Sweet Jesus!

This totally made me hungry for Cheetoes. Thanks a lot, JESUS.



ETA: Everything Is Terrible is simply glorious.

Still on my mind.

Basically, I want to be that guitar.

Ethiopian Jazz. I'll say it again. Ethiopian Jazz.

My new Ethiopiques Volume 3 CD is beyond awesome. I can't stop listening obsessively to it, and particularly Yèqondjowotch Mendèr by Hirut Bèqèlè and Kèlkeyelgn by Tèfèri Fèllèqè. I don't even want to hazard a wild guess as to how one would go about the business of pronouncing any of that, but trust me, it's on like Donkey Kong. Hirut Bèqèlè is particularly interesting to me because, superficially, I find her voice very hard to take (after some exhaustive Googling, I was able to determine that Hirut is indeed a girl's name--a pretty common one, too.) There are some tracks on these compilations that tread a very fine line between mind-boggling jazz and too Ethopian to make much sense to Western ears--that is to say, you can appreciate the complex rhythms and tribal vocalizations as awesomeness in and of itself, but it doesn't do whatever it is that music does when everything lights up and your soul adds something on to its repertoire. (By the way, I do mean COMPLEX rhythms. Mind-fuckingly complex. You can't even imagine. I didn't know the human brain bent that way.) But I'd be surprised if I've listened to Yèqondjowotch Mendèr less than 30 times today. At the risk of totally embarrassing myself, the best way I can think to articulate it is that she's not unlike an Ethiopian Janis Joplin--you just think "Oh my God why is this lady SCREAMING AT ME" but you compulsively listen to it again and again anyway because you can't help yourself and it worms its way so deeply into your soul that you have no choice but to be in awe of its power and love it so much that it's actually kind of weird. At least, that's happens to me. I'd give anything to know what she's saying, but "Ethiopian to English" is not on the Babelfish pull-down menu. I know. Shocking.

I went to extreme measures to try to find a postable version of the song I'm obsessed with (Yèqondjowotch Mendèr)--no luck--but here is Hirut Bèqèlè in an old-timey promotional video. My newfound love is so staggering I can barely see straight.

http://www.ethiotube.net/video/1291/Classic--Hirut-BeQele--Yemiretah-Yelem

Too Good To Wait

Were I a good blogger, I would have waited a couple of weeks to post this. March 2 would have been my late husband's* 61st birthday, you see. But it's getting near sundown, it's snowing again and we are alone in the house together. Like so many times before, I am too overcome.

Happy early birthday, my darling. I miss you.



*Wedding may have taken place in my imagination.

Windier Days...A Bell-Kick Montage (The girl is me)(The producer is Beulah)

Grinding Halt

I don't want the snow to stop. I love snow when it's SNOW and not a thin layer of dusty ice that turns to slosh by nine o'clock in the morning and is melted into dirty puddles by dusk. I love it when everything is blanketed and blanked out and cars and bikes and garbage cans and recycling bins and mailboxes and fire hydrants are all indecipherable white blobs and everything is blinding and sunless and reflective. It reminds me of the kind of snow we had when I was a kid in Minnesota and North Dakota. Snow you can really work with. Snow that means business. Snow you can build animal villages and houses and cars with, and then 'paint' them using spray bottles filled with water and food coloring. Snow that I used to teach myself the front handspring in the winter of my seventh year, when there was no danger of boinking my head or breaking my tailbone on the hard ground. By the time the snow melted, I was an expert. I can still do it, too.

Real snow is inextricably linked with the kiddie nostalgia in me. "So-and-so threw his/her back out shovelling the driveway" was such a common complaint among the adults of my life that I just assumed it was one of those things that comes automatically with being a grownup, like coffee-drinking and fun-hating. I knew with a definitive finality that my own back being thrown out while shovelling the driveway was only a matter of time (which it definitely would have been if I'd stayed in a snowy climate, since merely sitting in the wrong position during a movie will have me tottering around like the undead for days.) Snow suits and snow boots would always be either hanging from a hook by the front door or put back in the front-hall closet depending on the season, and they would always be yellow because my mother's favorite color was yellow and I was her girl to dress up. My favorite yellow snow suit had a 70's-style cloud with a rainbow shooting out of it emblemized on the chest. There is a picture of me wearing it when we lived in Illinois. I am triumphantly carrying a snowball so huge it fills up both of my arms. I'm laughing at something, probably my brother, because my brother was hilarious and made me laugh a lot, especially when we would play in the snow. I was still adorable, but just barely. Another six months would bring the onset of an ugly stage that I never quite managed to grow out of. Mentally, anyway. But I love that picture, because I look so Norwegian and blonde and happy and so un-me-like it's hard to believe that I once inhabited that angelic little shell. If I saw that little girl now, I'd think (with an embarassing degree of jealousy), "My God, she's going to be beautiful." You just never can tell.

It is at once sweet, amusing and infuriating to see what a couple inches of powder does to people who see it once a decade.

The Menacing Skies

Hey, guess what I hate with the fire of a thousand burning suns? Flying!

Surely the universe has never conceived of a more torturous, horrific, frustrating, headache-inducing, uncomfortable, inhumane experience in the history of carbon-based life experiences...not to mention the fact that there is a very large part of my brain that is genuinely, sincerely convinced that I am going to die on Monday.

Standing in a cattle ring to be issued a seat number by an apathetic and overworked drone who indifferently hands me the boarding pass to what will be, at best, the source of lower back pain for days to come and, at worst, my final resting place. Waiting for an hour to be prodded with fingers and metal detectors and relieved of such menacing items as my lip gloss. Being packed like a sardine into a metal coffin with 350 other pissed-off travellers who are all either shrieking babies or coughing tubercularly on the back of my head. Trying to contain my panic and failing as I burst into tears during take-off. Swallowing the Valium which turns naked mortal terror into groggy, slow-moving mortal terror. Eight hours of shifting and drooling and trying in vain to get comfortable while every drop of moisture in my body is slowly sucked out through my pores and turned into re-circulated, stale air. Standing in the passport control line for two hours, delirious from sedatives and the fact that it's four in the morning according to my body clock. Staring at a rotating metal conveyor belt for a further two hours until my suitcase pops out and I have to wrestle it off the belt and through a throng of people three rows deep--if I'm lucky. If I'm unlucky, the suitcase never appears, and I discover that it accidentally went to Nigeria or Tibet or Vladivodstok, and I have to rush out the next morning to buy clean underwear and a toothbrush, and all I can think about for three days is the fact that I had to put all of my valuables in the suitcase because they probably would have been mistaken for terrorist paraphernalia and confiscated by airport security had I tried to carry them with me. Being so overwhelmed with exhaustion that I barely recognize my brother's expectant face at the top of the escalators in the Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport. Feeling like the world's worst sister for passing out cold in the back seat of his car on the way back to his house.

I've done it a thousand times. I'll probably have to do it a thousand more.

If I don't die.

Oh help.