Women's voices: It's hard at the end of the day

I’m not going to get through a month of Voices without Nina Simone. I’ve been in her thrall for maybe 20 years. That voice, that delivery; it’s just soul-gripping.

The song I’m sharing is Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman”, because no one captures the spirit of that piece like Simone. She had the life to do it justice.

There’s also a recording of her singing it in concert late in her life, which you might want to visit to see how she commanded the material even in ill-health. It’s extraordinary.

(And if you want to put your viscera through it, listen to her cover of “Strange Fruit”.)

My second Voice today is Sarah McLachlan. Polar opposite to Simone in many respects—ethereal, high and thready tone, a northern perspective; yet she digs into life in pretty much the same way as Simone. Neither of them takes any prisoners.

I like that.

One of my favorites is “Angel”. If you can divorce your sensibilities from the SPCA commercials that McLachlan did, and listen to it, it’s about as dark a picture of despair as they come. (Personally, when I heard the music for that ad, I either muted or walked out of the room.)

Frankly, I wonder exactly what the angel might be, but I don’t ask too many questions, since I often find myself in that dark, cold hotel room.

Now, Voyager

Ah, Voyager has left the building.

Yesterday NASA confirmed that the unmanned probe called Voyager 1, launched 36 years ago this month, has boldly gone where nothing from this planet has gone before. We’re pretty sure.

It’s doing a good job; but so is its sister craft. Voyager 2, is also still soldiering on. And I have a personal stake in V2.

Back in 1977 I was working for the Pasadena Star-News; I’d started as an intern at the beginning of the summer (just before my junior year in college), but when a couple of their reporters were invalided out, they brought me back as staff writer. Getting money to write stories every day. I thought I’d been hauled straight into heaven without all that pesky business of dying first.

They put me on General Assignment, with an emphasis on features, because it was always the human side of the stories that interested me. And I have a gift for it.

But on 20 August 1977, for some reason, the guy who reported the science beat wasn’t available to get out to Jet Propulsion Lab to cover the launch of Voyager 2 (which was sent up a couple of weeks before Voyager 1, but on a slower trajectory). So they sent me, one of my last assignments before the Fall semester started.

I didn't really know anything about the program, had never been to JPL, so I focused on what I do best: the people.

What I found was a bunch of mostly men (though a few women), in short-sleeved shirts, as high as it’s possible to be in a strict no-booze/no-drugs work environment. And before the days of energy-drinks. They were whooping and wheeing, just buzzing around the room like bees on supercharged pollen.

And what I remember was one of them explaining to me that what the whole Voyager program was “like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle with the picture side down and you’re not sure you have all the pieces.” But they were thoroughly and completely dedicated to putting that sucker together and figuring out what to do with the picture that emerged.

I often thought of that when I watched Space Shuttle launches (and disasters). It’s a tremendous leap of faith to embark on projects like that.

Speed well, Voyager.

Women's voices: Days like this

Okay, so I pointed out the blindingly obvious yesterday—stuff happens in life. And then happens again. And rinse and repeat.

Today being a Friday the Thirteenth, we might want to consider this. 

And naturally the Voices have it covered.

One of the classics in this regard has to be “Mama Said”, and the classic rendition of it is by The Shirelles, one of the classic girl-groups from the 60s.

I can’t tell you how many times after bizarre conference calls or when projects took a turn for the worse my only consolation has been to imagine the refrain from this song. When it gets really bad, I actually start singing it.

And I love The Shirelles; their harmonies are just so…girl-groupy. They did a bang-up cover of Carole King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”, and I vaguely remember “Soldier Boy” from the (gasp) AM radio days. If you’ve not met them, haul yourself over to YouTube and wallow.

On the subject of dealing with those Mama-said days, King wrote “Up on the Roof”, which I also offer today.

Yeah, this is a city song—not a lot of places I’ve lived had a roof you could even get up to, much less sit on for any length of time without serious health consequences. (Closest I ever got was my second escape attempt from the house I grew up in; age four, I climbed out the window of my bedroom and my mom had to haul me back in from the roof.)

But I like the idea of a time-out kind of place, whether it’s a roof, a park, a bar or a bathtub spiked with Japanese bath salts. We all need that sort of refuge, whatever the metaphor.

Women's voices: Waiting for the walking green

Life comes at you from all directions. It’s like doing the laundry: it just never stops. Even as you’re filling the washer with the last load of the week, you’re (probably) wearing clothes that are going to have to be washed. Unless you’re a frat boy.

So it’s just never done.

And the Voices find ways of coping with it.

I believe I first heard Kathy Mattea while I was in the UK. My sister used to send me home-made mix tapes of all kinds of different singers. Some were pretty good, some not so much. But the adventure was she never labeled them or included a play list. So I’d have to try to figure out what the song title might be and see if I could find out something about it on Google (pre-YouTube, you’ll note), or else write her via snailmail to ask.

“The 8^th song on the B side; maybe called “Close Your Eyes”? Who’s the guy singing it? And what’s it really called?”

I wasn’t going to know the artists, because she’s more country than I am. Reba? Martina? Who?

(But it turns out I am educable.)

Mattea’s “Come from the Heart” arrived that way. I loved her voice—there’s a warmth to it that permeates even the coldest day.

Since then I’ve seen the first three lines of the refrain passing around the Internet in the guise of some old saying. They were actually written by Richard Leigh and Susanna Clark. But they certainly resonate.

It’s hard to remember it when you realize that you’re smack in the midst of doing something remarkably stupid…in front of an audience. But it’s good advice anyhow, and Mattea obviously knows of what she sings.

My other slice of life for today comes from Joni Mitchell.

Dunno about you, but sometimes I have to plumb haul my drifting ass into cold, unwilling consciousness with the karmic equivalent of a Glock to my head. I just get so wrapped up in where I have to be and when and what I’m going to say when I get there and blah and blah and more unending unremitting blah.

But when you get that wrapped up in crap like that, you miss the treasures all around you.

That’s what Mitchell was pointing out in “For Free”—the guy playing clarinet beautifully, with no one on the street paying a lick of attention.

Thing is—I know for certain that where I’m going and when I have to be there and what I’m going to say when I get there don’t hold a candle to what’s going on right this moment right in front of me, or beside me, or just behind me. When you start walking down that brain-dead path, you miss the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra at the arts and wine festival.

Or Joshua Bell playing in a D.C. Metro station.

You don’t want to do that. At least, I don’t.

Watching bodies fall--self portrait in horror

Twitter isn’t completely full of crap; maybe just 97.3%.

But today the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten retweeted this photo taken by Time magazine’s International Picture Editor, Patrick Witty.

Witty was in the street on the morning of 11 September 2001 watching the horror at the World Trade Center. As the South Tower collapsed, he turned around and captured these extraordinary faces.

Weingarten commented, “Daring impulse to turn around and get the photo no one else would have.”

And Witty replied, “I turned around because I couldn’t bear watching bodies fall. It’s a self-portrait in many ways.”

And so it is.

Women's voices: Where in hell can you go

On the subject of standup women who live by the choices they make, you can’t make a clearer statement than Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

For those unwilling to fire up Google Translate, it means “I don’t regret a thing.” And the somewhat inexorable beat of her delivery underscores the message.

Besides—it’s Edith Piaf. A lesser woman would have regretted about 80% of what Piaf did during her lifetime. But that’s the whole point.

My second entry today comes from Natalie Merchant, who has one of the most compelling voices I’ve ever heard. You may recall her from 10,000 Maniacs.

Or possibly not.

My association with this song came a couple of weeks after I’d returned to Virginia from the UK; so six weeks after 9/11, one week after being officially laid off along with 6,599 of my closest colleagues. I was driving down Route 7, listening to NPR and heard Scott Simon interview Merchant about the album she’d completed on 9 September. Then she sang “Motherland” in the studio.

I felt as though someone had reached past my sternum and squeezed my heart, wringing out anguish and sorrow in great flowing streams. I kept driving until I got to the Tower Records store in Tysons Corner, and I bought the CD. If it had been vinyl, I’d probably have worn out the grooves by December.

It’s not possible for me to listen to this and not be transported back to that nightmarish time, when I made some world-class mistakes worthy of that mass grave in Arkansas.

Perhaps I’ll just play “Non, je ne regrette rien” one more time.

Women's voices: Pray for the heart & the nerve

Life is all about choices.

There is a Spanish proverb that goes: Take what you want, God said. And pay for it. These days it seems to me that people have fully bought into the first sentence, while never even hearing the second.

Observing folks in the workplace, in the news, on social media—I’ve noticed that there is increasingly an expectation that the choices people make come with automatic do-overs or delete options if they don’t turn out to have unfailingly positive results. I mean, I understand the desire to bury your mistakes—God knows I have enough of my own to fill a mass grave the size of Arkansas. But I think of all the effort these people put into denial, transference, blustering, finger-pointing, self-justification and moaning about their deprived childhoods…and I get flat worn out.

I purely admire the few, the proud, the ones who say, “Well, I certainly fucked that up,” apologize for the pain (not “inconvenience”) they’ve caused, check themselves for signs of hemorrhaging and figure out how not to repeat the mistake.

Generally speaking, they also do not tweet about it. Extra treble points for that.

So today the Voices are again about women with a strong sense of self, a quality I seem eternally in search of.

First off—my favorite sequence from The Blues Brothers. Yeah, you can have all the car crashes and missions from God you want; I’ll take Aretha Franklin singing “Think”, with those pink slippers on.

I really wish that I’d taken on board Franklin’s message about not taking shit from a man just because he’s smart, funny and good-looking back when I first saw the movie. I should definitely have applied it to the guy I saw the movie with.

Well, heigh-ho. The hemorrhaging stopped a while ago; but I’m just sayin’.

It’s a bit of a change of pace, but Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “The Moon and Saint Christopher” is heart-breaking. This is definitely the woman who takes her chances, but knows that being a stubborn woman comes at a price.

Mary Black’s cover of this was the first time I heard it, but most days I favor Carpenter’s, so that’s what I’m sharing today. But feel free to listen to Black and make your own choice.

Women's voices: I know where I'm not going

When it comes to setting boundaries and standing up for yourself, I can’t think of anyone who can do it better than Bonnie Raitt and Mary Chapin Carpenter. That’s from listening to the songs they write and the way they sing them.

Look—there are thousands of songs about being subsumed by love, and standing by your man, recovering from pain and blah-blah-blah. But women are way more than that. And Carpenter and Raitt are 24-karat exemplars of those who, well, look life in the face, cut the cards and play from either side. They also don’t spend a lot of time whining about the hand they were dealt.

I can’t tell you how much I admire that.

Whenever I feel my inner whiner sniveling out to the surface (which is way too often), I slap a cut of Carpenter’s “I Take My Chances” into my earbuds and I recover my senses. I’ve come to learn that I, too, have a core belief that safety is overrated. But I think she does a better job of not clinging to remorse or regret than I do.  

(I can’t find my favorite version of this on the Web. Desolée.)

And now we’ll hear Bonnie Raitt sing “I Will Not Be Broken”. Just listen to the way she delivers it.

Any questions? Didn't think so.

Gratitude Monday: The quality of rain

It’s easier to be grateful for what you’ve got, but today I’m remembering the beauty of rain, even though I’ve not seen it for months.

I love rain. Growing up in Southern California, you learn to appreciate it for its rarity and the relief it brings after weeks of dryness. (What I most recall is the cycle of the seven-year storm: we’d have very little rain for years, and then suddenly all the water in the world would drop on us, overwhelming the street drains. I recall driving down Foothill Boulevard in Monrovia during one of those storms; the tailpipe in my Toyota was underwater.)

I loved the weather on the East Coast—in Virginia, not only was there rain, there were thunderstorms! They scared the liver out of me at first; but I came to enjoy them.

(Although, okay—seems like Dominion Power pretty much lost the plot whenever there was a thunderstorm.)

And the varieties of rain: mist, sprinkles, showers, gully-washers. An entire vocabulary of rain. And it always cleared the air and left things clean.

(Except in the summer. Sometimes rain alleviates the choking feeling of humidity, but you know it’s only temporary. You’re stuck until September.)

I will confess that rain in London could sometimes be a bit much—grey, grimy streets; grey, grimy buildings; grey, grimy rain pissing down for days. And Seattle? Don’t even get me started.

But experiencing rain in all its infinite variety, listening to it against the windows, running through it, watching it bead on plants and puddle up on sidewalks and lawns—knowing there’s something different happening in the air out there, a change from relentless, unremitting bloody sunshine…

I’m so grateful that I’ve lived places where rain has been a part of my life. There are people in the Silicon Valley who’ve never lived anywhere else; what impoverished lives those must be.

Women's voices: Standing on their own two feet

Today’s Voices are about setting and honoring boundaries. Women tend to have difficulties with this, and knowing where I need to draw the lines has always been a rather precarious balancing act for me. I’m still trying to figure out how to keep from dropping the plates.

It’s always something, isn’t it?

Because the concept of setting boundaries, making choices and other life management skills is broad, I’m filling the week with Voices singing about the various aspects.

To kick off, let’s go to one of the earlier declarations of emancipation (at least in my memory), “You Don’t Own Me.” Last year, Lesley Gore lent her 1964 cover of it to a PSA urging women to vote for candidates who aren’t stuck in 15^th Century views of female bodies as male property in one form or another. The video features a number of young women in the fashion and entertainment industries lip-synching to Gore’s music.

But the version I’m sharing today is from The First Wives Club, the 1996 don’t-get-mad-get-even film. (Or, as Ivana Trump says memorably toward the end, “Don’t get mad, get everything!”) I love this movie; it’s an example of 1990s screwball comedy—fast pace, witty dialogue, great clothes, plastic surgery.

And, of course, a happy ending.

Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton carry it off with the aplomb you’d have expected from Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard and Katharine Hepburn. The material might not have been up to 1930s Preston Sturges standards, but it’s serviceable. And Maggie Smith (as close as we get to Kate Hepburn these days) is smashing as Gunilla Garson Goldberg, a Manhattan version of Wallis Simpson; I can pretty much watch Smith doing anything on the screen.

The soundtrack also includes a great version of “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves,” featuring Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox, over a montage of the First Wives, well, doing exactly that. So I’ll toss a clip of that in as an extra added bonus for you. (It’s great for setting the pace for a cardio workout, too.) It's a growly, earthy anthem about another aspect of setting boundaries.

Thinking about standing on their own two feet takes me back to the movie. I purely admire the fact that they are strutting down that street and not falling off those heels.