The Queen of Mood Swings

I'm feeling good today. (Mood Swing Queen!)

I haven't had a drink in four days, though, and feeling good about it. I haven't been to Cheers since Saturday!

B and I have switched from sleepovers to lunch dates and we had such a nice one yesterday. I love "talking shop" with him. He picked us up some Indian food and met me at my apartment, which I had been cleaning all day. The dining table was actually visible (freed from its usual piles of dry cleaning and mounds of junk mail) and so we decided to eat there, like civilized people, instead of eating on the couch, which is my norm. We talked about Christianity and Liberation Theology, which has been on his mind, and about the "saving of the Christian narrative" after the atrocities of WWII, which has been on my mind. I've been thinking of history in much more "literary theory" terms lately, and while it's opening up new strains of thought, it all has my head spinning a bit. I would elaborate here, but I don't quite have the energy right now to grab onto that thread and rearticulate it for you.

My choir concert is coming up this weekend, and as such I've had six hours of rehearsal so far this week. The nice part is that we have been "dress rehearsing" on location, so I've been singing gorgeous Orthodox chant in dimly lit cold churches for half the week. I can't think of many activities better than that. (I'm serious... I can't!) If you want to know about the music, you should go check out the website. It's going to be pretty cool. The first two pieces on the program are all men, and I heard them for the first time last night. They are really strange sounding. As the program notes put it,

The concert begins with a song of Tsar Feodor Alekseyevich, "Hymn to the Mother of God", composed in the znamenny style of one-voice chanting, in which you can hear the faint intonations of its ancient Byzantine ancestors. From these ancestors, a thousand years ago, during the time of Prince Vladimir, the Slavs received Orthodoxy. As a result, the principles of Greek church singing are embedded in the foundation of Russian sacred singing. The next song, "Christ is Born," is a vivid example of early Russian linear polyphony of the 17th century. The first musicologists who successfully deciphered this ancient and forgotten notation system were struck by the strangely dissonant sphere of sounds created by the combined voices: it could be compared to nothing heard earlier.

Yesterday, as I was listening to the men sing, I felt a combination of spiritual openess and absolute absurdity. It was a moment of clarity, but not necessarily a moment of meaning. I texted Narc (don't ask me why!):

I'm tired. Listening to the men in my choir performing very strange sounding asiatic/russian chant...

I didn't expect an answer, and didn't get one until a few hours later when he wrote to me:

Southpark tackles AA! Fucking brilliant!

(Narc and I had been talking about AA on Sunday. I told him that I had been twice-- about a year apart. He discouraged it, but that doesn't surprise me. He has a vested interest in keeping me a "drinker," even though he likes to say I'm too "unhealthy" for him...)

Anyway, I wrote back to him, telling him I procrastinated all day by making South Park caricatures, including one of him. Later I sent him the link by email. I also wrote:

Anyway, have fun at Depeche Mode tomorrow! Let me know how it is-- and if the seats are really as awful as you say. (I wonder if that Craig's List girl w/ the extra ticket ever found anyone to go with her.)

Hope you're having a good night! I'm about to crawl into bed now...

:)

Hyde

The bigger surprise-- he wrote back to me this morning!

Yeah, found the "Build Your Own SouthPark Character" bit a while ago--good fun. Also try the "Build Your Own Superhero" studio as well (not sure of the link, but Google should have it). Off to lunch, then work, then the big DM!

Let you know how it goes

--Narc

Anyway, I guess that's it for now. I'm late to run to class. But I have Mystic's song for me, "Never, Never, Never," stuck in my head beyond compare, and I'm loving every minute of it. I've been fiddling with my new IPod and have come up with a partial "mascohistic playlist."
(I know... I'm sick).

It includes:

Never, Never, Never (Shirley Bassey)
Stand By Your Man (Tammy Wynette)
My Man (Barbara Streisand...Although Babs takes out the phrase of the song in which "he beats me too... what can I do?")
As Long as He Needs Me (Shirley Bassey, again)

And then I've included songs like I'm Over You (Laura Branigan), The Taker (Kris Kristofferson) and I'd Rather Be Sorry (Kris Kristofferson, again).

Okay, okay... so I stopped short of the Crystals singing "He hit me, but it felt like a kiss." (Crazy Phil Spector...)

Speaking of Phil Spector (talk about a stream of consciousness post!) I was recently reading a 1998 Salon.com article about him (by Mary Elizabeth Williams). I thought the article was so beautiful and hit something so smack on the head, that I'm copying excerpts of it for you here.

(Passionate love, masochism, decadence, ambivalence, gut-wrenching music. Mmmm...)

Here it is--

Love, as anybody who's ever been in it knows, can make you sick with feeling. But nobody ever expressed the dizzying fever of romance quite the way Phil Spector did...

...The Wall of Sound was a musical mind-slam; it overloaded the auditory nerves with such sweepingly complex arrangements and such a barrage of instruments that it rendered the individual parts of the whole unrecognizable. Spector called his singles "little symphonies for the kids," but they were closer to opera -- full of romantic Sturm und Drang and more than occasional dips into absolute madness. The Wall was the sound of young love distilled into the three-minute opus -- beautiful and horrible and sweet and suffocating...

...Because Spector produced as a young man, his music had an authentically vulnerable young sound. It was simultaneously rough and elaborate; it beckoned with a finger snap and thumped like a heartbeat. And it laid bare Spector's own private and painful betes noire -- his hyperkinetic, insomniac energy; his doomed love affairs; his family's legacy of mental illness.

Spector knew the tumult and the masochism of love, how a blow can seem like a caress when you haven't yet learned the difference between the two. The shocking power of "He Hit Me (But It Felt Like a Kiss)," which was banned by some radio stations because of its lyrics, has only increased over time; it's brutal proof of Spector's unflinching understanding that not all relationships are chaste, "Walking in the Sand" affairs. His music reflected the intensity of first love and first sex, when one's newfound capacity for pleasure can be so desperately good it crosses over into torment.

Spector had a gift for expressing that raw emotion from a female as well as male perspective. Two of the primary vehicles for his recording studio passions, the Crystals and Ronettes, were the first girl groups to be frankly carnal and unabashed about stating their needs; their voices howled above tsunamis of melody. The heroines of "Then He Kissed Me," for example, were so blown away at being "kissed in a way that I'd never been kissed before" that the music could only thunder along in knee-buckling amazement at the erotic sensation. Ronettes' lead singer Ronnie Bennett -- Spector's lover and later wife -- didn't stop at simply asking to "be my little baby," she demanded that you "be my baby now" with a gorgeously scary urgency. On the painfully majestic "River Deep-Mountain High," his ultimate metaphor for the soaring, sinking nature of love, Spector reduced Tina Turner to trembling, practically choking sobs, as she moaned, "Do I love you, my oh my?" And then, to show men also could be passion's victims, he had the Righteous Brothers throw themselves from the cliffs in such instant pop masterpieces as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" ("You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips/There's no tenderness like before in your fingertips").

But one can only feel so much for so long. By 1966, propelled by the commercial failure of "River Deep-Mountain High," he had begun his disgusted retreat away from the music world and into seclusion...

The "tycoon of teen" was burned out well before he even hit 30, in 1970. In later years Spector traded his vibrancy for eccentricity. By the time he produced the Ramones' 1980 "End of the Century," he was as famous for being a show business kook as he'd ever been for being a producer. The punk heroes did a cover of "Baby I Love You" that creaked with irony.
Gothic stories of drugs and vicious guard dogs and bodyguards spilled out from his Hollywood mansion. Spector took to wearing a gun on his hip and, for a while, a gigantic cross around his neck. He could waste entire days listening to the same track over and over and over again. Guests at his mansion found themselves subjected to capricious lock-ins; his children and ex-wives would claim Spector abused them. The brilliant, beautiful romantic couldn't die like a Romeo or waste away like a Keats; he settled instead for a dementia-tinged exile. Today Spector still works now and then, but mostly, the man who built the Wall of Sound has erected around himself a wall of silence. And if there are still intoxicating melodies playing in his head, he's no longer terribly interested in unleashing them on the world...

...Because Spector's greatest songs can still make you feel again -- not in a cloyingly nostalgic way, but in a brazenly real one -- what it is to confront the world with a young and pliant soul. And they can remind you that while hearts are broken all the time by pain and loneliness, those in love can be wrecked just as easily by pure, astonishing joy.

SALON Nov. 10, 1998

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did!

Later...

-h-