Saturday, August 03, 2002

 
Another very late night-- up til 3:00AM. It just keeps getting worse. Of all nights of the week, I wish I could get to bed early on Friday night so I could wake up in time to go to one of the local farmers' markets. Makes it so much easier to plan interesting meals for the coming week when I have a bunch of good looking fresh stuff. Now, of course, it's too late to get out there before they close, plus it's already too miserably hot to enjoy outside shopping.

I could just recycle last week's ToDo list except cross off the buying of garden tools and add writing bills. I got one of the two garden plots excavated, but the other one still needs doing.I also managed to get some brief email off to my mother and Nan. I sent DM my reaction to The Rising (to which there was no reaction) and some quotes from a lame review in the local paper (to which there was). Bashing is so much easier than praising.
posted by Suzy 11:03 AM

Thursday, August 01, 2002

 
Another amphibian asphixiator, and the cat inside but nowhere to be found. We've often thought we'd like to turn the bumpy entrance area outside the front windows into a fishpond-- right now there's a preview of what that would look like, complete with a foot-wide waterfall pouring off the roof into it-- a nice touch! The leaves darting around in the turbulence even look a little like goldfish. I tried to post this bit earlier but apparently the house network is down and I lost it. I'll paste this text from Notepad into the blog later.

It was fun hearing words from the mouths of the band members last night-- I realized that except for Max and Clarence, both of whom I've spoken to in person, I'd never heard any of them speak.
posted by Suzy 7:03 PM

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

 
BLOOD AND KISSES

Friends sometimes tell me they are surprised by how seldom I listen to music, meaning that I don't spend hours each day playing CDs, MP3s or the radio. What they don't understand is I am listening to music virtually ALL the time. I always have something playing in my mind. It takes very few listenings (sometimes only one) for a song to be added to my mental playlist. I don't have a whole lot of control about what plays and how many times-- it is kinda like the radio in that sense.

Just now, of course, it's the songs from The Rising, which I played through one more time today. It's fascinating what parts of what songs go immediately to my musical jugular. "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)" has been the most immediate and infectiously persistent of these, but the choruses of "Into the Fire" and "My City of Ruins" are close behind, plus, surprisingly enough, "Paradise," the moodiest and most obscure of the tracks.

This may well be Bruce's best album ever. It is beautifully crafted, lucidly recorded. It has the lustrous surface and hook-laden structure of his most accessible pop numbers, yet has every bit as much depth and seriousness as Nebraska or Tom Joad. It manages to be a concept record without the awkwardness that usually entails. It has as much thematic coherence as Darkness, but uses a much broader musical pallete. Bruce has always been good at writing which can be understood on more than one level, but he's quite outdone himself here. Yes, echoes of 9/11 can be heard throughout, but there's not a song on there that can't be understood and enjoyed without any reference to that whatsoever. Nothing beats you over the head, nothing exploits the tragedy, lapses into bathos or indulges in mindless flag waving. His touch on sensitive areas is feather-light, yet it goes to the core. The lyrics are drenched in blood, a frequent metaphor that not only stands for violent death but also the blood that unites us all as human beings. They don't shrink from the horror of what happened that day, and what happens far too often every day. The desire for revenge is acknowledged, but it is but one facet of our complex and sometimes contradictory response to events that seem beyond our control or understanding. The songs are also filled with kisses as a symbol for the immediacy of physical love, the human touch the loss of which can be the most searing part of grieving for a loved one. But kisses are also about compassion, affection and solidarity. Maybe they also symbolize understanding and forgiveness.

This is just a start, and rather superficial, I fear. I haven't even gotten into how splendid and inventive the music is. One of my favorite things that came out of yesterday's media blitz was the story of the guy yelling to Bruce out a car window in Asbury shortly after 9/11, "We really NEED you." Bruce admitted to Ted Koppel that he knew exactly what the guy meant, and that it was time for him to go to work. I love that clear-headed honesty he has about his role in the life of his audience. Yet I'm glad he is making the effort this time to once again reach beyond his core fans, because he's delivered something that is badly needed by people in general: a perspective that doesn't promise easy answers, but offers hope, healing and a reason to believe.
posted by Suzy 9:59 PM

 
Yesterday was Bruce Day: All Bruce, All the Time on the tube, it seemed. Good old TiVo-- I made a "wish list" and it automatically recorded the Today show, Nightline and Up Close-- and has scheduled more obscure things for the next 10 days that even Bruce's website doesn't know about.

As for the new album, it's amazing. I listened to parts of it with my jaw literally hanging open. I've only heard it 1-1/2 times so far, so I'm not prepared to react in any detail yet. Large chunks of it are lodged in my brain already, though. DM was right: it reminds me somewhat of mid-era Beatles in terms of its combination of accessibility and experimental harmonies and instrumentation.
posted by Suzy 9:47 AM

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

 
Looks like it's Tuesday already. The Rising comes out today. Who ever thought that six weeks would pass so slowly? Bruce will be all over the media for a few days at least.
posted by Suzy 12:43 AM

 
This was the first day since starting the blog I've been back working in the office. I'd almost forgotten how draining it is, how relentless. Very little energy left at the end of the day for things like this. I need another sabbatical! I have finally spoken of it with someone else, a guy who posts to GNLIB-L who obviously keeps tabs on the journal also. It helps to try to frame some of it in words. I signed up for the Message Board tonight-- it's been upgraded, apparently. But now the entire server is busied out! Technical problems everywhere you look.

I finished Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!" last night. I can't remember a book where I laughed out loud more often. He is hilarious, but also very very good-- all the humor serves the story. And it has some of the very best writing about libraries that I've read anywhere. L-Space indeed! And the lovely part is, he's written lots of other books set in the disc world uni-- , uh, multiverse.
posted by Suzy 12:32 AM

Sunday, July 28, 2002

 
The bad part about posting a ToDo list like that is you have all the things you didn't do staring you in the face the next day. The only thing I actually did is "Get something to hack through the jungle surrounding the garden". I got several somethings actually: some killer hedge clippers, some grass clippers, a nameless thing on a pole described only as "ideal for cutting grass and weeds from large areas", insecticidal soap ("soap" sounds so much nicer than "poison") to deal with the critters presently feasting on my plants, some new garden gloves to protect myself from said soap, and a pad to kneel on. Now I need to go do the actual hacking, hewing, weeding and fertilizing. Which means going out and swimming through air so hot and humid that breathing feels like drowning.

I also picked up the last two copies of Coraline in B&N to send to Megan and Julia and the audio CD-- B&N didn't have the audio tape version. They offered to order it, but I know I can get it from amazon much faster. Or Border's might have it. Also got DVD of season two of M.A.S.H. to include with the player I will someday get to my dad. It is a gift for his 90th birthday which was in January. Just a little late...

Spent the morning getting way lost in the Gaiman site. It would take days to plow through the whole thing, but I'm determined to manage it. I did finally unearth the place where you can send him questions, though. When I get the Sandman project a little more clearly defined, I'll run it by him.

Off I go into the jungle swamp!
posted by Suzy 1:37 PM