Mandolin Hangover
 
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| Thursday, April 22, 2004 Earth Day |
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I've felt just frantically busy lately, although I know I'm really not. I just have a lot of things I want to do, and there just isn't enough time for them all. Particularly this week. One of the things I would like very much to do is sleep, and I haven't been doing very much of that the last few days, mostly because of Dinah. I wrote in an email to Misty:
Dinah is driving me NUTS. She threw up on "her" chair in the bedroom--the
one she always slept on. There was a blanket in it, so Bob washed the
blanket, but she wouldn't lie on it. So we put a *different* blanket in the
chair, but she *still* won't lie in it. It's like throwing up on it ruined
it FOREVER, even though it didn't actually touch the chair itself.
It's driving me insane. I suppose this is something like people with babies must experience--being woken up every night in the middle of the night. Bob said that maybe we should get a king-size bed (ours is queen-size), but I don't think that would help. They'd still be on either side of me, leaning on me, with all this empty space on either side . . . I guess it could be worse. Misty said one of her cats has taken to sleeping on her head. Okay, that's poetic license. She actually said that Scheile has started sleeping on her pillow, leaning on her head. I could see Dinah doing that. She's gotten so she pretty much always wants to be on my lap, and her preferred position is to rest her chin on my forearm, like when I'm typing. Makes it difficult to type, but the cats must be accommodated, you know? I'm not sure why it seems to important not to disturb them, but I remember waking up in the night to go to the bathroom when we had Doña, and getting out of bed very carefully so I didn't disturb her. And I do the same thing now, with Dinah, although with her I can understand it a little bit more, because she was so standoffish for so long, and I'm pleased that she'll finally sleep on the bed now. Although of course now I'm really wishing she'd just go lie in the damn chair.
We went to Lawrence last night to see Nickel Creek at Liberty Hall. I had never heard of them, but Bob's friend Phil likes them, and when Bob saw that they were playing, he suggested going. I didn't really have very high expectations, but I loved them! They were really wonderful. Sort of alternative-rock-with-mandolin. Kind of a combination rock/bluegrass thing. I really like that plaintive, traditional folk music kind of sound, and they did a bit of that, plus some of their own compositions. The female singer has a really interesting voice, but I'm at a loss to compare it to anyone; the guitar player was very good, but I thought the mandolin player was the most interesting. I liked pretty much everything they played, but especially a song called "When You Come Down." Hearing them last night made me remember an album I have by a band called Snakefarm. When we got home, I got down on my hands and knees to peer at my CDs and try to find it (prompting Dinah to jump up on my back like a circus performer); I found it--I'd forgotten that the title was Songs From My Funeral. From a review by George Graham: The premise behind this album is to present old, instantly recognizable, traditional folk songs, many which were the mainstays of the hootenannies of the 1960s, and give them a very different treatment, with hip-hop and techno-dance beats, and a dark, urban, sound reminiscent of a collision among so-called acid-jazz, rave and film noire. The result is fascinating, and on the whole, quite creative and artistically successful. So I stuck it in the car CD player, and I took the Nickel Creek CD, which Phil had lent us, to work with me. I listened to Snakefarm on the way to work, and after I got there, I listened to Nickel Creek on the headphones. It was good headphone music--I only listen to music when I really, really have to concentrate and want to shut out the world--but sometime mid-morning I started feeling kind of, I don't know, down, I guess. [Big surprise, right?] I wrote to David that I thought I was going to have to stop listening to it, because while I love the old traditional, and pseudo-traditional, folk music, it all seems to be about pain or dying, and it was beginning to depress me. The realization came to me as I was listening to one of the songs that Misty had recommended, "The Lighthouse's Tale," which has a lighthouse keeper jumping to his death off the lighthouse after his lover drowns. A beautiful, beautiful song, but so sad. And "Sweet Afton"--imploring the Afton river to flow quietly and not disturb his love, who lies in a grave near the banks:
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, I was also thinking about an album that Joanna sent me, called North Wind, by Aengus Finnan. Beautiful, sad, and achingly evocative. Exactly the kind of thing that I love. Bob always laughs at me--the quintessential one is Nick Cave's Murder Ballads. He says only Nick Cave could make an album about murder and have it sell. So anyway, all this was kind of flowing over me, and through me, and a little later David wrote and said that he thought I sounded a bit fragile today, and was I all right? I said that I was fine, that music sometimes does this to me--especially this kind of music. It makes me sort of emotionally hyperaware or something, makes my nerve endings buzz. I said I thought I had a mandolin hangover.
When You Come Back Down
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