Showing posts with label damien rice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label damien rice. Show all posts

9.18.2012

things I like this week (month), vol. 35, pt.2

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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A really lovely example of musicality.

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 From a friend's facebook.

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An art joke, a pop culture reference, and a social commentary all in one. I'd wear it. 

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For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
 - Ernest Hemingway, Nobel speech

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 Currently my favorite blues video.

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Spain, 1950, from the Sart's vintage reader submissions.

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Found via my friend Elise's new blog. Her commentary is good, so I won't elaborate, but I do love me some Otis Redding. And songs you can blues to.

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I love the look on her face. Tango, at its best, is something like a twelve minute long vertical cuddle to music. 

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I am fascinated by this picture. I didn't like it at first, but the more I look at it, the more details I find that I enjoy - the iPhones face down on the blanket; six figures but no faces, which feels almost like what she's taking a picture of is not the people but the space between them; the incongruous stuffed animals beside the reclining girl who looks so relaxed as to be sleeping.

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I love Like the Vodka for her humor, but she's a beautiful writer, too, and this post about the beach really resonates:

. . . like the distant roar deep within a conch shell pressed to your ear, my need to be near the ocean is muffled but omnipresent. I developed a fantasy around the age of nine or so that involved me as a grown-up, living alone by the sea.  Whenever I had trouble sleeping, I’d conjur a very specific image of where I lived and what I was doing to help me drift off. There was a cottage on stilts right on the beach, shelves and shelves of books, usually a dog but interestingly — no husband or kids. Very Gift from the Sea, years before I had actually read it. In my fantasy it was always cold and dark but I was tucked snugly away in the little house, wrapped in a white fisherman’s sweater at a desk by a window overlooking the moonlit beach. In my fantasy I was an accomplished writer and I’d be composing something brilliant on a typewriter. A manual typewriter. This was a mid-’70s fantasy, after all.

I still summon that image on nights when I can’t fall asleep, although some important details have changed. There’s room now for a husband and son, and I’ve traded up to a laptop. But outside the window of the little cottage the moon still shines bright and cold on the infinite water.

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I have always loved this description, accurate or no. (Scans from here). 

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Laura does not only make pictures, she makes good pictures.

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The instrumental before and after the main part of the song is wonderful.

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4.23.2012

damien rice

A friend of mine last week shared some of the music that had been very influential in her formative years (Sisters of Mercy, if anyone's interested), and then asked what song or artist had defined me in some way.

The answer is, of course, Damien Rice, he of the lilting harmonies and cellos and shadowy lyrics. The song I played for her was "Amie," off his first album.



(and because lyrics are important, I will save you the trouble of Googling)

Nothing unusual, nothing strange
Close to nothing at all
The same old scenario, the same old rain
And there's no explosions here
Then something unusual, something strange
Comes from nothing at all
I saw a spaceship fly by your window
Did you see it disappear?

Amie come sit on my wall

And read me the story of O
And tell it like you still believe
That the end of the century
Brings a change for you and me
Nothing unusual, nothing's changed
Just a little older that's all
You know when you've found it,
There's something I've learned
'Cause you feel it when they take it away

Something unusual, something strange

Comes from nothing at all
But I'm not a miracle
And you're not a saint
Just another soldier
On the road to nowhere

Amie come sit on my wall

And read me the story of O
And tell it like you still believe
That the end of the century
Brings a change for you and me


The next one, "The Professor and La Fille Danse," is one of my favorites. I think he released it on an LP, but it was never on an album. This version happens to be the one I like, and it conveniently has the lyrics built into the video:




The french at the end translates to something like:

The girl dances 
when she plays with me 
and I think that I love her sometimes 
the silence does not dare
when we are together
put the words to sleep 

And here's something off his sophomore release.



Woke up and for the first time the animals were gone
It's left this house empty now, not sure if I belong
Yesterday you asked me to write you a pleasant song
I'll do my best now, but you've been gone for so long

The window's open now and the winter settles in
We'll call it Christmas when the adverts begin
I love your depression and I love your double chin
I love almost everything that you bring to this offering

Oh I know that I left you in places of despair
Oh I know that I love you, so please throw down your hair
At night I trip without you, and hope I don't wake up
'Cause waking up without you is like drinking from an empty cup

Woke up and for the first time the animals were gone
Our clocks are ticking now so before our time is gone
We could get a house and some boxes on the lawn
We could make babies and accidental songs

I know I've been a liar and I know I've been a fool
I hope we didn't break yet, but I'm glad we broke the rules
My cave is deep now, yet your light is shining through
I cover my eyes, still all I see is you

Oh I know that I left you in places of despair
Oh I know that I love you, so please throw down your hair
At night I trip without you, and hope I don't wake up
'Cause waking up without you is like drinking from an empty cup


I have found him appropriate for all times and seasons, but especially so, of late.

9.19.2010

the concert

Sitting in a darkened audience, watching
a man
in a single shaft of light
cradling a guitar
and a broken voice.

Incredible,
the duet of disparate time-lines
—what was, what could have been—
on the road behind the concert house
three hours later:
two dark, star-lined highways
that crossed in momentary harmony,
thrumming through each other
before departing softly into the night.