below many leaves:



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[Subject line from Barbara Jordan's "We All Have Many Chances," in Channel (Beacon Press, 1990)]


Asheville, April 2016

Also seen/heard this weekend:

* a girl on a stool on a porch, with a clarinet

* a father with his arms full of Maypole ribbons

* a colleague about a friend who used to play horn for Prince, on retainer

* the church pianist's riffs on various hymns

* "Don't Leave Me This Way" (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes?) at Pinewood Social

[photo challenge: Upper Rubber Boot's 100 Untimed Books] prompt 35: prescriptions for loneliness

Alfred A. Knopf's photo album came to mind when I was pondering this prompt, perhaps because it's where I store my copy of the program for the 1945 dinner in honor of Fred Melcher's fifty years in publishing (Melcher being a prominent Unitarian Universalist who, among many other roles, was a key player in establishing the Newbery and Caldecott medals).





In Victoria Glendinning's biography of Elizabeth Bowen, there's a photo of Elizabeth at the Knopf home in Purchase, New York. I find Glendinning's generalizations about sexuality and friendship irritating, but within the nonsense there are glimpses of a past generation's true moments of connection:

William Maxwell of The New Yorker/ observed that [Elizabeth] was at her best and most affectionate when she was with Blanche and Alfred Knopf -- "I always felt that they must have played together as children" -- and he remembered a dinner party with the Knopfs and Elizabeth as "a kind of blaze of happiness.

The clipping is from an October 4 edition of the New York Times, in which Penelope Green writes about interviewing Patti Smith:

"I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did," she said. "I'd like to write something as great as Pinocchio or Little Women. I won't say Moby-Dick because that's impossible. I'd like to write a book that everybody loves. I'd like to take a picture that someone wants to put above their desk so they can look at it while they're writing a letter or doing whatever they're doing while sitting at their desk. I'd like to do a painting that would astonish people."

But books are her deepest love, and writing them is clearly her keenest ambition. When she received her advance from Knopf, the publisher of M Train, she bought a bronze statue of a young boy who has caught a bird in his hands; she set it in her tangled front yard here.

"It was my dream to be with Knopf since I was 20," she said. "I wanted to have something solid to mark that. I bought him because he reminded me of Peter Pan."

David Early-Zald wrote this for me: Mechaieh

(My copies of the CD just arrived in yesterday's mail. Whee-yay!)

Prompt 7: playing



The book was likely given to me by one of my grade school piano teachers, though none of its pieces were formally assigned. There are a handful of notes on alternate titles and verses -- my hymn-nerd tendencies apparently go WAY back.

What I mainly remember is playing and singing from it year round -- then, as now, for solace and discovery (how will this sound an octave up? if I play it cross-handed? ...).

The piano in the photo was a gift from the calligraphy teacher mentioned in the previous entry. Years later, I learned it had been a gift to her from her father.

That moment in By the Shores of Silver Lake when Laura realizes she must be a grown up because [...] is gone? My mind flies to those pages when I think about when, in the process of getting my mother's house ready to sell, I realized that I would not be moving my childhood piano from Kentucky to Tennessee, for a host of practical reasons. It is not a decision I lose sleep over, but it's embedded in my history as This Is What Grown-Ups Do moment: I like being an adult most of the time, but it does at times require making choices I didn't foresee -- choices that carry the gut-punch of saying farewell to things I'd thought I'd always want in my life.

[Prompted by Upper Rubber Boot's #100untimedbooks photo challenge // http://upperrubberboot.tumblr.com/post/123904555213; subject line from Ahrens and Flaherty's "Streets of Dublin"]

I have been humming "I Am That Great and Fiery Force" to myself since Sunday, when it was sung as one of the morning songs at church. Words by Hildegarde von Bingen, set to "Ave Vera Virginitas" by Josquin Desprez -- you can hear a bit of it sung by Missing Rachel, and longer versions of the tune on YouTube, inluding one by a Slovak choir, the Hilliard Ensemble, et al. The verses:

I am that great and fiery force
sparkling in everything that lives;
in shining of the river's course,
in greening grass that glory gives.

I shine in glitter on the seas,
in burning sun, in moon and stars.
In unseen wind, in verdant trees
I breathe within, both near and far.

And where I breathe there is no death,
and meadows glow with beauties rife.
I am in all, the spirit's breath,
the thundered word, for I am Life.

The chamber choir sang two pieces, including the Real Group's "Words," which was applauded at both services.

Present reading: Erica E. Hirshler's Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting

Recent cooking: Chicken with mushroom-wine sauce (and parsley from an early birthday present); Mexican-ish brownies for a Cinco de Mayo potluck (using salted caramel cocoa mix, throwing in a cupful of chocolate chips, cutting the sugar in half, and ancho chile powder -- they turned out fine. The intern who shares my office gushed about them without knowing I was the one who made them. \o/); fufu (to go with the leftover chicken)

Today's workout: a long swim. I had lane 2 to myself, which meant I could indulge in backstroke as well as freestyle.

Today's remaining goal: some ironing. Chores toward comfort: story of my life. ;)

[The subject line is from Freedy Johnston's "Bad Reputation."]

As I work, I've been listening to Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)," a song that often takes me back to the spring and summer of 2008, specifically to the counter of Ground Effects, a coffeeshop in Berea, Kentucky. There was neither coffee nor wifi at my mother's house, so I'd drive to Chestnut Street to get my caffeine fix and check in with project managers, and this song was often playing as I researched and wrote, as well as dealing with the things that executors do.

Foster the People's "Don't Stop" is the ringtone on my phone. (I originally set it as the alarm, but the BYM threatened to stop sleeping with me unless I changed it.) It takes me back to watching tennis in Paris (the DJ frequently played it as exit music -- in fact, I first heard it as "Bon Soir, Bon Soir") at the POPB, which ranks as my favorite arena experience to date, and also brings back happy memories of making myself understood in French, as well as later parts of that trip (such as the evening chez Ginette et Au Lapin Agile).

The alarm is Mika's Elle Me Dit -- which the BYM probably now can't stand either, since my phone was blaring it every four hours during the first month after The Wreck, to keep us on track with his meds. But the opening still cracks me up every time, and other roommates have burst out laughing at its sheer obnoxiousness... (dum dum dum, dum dum dum dum HEY!)

The Smithereens' "Blood and Roses" takes me back to my late teens, to an apartment in Lexington, Kentucky, listening to an ex sing along to "I want to love but it comes out wrong." "Dance Like an Egyptian" reminds me of the Snowball Dance I attended with that ex, and the tinsel I draped on his suit (some of which found its way into the Christmas card he sent later that month, which is still somewhere in one of the boxes in this house).

The Cars' "Just What I Needed" was the only vinyl single I bought in high school (long story, and long after it came out), and I have lots of memories attached to it, but my favorite may be the time I sang it twice at a wedding reception two decades later -- the second time was by request, because the crowd of church teenagers wanted to do the hustle to it, which was hilariously weird and happy.

"Stacy's Mom" reminds me of dancing with marginaliana in a Chicago ballroom, on another hot summer night. "Lay All Your Love on Me" reminds me of Haifa, Israel -- of the hip sushi bar that played the Erasure cover that earwormed me, the skanky hotel room where I subsequently played it on my laptop through half the night, and the characters that then wouldn't leave me alone until I gave them their say.

(I usually don't work with music on at all -- especially when creating or finetuning wording is called for -- but sometimes it's unavoidable [e.g., when dependent on cafe wifi] and sometimes it's compatible with the tasks at hand [such as entering data or cleaning up redlines].)