Peripatetic

But just a little, and maybe the last for a little while. Maybe.

I’m not sure where I first heard the phrase “There are ways and ways of looking at things.” It’s quite possible that I made it up myself, but if I did, it was at least influenced by (if not lifted from) Ordinary People, one of the best novels ever written about adolescent depression (or maybe I’m just biased because so much of it resonated with me when I had my first, worst bout of major depressive disorder (as the DSM-V calls it), at sixteen). Because that’s what Conrad ends up learning from his therapist, among other things: that you can choose, at least to some extent, how you parse a situation or a relationship. It’s my watchphrase in my better times, and sometimes even in my more difficult times, when I remember to invoke it.

Its particular relevance to all of my recent introspection about the subject of friendship—both the distressing little episode I had in St. Louis and the unrelated whirlwind of reconnecting with old friends—is that I’ve always, always tended to dwell on how bad I am at friendships, and I had been thinking that both what happened a couple of weeks ago in St. Louis and the fact that I’d lost touch with so many people who were once such a big part of my life were evidence of my inability to interact successfully with people over an extended period of time. And maybe they are, but there are ways and ways…and in this case, the fact that the people in that room in St. Louis are still my friends and not only don’t hate me for what I wrote but actually understand it, and the apparent fact that the people I’ve been reconnecting with are as happy to hear from me as I am to hear from them,* suggests that maybe I’ve been looking at this the wrong way all along. I was afraid of opening a Pandora’s box with many of these posts and the contacts that have developed as a result, and I haven’t at all, really (well, maybe a little bit of one in a corner over there, but we won’t talk about that just now, if ever…and okay, it’s not so little at all, but that’s enough about that). I’ve been in a tizzy of sorts from all of this, but not in a negative way at all. The only vaguely negative emotion I’ve felt has been apprehension, and even that’s been mitigated by something like joy, I think.

(And I have to say that even the remote prospect of possibly seeing anyone who hasn’t seen you since you were a sylphlike early-twentysomething is an excellent motivational tool when you’re trying to eat less and eat better and go to the gym as often as possible.)

There are ways and ways. It’s sort of a platitude, but hey, when you’re a clinical depressive, sometimes platitudes are essential in getting you through.

Three entries in one day = not a page read or a stitch knit since I got home…and I really need to finish the damn cat bed already so that I can start on a garment for moi, plus I’m reading, a year after every other lefty on the planet, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, about which more later, and would really like to plow ahead and finish it. I usually read nonfiction at a fraction of the speed with which I read fiction—I read fiction pretty damn fast, although not nearly as fast as I used to—but I’ve been finding this book a very quick read, except that between friggin’ new TV shows and too much e-mailing/blogging, I haven’t read more than a chapter since Sunday. And oh look, it’s time for “CSI” now.

*Got a quick note from my beloved friend Peter, who has been a close friend for just shy of 20 years but with whom I had slipped out of touch with for just a little too long, today and he was as glad to hear from me as I was to have finally written to him over the weekend. When someone ’s been dear and true and loyal and supportive to you for as long as Peter has to me, it should pretty much be illegal to let them fall out of your life entirely, even if you live in different places and both have busy lives.

I think I’m completely in love with this:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1541732.html

I particularly like the idea that it’s going to be there for 20 years. But only 20 years, and no more. (That’s assuming it lasts that long. If nothing else, if it really is knitted, it’s going to be unrecognizably filthy within a year.)

Wow, two short, snappy posts in the same day, and no navel-gazing. Perhaps I will eventually get the hang of this blogging thing after all.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Darby Conley’s “Get Fuzzy,” my favorite current comic strip, has been running a series of strips on cat facts this week, including some very funny ones, and a few that I, despite being a noted cat weirdo, did not know. My favorite, I think, is this:

“An average 15-year-old cat has slept 10 years.”

I know, of course, that cats sleep, and need to sleep, an average of 16 to 18 hours per day. I’d just never seen it framed in those terms, and when it’s put that way, it just reaffirms why cats are cool. After all, most days I wish I could sleep for about 10 years…

I hate quoting that ravingly antisemitic old misogynist bastard, but he is extremely quotable, and after hearing Michael Brown try to turn the handling of Hurricane Katrina into a partisan issue, this one fits:

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

As cited on Salon:

“I don’t want to make this partisan,” Brown said, delivering the day’s most disingenuous line. “I can’t help it if Alabama and Mississippi are governed by Republican governors, and Louisiana is governed by a Democratic governor.”—Michael Brown

Every day, I wonder just a little more why decent people aren’t rising up and rioting in the streets. Then I remember that it’s because we’re too busy wondering who’s going to be voted off “America’s Next Top Model” next. (And I include myself in that bit of damnation.) But honestly, will the Bushies truly stop at nothing?

That’s a rhetorical question, of course. They’ve already amply demonstrated that they won’t.

It occurs to me that in my lengthy post about my particular attachment to Dolly Varden, I didn’t say a whole hell of a lot about what they sound like. That’s partly because their sound is a little bit hard to describe; for a while, they tended to get lumped in with alt-country/Americana, but that’s not really accurate. I really need to come up with a genre term that describes the style of bands like Dolly Varden and Dolorean—not that the two sound alike at all, just that they’re equally hard to describe. In the case of Dolly Varden, there’s a little twang, lots of melody, and the highly distinctive guitar work of Mark Balletto (who has a fine spinoff band of his own, My Record Player), which is capable of being both shimmery and unexpectedly crunchy, though not usually in the same song. Mostly, there are two words that come to mind when I try to describe the Vardens: “joyous” and “beautiful.” Even when the lyrics are downbeat, which they often are, there’s a sheer joy to the sound of the songs that just lifts the heart up and brings a little ache to the throat. Geez, I wish I had a better vocabulary for this kind of thing, rather than standard rock-crit cliches, but…there’s a lyric in the (happy, upbeat, joyous) song “I Come to You,” from “The Dumbest Magnets,” that goes: “And when my chest is open wide/You could pull yourself inside.” When you listen to it, you feel exactly what Steve is singing: your heart feels so big and full that it could just burst from your body. (Okay, now I’m starting to sound like the plot of “Alien.” Maybe I should quit while I’m behind.)

And beautiful: the melodies, the vocals, the arrangements. Beautiful and sometimes delicate, but in no way wispy or ethereal or frail. Just sheer gorgeousness and gorgeosity, to quote that little droogy Alex. Steve and Diane’s first band, Stump the Host, was kind of a punk band, I guess, but Steve says that it didn’t work so well for him and Diane to sing in that style because they’re both “pretty” singers. And it’s true, they are—both of them. Diane’s voice is full of color and timbre, capable of moving from light and sweet to dark and slightly husky in the same song; Steve’s is soulful and strong, but still, well, pretty.

Argh, enough trying to wrestle an adequate description to the ground. Just go listen to them: there are a number of MP3s on this page of their site.

Moving on: today’s NP list:

1. Michael Berube’s blog, because it’s been a while since I mentioned it, but also because the most recent entry (dated September 23) is exceptionally powerful. There are so many great political blogs out there (along with the crappy ones) that it’s hard to definitively say that any one of them is the best, but I will say that Michael’s is my favorite, bar none. (NB: I get to call him Michael because he was at Columbia when I was at Barnard—he was a year behind me—and though I don’t actually know him, we have mutual friends. In case anyone was wondering.)

2. The Brakes, “Give Blood.”* My online friend Ged has been pimping this UK band for months. I respect his taste, so I listened to some samples online. Liked ‘em pretty well, but wasn’t sure I was going to buy the album. But then it was released in the US, and half of the rest of Postcard starting raving about it too, so I caved in to peer pressure and bought it. And I’m very glad I did. It’s a weird little (and I do mean little: it’s less than half an hour long, which I guess is kind of a raw deal when you’re paying full CD price, but is nonetheless fine with me because I think almost every CD that comes out nowadays, including ones that I adore, is just too damn long) record, full of humor and quirks, but they’re not a novelty band by any means. Mostly, what they are is entertaining, in the best sense. Vastly entertaining, and definitely innovative. But perhaps not as innovative as…

3. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods.” I probably wouldn’t even know about this guy if he weren’t on the Delgados’ label, Chemikal Underground, because I wasn’t familiar with the band he was (is?) in, Arab Strap. Fortunately, though, I’ll listen to anything the Delgados tell me to listen to (though I draw the line at Mother and the Addicts), so I checked out Malcolm’s latest. I ended up buying his first record, the brilliantly titled “5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine” (how could you not love a record with a title like that?), and falling in love with it first, because “Into the Woods” was only available on import. When it was released here, though, I bought it right away, and it’s just genius. Maybe it would seem more ordinary if he didn’t have a heavy Scottish (Glaswegian, I think) accent, but I think the accent is only a small part of the whole picture. He takes deeply depressive but also sometimes hysterically funny lyrics and sets them against melodies that are alternately dreamy and just sort of jangly and upbeat, and his voice, which is gruff and talky and not at all sweet, is what ties it all together. Amazing stuff. Sample lyric: “You’re gonnae break my heart and I know it/And if you don’t/You’re gonna break my string of bad luck/And ruin my career.”

4. The first, self-titled David Johansen record, recently discussed here. Hearing a once-beloved record that you haven’t heard in eons is kind of like the reconnection with old friends that I’ve been dwelling on so much here lately: you wonder if memory has put too much of a shiny gloss on reality, and you question whether you’ll still have anything in common. In this case, there was no reason to worry. This is still a great album that doesn’t sound even remotely dated, and I was happy to find that not only do the killer songs that I remember vividly (”Donna,” “Cool Metro,” “Frenchette”) still sound as great as ever, some of the ones I had forgotten (”Pain in My Heart,” “I’m a Lover”) do too. And it’s another blessedly short record, even with the addition of a (totally inessential) bonus track. Of course, it’s probable that I can’t be objective about this record, because of the powerful time-and-place associations with it. But insofar as I can be, I feel comfortable recommending the record.

5. And sticking to following up on that same post, I’ve been treating myself to an episode every few nights of “Butterflies,” and I’m delighted to find that I still love it. It’s odd how much I remembered about it (and some little details that I’d forgotten, or misremembered: for my own satisfaction, I need to correct myself to note that Ria meets Leonard in a restaurant, not in the park—and it’s a very funny scene). I can’t unequivocally recommend it to everyone, I guess, for various reasons: the production values are pretty much nonexistent (I guess the Beeb didn’t have much of a budget for sitcoms in 1978), and it seems kind of stagy at times; you can sort of feel the writing behind the lines as they’re spoken. But they’re often very, very funny lines—I’ve been laughing at the show much more than I expected—as well as incisive and sometimes wistful and heart-tugging. And the acting is marvelous, even if the clothes and hairstyles are comically dated. I haven’t gotten to the more wistful stuff yet; in fact, I don’t think that cropped up much in the first season, which is the only one that’s available so far. But I do still get a little teary when I hear the theme song (a somewhat de-schmaltzed rendition of Dolly Parton’s extra-schmaltzy song “Love is Like a Butterfly”).

Um, I guess I haven’t really gotten the hang of this NP thing yet—these were supposed to be short, simple posts so that I could do them regularly without using up a whole lunch hour. More practice is required, I guess.

*(Lately, I’ve been putting album titles in quotation marks, which makes me a little uneasy, because I’m a Chicago Manual type of girl and at heart I believe that titles should be in italics. But quotes are so much easier to type…So if I decide to go back to italics, I apologize in advance to anyone who is driven crazy by such stylistic inconsistencies. Which pretty much means that I’m apologizing to myself.)

The Yankees have been infuriating to root for this year, so I wasn’t following their ups and downs all that closely. In fact, I wasn’t following baseball all that closely, because the three AL teams I root for (in order: Yanks, Twins, Royals, due to birthright and geography) weren’t doing so hot, and the one NL team I root for (that would be the Cardinals) were so far ahead so early on that I didn’t even need to worry about them. The Yankees were frustrating, the Twins possibly even more so, and whereas last year’s record-settingly awful Royals season was somehow watchable, this year’s potentially even worse one has been beyond laughable; as far as I’m concerned, they’re not even a real baseball team.

But it’s September now, and true to form, the Yankees have pulled their thumbs out and started to play like they’d actually like to win. So I’m glued to the division race, of course. And Boston are thrashing the Orioles today (9-2, top of the sixth, right this minute according to ESPN’s online scoreboard), so I was miserable when Toronto took the lead, delighted when the Yanks took it back, terrified when things got tight again in the top of the eighth, and massively relieved when Mariano got out of trouble in that same inning. Right now it’s bottom of the eighth, two on, nobody out, edge of seat. Sheffield batting, 2-0. I hardly dare to hope for a win, so I won’t even say it’s looking good, although it is, especially with Mariano (can I just say “God bless Mariano Rivera”? Thank you) coming back in the…OOH, three-run homer, Gary Sheffield. So much for whether he should have come back this soon or not.

I love this time of year.

On the various music lists that I’m on/have been on in the past, people often include an “n.p.” at the bottom of their posts. It stands for “now playing,” and it’s followed by whatever they’re listening to at that moment. (There’s also “npimh,” which I like better: it means “now playing in my head,” and it’s used when a post’s content somehow calls to mind a song or song title.) I like looking at people’s n.p.’s; I’ve actually found out about new bands I’ve come to like just by asking about a record in someone’s n.p. line. N.p. lines are disappearing rapidly from one of the lists because a lot of the people there are using Last.fm/Audioscrobbler, so they just post lists of their top 10 scrobbles of the week, which is fine, except I liked it better when people posted actual content and then stuck an n.p. line at the bottom, rather than just posting a list of ten band names. But such is the march of technology, I suppose.

And I notice that various IM services have picked up on the n.p. idea now—I was a little alarmed the other day when I signed into MSN’s Messenger (which we use at work) to send a quick note to a co-worker who was talking to the client, and a little line appeared at the top of the message window showing the title of the song I was listening to. Oooh, creepy.

But I’ve decided that here on the blog, henceforth “n.p.” will stand for “now pimping.” I guess the more family-friendly version would be “now plugging,” but thanks to Postcard, I’ve gotten in the habit of calling the act of proselytizing for a band “pimping,” so I’ll stick with that.

Or maybe it should stand for “now proselytizing,” for that matter. I have a draft of a blog entry that I started months ago somewhere that’s actually called Proselytizing, and it’s about how like a lot of avid music listeners, I secretly think that my taste is the best and everyone should share it, but while there are certain bands that I actively proselytize for because I think that just about everyone I know—not to mention everyone on the planet—should know and love, there are some that I’m not as active in pimping because I know they’re not for everyone. In most cases, I fully understand why people don’t “get” those bands. They’re wrong, of course, but I forgive them. Dolorean were the example I was thinking of when I started the post, because although I think Al James can pretty much do no wrong, I understand that the band’s dreamy, slow, elegiac sound won’t appeal to everyone. So although I try to talk about them a lot, I don’t push too hard, because I know some people just plain old won’t like them. And I can live with that.

On the other hand, there are bands like the Delgados and the Libertines who deserve universal love. I won’t say this on an e-mail list, of course, where I am doing my best to remain polite and diplomatic because I got so sick of feuding with people (people who, for the purposes of my universe, were not actually people but merely faceless collections of zeroes and ones on the other side of a connection node, which makes it even sillier to get het up about disagreements with them), but in some small, impolite part of my brain, I believe fundamentally that if you are a fan of whatever you want to call the current post-indie-heyday rock genre and you don’t like the Delgados or the Libertines, you’re just wrong, and your head is implanted in some bodily orifice from which you really need to extract it. Okay, that’s only a small part of my otherwise well-behaved little brain that says that, but it does, in fact, say it.

And in that spirit, I want to start regular pimping of music, books, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment (I’d include movies, but considering how far behind the curve I am these days with movies—hell, I just saw “Vera Drake,” a highly acclaimed movie by my favorite filmmaker, last night—I think any movie recommendations I might make would be irrelevant, unless I’m pimping old classics, I guess) that I think everyone should be paying attention to. I’m going to try to pimp roughly five items per week; might end up with more than that, but given my, er, spotty history of keeping the blog updated, five seems like a good number to aim for at the start.

Except that today’s list is only going to include one item, I think, because (gee, how surprising) this one requires a little more than just a couple of lines of “why I think this band/record/book/blog/TV show is good.” Here goes:

1. Steve Dawson, “Sweet Is the Anchor.” Steve is the co-lead singer, along with his wife, Diane Christiansen, of the recently dormant but not dead Chicago band Dolly Varden, and this is a side project of his. It’s being billed as a solo album, though he recorded it and has been playing it live with a band, featuring vibes, pedal steel, and some cool percussion (not to mention Diane doing backing vocals). It’s quite different from the slightly alt-country-tinged indie rock (or whatever we’re calling it) of Dolly Varden; Steve’s a big soul fan, and there are hints of soul and gospel all through the record, but it’s not exactly a soul record. It’s hard to describe, so just listen to some MP3s here, and if “Love Is a Blessing” is a little too slow and long for you, don’t be put off; it’s a great song, but it is a little more lugubrious than others on the record. The instrumentation is part of what makes the record cool, but Steve’s songwriting and his gorgeous voice (and Diane’s too) are what really make it stand out. It was the only thing in my CD player for a good long while recently. Go see Steve and band live too, if you get a chance, because the record really comes to life when they play it live—though unless you live in Chicago, you probably won’t get a chance to see them.

In the interests of full disclosure, and because I’ve mentioned Dolly Varden at least once on the blog but haven’t really talked about them at length, I’ll take a little detour here to pimp them, even though they won’t have a new record out until next year at the soonest. I had never even heard of them until I was asked to interview them, back when I was living in Chicago and still writing for the MoMzine. Corrie from Miles of Music sent me their then-new record “The Dumbest Magnets,” and my friend Roy was also pimping it at the time, so I expected to like it, and I did, pretty okay. And then I listened to it some more, and then a few times more, and with each listen I found myself falling in love with it a little more. It’s that kind of record: you don’t just want to listen to it, you want to date it—gaze deeply into its eyes and take it with you everywhere you go.

I interviewed Steve in person and Diane by phone, and really took to them as people, too; they’re extremely gifted (Diane is an artist as well as a musician, and one of these days, I’m going to buy a painting of hers), but also totally down to earth and normal— that is, normal in my definition, which is “having a lot of common ground with me.” The article was one of the best I did for the MoMzine (though I can’t prove that, unfortunately, since the old archives aren’t online anymore). I’d always chat with Steve when I ran into him at shows during my remaining months in Chicago, and we stayed in loose touch after I left. They put out another record, “Forgiven Now,” which objectively speaking is pretty much every bit as good as “The Dumbest Magnets,” except that I’m not capable of objectivity about the latter.

Steve and Diane also put out a pretty stellar duets record (no longer available, alas, but you can go buy the entire Dolly Varden catalog at their site), and then I pimped Steve and Diane for a duet show at Twangfest 7, where they were rapturously received by at least five of us. (Twangfest Wednesday night shows are usually as much about everyone seeing each other again for the first time in a while and catching up and chatting as they are about the music, which is fine, but that night I wanted to physically assault anyone who talked during Steve and Diane’s set.) Bill and I were planning our wedding at that time, and we agreed that Steve and Diane would make a wonderful wedding band for us, so I took a deep breath after the show and asked Steve, who said they’d be honored and to send him the details.

So Steve and Diane sang at our wedding, with their then-preteen daughter in tow. She hung out with Bill’s niece, who’s just a year younger, and they hit it off, and our families, including my dad, absolutely loved the performance—my oldest brother ended up buying one of their CDs. It couldn’t have been better. The did both appropriate covers (”Together Again,” “If I Needed You,” that kind of thing) as well as their own material, including the title song from “The Dumbest Magnets.” It’s a song that Steve wrote about his wedding to Diane, and objectively, it was probably a little weird for me to request that they sing it at my wedding—it’s their wedding song, not ours, after all. But it kills me, it’s such a perfect (and I mean that word in the most literal sense) song, lyrically and musically, and I couldn’t not have them sing it. Bill and I were married on a glorious October day in one of the pavilions in Tower Grove Park in St. Louis, and the reception was at the Eliot Room at the Schlafly Brewery in St. Louis. Schlafly is where Bill’s favorite beer is made, and where Twangfest’s Wednesday night shows are held, so it was sort of a natural (if amusingly so) place to have our reception. But it’s also a beautifully restored old building with lots and lots of big, wide windows, and there’s a line in “The Dumbest Magnets” that goes “Room all lit from the outside/Indian summer,” and just at the moment that Steve and Diane sang that line, the late afternoon sun was still streaming in, and…well, okay, enough mushiness, but it was a moment of pure, soaring joy, and maybe that captures a little of how special that song, that record, and that band are to me. So I’d probably pimp Steve’s new record even if I didn’t think it was superb…but fortunately, it is. And that’s what I’m pimping today.

Next: a simple five-item pimp list, just to prove that I can too write a post that’s less than novel length.

I am completely weirded out—in an entirely happy way—by hearing from people from my past as a result of my Speedies/Student Teachers post a few days ago. Like most people, I imagine, I’ve used the Web to look for old familiar names for years now, at least since Yahoo’s people search feature launched (which was probably ten years ago or so). And I’ve turned up plenty of them—some quite easily, especially the ones with unusual names.

Last year, I even, finally, after years of trying, found Marina, the long-lost best friend I mentioned a few posts back. (She had an unusual surname, so it was odd that I couldn’t find her…though as a librarian type, I know that Yahoo and Google are far from omniscient, and as it turned out, she’d gotten married to someone with a much more common name.) I was fascinated and kind of strangely excited to find any details at all about her, sketchy as they were, and to find that she’d ended up kind of exactly as I’d predicted: living in upstate New York, where her family (used to?) own a summer place, and married to the guy she was dating when she and I had our falling out (and their dating and our falling out were not unrelated; the guy was a year behind us in high school and was best friends with a close friend of mine, and in a way, I was crazy about him, but he had this odd hold on Marina—actually, on me too; I took his advice and opinion way more seriously than I should have—and I’d be lying if I said I don’t blame him a little for the death of my friendship with Marina).

I e-mailed her and didn’t hear back, but it was through one of those awful Reunion.com places, and for all I know, my message wound up in her spam folder; that’s where my mail from those places generally turns up, even if I’ve signed up for them. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t want to hear from me, which I completely understand even if it makes me feel kind of like I just swallowed a knife. Maybe—okay, almost certainly—I’ve romanticized our friendship, though the truth is that I remember the occasional bad parts too. I’ve had more steadfast and loyal and trustworthy friends since then, if I look at it objectively. And though I realize that my behavior was the main cause of our friendship falling apart, she hurt me pretty badly and let me down at a time when I really needed her, so it’s not like I take all the blame. (All of this is getting kind of oblique without the full backstory, isn’t it, and I don’t have the stomach to tell the whole story just now…but the fact that it still causes me a little twinge of occasional pain more than 20 years after it happened should give a sense of how much she mattered to me.) But I’d still give almost anything to hear from her.

Generally, I’ve been happy to follow those people from my past from a distance, through Google, on days when things were quiet at work or when something suddenly reminded me of them. Sure, I could e-mail them; I’ve certainly thought about it, and I have no doubt that it would be nice to be in touch occasionally, the way I am with some of my friends from my Austin days. But mostly, I’m content to have them be a (warmly remembered) part of my past. People change, lives move on, and who knows how much we’d even have to say to each other again. Besides, I’ve become a hopeless slacker about personal e-mail, and once I start e-mailing back and forth with someone, it often becomes just one more opportunity to be a less than adequate friend. It’s good to see how successful some of them have been, and just knowing they’re out there and doing fine is pretty much all I need to know, I guess. Not that I’d be sorry if I suddenly heard from any of them; on the contrary, I’d be delighted, as I have been with the responses to the Speedies/Student Teachers post. When I think about how few people I wouldn’t want to hear from (long-ago ex-boyfriends, mainly), and how many I’d love to hear from, I feel pretty lucky, in fact.

And in a mostly unrelated episode, I stumbled across first an article by and then the blog of another friend from college days, another one with whom I’d had a falling out. That’s a really dumb story, and one which I doubt I’ll ever tell. The falling out was probably both of our faults, who knows, but I held on to the feeling that I was entirely justified in no longer being friends with him for a pretty long time and, if I’m remembering right, rebuffed an indirect attempt by him to get back in touch some years later. I’m only capable of holding a maximum of one grudge at a time, though (and right now I’m not holding any, which is a good position to be in), and the one against him fell out of the queue a really long time ago. Besides, the article was excellent and the blog was a very good read, so on impulse, I put in a little teaser of a comment and lured him into e-mailing me. Spent a good little while yesterday e-mailing back and forth, pleasantly and interestingly, and I hope we’ll stay in touch at least sporadically.

One of my Texas friends once said to me, when visiting me in Mpls., that I shouldn’t feel bad that we only saw/spoke to each other every so often, but rather that, given the physical distance and other practical matters that separated us, I should be glad that we were able to keep any kind of contact going. That’s a healthy way to look at it, I think, and as much as I can be content knowing that people from my past are out there doing well, I think I’d like it even better if I could hear from them just every now and then—even every few years would be okay.

In that spirit, today I e-mailed one of my closest friends from college days, who happens to have quite an unusual last name and is easy to find on the Web because he’s published impressive academic books ‘n’ stuff. I’ve followed his progress with admiration and some amusement (far as I can tell, he’s been working on his doctorate for about 15 years, which means he at least hasn’t changed entirely since we were younger). I think I last saw him not long after my first wedding, in 1990, and I’m not exactly sure when we lost touch, or how or why. I guess I stopped calling him when Eric (my first husband) and I were in NYC for visits because Eric, though a lovely and interesting and intelligent person, is very different from…from most other people on the planet, basically, and it can be hard to integrate him with others. And then I stopped calling when I was home for visits by myself, because I got into this phase where I just wanted to stay close to home and hang out with my parents whenever I went home. (I’m not sorry about that, either, because it meant extra time with my mom, and though I didn’t fully realize it then, every second I had with her was precious.)

I’m also not sure why I didn’t start e-mailing him when people’s e-mail addresses became easier to find, because of all the people from that era, he and my friend Martha (with whom I’ve been in touch far more recently, though not for a few years now) were the ones who knew me best and with whom I spent the most time. I’ve been thinking about this for the past day or so, and I think it has something to do with—this is hard to articulate—the fact that my life has turned out, at least from a surface view, very differently from how I or anyone who knew me back then would have expected. But I don’t know why that would keep me from contacting Andy, exactly; I’m still trying to work that out. I’ve been in touch with people who are just as conspicuously and impressively successful—my beloved friend and former roommate Bill Maxwell, for example, who’s had a fairly stellar academic career—and I didn’t feel self-conscious about letting those people see how I’ve turned out. So I don’t know if that’s quite what’s kept me from getting in touch with Andy.
I don’t know if it isn’t, either; I’m just unsure about the whole thing, though I’m not sorry I e-mailed him (at least not yet! Let’s hope I won’t have cause to be).

Do I feel like I have something to apologize for, maybe? I dunno. I don’t have any regrets about the choices I’ve made (regrets about some individual actions, yeah, but not about the way my life has gone in general, and I’m certainly not embarrassed about any of it; in many ways, I think my life has been much more interesting than it might have been had I followed the expected path, i.e. staying in NYC, going to law school or something equally conventional, maybe marrying a yuppie Jewish guy or whatever (although that last one is highly unlikely; I’ve never even dated a Jewish guy, really—had a fling with one, but that’s it), and generally living the same sort of life as the million other curly-haired Jewish girls from the Upper West Side who are exactly like me. I’m sometimes (actually, very rarely) struck by the fact that I didn’t follow that path, but I’ve truly never been sorry about it. Life’s a funny old thing that takes twists and turns that you can’t predict or expect, and sometimes the results are incredibly cool.

(And yeah, okay, sometimes the results leave you sitting alone in a crappy apartment in Chicago with a job you despise, hundreds of miles from your new boyfriend, the husband you’ve just left, your adored family, and anything else that makes any kind of sense to you. But that’s a story for another day…and it’s also been the exception in my adventures rather than the rule—the only peripatetic episode that really didn’t work.)

Anyway, I’m exhilarated and a little wacked out by this flurry of contacts that I’ve initiated, and I think I’m going to need to take a step back from it after the weekend and just go back to being my boring old self and posting about all the new records I’ve bought lately. But right now, I’m still in conjuring mode. This evening, when I got home from work (and before I took my ritual Friday evening nap), I started Googling one of the few ex-boyfriends that I’d actually like to hear from again. (Generally, my romantic past prior to my first marriage is nothing to write home, or write blog, about, let’s leave it at that.) I was going to go into a long digression (”digression” might be too mild a term, since I could write a whole novel about the guy— he was fascinating, albeit in not entirely positive ways) about him, but then I remembered that I’ve already written about him in the past. I’ve actually been trying, sporadically and half-heartedly, to find him since before the days of the Web; I used to look him up in the NYC phone book every time I went home, but he too has a fairly common name, and it seemed entirely possible to me anyway that he might not even have enough income at the time to have a phone or an apartment in his own name. But tonight, for whatever reason, I had the patience to browse through endless Google results pages, without any real hope of succcess…and bloody hell, I tracked him down. (Sometimes, apparently, having the kind of mind that can’t remember that I’m supposed to be at a meeting five minutes after my online calendar has reminded me of it but can remember things like where ex-boyfriends from the 1980s went to junior high turns out to be useful after all.) I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this newfound information; I’ve always told myself that more than wanting to resume contact with him, I just wanted to know what had become of him, since he was someone who could have easily ended up, well, y’know, dead at a young age, but then again, there was always the chance that he’d grow up, as most of us seem to have, and actually make something of himself. I’m comforted that the truth turns out to be the latter, and maybe I should leave it at that.

Because really, what reason would I have for contacting him? It’s not like there’s a romantic interest; I am very thoroughly married and, honestly, don’t even look at other men (except having crushes on cute actors or musicians, but that doesn’t count, obviously). My attention may have wandered during my first marriage, but that was highly atypical behavior for me and was of course symptomatic of profound problems in the marriage, and enough about that. At every other time in my life, I’ve been almost quaint in my monogamousness (that is too a word, because I say so), and right now is no exception. And the estranged friend mentioned above, the one with whom I exchanged a slew of e-mails yesterday, who happens to also be the person who introduced Kevin and me, just told me something about their last encounter that took quite a bit of the shine off of my already not-so-shiny memories, and it made me slightly less enthusiastic about trying to find him.

Maybe not as much less enthusiastic as I should be, though, because I’m still thinking about contacting him. I think maybe it’s that I hate loose ends and things that were left unresolved (I had a best friend in junior high whom I dumped, basically, in graceless and even rather cruel fashion, when we were about 15, and about once or twice a decade, I think about trying to make amends/peace with her too; these aren’t things I think about very often, but guilt comes naturally to me, and sometimes it comes along and bites me when I least expect it). But it’s equally possible that that’s not it, that it’s more like a bad tooth that you can’t resist poking at with your tongue (I assume I’m not the only person who does that)— you know it could cause even more trouble, but the temptation is still there. That’s why I’m not going to do anything about it for a few days, because I need to think more about whether playing with the past is always such a good idea. And of course, I need to get back to the present, whether or not I continue to travel down this bewilderingly enjoyable detour into my past.

Next entry will be music-related and/or firmly based in 2005, I swear.

I’m getting a big kick out of the comments on my Speedies/Student Teachers post from a few days ago, and I expect my blogging will be kind of focused on that for a while, plus I have to admit that I’m having trouble concentrating on much of anything this evening with the news from the Gulf states turning terrifying again (I have friends and acquaintances down that way, and I’m worried as hell about them). But nonetheless—and tying in to the universe’s apparent ongoing effort to keep me somewhere between 1978 and 1981—I need to write just briefly about the Sandy Denny boxed set that arrived in the mail yesterday.

It’s my second Sandy box (this one is “Boxful of Treasures,” which repeats a fair amount of what’s on the box I already owned, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” but also includes a lot of demos and home recordings and alternate takes, and I’m a sucker for that kind of thing), which is maybe a little self-indulgent, but I got it for a “good” price (brand new, still shrink-wrapped, not a promo, for $70 instead of the $100+ that most retailers wanted for it), and I was feeling sorry for myself last week, so I ordered it. It arrived yesterday, and I posted about it on one of the music e-mail lists that I’m on, but that wasn’t really the appropriate venue for it—not too many fans over there, or probably even people who know who she was. So I’m going to do something I don’t normally do: crib part of the post from that list and repost it here, with some edits and rewrites.

I guess if I’d made a concerted effort to compare the track listing side by side with that of the other Sandy
box, I’d have realized that there was a lot of overlap between the two, and maybe I wouldn’t have bought it. But then again, as soon as I started reading the liner notes, I thought, “Fuck that.” Richard
Thompson’s introduction alone was worth the money.

I’ve posted about Sandy here on the blog in the past, but this year, I finally came to the conclusion, after years of wavering about whether I could make such a strong statement, that she was simply the greatest singer I’ve ever heard. (That’s opinion–I’m not attempting to state it as fact, so I hope no one will
attack me for it.) Her songwriting was always interesting and occasionally brilliant, and of course, she was an essential part of the revival/modernization of British Isles traditional music. Her death, at the age of just 31, was close to inevitable, and was the result of damage she’d knowingly done to herself, but it was
nonetheless tragic, especially when you consider how much more she might have contributed. Several quotes in the liner notes from those who knew her express surprise and even bitterness that she hasn’t
received the same sort of cult adulation that Nick Drake received, and though I think it’s a little strange to be bitter about something like that, I also see the point (though I’m also a member of the cult of Nick, certainly; that’s a post for another day too). She was extraordinary (as a singer, but also apparently as a human being, according to those who knew her), and irreplaceable.

And mostly, for me at least, it was that voice: breathy (I’ve always said that she sang kind of the way Bette Davis talked), but in no way wispy or ethereal; on the contrary, she was a magnificently powerful singer with extraordinary command and control of her voice, a wonderful sense of dynamics and phrasing, and just the most beautiful, awe-inspiring tone and timbre I’ve ever heard. I can sing some (not so well as I used to, since I’m an old broad and haven’t sung as regularly as I’ve gotten older as I used to), and from the very first time I heard Sandy sing, I tried to model my voice after hers. Doing so improved my phrasing and some other aspects of my singing…but I could never actually sound like Sandy; no one ever did or could. (Wanna see me get really, really mad? Find one of the several reviews from the late 1980s of one of Syd Straw’s records that compared her voice to Sandy’s. Yeah.) There are a lot of female singers in the trad-folk/Brit/Celtic tradition that I admire and adore, from Niamh Parsons’s wonderful dusky contralto to Karan Casey’s miraculous, airy, tripping soprano to Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh’s (hey, first time I’ve ever spelled that right without having to look it up first!) canonically gorgeous and sweet high soprano to Kate Rusby’s modernized version of a great traditional British voice, and more. But when you get right down to it, none of them can touch Sandy: she was the greatest, period.

I started crying as soon as I opened the box and looked at the photo on the booklet cover: an older Sandy (as old as she got, anyway), looking dissipated and world-weary and a little bit lost. Not the photo I’d
have chosen, probably, but an honest one, at least. I’ve always half-wondered (and I’m not the only one) how different her career and life might have been if she had been beautiful and sexy instead of
sweet-faced and dumpy…though that’s speculation for another day.

The first thing I listened to from the box was “The Pond and the Stream,” one of my favorite songs that Sandy wrote. She wrote it about the far more obscure singer Anne Briggs, who was a huge influence on Sandy and other Brit-trad female singers of the time, like Maddy Prior and Linda Thompson. (I didn’t
know about Briggs until this year, I’m embarrassed to say, and I’ve been meaning to have a word with my Lancastrian/Mancunian friend Ged about how he could allow this ignorance of mine to exist. But I’ve made up for it since then.)

When Sandy died in horrible, stupidly unnecessary circumstances in 1978, I was, coincidentally, experiencing my first (and still worst) major depression, and her death hit me especially hard, almost like the death of a friend. I still have the journal entry I wrote about it at the time, though I won’t post it here—there are some limits to how confessional even I’m willing to get. But now that I’m watching “Butterflies” again (and the first season of “The Muppet Show”! Another blast from my past), and since, as noted, the universe seems to want me to revisit my late teen years, I find myself mourning her again. Then again, in some sense, I never really stopped. Every time I hear her sing—that voice, my God, that voice—I mourn her all over again.

Yeah, so much for pride in my work. Just got feedback from the client, who a) doesn’t seem to have read a word of my notes explaining the reasoning behind my decisions, and b) seems to have had a completely different understanding from mine of what we were going to provide. I guess this is the other side of being new in my field: on the one hand, I’m new enough to still be really excited about what I do, but on the other hand, I’m new enough that I lack the confidence to say, “No, I’m right, and you’re wrong, and here’s why.” And complicating that, of course, is the fact that we’re an agency and they’re the client, and ultimately, they’re right even when they’re not.

Sure feels like a Monday all of a sudden. Blech.