9 posts from June 2006

You've heard, I'm sure, Etta James' voice on teevee commercials.

Etta James got her start in the late 50s/early 60s - the early stuff just knocks you out, it's so raw. By the mid 70s, though, she'd run into some trouble with drugs and some other stuff and had kind of lost her mojo. She released an album while she was struggling to recover called Come A Little Closer that caught the attention of the Stones, who brought her on tour with them (I don't know how that helped her recovery, but whatever). The reaction of the crowd? Booing.

Here's a song from that record. She sounds like she's been through the wringer but has come out the other side. It's one of my favorites.

ETA: I can't figure out why it didn't post. It's over there on the sidebar.

Oh, Smithereens!

Oh, Especially For You! Oh, Beauty and Sadness EP (especially Beauty and Sadness EP)! Oh, Green Thoughts, even! Such brilliant, brilliant stuff.

The Smithereens released their best work in the mid-80s; by the time 11 came out in 1989, they were getting the likes of Belinda Carlisle to guest on vocals and being real asses on stage (I saw them in early 1990 after this record came out - it was a terrible day, with lots of drunkenness and lighting the wrong ends of cigarettes at a venue we couldn't leave; even Soul Asylum, who were opening, were lackluster) - essentially, the more commercial their music got, the less I liked them.

But when I heard this song it caught me; a little unexpected chord change here, a sweet harmony there. It's eminently coverable, with lots of potential for other, unexplored harmonies. It's short and sad and doesn't try too hard.

In my movie, this song is playing my senior year of college, in the fall, just before - well, everything that happened that year, which was, well, everything. The record store job. The radio station. A guy named G, who taught me so much about music and remains a friend 17 years later. No, this song is playing as I swing across campus, freed from a silly boyfriend but wondering about someone sillier, leaves falling around my head.

Julia Child mentions E. Dehillerin in her posthumous memoir My Life in France (and Clotilde at Chocolate & Zucchini has written about it as well) and it just better be open when I head over to France in 2008. OK? OK.

Tonight's tres unglamorous dinner was, unfortunately, barely-passable pizza from a new place we thought we'd try. You'd think, for a town that supposedly has more pizza possibilities per capita than any other place in the US (I don't believe it, but Jim swears he read it somewhere), that we'd be able to get our hands on a decent pizza, but you'd be WRONG. I've never really liked the pizza here very much, with the possible exception of this one place, but their shop on our side of town closed a few years ago and getting their pizza now means venturing onto campus, whcih drives me insane. I make a pretty decent pizza - lately I've been relying on whole wheat dough made by my friend S at the co-op, but Julia's crust recipe in The Way to Cook is awesome - but tonight we were stumped for a meal, and paying for pizza seemed like a good idea. Ick. Never again.

Dessert, on the other hand, should be is excellent - homemade vanilla ice cream (I didn't make it, though I'm officially in the market for an ice cream maker now that I have such a good line on clean, local dairy products, so if anyone has a recommendation, I'm all ears... or eyes... whatever) with Ah!Laska chocolate syrup. A few bites and I'm good.

Jim folds clothes. Cody frets over North Korea. Lilly draws me puffy hearts with glitter.

Memes always ask the question who would play you in the movie about your life?

I prefer to ask the question which songs would be on the soundtrack to the movie about your life?

The songs in this ongoing series would be good in any movie if appropriately placed. I've dreamed, in the past, of having the job where you get to decide which song goes where. I have a friend who does that now for a very popular show on NPR. Jealous. She has great taste in music.

For me, the songs don't have to have to be attached to a particular event to make my soundtrack. For example, the song below wouldn't necessarily be in the movie during the part of my high school life where I'm swooning over E (which is what I was doing when I was into this record); it could be during a montage of Jim and I walking the streets in CHGO, or playing frisbee on the beach, or frolicking with the kids, or whatever. It's definitely an action song.

The song is "Burn For You" by INXS, from their completely underrated 1984 classic The Swing. Most records from that period have withered and dated themselves; this record is 22 years old (!) and sounds fresh and potent and earnestly sexy and blunt. Michael Hutchence effectively channels Mick Jagger on this record but not in a he's-being-obvious-on-purpose kind of way; it's the subtleties - the way he sings with the women on this song reminds me, strangely, of the way Jagger sings with Carly Simon on "You're So Vain". It's totally effective and a little sad; this record was really INXS' creative apex.

This song would definitely be in the my autobiographical movie. It would be during the part, I think, where Jim and I are walking in downtown CHGO, record shopping, eating ice cream, trying on clothes, falling in love.

Sibs that foos together, stay together.

It's too bad we didn't find out about the auditions for the local theatre group's version of Oliver! until it was too late - my kid has the acting bug. He was one of the leads in his school's production of Guys and Dolls. It was the first production the middle school had done of anything for ten years, and they did a terrific job.

Not only that, my kid was spectacular.

I know, he's my kid. Of course I think so. Except that I was overhearing other people say that about him, his sister was absolutely transfixed by his performance, and I was watching people ask him for autographs after the show was over. On one hand I was thinking, are people so craving being near celebrity that they're coming up to a 13 year-old boy for an autograph? But then I realized that at least some of those folks were doing it for his benefit. "I can say 'I knew him when'," explained one parent. My kid beamed.

Aw, he had a blast.

I thought I'd post this photo of the backyard a year and a few months ago, when we first moved in. It looks completely alien to me. The photo in the previous entry was taken yesterday.

I love our house. It's small - officially 1100 SF but we count the 500 SF "garden apartment", so maybe more like 1600 SF - but the yard is large. And it's ours. I never really believed we'd ever buy a house and didn't believe we owned this one until the keys were in my hand. I feel incredible gratitude; I can grow plenty of flowers, herbs, and vegetables, work on projects in the garage, enjoy a cup of coffee on the front patio, walk barefoot on our lovely wood floors. It's modest, and my teenage son is chafing and wishing there was a little more flash to the old B-K unit, but I love it.

My writerly chops have left me for the evening. I'm out of practice. Back when I did madameinsane dot com, I wrote these essays about my home life - the kids, the garden, the knitting and the breadbaking, my husband, politics, music, etc. I wrote often and sometimes I wrote well. I loved the design, I loved the feedback, I loved writing about my existence. I loved it.

It was no accident, however, that the blog started breaking at about the same time I started thinking that something else had to happen and that this isn't enough and that the next phase is right around the corner. And it was - within a year of that domain lapsing - July 2004 - we bought our house, I started working part-time, and some friendships ended while others began. I started a new blog, but the vibe isn't the same. I'm not as revealing, and that's on purpose, but I also feel like I don't know how to talk to the blogging client. The cursor sits there and blinks at me. I'm intimidated by the blog.

I've changed, too. I'm not really the person I was when I started writing about my life in early 2002 (was that when?). I work full-time now at a job I enjoy and feel very fortunate to have. My kids are enrolled in public school, which was unthinkable to me in 2002. I've let go of a lot. My marriage, an excellent one, soldiers on. Due to a soul sister's recent move, I have no real close friends here once again, which frees up some mental energy to focus on myself (though I miss her terribly).

I wrote elsewhere that I've forgotten how to dream, so busy I've been raising kids and experimenting with the home arts and helping other people achieve what they wanted to achieve, listening, being capable, trying to find peace in that. I'm very used to doing what I'm supposed to do, which occasionally dovetails with what I really want to do.

So one of my goals - and I have many - is to remember how to dream, how to find energy and direct it toward something I want. I started this spring by going after the job I have and getting it - who's to say I can't keep going?

France, 2008.

... to have too many places to put oneself out there?

I mean, I have a blog, a Livejournal, a list at 43 Things, a profile at StumbleUpon, etc. I'm only barely active at a couple of those, since work and RL activities are pretty time-consuming lately.

 What does that say about me? That I'm compulsive about finding like minds? That I need attention? That I don't have enough of an online presence?

That being said, I'm glad to test something new and I hope to meet a few new people this way. Livejournal is wearing me out lately, and while I enjoy my blog, I've found some of the attention I've gotten from it to be irritating. I know. I'm terrible.

OK! Love to all! Beta testing rules!

Test post.

Thanks, Omy.