la boheme

Roger Viollet, Portrait d'une bohémienne, circa 1940

stalled in their skins: lester bangs on astral weeks

in the spring, i always reattach myself to van morrison's astral weeks, one of the most important albums of my life soundtrack. it has been following me around for days now.

this is what lester bangs said about the album in a 1979 article:

"What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. "

lester bangs on astral weeks

rick steves: make something!

famed backdoor travel guru & american dreamer rick steves discusses travel, economy, and global perspectives in a recent salon.com interview. this is one of many morsels of his snappy, inspiring clarity & poignant worldly wisdom:

---
"A headline today said, "Americans lose 18 percent of their wealth." Well, no, it wasn't real wealth, it was a bubble. You're down 18 percent? You're not. It shouldn't have been up there in the first place. So get over it. Shut up. Go to work, produce stuff that has value. I really think the days are gone, I hope, when people can rearrange the furniture and get rich on it. You got to produce something."
---

full interview: salon.com

genius and how we ruin it: elizabeth gilbert on creativity

elizabeth gilbert, the writer who found sudden, wild, international success with her travel/soul-searching memoir eat, pray, love, talks about western conceptions of creativity, how they came about, and why they are dangerous. gilbert proposes a return to an ancient understanding of art and genius in this inspiring twenty minutes, which has moved me to motion in the past & just woke me up again amid the delirium of finals week.

support your local indian food

ferdinand and i have this tendency to develop co-dependent relationships with the proprietors of mostly-empty indian restaurants, and yesterday we added one to our list. we ordered some food & the owner invited us back to the kitchen for a VIP sneak peek of his tandoor, the old-school clay oven crucial to open-fire indian cuisine. he made some naan in the blink of an eye & gave it to us on the house. it was amazingly delicious.

face the music

and songs are like cues or keys, and when seasons begin, music bears layers of years and anxious nostalgia. i hear a song from some other spring, and it transports me with this wincing shock of memory, sharp and sudden and bittersweet. one year ago we sat on the roof in windy sun, drinking gas station wine with ice cubes from coffee mugs. i woke up early every morning to lie in the grass under the epic white trees on the oval, paging through dubliners and mrs.dalloway with a hand over my heart. and two years ago, somehow, was spring in dijon, walking the streets in this ecstacy of warmth and green, and everything suddenly alive. we spread blankets on the grass and sat in our worldly circles, planning and chainsmoking, sundizzy and deliriously content. songs appear like apparitions when i comb backwards through catalogues of marches and aprils, but i never make conclusions anymore. we cannot have a final say, we can never access time that is gone. we can connect dots and tell it all like one long story, but with distance and time and meandering retrospect, the past crystallizes until it is contained in one single song, and then somehow every flicker of some long-gone season comes spilling out to wash over us in the spots where we stand.

patsy cline & prophecies of doom

"But in 1962, while recording “Sweet Dreams,” Cline cried at the microphone. Perhaps her emotion reflected a sense of impending doom. Cline began giving personal items away and wrote her last will and testament. She also asked close friends to care for her children if anything happened to her.

On March 3, 1963, she gave a brilliant performance at a benefit concert in Kansas City, Kansas. Afterward, Cline’s close friend, Dottie West, pleaded with her to ride home with her and her husband Bill. Anxious to see her children, Cline told West, “Don’t worry about me, Hoss ( a name she used for close friends). When it’s my time to go, it’s my time.”

After calling her mother, Cline boarded a Piper Comanche for Nashville flown by her manager Randy Hughes. “Cowboy” Copas and “Hawkshaw” Hawkins joined them. They stopped in Dyersburg, Tennessee to refuel and the airport manager suggested they spend the night because of high winds and inclement weather ahead. Hughes replied, “I’ve already come this far. We’ll be there before you know it.”

Hughes and his passengers left Dyersburg at 6:07 p.m. and crashed, according to Cline’s wristwatch, at 6:20 p.m. just outside Camden, Tennessee. Nobody survived.

At just 30, they laid Patsy Cline to rest in Sheandoah Memorial Park in Winchester."

musicouch.com

r.e.m. time traveling: the hartford circus fire

i am occasionally haunted by ghostly victims of the 1944 hartford circus fire. sometimes they wander into my dreams at night. according to international circus code, when the band plays "stars & stripes forever" during a performace, it signals distress to the circus personnel.

"In 1950, a Circleville, Ohio man named Robert D. Segee claimed he was responsible for setting the Hartford Circus Fire. He said he had a nightmare in which an Indian riding on a "flaming horse" told him to set fires. He further claimed that after this nightmare his mind went blank, and that he did not come out of this state until the circus fire had already been set."