Friday Night Frolic - Cold, Cold Ground

Then came the ice birds, through the bleeding sky, over the undulating, aqua field.  The white forest, frozen in dream, did not hear their trumpeting, nor the crunching upon the crisp ocean as a gaggle landed on its crystal beads. 

One eye open and one eye shut, they rested uneasy, gulping the heaving field's abundant air—until impatient and hungry grew the gosling, who cried!

Mother goose took the lead, dew-tipped tails waddled behind, the bleached horizon in the distance pined. 

Where the red sky meets the blue plain, dusk and dawn are the very same. 

A poem, at times, must be scrutinized, to uncover certain clues—this is what the schoolmaster uttered, his tapered pointer a dancing muse.

Ice birds fixed on the cold, cold ground of the ivory shore as they shuffled in cedilla form 
(unlike their innate, accent circonflexe arrays in ruby heavens).

The silver gander considered the graze, and advanced along the inversion, his broad crown alert to what might fill the gizzard. 

Somewhere in the sea of brush: berries, sedge and root. (Had he expected fish?) Then came the ice birds, mandibles wide and serrated, pulled up all the grasses, swam along the scrub, filled their bellies with white forest and frozen dream.

* * *

TOM WAITS

                                                         

No one writes more imaginative story/songs/poems (especially the scruffy, down-and-out sort)  than Tom Waits. Loss, lies, love, lowlife, liquor, loners and lullabies, he covers a lot of ground with a mean growl. Only Bukowski (whose influence on Waits is palpable) growled more prolifically. But Waits is the master of pairing poetic story with melody. And his ballads are beautiful.

From Franks Wild Years (1987)

From his 2006 album, Orphans:

From Mule Variations (1999):

From Alice (2002):

Waits's most recent album, Bad As Me, was released in 2011after a seven year absence in the studio. On Bad As Me he's back like the geese, mandible wide and serrated. You can read (or listen—highly worth the 45 minutes) more about the release on this October, 2011, NPR Fresh Air interview with Waits. 

____________________________________

The geese, as they were this morning (minus inverted color), in the undulating field.

Friday Night Frolic — Un Française Folâtrer

Yes, a very French Frolic.

It's Mother's birthday today, so I'm going to keep this brief as the family is having a celebratory gathering this evening—an event for which Max and Lu are beyond ready now that semester exams have come to a close. (Good God, I'm glad that's over.)

Some of you may remember that last year, on this very day, I wrote a little love letter—here on SS—to Mother, to whom I referred as my Anti-Tiger Mom. Then I rolled up a hard copy and tied it with ribbon, as several Blogger friends suggested, and gave it to her as a present. She loved it. She's always loved anything her children would give her, excepting, perhaps, a hard time. But, even in the midst of hard times during those early years of parenthood her temperament was unwaveringly serene.

Above is a picture of the saintly birthday girl with five sixths of her brood. Young Thomas is missing, having not yet been a twinkle (if he was, in fact, ever a twinkle) at the time this picture was taken. Mary (who was maybe a twinkle) is in Mother's lap. Backwoods Betty and Tony are grin-smirking behind Mother, and Chris and I (sporting one of my father's custom bowl haircuts), well, ugh, we don't look particularly happy, do we? That may have been because we were involuntarily participating in an event for which we had to remain still.

Mother, it seems, is the only one who looks truly happy. (Don't let Betty and Tony fool you, they'd done something naughty just before the camera clicked, I'm sure.) This is also Mother's temperament.

An abridged story: yesterday, Mother brought the kids home from early dismissal at school and stayed to lunch with us. Lulu, as she likes to do, ate just about everything in sight and then hunted for more, topping the feast off with ice cream. Soon thereafter, buckled at the belly and groaning, Lu asked if we'd EVER get a cat. (Why this could possibly have been on her mind at that moment, I've no idea.) And I, who did not inherit Mother's facile temperament, immediately replied, No, we're NEVER getting a cat.

Why NOT? Lu moaned.

Because, I snarled, you'd EAT it!

Well, Mother twitched with delight and stirred memories. You see, she told us, only weeks after she and Dad (and the four that had twinkled) moved into their city colonial, neighbors Charlie and Doris implicated Mother in the case of their missing cat. Several days after the neighbors' cat failed to duteously return home (look, I'm a bit rushed, you don't mind if I split infinitives here, right?), Doris eyed Mother with this inquiry: Well, Charlie mentioned that the French do like CHAT, now don't they?

It should be noted that, at the time, the city's population consisted of nearly eighty percent French Canadians/Franco-Americans. Mother graciously informed Doris that chat was not considered to be a French gastronomique, unless perhaps, one was starving, which would be très malheureux, indeed. This put a quick end to Doris's inquisition. 

I think that Doris might have once heard that the French eat calf. All the same, perhaps we should continue to wait on the cat. Then again, Lu is only half French.

The French, you know, really are quite happy people. We'll be Frolicking with many of them tonight.

Joyeux Anniversaire, Maman.

* * *

While Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Aznavour, Jaques Brel, and to some degree, Josephine Baker, who was not French, but embraced France as her home, may be known worldwide as the most famous of French singers, there are beguiling voices of less known vocalists, such as the smooth, silky and emotive voice of chanteuse Lucienne Boyer, who deserve as much attention as the well known greats. In her native France, however, Boyer was known as a grande vedette, or superstar.

Like Mother, Boyer (according to Astrotheme) tended toward playful and witty, and seemed to be—to paraphrase—like a cat, always landing on her feet. 

You don't think Boyer....

climbed trees? 

Thank goodness she never got lost.

You can listen to many of her recordings, and find out more about Boyer here. 

A santé!

Friday Night Frolic — Pointed Weights

Kandinsky

It would seem Friday has become the place where the Suburban Soliloquist goes for a third person point of
view and a stiff drink. She steps inside its faux finished walls, glazed with a red lacquer, grabs a canapé and a dirty martini at the bar where she thinks she can also swap her first person POV for a third person POV as easily as Tim O'Brien did in The Things They Carried.

Oh, those stories are haunting, says the bartender. And, well, O'Brien is a wizard. What do you want to trade for, anyway? Stick with what you got, kid.

She gets it. She's knows she's not writing a classic. But she reasons. She says her pencil's not so sharp. And if her pencil's not so sharp, it's going to make some mistakes. Sometimes the pencil has trouble deciphering fact from fiction, or deciding which it prefers. She can barely get it to draw a straight line, and it spends too much time in the margins.

In that way, she tells the bartender, she's very much like the pencil.

And it weighs on her. She's thinks about embellishment. She considers stripping down to her skivvies.

Hey, look lady, this ain't that kind of place! the bartender growls.

She wonders if she ought to trade in the manual sharpener for an electric one. She wonders. Acoustic or synthesized? Bamboo or floral? Hardwood or carpeting? Paint or wallpaper? Verbose or succinct? Pointed weights or weighted points?

How come you don't ever have any music in here? she asks the bartender.

Lady, these walls aren't real. You get a band in here and the walls will crumble, he says, shaking his head as he towel-dries a brandy snifter. You do know this ain't real, right?

Hmm, she sighs. Yup, I know. I think I'm going to refinish my hardwoods tonight. Or maybe I'll paint my walls. My real walls.

Ok, Lady, the bartender laughs. You have fun, now. That's right, keep it all real and don't be switching viewpoints! 

Actually, she brightens, I'm going to go write a poem. With a pen. Then she walks out the door and shuts it, maybe a little too hard, and the walls fall down.

And she grins.

Rusty Belle, hailing from Amherst, Massachusetts, was formed in 2006 by siblings Matt and Kate Lorenz, and friend Zak Tojano. From their About page: "...rusty belle swings easily from sweet, simple melodies, whiskey lullabies, blood ballads, busted bluegrass, and folk-punk anthems, to tongue-in-cheek sleaze-rock, glossy-mag candy-pop, and down-home porch-tunes.  the remarkable thing is that its all done with honesty and respect for the music..."  

I think I'm going to have that martini now...

Friday Night Frolic — Building Roads Beneath the Full Moon

[Source]

What she'd like to do is sit down in her little striped beach chair, late, late afternoon by berylline ocean waters and watch pools of frothy tide swish to and fro the shore, as it happens, until the amber sun fades into the sea's violaceous horizon, and the sky illuminates with the shimmery light of this Friday's milky floret of a moon.

The full moon calls.

But that scene is an hour away, and driving is still somewhat restricted (perils of pain medication), so she is here at home, late afternoon, trying to forge a Frolic, feeling anxious and overwhelmed and wanting to be by the beach. She's not happy.

The large framed second story east facing window will have to do. From there, she can almost pluck a low moon from the dark sky.

And then she reads this, from Jan Spiller (whom she's never consulted):

There is an opportunity for insight and progress inherent in the FULL MOON. People often react emotionally during the days of the Full Moon due to a feeling of helplessness.  They become aware of the distance between the way they want their life to be, and the way it currently is.  Often, when they see this gap, they become upset.

Haha, she says, laughing like a madwoman. It's not my ailments, it's the moon!

She pulls the liner notes from Building a Road by Spottiswoode and His Enemies and sips on her damn green tea. There will be no wine tonight. But there will be the full moon. (Unless she fails to finish this Frolic.)

There are no liner notes, really, just perfunctory thank yous and  lists of Special Friends and Archenemies, and one Bete Noire. She cannot imagine that Spottiswoode, the frontman, guitarist and harp player for his rock and soul and cabaret avant garde  band—who reminds her of a young Leonard Cohen (with whom she has frolicked) and Harry Nilsson (with whom she'd like to frolic, lime in de coconut and all)—would have adversaries.

Yet Spottiswoode is drawn to the dark, where foes lurk.

And it is under Stygian skies that she finds a few specters Building a Road:



(She is frustrated that she does not know how to build an MP3 sample.)

And others, far from the Road, at play, building scenes like this:



And this:



And then she flips through the Farmers' Almanac to find that today is the beginning of some of the best days of the year:

According to Farmers' Almanac tradition, when the moon is in the appropriate phase and place in the zodiac, it's widely believed that activities will be more fruitful or lead to improved results. The period between the new and full moon (first and second quarters) is considered as the best time to perform tasks that require strength, fertility and growth...

Who knew! Perhaps it's not all bad, she thinks. Surely there's something that can be done here in the burbs. Ah, a tall iced tea, chilled cherries, the setting sun from the west facing dappled deck accompanied by Spottiswoode. And a stroll down the street. That'll do. Who knows where it may lead...

(Maybe she'll find more goblins along the road. Maybe she will conquer some demons.)

* * * 

You can find Spottiswoode's whole show, starting with scene 1, Live @ Joe's Pub in New York City here.

His latest album is Wild Goosechase Expedition, about the doomed course of a touring rock band. The second track is Beautiful Monday:



Beautiful music.

"Friday Night Frolic" - Dance to the End

Leonard Cohen

You thought it was over didn't you? Your week dragged on and you thought the magic had ended. Poof. Kaput. Now you're looking for it, you want it back.

You've arrived at this point, at this very juncture, this Friday, feeling like all life had been sucked out of you. Leather-faced and bone-dry, you're nothing but a desert of thorny shrub and tumbleweed straight out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, that haunting harmonica score wailing in your achy head.

Everybody wants a piece of you. All of 'em, all the characters: the kids, the boss, the job itself, the partner, the spouse—they all want something from you, don't they? But you feel like you've nothing left to give. And maybe you don't. Maybe, when you get home today (or maybe you're already home) you just head straight for bed. For a long slumber.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you can't sleep because you're obsessing. You want to know why you have to carry all the bags and juggle all the balls—you don't get this brand of entertainment. You want to know what's in it for you—what's it all for? Time is endless, yet finite. Where's the meaning? Obsession's got its twisted fingers around your neck and it's suffocating you. It's going to finish you off unless you take it down by its knees. You gotta get it straight. Flatten it.

So you turn on the light—the one with the alarmingly bright bulb that you'll never get to changing—and grab that book sitting on your bedside table. Yes, that book, the one with all the answers, or so you thought. You leaf through it and start thinking about all the characters in your life, how you oughta just sit 'em all down and have an intervention. Set 'em straight. Tell 'em you're tired of doing It. All of It.

And then you do it: you call them in and gather them 'round the edge of your iron bed. They're pretty comfortable, those characters, so what do they do? They all sit on your bed, all around it, on that nice, freshly dry-cleaned, linen jacquard coverlet. And they start yackin', a cacophony of voices you don't recognize. It's all garbled and crazy, completely absurd. You picture yourself in a Beckett play. Or maybe more like a Monty Python movie, only you're not laughing. So what do you do? You're too nice, so you offer them a beer or a milk or a glass of chardonnay, hoping that will shut them up. (There you go again—giving.) But it doesn't.

You clear your throat (loudly) and ask them what the hell they all want from you. You tell 'em you don't know if you can do It any longer. You're barren wasteland and haven't much left to offer. You're done, you say, you are tired of It.

There's a quiet in the room. Lover looks at boss, boss looks at bags, bags looks at kid, kid looks at balls, balls looks at job, job looks at all those damn dinner-time fundraising calls, and calls doesn't know where to look. They are befuddled.

And so you say, Get out! Just get the hell out. I don't know what I called you in here for in the first place. I've forgotten, dammit. I'm done with It. I can't do It anymore!

Then you get out of bed, pick up the balls and start juggling them. Now you're smiling, hey that feels good. You remember what you love—your music, your books, your work, your family, whatever it is, and that it's Friday night and you're still alive! You start to whistle and clang your tambourine, and feel as free as a gypsy.

And those things, aside from your loved ones, those things that brighten the world and make you feel alive—the collision of harmony, poetry, literature—stand before you and smile back. They're humming a poesy that makes you feel fluid:

And in your desert springs a glistening estuary that gently greets the wide open sea:

And you know you can do It. It's alright, yes all straight now, and you'll sure as hell dance to the end.

For more Leonard Cohen magic (and one of my favorites) go here.