Category Archives: Love

Far Into The Night

Music

If you’ve been dying to hear me sing, here’s your chance.

Download Far Into The Night, a song recorded about ten years ago live at The Creamery in Keosauqua with the band Stormy Heaven, and engineered by Emo.

Please note that I was drunk during this recording, and my monitor sucked. No, that’s not an excuse, I’m just sayin’.

This file should play in iTunes or Winamp or what-have-you. If you have problems opening it after download, change the file’s extension from “m4a” to “mp4.”

And if you tell me I sound like Janice Joplin, I will bitch-slap you.

Earworm

Music

I’m infatuated with this chart right now. Infatuated.

  • Download: Grace (Jeff Buckley)

I’ve been listening to it about a dozen times a day for three days now. The quavering, hard rock vocal should drive me apeshit, but for some reason I love it. The depressing, angst-ridden lyric should drive me apeshit, but for some reason I’m super into it. The highly-audible clicky-clicky pick sounds against the strings should drive me apeshit, but for some reason it makes me all hot and bothered. I shouldn’t like this track, but I love it. The whole thing just floats. It’s gorgeous. It’s sweeping.

And no, it doesn’t suck like that Brit pop from before. (Which I still think is adorable, you snobs!) Thanks for asking.

You can go buy the album. It’s so hot.

September

Music

In September, I’m going to New York City to work on an album with my old friend Barbara, aka Ilana Iguana, and I’m so excited I could squeal. (Never been to NYC before. Been in New York, but never the city.) Aimee and I are flying out together – she found us a screamin’ deal on airfare – and we’ll staying with Steven in the city and then with Barbara in Jersey. We’ll be rehearsing in subways, eating good food, and hanging out. I’ll see Katya and Tane and meet the Roche sisters and everything.

The material is this amazing a cappella stuff Barbara’s been writing over the last twenty-five years. I even get a gospel solo in the end of one of the charts… Barbara gave me an old recording of the chart, Sweet True Love, that we recorded with a boom box in the MIU student union in the early 90’s and said, “This is the exact way I want you to sing the solo. You nailed it… it’s perfect. Do it like that.” So even though I’m usually queen of the improv solo, I’ll be copying my own decade-old improv because she loves it.

While I’m gone, Brett will be going to Telluride to the Blues ‘n Brews Festival, where the dumb whore will get to see The Reverend Al Green live and in motherfucking person! *swoon* If I weren’t going to sing and see old friends, I’d be painfully jealous.

I’m a little jealous as it is.

I have no idea what we’ll do with the dogs. We’ve never kenneled them before, but I can’t imagine asking someone to come out here twice a day for five days, or asking someone to keep them for that long ’cause they’re all spazzes. And when I say “spas,” what I mean is, that Dingo will eat your baby. What I mean is she’s already munched a kitten (oh, gross bad dog) and bitten a cop (oh, good dog!).

Discrimination vs. karma

Soapbox

I had a long conversation with Hattie recently about tattoos. She said she’d actually spoken face-to-face with a woman who told her tattoos were “for hookers and white trash.”

I read a web page this year by a woman who urged other women considering getting tattoed to be extremely careful where they put their body art, so that they could hide it when necessary because they would without a doubt be discriminated against because of it.

Today, I read a blog entry by a guy whose own mother told him his tattoo was white trash, and he was over 30 when he got it.

I have women friends who recount varied tales of sex discrimination in the workplace, and in companies I’ve personally worked for myself. I’ve heard tales of women being shut out of jobs or opportunities by men who wanted to keep them for themselves.

And all of this, quite frankly, baffles me. I feel like I live on a different planet than the rest of these people.

I honestly can’t remember a single time I’ve ever gotten a “shut up, you’re just a woman” vibe in my entire life. I’ve never had any problems with male customers refusing to listen to me or work with me because I’m female.

I’ve never had anyone ever give me attitude or even dirty looks because of my tattoos. I’ve never even met anyone who had a strong negative reaction to my ink. Or my piercings (I have my nose pierced).

People tell me these kinds of discrimination exist, and it’s not like I don’t believe them, but I’ve never once experienced sexual discrimination in my entire professional life, and I’ve been working since I was sixteen. I’ve never been shut out, refused a promotion, or even strongly condescended to (for the latter case, if I was I never felt that it was sex based. Some people are just condescending fucks, and that’s that. It doesn’t have to be a sex role issue).

Of course I’ve had personal issues with co-workers over the years, but I never interpreted it as being due to my sex.

I’ve worked blue collar jobs and white collar jobs. I’ve worked in warehouses lifting boxes alongside men, I’ve worked in offices with men, I once did my own valve lash adjustment and I’m quite capable of doing basic maintenence on a vehicle, and I currently work in a building full of Internet geeks who are all men – I’m the only woman in this department. And while most of them will hold the door for me if we happen to arrive at it at the same time, none of them have ever doubted my ability, intellect, or competence.

Yesterday a customer came in to pick up a NIC card. He was male, older than me, and we had a long conversation about installing the card (I explained how to do it) and about his network problems (I explained all the possible reasons for the symtoms his network was having). I was clearly the expert in the situation, and I was clearly educating him. I got absolutely no vibe off of him. He was, like every customer I’ve ever dealt with since I became an Internet engineer, attentive and polite.

Which leads me to karma. I mean, clearly I do live on the same green earth as these people who get shit for their tattoos and these women who have had to fight tooth and nail for the right to do the same job a man does only better, but it’s none of it ever happened to me.

This is where the brilliant conclusion would go, if I had one. But I don’t. Sorry. I just think it’s interesting that wherever you go, there you are. (I get my ass totally kicked in other areas, so it’s not like I think I’m special.)

Earworms

Music

Mike at Troubled Diva recently released his first podcast [link is 50.2 MB], and I just just got around to listening to it last night.

It’s an hour long radio show, essentially. It’s so fabulously English I can barely stand myself. The tracks are quirky and obscure (from an American point of view), and the accent is just wonderful. I’d literally never heard a single track before – so there’s really much fun to be had listening to it. There’s an hysterical Japanese pop thing from the 80’s about Don Quixote you really gotta hear just to say you did. Plus the English accent. Did I mention the accent?

Anyway, despite all that, the first track is Hard To Beat, currently on Brit pop charts, and I’m shamelessly in love with its bouncy pop goodness and the neato distortion on the vocals.

I also recently started to expand my appreciation of Mr. Buckley by adding a CD to my collection and I. Am. In. Love. with the sweeping scope and almost theatrical Frenchness of the (believe it or not) bluesy six-eight waltz called Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.

And so here, for your downloading and listening pleasure, are the two very different songs that are currently fighting to take over my brain.

  1. Hard To Beat (Hard Fi)
  2. Lover, You Should’ve Come Over (Jeff Buckley)

Ten Cute Things

Love & Marriage

Ten cute things about my beloved:

      1. If he hasn’t seen me in more than, say, twenty minutes, he greets me by yelling, “Mmmmmushlette!”
      2. He almost always helps me put the groceries away.
      3. He likes to cuddle.
      4. I get more fantastic, awesome foreplay in a month than all the rest of you bitches get in a year. (Smirk.)
      5. He fixes my car. (Sometimes.)
      6. He giggles. Is there anything cuter than a grown man who giggles?
      7. He often hands me his entire paycheck in cash. It’s nice to be trusted, innit? (Of course, he usually asks for a bunch of it back later, but that’s another post.)
      8. His predictions about human behavior are so right on as to make me suspect he’s psychic. If he claims to dislike someone, they invariably do something indescribably horrid within the year.
      9. He lets me hang out with ex-boyfriends and/or stay out all night, and he never gets jealous or bossy or weird. (In other words, his trust is complete.)
      10. He’s covered in freckles. I adore freckles, since I don’t have any.

While I could go on for hours about the things he does that drive me totally apeshit (and I have), overall he’s a fantastic man and a great husband.

Plus he married me, which no one else was willing to do considering what a total spas I can be. Snort!
——–

Bambu

Music

A bunch of old friends are in town. They were all in a band called Bambu once upon a time, and I haven’t seen some of them in many years.

Bambu played a little reunion gig on the square in Fairfield tonight. Barbara (Ilana) and Derby (Stephen) came in from NYC to do this gig.

I didn’t know about it until two minutes ago. Undoubtedly everyone from my era was there, and they all had a great time… and I missed it. I thought it was next weekend. (Of course I was asleep until quarter to ten this evening, but maybe I wouldn’t have been had I known Bambu was tonight.)

I didn’t see a single ad, and nobody called me.

Mood: crushing disappointment.
——–

I'll have what he's having

Music

I shamelessly surf gay blogs for MP3s to feed my iPod, because I find my musical tastes often tend to coincide with those boys’. Let me say just one word unto you: disco!

Oh, and heart-wrenching, neurotic, sexy ballads. Yesterday I downloaded this amazing track* from The Sean Show. And after listening to it and being amazed (the artist apparently had a four-octave working range), I surfed for more information only to learn that the vocalist had died years ago. After releasing only one complete studio album, Amazing Grace, Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississsippi in 1997.

I had five octaves when I was in operatic shape, but only three – maybe three and a half – were really working octaves.

I’d never heard of him until yesterday, in spite of a famous father and an award-winning documentary called Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley that made the film festival rounds in 2004. Where in the holy hell have I been?

Oh yeah, right. Iowa. I’ve been in Iowa.

Living in Iowa means you don’t listen to the radio, because all they play is classic rock, country, and Christianity. If you’re me and you hate TV, you don’t watch TV either. Compounded with an almost total lack of culture and print news, you got yourself a kind of media blackout.

So I’ve missed not only musicians since I moved out here from Oregon in 1992, but entire fads completely.

To make up for it though, there’s a lot of good music happening in town this weekend, including my gig at Revelations Friday night at 8:00. Come see me sing!
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