To further remind me of the random wonderfulness of the universe, I ended up last night at a live “coffeehouse” performance of Cassandra Kubinski, a singer-songwriter I had never heard of previously.

Kubinski performed in the initimate and completed unplugged space of The Depot as part of the Milford Fine Arts Council’s 2011 Performance Coffeehouse.

Seeing Kubinski’s two-hour, voice-and-piano-only performance of original work added even more fuel to the fire of my belief that there are many very talented artists and musicians working and making great work.

But not necessarily at the level of so-called glamour and fame we see on “Idol.”

I sort of gathered that Kubinksi, like many gifted singer-songwriters — Lovett, Colvin, Emmylou —  has an intense and committed group of followers and fans.

But she isn’t famous and has no fear of the paparazzi catching her doing squats at the gym for “Stars, They’re Just Like Us!”.

Having browsed her MySpace site and listened to her CDs after the performance, I realize how fortunate I was to get to see her perform in this particular space. Without the aid of a microphone, this audience was able to really hear the true range of her voice– an occasionally tender and sometimes brutal mix of Aretha, Norah Jones, Elvis Costello.

Kubinksi, a pianst, is physically lovely, and brings a intimate sensuality to her interaction with her instrument. But that relationship goes beyond any pin-up girl sweetie pie image. Her music  – both lyrically and compositionally — travels rutted and unmarked roads. Like Colvin, Costello and greats like Springsteen, her songs tell stories in the marriage of lyric, voice, and music.

Songs like “Timeless” and “Cradle the Moon” wrench the heart and give you a place to wander in your own angst. Songs like “Textual Healing” “Literally” and “Just Being Myself” show her wit, and her ability to start with an idea of traditional melody and transform it.

I learned two things last night from Cassandra Kubinski: that trusting the universe is often a fine idea when it comes to experiencing art and music.

And that beautiful music and writing is alive and working — if even in cheerful obscurity– in New York City.

Next show? She’ll be at The Bitter End in NYC on April 7.

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The fog and the mugginess this morning reminds me of London.
Previously posted on Jan 16, 2006


Everybody’s got a darkness
They’re not going to show it to you.

It’s Monday and grey again in London.

I dreamed of you last night. I sat in a cafe over cappuccinos with some friend. He told me the flat I used to live in on Randolph Avenue was going to occupied again soon. By you.

Everybody’s got a shadow
Following them around
Clinging, clinging to their footsteps
Dragging them to the ground.*

In the dream, I felt you coming here like a rocket shooting to the moon. I thought, in the dream, that suddenly you realized you could not be away from me anymore.

Darkness…
Shadow…
Secret…
Hear them rattlin’ bones

My friend, well, he didn’t know I knew you. He said your name like he was reading it off a marquee. I listened, then I blurted it out. Who you were to me.

Darkness…
Shadow…
Secret…
Hear them rattlin’ bones

There was silence over the wobbly wooden table, as we stared down into the dregs of our foam. It was strange to him — as it is to everyone — the thought that you were mine once. He stumbled a laugh, one that I mimicked. We changed the subject. But I wanted to leap up and run to 115 Randolph Avenue and sit on the step, petting Missy the cat, and wait for you to arrive.

Everybody’s got a little secret
Something they never gonna tell
Gonna take it right down to their grave
Up to heaven or maybe to …well,

I tried to go back to sleep after that dream. It was 2:53 a.m. I flipped on the blue pinlight of my booklight and tried not to wake Colin. He rolled over and reached for me but did not wake. I read for a while, then got up, and laid on the couch. There was a rumble, deep inside of me, pulling down, down.

I watched BBC. In the middle of the night, they rebroadcast shows with a sign language interpreter in the corner. I watched the face and the hands and didn’t listen. I watched until 4:15. Then I went back and read some more.

I finally slept, maybe around 5:15 or so.

There is a skeleton in your closet
Do you hear, do you hear it rattlin’ bones?
I think you better look the thing in the eye.
It’s never gonna leave you alone.

This morning, I walked from our flat on Delaware toward the shops at Maida Vale. I carried my laptop on my back, heavy and full of stories I am having trouble telling. A thin, dark man walked toward me. His coat was too big for him, his eyes looming large behind his glasses. The weight hanging from my heart swung and loomed, pulled down again. I walked by 115 Randolph Avenue under lead skies.

I wondered what that man, walking by me just then, carried inside him, the color of his darkness. “Tell me your secret,” I whispered to myself, a dirty proposition. I wondered what he dreamed last night.

Darkness…
Shadow…
Secret…
Hear them rattlin’ bones.

*Lyrics from “Darkness” by Kelley Hunt

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“So tell me your dream
Lay your head on my pillow
Tell me the things that you hide away
Your pain
Your pleasure
Your sorrow
Tell me the things that you hide away
Your pain your pleasure your sorrow.”
–Blue Rodeo

If you are looking for the less fortunate, you can find them waiting in long lines outside the St Charles rescue mission on East Main on Bridgeport.

If you are looking for a shade different than the golden hues of the New England Gateway, you can stand in line for a free turkey too. And a plastic bag of miscellaneous groceries, with which you will have to make do.

Whose dreams are filled with Stove Top stuffing? Whose childhood memories taste like canned corn and potato buds?

The old man with half a missing ear kissed and blessed me today. I dreamed I found a way to inject my many spare blessings into his empty cupboards.

In Westport, this morning,  you could trade a turkey for tickets to see Taylor Hicks  in Grease. What morsel of entertainment could we dine on any other holy day?

Forget the thanks. Lean on giving. Forget the holy. Remember the day. Remember the day-to-day dreams.

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I took this photo in May of 2007, which of course seems like about two weeks ago. We’ve been in this small state for almost two and half years and I see how time gets compressed–I’ve erased the afternoons and the mornings and the evenings and all that remains is the back and forth motion of time, tightly sequenced and carefully structured so as to take care of our little passengers who are moving through it — at the moment –thoughtlessly.

I am the ponderous oaf, the deep resounding bell that drops in slow motion —-DONNNNNG then releases for a sweet moment, only to fall again, repeating the sound with whatever momentum is left, because I have to —-DONNG! The sound forms on dusty bell curves, dust that flies up manically for a moment and which then also forgets itself soon enough, and settles down again after the vibrations silence themselves past dusk.

Inside the bell tower, there is no drudgery and there is no satisfaction. The rain falls and we are damp– rather we are blindly scorched by the summer’s rays. Unhappy hasn’t found its way up the winding staircases or inside the ringers’ sleeves yet.

It’s only that we are just not sure where to land on the issue, inside the bell tower, as we pass another hour for the time to complain again.

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1. The Bell Ringers of Westminster Abbey
2. Tower after Hours

There are planned activities and there is structure and routine.

There are things to entertain and items to educate.

There are chores for me and for him and for us.

And there is the emptiness of an afternoon, the dreaded sameness of a day, like today and any other day.

There are the people who are proud, and the people who are curious. There are the people who are helping and those who are hiding.

The jealous and the amazed, claiming empathetic exhaustion, merely through imagination.

There are all those people who are slowly forgetting me. Who are anxious to let me go, like a snack tucked into a cubbie. They run to their playground and I am left behind.

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight
They’re circling low and inside tonight
It’s another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight.
—Emmy Lou Harris, “The Pearl“

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I was having a perfectly lovely lazy Thanksgiving when I notice a young teeny bopper-ish boy performing during halftime of the game that was on TV. He was pretty cute, I thought. Dark curly hair, sweet mischievous smile, eyes that crinkled to a squint when he grinned. In the photo, here, it’s the one on the left.

Than I got this feeling like I recognized him from somewhere. I asked Frances who it was performing… she didn’t know.

“That’s those Jonas Brothers,” Joe Smith said. He knew.

Hmmm… I looked more closely at the young man singing and the lightbulb flickered and switched on, like a CFL in my head.

“Colin? Is that you???”

Colin, in his Teen-Swoon Years.

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I’ve been getting attached to things that aren’t mine anymore, things that have moved on, most especially since I have been reading the “American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating & Drinking.” It was published in 1964 and is chock full of old American recipes, including the famous Chicken Corn Soup and Fastnachts that were staples of my German paternal grandparents.

And I am lonely. Lonely for something I never had– the idea of the past that is romantic, that was never mine to own. It’s all floating here in the pages of this Cookbook, a mirror of the lovely ache of imagine memories etched in my heart.

“Between the Midwest, that ocean of good grass, and the Pacific, that ocean of salty water, lies almost every landscape known to man. Those landscapes produce almost every form of food known to man.” – Paul Engle, American Heritage Cookbook

I settle down to dinner and eat the soup and find it very satisfying, even more so because I made it, and more so because I grew the carrots in our garden.

“It was a time of close-up smells of rich tastes, of food handled by the same person who would ultimately eat it.”

But soon enough I’ve finished it and the bowl is not only empty but dirty as well, and so is the pan I cooked it in, and the freezer I stored it in, and the garden where I grew it. And I have to work hard, again, to achieve that sense of happiness and satisfaction. The winter is coming on. The sun dips below the horizon and despite outward appearances, I am alone, and all that is left are some words and measurements in this old cookbook.

“When the first settlers came to Iowa, they laboriously cleared land in the woods along the rivers, intimidated by those broad, open spaces of the grassy prairies, so unlike the eastern countryside they had known. Gradually they moved out of their woods and onto that rich soil...”

When I am ready, I’ll look up from the small page and smaller letters and let the loneliness overtake me. It is a prairie night, with nothing to light it but the stars and a sliver moon. From the fractured light, the reminder of the past and the possibility of the future meet. I let myself disappear.

When the possibility of it has swallowed me, then I’ll be able to stop, open my eyes. I’ll be able to see in the darkness, how gradually the light is forming, and the space around me is warming. The loneliness is not an empty room or a darkness– it is the cold prairie night filled with stars, the weeping sap forming a maple ice facemask while silvery fish scamper beneath a wide frozen lake.

“At such times, all normal standards of bulk and number vanished.”

“…And all you know of where the road goes
Is some place far and unknown.
You would think
You would have gotten used to it all by now.
But each day it just gets harder,
Every journey alone
Never knowing if you’ll make it
Back home somehow.

“And it’s hard not to want to turn around,
And it’s hard not to want to back on down.
We’re only as brave as we think we are,
Only as brave.

“And it’s hard not to want to turn it down,
For some guaranteed, soul crushing
Merry-go-round.
It would have driven you
Straight into the ground,
Driven you down…

–Leaving Song, Mary Chapin Carpenter

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1. Evening song

The Genius on my iPod might as well just say “Awesome Singer Songwriters Need Only Apply.” It is constantly shuffling around Chapin and Lyle, Pink Martini and Tom Waits, Emmylou and Patti Griffin, Catie Curtis and the Tragically Hip. And, of course, Jonatha. I’ve got other music dappled on the lists, but it is just the padding to buffer my soul, keep it from getting over stimulated by the crushing ironies and chord bending music.

Jonatha performed music from her new disc “The Works” last night at the Fairfield Theatre Company, and Colin and I went. Most of the time it was just her voice and her guitar (with a bit of percussion from her stomping boots), but the sound was as full and realized as any orchestra. Her voice is as confident in the breathiest love whispers as it is raging at full forte, and she lets the notes slip about like wingtips on ice.

She indulged in playing many of the new songs she written weaving Woody Guthrie lyrics together to form new songs from unformed ones, and no one minded. She played a scattering of “hits” from her previous albums, from Steady Pull to 10 Cent Wings and Careful What You Wish For. No one breathed. She bantered in her Red Sox t-shirt with a fellow audience member — a guy with girlfriend — who wore the same garb and was checking the scores for her during the intermission. She danced the jig she’d learned in a bar in Ireland when she was 15.

It was just the few of us there, so she introduced “The Choice” and reiterated to us it was “Yes, THAT choice” before she and the piano collided in the song.  She told us offhandedly about her many jobs over the years– janitor, housekeeper, nanny– before she slipped in that she did not have children. So it was wild, empathetic love for someone else’s daughters that ground out of the wrenching ballad “So Much Mine.” It shattered me.

I was tired before I sat down with Jonatha last night. By the end, I was soggy with wear.

We always look at a woman and draw conclusion about her body and why? I guess because women are identified wherever they go by their shape. Jonatha was lithe and straight, holding her dancer’s posture. But as a musician and a woman, she looked like a wise pillar, with legs that launched out from her sides like uncontrollable wings. When she played her guitar, I tried to will myself into her body, if even for a moment so I could feel myself the control over that artistry, and I could hum with the vibration of those two instruments– her guitar and her body–  held together by her voice.

Jonatha said she wasn’t a “folkie” so she wondered why she was chosen to enter the Woody Guthrie archive. What isn’t clear in defined categories of music was as brilliant as a sunbeam in that black box space last night — the curve of her voice bandaging the broken parts of Woody’s heart.

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1. Love me, Love my Generalization

Interrupting my A.M. snoozing time/Morning Edition listening hour this morning was Kate Remington of WSHU’s classical music morning telling me that she’d gotten to work early this morning for “a very special fundraiser.”

Memorial Day weekend marked our one year anniversary back in the U.S., our return to National Public Radio. I love NPR. I fell in love with it in Kansas City, listening to KCUR, home of Walt Bodine and New Letters on the Air. My love affair with KCUR in the Kansas City marked GREAT SHIFT in my life: from music to talk. Although I still LOVE music and constantly listen to it in the car and while I exercise and walk and around the house, in the morning, our clock radio awakes us with Morning Edition.

WSHU – An NPR Station with a Habit?

Ruining all of that for me is WSHU, the NPR station of Fairfield County. I am not sure why–perhaps to distinguish itself from WNYC’s excellent programming– WSHU insists on doing the TWO THINGS that absolutely ruin any NPR station: excessive classical music and excessive fundraisers.

Since we arrived one year ago, WSHU has held SIX fundraisers. This one, today, is “very special” because it is a one-day event with funds being matched by the Newman Foundation. If WSHU were successful at fundraising, they wouldn’t have to keep knocking on our doors, like a bastard child with a drug habit.

The last one, in March, was the “Semi-annual” (hah) fundraiser, where volunteers tried to convince people to give more money earlier, saying if they reached their goal of X before a certain time, they’d all shut up and just let us listen to Morning Edition.

Give me money, and I’ll go away? Another great tactic used by many black sheep family members with drug habits.

Since I am trapped in the WSHU bubble at the moment, I am not sure whether other NPR stations have upped the ante and started nagging their listeners. Perhaps this is an NPR-wide phenomenon? If so, it’s a mistake.

Classical Snooze-ville

Meanwhile starting at 9 a.m., instead of great local programing (KCUR, for example, features an award-winning one-hour daily public affairs/talk show and a local host talk show), Day to Day, Talk of the Nation and Fresh Air, WSHU hosts a deadly boring 7 hours of classical music.

Hmm, what will I listen to while I stare into the flashing red eyes of the brake lights in front of me on I-95? I know, this Johann Strauss Polka played by the Russian string Quartet SKAZ.
zzz….zzz….

Viva KCUR!

I am considering sending my NPR donation every year back to KCUR. I believe in local and I believe in NPR, but at least I won’t be supporting the fundraiser-and-classical programming that some poncy WSHU director came up with while laying on a Southport beach.

And hey, at least then I’ll still get the mug.

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I was juicing an orange this morning when a memory blast of Galway hit me.

I didn’t juice any oranges, that I remember, in Galway, or any part of Ireland. I wonder what part of my brain shot me through with a violently lovely blip of those two days a year ago in Ireland.

We travelled by car all over the southern half of the country. An American sort of way to see Ireland, we were in our last throes of panic to see whatever we could before we moved back to the States. It wasn’t quantity or quality, probably, but it wasn’t bad at all.

In Galway, we drove from our B&B to the town center, which was overfilled with young people. We disregarded at least two restaurants– even though we were starving — before settling on one that was narrow and tall with tables right up at the street level window and a tiny curved bar with wine bottled stacked to the ceiling behind it. One old man sat at the bar like he had grown out of the wood of the tree it was made from, talking to the bartender while looking out the window.

We got that table in the window. We got a Canadian waiter, who bonded with Colin. We got a fantastic dinner and watched the wild people spill in and out of the pub across the cobbled pedestrianized street. The waiter gave us a tip for where to see real live music and, in the darkness, we wandered out, across the river to the pub.

The musicians, crowded elbow to elbow in the room upstairs, weren’t part of a band, just people who’d known each other for a long time and played around each other. This was an Irish equivalent of a jam session and they were honoring Mickey Finn. Colin and I wedged ourselves into chair with a pint and listened.

It was a long three years in London, with the dreariness of the weather matching the unhappiness of the people, to get a warm crowded room of music in Galway. The Irish are not the British. They are not leprechauns or trolls, as legends have made them. In that upstairs room in Galway that night, I saw them (as I had throughout the trip) as people with their hearts upon their sleeves. People singing to relieve the heartache, to share the joy, to quiet the questions that don’t have any answers.

I don’t know why the image of walking in Galway leaped into my mind this morning, but for today I think I’ll do some singing, and wear my heart on my sleeve.

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