Ah, but this time around I am a blogger, and a blogger who reads other bloggers. Somewhere earlier this year I discovered U2 Sermons, which seems to be U2 news, links to other bloggers and sites rather than pontifications. From Beth Maynard’s posts, I learned that “Vertigo”, the new single from the upcoming album (hype starts here), has been playing on the radio already. Today she linked to this site which has some reviews – everything from Best single since “The Fly.” to “Bono can’t count in Spanish very well. Can we listen to the mole song (“Elevation,” of course) instead?” (Sarah, age 5)

Those interested in reading further commentary or finding a version of “Vertigo” to download can do what I did last night and take Feedster for a ride . Already there are plenty of links to U2 and to mp3s (isn’t that illegal though?!). Lots of bloggers dizzy from Vertigo, or maybe it’s just contemplating the mystery of what it will mean to dissmantle an atomic bomb or trying to determine what sort of scene the lyrics of the first single illustrate (in typical U2 fashion, it seems Vertigo could be describing anything from the sexual to the spiritual or all of it). I guess I just added one more post to that pile…

Last year we had fun at a Family Concert. This season two Family Concerts are offered: one in October and the other in February. This one looks quite tempting to me.

THE SOUND AND YOU!
FEBRUARY 5, 2005, 2:00 pm
Family Concert Series/Classic Concert Series
STOYANOVICH – Rhapsody of the Seas
HOVHANNES – And God Created Whales
GORDON – Master and Commander
BACH – Cello Suite, #1 in G Major
NEWMAN – Finding Nemo
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Scheherazade
BADELT – Pirates of the Caribbean

Speaking of music, the girls and I have been enjoying The Story of the Orchestra by Robert Levine. I think I am learning as much as my children are. The accompanying CD is invaluable and fun. Today we pirouetted around the living room to snippets from the Romantic Era of Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Brahms. Tomorrow we begin the Modern Era with a lovely Debussy clip…By the time we see the Symphony in February, we will be excited and a bit more educated…

P.S. If you’d like to meet up at the concert on February 5th, please let me know!

But after a recent email from the topica group (a groupie network, I suppose), I’ve been checking the board more, and today I discovered this link to The Runway Network, started by Scott Dente and Charlie Peacock…

The Runway Network is a new “emerging model” music company taking flight. We are reimagining what it means to be in the music business and looking to connect with others eager to do the same. We are small, mobile, and quick. We think injecting our company with a greed vaccination is a good idea.

[...]

We think laughter is the best elixir, love the only way, and dreams essential. We think that Jimi Hendrix should have lived long enough to record with Miles Davis. We think Bono and Al Green should team up to record Bacharach’s best songs with Bill Frisell on guitar. We think The White Stripes are some kind of hope for rock. And we think the best music is the music we are about to discover.

Scott and Charlie list their iPod playlists and reading lists. Scott’s selections are pasted below.

Top 10 (or 17 ) albums in my iPod that changed my life ( or made me feel real good )

Kind of Blue – Miles Davis
American Garage – Pat Metheny
Woodface – Crowded House
Led Zeppelin I – Led Zeppelin
October – U2
Steady On – Shawn Colvin
Jeff Beck – Wired
Who’s Next – The Who
Whatever- Aimee Mann
Soul Cages – Sting
Wildflowers – Tom Petty
Pirates – Rickie Lee Jones
Parachutes – Coldplay
Plumb – Jonatha Brooke
Secret World Live – Peter Gabriel
Innocence Mission – The Innocence Mission
Axis Bold as Love- Jimi Hendrix
Neil Young – Comes a Time

What I’ve Read, What I’m Reading:

Mark Helprin- Soldier of the Great War ( all of his books really )
C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity – ( among others of his )
Andre Gide- The Immoralist
Douglas Coupland – ( any and all )
Curtis / Eldredge- The Sacred Romance
Albert Camus – A Happy Death
J.D. Salinger- Franny and Zooey
Chaim Potok- My Name Is Asher Lev
Ayn Rand- The Fountainhead
J.R.R. Tolkien- The Two Towers
Donald Miller – Blue Like Jazz

And I guess I must be a groupie after all, since seeing this site and reading through these lists tonight has inspired me and given me a case of excited-school-girl giggles…

Ted had already made a commitment to help a friend so I took the girls by myself. A bit of an adventure but fun. I sent a note to the yahoogroup asking if anyone wanted to meet there, describing myself as a mom of three little girls.

We arrived as the first piece began. It was certainly a young orchestra. The tones of the brass sounded as if they were underwater. But perhaps the aquatic image was appropriate: the auditorium was built on top of a swimming pool. From the reception area, we could watch the swim meet. For me it was the first time I have smelled chlorine and heard violin strings at the same time.

However, aquatic imagery aside, it was a good concert. Once I had a chance to read the program (it made excellent amusement for Elisabeth most of the night) I was impressed at the ability of these kids: the concertmistress is 15 years old! As a former violinist in my youth, I shouldn’t be critical of the tuning and tones: I remember how hard it was.

Elisabeth bopped her head in time to the music for a few pieces. Abigail and Michaela sat quietly and patiently. A student conductor – also 15 – lead the symphony in a rich round of “Amazing Grace”. A trio of flute, clarinet and violin played sweet Pachelbel. The last Mussorgsky piece had strong chords and tone, like a movie theme, a rousing ending.

Going to a concert with little kids is a different experience. I am getting more relaxed. But it’s hard not to feel that I am monitoring every move of three little people, hoping none of them will make a sudden loud noise, kick a chair or announce a need for a potty in the middle of a movement. The girls though did well and seemed to enjoy the music.

At least two moms came up to me and asked “are you on the yahoogroup?” Apparently they recognized me – and my multiple minions – from my email – and said they were glad to have a face to go with the name. Yes, here I am. Flesh and blood. Living being, animal that I am. The face behind the hypetype.

After the concert we nibbled cookies while watching the swimmers splash below us and the musicians mingle around us.

I can only imagine what it would have been like to go to the Viennese Vegetable Orchestra this past weekend. I’m not sure I’m surprised that organic vegetables don’t work as well to make instruments. The leek violin and cucumber saxophone intrigue me. And so does the thought of vegetable soup afterwards…

Children are brilliant refractors of time. Our three came along and changed the spectrum completely. They shrank it down at first, taking up so much time that we couldn’t find any for ourselves. Then they fanned it into warp speed, growing so fast we wondered where the time had gone.

Christine’s lyrics and perspective on life resonate with me deeply, and at least one song on each of her albums wrestles with time, how fast the days disappear, how to measure our moments and how to savor the seasons. Her solo album has been out for several months now, but it is seems quite appropriate to begin playing Summer

How short the days are long
How fast the days of slow go away
So I’m wading right in
Playing your games
And I’m running the full length of summer
By your side

In 1992, at the height of his fame, he moved to Los Angeles, a time less is known about. In an apartment in the Fairfax district, he put down his guitar, picked up a paintbrush and contemplated a life without music. For several months he was ensconced in a mad world of creation. He painted using acrylics and oils, but at times he mixed his own blood, semen, cigarette ash and fecal matter into his medium. It was astonishing work. Most of it has been seen only by his closest friends.

Cobain died at 27. The music he created in the last year of his life was some of his best, which leaves critics and fans to forever wonder about what might have been. But none of the Cobain “what-ifs” are as fascinating as the one that imagines him quitting the spotlight of the music business and retreating to the world of art. It was an option he talked about frequently with his closest friends, and the one turn that might have saved his life.

Two of his creations are included in the on-line article.

Two questions I have: I wonder how artistic gifts are linked to each other. For example: are there painters who would be gifted musicians and musicians who would be gifted painters?

And of course, the big question is the What If? What if Kurt Cobain had pursued painting…

I will link tomorrow’s article, part II, below soon…

Update: Monday April 5, 2004 10 years gone: In life and death, Kurt Cobain is forever linked to Seattle: the social and cultural aspects of his life and death here.

When Love told him he could no longer do drugs in their house, he moved into cheap $18-a-night hotels on Aurora Avenue. He made one last attempt at rehab, but escaped after 48 hours. He spent the first few days of April on the run in Seattle, trying to avoid police, private detectives and friends who were searching for him. On April 5, in a greenhouse of his Lake Washington Boulevard house, he took his own life with a shotgun. In his one-page suicide note, he cited the pressures of fame, his lifelong stomach pain and the culpability he felt at not enjoying music anymore.

[...]

Most Nirvana fans know that Cobain was cremated and his ashes scattered in a number of spots, including Olympia. But few know that there is a sliver of Cobain left in Denny-Blaine — some of his remains were also sprinkled around the magnolias, willow trees and rhododendrons in the neighborhood. For an artist who mixed ashes into his paintings, this living landscape seems appropriate.

[...]

“He was truly very talented,” Novoselic said of Cobain back in 1998.

“If you look at his drawings, and the stuff that he did even as far back as high school, it was really good. He was an artist, really, in every sense of the word. In every village there’s a carpenter and a blacksmith. Well, Kurt, he was the village artist.”

So I clicked. And read:
(excerpts)

Now artists have options. We don’t have to work with major labels anymore, because the digital economy is creating new ways to distribute and market music.

The status quo gives us a boring culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists a year sell a million records. By any measure, that’s a huge failure.

Let us do our real jobs. And those of us addicted to celebrity because we have nothing else to give will fade away. And those of us addicted to celebrity because it was there will find a better, purer way to live.

I know my place. I’m a waiter. I’m in the service industry. I live on tips.

Why can’t MP3.com pay each artist a fixed amount based on the number of their downloads?

I had to forward this essay to my brother, bassist for Spiral. What Courtney Love wrote reminded me of a conversation we had last summer sitting out on our deck. While he and the lead singer of the band were at our home for a family birthday barbecue, we discussed the recording industry. My brother’s band is creative and eclectic: their music is difficult to fit into a category or market with a label. Distribution through a new digital economy would benefit Spiral in big ways. I’m sure my brother and his bandmates would love to have a “tip jar”.

While grilling chicken, Ted shared helpful insight. The night before he had posted this piece Changing the game in music, quoting Dana Blankenhorn.

But the best thing you can do is keep your wallet in your pocket. No matter how much “law” the RIAA may claim to have on its side you have the ultimate power. If you don’t like the terms and conditions under which a product is offered to you, don’t buy it.

There’s one other thing he left out that we could do. Find a way to support artists who are producing music outside of the RIAA.

For the sake of my brother and his band, for the sake of Courtney Love and us all, I hope we soon find a way to let musicians “do their real jobs”. Where’s the tip jar?

we’ve got information in the information age,
but do we know what life is?
outside of our convenient Lexus cages?
She said, He said live like no tomorrow,
every moment that we borrow,
brings us closer to the God who’s not short on cash

Lyrics to “Gone” by Switchfoot

Those numbers include my brother who has a day job but at night plays with Spiral. He’s the professional musician of the family. My sister and I received lots of lessons when we were kids, but it’s my brother, a self-taught bass guitarist, who’s playing music for people.

Friday night was the first time Ted and I were able to see him perform. I’d heard him monkey around a bit at home when we were kids but I’d never seen him with a band. Spiral was one of the ones opening for Pyromania at the Showbox, near Pike Place Market.

We’d never been to the Showbox and weren’t prepared to show our ID at the door.

do we look that young?

Inside the guys who took our tickets asked who we had come to see.

“Spiral.”

They handed us the stubs and stamped our hands: “Keep the stubs. Remember when you were young.”

do we look that old?

The rest of the evening I spent wondering how old I did look. It used to be people told us we looked like kids. But maybe the kids have caught up with us.

Compared to the rest of the crowd I was on average at least a decade ahead of most of the guys and gals clustered around the tables, drinking beer, laughing, dancing.
I thought maybe it was what I was wearing: the fact that I was wearing a coat, a practical black slicker that practically declares “I’m-a-mom-in-my-thirties”, and that I was wearing a wedding ring. Ted thought it was what I wasn’t wearing. Next time perhaps I’ll dress more appropriately. Then again, as I told Ted on the way home, I used to have some outfits like that and something happened to them, they disappeared from my wardrobe once we got married…

I got to see my brother for a moment and hug him before he went back stage. My sister came to the concert too. A family event on a Friday night at First and Pike. Ted and I found a space to stand against a short wall and away from the speakers. Most of the Showbox is open floor, with tables and bars on the sides.

The band started soon after 9. The stage and lighting tested the limits of my camera, or maybe just my photography skills. (For much better photos look at the Spiral site.) Here’s one of the better pictures I caught. My brother is the bassist on the left.

I wrote earlier this week about having a performance persona. It’s one thing to know the performance persona first and then discover who lives behind it. But it’s something else altogether to discover the public sides of people you’ve known privately for years. Like your little brother. Here was the guy I babysat. I taught him the birds and bees. I could even claim to have been his first band experience: years ago we four kids did a Monkees imitation, performing and singing for our parents. And there he was up on stage, wearing leather pants, exotic shirt and hat, rocking the room with his bass guitar. The floor was shaking and he was the reason why.

Daniella the lead singer has been to our home, hanging out with our family, participating in Abigail’s birthday party, making a placemat with pen and stickers. She’s sweet and cute. Up on stage she was dressed in fishnet stockings with furry white go-go boots, pleated black mini-skirt, purple velour shirt, something glittering in her blond hair. She’s got a voice that would sound just as good in gospel as heavy metal and she’s up there posing and strutting along with the lyrics. Clive Thompson’s recent post on lip-synching and dancing comes to mind. It’s clear that Spiral was certainly singing and making their own music – no lip-synching here – but they were also doing drama and dance, putting on a show and makin’ it lively for ya.

The music was loud and pulsing through the floor and walls. Some of the songs sounded new and some I recognized from the demo discs my brother has given us. All the creativity amazed me: the music, lyrics, costumes, dancing…I realized how much my brother and his bandmates have put into their performances.

We had to leave to catch the boat before the last song. The crowd was starting to dance more as we slipped out the door and into the dark.

Reading blogs today I saw that Ariel Meadow Stallings was there too. I had noticed her blog link on Spiral’s site and learned she’s a friend of my brother. She said in her post that Daniella’s dad was also at the Showbox. Wish we could have stayed around. But we needed to get back home for our babysitter.

Can you hear? I said to Ted as we strode towards the ferry dock.
My ears felt a bit dulled. We walked quietly in the cold, hurrying to make it home.
The songs lingered in my mind.

If I close my eyes I can hear Daniella’s voice strong. I see my brother standing on the stage, strumming, smiling. He is happy. My brother the bassist.

I want to tell her, “Hey, do you know that your dad dedicated this song to your mom?” “Do you know that your parents danced to this before you were born?” “Do you know how your dad said these lyrics were about me?” When this song comes on, I can still see Ted’s apartment from thirteen years ago, the stereo in the living room there that’s now in our living room here, my then-boyfriend telling me how the lyrics reminded him of me and our relationship. I can still see the look in his eyes

But I don’t say anything to Abigail. I’ll tell her someday. For the moment, I’ll let her make her own memories to the music. Although, when we went downstairs for dinner the other night, after she had danced to the radio in her room, I searched in the closet and found our CD of the same song, putting it into the stereo to play it again one more time for her – and for me.

There are a couple Amy Grant albums that played parts in our dating relationship. Heart in Motion, the one I took out the other night, and also the one prior to that one, Lead Me On, had some significant songs for us as a couple. Sure it’s late 80′s pop, pretty dated, bouncy and bubbly, but the music still has meaning to me. When I was learning to play guitar, I bought the book for Lead Me On so I could serenade Ted with some of the songs.

Sure Enough is one of my favorites. More than melodies, I like lyrics – memorizing and singing them easily as some other bloggers do – and I think the album Lead Me On has one of the best portraits of what love looks like long after the wedding and honeymoon days have passed, when you look in the mirror at yourself in your marriage, when you know you’re in it for the long haul and the haul seems long.

One reason the lyrics probably have meaning to me is because the song – and the album as a whole – hints at endurance in relationship, what it takes to stay around to make a marriage work. My parents divorced and in our early years of our marriage there were moments when leaving looked good to me too, easier than trying to stay around and work through the difficulties. It was hard. But by grasping to God and His grace, I stayed.

This year this song has been playing in my mind. I think perhaps because one of the lines reminds me of a post I wrote a few months ago. But also too for Ted and me, it is as if we are seeing sun after storm, spring after winter, emerging from the past few years of intensity, only stronger and more in love. It sounds sappy but it’s true. If a prophet had predicted to us all that we’ve experienced in our marriage, especially our time here in the Northwest, I’m not sure we would have believed it – or that we would have gotten married and gone through it all;)

But now, we both know even more how much we belong together.
I think it’s something stronger than words within us: a depth, a sense, a truth.
I never would have believed either how much in love we are, even more than Before Marriage, when we danced to music like our daughter does now.

I’m sure I’m staying now: I’d never want to be without you, Ted.

I’m laying it all out on the table
I’m telling you again what I’ve already told you before
My love is not a soon forgotten fable
My love is not a box with a lock at a five and dime store

Sure enough
to never want to be without you
Sure enough
to stay for good
Sure enough
in every little thing about you
Sure enough