Gogol Bordello, Boston, June 1, 2012

Hubby, my older daughter, and I went to see Gogol Bordello in Boston last night. I figured out a little bit more why this is the best live band I’ve ever seen, and, when you go, the best live band you will ever see. It is their interaction with and inclusion of the audience in every move they make on stage. That’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the overarching ones.

One of my favorite things last night happened after the concert. We were driving back home on I-90 and we stopped at a rest stop to grab a bite to eat (I try, I really do. I had a cooler and food bag packed with healthy stuff, but McDonald’s fries and coffee won out in the end). While waiting in line, a 20-something man noticed my [new] Gogol Bordello t-shirt and asked, “Were you at the show?” He was in a state of bewilderment, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, a halo of bliss above his head. I answered that yes, I’d been at the show. We began to chat. It was nice to see the reverence in his face, the gears clicking in his head trying to figure out how it was possible for such a band to exist.

I also struck up a quick conversation, still in line at McDonald’s, with a teenage girl (14-years old, maybe) who had the same happy, dazed look on her face.

“Did you just come from the concert?” I asked.

“Yes. Weren’t they amazing?” she asked.

“Yes.” I answered, and: “Had you seen them before?”

“No, have you? Does he tour a lot?”

It was all so endearing.

♦ ♦ ♦

Just 2 hours ago, I bought tickets to see Gogol Bordello on Lake Champlain for a mid-August concert. This time, I’m going for it. Up in front of the stage with all the pretty young women and raving young men. RIGHT UP FRONT. That’ll be me backstage, the only sober person in a throng of groupies trying to share a bottle of wine with the band. Maybe Eugene will let me massage his hands. Or forearms. Or the twisted erector spinae muscles of his back. Yeah, that’s how fantasies work around here: me massaging famous rock stars.

It’s like my kid, clucking at me to Stop it, Mom when I was bounding, fleet-foot, up the aisle last night, dancing around, twirling my new t-shirt in the air. Nobody cares, Violet. Nobody cares what I am doing. They are not looking at me. She danced next to me the whole concert, her face glowing and carefree, safe with her parents, buoyed up by the good will all around her.

I’m here to be happy, to fill the empty spaces with energy and heat and vibration. Just like that band up there, biding our time and asking everyone to join in the ecstatic moments.

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Music Monday–twinkly’s inevitable Leonard Cohen post

I never knew who Leonard Cohen was until well after college and beyond, into the time after I became a massage therapist (the late ’80s). I have a strange memory of the song “Bird on a Wire” from my younger years. I definitely knew the song “Suzanne,” because I went to camp as a kid and the wanna-be hippie counselors were probably singing it on their hippie guitars around campfires. Or maybe I heard Judy Collins singing it on the radio, or both.

I had a massage client in Kent (Brady Lake, no less), and he used to give me cassette tapes, back in the day, of all sorts of music I hadn’t previously known. He turned me on to Leonard Cohen and I introduced him to Robyn Hitchcock and Tom Waits. He gave me Marianne Faithful and Ken Nordine and really every Leonard Cohen song that you couldn’t find any more on vinyl and that would never be released on CD (or so I thought in the early ’90s).

I think the song I’ve most listened to is “Famous Blue Raincoat.” I like how it’s in a minor key–it’s so fucking depressing–and then he switches to a major chord for the Jane came by with a lock of your hair line. For a tiny moment, he gives a respite. But not for long, plunging us into the depths again.

and you treated my woman to a flake of your life

Sweet Jesus, can you believe that line?

This is the one that I listened to over and over when he was new to me:

This whole post was inspired by my recent listening to “Hallelujah” for about the last 4 months.

When my kids were younger, we forbade them from using the word “awesome” because of its disgraceful misuse by the youth of today (well, by now, the youth of yesterday), but we finally caved because we are NOT word Nazis, dammit!

This is an awesome song, as bad as that adjective sounds when applied to anything of substance. It’s beautiful and rich and complex and deep and meaningful and I am in awe of it. I love it and I think I can sing it, too, but I have to read along because my capacity for actually remembering new lyrics has greatly diminished of late. Perhaps, too, I could use a good guitarist. Maybe someone cute, even beautiful and sexy, younger than me, but not too young. I would like the challenge of singing with a man playing a guitar, but I’d probably prefer a woman because, ultimately, things would be less subject to any confusion, you dig?

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sometimes I have to shop too much, it is true

It goes like this some days:

good luck/bad luck

I find good parking spaces, often; I have terrible luck with shopping carts, the wonky wheels

I kept passing the same man in the grocery store today, 5, maybe 6, times. A regular guy, maybe two or three years older than me, not too tall. For at least 20 minutes I saw him, passing me in this or that aisle. He never made eye contact with me. I tried to make eye contact with him. A little smile, an acknowledgement. I ended up looking at the ground and smiling to the floor after about 3 times. When he exited the store, I saw that he was empty-handed.

I went to a grocery store earlier in the day. A tall, dark-skinned African woman in a dress made of traditional African cloth (if I knew anything about Africa, maybe I could say what country the cloth was from) was walking in the beverage aisle (I came there to see if the Polar seltzer was on sale, but they never carry the black cherry) toward me. She walked slowly, but with a rhythm all her own, in her own world, and she wore large, Birkenstock-like slippers on her feet. They were incongruous. Maybe they were Crocs with furry linings?

Later, a few hours later, I saw the same woman behind a grocery cart outside another grocery store. I recognized her feet first, I must have been looking down. She never looked at me, neither time.

When I read blogs in which the words are written on a black background, I can’t read. I look away and all I see are lines lines lines. This is unfortunate, I think, and I wonder if other people have this problem. Sometimes I get ocular migraines and I think these blogs could trigger one, but come to think of it, none ever has.

Today was a shopping day, a catching-up-on-groceries-and-errands day. I went to FIVE different stores and to TWO different banks. I still haven’t gone to the post office to mail a package that I haven’t yet packed, sealed, or addressed.

On the road, on my way to the third grocery store, someone in a Suburu Outback wagon was following behind my car and although the driver was not actually allowing her car to tailgate mine, I had the sense that she was in a hurry or pissed off or needing something urgently. She passed me when she could and turned ahead of me, less than half-a-block ahead. I caught a glimpse of her silvery short hair and proper, politically-correct bumper sticker.

In the third grocery store, I passed 2 women talking and I recognized the woman with short silver hair as the driver of the almost-tailgating-me Suburu. She had all of the signs of someone who lives in the Pioneer Valley, just like I do. Right then and there, I decided she was full of shit and I wanted to ask her why she drove like an asshole.

In the Whole Foods Market in Hadley, Massachusetts, one enters directly into the produce department. When I walked into the store (my FIFTH and final store of the day), I heard a high-pitched screaming. A mother shopping with her 2 children, the youngest still in the realm of baby-hood (13 months, maybe?), was pushing the screecher in a cart, her other child walking beside. The sound of the screeching was jarring to my system and painful to my ears. I asked the cute produce man putting up local green peppers, of which I needed at least two, “how long have you had to listen to that?” at which he answered that he was glad his wife had a boy because “they don’t scream like that.” Now that I’m not sure about. I just thought the mother was a particularly indulgent mother who was raising a child who could have been told not to scream. I heard the mother try this once, maybe twice, all the while while the baby screamed and screamed, laughing and giggling and making cutesy faces after every scream. The baby screamed and screeched the entire half-hour that I was in the store. The employees, you can tell, are not allowed to say anything negative in conversation about anything like an obnoxious screaming baby. So everyone, shoppers and workers, just nodded our heads uncomfortably. Sometimes a shopper would hear the screeching baby for the first time, as the little family approached. I could tell it was the first time by the way the shopper would jolt and startle and jump a little in his shoes. I think I jumped a little almost every time until I got far enough away that I sort of forgot about it until now.

I look at the women a lot. The women shopping, in the parking lots, in their cars, in their yoga pants and sports tops. In their good flip flops. With bouncy long hair, with beautiful silver hair. Thinner than me. More fit than me. This one’s got runner’s legs, that one has cork heels too high for safety with her small daughter walking next to her. What if she has to run after her in the parking lot? I don’t notice the men as much and there aren’t as many of them anyway. I have good flip-flops, too, but not flip-flops with bling. When did flip-flops get to have supportive soles?

I love the women at my bank. One has smoked for too long, I can hear it in her voice. She wears a crucifix around her neck. She is beautiful and kind, a little older than me. She has a pretty face and I love her.

I never remember names any more. The cashier I always talk to at WF has 2 daughters, one a new baby, and I ask and ask and I can’t remember. I know where she lives, I see her walking her baby in a stroller on the sidewalk, I know that her grandfather is from Italy, Sicily to be exact, I know the grade her oldest daughter is going into, but I can’t remember the names. What happened to my memory?

It is almost one o’clock and I thought it was only almost midnight.

I went to sing Sacred Harp tonight, as I do almost every Tuesday night at Helen Hills Hills Chapel on the Smith College campus in Northampton, Mass, and my oldest daughter went with me. She looked really pretty tonight and was very happy, but I still got ticked off at her in the car on the way home.

I went to yoga before singing and it was GREAT and I thought that sometimes good yoga is like good sex and I know I’m not the first to say or think or write this, so why bother?

When I used to do a lot of massage, this was a regular thing, someone or another would say that a great massage was as good as great sex. My clients never said this to me, just friends or acquaintances.

When I come across a new blog and I see that the posts are all long or I see a long post, I don’t read usually. So I try not to have blog posts that are too long. But I am full of words, swimming in my head when I am in the car too much or in a certain manic state and now look where it’s got me. And this is AFTER yoga! But also after singing, which can wind me up sometimes.

At a local, annual food-tasting the other day, a guy giving out samples told me I had blueberry eyes and he asked me if I do have blueberry eyes: do you have blueberry eyes? I said I don’t really like blueberries, but I wish I did. That was a new one: blueberry eyes. I’ll take it.

What about the words lush and razz-ma-tazz and linger? Can you guess who I was listening to in the car? Here’s another hint: dame.

Well, I’m tired and wired, so you know that means it’s time for my crossword. If you got this far, you may a. be married to me or b. a really good friend or c. brave and patient, more than I probably am or d. the recipient of my gratitude. I love my readers.

I even have something in common with Ol’ Blue Eyes. Whaddaya know?

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