In honor and preparation of the upcoming Wilco show in VT. Inspired by all things Top 10, including our 2010 Christmas card.
If I do nothing else right as a mother, taking my kids to 2 Wilco shows in one week should carry them to unknown places full of heart anyway. And the week after that? GOGOL BORDELLO BABY!!! I’m hoping Eugene’s pants are a bit looser than the last time we saw them.
1. Misunderstood (how long can Jeff hold an unresolved chord?) Here’s a recent live version, the opening number from a concert down in Alabammy this May
Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong with me
My mind is filled with silvery stuff
Honey, kisses, clouds of fluff
Shoulders shrugging off
Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong wit h me
My mind is filled with radio cures
Electronic surgical words
Picking apples for kings and queens of things I have never seen
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong with me
My mind is filled with silvery stars
Honey, kisses, clouds of love
Picking apples for the kings and queens of things I’ve never seen
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Oh, distance the way of making love understandable
Oh, distance the way of making love understandable
If you are new here, if you searched for twinklysparkles on google to get here, for instance, you may surprised to discover that I have a tendency to chew on the negative, to get the blues, to sit with my own dry crusty thoughts*
*from the poem What Have I Learned? by Gary Snyder, from the book Axe Handles
I’ve been a bit funky lately and not in a good James Brown sort of way. This condition has put a damper on my creative juices (or is it the other way around, chicken-and-egg like?). This is entirely the reason that I invented Thankful Thursday (yes, I invented it; I was the first, I swear).
I love many things today
I love yoga, the 2 studios I frequent, the teachers whose classes I attend. I love the yoga class I was in on Tuesday night wherein my teacher taught to the body of spring, to our spring bodies, to the shift in the air and light. I love how deep yoga goes, how it inspires me, the coiled snake, the mud, the ooze, the tones of my being, the heat, the invertebrate that resonates in my soft tissue, below the bones. I love the 7 chakras and that each has a sound, a color, and a desire or higher manifestation. I love the double helix and the spirals of my muscles which wrap around my bones.
I love that to be a student of yoga is to be in a state of unknowing, same as to be a student of the Alexander Technique. That in the West, thinking one needs to be positive alone to attain enlightenment is a misunderstanding of complexity. I am not enlightened; I am only on a path and that path has no destination.
I love acupuncture and the lessons my practitioner shares with me. That the Chinese system of looking at the body is more complete and encompassing than a Western approach, that it is both subtle and complex, that I will never understand it, that I know only the tiniest bit about it, but what I know I understand and want more of. I love that the Chinese understanding of the body includes how we relate to the world seasonally, that there is an explanation for how our bodies chime with the brightness of spring and that sometimes this can manifest in restlessness and anger. I love that there are foods and activities that nurture our bodies and that these change seasonally. I love that every part of the self is interdependent. I love the 5 elements though I have little understanding of them.
I love that my Alexander teacher, Missy Vineyard, sent me a link about this.
I love that I wrote my original Thankful Thursday post almost a year ago today. I had no idea when I went to search for it just now. I love symmetry and anniversaries and time as much as I hate them; therefore, I love asymmetry and random occurrences and timelessness.
I love so much that sometimes I am taken down by it. I cry with the spring, I wait for the rain, I walk the earth alone; I let my thoughts whisper and hope they take flight in the moonless, cloudless night. I bear witness to the air, the red planet twinkling, the new prey being eaten in the dark, all that goes past us and beyond our time here.
I am sure it had been 7 or 8 years since I last made miso soup. My miso soup tonight wasn’t very good. Then again, it wasn’t very bad. I have forgotten how to make a more flavorful miso soup. I used to make miso soup more frequently when we lived in Ohio, before kids especially. It was never restaurant-quality or as good as a real Japanese cook (you can take that to mean a person from Japan OR a person trained in Japanese cooking) would make, but it was good enough.
The best miso soup I ever had was from a crazy Japanese-Chinese restaurant in Cuyahoga Falls (Ohio). It’s not always a good sign, a combo Japanese-Chinese restaurant. ESPECIALLY if you are in Paris (France), c’est vrai!
Anyway, I used to love the miso soup at that restaurant (which had very dirty walls with built-up dust and grease, by the way), but I found out I loved it because it was pork-based and then I didn’t trust it so much.
Today, I am grateful for miso soup. Tonight, I made my miso soup with dandelion greens, garlic, toasted sesame oil, carrots and lemon zest, not in that order. Oh, and a good barley miso which came from a local producer, right in here in the Pioneer Valley. YES!
You may recall that I love the movie Big Night. I love the whole movie. The movie is about food, especially Italian food. And it is a little about New York City in the 1950s. And Italian immigrants in New York City in the ’50s.
But really, the movie is about people. It is full of interesting and likeable and well-written characters and that is my favorite kind of movie. The script is outstanding. The cinematography is outstanding. The acting is outstanding.
While all of the acting is very, very good, Ian Holm and Tony Shalhoub are the standouts. I really love them both in this movie. But really don’t I love Tony Shalhoub as Monk, too? And couldn’t a student of theater learn a zillion ways to act well by watching either of them at any time in any role? I think so. Who dares to bet me a million bucks (or less if you prefer) that Ian Holm has studied the Alexander Technique? I know it’s not that much of a stretch since he’s British and likely classically trained. Oh, well, for all of my wealthy, betting readers, it was worth a try.
For your pleasure (as is so often the case, you’ll have to excuse the blurry visuals):
I don’t have an iPod (RIP Steve Jobs) and even if I did, I couldn’t play it through my 2000 Toyota mini-van’s stereo system (see, I used the phrase stereo system, so you know the dinosaur part about me is true).
I bought the new Wilco CD yesterday and I played it in the car on the way to the high school open house I attended last night. I listened to this track twice, once on the way to the school, once on the way home. Wilco played this live when we saw them in Boston last month and it stuck with me…I kept wondering which song was that?
During our 15-minute Geometry “class” at the open house, I tried sneaking reading the lyrics, but no worries, my daughter will probably get an A, unlike me who flunked high school Geometry (or was that Alg II?). Sneaking lyrics wasn’t the only thing I did in high school to get into trouble and I can only hope my amazing, intense, creative, energetic, artistic daughter goes a better way than I did back then.
This song, I don’t know what it’s about, but I think this is the true gem of the album, the one for the ages. There are a couple of lines that kill the hell outta me:
Outside I look lived in/like the bones in a shrine–it’s immediate, sharp and soft at the same time, and reminds me of churches in Prague and I am cold for my father/frozen underground
I’ve lived without my father for so long, lived without knowing him for so much of my life, but I was missing him and picturing him yesterday. I pulled out a bin of old photos.
I forget the damage, you know, the damage of losing a parent when you’re still pretty young. I don’t grieve for him any more, but I am today. How death defines us, underneath all of the geometry and the words and anything else we layer on top.
One Sunday Morning
This is how I tell it
Oh, but it’s long
One Sunday morning
Oh, one son is gone
I can see where they’re dawning
Over the sea
My father said what I had become
No-one should be
Outside I look lived in
Like the bones in a shrine
How am I forgiven?
Oh, I’ll give it time
This, I learned without warning
Holding my brow
In time he thought I would kill him
Oh, but I didn’t know how
I said it’s your god I don’t believe in
No, your Bible can’t be true
Knocked down by the long life
He cried, ‘I fear what waits for you’
I can hear those bells
Spoken and gone
I feel relief, I feel well
Now he knows he was wrong
I am cold for my father
Frozen underground
Jesus, I wouldn’t bother
He belongs to me now
Something sad keeps moving
So I wandered around
I fell in love with the burden
Holding me down
Bless my mind, I miss
Being told how to live
What I learned without knowing
How much more that I owe that I can give
This is how I tell it
Oh, but it’s long
One Sunday morning
One son is gone
Buckle up, people, it’s a long one. It’s also a bit of a linkfest. Never been to a linkfest before? Here’s your chance.
YES YES YES YES I can’t stop it I am compelled to keep listening to these songs and isn’t that what Music Monday should be about?
After seeing Wilco at the end of June at the Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCA, 2 members of my family went a little nuts and listened exclusively to Wilco for several weeks. It got so crazy that there had been talk of renaming our cat Willow, Wilco.
Only recently has the spell been broken, but it’s been cast on yours truly, the twinklinator.
This is the song, this is the one, these are the words, this is the Tweedy. Look, I am not too far a fan of self-indulgent guitar solos and for the most part this goes too far. But it’s fucking great in spite of and because of it. Paulie says this is pure Tom Verlaine-style and yes, I hear it, and it’s fucking beautiful.
Inside out of love, what a laugh, I was looking for you
The whole song encapsulates what addiction is about, or at least a particular aspect of it. Nails it.
and then there’s this
and this
and my latest favorite, the amazing “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”
I am sure I don’t know what those all of the words mean except that they get to me.
Bible-black predawn and
I want to glide through those brown eyes dreaming,/ Take you from the inside, baby hold on tight
That gets to a girl, you know? Take you from the inside, baby hold on tight. Who writes like that? Tweedy, that’s who.
Yours to discover: Steven Colbert interviewing Jeff Tweedy around the time of the presidential run in ’08. Wilco performing on The Colbert Report on the same episode. Also this and this.
You know what I think I like most about Jeff Tweedy? You can’t sex him up. He’s old-school humble. It’s good to know that this still exists in this troubled world. Salt of the earth, a real mensch. Like you or me.
(Can you all believe how brilliant I am? That heart up there? Damn I’m good).
I am grateful for this day and that I have decided to push myself to give thanks each Thursday (more or less each Thursday and more or less thanks)
Glad that Hubby helped me fix yesterday’s poem’s formatting, which I had screwed up when left to my own devices, Mac and me. I needs my Mac Daddy.
How about lack of pretension and a sense of humility? It sounds pretentious to say it, but I love a lack of pretension. Innocence, the naif. Humility, humus, the dirt, the ground, the earth, what is lowly and below, what lacks ego. I am loving Jeff Tweedy’s old school lack of pretension, but also love knowing what a complicated person he seems to be.
Grateful for Woody Guthrie’s words channeled through Jeff Tweedy’s music and voice. I chose this version because it’s so like Woody. The studio version and the many live versions are often great (how can you fail with those lyrics and Tweedy’s voice?), but this is the most simple, humble, and lovely to me.
Woody had me already, for many years, and Wilco had me a bit, but this? It’s beautiful, so beautiful.
Here’s another. I always forget how plainly sexual Woody Guthrie’s words often are, but how in their simplicity, they are often much more –broad and encompassing, clear and honest; never missing. It’s the Garden of Eden, maybe without the shame, isn’t it?
“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 wood vines 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
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as 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 where 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
twinklysparkles 