THE OCCASIONAL RANTINGS OF AN AGING LIBERAL CHRISTIAN ON HIS FAITH, HIS CHURCH (EPISCOPAL), POLITICS, ART, FOOD, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AND OTHER MOMENTARY INDULGENCES.
I’ve been hooked on Marianne Faithful’s new album. Easy Come, Easy Go, for the soundtrack of my morning walk. Here’s “How Many Worlds,” by Brian Eno.
I also really adore the version of, Oh Baby, Baby by Marianne and Anthony Hegarty of Anthony and the Johnsons. Her voice is probably not to everyone’s liking but if it is to yours, buy the album.
And, for those too young to remember Marianne, here’s a taste of the early Marianne Faithful (written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Andrew Oldham) from the soundtrack of my youth.
My day has gotten off to a screwy start as my Internet connection was down when I woke up and just now came back on. I was planning on taking care of some online stuff (especially finishing taxes) so this screwed everything up. So, I probably won’t have much time to do much blogging today. Besides, nothing really seems to be getting under my skin, or making me exceeding excited.
In the meantime, I leave you with a video by my friend, LA singer song-writer, Claire Holley.
Also, FYI, Image Journal has just named Claire “Artist of the Month,” saying that she:
writes songs that are literary, playful, meditative, and earthy. A native of Mississippi, she owes much to the southern tradition of storytelling, and just as much to the southern tradition of charm, which is to say of knowing how much is too much and how much is enough, of finding just the right blend of mystery and brass, seductiveness and self-deprecation. With spare, delicate arrangements and a frank, lovely, and versatile sound, she sings deceptively simple songs about love, motherhood, and family life. Hers is a value for the ordinary pleasures as well as the profound questions. Both as a lyricist and a singer, Holley is an exemplar of the value of not overdoing it. Though gifted with a mighty voice, she uses it with restraint and without affectation, and her lyrics seem so effortless at first that you can almost miss their weight. Many of her original songs sound like they might be traditionals, with the stripped-down diction of the oldest American music and the beauty of Shaker furniture, but all bear Holley’s distinct stamp: a spareness that is at times eerie, at times sweet, always full of grace.
Barry Taylor points his readers to a song, by Nick Cave, that I thought I’d share with you as it touched me this morning. (And, don’t think I don’t know that posting this right after the video below makes me seem a bit schizophrenic.)
I’ve been busy cooking and not taking much time to read my normal reading so I’m not into posting much to the blog. I will however leave you to listen and watch one of my favorites, Joan Osborne, sing a song from my long lost youth. I love her roughness and her growl.
Randall Balmer on The Daily Show, about God in the White House. (Click on the Randall Balmer segment in the “Coming Up Next” box.
Paul Krugman on the impact of the centrist cuts in the stimulus plan. 600,000 fewer employed Americans. DAMN! I could be one of them.
I know this is not the point of this NY Times story, but I thought it was interesting (in a weird sort of way) that Mike Tyson was once married to the sister of Michael Steele, the new GOP head.
SNL’s Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi press conference. Sometimes we have to laugh at ourselves. “Maybe if we spent more money on education and sex ed the next generations won’t have so many stupid people…”
Remember when, not too long ago, Barack Hussein Obama was unelectable. (Or so said many politicians and pundits.) Well, in less than 18 hours it will be PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! I am so proud to be an American today.
From the The Times of London comes this commentary on the spiritual significance one of my favorite songs, Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen, via Ruth Gledhill’s blog. (There is a great article Alan Franks wrote about Cohen that first appeared in The Times Magazine (of London) in October 2001.)
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah never set out to be a rock song, any more than its 74-year-old author set out to be a rock singer. But both have acquired that label by virtue of their sheer popularity and transcendence over the years.
It’s not as new as people think, having been released on a 1984 album. The title of that collection Various Positions, should alert the listener to Cohen’s trademark ambiguities. He is manifestly a man of faith, having spent several years in the Buddhist community of the remote Mount Baldy in California. But then he is just as publicly a man of the flesh and its weaknesses, with all those half-sung, half-groaned reports from the front line of love-making.
Still, if the agonies and ecstasies of such human duality were good enough for a seventeenth century dean of St. Pauls, John Donne, they will do very nicely for contemporary troubadours.
It is tempting to say that Hallelujah has become as successful as it has because it articulates some spiritual yearning without being too specific. It won’t embarrass the secular singer or listener by alligning them with an uncool movement. It does what the title prepares you for – repeats the word, which is taken from the Hebrew for Praise The Lord, again and again.
But praise Him/Her/It for what? Well, nothing and everything. Cohen is a poet as well as a rock singer, remember, and in both these guises he has the absolute right, some would say duty, not to give his meaning away cheaply.
He boiled down some eighty possible verses into its present form of five-maximum; first we’ve got David playing a secret chord, then a picture of domestic surrender, then a typical piece of Cohenite bathos with “I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch / love is not a victory march / it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”
Then this fabulous fusion of his sacred and profane modes: “..remember when I moved in you / the holy dove was moving too / And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.” Ridiculous to ask what it’s about because it doesn’t matter, and it will strike different chords in different people. Literally so; part of its allure for musicians has to be its early deconstruction of the very chord sequence on which its melody is rising: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor Fall, the major lift…”
No wonder so many have had a crack at it, from Jeff Buckley to Katherine Jenkins.
All seem to have a deeply personal connection with it, and a couple even pay it the risky compliment of tampering: Rufus Wainwright sings holy dark instead of holy dove, and Alison Crowe sings holy ghost.
Around the time he wrote it, one of his few peers, also Jewish, said Cohen seemed to have taken to writing hymns. Perhaps it took one to know one, for the observation was Bob Dylan’s. Nearly a quarter of a century on it has evolved into that contradictory hybrid of secular hymn.
This puts it in a tradition that runs, at random, from Blake/Parry’s Jerusalem, through Sir Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s You’ll Never Walk Alone to The Beatles’ Let It Be, not to mention a couple by Dylan himself. Numinous is the overworked word that describes their effect. Wherever they came from, they far outran their commercial dreams, and probably their artistic ones as well. Cohen doesn’t do happy endings, but what a good late twist that this number should have restored the pension fund that was pilfered by an accountant.
I’ve been away from the world (and the Internet) for a while, working on some things including getting back to volunteering at my church’s homeless meal on Mondays. Today was Thanksgiving and we carved 26 turkeys. So, all I have time is to post some music by my friend, and fellow All Saint’s parishioner, Claire Holley.
MICAH 6:8
But he's already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It's quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, And don't take yourself too seriously—take God seriously.
Clyde
Recent Comments