To Cover or not to Cover

Sometimes covers are better than originals. Sometimes they completely ruin them. Sometimes they're not bad, but the strip the original of the magic it was written with.

Any thoughts on which one this is?

The National - About Today

I went and saw The National on Saturday night. They were performing at the Sydney Opera House forecourt as part of the Opera House's contemporary music program Music At The House. (check out their website - they have a cool graphic designer)

It was a pretty special night, with the Opera House and the Bridge lit up in lapis lazuli blue, the Sydney sandstone a warm yellow and the gentle eucalypts a swaying calm green in the warm summer breeze.   

I've seen The National before, and while this was not their best gig ever, they were solid.  This song was the highlight for me. Mainly because of the Aaron Dessner's gentle guitar riff and the simplicity of the lyrics.

Hey, are you awake
Yeah I'm right here
Well can I ask you
About today

How close am I
To losing you

Images by Vincent Moon, JM Goett, Gaspar Claus
Edit by Vincent Moon
Produced by Beggars Banquet

Paris, Guinguette Pirate, december 2005

laura veirs - the sleeper in the valley

And amazing song by Laura Viers - so gentle, so delicately layered. The words a translated from a well-known French poem by Arthur Rimbaud called Le Dormeur du Val:

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

Veir's English translation is not wholly loyal to the original, but it is just as moving:

In a green hollow where the river sings,
Tiny valley, bluebells ring.

There's a young soldier under the clouds,
His mouth is open, and the light rains down.

And the light rains down,
And the crows come round,
To the two red holes in his right side, oh
In his right side, oh.

Sleeping in the sun, hand on his breast
The nape of his neck bathed in
Blue watercress
He's just a kid and he never knew,
He would would be a sleeper in the valley so soon.

So soon, So soon,
And the crows, they swoon,
At the two red holes in his right side, oh

So soon, so soon,
And the crows, they swoon,
At the two red holes in his right side, oh
In his right side, oh.

As a side note - Rimbaud wrote this poem at the tender age of 17. By the time he turned 18, Rimbaud had moved to Paris where he'd lived a absynthe-fuelled existence with fellow french poet Paul Verlaine; lived in abject squalor in London, relying on the free heating, lighting, pens and ink of the British Museum to write; and survived being shot in the wrist by Verlaine in Brussels.  All of Rimbaud's poetry was written as a teenager and he gave up creative writing completely before he turned 20.  He travelled extensively for the remainder of his life, working as a stone quarry forman in Cyprus, and member of the Dutch Colonial Army in Indonesia and as an exporter of coffee and weapons from Yemen, before dying of cancer at the age of 37.

Elbow back at it - Fly Boy Blue and Lunette

Elbow have released two songs off their new album, The Take Off and Landing of Everything.

I have posted this song primarily just for the way he sings the following phrase:

But there isn't words yet for the comfort I get from the gentle lunette of the top of the nape of your neck that I wake to.  And where are the words for the leap in my chest.

Yummy.

Little Aches and Pains (Paul Kelly)

This is my first go at sharing some of my covers online. This is a cover of a beautiful song by Paul Kelly called Little Aches and Pains. Hope you likey.

Shrinking Women

On Beauty and Being Just

Two quotes from Elaine Scarry in her book 'On Beauty and Being Just'.  With thanks to Kate Brennan

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterward one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction— to locate what is true. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never any- where seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely. “No, wait,” he says, oddly interrupting himself. Some- thing has suddenly entered his mind. Here are the lines:

But if you’re one of the mortals living here on earth, three times blest are your father, your queenly mother, three times over your brothers too. How often their hearts must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances— such a bloom of beauty. . . . I have never laid eyes on anyone like you, neither man nor woman . . . I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.
Wait, once I saw the like—in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar—
the young slip of a palm-tree springing into the light. There I’d sailed, you see, with a great army in my wake, out on the long campaign that doomed my life to hardship. That vision! Just as I stood there gazing, rapt, for hours . . . no shaft like that had ever risen up from the earth— so now I marvel at you, my lady: rapt, enthralled,
too struck with awe to grasp you by the knees
though pain has ground me down. 

Odysseus’s speech makes visible the structure of perception at the moment one stands in the presence of beauty. The beautiful thing seems—is—incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of be- ing without precedent conveys a sense of the “newness” or “new- bornness” of the entire world. Nausicaa’s childlike form, playing ball on the beach with her playmates, reinforces this sense. But now something odd and delicately funny happens. Usually when the “unprecedented” suddenly comes before one, and when one has made a proclamation about the state of affairs—“There is no one like you, nothing like this, anywhere”—the mind, despite the conŠdently announced mimesis of carrying out a search, does not actually enter into any such search, for it is too exclusively Šlled with the beautiful object that stands in its presence. It is the very way the beautiful thing Šlls the mind and breaks all frames that gives the “never before in the history of the world” feeling.

Odysseus startles us by actually searching for and Šnding a pre- cedent; then startles us again by managing through that precedent to magnify, rather than diminish, his statement of regard for Nau- sicaa, letting the “young slip of a palm-tree springing into the light” clarify and verify her beauty. The passage continually re- starts and refreshes itself. Three key features of beauty return in the new, but chronologically prior, object of beauty. 

This small photo strip...

Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

I have been meaning to post these photos for a while now. A few quick snaps from a trip to Malaysia from earlier this year. Two orphaned orang-utans in rehab and some night market shots.

Washington - NYC - Salt Lake City

Hey y'all,

Some quick shots from a recent work trip to the States. Managed to catch up with some good friends in Washington and NYC - (Antonia - thanks for taking me out on U street. Lucie La Gentille - Merci de m'avoir hebergé et mercy à Camille aussi d'avoir supporté mes renflements!).

It was a fly-by visit. But it was great to get out of Australia for a little while and remember that there's a big old world out there and that, everywhere, there's someone getting on with the business of living.

Things learned on this trip:

1. It's scary how similar Washington feels to Canberra. It's a public service town with interesting work that attracts a certain type of person. There's a desolation to the streets after 8pm that reminded me of home. People ride bikes everywhere and people say things like, "I like New York as a place to go on weekends, but I'm not sure I could live there you know? I mean... I canoe on weekends now!" 
2. Tap beer in Salt Lake City is legally required to be less than 4% alcohol. It's like a town with only light beer on tap. The horror. 
3. Americans come in for a fair amount of external criticism. Stereotypes abound that they are stupid, vain, lacking culture, fat, lacking in any sort of global perspective and shallow. As with all stereotypes, if you spend more than five minutes with someone, they turn out not to be true. Although I did have a few interesting experiences, (like when someone asked me if I was irish (what?), there were many times where I thought that we (Australians) might do well to learn from the American stereotype. For example, I met a  man who literally exploded with excitement at how cool he thought Washington was and how lucky Washingtonites were to live in a city with so many great culinary delights. I tried hard to imagine an Australian showing a foreigner around Sydney Harbour and being as excited about the beauty of Sydney. I doubt it would happen. Instead I think an Australian would probably wait for the foreigner to say, "this is  amazing" and then reply, "yeah… it's alright I guess", which is a little sad.  I mean, why not be excited? Being apathetic might mean you never risk being vulnerable, but there was something endearing about this overly-excited American man. He loved his city. Sure, there may be better places in the world, but he loved it nonetheless. He put his opinion out there and was proud. 
4. New York - I don't get it. Everywhere is a line, nothing is discovered for the first time, everyone has done it before you, people work long hours, apartments are expensive and small, there's a constant sense of needing to prove your better than everyone else you meet, and yet, when it came time to go, I was not ready. 
5. Australian print media is shithouse. I worry about the breadth and depth of news that is available to the average Australian. Every morning I read the paper: The Wall Street Journal, THe Washington Post or the New York Times. It wasn't just the selection of stories that was broader - raining from stories on the nuclear weapons deal with Iran to in depth analysis of the anniversary of the Gettysburg address - the writing was vastly superior too. On arrival back in Australia I did a quick check of the front page of the Daily Telegraph. The headlines read: Dr Harry's tragic loss; Dannii v Kylie - Talent Show Sister Act; Mauled - Australia Zoo Attack; and a small story titled Grins of the Father, about a Bishop who smiled during the royal commission hearing into child sex abuse. Over on page 18, the world news section included two stories about how a bikini removal caused a car crash in New York, and a story on a Parisian couple who had carried out a suicide love-pact.

< WASHINGTON >

< NYC >

< SALT LAKE CITY >

The Employee - Short Film

stewart lee - woah

     

Eleanor Dunlop - Disguise

Heard this song on the radio this afternoon and could have sworn it was Juanita Stein from Waikiki. Surreal similarity in the voices.

Arcade Fire - Here Comes the Night Time

We learn two things in this video:

1. Arcade Fire are totally fine with taking the piss out of themselves.
2. Michael Cera is just as funny in Spanish as he is in English. 

The Freelance Whales - The Great Escape

Joakim - Forever Young

Choral Music Friday

Just to get you all pumped for the weekend, it's time to get into some choral music! What's that? I know! Oh yeah baby!

Here are a few of my favourite pieces. I've tried to seek out the best standard of singing for each piece. Unfortunately the standard of video doesn't always correlate.

If you're new to choral music and have an overwhelming desire to click back to facebook right now, just let's take a risk together. How to explain why listening to a good choir is exciting?

Imagine a sound guy at the mixing desk at your local pub. The band are rocking away on stay. The guitarist has his amp up as loud as it will go. The drumming is smashing away up the back. The bassist is thumbing away trying not to be seen. And the singer is gyrating into the microphone stand as he screams away into the mic. Individually, they are playing a different gig to the one you hear. That's because what you hear is what the sound guy lets you hear. That's because it is the sound guy's job to make sure all the 'levels' are correct. He can make the drums cut through, or make them 'sit underneath' the bass so that the it comes out of the speakers as a unit that gets your feet moving. He can make the vocals louder so that they're not drowned out by that distorted guitar. He can even monitor the levels during a song to make sure any vigorous playing doesn't stick out too much. The point is, one person has control over what you hear.

With a choir, what you hear is dependent on 30 people, reacting in real-time to create a unified sound. Each member has to be listening and singing in unison, not only with the other people in their part (ie soprano, alto, tenor, bass), but also as part of the whole. It's a constant process of 'mixing' by each chorister. As you can imagine, when thirty people are trying to do this at the same time, there's a lot of scope for error. One person out of time, one person giving slightly more emphasis to a note or a word in the wrong place, and what you hear will sound impure. It's like a human pyramid. When one member goes down, the whole thing falls over.

So when you hear a choir sing and it sounds like one living organism, rather than a collection of parts, you can be sure of two things: it is superior singing and it has probably taken about 5 years to get the choir to sing like that.

Take a moment to listen out for the way some of these choirs treat the words in these pieces. For example, listen for the word 'drown' in the first video 'weep o mine eyes'. Can you hear the way they accentuate the 'd' and fall away from the rest of the word, so that the '-rown' is swallowed by the acoustics. Does it not sound exactly like someone slipping below the surface of the water?

Similarly, listen to the way the choir plays with tempo in the second video, a version of Ubi Caritas by King's College Cambridge. Listen to the way they slow down ever so slightly to savour the resolutions of the phrases, particularly the one 'et ex corde diligamus nos sincero' (May we love each other with a sincere heart'). It's not so much a change in tempo as the choir allowing the music to breath. hm-hmmmm.

The Basts/Spring Landscape - Music from Howard's End

'...for the world is filled with wonders.'

I often wonder why so much of children's literature contains messages encouraging the reader to maintain faith in the impossible. I'm thinking of Alice in Wonderland (believing in five impossible things before breakfast), The Chronicles of Narnia (believing in the magic from before the dawn of time), Peter Pan (believing in fairies), just to name a few. Perhaps the adults that write these books are trying to remind adults of the things they used to believe in, and how easy it used to be, before the veil the separates the child in all of us from our adult selves came down.

In L. Frank Baum's Rinkitink in Oz there is a wonderful exchange between King Kitticut, the ruler of the Island of Pingaree, and his son Prince Inga. King Kitticut has decided to confide in his son and reveal to his heir the great secret of his rule:

THIS BAG HE proceeded to open, showing Inga that it contained three great pearls, each one as big around as a marble. One had a blue tint and one was of a delicate rose color, but the third was pure white. 

"These three pearls," said the King, speaking in a solemn, impressive voice, "are the most wonderful the world has ever known. They were gifts to one of my ancestors from the Mermaid Queen, a powerful fairy whom he once had the good fortune to rescue from her enemies. In gratitude for this favor she presented him with these pearls. Each of the three possesses an astonishing power, and whoever is their owner may count himself a fortunate man. This one having the blue tint will give to the person who carries it a strength so great that no power can resist him. The one with the pink glow will protect its owner from all dangers that may threaten him, no matter from what source they may come. The third pearl -- this one of pure white -- can speak, and its words are always wise and helpful." 

"What is this, my father!" exclaimed the Prince, amazed; "do you tell me that a pearl can speak? It sounds impossible." 

"Your doubt is due to your ignorance of fairy powers," returned the King, gravely. "Listen, my son, and you will know that I speak the truth." 

He held the white pearl to Inga's ear and the Prince heard a small voice say distinctly: 

"Your father is right. Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders."

It is good wisdom. 

I recently watched the below sermon by Frederick Buechner, delivered some thirteen years ago now, when Buechner was 74. I encourage you to take twenty minutes out of your lives to watch it. And if you do decide to watch it, maybe you could write down your reflections on it. 

I’ve included some of mine below. I am loathe to pigeon hole them as ‘Christian reflections’ because I feel like what Buechner says in this video is so much bigger than just the Christian story. It’s so much more universal than that. It's as if to speak of it through a Christian lens is to marginalise the message somehow, to make it too easy to shoot down. And for that reason, I wish I could take Jesus out of the book, so to speak. To free the story from the connotations of religion so that it can rightly be what it is, a story about us, rather than 'the story' out of 'The Bible’.  But I also understand that to the objective observer, these thoughts below must seem very biblical. 

So how do I separate them from the heaviness of the church?  Or from the heaviness of religion? Not mention them at all here or anywhere?  Trust me, I've thought about doing that. But then I thought, this blog is meant to be about sharing in a fragile hope of connection - that the same bird might echo through both of us. And then I thought, maybe I don't need to understand why I'm writing this here for now. Maybe I should simply accept the wisdom of King Kitticut's pure white pearl. 'Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders.' And maybe understanding that is enough for now. 

So here is what I thought about after watching Buechner's sermon. 

'Truth as seen by the heart' 

That is the phrase that has stuck with me. It seems to me the very centre of faith.  The faith I have (maybe not a churchly faith perhaps but I believe a faith nonetheless) is one that believes in the 'holiness' of the world that I see with my heart and the hidden 'holiness' at the centre of every person in it as they go about their daily business of seraching for someone to be, someone to love and work to do. 

The holiness of Jerry the disabled program-seller at Eastwood Rugby Club, who turns up with such excitement each Saturday, immaculately dressed in his gifted blue and white pin stripe suit – his prize possession. I wonder what he does with his weeks: the in-between times. There’s holiness in his story.  

Or the holiness of my Mum and her steady struggle to create moments of value around her, despite her parents never having really seen the true value in her and as a result her becoming deaf and blind to her own value. There’s holiness in that struggle.  

And even the holiness at the centre of the struggle of the people that call up to agree with Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt, and in doing so, perpetuate such inhuman ugliness. What makes a person that way? There's something to understand there. Something about their fear maybe?

The thing is, this faith that I have is almost always in spite of the shadows and doubts and unholiness that I see with my eyes.  It’s in spite of what I see. It is a faith in things unseen. It is I believe, as Shakespeare writes, the dream that we wake from, only to cry to dream again. 

In his book, The Sacred Journey, Buechner reminisces about a phone call he received just as he was sitting down to a dinner one night with his mother. It was a from a friend in distress. His friend's family had been involved in a serious car accident and he asks Buechner to come and sit with him at the airport until his plane leaves to go see them. 
Buechner writes:

THERE ARE MANY people in this world — I suspect they may even be in the majority — who in face of such a cry for help as that would have seen right away that, humanly speaking, there was no alternative but to say that they would be at the airport as soon as a taxi would take them
there. I have known many such people in my day and can explain them only on the grounds that they are strong, compassionate, and at least in that sense, Christian by instinct. My instinct, on the other hand, was to be nothing so much as afraid. I was afraid of my friend's fear and of his tears. I was afraid of his faith that I could somehow be a comfort and help to him and afraid that I was not friend enough to be able to be. Dating perhaps from that November morning of my childhood when I opened the door of Jamie's and my bedroom on a tragic and terrifying world that I had no resources for dealing with, I was afraid of opening the door into his pain or anybody's pain. So although I knew as well as anybody that I had no choice but to say that I would come, what I said instead, Heaven help me, was that I would come if I possibly could but there were things I had to take care of first and would he phone me back in about ten minutes. 

Buechner's mother's reaction was also to shut out this cry for help, although for different reasons:

THE WHOLE THING was absurd, she said. My friend was a grown man. He had no business carrying on like a hysterical child. What earthly good could I do anyway? It was outrageous to think of spoiling an evening together that we had both been looking forward to for days.

Buechner recalls that everything his mother said was precisely what at some level of his being he had already been saying to himself, and that was of course what made it so appalling. It was only when he heard it on someone else's lips that he heard it for what it was, and as much out of revulsion at himself as out of pity for his friend, he resolved that as soon as he called again, he would tell him that he would come immediately.
 
This decision turns out to be one of the watershed moments in Buechner's life:

MY MOTHER'S APARTMENT by candlelight was haven and home and shelter from everything in the world that seemed dangerous and a threat to my peace. And my friend's broken voice on the phone was a voice calling me out into that dangerous world not simply for his sake, as I suddenly saw it, but also for my sake. The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive. It was not a conclusion that I came to in time. It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me. God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling. 

I think 'The Battle' that Buechner calls us to necessarily takes place in the shadows of our faith. It takes place in the moments of doubts. In those waking, crying moments. The time we are let down by a friend. Or by our work. Or by the world! Or, and this is by far the most common for me, the time we let ourselves down. That is where the battle takes place. Because it's in these moments that our faith in things unseen is challenged. And it's in these moments that we have to choose either to fight for the truth of that faith, even when every worldly thing points to our being wrong, or accept that wrongness as the actual reality of our existence.

For me, the ultimate answer to our doubt in those moments - those moments where we might start to believe in the wrongness of things - lies in the other phrase that stood out for me in Buechner’s sermon: 'To see with the heart, is to know that, in the long run, his kind of life is the only kind of life worth living. It's a simple as that.'

I love this phrase, 'in the long run'.  It implies a span of time over which mistakes can be made. It implies a span of time throughout which we have, at different points and for different lengths of time, doubted whether his kind of life really is the only kind of life worth living! And finally it implies an inevitability to the truth of the conclusion that yes, while we will doubt, we will all eventually end up at the same point, at the same conclusion: because ultimately, it’s the only conclusion we can any of us come to.

It’s an endless longing… for home.

‘Blessed are those that have not seen, and yet believe.’

 

Gosh.

Louis CK - Jizanthepus

This is amazing.

I don't know how you are this offensive and then come out somehow having made some really pertinent universal human observation.

For all its chaos, it's perfectly measured, with the punchline sneaking right up on you just as you've about had enough. You can see in his eyes as he takes a drink of water that he knows he's right on the brink. Then he saves it with this:

'You gotta protect your kids. A lot of people talk the talk, "I would throw myself under a bus." Oh yeah?! Would you fuck another kid's dad and confuse him sexually and yourself sexually in the process, and use homophobia that you hate against another person just because some kid shoved your kid for a second?'