Friday Night Frolic — A Mouse is a Mouse, For All That

"It's a constant battle between mice and men."

~ Lulu

Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast,
 O, what a panic is in your little breast!
 You need not start away so hasty 
With argumentative chatter! 
I would be loath to run and chase you,
 With murdering plough-staff.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
 Has broken Nature's social union,
 And justifies that ill opinion
 Which makes thee startle
 At me, thy poor, earth born companion 
And fellow mortal!

I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal;
 What then? Poor little beast, you must live!
 An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves 
Is a small request;
 I will get a blessing with what is left,
 And never miss it.

Your small house, too, in ruin!
 Its feeble walls the winds are scattering!
 And nothing now, to build a new one,
 Of coarse grass green!
 And bleak December's winds coming, 
Both bitter and keen!

You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
 And weary winter coming fast,
 And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
 Till crash! the cruel plough passed 
Out through your cell.

That small bit heap of leaves and stubble,
 Has cost you many a weary nibble! 
Now you are turned out, for all your trouble,
 Without house or holding,
 To endure the winter's sleety dribble, 
And hoar-frost cold.

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
 In proving foresight may be vain:
 The best laid schemes of mice and men
 Go often askew,
 And leave us nothing but grief and pain, 
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
 The present only touches you:
 But oh! I backward cast my eye, 
On prospects dreary!
 And forward, though I cannot see, 
I guess and fear!

~Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" [Standard English Translation] *

* * *

Our furry mortal companions, after all, are merely trying to meet the three basic needs of any living thing: water, food, shelter (and clothing for us lesser humans). Air and sunlight help, too. So what exactly is the battle? What is this compulsion to subordinate nature to man? Can we not work together, in harmony? Maybe this is why Michael leaves peanut butter out for our critters? (She naively asks.)

The thing is, though, the mice have come into our natural world. Our home. And they are, to be sure, small and crafty. Their careful approach to the mouse traps—evidenced by clawed peanut butter globs atop the plastic cheese of traps set around the house—illustrates their slyness and resolve. We are housing and feeding the beasts. Like hell they startle at us!

Up until Michael found a few mini-Santa chocolates haphazardly unwrapped—broken pieces of Santa-shaped, teeny-gnaw-marked chocolate bits scattered under the Christmas tree—the children were accused of consuming too much candy and leaving foil wrappers strewn about the house. Not one of you will fess up, eh? And why the heck are so many ornaments knocked off the tree? Well? They stared at me with eyes narrower than usual. You mock your mother?!

Soon after Max's and Lu's acquittal, while de-decking the house of boughs of holly and sucking all traces of pine into a monster canister, I broke out the vacuum's brush attachment, lifted the cushions from the living room's couch and found a trove of bird seed that had been hoarded by the mice. Under the cushion of a fabric-covered chair, I discovered a small, sugar-sprinkled gingerbread cookie (a treat left for our Santa chimera), shredded ribbon and other scraps. I wondered if it hadn't taken a platoon of mice to conceal their booty. Our house had become the bandits' very own Moveable Feast—a splendid place brimming with tasty morsels and sparkly lights, with ample nooks and chinks for notable adventures. Who needs Paris?!

And then my breast went a-panic. Bold rodents! What have they to worry about? They'll tear apart the pantry! I thought about d-CON (for a moment), and shored up all food-filled containers, vacuumed and sprayed and scrubbed. And then Michael went for the traps.

But our mice are much too clever.

There's a little voice inside me, though, thanking the gods for not mashing the head of one mouse in those traps. Yes, the fields are bare and wasted, and the bleak winds of winter have arrived, but the critters are merely trying to survive. There must be a more humane way to rid our domain of them (for it's quite impossible and far too unsanitary to co-exist in the same domicile). Is there not?

Until we figure it out, Max will carry on about the pests' scratchy evening shenanigans keeping him awake at night. And I'll stock up on glass containers.

* * *

King Rat (an illegal whale hunt protest) by Indie rock band Modest Mouse, has an official animated video, directed by the late Heath Ledger, that's apparently been hijacked by VEVO. If you'd like, you can see it here. Modest Mouse has been making music since 1997, but it wasn't until 2004 that they established mainstream success with We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, for which they enlisted musician and vocalist James Mercer of the Shins, and Broken Bells (with whom we Frolicked here), as well as help from Johnny Marr (former Smiths guitarist). Marr ultimately toured, in 2007, with Modest Mouse.

You can find more information, including tour dates, on MM's blog. They'll be playing in San Francisco, at the Macworld/iWorld convention, January 25, 2012.

Hmm, the only modest thing about our mice is that they don't make a show of it while we're still puttering around the house. But in the evenings, they Frolic!

___________________________________
*Burns's poem inspired at least two book titles: Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Sidney Sheldon's The Best Laid Plans. Per Wiki, in 2007, Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull) read the first stanza of the poem as a prelude to his remastered One Brown Mouse, adding the line "But a mouse is a mouse, for all that" (referencing Burns's Scot song, "Is There for Honest Poverty"—popularly known as "A Man's A Man for A' That") which I sneaky-as-a-mouse stole for this post's title.

Friday Night Frolic — To Hadestown and Back

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
~Louise Glück

She'd been there twice. Once, in her early twenties, on a cocaine and booze fueled road trip to Florida. Later, as a mature mother with children in strollers. South of the Border is as grey and wonky as it looks on the thirty-year-old postcard whether one is stone-cold sober or stardust-spangled high, and she tries in vain to remember the man who sent it to her that briny-breezed May of 1982. 

She was in her senior year of college—the year she lost her bearing and went astray. Her housemates worried. Up 'til then, she had merely flirted with drugs and alcohol. Or so she thought. Evenings were often equal part studies and getting stoned. She'd close the books and walk down to the beach with a pitcher of kamikaze mix, sit on the seawall and dreamy-stare at the curly waves frothing at the shore. Or she'd slip into a happy hour, which was as easy to find as the steepled churches that hugged nearly every street corner of her Franco-American hometown. There, in those sticky, beer-crusted shrines, or on the beach with her pitcher, she found hollow comfort from the demons that haunted her. 

But this guy, where had she met this guy? Why had he sent her a post card? She'd hardly known him. And he was sure to have been as much trouble as the man for whom she'd left the nice guy. She must have known this, somehow, in those hazy days of painful insecurities and indecisiveness, she must have sensed a danger. Even then, a doubtful girl, she was determined in her ways.

Blond hair, on the longish side was all she could evoke. Maybe a house party, dancing to Human League's throbbing, synthesized  music—Don't you want me baby, don't you want me, ooohhhooo—black lights, cigarette-smoke and stale-beer infused furnishings... 

He went to Key West. She knew this only by the Sloppy Joe's postcard he'd sent previous to his South of the Border note. It's all she remembers. Does any of it really matter? Back then, she'd settled into a long, bleary underworld siesta from which she feared she wouldn't wake.

But she did. She woke in time to keep herself from dialing the number.

*    *    *

In her fifth and latest release, Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell, with her sweet Goldie Hawn-like persona and distinctive voice (an Eartha Kittiness quality to it) sings, with her Hadestown Orchestra, about love, sorrow, regret and displacement in a refreshing rock-opera based on the popular Greek myth of Orpheus, Eurydice and Persephone, only set in a post-apocalyptic American depression. (Sounds scary-familiar?)

Along with Mitchell as Eurydice, the cast in this opera includes an impressive list of voices and musicians: Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) in the role of Orpheus, Greg Brown as Hades, Ben Knox Miller (The Low Anthem) as Hermes and Ani DiFranco as Persephone.

Find out more about the Vermont-born and based Mitchell at her official website. 

Friday Night Frolic — Moments of Ambiguous Limpidity

A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.

~Charles Ives

Internet source unknown

Much of this week has been spent living in my head—spending the better part of the week cavorting with a new laptop, nursing my sick son, formulating few words, but thinking, thinking quite a bit I might add, about all my little daily delusions (triggered, in part, by seeing Laurie Anderson's brilliant and disturbing Delusion in Providence last weekend) like, per se, a new piece of technology improving my life—offering me not only the luxury of computing at greater speed, but also, peace and happiness. No?

I had another thought about my delusions. And then I lost it. I assumed: if I write and write and write, dammit, I will find it. But I haven't.

In its absence, I've come up with a new mantra for decision making and weeding—as in purging unnecessary anything from home and heart: How will this enhance my life?

An old, faded blouse that I no longer wear but can't part with because it's a designer pluck from Filene's Basement. How will this enhance my life?
Kid 1 asks if I'll help with a project. How will this enhance my life?
Kid 2 asks if I can drive him to a friend's house. How will this enhance my life?
Kid 1 asks if I would make some cookies for the bake sale. How will this enhance my life?

Ah! You see how deluded I am? I think my mantra will actually enhance my life. I think my mantra is something that can be realistically applied to everyday situations like it's the final word. Perhaps what I need to do is consider substitutes for the word enhance—like change, or stress, or screw-up or prolong or abbreviate—and then deal with the answer, wherever it falls. But of course, this means that I  manipulate the answer by sculpting the question in furtherance of my fantasy.

Today I am deluded. Yesterday I was too. And tomorrow, I shall be again.

I wonder, if I spend enough time drooling over this laptop, with no thought other than my sudden awareness of being overly deluded, will I write something shrewd and comprehensible? (Oh yes! and my children will sit straight in their chairs and behave like perfect little adults in restaurants, and my car will run endlessly without an oil change, and the real estate market will bounce back soon, and the ceramic pots on the deck will not crack if left out all winter long—which began, prematurely, overnight.)

It's like I've been humming a thin, discordant tune... its tinny truth aches. And more, it comforts.



Laurie Anderson is an American musician, artist, composer, poet, photographer and filmmaker. And something you may not know about her: she's NASA's first (and likely last) artist-in-residence, and is married to Lou Reed. Her work is at once provocative, humorous, jarring, thoughtful, creepy, intelligent and inspiring. Lately, she's been peeling away the layers of our collective misconceptions and scraping fatuous seeds from its core.

From her most recent album, Homeland:



And from her Big Science album:



You can read more about Anderson's multi-media show Delusion, here. And here, a short video about the show.

Friday Night Frolic — Heading for the Fir Lined Hills

The Juveniles Children in N.H. Fall 2009.

To New Hampshire I go, I go
Oh yes, it's so, it's so!
for my sister waits
for these special dates
in the hills of the Great White North.

With she I find my best friend,
this sisterly love we tend
strolling the wispy-haired summit
its rocky paths down we plummet
the grand hills of the Great White North

Bathing in its giggling brooks
with smooth stones underfoot
the wade shan't be brief
as we covet relief
of heat cloaking the Great White North

Spouses away the weekend
this, being when we pretend
to have no annoyance or burden
until we recall we've the juveniles children
in the hills of the Great White North

Still, we ladies have one another
the juveniles children not too much bother
behaved, they'll  allow us to gossip
lest they desire a backhand wallop
in the HILLS of the Great White North



Right now, I'm feeling as giddy as Jade and Alex. Ready to hit the road with my babes and clamber beyond Franconia Notch to where Backwoods Betty makes her beautiful hillside home. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, who helped usher in the current folk-rock revival, are fired up to make the journey with us.

There's been mountains of rumor as to whether or not their euphoric sound is drug induced. They—Alex and Jade, at least—appear so enraptured by life, in love with their music, it's almost impossible to believe it's a natural high, a rush at the peak. But Alex Ebert and his alter ego (Edward Sharpe: "a messianic porn star whose mission to save mankind is disrupted by a series of romantic entanglements with beautiful women") has cleaned up his act since leaving Ima Robot (see him here, with Ima in a very different, darker role), and now stands high on love and life. The anthems he composes are gleeful and brimming with hope.

New Hampshire-bound jingles and hymns that set our spirits free. (Maybe I'll even turn off the droid.)

Betty: I'm coming up!

Backwoods Betty's place -- a/k/a Maggie's Farm
(photo from Design New England)