zirconium

Today's subject line is from Bachelor's "Stay in the Car," which has been earworming me since I heard it on WXNP earlier this week.

Dance recommendation: Anna Morrissey's All Together Alone, a modern take on "Ebben? ne andrò lontana," which I've adored since playing viola for it eons ago. Up until May 29. Warning for light-sensitives: there is some strobe action in it.

I keep meaning to mention the Stay at Home Choir's recording of Christopher Tin's "Sogno di Volare," which I sang on. (I chose to participate audio-only on this one.)

Watch on YouTube

A Catholic composer who had also been involved with "Sogno" contacted me via Instagram about joining the virtual choir for one of his recordings, so that's in my practice folder now. I've sat out most of this year's SAHC projects, but they're doing another run at Ode to Joy, this time with a new German text by Michael Köhlmeier, and there's no registration fee for this one. It's unclear if there will be a recording involved, nor can I make the first alto sectional, but I do not care -- any time I can spend with that piece will help me refuel.

Today I squeezed in two dance sessions -- one for a reel that will be shown at a UK folk festival in June, and Karen Arceneaux's Beginner Horton class with Ailey Extension, where we're learning a combination to Billie Eilish's "Lovely" that Karen choreographed with Mental Health Awareness Month in mind. My back and shoulder are not 100%, and I stepped on a splinter last night (ow!), and there's like forty hours of work to fit into the next fourteen, so I'm pleased with myself for showing up (on camera, even!) and staying more focused than not.

It's not all wine and roses here, but my roses are doing very well this year, and my mom-in-law brought two bottles of prosecco to lunch on Sunday, along with this bouquet:

What I served (for four people total):

deviled eggs

bacon jam balls on red pepper strips

cashews

pickled garlic

tortellini with shrimp in a radish-lemon-anchovy sauce (adapted from an Anita Lo recipe)

green beans seasoned with butter and raspberry balsamic vinegar

zucchini soufflé

almond layer cake from Sweet 16th

The next afternoon, the other two members of the museum editorial team came over for our production meeting. I made another plate of deviled eggs, the junior editor brought Russian tea cookies, and we collectively put away more cake while having ourselves a merry time and discussing at length All the Things Due.

A week ago, something decided to eat every mallow seedling in my back yard. It left the adjacent zinnia seedlings alone, and I hadn't spent too much time thinning out the mallows, so I was amused as well as annoyed: I mean, clearly it was a really tasty snack for the critter? It had even consumed the scraps I had pulled from the ground earlier that Friday.

Being slightly ridiculous, I had put some of the bigger thinnings in water in hopes of transplanting them, and by yesterday some of them had developed long plump roots, so they went into some of the dirt patches out front. Fingers crossed . . .

Current Music: Stephen Colbert grooving to "When Doves Cry"

The subject line is from P!nk's "What About Us":

Watch on YouTube

]

September 17 is Constitution Day in the United States.

My friend Katy boosted the signal on the "We the People" jewelry by Slow Factory (proceeds to the ACLU, hoop earrings become available this Monday): https://slowfactory.com/

A certain ~~medal~~ pin collector tried to drag Kaep for not mentoring guys in the hood. That sound you hear is New York and Tampa clapping back:

I’ve literally seen Kaepernick do this. In Oakland. Teaching the Constitution to young black men. Even got a pic as evidence. https://t.co/CzEWNBCAoT
— jelani cobb (@jelani9) September 16, 2017

A brother who's degree is about to be revoked for plagiarizism is questioning someone else's authenticity?
— Christina Jefferson (@tampagirl19655) September 17, 2017

I've given the NYT pieces of my mind at least twice this year, and link to them probably less than 1/8 of what I used to, because [profane rant redacted here], but the wedding section remains a guilty pleasure, in part to glimpse how other connections are made:

"Melissa you’re going to like this guy," she recalled Amanda Lynch, a former Harvard roommate, telling her. "He has the preamble to the Constitution tattooed on his back."

At the New York Public Library (which will star in a documentary that comes to my town next month), there are people meeting monthly to write out the Constitution by hand. [NYT]

Tennessee's Andrew Johnson was a very, very, very flawed man, but when I first learned about him (in my US Presidents coloring book), what the one-page biography stressed was his profound love of the Constitution, and how he was buried with a copy of it under his head.

Current Music: "For All the Saints" at Westminster Abbey

A couple of days ago, I went looking for photos of some of the Bikram postures, and came across a nifty guide (illustrated with colorful stick figures) produced by a NY studio.

(When I manage standing bow, it feels pretty cool. Then there's me getting water up my nose when I tried to sneak in a sip during savasana...)

I am taking a break from it today, though, because my body and brain both need a timeout -- a couple of old injuries have flared up, and I need a day where I don't have to be anywhere by x o'clock. (It's not really a day off -- I'm planning to divide 8-10 hours between lettering and copyediting -- but not having to stop to get myself ready to go somewhere else will make a difference. I'm such a housecat.)

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Rita Frizzell's memorial service. It included humor and drama and tears and quite a bit of music, including Sarah Dan Jones's "Meditation on Breathing" ("When I breathe in, I'll breathe in peace. When I breathe out, I'll breathe out love"). The humor included Dawn Thornton referring to herself as "Buddish" (referring to her sort-of practice of meditation); the drama included a theatre director reading aloud passages from Hamlet and coming up with a new collective noun ("an incandescence of Ritas") to encompass the different facets of she-who-was-called-Rita. There was chanting from the Tibetan Book of the Dead; there was a colorful portrait of an eight-limbed goddess hanging behind the pulpit. There was a reference to "Tibetan Buddhism's glass ceiling for women" (one of the situations leading Rita to Unitarian Universalism) but also glowing descriptions of the Friday night sangha she led, which will be continued by another member of FUUN.

The closing song was a group rendition of "You Are My Sunshine," a song Rita's mother had sung many times to her. We sang through it three times, twice with the words ("Please don't take my sunshine away...") and once simply humming. Afterward, at least two people said to me, "The humming, that's what got me." Music is such a physical act.

After the reception, I hopped into a friend's car and she steered it downtown toward sushi. Sarge talked about her plans to make blackberry wine; B. and I chatted about our connections to Texas. There was a lot of laughing with and at each other, including me at S. when she declared "I'm too old to be butch" (when B. declined her offer to pump gas) and both S. and B. at me when I waxed enthusiastic about fantasy tennis and horse handicapping. ("Look, I'm a nerd. Therefore I have nerd hobbies." "We're glad you know that.")

Speaking of which: Thanks to an $7K bet on Oxbow and a $10K bet on Mylute, I am currently leading the Smarty Jones Stakes (a Triple Crown predictions contest) over at TalkAboutTennis.com. My penchant for humoring my hunches seldom pays out two races in a row, however; moreover, I've noticed that it's always a longshot I don't pick that ends up second. Still, for the moment, peppermints all around! ;-)

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Bruch, "Eight Pieces for Viola, Clarinet, and Piano"

At the start of the service, the choir sang Ysaye Barnwell's arrangement of Kahlil Gibran's "On Children":

Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself
They come through you but they are not from you
And though they are with you they belong not to you

You can give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For the souls dwell in a place of tomorrow
Which you cannot visit
Not even in your dreams

You can strive to be like them
But you cannot make them just like you

Rev. Gail preached about family and community, and how individuals possess both the desire to belong and the desire for freedom -- the challenge being as a family member (by blood or by choice) to nurture the people we love in such a way that they also feel free to be themselves.

Midway through the sermon, she stated that the largest category of households in the United States consists of people who live alone, which was true of our congregation -- and that the majority of that group at FUUN live alone by choice. She quoted a member of the congregation who had said to her, "I'm looking for someone to date -- but there's NO WAY I'm looking for someone to marry!" This was greeted with a wave of laughter -- and a heartfelt "Amen!" bellowed from the middle of the sanctuary, which triggered a second wave of laughter.

Maybe ten years ago, a group at church performed another Sweet Honey in the Rock piece, "No Mirrors in My Nana's House." This animated version of it (Chris Raschka illustrations) is a joy:

Today's subject line is from Jane Hirshfield's Hope and Love. It is one of the pieces I am currently rehearsing for this Sunday's services. The other one is a lively setting of Emily Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers":

I've also been looking at various hymns set to "Charleston" (albeit wayyy slower than the midi at Hymnary). We sang the version that begins "There's a wideness in your mercy" (words by Frederick William Faber) at church not too long ago:

There's a wideness in your mercy like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in your justice which is more than liberty.

But we make your love too narrow by false limits of our own,
and we magnify your strictness with a zeal you will not own.

For the love of God is broader than the measures of our minds
and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

Listening to: the USA Today stream of clips from Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer's "Child Ballads" album (link via my friend Katy). Between that and the severe weather making the sky so very grey, I'm inclined to spend the afternoon working on fairy-tale riffs (but tax prep is calling, calling).

Reading: the Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. Pages 374-75 provide pleasingly detailed advice on buying fresh shrimp:

When buying shrimp with heads, note that they spoil quicker and that the heads constitute about 35 percent of the shrimp's weight. So if a recipe calls for 2 pounds of headless shrimp, shells on, buy almost 2 3/4 pounds whole shrimp with shells to compensate.

Keep in mind that a shrimp's shell and legs make up about 12 percent of its weight, so if you're using peeled shrimp in a recipe that calls for 2 pounds headless shrimp, shells on, you'll require only 88 percent of that weight, or about 1 3/4 pounds.

Today's lunchtime reading was a couple of sections of yesterday's New York Times. I was struck by two mentions of historians brought to tears, both within Dan Barry's article about the Jackie Clarke collection in Ireland. In the first, Barry speculates on prize artifacts that would have changed Sinead McCoole's initially low expectations of the collection:

Was it the fabric flower, called a cockade, that Wolfe Tone -- Wolfe Tone! -- wore affixed to his hat when he was captured while leading a failed rebellion against the English in 1798? When Ms. McCoole showed the cockade to a scholar friend steeped in that era, the scholar began to weep.

The other immediately reminded me of how difficult it can be to define and observe the scope of academic projects (...and, really, projects in any sphere, but as you might guess, scope comes up a lot in academic publishing):

Often, as Ms. McCoole set out to begin another wearying day of academic mining, one of the fish shop's employees, Smokey Gorman, would give her a cryptic greeting: "And you haven’t even gotten to the roof yet." For a while she thought this meant that Mr. Gorman might have spent too much time in the smokehouse, but Mrs. Clarke eventually told her that Mr. Gorman was referring to some "modern stuff" that he once helped Jackie Clarke carry to a storeroom built onto the roof.

One day, with the end of her papered tunnel in sight, Ms. McCoole went to that room on the roof, where loads of bundles were wrapped in relatively recent copies of the local newspaper. Inconsequential modern stuff, she thought. But when she opened a bundle or two, she found rare political pamphlets and newspapers dating to the 17th and 18th centuries.

"Instead of being euphoric, I cried for two days," Ms. McCoole said. “I cried and I cried and I cried. It was just more things to do. I knew the job hadn't ended."

But when she recovered Ms. McCoole realized that she was immersed in something very rare and wonderful, a feeling now validated by other scholars.

Current Mood: cold

The subject line's from Nikki Giovanni's "I am Jazz," which is in Bicycles: Love Poems, which I am reading tonight because my e-book loan expires in a couple of days.

I am cooking: "Company Carrots" (recipe from Charleston Receipts Repeats), a riff on parmesan black pepper coleslaw (because both parmesan and cabbage were on sale at the supermarket), and pork chops.

I am listening to TFS's "Blackest Crow," via Nathalie. Sxip Shirley: "The girls started singing 'The Blackest Crow' and it was like a mute volume hit the party. The party went SILENT and people listened to the women sing and it felt like that...LISTENING TO THE WOMEN SING."

Back to the stove, back to the knife, back to the pen and the paring life... ;-)

Current Mood: discontent
Current Location: kitchen counter
Current Music: TFS, "Blackest Crow"

I led hymns at church this morning. The minister (a frank and funny woman who has been married for 45 years, some of them happy, some of them less so) preached about healthy sexuality. One of the readings was from "The Sacred Marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi," which included these lines:

He put his hand in her hand.
He put his hand to her heart.
Sweet is the sleep of hand-to-hand.
Sweeter still the sleep of heart-to-heart.

One of the highlights of the service was Laura Fott singing Elizabeth Alexander's setting of "A Love Like That," a Hafiz text translated (or transformed, depending on who you ask) by Daniel Ladinsky (Alexander's own notes on the topic appeared in our order of service). Laura is one of the nicest women I know; she also performed in professional musical theater before moving to Tennessee. So the performance was enjoyable both because of its virtuosity (both of Laura and the accompanist, Susan Snyder), and because, after the service, people were lining up to thank Laura, and I overheard others asking the minister about her, awestruck.

I got home in time to catch Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me! on WPLN. Kurt Elling gives one of the best "Not My Job" performances in ages (and singing Ke$ha lyrics to a Roberta Flack standard is the least of it).

Someone on my tennis tweetline posted a link to a show of fountains in Dubai synchronized to "I Will Always Love You". It is stunning.

I have mixed memories of "The Greatest Love of All" -- it was the song used for the "poise" routine in a pageant I participated in back when I was sixteen, and I wasn't crazy about it even before hearing it over and over again that summer, as I practiced lifting and dropping my arms just so. But I never got tired of the final four lines -- what they say, and how Whitney sang them:

And if by chance, that special place
That you've been dreaming of
Leads you to a lonely place
Find your strength in love

From zirconium

Current Mood: pensive

[testing how DW handles diacritics in IE and Chrome. And because I really like the song.]

http://lyricstranslate.com
Ce rêve auquel tu crois,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Si tu ne bouges pas,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Si tu traînes chez toi
Dans l'angoisse inutile,
Si tu ne chantes pas,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
De tes éclats de rire,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
De tes si bons délires,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
A toujours te complaire
Dans ce qui est futile,
Tout ce que tu espères,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?

Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Danse avec moi.
Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec toi.

Cette envie d'être libre,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Tout ce pour quoi tu vibres,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Si tu dis j'abandonne
Comme font les imbéciles.
La douceur qu'on se donne,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?

Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Danse avec moi.
Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec toi.

Tous ces baisers brulants,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Et nos yeux t'adorant,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Si nos journées pourries
Nous rendent bien dociles
De nos si belles nuits,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?

Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Danse avec moi.
Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec toi.

Si tu attends bêtement,
Dis qu'en restera t-il
A part perdre ton temps?
Dis qu'en restera t-il?
Si tu ne comprends pas
Que la vie se défile,
Le jour ou elle s'en va,
Dis qu'en restera t-il?

Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec moi.
Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec toi.
Allez danse danse danse
Danse danse danse danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec toi
Allez danse
Danse ta vie, danse
Allez danse
Et danse avec toi
Allez danse.

Current Mood: hopeful

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zirconium

NashPanache

January 2025

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hair in a tantrum / eyes like two streaks of fire
we are billions of beautiful hearts
practicing breathing; being a sports nerd
Mother's Day at church
"Hope is the hardest love we carry"
Monday notes
"salt in the pond / for your fish"
Sunday morning / singers
"Danse" by Grégoire

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Hard, lustrous, silvery . . . but will burn in air. - Emsley, THE ELEMENTS

Entries tagged with songs

hair in a tantrum / eyes like two streaks of fire

we are billions of beautiful hearts

practicing breathing; being a sports nerd

Mother's Day at church

"Hope is the hardest love we carry"

Monday notes

"salt in the pond / for your fish"

Sunday morning / singers

"Danse" by Grégoire