Mojo Pin

"All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful."

This is a way more articulate sentiment than I could produce right now (or ever), but it speaks to a certain sense of ennui/dread/wonder/distraction which currently occupies my head. These are the final lines of "The Bight" by Elizabeth Bishop, and are also the epitaph on her headstone. I visited it once, but I can't seem to find the photo I took of her grave. All I have is an image of this tree across the road.

November 2015

Anyhow, when I was on my wild Greyhound trip back from visiting my friend Rose in Chicago (hi, Rose!), I listened to this Jeff Buckley album a lot. There was a bunch of night lightning in the western sky over Illinois, and I caught a calm twenty minutes of sleep to this music. Then a fight almost broke out at the bus station and our bus broke down in rural Missouri, but the adventure was worthwhile.

- "Mojo Pin" by Jeff Buckley, from Grace (1994)

Jamaican Farewell

Today calls for a deep breath, a bit of list-making, and a Harry Belafonte song. I'm trying to get my life into some semblance of order before I leave, which means doing things like getting my glasses fixed, going to the phone store, banging my head against the wall, cleaning my disaster of a bedroom, and all other manner of fun tasks.

I have no idea the story behind this video, but it's a compelling little peek into the televised music of the 1950's:

- "Jamaican Farewell," from Calypso by Harry Belafonte (1956)

Finally, if you are reading this, thank you.

Shakespeare and Shostakovich

That title was a deliberate attempt to seem sophisticated and knowledgeable, I'm just nodding to that fact up front.

Right now, I'm finishing up a painful paper about Shakespeare's representation of gender within As You Like It, and as such I'm trying to find some good study music. I began listening to some Shostakovich fugues, which were quite conducive to efficient writing. Then I found this amazing album of Shostakovich's jazz suites and now I'm on fire. Not literally, obviously, but this essay is finally coming together.


This specific piece always reminds me of the Nintendo 64 game Mission Impossible. There was a level on that game where you had to infiltrate this Russian palace by finding the sheet music for this song. When the pianist began to play the song, it distracted the ambassador you had to sneak past or something like that. Also, more recently, it makes me think of the end of Eyes Wide Shut, but that's a completely different can of worms that we won't open today.

In the spirit of college and paper-writing and gray rainy weather (and quite frankly, because I don't have time to format/type up anything cool today), here are some study tunes, in case you too are suffering through the uptown problem of surviving finals and the burden of receiving a fine education

 

- "Waltz No. 2" from The Suite for Variety Orchestra by Dmitri Shostakovich