Friday Night Frolic — The Metamorphosis (To Come)

'Now my dears,' said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into the fields or down the lane, 
but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; 
he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.'
~Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit

There are forces—intrinsic, extrinsic, otherworldly, Olympian—in the preteen psyche that I hadn't anticipated. The girl is petitioning for a room makeover. Well, is it any wonder? I shouldn't be so surprised, after all, she is surrounded by storybook misfortune: rabbits captured for pie, eggs swiped from ducks, foxy-whiskered, prick-eared gentleman not to be trusted, and owls who skin squirrels alive.

Lulu, who turns thirteen in a little more than two months, has lived among the red hued toile rendering—wall covering and coordinating balloon shades—of Beatrix Potter's creatures for as many years. 

I hadn't thought about Potter's nursery rhyme characters in that light when I decorated Lu's room more than a dozen years ago. I thought, to be candid, that the paper and fabric made for a nursery design with which I could live and a wall covering that would easily grow up with Lu. Now I wonder how easily she's slept for all those years in that angelic, antique three quarter bed while Potter's beasts dallied on the walls.

I admit, the toile was for me. 

But thirteen is a coming of age birthday—a right of passage that has been known to be marked (her brother's room as precedent) by inner sanctum transformation. Hence, Lu's passage into teen-hood will be observed by the conspicuous and abrupt changes that are characteristic of any metamorphosis: a permutation of color; the shedding of layers; altered structures.

The coming transformation is for Lu.

I worry. I wonder if any morsel of Lu's youth will be recognizable in her transmuted cocoon. Or shall I enter to find a Kafka nightmare? Lu as a gargantuan pest?

Goodbye Jemima Puddle-Duck, Pigling Bland, Squirrel Nutkin, my Peter. Augmented inner sanctums take no victims. (Nor—I hope—accidents, like fluorescent permutations.)

*  *  * 

  Mason Jar Music Presents… Lacrymosa - "Weltschmerz (Smitten Song)" by MasonJarMusic

Lacrymosa is the stage name for 22 year old Brooklyn singer/pianist/composer Caitlin Pasko, whose warm, tranquil music gently fills space, time, and captivates. Her second album, Selah, was released in 2010.

Pasko studied classical piano from a young age, and quickly developed a style which she has described as whimsical forest music. Her angelic soprano lends itself well to her otherworldly sound, as well as the pastoral imagery her songs evoke.

Pasko's lyrics are peppered with fields of gold, roses, buttercups, parrots, trees, spiders and tiny horses—just the type of visuals that also might make for something really sweet, like, say...

 Wallpaper?

  01 - Not About Want by Suburban Soliloquist

Friday Night Frolic — For The Children (and Daphne)

What is the use of a house if you don't have a decent planet to put it on? 

~ Henry David Thoreau

The brook is so low it's barely moving. The whole of our little riparian zone here in our corner lot in Suburbaland is a mess with fallen branches, twisted twig, and windswept trash. It looks miserable. This time of year, when mud season creeps in, I always feel like our land is telling us that it would like to be left alone. That it should never have been disturbed. That it wasn't meant to have been developed. We bought it, though, despite my general concerns regarding suburbia, after the cul-de-sac had been close to fully developed, and the biggish house (and in the grand scope of big-home suburbia--land of obscene McMansions--ours is the caretaker's home, which is still more than I care to care for) and pretty wetlands at its border drew us in.

We bought it for quality of life. For the family. We bought it for the school system (which, as it turned out, was rather overrated and spiraled southward soon after we moved in). We bought it because we got more home for the dollar here in lil' Rhody (oh, but the taxes!). We bought it for the dream.

Lately, I've been reading and reassessing our quality of life and what that means to me, my family, our environment, our ecosystems, the world as a whole...

Swift growth outside of urban areas is not unique to Suburbaland. Our town, to which I have before, by way of photo essay, referred, is like many other suburbs that hope to lure families to the dream with biggish new lots on which sit biggish new homes with biggish new lawns (and sometimes littleish lots with biggish homes and littleish lawns) and the pièce de résistance: biggish privacy. Though I'm not well versed in Suburbaland's permitting process, I'd imagine that developers love towns like ours that seem, or at least seemed at one point, quick to hand out building permits. Of course, we all know how that ended. Yet, it hasn't actually ended.

Several years after we moved into town, a new development went up on a hilly parcel of land along an old country road. The land comprised the few remaining untouched acres on this particular part of the road. Right under the bridge of a highway. McMansions set on steep mounds of craggy soil below the highway. I wondered if we needed housing that badly.

Eventually, the homes sold, with the exception of the first house built at the corner of the country road and the new road. What was also sold off was our buffer zone. Trees and brush and any living thing that offered padding from the noise of the expressway was flattened. A half-mile or so away from the new McHood, my neighborhood is now a little bit noisier. But certainly not noisier than the old Boston 'hood, on Comm. Ave., where most services were a walk away, and the T screeched by every fifteen minutes (which I never, ever minded).

It's all relative, as they say.

Still, I reassess. Our mayor, who hitherto has been the champion of town edification, has proposed a plan to create a town center on the protected lands of our old Monastery, in which the town library is housed. It's a beautiful 550 acre swath of grassy tracts, leafy trails and wetlands where I walk and cross country ski, and where the children run cross-country, and while I applaud the idea of a town center, the thought of transforming any portion of this slice of verdant land into what the mayor dubs an "Educational Village," containing a relocated town hall (in perhaps a more desirable location?) is shameful. The reason we don't have a town center is because of historically poor town planning. It's by this same reason, and at the hands of town solicitors and leaders who believe that land conservation easements were meant to be modified, that this community is at risk of losing even more of our valuable fields and woodland. 

So much for Suburbaland's open space priorities. 

Simply by virtue of living in this town, in this neat little subdivision without sidewalks, in this world of homes of unused living rooms and front porches, on the edge of the remains of a place that was once fully adorned with flora and fauna, I am beginning to feel that I am in collusion with suburban sprawl--the need to push our planet to its absolute limit, and the willingness to turn a blind eye at the cannibalization of every morsel of land. I am a part of the rapid consumption of open space, the degradation of environment, biodiversity, farmlands, our very quality of life. I am a part.

Yet here we remain. For the children. Until the time, not too long from now, I can remain no more. And when that time arrives I'm going to pray like hell that someone else wants the caretaker's home in the dream.

Will it be different elsewhere?

 Lia Ices - Daphne by Pop Culture Monster

Lia Ices released her sophomore effort, Grown Unknown, last January 2011. Pitchfork reviewed it soon thereafter:

When Ices indulges her avant leanings, the material provides a more suitable foil for her voice. A mixture of finger snaps, glinting piano, and subdued organ provides a suitably artful backbone over which she hangs a touchingly forlorn vocal turn on "Little Marriage", and there's a deft marrying of chamber music sadness and welts of distorted guitar on "Bag of Wind". But it's the standout title track that provides the most successful conduit for Ices' eclectic whims, with a militaristic handclap and acoustic picking alongside feather-light string parts. Here Ices sounds relaxed, locating a natural meeting point for her disparate sounds and easing into a vocal that effortlessly intertwines with the arrangement.

From Necima (2008):

Grown Unknown, has all the same haunting melancholy feel as her debut album, Necima, but is less shaky, more grown up than unknown, and clearly reflects her experimental theatre education at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as her Shakespearian studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. 

 Lia ices -grownunknown by totosarg

Bravo, Lia.

Friday Night Frolic — The Reservoir at 8:00 am

People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
~Ayn Rand

I wasn't supposed to be walking along the paved path this morning, not alone, not at anytime or any day, but I had abandoned my first route—an attempt to reach the falls at the western end of the 252 acre reservoir—when I came nearly face to face with a fox halted on all fours. I noticed his red coat partially hidden by brush and I knew he had been tracking me as I approached his immediate territory. Not wishing to take any chances with a potentially rabid animal, I decided to slowly pivot back east, back through the rain-soaked leaves and muddy trail, back toward my car, the lone car, parked behind a local Masonic lodge. As I retreated I pulled my car keys from my coat pocket and shook them like a noisemaker just to let that fox know who was boss, all the while hoping he wouldn't come at me from behind, not looking back, not once.

There's a small baseball field at the northern end of the lodge's parking lot, backing up along the reservoir, and on the eastern side of the lot stands a chain link fence protecting the water supply. I hadn't before noticed that the reservoir curled around so closely to the field, which I'd been to only once or twice, late spring several years back when the boy used to play ball, long after he had confessed to me, but before he had worked up enough nerve to tell his father—who kept signing him up, spring and fall, year after year—that his heart just didn't connect with the game. Pulling grass and snapping at butterflies in the outfield should have been sign enough, but not to father's of mighty-armed, left handed boys. 

Dreams. 

[I wondered if it weren't denial (well, of course it was) that kept my husband from noticing what seemed so very obvious to me. I'd grown up with ball players. My dad, who'd coached, let his tomboy daughter (for whom, at the time, no hardball league existed) practice with his team and keep stats. I loved the game as much as my dad and brothers, and I knew when a boy was in love with it too. A boy gently smoothing a stitched, leather-covered hardball in his hands like it were a sacred thing, or stepping into the batter's box, face lowered and serious, as if it were a confessional and he was ready for release. Almighty God, let it go, set me free! There was a level of intimacy with the sport that my son just never felt. And that was okay with me. Eventually—after a mourning spell—it was alright with his father, too.]

With the morning chill and drizzle intensifying, I plodded through the thick brush along the fence at the edge of a cemetery and church bordering the reservoir and found the fence trailed off where the woods opened up beyond the hallowed grounds. At the risk of a $500.00 fine and imprisonment for up to one year, it was there I transgressed and climbed an unobstructed embankment to find a winding, smoothed asphalt path at its crest, surrounding the reservoir. (Damn the electronic surveillance and penalties. Tell me how one turns away from this path?) It was from this perspective that I could see nearly the whole of the reservoir. The view was grace, pure grace. Alone, in the midst of this serene form, I put down the knotty stick that I had picked up along the way, and stood looking at the water, the grey mist rising from it, the leaf-lined path, the evergreen and flora fringe, before freezing the moment with the camera built into my cell phone, its shutter sound effect slicing the moist air. 

And then I looked straight ahead and walked.

* * * 

Sharon Van Etten is a young singer/songwriting from New Jersey who spent her college years in Tennessee. It was there that she found the music that was to influence her highly personal songwriting. In the past three years she's put out just as many albums, and has found a solid American fan base.

Pitchfork, on Van Etten's debut album, Because I Was In Love: 

Most crucial to the album's success, however, is Van Etten's unerring sense for crafting memorable, seductive melodies. Here again she takes no shortcuts, as she largely forgoes standard verse-chorus repetition in favor of a more organic style, with wonderful songs like "For You" and "Holding Out" gently unwinding like the lines across a hand-drawn road map. Even in a folk scene that can sometimes feel over-crowded, Because I Was in Love positions Sharon Van Etten immediately towards the front of the pack.

From Because...

And We Are Fine, from Tramp (2012)

NPR calls Van Etten "hypnotically complicated." I think she's going to stick around long enough to hypnotize many of us. You can find more on her latest album here.

Friday Night Frolic — The Low Anthems of a Dysfunctional Winter

A Scene on the Ice -  Hendrick Avercamp 

No ice
not even snow
on this island
that sits low
by the sea

Ponds long
to be cut
with silver blades
a fishing hut
or a puck

No such luck.

Where has winter gone?

Suburban soliloquists
take trains
stare out windows
at city's winter rains
dreaming of frost

Skis of copious length
on which to mount
a field of firn
to linger, scout
a winterland struck

But fuck.

Where has winter gone?

To the Dutch
they've it all
ice, skates, kolf
snow wonder they stand tall
on glacial ivory

The brilliance
of a Vermeer
Jan Davidsz de Heem's
flowers, oh dear!
Steen's palette instructs

Winter's not amuck!

As it should be:

Swirling, whirling crystal
fleecy drifts severe
white-out hypnotics!
The island's absent pearlescent smear
and Khione's heart despairs

So to Avercamp
the scenes he'd deliver
lustful heads turn
toward his frozen river
away from this muck

What's known as winter yuck.

A dysfunctional winter.

* * *

The north wind blows and brittle branches scratch against the clapboards, yet I don't hear the siren calls of winter. Temperatures have dipped (somewhat), but the blizzards of last year seem merely a dream. How can that be? The last time we Rhode Islanders saw snow around here it was cavorting with fall, just before Halloween. That was the trick. The treat has yet to follow, and I fear my friend snow may not remain as it should: a going concern. 

In a corner of the garage, my cross-country skis sit lonely, and I almost want to curse our pulsating sun that fights the brume for attention. This is not as winter should be. Not here. Not in Lil Rhody!

What we do have, though—even during abnormal winters—throughout the year, is a vibrant music scene, and a history of serving as a launching pad, or at the very least, sowing seeds, for several remarkable bands. Members of the Talking Heads met at RISD. Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lisa Loeb, Duncan Sheik, Jesse Sykes (Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter), and Chris Keating (of Yeasayer) graduated from Brown University. And let's not forget one of my very favorites (especially when he's with his partner, Gillian Welch), David Rawlings, who grew up in the very next town from where I was born and raised.

In Providence, the local music scene includes, among others, The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, Deer Tick, and The Low Anthem:

Ghost Women Blues—as well as other songs from The Low Anthem's most recent release, Smart Flesh—was recorded in an abandoned pasta sauce factory located in Central Falls, RI (home to Stanley's famous burgers), which is, like most places in R.I., barely a stone's throw away from my home. 

Oh My God, Charlie Darwin (2009) was recorded on Block Island—in the midst of its deep-freeze winter months. TLA is known for using locally found materials as percussion instruments, as well as its album sleeves and art. (Ah—a dumpster's treasures.) And I wonder what charms they dug up along the bluffs of one of the Last Great Places.

On My Space, TLA describes its music as minimalist, psychedelic and comedy. I think it's beautiful. (Or, wicked awesome, as the locals like to say.) And hope for more treats from them, as a going concern.

Now, please, Khione, bring on the snow!

Friday Night Frolic — Reckoning With Forces

Downtown Providence, RI--1938 Hurricane (RI Historical Society)

Today's Frolic will be brief as we have visitors from Quebec—not to mention a swirling and churning she-storm making its way up the East Coast—converging upon us at any moment.

Our French visitors should be here this afternoon. Irene, if her wrath shan't dwindle, will make her presence known Saturday evening and she may prove to be a force that we New Englanders haven't encountered since the great New England hurricane of 1938. (Though we've weathered significant storms since, but not the sort labeled "Category 3" that also make landfall.)

All this dark, tempestuous she-talk of late reminds me of another force: Danish singer/songwriter Agnes Obel.




Obel's power can be found in the substratum of classical music, simple melodies and often morbid lyrics. You can find more about Agnes here. Her debut album, Philharmonics, was released in September, 2010.



Obel's pitch perfect voice lingers long after the storm has passed. 

Be safe, my East Coast friends. Be safe.