1974

Best of Soul Train today is:
George McCrea - a C list soul singer with a dance hit or two.
Franklin Ajaye - wonder what ever happened to him?
Billy Preston - Whoot! (With a big ‘ol badass ‘fro entourage)
And to top it off -
Rufus. With Miss Chaka Khan lookin’ so young, so good, in a purple sequin tube top and black satin hip hugger elephant bells with roses appliquéd all over them. Singing “Tell Me Something Good”.
I remember riding the Tilt-a-Whirl at the Hillsdale County fair while that was playing over and over. Man I loved the Tilt-a-Whirl. That was the time that my Mom had to sit me down and explain genes, chromosomes and inbreeding to me because I was completely flipped out by all the mutants there. She used the House of Hanover/Windsor to illustrate her points to me. To this day I am completely freaked out by the Monarchy and obsessed with any movie that has mutants.
Happy Birthday Ma, wherever you ended up.

Just this moment POTF #4

‘06

5 ’o’clock brooding bands of September cloud skeins
Dragons writhe inky, boiling up from the tree line
Drive straight into moment framed lightening in windscreen
Sky transfers pigment to newly blacked street

Plumpy raindrops soothe bus roof, rain ripples mirrors lenses
Greys meld with pure ray colour bright spectrums
Fluorescent umbrellas dispersed by windows
Sugar shine distortions, the brief burst abated

Sweet

Another auspicious number 5555

Several recent AM earworms

A few days ago on one of those nice mornings I woke up and my brain actually immediately said “woke up it was a Chelsea morning and the first thing that I heard”.
Joni Mitchell’s version of course. That’s pretty much an ultimate am earworm.
Then yesterday or the day before it was Donovan’s “Ferris Wheel” which is one of my favourite all time songs. Today it was the J. Geils Band doing “Detroit Break Down”.

All of which seems to give rise to a theory that my earworm generator really needs to have heard the song like a million times to put it in the hopper. It is very rare for it to pop out anything later than the eighties and if it does it is something we’ve listened to a whole lot. I could see it potentially using Rufus Wainright or the Eels or Dead Meadow or some evil jingle. But it seems to like the ones that I have worn a deep groove into either by design or by dint of early FM radio overexposure.

POTF #3

To My Muse

You bricked me down
in that nauseous dirt
Hit on some Saints lines
The Mary's and Michael's

I said to my self GIRRRL
If you don’t climb this hill
you’ll be kicking yourself
in the ass till you’re dead

The tourists all stared
as I crawled to the path
down on my knees
where things frequently start

I summoned what will
broke through my wall
so I'm climbing that hill
You stay with me still.

The SOOOUUULLLL TRAIIINNNN

I love the best of Soultrain. Last week it was The Dazz Band and Run DMC. A few weeks ago the Delfonics. Yesterday was Whodini and Freddie Jackson. I always thought our own local show “The Scene with Nat Morris” was better though . Now that was a show with some hardcore freakin', not all that foofy LA dance stuff. I know ST was originally out of Philly but when it moved it got all LALA.
But it’s still fun to revisit especially when they go back to the seventies when pop and lock first came out. And those afros, naturals, platforms, glitter and mylar. Crazy. It feels so Saturday afternoon, to watch Soul Train at 2 ‘o’ clock.

Childhood doggerel

“I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
it makes the peas taste funny
but it keeps them on the knife.”

I thought of this for the first time in years because I had a special treat today, honey on me toast. It’s been so expensive for so long but it was on sale the other day so I got two.

POTF #2

Writing on word lists

Each year at this time
I wait almost spent
with winter I want
so much to be done

I hunker most rooted
frozen in months
in icy inaction
and waddings of snow

Films and blind curtains
my eyes in my headache
enforcing the darkness
devoid of big flame

Sick of the sussering
trapped in my cave
I wait almost spent
for the swans to the lake

Chippin’

Away at the stuckness. It’s one or two things at a time. I can only do so much without the anxiety getting too high. The amount of paperwork a modern human is meant to cope with is irrational and absurd. Even someone like me who tries really hard to keep it simple and to the bare minimum. The piles just grow. The only good part is going through and extracting the huge pile that can go straight to recycling that’s the part I love. Taking the overwhelming stack and reducing it to a little pile of criticals and then the rest is just crap and goes away. if it wasn’t for that I would have to be on daily meds.
Gotta get to some stuff that needs to ready for a meeting this afternoon though so i’ll do that to the sound of spring thunder. Later, when it’s more processed maybe I’ll say something about the funeral.

Poetry on the fly

I’m going to give you some examples over the next little while of some stuff I wrote recently at my school poetry club. The exercises are to just write on the fly with something like a picture or a list of words or a particular topic as the starting point. I think he said these exercises are from a book about the Iowa Writers Workshops. So these are raw and unedited (much). Unlike my usual stuff that I have sweated over and rewritten sometimes for 20 years or more.......

On pictures of the back fence

I will plant a trellis rose
Will mirror tendrils of my hair
When July blooms have come to bear
I’ll keep just one to wear

This time I’ll take the time for earth
For crumbling leaf moulds in my hand
For troweling compost into sand
Inhale the rich breath of the land

This year I will not stint
To give myself such moments
Which calm my hectic torments
Just are, not needing comment

Earworm

Para Donde Vas - The Iguanas

A tinker, a tailor, a soldiers things

Drove into the heartland of the midwest this weekend. Every time I do I see more trailers and abandoned or junked out houses. Boarded up front doors with the folks living out of the back. More gas guzzling toys of the lower and middle classes for sale.
More desolated towns and abandoned dreams. It’s like living in a Tom waits song.

The bottom has fallen out and the descent is limitless. Makes one appreciate what you have but also get real nervous about what could happen. And the thing that is really creepy is that as the impoverished get desperate and start trying to sell everything off, the rich swoop in and by the family heirlooms and last hope valuables on the cheap thus further consolidating their wealth and the other family goes under anyway because the month or two it bought them is never enough to save them.

Saturdays At Home

Working on the blog a bit this am. Trying out a few of the new features. Subsequently republishing and republishing. This got me like 30 hits from the folks all over the planet who do the “go to next published blog”. One was kind enough to leave a comment. I have more hits today than in the last 2 weeks.

Still can’t fix the green deely bops in the links section though. In fact I think I may have grown a new one. The rest of the morning so far has been watching cartoons and 6 Feet Under and listening to Klezmer on myspace.

I’m supposed to be doing “stuff” can you tell?

Dream note to self haiku with earworm

What will it take to
get myself out, into flight,
traveling westward

A close approximation of the sticky note that was being shoved in my face by me or someone in my dream right before I woke up. As well as “The Spiraling Shapes” - TMBG either being in the dream or the player starting up immediately upon waking.

You know the drill

Nitti Pomfritti - Vasen
This is a beautiful little instrumental piece by a Swedish ”New Folk” group I love. It translates to Ninety French Fries. The band features the nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle which is a traditional Swedish instrument.
I was dreaming that I was a salesgirl at some warehouse store and all the way at the back, past all the refrigerators, stoves and washing machines was the music section where this was being piped in. I was showing/pushing vintage copies of Hans Brinker in the original Dutch. (Don’t ask me I don’t make this stuff up! Oh, wait, yes I do.)
I wish you lived inside my head, it’s beautiful in there at the moment. But since you don't they do have a myspace site/player, they just don’t have this, my favourite song, on it.
Breaking news- Apparently ghee-La, the cat who hates music, (as opposed to Naan who LOVES it) just doesn’t like our music or our general taste in music. I put in this one, with all strings and goat hooves and she became obsessed with it.

This morning

“Tomorrow (never comes)” - The Espers. Much as I never thought I’d sing in a folk band, I never thought I ‘d like a folk band as well as I like them.

2nd Today

A mashup of “Give Me That Ol’ Time Religion and “Hair” from Hair (Broadway version)

Todays Earworm

The Violent Femmes - The one that has the “Gone Daddy Gone” chorus

Blogster on the fly

I am not good at this student thing. I can make it all look good on paper, but what I go through and the amount of stress it causes me is feeling out of proportion to the results.
Midterms - feh. 3 exams, 2 essays, a quiz and a paper all this week. Time management skills? Not so much.....

Note to self

Read release
Brazilian peppers
Spread thin

Found to be unintelligible on 3/12

Platitudes and other lies

Another old saw that I find to actually be frequently true is “that if you want something done right do it yourself”.
As opposed to the one that just this second went by on the kiddie show I am watching; “hugs always make things better”. I call bullshit on that one.

AM Earworm

Daddy Kool - Rockin’ Dopsie

MAYBE

• I am in rebellion against the new blogger version I was finally forced to adopt
• I am tired of being scrutinized
• I had a death in the family and the reverberations are stressful and enervating
• I am overly sensitive and withholding
• I am sick of writing
• I feel vulnerable
• I’d rather just sit here and cuddle my cat
• I’m just frickin’ tired
• I have nothing of any import to say

Symbols

I can’t help but feel that it is wholly representative of the odd dichotomies that are me, that the very first 45s I ever walked over to K-mart to buy, on my own with my own money, were Black Sabbath: Electric Funeral b/w Iron Man, as well as The Jackson 5: Dancing Machine.