Addiction

 This short video explains the view of a physician who worked with the most trenchant forms of addiction in Vancouver, British Columbia.  But he doesn't believe that pills, or even the modus operandi of changing behavior, is the answer to the problem.  His observation is that addiction is a response to emotional trauma, especially that which occurs in childhood.  His perspective reminds me of Carl Jung's, when Jung said that all neuroses are an attempt to avoid genuine suffering.  We all suffer.  What is at the root of our responses to our own suffering and our inability to resolve and heal that pain? 

Gaelic Folk

The great Julie Fowlis singing in Gaelic and playing the harmonium.  I love any instrument that creates a drone -- the harmonium, the tambura, or feedback on an electric guitar.  There's something mystical about the sound of the drone -- it always puts me into a sort of altered state of mind.

Birthday

 It's an old friend's birthday today and I thought I'd pay tribute with this song which, oddly enough, was written by George Harrison, who shares this birthday, and oddly enough, is done here by a duo (Astrid and Stanley Samuelsen) as a tribute to George.  Got all that straight?  Good.  Happy birthday to my friend.

Selene Munoz

Selene Munoz with Hallgrim Hansegard in a short but interesting practice session.

Last Dreamers' Circus video

 They have many, many others, of course, but I think I've given them a fair showing.  In this last video I am really introducing a new artist, their fellow countrywoman, Selene Munoz.

Selene is half-Danish and half-Spanish, as her surname suggests.  She started dancing at age nine and graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Dance in Madrid.  As will become apparent, she also studied flamenco while in Spain, developing a fusion of both traditional and contemporary versions of that style.

In fact, she IS this video: it's a poignant and oftentimes painful depiction of the unfortunate and unconscious internalization of oppression that women face the world over.  There's a chilling distinction made between the external/internal woman in this performance.  It gave me pause for thought about how such external oppression becomes personal repression.  And of the incapacity of men to see women for who they really are.  

At least that's my take on it all.  But I'm saying too much.  Better simply to watch Selene.  The song is entitled, "A Room In Paris."

A Little of This, a Little of That

 Got my first covid vaccination.  I had applied with my county's health services site online and over the course of a month received four automated responses that just said, "We're reviewing your request for an appointment."  After first responders, our county first chose folks over 75, then dropped it down another 10 years.  I then qualified.

So last Saturday night I finally got an email saying, "Make your appointment no later than tomorrow."  Although I could have chosen by distance, I decided to simply take the first available appointment, which happened to be up in Antioch, at 9:30 am on Wednesday.

I was driving against the morning commute so it was a piece of cake to get there.  In fact, I was forty minutes early and they weren't taking people until literally the time of the appointment, so I took a stroll through beautiful downtown Antioch.  The old downtown is right along the water, which is the San Joaquin/Sacramento River delta.  I often have said to people that I was up by the river and they always give me this nonplussed look, so maybe the locals refer to it as the delta, I don't know.

The whole downtown is only about 5 or 6 blocks square.  The railway runs right along the water, and between the tracks and the shore are umpteen homeless encampments.  I guess that's a function of the railroad.  Or the fact that the land is part of the right of way for the railroad but nobody's bothering those folks.

Anyway, once my group was called in, I was highly impressed by how organized it was and by how cooperative everyone was.  For a brief moment, I was actually proud of my country and the people in it -- and I haven't felt that way for a very long time.  I was registered within five minutes, only waited maybe another 5 to get to one of a dozen stations for the shot.  The shot itself was painless.  Then we had to wait in an observation area, where chairs were placed six feet from one another on all sides, and we were asked by signage to stay for 15 minutes.  There was no one timing you; you were simply on the honor system and I saw no one, out of maybe 30-40 people, leaving early.  I was in and out in 27 minutes.

I go back in one month to the same site for my second shot.  Had a little bit of soreness, not much, in my upper arm last night and a slight headache, but I've had a stronger reaction to flu shots.  I hear the second shot may evoke a stronger reaction but I'm not sure of the reason why.

And to close, I'm going to toss up another music video.  I meant to include this with last week's Valentine's Day songs.  It's my next-to-last Dreamer's Circus video.  This time they're guesting with another Danish musician, Kristian Leth, who wrote and sings lead on the song.  It's called "When the Lights Go Out" and it's part of an album entitled "Dangerous Alliance."  But then, in the world of romance, all alliances are dangerous.  They all have the potential to put an end to an old life, take you on an entirely new path, or cast you down a dark hole.  You need both courage and wisdom.  And your wits and wisdom are not the same thing.  Wisdom comes from the heart, not the head.

I'll have one last DC song in a few days and it's a segue into introducing a new artist and then entirely new artistic territory.  Enjoy.

Basalt Lava Flows and Ice Age Floods

 I grew up in a region of southeastern Washington state known as the Palouse.  This landscape, which I took for granted as a child, gradually became more impactful for me as an adult when I learned more about the forces that came into play, shaping the area in which I lived, roamed, and wandered.

Originally, the landscape of eastern Washington and Oregon, southwestern Idaho, and a divot of Nevada, was shaped in large part by enormous flows of lava spawned by a hot spot which now -- because of the drift of the continental north American tectonic plate -- sits under Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.  These lava flows were active between 17 million and 9 million years ago.

But what's extremely rare, and most interesting about the landscape of the Palouse is that most of it was shaped relatively recently -- within the last 20,000 years -- by massive floods occasioned by various Ice Age lakes which no longer exist.

This episode by Central Washington University geologist Nick Zentner gives a quick overview of this area of the earth, especially the Ice Age floods which not so long ago scoured the land.  Nick has many such videos and most of them are at least an hour in length, so geologically speaking, this is a quick sprint through the way in which this magnificent land was shaped.

Chup

 Zeb and Haniya again.  Although the closed caption translation of "chup" is "quiet," I like the one I found online better -- Hush!

This is my other favorite song of this duo; from the same session as the previous one, with the same musicians.  What I find interesting about this song is its obvious jazz-inflected tone and the rather risque lyrics.  Certainly not what you'd expect from Pakistan at first glance, but music really is the universal language.  We can build bridges across cultures this way.  It also gives me pause for thought that love and desire are perennial and universal.  So I hope you enjoy this little sojourn.

Zeb & Haniya

 Z&H are a duo of Pakistani singer/songwriters.  They are cousins who, while both attending college in the NE United States, would meet periodically because they were homesick and they began to sing the songs from their childhood together.  Obviously, both were gifted musically.  They also made pilgrimages to the Radio City Music Hall in NYC to see shows.  Zeb, I believe, became a big fan of the Delta blues.  Eventually they went home and all these influences came together in a wonderful format that was for some time advanced by a live studio sponsored by MTV and Coke.  For a few years, some of the best music in the world was broadcast from this studio, a hybrid of modern musical forms and instrumentation, paired with folk instruments indigenous to Pakistan and the Punjab.  I found it a brilliant combo.

Eventually, the powers that be in Pakistan seemed to exert their influence and the music from this studio became much more conservative.  Such is life.  But I found it truly enlightening that a country we know so little about in terms of culture, Pakistan, should have been at the cutting edge of the world's music scene, at least in my estimation.

There are a couple of things to say about this song.  It is nested, lyrically speaking, in the tradition of the Urdu ghazal, in terms of content and style if not form.  The ghazal as a poetic form originated in medieval Persia and emigrated to India (and what would become Pakistan) along with the Moghul invasion and subsequent dynasty in northern India.  Traditionally, the ghazal was a form of love lyric, but it has an unusual structure in that each couplet stands as an independent unit.  The whole is not linear as English language tends to be.  And yet there must be a thread of unity throughout any given ghazal.  The analogy is that of a necklace with many kinds of gems and stones threaded upon it.  So you have many surprising twists and turns in a ghazal, with social and personal commentary included therein.  

The Urdu ghazal is really the only living form of poetry at present that attends to the subject matter of love and all its many permutations.  I only mention all this in order to introduce the listener to the sensibility behind the lyrical style of this song.

One other thing.  What stood out to me about this song was how the delicate dynamic was maintained throughout.  In contemporary Western pop music, people seem addicted to shifting from delicate intros into thrashing choruses, which just bores me to fucking tears.  Thank goodness for musicians who can carry a delicate melodic line through to the song's conclusion.  I love the lilting feel to this performance.

I'm pushing the edge a bit here but this is still intended to be part of my Valentine's Day theme and thread.  Click on the "cc" closed captions to get the translation.  Best to watch it on a laptop, then.

And so, without further ado....

Marta Gómez y Javier Ruibal

I don't speak Spanish, more's the pity, but there's something about this song that tugs at my heartstrings nonetheless.  When I explained last fall that I had survived my long emotional desert sojourn, more commonly called life, by listening to songs from other cultures in the original languages, this was one of the many examples that sprang to mind.  

Marta Gomez is a Colombian folk singer and songwriter whom I discovered while she was still living there.  She has since re-located to Barcelona and has happily become a mother.  Her latest album was a delightful compilation of children's lullabyes.  In this duet she collaborates with Spanish singer-songwriter, Javier Ruibal.  

It gives me hope to see a man and a woman create such beauty together, simply sitting on a sofa in someone's living room, accompanied by a single guitar but combining their voices so wonderfully.  I love Marta's voice in its lower registers -- there is a human warmth that comes through and especially touches me.  Javier's voice gives me the sense of someone who has lived but has not let the vicissitudes of life suppress his spirit nor his heart.  Perhaps I'm projecting, but I also aspire to live in such a way -- to be open to love and life, and to never let life's hard knocks quell my spirit or my heart.  Today's world seems to trend toward the guarding of one's heart, but we all suffer needlessly thereby.  Trust is the test.  Paradoxically, one must learn to trust one's own heart before becoming capable of trusting another's.

Khruangbin

 Fittingly, this song is called "Friday Morning" as I'm posting it on that day.  It's by the group who backed up Leon Bridges on his song, "Texas Sun," which I posted yesterday.  In keeping with the thread this week, it's more or less about love.  But what I really appreciate is the way they've captured the sound of the late Seventies.  This vibe is classic Seventies to a "T." Love and desire go hand in hand here, very smoothly.  And yet there's a kind of easy innocence to it all.  Life was like that, once.  Maybe it's just a wistful look back -- could love still capture this feeling today?

Texas Sun

 There are several things going on here at once -- there's the song itself by a young fellah named Leon Bridges.  The backing group is a trio from Houston called Khruangbin, whom I'll feature in videos of their own a little further down the road.  But mostly I'm sold on this video, which is quite creative in its own right.  The landscape reminds me of back home in southeastern Washington state -- an area called the Palouse -- which looks a lot like this, basically dry farm and range land.  So many different echoes and shades of feeling for me here. 

But I'm really posting this because it's a love song and Valentine's Day falls on this weekend.  Now, I probably haven't celebrated V-Day in any form in a dozen years or so.  If you've somehow survived your life thus far with your sense of romance intact, and you're not completely jaded and haven't become a closed-hearted cynic, well -- my hat's off to you, then.  Enjoy the video.

Lighten up, Lance

 I have to watch out, methinks I'm in danger of becoming a crotchety, crusty old crackpot, an anachronistic iconoclast, or just an overgrown barnacle attached to a submerged, stationary and stanchion hunk of rock.  That said, my goal for the rest of the month is just to lighten up, instead of dredging up the dregs of humanity's behavior.  Or my own.  So I'm hitting on an old standby, my Danish trio, but this time starting with one of their own songs, "Rooster's Show-off," which segues into, believe it or not, an old Beatles tune sung with a Danish accent -- and with a little help from their friends.  You're sure to love it -- I do.

The 7th Shadow of Separation: a Rant of Sorts

Today is Super Bowl Sunday -- or so I gather -- and I probably haven't watched the Super Bowl in over 40 years.  I used to watch as a kid, when it was just a football game.  But the Super Bowl became merely a spectacle, a focal point for everything that is wrong with this culture.  In a world driven by $$$, everything becomes just another commodity to sell, so....money, greed and avarice win the day yet again.  No matter who wins the football game, the advertisers have made their bid to buy and sell your soul.  Again.

If you wonder what happened in the Sixties, well, the Merchants of Menace simply took the Revolution, commodified it, and sold it back to the people.  In their world, which unfortunately is also our world, there is nothing so noble that it can't be co-opted and turned into just another marketing opportunity.  Did you turn a profit?  That's their bottom line, and the only bottom line that matters in a world that can be bought and sold. 

There must be a way to co-opt the co-opters and beat them at their own game?  My hope is to tell the truth as I see it and let the chips fall where they may.  In today's world, someone will come along to twist, spin, lie and spew forth their inverted version of whatever you may have said.  So be it.  Let the buyer beware.  Use your own common sense, if you have any left.

What would a world that wasn't built on the mercenary merits of greed and avarice look like?

I haven't written anything in a while and one of the issues that someone raised recently was the protection of intellectual property.  I have to look into that.  Not that anything that I've written qualifies, nor is what I've written anything someone might try to steal, beyond a fairy tale I published hereon, but if one aspires to write, for whatever reason, one has to consider the consequences of possibly being co-opted.  By whom and for what reasons, who knows?  Everyone seems to have an axe to grind nowadays.  Anyway, I'm posing the question to myself.

If you don't write for self-aggrandizement, then why do you write?  If not for riches, fame, glory, or even to publish?  Certainly not for literary merit.  In other words, not for the sake of vanity.  What if you write simply to discover what you really think?  To translate the unconscious into consciousness, in the crucible of cognition?  And if you happen to say something that helps even one individual, then it is well worth the while. 

As for all the rest -- the buyers and sellers, the arbiters of value, worth, and the holy grail of a buck, the axe-grinders and ne'er-do-wells of the world - well, que sera, sera.  I'll speak my piece and then be on my merry way.

Last Time Around...

 ...with my favorite one-man-band, Jarle Bernhoft.  A song called "Come Around With Me."  American rhythm and blues meets Oslo pop and pure joy ensues.

Bernhoft Round Two

 Here he is again, multi-tracking his way into one-man-band-ness -- live, no less. Just passing the time in the back of a second-hand shop.

Jarle Bernhoft

A couple of years ago, I was looking on youtube for a good version of the old Jimmy Webb song, "The Moon's A Harsh Mistress."  In doing so, I stumbled upon this fellow from Oslo, Jarle Bernhoft.  I liked his version of this song so decided to post it here for your perusal. The lyrics are below -- they make for good poetry.

See her, how she flies
Golden sails across the sky
Close enough to touch
But careful if you try
Though she looks as warm as gold
The moon's a harsh mistress
The moon can be so cold

Once the sun did shine
Lord, it felt so fine
The moon a phantom rose
Through the mountains and the pines
And then the darkness fell
The moon's a harsh mistress
It's hard to love her well

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell flat on my face
I tripped and missed my star
I fell and fell alone
The moon's a harsh mistress
She's hard to call your own

The moon's a harsh mistress
The sky is made of stone