Back to the gypsy that I was

Who spent 3 hours 12 feet from Stevie Nicks? Me. And my mom. It was magical.

On our way in, I politely tell Tim, the events staff member showing us to our floor seats, that if any front row seats just happen to be become available, that we would be more than happy to fill them. So Tim looks us out, as he said he would, and mere minutes later we are standing right in front of the stage. Thanks, Tim.

This was a hits tour so it stands to reason that the renditions of "Landslide," "Gypsy," "Go Your Own Way," "Dreams," "Second Hand News," "Rhiannon," etc. made up the majority of the set list. I had tears in my eyes through "Landslide." "Gold Dust Woman" was beautifully done.

Lindsey Buckingham played a ridiculous show. His solos were amazing. The passion he and Stevie showed was moving. At one point they embraced while he played his guitar. It was a moment of such personal and private emotion. You could see the years falling around them.

Here are some crappy pics I took with my camera phone, because, of course, I forgot my camera.

Stevie through various changes of clothing:





Lindsey soloing it about five feet from us:



And John McVie gettin funky:



I narrowly avoided buying a Second Hand News t-shirt, which would be somewhat a propos to my personal life right now, minus the "someone else" and "stuff." I went with one that read "Rock on Gold Dust Woman." Because who can resist that? Thanks for the t-shirt, Mom. And Happy Mother's Day!

Poetry Friday: Fitting, Sad.

One more from Naomi Shihab Nye.


Adios

It is a good word, rolling off the tongue
no matter what language you were born with.
Use it. Learn where it begins,
the small alphabet of departure,
how long it takes to think of it,
then say it, then be heard.

Marry it. More than any golden ring,
it shines, it shines.
Wear it on every finger
till your hands dance,
touching everything easily,
letting everything easily go.

Strap it to your back like wings.
Or a kite-tail. The stream of air behind a jet.
If you are known for anything,
let it be the way you rise out of sight
when your work is finished.

Think of things that linger: leaves,
cartons and napkins, the damp smell of mold.

Think of things that disappear.

Think of what you love best,
what brings tears to your eyes.

Something that said adios to you
before you knew what it meant
or how long it was for.

Explain little, the word explains itself.
Later perhaps. Lessons following lessons,
like silence following sound.

I Could Be a Poet

Just discovered Taylor Mali. Love him! I was sorta hoping he wasn't going to curse so I could show this to my kids, but I'm going to show them another on speaking with conviction.

. . .The path is clear though no eyes can see. . .

Poem as promised:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

--Naomi Shihab Nye




P.S.--I bought Oh, The Places You'll Go to read to my 8th graders on their last day of school. I used to get teary reading it to the 3-year-old I used to nanny. I can't imagine this bodes well--I see blubbering in my future.

Born Again from the Rhythm

Poetry Friday for ya. . . I promise an actual poem soon. This is, of course, a Leonard Cohen original. But this rendition is so heartbreakingly beautiful, no?

. . .wait, have I posted this before? Possibly. Oh well.

Thanks to Joining Hands in Silence for these images of Buckley:

Enjoy

Case of You


Just before our love got lost you said,
"I am as constant as a northern star."
And I said, "Constant in the darkness,
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar."

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh, Canada
With your face sketched on it twice.

Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh, I would still be on my feet.

Oh, I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints.
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid.

I remember that time you told me
You said, "Love is toching souls."
Surely you touched mine.
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time.

Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet.
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
And still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds.
And she said, "Go to him, stay with him if you can
but be prepared to bleed."

Oh, but you are in my blood
You're my holy wine
You're so bitter
bitter and so sweet.
Oh, I could drink a case of you darling
still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.

Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand

The title has nothing to do with the post, really. Well, maybe in some dark, subconscious way. Or maybe not.

I just remembered how much I love this poem by Carl Sandburg. We read it when I student taught, during our Romeo & Juliet unit. It was so much fun to perform. And I think what I love best is, I can find something in each stanza that I'm nodding along to. See if the same holds true for you.


Here's an excerpt:

Little Word, Little White Bird

Love, is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams
in the black night?
Love, is it a bird--a goldfinch with a burnish
on its wingtips or a little gray sparrow
picking crumbs, hunting crumbs?
Love, is it a tug at the heart that comes high and
costs, always costs, as long as you have it?
Love, is it a free glad spender, ready to spend to
the limit, and then go head over heels in debt?
Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave
the one lost and groping?
Love, can you pick it up like a mouse and put it in
your pocket and take it to your room and bring it
out of your pocket and say,
O here is my love,
my little pretty mousey love?

Yes--love, this little word you hear about,
is love an elephant and you step out of the way
where the elephant comes trampling, tromping,
traveling with big feet and long flaps of
drooping ears and straight white ivory tusks--
and you step out of the way with respect,
with high respect, and surprise near to shock
as you say,
Dear God, he's big,
big like stupendous is big,
heavy and elephantine and funny,
immense and slow and easy.
I'm asking, is love an elephant?

Or could it be love is a snake--like a rattlesnake,
like a creeping winding slithering rattlesnake
with fangs--poison fangs they tell me,
and when the bite of it gets you
then you run crying for help
if you don't fall cold and dead on the way.
Can love be a snake?

Or would you say love is a flamingo, with pink feathers--
a soft sunset pink, a sweet gleaming naked pink--
and with enough long pink feathers
you could make the fan for a fan dance
and hear a person telling their lover,
Speak, my chosen one,
and give me your wish
as to what manner of fan dance
you would have from me
in the cool of evening
or the black velvet sheen of midnight.
Could it be love is a flamingo?

Or is love a big red apple, and you don't know
whether to bite into it--and you knock on wood
and call off your luck numbers and hold your breath--
and you put your teeth into it and get a mouthful,
tasting all there is to it,
and whether it's sweet and wild
or a dry mush you want to spit out,
it's something else than you expected.
I'm asking, sir, is love a big red apple?

And I've heard some say love is a spy and a sneak,
a blatherer, a gabby mouth,
tattling and tittering as it tattles,
and you believe it and take it to your heart
and nurse it like good news,
like heaven-sent news meant for you
and you only--precious little you.
Have you heard love comes creeping and cheating like that?

Here's the whole thing.

Go Ahead. . .

Chuckle. Chuckle at the fact that I love Rush enough to turn "Tom Sawyer" lyrics (cause that's not a predictable choice or anything) into an impromptu Poetry Sunday while I sit and listen with strep throat on the FIRST TWO DAYS OF MY BREAK. Figures. Literally the moment I got home Friday, my body says oooook time to be sick now.

BTW, did anyone see Mos Def school Bill Maher on the working poor last week? Sometimes, as one of my professors once said, Bill really kicks down instead of up. Mos was not having it. I will try to find the moment on youtube.


What is it with me and musicians named Neil?



Tom Sawyer

A modern day warrior
Mean, mean stride
Today's Tom Sawyer
Mean, mean pride

Though his mind is not for rent
Don't put him down as arrogant
His reserve, a quiet defense
Riding out the day's events
The river

What you say about his company
Is what you say about society
Catch the mist, catch the myth
Catch the mystery, catch the drift

The world is, the world is
Love and life are deep
Maybe as his skies are wide

Today's Tom Sawyer
He gets high on you
And the space he invades
He gets by on you

No his mind is not for rent
To any god or government
Always hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren't permanent
But change is

What you say about his company
Is what you say about society
Catch the witness, catch the wit
Catch the spirit, catch the spit

The world is, the world is
Love and life are deep
Maybe as his eyes are wide

Exit the warrior
Today's Tom Sawyer
He gets high on you
And the energy you trade
He gets right on to the friction of the day

"Art Wins! Art Wins!"

This is a post about teaching. . .


but the post title borrowed from Kanye West's blog. . . he kind of sums up exactly how I feel about him and his work in his own words: "you gotta love it, though, somebody still speak from his soul." Not long ago, in fact, I used some lyrics from Kanye for my students to practice this new, crazy NJASK task where they have to read & interpret a quote. I figure, let's keep it familiar at least some of the time for them. They'll have plenty of Confucius to work with later.

We've had an interesting couple weeks in the Land O' Plenty. The kids are getting pretty dramatic and pretty antsy and pretty. . . ugh, hormonal. They are SUCH 8th graders right now. Which is at times amusing and at times an instructional feat. We're all ready for a break--5 days and counting!

Small victories in which art is definitely winning:

-My students are pumped about submitting their "This I Believe" essays to National Public Radio's website for this segment, thisibelieve.org. NPR chooses essays to publish online and sometimes records writers reading them for the radio segment. I am just glowing with pride for them--while I have a dozen or so "I believe that if I put my mind to something, I can do it" carbon-copy essays, there are some essays that are filled with such emotional honesty that I'm blown away. And some of my most struggling writers produced the most articulate work, some of them finding their writer's voices for the first time in a while. I had two students write about what they believe as a result of losing a parent--the language was stark and powerful. One student wrote about coping with a learning disability and how overcoming it informed her beliefs, while another framed his belief by discussing how hard his mother fought to help him overcome severe handicaps as a young child--the doctors did not believe he would ever walk or talk and now he's perfectly typical.

We held a publishing celebration for our essays and the students did a fair job of crafting genuine praise and positive feedback for the work of their peers.

The website for This I Believe was helpful and I employed a couple of their curricular ideas for this unit, adding in some resources from a cooperating teacher I worked with a couple years ago. I'm looking forward to making this unit even stronger next year.

Hooray for authentic audiences. Whether my students get published by NPR or not, we're all feeling like winners already.



-One of my girls told me last week how she never thought she was a good reader or writer, or "good at English" but now she does and she's taking Honors English next year. This is a girl who I had to pull aside a couple months ago and talk with--she was getting a little obsessed with climbing the social ladder and in the process was really changing into a person she was not. I was impressed with her reaction to my thoughts, which were that she was way too smart and cool to be changing who she really is for others. I saw her gradually return to the kind, caring girl she was to start with and--perhaps to her surprise--her social status didn't suffer a bit.

-My differentiated independent study project on tolerance--including a whole host of issues from race in America to the Holocaust--is working marvelously. The students are gaining a unique understanding of various issues that they have chosen to explore. Resources included in the options range from Obama's speech on race to the MLK obituary all the way to issues of immigration and schooling. It's based on a tiered-point system that matches up with Bloom's Taxonomy. Thanks, Mom, for the wonderful template!


pics npr.org; kanyeuniversitycity.com/blog

Prose Friday or Walking Contradiction

Serious eye and sincere life indeed. . .


In typical Libra style, a little H.D. Thoreau for some much-needed balance around here. . . a most cherished passage from Walden, "Economy:"



We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labour. . .

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art . . . All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people.









P.S.--I have an exciting post to do all about our Socratic Seminar the other day, complete with quotes straight from the mouths of babes. They did so well it makes me all teary to think about it!

Better to Burn Out than to Fade Away

There are plenty of songs I love, even prefer, to hear in acoustic. Neil's "Hey Hey My My" just isn't one of them. It doesn't get much better for my money, folks. . .

The crowd's rockin in this version if I ever saw a crowd rockin. . . check for dude with the rad sunglasses around 2:30.







By the way, have you discovered pandora radio yet? You create stations based on favorite artists or songs, and the site plays other songs they think you might like that include similar musical qualities. So far only a few of the channels have gone south with the recommendations (The Mamas and the Papas, for example, because all I really wanted to hear was "California Dreamin and I ended up with way too much Paul Simon); most keep me jammin through free time in my school day. My Neil station is bringing all kinds of forgotten favorites back.

Best Excuse for Poetry Friday

Leonard Cohen's heartbreakingly wonderful "Bird on a Wire"


Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a young man leaning on his wooden crutch,
He called out to me, don't ask for so much.
And a young woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, hey, why not ask for more?

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.



Here's the incomparable Johnny Cash performing it. . .

Random Acts of Music

Wind & Wuthering is one of my most favorite albums ever.

I Think I'm in Love with My Radio

I was never a HUGE Beyonce fan. I've always loved her other half and have just about every one of his cds--one of the greatest artists of my generation if you ask me. I don't mean to suggest that I ever disliked Beyonce--I always liked Destiny's Child and enjoyed her work as a solo artist, but I hadn't owned a single album. I do see her as in many ways unparalleled in style, class and talent when it comes to the new breed of whatever genre it is in which you would place her. She's no Mariah and no Mary J.--there is only one Mary J.--but that's not to slight her talent in the least. It's just a different generation. So imagine my surprise at my new found love! Contrary to my usual m.o., I picked up her new album, I Am. . . Sasha Fierce yesterday. I'm so not a new cd buyer. I'm a chronic burner (just noticed how that could be construed. . . I meant as in I chronically burn c.d.s from others) and the majority of the music I listen to was made long before I was born. I do like rap, as in real rap not hip-hop silly stuff that they call rap nowadays. Anyhow. . . it seemed like B was making a major comeback with her last few songs, so I decided to pick it up. The c.d. is faaaabulous. My favorite tracks so far are "Radio" (line from post title) and "Diva." The Hov influence is strongly identifiable in "Diva" and I eagerly await a fantastical collaboration with him or another equally major rapper. There are some interesting influences which I'm still trying to place cropping up throughout the double-disc album. I'm hearing Prince in there, some Michael Jackson--no surprises here--but then I also hear her channeling more bluesy notes at times. Without question, I'm more partial to the Sasha Fierce half of the album. The beats are, how do you say? Bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

Here's "Diva," for your listening pleasure. . .









I've been super busy lately, so sorry for my lack of commenting on everyone's blog. Parent/teacher conferences this week are finally over, but more to come next week. . . commence dreaming of snow days. . .

The Moon and the Deep Blue Sea

Jimi doing "Angel"

Consider it my Poetry Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday. It was worth waiting for, no?





Ok, and "Little Wing," for good measure. This is a beautiful recording.







Did you know that when Jimi said he wanted the cover of Axis: Bold as Love to have an "Indian" theme, he meant Native American Indian, not East Asian? Yep. So he ended up with the iconic cover by mistake:

Random Acts of Music

A little Joni for a lovely Saturday. . .

I really wanted to find a live performance of "Case of You," but to no avail. I surmise that the lack of live performances of this song may be due to the fact that it is heartbreakingly sad, perhaps personally so for Mitchell. But there I go again with the authorial intention critique--wholly unreliable and deplorable theory as we English majors were told again and again. . . oh, but it's so tempting. . .

Random Acts of Music

I discovered Jeff Buckley a few years ago and immediately regretted not knowing about him earlier. He left behind an immense and extremely devoted fan base upon his untimely death in 1997. If you haven't heard his album, Grace, I suggest that you make it the very next cd you purchase (after, of course, you call all of your friends in hopes of acquiring a copy). He was heralded as one of the greatest contemporary songwriters by all-time greats including Neil Pert, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

Although his cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is devastatingly beautiful, I think this song, "Lover, You Should've Come Over," reveals the degree to which Buckley was not only a master lyricist, but one seriously soulful performer and individual.

Here he is performing live in Chicago. Sorry, no date included in the youtube blurb. Please enjoy at your leisure:





Ok and one more pic...

Lawyers in Love. . . With Intellectual Property Laws

Jackson Browne (above, wearing a tee in protest of the construction of Diablo Canyon Power Plant, circa 1982, looking pretty darn d-r-e-a-m-y if you ask me) has just filed a suit against the Republican Party and John McCain's campaign for their unauthorized use of his songs during McCain events:

"In light of Jackson Browne's lifelong commitment to Democratic ideals and political candidates, the misappropriation of Jackson Browne's endorsement is entirely reprehensible, and I have no doubt that a jury will agree."

Check out the full article here.

Just who does McCain think he is? You can't go using other people's art willy nilly to support your own crazy quests. Especially people who so vehemently oppose everything for which you and your party stand, and have a long history of voicing said opposition!

And is it not more than a little ironic that McCain chose "Running on Empty?" I mean, really? Even if he was using it against Obama, it still seems sort of hilarious that McCain would utilize a song in which lyrics read:

"Running on - running on empty
Running on - running blind
Running on - running into the sun
But I'm running behind"

Don't you feel this way sometimes, too?

This one is "Bookstack Girl."

This is the work of Emily Martin, and more of it can be found on Etsy at her shop, The Black Apple. I really do want a print for every single room in my house (and, uhm, my classroom).