Odds and Ends

A few things I've been meaning to put down before they get rudely shoved aside in my mind by intrusive thoughts of the butterscotch milkshake I'm craving or dress fitting appointments or JDE invoicing or whatever else might randomly slip in:

Random Compliments That I've Received Lately and To Which I Have Not Known How To Respond:

- "You look like a young Bette Midler" (holy crap -- what???)

- "You have the nicest skin! I'm looking at it so closely and I can't see any pores at all!" (while I certainly appreciate the sentiment, get.away.from.my.face -- we're at a business dinner, psycho)

- "You've got great boobs." (from a chick, no less)

- "You've got great taste in food." (okay, well...yes, I do -- thank you)


A Movie Scene Which I'm Sure Has Never Been Filmed But Which I Would Very Much Enjoy Seeing Nonetheless:

A sex scene in which the two lovers are locked together 9-1/2 Weeks-style in some very random location (like the inside of an old phone booth or a drained swimming pool next to an abandoned hotel), completely throwing all decency to the wind and saying nothing to each other as a Hardingfele plays mournfully over the scene. I know, I know: you're laughing now at the Hardingfele, aren't you? You're either laughing at the word "Hardingfele" even though you have no idea what it is, or you're laughing because you actually know what one is and you're either associating it with The Lord of the Rings soundtrack (no! stop it!) or you're imagining a jolly Norwegian tune being played on it while two people get down in a phone booth.

But go and listen to "Folkdance from the Hills" by Edvard Grieg (you can listen to a small snippet of it on Amazon, but it's not the good part and it really doesn't do it justice). Now picture that playing over the sex. It's totally hot, isn't it? Smoking hot. And here you were, making fun of a Hardingfele like a 13-year-old.


The Temp Who's Sharing My Office With Me Is Very Interested in Homeopathic Medicine

Very interested. He talks about it all the time, which I have a hard time reconciling with the music that he listens to all day long (paging Megadeth to office 1350, Megadeth to 1350, please). I mean, as I write this, he's mumbling something to me about Valerian root. Thank God he can't see my computer screen. So today, I'm getting a little flustered while I'm on the phone with an employee and I flub my words. Big deal; whatever. But when I finish the call, there's the temp waiting with baited breath to tell me:

"You messed up your words just now." Yeah, thanks for noticing.

"You know that the reason people do that -- the reason their minds are all foggy -- is that they have a stomach fungus." What?

"Yeah, a stomach fungus -- it's called candida." You mean yeast? Like a yeast infection? In someone's stomach? O.....kay.

"Yeah, gross, huh? You should totally eat some cream of tartar; it'll clear that right up." Thanks for the heads up, buddy. I'll get right on that one.


A Poem Which I Had Forgotten That I Really Enjoy and Found Again In the Back Of a Notebook Today:

If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
'He has forgotten me'.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side;
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.

-Postcript for Gweno, by Alun Lewis


Hey, Bette Midler's Looking Pretty Good For an Older Broad!:

Hot, Warm, Nervous Hands

Woody Guthrie is deeply underappreciated.

Remember The Mountain Bed

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs.
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled woodvines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me.

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky.
As your fingers played with grassy moss, and limber you did lie:
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots, as you lay thinking there.

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away:
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go.

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned.
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life’s reason why
The People laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die.

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown,
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees were singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim, but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head…

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams,
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands.

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears,
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here:
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.

I wanted to play this song at the wedding (the Billy Bragg/Wilco version), but Richard said that he'd only indulge my eccentric tastes if I would indulge his and allow him to play Rock You Like a Hurricane for our first dance. Thanks so much for that idea, Marge.

Leonard Cohen

Well, after many moons of posting blogs on another site, I've decided to transfer them over here to lovely Blogger, which I once utilized and then callously abandoned about three years ago. Unlike Myspace, Blogger is actually accessible here at work and -- what a sad commentary this is -- I do most of my writing at work. It's not that I don't have real work to do, it's more that when I'm sitting here in a big, mostly empty office with music playing, that's when ideas come to me. That, and it really helps diminish my stress level when I can put things aside for thirty minutes or so and just gush randomly onto a little white screen and into a mostly unknown audience.

It's a Rufus Wainwright kind of day over here, by which I mean that I've been listening to old Wainwright CDs all morning long. He makes the perfect contemplative music -- relaxing yet edgy and thought-provoking. I also love the random covers that he does; if you've never heard his cover of Careless Whisper with Ben Folds, go ye to YouTube right now and check it out. It's just awesomely funny and trippy. And right here is where I could head off on a tangent about how much I love Ben Folds now that he's no longer with Ben Folds Five, but let's just stop right here, shall we?

Anyway, one of the covers that Rufus Wainwright did was an old Leonard Cohen song, Chelsea Hotel No. 2, hence the title of the new-ish blog. It's my absolute favorite Cohen song, which is saying a lot (I think that my perverse obsession with Leonard Cohen has been well-documented elsewhere in my blogs, so I'll not go into this right now). I love Cohen's voice, but in the same way that you love Bob Dylan's voice. You accept that it's not perfect, it's often off-key, it's gravelly and not in the good Don Henley way and that's okay because - goddamn - the man wrote some of the most beautiful lyrics this world has ever seen and he can fucking mime them if he wants to because they're his. It doesn't matter how his voice sounds; to actually hear the man that wrote the words say or sing them aloud is an experience in and of itself. It's akin to listening to Eliot read The Wasteland aloud (please, please, please check this out if you've never heard it) and hearing where emphasis is placed upon certain words and phrases, where the pauses and breaths communicate deeper imagery and meaning, far removed from a world where scholars endlessly pick apart his lines and insert their own agendas and interpretations into his work.

But listening to Wainwright's voice with Cohen's lyrics...that was a revelation, too, the first time I heard it. Rufus Wainwright has the amazing ability to take lyrics that aren't his or that are his but have nothing at all to do with him (listen to The Art Teacher for an excellent example) and make you believe that he's felt all of the agony or excitement or passion himself. Now that's a great artist, a great performer. When I listen to Chelsea Hotel No. 2, I ache. I ache for lost opportunities, lost friends, lost times and possibilities and potential. But aching is not a bad thing, not always. Aching - any kind of unpleasantness, for that matter - just paints the good moments in starker contrast to the bad, forces you to appreciate them both more.

Now that I've driven on that side road for long enough, back to the highway. The main point here is that I wanted to share these lyrics because - as I've always said - there isn't enough Cohen in the world:

Chelsea Hotel No. 2

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street
Those were the reasons, that was New York
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
Probably still is for those of them left
Ah, but you got away, didn't you, babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jiving around

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me, you would make an exception
Then, clenching your fists for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself and said, well, nevermind
We are ugly, but we have the music
And then you got away, didn't you, babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jiving around

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best
I can't keep track of each fallen robin
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
That's all
I don't even think of you that often

BONUS POINTS: Whosoever of you can tell me about whom Leonard Cohen wrote this song will receive, by U.S. Mail, a shiny penny.