Where your soul goes your heart will soon follow
like thoughts drifting into the fertile air,
taking seed in the cracks and hollows
sprouting manifestos everywhere
poems your heart and soul create
comes from this sacred place.
Go Dog Go Cafe: Tuesday Writing prompt
Ballet of branches
Graceful in the gentle wind
Soon shall bloom in full
©2019 Annette Rochelle Aben
Spring is not quite here
Yet, spring cleaning needs to start
To reduce the piles
Some stuff went into the trash
Some stuff started brand new piles
©2019 Annette Rochelle Aben
Seek
moments
where peace soothes
your soul, welcomes
love into your heart
starts a revolution
of pure magical thinking
a flash where clarity prevails
gleams like diamonds in golden sunshine
these are gems of a beautiful life
Colleen’s Weekly Poetry Challenge
https://pixabay.com/photos/bathroom-public-toilet-toilet-3d-4043097/
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PRIVACY? WHAT PRIVACY?
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Tightly fitting doors
For bathroom stall privacy
Why don’t we have this?
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NOTE: USAmericans have to suffer through making eye contact with strangers while sitting on the throne because of gaps between the bathroom door and bathroom stall walls. This shocks visitors to the USA. The photograph is by a Russian photographer.
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Free eBook: YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIND
This is my review on Amazon:
J.D. Hutchison: Roots Music Master — The Real Deal
March 15, 2019
J.D. Hutchison is better than just better. In Athens County, Ohio, He is sometimes called “Lost John,” which is an odd name for such an obviously all-together guy. Maybe he got that nickname because of his self-derogatory humor (“I counted all the way up to ten once and learned all my ABCs up to M and N”). A better nickname for him would be “The Real Deal.”
This album opens strongly with his blues song “Little Legs Moan”: “‘Don’t want to hurt you’ / That’s what she said / She did not hurt me, boys / She killed me stone dead / With the little legs moan.”
These lines from “Another Fool’s Café” shows his way of poetry-izing lyrics: “There’s always an empty table or two / It’s a hill jack twilight zone / The door is always open / And the lights are always on / Ain’t no bottom to the bottle, boys / No difference in the night and day / There ain’t no hands on the clock / In another fool’s café.”
Another standout song is his “Since My Bird has Flied Away,” which has been covered by Ingrid Lucia & The Flying Neutrinos, John Kirkpatrick and Chris Parkinson, and The Local Girls. Any singer-songwriter will probably tell you that the ultimate compliment is other people covering your songs. A few lyrics: “I need to change my head around / Maybe trip out to the zoo / Take a walk downtown / Hell, I don’t know what to do / But nothing seems to matter / Since my bird has flied away.” The bird, of course, is a woman.
Readers of this review should make heavy use of Amazon’s preview snippets of J.D. Hutchison’s songs on this page. Fans of roots music (defined as various combinations of blues, folk, country, bluegrass, and whatever else the singer-songwriter knows will make the song better) will find much to like. J.D. Hutchison is a regionally famous singer-songwriter who in my humble opinion ought to be at least nationally famous — and a whole lot richer. Better late than later.
I love this album, all songs of which are by J.D. Hutchison.
By the way, all the lyrics of this album can be seen at <http://www.jdhutchison.com/lyrics.html>.
Support local music, and be aware that in the age of the Internet and the WWW, Athens County is local worldwide.
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• William R. Brody, President of the Johns Hopkins University, tells a story about two students attending Columbia University. One student was Sandy Greenberg, who discovered that he was suffering from glaucoma. The eye disease had not been discovered in time, and he became blind. Fortunately, the other student, with whom he roomed, read his textbooks to him each night, and Mr. Greenberg got his degree with honors and even earned a Fulbright Scholarship. Of course, he stayed in contact with his former roommate, who had also graduated and who also went on to do graduate work. It turned out that his former roommate was unhappy in graduate school, instead wanting to sing with a high school friend who was also interested in music, but they needed $500 to pay for a demo record. Mr. Greenberg was not rich, but he did have $500, and he sent it to his former roommate. (Mr. Greenberg said to Mr. Brody, “He made my life; I needed to help make his life.”) By the way, the roommate was Art Garfunkel, Art’s friend was Paul Simon, and the demo record resulted in Simon and Garfunkel’s first hit: “The Sound of Silence.” (Also by the way, Mr. Garfunkel sang at the wedding of Sandy’s daughter.) Here’s another Sandy Greenberg/Art Garfunkel story; this one is told by Jerry Speyer: After Sandy became blind, Art asked Sandy to accompany him on the subway to downtown as he ran an errand. Sandy agreed, but downtown, far from the campus, Art said to him, “All right then, Sandy, I’ll see you back at the dorms.” Then he left Sandy, who had not been on the subway alonesince he had become blind. Well, Sandy thought that Art had left him. Actually, Art stayed with him, but Sandy did not know that because he could not see. Sandy made his way back to the campus, and Art tapped his shoulder and told him, “I knew you could do it. I wanted to be sure YOU knew you could do it.” Mr. Speyer says, “I’ll leave out Sandy’s exact words to Art in that moment, but suffice it to say, they laughed about it later.”
• Both punk and riot grrrl (riot grrrl = punk + feminism) music believe in Do-It-Yourself (DIY) when it comes to creating music and other art. In 1994, a drunk and enthusiastic 16-year-old girl named Lauren Goften approached Rachel Holborow, who worked for the English record label Slampt. Lauren told Rachel about her band Kenickie, which she said she had formed with some schoolmates. Rachel was so intrigued by what she heard that she asked for a demo tape. Actually, the band existed only in Lauren’s head. Also, Lauren and her schoolmate Marie du Santiago did not know how to play musical instruments. No problem. They learned how to play two chords and started writing songs and recorded their first tape: Uglification. They then learned to play a third chord and started playing in public. Lauren, whose band name was Lauren Laverne, remembers that she forgot how to play her guitar solo while on stage, so she sang it instead. Basically, the band learned how to play on stage and they learned how to write songs by writing them. So what happened? Alan McGee, head of Creation Records, took a plane to see them. He liked what he heard and offered to sign them to a record deal. They turned him down. Kenickie was active from 1994 to 1998, recorded for Fierce Panda and EMI, and when they broke up, lots of female fans mourning the breakup sent letters for months to the music magazines NME(New Musical Express) and Melody Maker.
• In some parts of the world, girls are not prized as highly as boys. For example, in India, girls are sometimes unwanted because providing dowries and paying for weddings for them is very expensive. Boys, on the other hand, are valued because when they get married, they receive a dowry and bring money into the family. In India, many girls have been given the names“Nakusa” or “Nakushi.” In Hindi, these names mean “Unwanted.” In October 2011, hundreds of girls in central India attended a renaming ceremony in which they shed their unwanted names and instead chose new names for themselves. Their new, self-chosen names include “Aishwarya” after a Bollywood star, “Savitri” after a Hindi goddess, and “Vaishali,” which in Hindi means “prosperous, beautiful, and good.” A 15-year-old girl who had shed her old name of “Nakusa” for her new name of “Ashmita,” which in Hindi means “very tough,” said, “Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy.”
• So where did the title of John Lee Hooker’s song “Boom Boom” come from? He got the title from a bartender named Luilla at the Apex Bar in Detroit. Mr. Hooker was playing with a band, and he always arrived late. Whenever that happened, and it always happened, Luilla pointed at him and said, “Boom boom, you’re late again.” Mr. Hooker recognized a good song title when he heard it, so he created a song, and it was a hit first for him and later for the Animals. What about Luilla? Mr. Hooker says, “She went around telling everyone ‘I got John Lee to write that song.’ I gave her some bread for it, too, so she was pretty happy.”
• Sometimes, male audience members would yell “Show us your tits!” at the all-female San Francisco band Frightwig. They always yelled back, “Show us your dicks!” Soon, they began inviting a male audience member to come on stage and strip and dance as they played the song “A Man’s Gotta Do What a Man’s Gotta Do.” Once, four young fans asked if they could dance on stage to the song. They danced in their underwear and then turned around and mooned the audience. Frightwig member Deanna Ashley remembers that they had FRIGHTWIG written on their butt cheeks. She says, “It was so cute.”
• “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” — William Shakespeare
• “A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.” — Leopold Stokowski
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Copyright by Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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