Gratitude Monday: Healing sounds

Writing yesterday’s post got me thinking about the healing properties of music.

The thing about music—especially in the Age of the Interwebs—is that it’s easy to acquire. A couple of clicks on a streaming site and a pair of earbuds, and you can be immersed in whatever type of music feeds your soul at any particular moment, whether it’s Jay Z or Prokofiev.

But also, as shown in this NPR story, creating music is a way for the bereaved and the broken to share their pain, and thereby mitigate it. When his six-year-old daughter Ana was killed two years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School, jazz musician Jimmy Greene was devastated. It took him months to be able to face any sort of music, which was one of Ana’s great joys. But eventually he built an album around his daughter’s memory, Beautiful Life.

One of the cuts is Greene’s take on “Maybe”, one of Ana’s favorite songs, from the musical Annie. Greene’s soprano sax approximates his daughter’s voice beautifully.

You should listen to it.

Songs of joy

I’ve been doing some thinking about joy recently. Which coincides nicely with this being Gaudete Sunday in the season of Advent.

There are many seasonal songs related to joy; one of my favorites is “Gaudete”, which dates well back into Renaissance times or beyond. The streaming of the polyphonies into and around each other makes me think of a flowing river, especially when sung a capella.

My favorite version is by Mediaevel Baebes. There’s something about the purity of all women’s voices to evoke the sense of joy for me.

Here are the refrain and first verse, in Latin and English, to get you started.

Gaudete, gaudete! Christus est natus

Ex Maria virgine, gaudete!

Tempus adest gratiæ

Hoc quod optabamus,

Carmina lætitiæ

Devote reddamus.

Rejoice, rejoice! Christ is born

Of the Virgin Mary – rejoice!

The time of grace has come—

what we have wished for,

songs of joy

Let us give back faithfully.

Here’s to joy—today and every day.

Lost in translation

A friend of mine has one of those Advent calendars where each day you open one small present. She posts them on Facebook, and I love “watching” each day. There have been slippers, gloves, little things that I’m not sure of. But all very entertaining.

She posts these discoveries in Danish. Well, she is Danish, so that seems fair enough. Mostly I can figure out what each thing is because it looks like slippers or gloves and whatnot. But the other day, I clicked on “translate” to see if my guess was right.

Here’s what Bing (Facebook's default translation application) gave me:

In fairness, Google Translate only did marginally better:

So, #webfail

Done for love

Further to my posts about my friend Dick, the Washington Post (on page A-1) has featured him in a piece on holiday productions that are truly amateur. As in “done for love”.

I take issue with the notion of Dick being characterized as a bureaucrat, but I suppose the headline writers were going for alliteration.

Anyway, listen to his beautiful voice and consider how lucky I am that he’s a friend.

On gossamer wings

Here’s something I just love: IKEA sells fairy wings.

And for only $4.99.

I wonder a bit about the “encourages role playing” part. But I’m not going to go there.

I also take a dim view of their notion of “assorted colors”, by which they mean “white” and “pink”. Why no blue fairy wings? Or green or yellow ones? Or mauve? Mauve fairy wings would be totally def.

I wish I’d known about this before I went to all the trouble to make eight types of candy for Christmas gifts. Because fairy wings really would have surprised people.

Well, but there still may be time for you to avail yourselves of these great fashion items. For whatever role you want to play.

Working it out for yourself

A while ago I had occasion to talk with someone who worked for a number of years with Warren Clarke on the BBC Dalziel & Pascoe series. Like so many others in the published tributes, he spoke of Clarke’s generosity as an actor and a human.

He described Clarke’s ability as innate; he didn’t need to go to drama school, he made use of his natural intuitive skill. “Warren never trained; he just worked it out for himself.”

But here’s the part that really struck home for me. My friend said, “He used to say to me in the early days, ’Don’t do what I do, do your own thing. What I do will only work for me.’”

Well—ain’t that the truth? And not just about acting. People get so wound up looking for the [one] template for the perfect [insert aspect of career/life here; or—hell—the whole of life itself] into which they can fit themselves and have it all sorted. But one size does not, in fact, fit all.

Or even, as Clarke pointed out, two.

And all those extruders of all those ten/five/seventeen-steps-everyone-must-follow-to-achieve-success programs and books aren’t a patch on one Lancashire lad who left school at age 15 and not only made a successful career and life, but also achieved wisdom. 

(And I'm so lucky to have got this from him, at a distance.)

You walk your own path, sunshine. So you work it out for yourself. And don’t worry that you’re not seeing the same things as everyone else.

Rum-pum-pum-pum

Okay, I may have moved up the loathing spectrum on “The Little Drummer Boy.”

My long-held conviction has always been that it is not possible to sing that piece without sounding drunk (yes, even children’s choirs do); it just has a tempo and melody that sound like sots hanging on to bar stools at closing time.

(The corollary to this is that you really want to be well and truly lit before listening to it, because otherwise it’s just too painful.)

However, in the past few days I’ve come across a couple of renditions that have opened my eyes, and possibly my ears, to the notion that LDB might have…possibilities.

I shared the reimagined version with you last week, the one that might possibly count as dog abuse. But yesterday I came across this one, with Christopher Lee singing. Singing Heavy Metal:

Yes, obviously, I am not making this up. Dracula-Saruman just lets it rip in a way that you won’t believe until you hear it. Maybe not even then.

You’re welcome.

Libros de Buenos Aires

A friend of mine just back from a cruise of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, sent me this photo of a bookshop in Buenos Aires, because he knows first hand about the relationship between books and me:

He referred to it as “bookstore Valhalla”.

And yes—I want to go there.

It’s called El Ateneo, and was for many years a theatre with a seating capacity of more than 1000.

I’m pretty sure my friend would never have dared to go there if I were in tow, as I’d still be there, wandering through the shelves and stacking up a pile of purchases. Back when we were colleagues at Hughes Aircraft Company, he and another co-worker helped me relocate about 25 cartons of books from Pasadena to Van Nuys, using my father’s pickup truck as transport. (I leave other things to movers, but I always pack and sometimes move the books myself.)

After about his tenth carton, the third man asked, “Why’d you have to be such a literate woman?” But in fairness, they did finish the job without further stick, and I gave them a terrific lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place that had the most amazing burritos. Not even the Third Man could finish his.

Anyhow, I guess El Ateneo goes onto my bucket list. Because…damn.

Gratitude Monday: Cold toes & warm wine

Today I’m grateful that the other day I found Glühwein at World Market, and I bought a bottle.

It might seem a little petty to be giving thanks for something like that, but Glühwein to me means Christkindlmärkte—Christmas markets in Germany.

Walking around among stalls of ornaments, confections, toys and all manner of beguiling wares, in weather so cold you think your toes have turned to chunks of ice.

Parents and children, who aren’t quite sure what to make of it all. The air awash with Christmas music live or piped.

And the stalls that sell Glühwein, mit oder ohne Schnapps. I’m a fourth-generation Californian, so I don’t really do cold. Ergo I occasionally had my Glühwein mit Schnapps. And I am here to tell you that it’s one of the finer things civilization has to offer on a freezing December evening.

I’ve been to the markets in Köln, Dresden, Augsburg, Nürnberg, München and Berchtesgaden. Köln had at least three major markets and Nürenberg’s was a fairy land. Even in Dresden—which I visited barely ten years after the fall of Communism and was still half-buried in socialist-modernist concrete block buildings—the market made you forget your depressing surroundings, and at night you couldn’t seem them at all.

Here’s one of my shining memories, from the fair at Augsburg. I came across this young lad manning the stall, which as you can see is stacked with boxes of blown glass ornaments. He saw me squirreling with my camera, and by the time I got it up to take the shot, he’d put the Santa hat on. Just for me.

Every sip of hot Glühwein brings back all those memories. And I’m grateful to have had those experiences, to have been able to go to those markets. And I hope to go to more.

Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Let me start this out by promising you that I’m hard-put to find a Christmas song better geared to make me start banging my head against the wall than “Little Drummer Boy.”

I mean—that “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” jobber is pretty sick-making. But for shear wild-eyed get-me-outta-here, shoot-me-now mania, “Drummer Boy” is my primordial nightmare.

However, I’m almost rethinking my stance on this one, because:

If you can watch this video without projectile snorting whatever you might be in the process of drinking, you are one Scroogy dude.

This is so much better than the David Bowie/Bing Crosby version, which still takes high honors for WTF-iness and does make a great icebreaker if the punch at your Christmas party has gone a little flat.

But now, I’m never going to be able to hear any version of this lugubrious piece without picturing those patient dogs at the keyboards, bongos and cello, playing their, er, parts like they know there will be bowlfuls of treats once they get those silly outfits off.

Also—having the actual drummer boy wearing a Chanukah tee shirt and playing like Animal in the Muppets’ band just changes the whole sensibility of the thing.

Somebody needs to write a dissertation on this.