Month: July 2013

Diary of Lois Elaine Jelin: Entry One Hundred Fifty-Five

Entry One Hundred Fifty-Five

Friday Wed., July 18            Weather unmarked.

Dear Diary,

Bob is starting to warm up a bit. I never noticed how nice looking he was before. *I’m going to give him 2 years. If by that time there’s no spark……. I’ll try to forget him.

Current Obsession: David Gray

Sometimes a current obsession comes from music released in times passed just southeast of the present yet that music is able to remain still north of your present person. For me, that obsession is David Gray’s 2000 album White Ladder. The true test of an album is its longevity, and longevity is beget from timelessness which comes from cyclical relevance. So the question becomes: Can I relate to the same song I first discovered as a teenager when I’m pushing the precipice of 30? In its moment, White Ladder was mainly defined by the radio hit “Babylon,” but it offers the listener so much more. “My Oh My”, “Nightblindness”, and the song featured here–“This Years Love”–are melancholy, contemplative and wax poetic with every turn. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy “Babylon”; it has its place in my listening routine. It is merely that I’m called more strongly by soft sadness wrought from things come hard, and that has been true since I was a raincloud loving teen taken with the Beat Generation but cursed to live in an inhospitable Southern California climate.

This connection to music, the way certain albums and songs are able to stay with me in a visceral way (a way that quickens a pulse, or soothes an ache), is what I’ve chosen to spend my adult years attempting to dissect and describe. Like here, now. But you know what? Sometimes you just like what you like, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. It speaks, therefore you listen.

I’m listening, David. I’m listening.

Nostos Nic’s Picks: Week of 7/15/2013

Playing Brick & Mortar Music Hall: Monday, 7/15/2013.

Playing The Independent: Thursday, 7/18/2013.

Playing Bottom of the Hill: Friday, 7/19/2013.

Playing The Independent: Friday, 7/19/2013.

Playing Cafe Du Nord: Saturday, 7/20/2013.

Playing Bottom of the Hill: Saturday, 7/20/2013.

Playing Bottom of the Hill with Papa: Saturday, 7/20/2013.

Playing Bottom of the Hill: Sunday, 7/21/2013.

 

 

 

Current Obsession: Pancho-san

Learning that Rogue Wave is to play The Independent with Hey Marseilles  this weekend (Friday, 7/12/13, and Saturday, 7/13/13) triggered a wave of nostalgia. A current of flashbacks from my post-college years flickered by, all of them centered around the couch of my buddy’s tragic apartment where a group of us watched Arrested Development with Rogue Wave streaming on low in the background. At that time I was running the Music Department for an upstart online magazine that will remain nameless. In this capacity I was introduced to Patrick Abernathy, then bassist for Rogue Wave, and his solo project by the name of Pancho-san. I took to his album Oh, Mellow Melody immediately, and he was kind enough to spend some time with me after his show at Cafe Du Nord. Abernathy is a genuinely nice man who makes inexplicably underrated music. For this reason, I share it with you now: this current obsession that was once an old obsession.

Behind The Mask

From a Project Gutenberg reprinting of “A Flock of Girls and Boys” by Nora Perry, 1895.

Here, faithful readers, is a poem taken from a newspaper column in the women’s section of an 1890s San Francisco Chronicle title “Behind The Mask” by Nora Perry–an American poet and journalist who wrote for the Chicago Tribune. It is for the lonely ones who know not what they do.

“‘She speaks and smiles the gay old way

She is the same as yesterday,’

You turn and say.

 

The same as yesterday, before

The dark-winged angel at her door

Entered and bore

 

The treasure of her life away;

‘The same, the same as yesterday.’

And as you say

 

These questioning words with questioning tone,

Apart from you and quite alone

She makes her moan;

 

She does not dare to trust her woe

To break its bonds, her tears to flow

In outward show,

 

Lest, like a giant in her life,

This woe should rise to stronger life

And fiercer strife.

 

So, wearing on her face the guise

Of olden smiles, with tearless eyes

She dumbly tries

 

To lift her burden to the light,

To live by faith and not by sight,

And from the night

 

Of new despair and wasting grief

At last, at last to find relief

Beyond belief.

 

Even as she stands before you there

With all the old accustomed air,

The smiles that wear

 

The mirthful mask of yesterday.

She stands alone and far away

From yesterday.

 

She stands alone and quite apart,

With mirth and song her aching heart

Has lot nor part.

 

The while your criticize her air

Of gay repose, pierced with despair

She does not dare

 

To speak aloud her bitterness,

To tell you of her loneliness

And sore distress.”