Category Archives: Music

This feels like a fitting song to kick off February – the shortest month of the year, and the last full month of winter – as we play games dodging time in the season of slumber. Supposedly it was inspired by a party that Madonna and Guy Oseary threw, attended by Lana Del Rey. Friends have been telling me for years that I would/should love Lana due to her dramatic way around a melody, and I’m finally coming around to it. This one is especially gorgeous. 

We keep changing all the time
The best ones lost their minds
So I’m not gonna change
I’ll stay the same
No rose left on the vines
Don’t even want what’s mine
Much less the fame
It’s dark but just a game
It’s dark but just a game…

In the thick of winter, this is the time when some of us lose our minds. I remember visiting JoAnn in Cape Cod a number of years ago, and her brother Wally regaled what they did to make it through the winter – and for all of the trickery and mind-games that we could conjure and use to make it through the doldrums, the bottom line was that it sucked. Sometimes the only way through was to get a few friends, get a little drunk, and do a few doughnuts in an empty parking lot as a winter storm barreled down on the base of that summer-getaway peninsula.

Those days are blessedly behind us, and I have found better ways to embrace the winter, choosing to engage rather than defy. It is always folly to defy winter. 

It’s dark but just a game
So play it like a symphony
You know our love’s the same
They’ll both go down in infamy…

If you know, you know…

and I’m completely wrecked after seeing Episode 3 of ‘The Last of Us’. 

Lighting a cadre of candles to make a stand against the cold, pulling a fuzzy robe a little closer around my neck, and setting up a pot of tea, I conjure the spirit of hygge. This is how we embrace the winter rather than stave it off – the latter being an impossible mission, we might as well admit. The days go much easier when we bend with their general flow instead of fighting against them. I wish I’d understood that a few decades ago. 

Here is a little song to echo the blanket of snow that covers the outside world right now. 

It’s a muted song, for a muted morning, in a world of blankets. Before the work day begins, and before the sky has lightened and turned whatever shade of gray we will get for the morning, I putter quietly around the living room while the tea kettle warms. Hello, winter, the soul implores, begging for the response to be kind and, dare we wish for such a thing, warm.

Most days there is no answer, such as on this morning. Only quiet and silence and the muted sense that things are in a state of slumber. It’s better than when the answer is a storm, when the winter claps back with a scowl and a threat. Softness is welcome. Kindness appreciated. The lack of an answer is just an answer to another question. Winter winds its madness around the brain like cold hands around a cup of tea. 

The kettle squeals. The day begins.

It was a brutal winter’s night. Fragile but brutal. There was ice dangling in the air, too cold to drip. Smoke curling from the only glow in that darkness – the lit end of a cigarette, because we were smoking the hurt away. We dismissed our concerns with a flick of fingers and a sentiment cribbed from ‘Cabaret’: divine decadence. The wave goodbye, over the shoulders, was even less than the efforts that the wisp of a silk scarf made. We were young then, careless with our hearts, and, so much worse, careless with the hearts of others. We did it to make it through the winter. If there was warmth to be found in that decadence – in the burn of a cocktail, in the embers of a cigarette, in the arms of a stranger – I don’t think I found it. The traces of it, the echoes of it, the hints and peeks and dusty remnants of it – they never added up to anything more than a want or a wish, and as much as I wanted them to come together in something of substance, they disappeared like the smoke from my mouth, all too quickly melting into whatever formed the black night air of that winter. 

Who better than Marianne Faithfull to give voice and music to such a night? Who better to give voice to such a winter?

In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, I would visit my friends at Cornell. Suzie was a fellow cynic when it came to love, perhaps even more acerbic at times than me. My broken heart’s club wasn’t assembled because the men fucked us over – it’s because the men never fucked us at all. Not the kind of fucking that was on my wish list. I wanted it all – and the men I knew then could only provide bits and pieces of it. 

And so that winter was populated by the boozy, smoky nights where we found solace in approximating the divine decadence of someone like Sally Bowles – a creature as lost as we often felt, encased in her tattered fashion and solitary style. I listened to Marianne Faithfull, whose voice was the embodiment of smoke itself, and the desperation of winter.

Fall burned in a way that winter never would. 

It is understood that we are only just now seeing the light from stars that may have been extinguished or imploded (or whatever happens when a star dies) years after the fact. Is that comforting or disturbing? I can’t quite decide. It’s certainly a bit of a mind-fuck when it comes to time and perception and the purpose or pointlessness of our tiny place in the universe. 

A similar sense of displacement and fuckery is at work when I find myself on the verge of sleep and wake, suspended in that dream-like bardo of worlds where what is real blends confusingly with what is past, what may have never come to pass, and what has yet to come to pass. Ghosts haunt that borderline realm – the ghosts of time: past, present and future – like some Ebenezer Scrooge parable. 

Long ago, and oh, so far away
I fell in love with you before the second show
Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear
But you’re not really here, it’s just the radio

Don’t you remember, you told me you loved me baby?
You said you’d be coming back this way again, baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh baby
I love you, I really do

This haunting cover of ‘Superstar’ by The Carpenters gives me similar pause, an echo of the original that I posted about earlier. The song somehow becomes even more evocative in this version, a hazy visage drained of color like dreams or memories, and if the first post was one of youthful clarity, this one feels fuzzy and messy and the result of all my time on earth. 

Loneliness is such a sad affair
And I can hardly wait to be with you again
What to say, to make you come again? (Ooh, baby)
Come back to me again (Ooh, baby)
And play your sad guitar

For almost half a century, I’ve looked up at the same stars – the light from thousands of years ago. While my body aches and creaks and says so much time has passed, in relation to the stars this is merely a blip in the story of the universe. It lends all of us a certain humility, and humility will always be one of the most beautiful features of any human being. Too many of us (including myself too much of the time) forget to access or exhibit that at key moments – and every moment can be key when it comes to humility. At so many points, just a little dose of humility could have changed the course of history – personally and universally. When you think of how small we really are in the grand multi-dimensional scheme of time and space, it is gorgeously humbling. 

Don’t you remember, you told me you loved me baby?
You said you’d be coming back this way again, baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh baby
I love you, I really do

A piece of music has the power to paint its own pictures, just as much as a book or a play or a fable. Sometimes it can create more than a painting or a sculpture; those are set and stationary, whereas music is more malleable in its images. Such is the case with this magnificent work by Kayhan Kalhor – ‘Blue As The Turquoise Night of Neyshabur’ – here performed by Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble. The stories that may be spun from hearing it run through the mind along myriad paths, each one slightly different, taking new turns and twists depending on the listener. It begins in a calm if slightly mysterious and tense tone, before gradually unfurling into a rollicking adventure. 

Maybe it’s a love story, with all the tumult and passion of a first kiss. Maybe it’s a realization – a mystery slowly solved over the course of its fifteen minutes. Maybe it’s a journey, a trip we have taken to a new place, a new city, a new country. Maybe it’s a party, from the anticipatory preparation through the tense starting minutes to the bombastic climax when all the guests have assembled and the state of happy camaraderie crests in loud laughter and the majesty of merriment. 

Listening to this on a dark January night when all that lay ahead were more dark January nights, I felt the gentle and insistent tug of art and beauty, the tantalizing wisp of imagination and inspiration, the call of some distant muse or siren. It was a tempting invitation to travel from the comforts of a conversation couch to any number of far-off lands and worlds. Why limit our experiences to what we can physically achieve when the body is so bound by time and place?

And so I listen to this piece of music, not looking up its genesis or background, not wanting to be influenced or nudged into something for the first few times I experience it. I want it to make its own way, choose its own adventure, conjure its own castles of creation. Make its own memory from a pile of mental rubble. My wrists ache, my knees are sore, my eyes are failing by the minute – the body begins the downward slope. The brain, such as it ever was, remains mostly intact – and the imagination, my one shining strength in a world of largely unimaginative comrades, is still sharply honed. It’s kept me going for all these 47 years, and it pushes me forward on this turquoise night, when I hear music that makes me feel like I can fly… 

The sky clock ticked to an early descent of darkness. Late December worked like that. In the air hung the threat of snow and burial – a promise of peace and disappearance. 

The first burn of love gets a bad rap. Like the first anything, it’s not always as bad as we make it out to be. At least, that’s what I told myself. If it was a lie, it was a lie of protection, of self-preservation. It was a lie to save a life. The burns that came after were more intense, more cutting, more dangerous. Far from making me stronger, that first burn merely revealed what the pain was like; subsequent injuries would not be lessened by any sort of numbing effect – they would mount and multiply and murder more than once. “That which does not kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger – it just nearly kills you,” or something like that. And in our weakened state, when the heart wants what it wants, we do foolish things. If we happen to be the object of desire, we often act just as foolishly – sometimes more-so, true power being afforded so rarely in life. And being so admired places one squarely in a position of power, whether admitted, acknowledged, or ignored. True power stems largely from love. But we’re not supposed to say such things. That would eliminate the sentiment of it. That would extract the magic. That would mean we’re all mostly hollow.

LOVE IS A BURNING THING

AND IT MAKES A FIERY RING

BOUND BY WILD DESIRE

I FELL INTO A RING OF FIRE

Victims of love get more play than victors. Their story… ok, our story, is usually more exciting – and certainly more interesting unless you’re one of the parties involved. When I think back to some of my earlier adventures in romance, particularly the unrequited kind (and of those there were many) my mind recoils in a mixture of horror, hilarity, and hubris. How one young man could be so hysterically stupid and at the same time so full of himself still boggles my mind – and somehow I knew exactly what I was doing, even as I knew I shouldn’t be doing it. Self-awareness doesn’t necessarily equate to self-understanding. Only in the understanding of motive and impetus does one find healing and the ability to truly let go and move on. I could not know that then, and so I burned…

I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE

I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER

AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS

THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE

Burning demands more of a soundtrack than the typical crackling of a quaint fireplace. A true burn must roar, consuming all the oxygen in its path. It should be the sound of suffocation. Utter annihilation. Or in the case of this song, whereby the burn is mostly silent, the sound of something evil. 

The music here begins in slow, deliberately diabolical fashion. Sinister elegance. Innocent love song taken to a level of denigration and denial. Aural defiance. From the wreckage comes the wrecker ~ wreaker of havoc and destroyer of innocence ~ and when survival becomes the offense, the surest way of saving the heart is to go on the attack. Reverse the hunt. 

It’s music that begins insidiously – start it again and listen to the beginning. It doesn’t bash you over the head, it doesn’t instantly demand submission. I’ve tried that, and very rarely did it work; when it did, it never ensnared anyone worth ensnaring. No, this version of the song starts off slowly. It is an entrance of dramatic import – the kind of entrance that someone earns from a life of loving the hard way. It is the entrance of a poet and an arsonist ~ the entrance of someone who’s learned how to burn. 

THE TASTE OF LOVE IS SWEET

WHEN HEARTS LIKE OURS MEET

I FELL FOR YOU LIKE A CHILD

OH, BUT THE FIRE WENT WILD

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by fire. I’d play with matches and magnifying glasses, burning spent pine needles and following their hisses and little explosions. Some say it’s an early sign of serial killers or psychotics. I’d watch the trails of smoke left by discarded cigarettes in the ashtray at the entrance to OTB, when Dad would bring my brother and me there when Mom was at night school. Entranced by the way the smoke curled and dissipated, we’d go home reeking of it on our clothes and hair.

Candles held an allure that was as frightening as it was beautiful – and I still remember the shiver of dread I felt when the electricity was out one night, and we were sitting in the family room in candlelight. My brother shifted the table so that one of the candles started to fall off. Not knowing a thing about fire, I jumped up and grabbed it, certain that had it hit the carpet the whole house would have gone up in a split second, devouring all of us before we could even attempt to flee. Such was my misunderstanding of how fire worked.

A similar misunderstanding occurred when I fell in love the first few times. I always thought it was going to be forever, and I always thought it was going to be easy and perfect. If it involved bending or changing or compromise of any kind, it wasn’t to be. I ended a couple of romances that way. More often than not, however, others ended them for me. And a few times, others wouldn’t even let the spark start a fire. 

But oh how I could strike that spark…

I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE

I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER

AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS

THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE