Canadian composer and performer Zoë Keating has pushed the possibilities of the sounds a string instrument can make, and the kind of musical masterpieces that can be produced with a wondrous alchemy of classical instrumentation and cutting-edge technological techniques. Visit her marvelous website here, and make special note of some upcoming performances scheduled for November. Her magical musical prowess earns her this Dazzler of the Day honor. (Bonus points for fearless hair magnificence.)
While my favorite books remain ‘The God in Flight’ by Laura Argiri and ‘The Great Gatsby‘ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the inspirational work that has most informed my creative output in projects and how I present my artistic work to the world is easily Madonna’s infamous ‘Sex’ tome. Flashy and trashy, cheeky and freaky, low-brow and big-wow – ‘Sex’ was salacious, sultry, seductive, silly, and scintillating in all the best ways.
The promotional roll-out was christened by a topless runway walk at a Jean Paul Gautier fashion show by the Mistress of Ceremonies herself, and as Madonna as Dita smiled a golden-tooth-accented smile she sent the entire world into salivating anticipation for a book. That the woman who had made the art of the music video into a vaunted exercise in cinematic glory would put forth a book of sexual fantasies was a novel idea in many ways, starting with its metallic covers and spiral binding, and ending with its ridiculous comic book coda. In-between the aluminum was Madonna in all states of undress and erotic scenarios. As she had done for all her career, she was playing a part, or a series of roles, in an artistic expression on a theme – that the theme was sex heightened the allure and controversy, and the way she executed this mass-seduction of the world’s attention was a master-class in provocation to get one’s point across. As we moved into the digital age, it would become increasingly difficult to make such an imprint and impression on such a grand scale, but the lesson had already been learned.
Accompanying the ‘Sex’ book was the ‘Erotica’ album – and while ‘Sex’ may have brought about all the bombast, it was ‘Erotica’ that made the sounds that mattered. A work of edgy brilliance that remains a provocative slice of 90’s vibes, the album was strangely maligned by some, and recognized by others as the genius stroke of art-pop that it was. In anticipation of tomorrow’s 30th anniversary of this extraordinary period in Madonna’s legendary career, and a blog post that is slightly more somber and serious than the topic at hand might otherwise demand, here’s the track-listing of the ‘Erotica’ album and the Madonna Timeline entries that have been written thus far.
With his upcoming show at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on October 28, this Dazzler of the Day crowning for Richard Marx comes at a most opportune moment. (It appears the Troy Music Hall is getting all the great shows this season.) As for Marx, he’s been thrilling listeners since the 80’s, and a couple of his songs have formed some very lovely memories for those of us who came into our own then. More excitingly, Marx is still very much at the top of his musical game, and the release of his latest album ‘Songwriter’ is a welcome reminder as to what he does best (his amazing Twitter feed is perhaps a close second). Check out his website here for more of his brilliance.
I’ve been a not-so-secret Meghan Trainor fan for years. She’s got a new album coming out the same day as Taylor Swift, and Trainor has never been one to shy away from a challenge. When her songs are this catchy and fun there’s enough room for more than one musical impresaria in our midst. Trainor has been delighting fans for her entire career with an uncanny knack at crafting pop songs that feel both warmly nostalgic and surprisingly prescient. When there’s a message and meaning behind the music, that makes it all the more glorious. Her latest single, ‘Don’t I Make It Look Easy’ warns of the dangers of social media, but does so in such a sweet and aurally-pleasing manner that it does indeed go down easy. Currently I’m all about the next single about to drop, ‘Made You Look’ which is all the rage on Tik Tok. For making us all look, and listen, she easily earns this Dazzler of the Day. (Be sure to watch for ‘Takin’ It Back’, her new album out October 21.)
This fall season on the blog has been fueled by fire and memories and some redemptive rage. It’s featured the long-lost ‘FireWater’ project, a first and last letter to the first man who ever kissed me, these flaming feathers of fabulousness, and a fiery start that set the tone for what was, and still is, to come. These posts alone would have drained anyone, but I’m old hat at writing about experiences as a way of exorcising them, and this is more cathartic than any sort of therapy. So we shall continue on our flame-addled way, but not without a momentary respite, a pause in the hectic proceedings.
Way back several years and several seasons ago, this song formed the impetus for a blog post on touring and traveling. It was all excitement and anticipatory delight – all bright lights and big city 80’s excess. It was, in many ways, an embodiment of my youth and childhood. A time of innocence and hope and happiness – the way everyone’s childhood should be.
Many years have passed since the first iteration of the song and my subsequent memories of it – years that proved I was no longer a boy. The man in motion I’d longed to become had begun to slow down. I’m 47 years old. Some days I feel every one of those years; some days I still feel like I’m twelve. Most days I feel a little more certain, and still a little bit lost.
Listening to this acoustic version, by the original artist who sang it over those 80’s synths and manufactured beats, fills me with a strange sense of satisfaction, tinged with just the slightest bit of sadness at the way time has moved all of us along. With age does come a certain wisdom – mostly that wisdom is in the form of understanding how little I know, how much more there is to learn, how the search for perfection is a useless and futile quest. Inherent in such wisdom is a certain calm. The restlessness I once felt has subsided, the fire put out by experiencing quite a bit of life – sometimes too much – and the thirst for more has been quenched by the realization that there will always be more. No one can do it all. There is simply too much – too many places, too many people, too many options and opportunities.
In this age of immediate internet reach and instantaneous connection, the greatest rebellion is in slowing down and shutting it all off. Making the choice to disconnect and engage only when it truly matters, making experiences that count, making decisions that don’t consist mostly of going through the motions. These are the choices and edits that refine our new world, and how we choose to walk through it. For far too many years I was a man in motion, rushing to get through to the next event, the next experience, the next new thing. It was what I needed to do to make it through. Stopping was not an option. Stopping could very well have killed me, especially if it happened at the wrong time. Seeing the folly of that hectic pace has been one of the more difficult lessons, and one of the most rewarding.
And so we slow things down with this song, pausing to watch the leaves fall, pausing to reflect and enjoy, pausing to take a few deep breaths before we soldier on…
Sky mottled like a painter’s canvass, land and mountains undulating like the holding pattern of an ocean, the world around me signals fall as much as it signals forever. Carrying its secrets and mysteries, questions and non-answers, it is the foggy obfuscation of autumn that conceals and merely hints at its possibilities. If you’re looking for the key to life, it won’t be found amid such veiled beauty. I don’t even know if that key exists. Seems folly to have forged such a thing if no one can use it or share it. But that’s what humans do I suppose.
Why should fall posit these questions, this wonderment? And why should we bother with such wondering? Slumber awaits us all – the slumber of winter, the rest that the garden requires. We demand such a show from it from spring to summer – it deserves this reprieve.
Meanwhile, the world runs wild around us, in the water of the sea – but that recent journey is yet to be posted. Not to worry, it’s on the way…
The charming photo featured here is a glimpse of Troy, NY on a recent Saturday night on which we got to see the magnificent Rufus Wainwright perform at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. Clearly, the entire evening was an exercise in enchantment, and while this song has nothing to do with Mr. Wainwright, it felt like a fitting soundtrack to a fall night.
Lord knows I love a nocturne. May this one lull you to sweet sleep.
A somewhat purgatorial moment – this mid-week, mid-month, mid-fall day – and all the worst that is Wednesday still lays ahead. Or is it lies? My English major fails me yet again. I’m never quite as good as everyone thinks, and still quite better at the same time. Such a conundrum calls for a simple song that poses similar sentiments, with a somewhat sad piano melody. Wonderful Wednesday music…
Fall hangs heavily in the air on these foggy mornings. It takes a little longer to get out of bed, and this is only the beginning. Wait until January. Wait until February. Wait until that thirtieth snowstorm of March. We haven’t even approached winter, and the weight of its enormity feels overwhelming. At such times I return to my daily meditation, and remind myself of the focus on the moment at hand. One minute is easy enough to get through, and minutes becomes hours become days become months and so on. The blessed and cursed cadence of time.
Time, spilling out, spilling forward like gourds from a fall basket, is our greatest sorcerer. It bends and twists itself into grotesque forms, usually in whatever frightens us or wears us down the most. I don’t know how best to master or tame it. Instead, I do my best to take it a little bit at a time, trusting that being mindful is always the right choice, no matter how difficult it might be. Breathing through those tough times, one breath in and one breath out, and then again, and again. And then a minute has gone by, and if you can get through one, you can get through two. By three or four you forget what you’re doing and why, and perhaps a crisis is averted. Simply by breathing.
A good-enough lesson for a Wednesday morning.
Mastermind and executor behind Lords of Sound and Lesser Things, Joseph Abramo is once again crowned Dazzler of the Day, thanks in no small part to the tantalizing hints of the genius to come this Friday, October 14. That’s the date of ‘Samsara’ – a musical multi-media phantasmagoria (see the trailer below) that Abramo is performing at J. Louis von der Mehden Recital Hall at the University of Connecticut starting at 8 PM. This event will also be live-streamed at https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/ext… and https://www.twitch.tv/los_alt.
As Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, Abramo has been published in countless texts, all of them well above and beyond my brain level, but I’ve been lucky enough to connect with him on a more basic plane, that of a friend who can appreciate the various calls of an artist. On my last few trips to visit his wife Melissa and their two amazing kids, I’ve been able to get a glimpse of the mad musical genius that comprises Abramo’s artistic world, and it’s always exhilarating. Witness the two excerpts below.
What he has in store for the recital this Friday is anyone’s guess, but it looks to be his usual groundbreaking stuff – an amalgamation of music and images where gorgeous melodies reckon with modern-day technology, and the push and pull of darkness seeks out redemption or damnation, and the only way out is to go through each pulsating beat, letting it reverberate through the body and mind. Watching Abramo at work is like seeing a wizard at the height of his powers – it’s raw, wild, occasionally unnerving, and absolutely mesmerizing of sight and sound. Check out his recital this Friday if you get a chance.
Rufus Wainwright blew the beautiful proverbial roof off the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall last night, and while the performance alone would have been enough to earn this Dazzler of the Day, decades of a spectacular career are proof that he’s been dazzling us all along. Accompanying himself alternately on piano and guitar, Wainwright was somehow able to go from the most delicate ballad (‘Poses’ and Hallelujah’) to the most rollicking anthem (‘Pretty Afternoon’) along with some operatic grandeur thrown in for good measure (yes, he’s written a couple of operas). He explained how during his Robe Recitals and Quarantunes sessions (which, judging from audience reaction, seemed to have earned him a bunch of new fans) he found a way to take even his most bombastic and grandiose songs and perform them in a smaller but no less magnificent manner. That one man alone could make such a glorious ruckus is truly a testament to his talent and power.
The set list spanned most of his career, and returned to several classic favorites such as ‘Beauty Mark’ and ‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk’ – the latter taking on a world-weary wisdom and resignation, particularly in the way he solemnly drew out its ending. A majestically dark ‘Early Morning Madness’ was another highlight, as was a haunting encore of ‘Going to a Town’ which gains more resonance and meaning with each troubling, passing day.
With banter that was typically witty and sparkling (he had an encounter with the current King of England that sounded like a hilarious doozy) Wainwright remained the consummate show-man, able to enthrall with each musical story. It was an evening where one of America’s greatest living artists was at the top of his game, performing such pretty things in such a pretty place, and reminding us all of the power an artist, and a remarkable human being, can wield in our crazy world.
{Check out his website here for upcoming tour dates.}
Tangled in his sheets, my body, tanned from the summer – a last summer of innocence now that I can look back with such distance – is dark against their whiteness. His broad shoulders are freckled by summer too, and the heat is such that our actions leave us both a bit damp. He is the first man who has been naked with me, and it is maybe our third or fourth night together. I am nineteen years young, and not one day of those nineteen years has prepared me to be in this bed, in his arms, in his thrall. How could I be anything but terrified?
It was September – the September I discovered Marianne Faithfull’s ‘A Secret Life’ album – and the track so perfectly titled and timed played in my mind as we laid there in shadow.
I’ve already talked in great detail about what happened between us. Read that here if you’d like. For now, for this one moment, I am going back to that one moment – and it may not even be one moment anymore – maybe it’s an amalgamation of two or three moments, settling and coalescing into one single memory that haunts but no longer hinders my journey. This song takes me back there, to his bed – the bed of the first man I ever kissed – and to this night, just another night in his life of nights, a life that was already double the length of mine. And again I wonder how I could be anything but terrified?
That September was hot and stifling one moment, chilled and stormy the next. That’s how it felt in his bed – hot and cold, push and pull – we were each alternately powerful and entirely powerless. Who held sway over whom? The perfect lithe and unspoiled canvass of a nineteen-year-old young man could instantly disarm a thirty-six-year-old’s jaded experience. We weren’t on opposite ends of some human spectrum. We were closer to each other than we realized. I also understood that we could not find our footing outside of his little room. And I knew that it was more than that too.
In his watery blue eyes, I looked for answers to my questions. I had so many, and I was so young. How do you know if you’re in love? How and when do you reveal it? I’m not saying I’m in love with you. I only just met you. How can you love someone you barely know? He stopped my questions with a kiss, or a bite, the same way some animals put an end to play, both a tease and a warning. When he had me beneath him, when I could barely breathe, and when I wouldn’t have it any other way, I wondered at whether his warning would deliver some ecstatic death blow to the person I hadn’t quite yet become.
Fridays feel better in the fall – perhaps it’s a residual relief from years of being back at school at this time of the year. For this Friday, we’re offering some frilly feathers in keeping with the fiery theme of flames, and they align beautifully with the fabulous fable spun in the fantastic musical ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ (sadly his name didn’t start with an ‘F’, thus ending our little alliteration moment). In the fantastical opening number, our protagonist dreams of a better place than the classroom in which his teenage-self is stuck.
There’s a clock on the wall and it’s moving too slow
It’s got hours to kill and a lifetime to go
And I’m holding my breath ’til I hear the last bell
Then I’m coming out hard and I’m giving ’em hell
I’m a superstar and you don’t even know it
In a wonder bra and you don’t even know it
You’re so “blah blah” and you don’t even know it
I’m like, “au revoir” and you don’t even know it
To a certain extent, life is all about finding out how to turn feathers into fire while making them fly. When you’re just a kid in school, it’s hard to find the fire or the feathers, and even if they’re at your disposable, a kid doesn’t usually know how to use them. It’s hard enough to ignite the passion and strength to go through an average day as an adult – when the weight of the current world rests on a kid, it must feel overwhelming.
There’s a path I’ve planned (And you don’t even know it)
To the promised land (And you don’t even know it)
You won’t understand (And you don’t even know it)
Cos you’re my backing band (And you don’t even know it)
Whenever I think back to my days in grade school, it is usually fraught with the anxiety and dread that being in school and around other kids always produced. Once comfortable with a group, I could relax and shine, but there was so much work and energy required to get through the nerve-wracking first few days that the trauma would linger and be inextricably wound into any enjoyment I might have found. When you’re a kid, life should be mostly about that joy.
I’ve got the dreams, I’ve got the style
I’ve got the moves to make you smile
So kiss my ass goodbye
‘Cause I’m gonna be the one
Instead of finding joy in the present moment, I began to craft a world in my imagination, a world that could be fully accessed from anywhere at any time, but only reaching its fullest form when I could be alone, in solitude, conjuring scenes of fantasy and play and beauty. On my walks home from school I would inhabit this secret world, which was more exciting and grand and dramatic than the boring trappings of school and the dull doings of my classmates.
You’re in my lane, you’re in my light
Get out my way, I’m taking flight
And I ain’t coming back
‘Cause I’m gonna kiss the sun!
For my entire schooling stretch, even into college, I would maintain this secret world. Though I made some decent strides to integrate the imaginary dreams and wishes into the mundane reality in which I so often found myself, I wouldn’t fully merge the two until I was well into adulthood. Some days it’s still a struggle, and on those days I put on a song like this and feel the inspiration to be my authentic and genuine self for all the word to see. Dragging it into the brutal light of day, and allowing all the plumage and fire and majesty to assert itself, I listen to the music, do a little twirl, and make my merry way. In defiance there is power. In self-proclaimed majesty there is might. In the imagined world of a scared kid, there is a way out.
Singer/songwriter and performer Tom Goss is set to take the world by storm this September, as he has a string of live performances coming up, as well as new music. Upcoming Double Trouble tour dates can be found at his official website here, and that new work ‘Enemy of Good’ is set to be released on September 23. Today he is crowned Dazzler of the Day because no one dazzles quite so earnestly and exquisitely, eliciting smiles and joy and laughter, which is the secret to any artist’s happiness. Catch him live while he’s on the East Coast.
PS – Bonus points for the jockstrap, and the banana.
He was just about the only part of the MTV Video Music Awards that I could stomach for a few moments last night (I aged out of enjoyable engagement with MTV at least a decade ago), and his outfit of oodles of red layered sheer fabric was a feast for the eyes, as much as his melodies and voice were a feast for the ears. This is Conan Gray, who was by far the most fabulous part of last night’s MTV festivities. Check out his website here for more of his work, and further evidence of why he is the Dazzler of the Day.
There was something waltz-like about the piece. It stirred a little dance and a little dream.
A little darkness, and a bit of shadow. Dark like the iron shavings we would watch assemble in wondrous form atop a magnet in grade school. Dark like the nights near the end of summer, when the canopy of full tree leaves stretches wide and far to obliterate the most noble efforts of the moon. Dark like the secrets we keep in the name of protection and solace. Dark like the secrets we keep in the name of shame.
The summer is slowly slipping away in the night. The heat doesn’t hold its trance like it did just a few days ago. And yet we hang on, even as we grow weary – instinct and hope acting as much as habit and laziness. A week ends and begins, and August is about to depart for another year.
Ruminating upon this piece of music, I am challenged to do something – anything – to keep going. Creation beckons. Inspiration whispers. A shift is signaled by a change in atmosphere. The music keeps time. The world shudders and lets go of the dark.
