Picture for One Moment

Street Musicians

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Happy Hour Friday

Time to begin making dessert - peach crumble with this year's first local peaches.  Have a great weekend. :-)

Love and all Groovy Stuff,
Gina

Joni Mitchell Meets William Butler Yeats

Note: I revised and corrected (so many embarrassing mistakes!) this post from 2008 a bit and I'm republishing it for National Poetry Month.

sketch by John Singer Sargent

 I'm a huge Joni Mitchell fan. Being a teen in the mid-seventies, my favorite of Joni's music is not what was once categorized as folk, but her recordings since the mid-70's beginning with Hejira. From there I worked my way back to her folk beginnings. Even early on, Joni created a genre all of her own and remains to date an influence on countless songwriters, singers and musicians.

In this song, Mitchell takes the classic Yeats poem The Second Coming, slightly alters the words and writes a musical composition to it. My only complaint about Joni's version is that although she stayed fairly true to the original, she should have left it entirely as it was written. Others believe she shouldn't have touched it all. I'll let you decide.

(On a side note: Am I the only poetry nerd who thinks that Yeats was hot?  ;-)

 Slouching Toward Bethlehem from the CD Night Ride Home, 1991

Joni Mitchell

based on the poem by W.B. Yeats

 The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre*

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

*gyre -Yeats called each cycle of history a "gyre"--literally a circular or spiral turn. (He pronounced it with a hard "g.") He had a complicated system detailed in his book A Vision that proposed history as a series of 2,000 year eras, each of which begins and ends with some apocalyptic event in which the divine (in a Christian or some other form) inserts itself into human history resulting in cataclysmic historical and mythological consequences.

All You Fascists

 words by Woody Guthrie
1942


Billy Bragg and Wilco

I Was Here

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highlight for New Year's Eve

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highligh

Happy Birthday Ms. Georgia O'Keeffe

November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986

American Artist 

Blogging lite today, my friends...blogging light.  ;-) 


All the love,
Pagan Sphinx

Another Day Another Song

Chico Buarque

It loses a lot in translation but if you don't know Portuguese (and do know English) it gives you a sense of why Brasilian musicians were so frequently censored by the government.

 Father, take away from me this chalice
of wine tinted with blood!
How to drink this bitter drink
Inhale the pain, swallow the drudgery.
Even if the mouth is shut, the heart still remains
Silence in the city is not heard.
For what is it worth for me to be the son of the holy mother
It would be better that I were born to another
Another less dull reality
So many lies such brute force.

How hard it is to wake up silenced
If I hurt myself in the quiet of night
I desire to release an inhuman scream
Which would be a way to be heard
All of this silence makes me dizzy
Dazed, I remain attentive
In the expectation of, at any moment,
To see the monster of the lake emerge

From so much fat, the hog no longer walks
From so much use, the knife no longer cuts
How hard it is, father, to open the door
With this word stuck in my throat
This Homeric drunkenness in the world
What's the advantage of having good will?
Even if the heart is silenced, consciousness remains
Of all the drunkards downtown
Perhaps the world isn't that small
Nor is life a consummated fact
I desire to invent my own sin
I want to die from my own poison!
And disconnect my mind from yours
May my head lose your way of thinking
I want to sniff diesel fumes
And get intoxicated until I'm forgotten!

Another Day, Another Song (or two)

I have been overtaken by another Flower Power Moment

Melanie Safka

Ruby Tuesday

Not Much

Sorry, friends. I've been experiencing a lot of stress lately and I have very little to offer. Nothing to worry about...just workplace depression.  Entirely situational, though it does follow me wherever I go -  therein lies the problem.  :-)

Here is a song I like. That's all I have, for as long as it takes to ride this out.

Radio On - Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man

 This type of drama just wrecks me in a song.   ;-)

Very good, indeed-y.

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highlight & Blogging 'Round the Globe to...

 Today's Flowers: flowers and gardens from all over the globe!

thank you to my hosts

LUIZ SANTILLI JR. - DENISE IN VIRGINIA - LAERTE PUPO - VALKYRIEN

I've got tropical weather on the brain, that's for sure!

Pagan Spinx photo

 Caetano Veloso from A Tribute to Joni Mitchell

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highlight - Natalie Merchant - Sally Anne

 I loved this song when I first heard it by the excellent band The Horseflies. I was really excited that Natalie Merchant liked it enough to cover it a few years later. Her incredible voice more than does the song justice - it illuminates the story. Vague as it might be, when I hear this song, I imagine Jakarta and Argentina...

Joining Natalie on this Letterman performance is Horsefly members Judy Hyman on violin and at least one other member of the band, though I'm not sure which.

"The Horse Flies combine musical and lyrical quirkiness with beguiling wit and intelligence …  a melange of rock, folk, and minimalism … music that challenges the brain without sacrificing the groove."  (Chicago Tribune).

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highlight - Aimee Mann - I Should Have Known

Aimee Mann -- I Should've Known

Al | MySpace Video

Music for Sunday: Goodbye to Kate McGarrigle

 Kate McGarrigle (left) and her sister Anna chatted at the Monument National in September 2004 after a news conference announcing that the folk music duo were recipients of the Governor-General's Performing Arts Awards. Kate McGarrigle died Monday of cancer at age 63.

Photograph by:  JOHN MAHONEY, GAZETTE, FILE

Kate McGarrigle, one half of the McGarrigle Sisters, mother to singers Rufus and Martha Wainwright and supremely talented singer and songwriter from Canada, died on January 18 at the age of 63. Listen to the story on NPR.

 I loved her voice as soon as I heard it as a teen-ager in the mid-70's. So many of my favorite songs were written and performed by Kate and her sister Anna. Having lived in France and as a child, I loved the old French songs, too. It is amazing the love an artist can put into her songs. I think that love shielded Kate in her own world of music and passion for life. It was not about fame or fortune. She went unnoticed by the masses of people who buy records but some of us were lucky enough to discover and treasure her music. I know I will play those songs for my grandchildren.  

Music for Insomniacs - The Lemonheads - Into Your Arms

Music for Sunday

 This one goes out to Cloudia and her Comfort Spiral, out of Hawaii.  The band Poi Dog Pondering began in Hawaii and now out of Austin, Texas, it sounds like.  In the 90's, their debut album was on my top five favorites for whatever that year was. Yeah. The 90's are starting to sound like a long time ago!  :-)

Aloha, friend!

Music for Sunday - King of the Beats: Jack Kerouac

 Note to readers:  I have this all wrong!  The documentary that the featured song comes from is not King of the Beats; it's something else I'm not able to find quickly and I's got stuff to do! This will have to do.  In any event, at least the whole post is connected around Jack Kerouac, albeit loosely.
Sorry 'bout that.


 A song by Ben Gibbard (Deathcab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt).

If the end of the video clip were not cut off, the narrator would have gone on to say that this song is from the DVD documentary King of the Beats, about the life and work of author, poet and painter Jack Kerouac (1922-1969).
 

The link above will take you to the documentary in its entirety, I believe. It's slightly over an hour long but well worth it if you're a Jack Kerouac fan or if you have nothing better to do.  ;-)  I watched the whole thing not for lack of other things to do (which I have too many of) but because I like to learn the stories of creative people, particularly those with an immigrant background. Jack Kerouac was the son of French-Canadian immigrant parents and grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. But honestly, I started to read On the Road when I was in high school in the mid-seventies and I never finished it. He's on my list for Nova Scotia summer reading in 2010.

Happy Sunday

Love,

Pagan Sphinx

Music for Insomniacs - Monsters of Folk - Say Please

This sounds Lennon-esque to me. I heard it on WRSI, 93.9 FM out of Northampton, Massachusetts, on my way home from class the other night, took note of the time and went to the online playlist to find out who.

Independently owned for years and now owned by a bigger media company, 'RSI is still the best music in the valley and probably among the best "adult contemporary" stations in the country. Where else but Northampton does one hear the woman DJ talk about how she and her wife were celebrating their wedding anniversary? One of the many reasons I love being a Pioneer Valley Girl.   ;-)