The charming photo featured here is a glimpse of Troy, NY on a recent Saturday night on which we got to see the magnificent Rufus Wainwright perform at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. Clearly, the entire evening was an exercise in enchantment, and while this song has nothing to do with Mr. Wainwright, it felt like a fitting soundtrack to a fall night.
Lord knows I love a nocturne. May this one lull you to sweet sleep.
A somewhat purgatorial moment – this mid-week, mid-month, mid-fall day – and all the worst that is Wednesday still lays ahead. Or is it lies? My English major fails me yet again. I’m never quite as good as everyone thinks, and still quite better at the same time. Such a conundrum calls for a simple song that poses similar sentiments, with a somewhat sad piano melody. Wonderful Wednesday music…
Fall hangs heavily in the air on these foggy mornings. It takes a little longer to get out of bed, and this is only the beginning. Wait until January. Wait until February. Wait until that thirtieth snowstorm of March. We haven’t even approached winter, and the weight of its enormity feels overwhelming. At such times I return to my daily meditation, and remind myself of the focus on the moment at hand. One minute is easy enough to get through, and minutes becomes hours become days become months and so on. The blessed and cursed cadence of time.
Time, spilling out, spilling forward like gourds from a fall basket, is our greatest sorcerer. It bends and twists itself into grotesque forms, usually in whatever frightens us or wears us down the most. I don’t know how best to master or tame it. Instead, I do my best to take it a little bit at a time, trusting that being mindful is always the right choice, no matter how difficult it might be. Breathing through those tough times, one breath in and one breath out, and then again, and again. And then a minute has gone by, and if you can get through one, you can get through two. By three or four you forget what you’re doing and why, and perhaps a crisis is averted. Simply by breathing.
A good-enough lesson for a Wednesday morning.
Mastermind and executor behind Lords of Sound and Lesser Things, Joseph Abramo is once again crowned Dazzler of the Day, thanks in no small part to the tantalizing hints of the genius to come this Friday, October 14. That’s the date of ‘Samsara’ – a musical multi-media phantasmagoria (see the trailer below) that Abramo is performing at J. Louis von der Mehden Recital Hall at the University of Connecticut starting at 8 PM. This event will also be live-streamed at https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/ext… and https://www.twitch.tv/los_alt.
As Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, Abramo has been published in countless texts, all of them well above and beyond my brain level, but I’ve been lucky enough to connect with him on a more basic plane, that of a friend who can appreciate the various calls of an artist. On my last few trips to visit his wife Melissa and their two amazing kids, I’ve been able to get a glimpse of the mad musical genius that comprises Abramo’s artistic world, and it’s always exhilarating. Witness the two excerpts below.
What he has in store for the recital this Friday is anyone’s guess, but it looks to be his usual groundbreaking stuff – an amalgamation of music and images where gorgeous melodies reckon with modern-day technology, and the push and pull of darkness seeks out redemption or damnation, and the only way out is to go through each pulsating beat, letting it reverberate through the body and mind. Watching Abramo at work is like seeing a wizard at the height of his powers – it’s raw, wild, occasionally unnerving, and absolutely mesmerizing of sight and sound. Check out his recital this Friday if you get a chance.
Rufus Wainwright blew the beautiful proverbial roof off the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall last night, and while the performance alone would have been enough to earn this Dazzler of the Day, decades of a spectacular career are proof that he’s been dazzling us all along. Accompanying himself alternately on piano and guitar, Wainwright was somehow able to go from the most delicate ballad (‘Poses’ and Hallelujah’) to the most rollicking anthem (‘Pretty Afternoon’) along with some operatic grandeur thrown in for good measure (yes, he’s written a couple of operas). He explained how during his Robe Recitals and Quarantunes sessions (which, judging from audience reaction, seemed to have earned him a bunch of new fans) he found a way to take even his most bombastic and grandiose songs and perform them in a smaller but no less magnificent manner. That one man alone could make such a glorious ruckus is truly a testament to his talent and power.
The set list spanned most of his career, and returned to several classic favorites such as ‘Beauty Mark’ and ‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk’ – the latter taking on a world-weary wisdom and resignation, particularly in the way he solemnly drew out its ending. A majestically dark ‘Early Morning Madness’ was another highlight, as was a haunting encore of ‘Going to a Town’ which gains more resonance and meaning with each troubling, passing day.
With banter that was typically witty and sparkling (he had an encounter with the current King of England that sounded like a hilarious doozy) Wainwright remained the consummate show-man, able to enthrall with each musical story. It was an evening where one of America’s greatest living artists was at the top of his game, performing such pretty things in such a pretty place, and reminding us all of the power an artist, and a remarkable human being, can wield in our crazy world.
{Check out his website here for upcoming tour dates.}
Tangled in his sheets, my body, tanned from the summer – a last summer of innocence now that I can look back with such distance – is dark against their whiteness. His broad shoulders are freckled by summer too, and the heat is such that our actions leave us both a bit damp. He is the first man who has been naked with me, and it is maybe our third or fourth night together. I am nineteen years young, and not one day of those nineteen years has prepared me to be in this bed, in his arms, in his thrall. How could I be anything but terrified?
It was September – the September I discovered Marianne Faithfull’s ‘A Secret Life’ album – and the track so perfectly titled and timed played in my mind as we laid there in shadow.
I’ve already talked in great detail about what happened between us. Read that here if you’d like. For now, for this one moment, I am going back to that one moment – and it may not even be one moment anymore – maybe it’s an amalgamation of two or three moments, settling and coalescing into one single memory that haunts but no longer hinders my journey. This song takes me back there, to his bed – the bed of the first man I ever kissed – and to this night, just another night in his life of nights, a life that was already double the length of mine. And again I wonder how I could be anything but terrified?
That September was hot and stifling one moment, chilled and stormy the next. That’s how it felt in his bed – hot and cold, push and pull – we were each alternately powerful and entirely powerless. Who held sway over whom? The perfect lithe and unspoiled canvass of a nineteen-year-old young man could instantly disarm a thirty-six-year-old’s jaded experience. We weren’t on opposite ends of some human spectrum. We were closer to each other than we realized. I also understood that we could not find our footing outside of his little room. And I knew that it was more than that too.
In his watery blue eyes, I looked for answers to my questions. I had so many, and I was so young. How do you know if you’re in love? How and when do you reveal it? I’m not saying I’m in love with you. I only just met you. How can you love someone you barely know? He stopped my questions with a kiss, or a bite, the same way some animals put an end to play, both a tease and a warning. When he had me beneath him, when I could barely breathe, and when I wouldn’t have it any other way, I wondered at whether his warning would deliver some ecstatic death blow to the person I hadn’t quite yet become.
Fridays feel better in the fall – perhaps it’s a residual relief from years of being back at school at this time of the year. For this Friday, we’re offering some frilly feathers in keeping with the fiery theme of flames, and they align beautifully with the fabulous fable spun in the fantastic musical ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ (sadly his name didn’t start with an ‘F’, thus ending our little alliteration moment). In the fantastical opening number, our protagonist dreams of a better place than the classroom in which his teenage-self is stuck.
There’s a clock on the wall and it’s moving too slow
It’s got hours to kill and a lifetime to go
And I’m holding my breath ’til I hear the last bell
Then I’m coming out hard and I’m giving ’em hell
I’m a superstar and you don’t even know it
In a wonder bra and you don’t even know it
You’re so “blah blah” and you don’t even know it
I’m like, “au revoir” and you don’t even know it
To a certain extent, life is all about finding out how to turn feathers into fire while making them fly. When you’re just a kid in school, it’s hard to find the fire or the feathers, and even if they’re at your disposable, a kid doesn’t usually know how to use them. It’s hard enough to ignite the passion and strength to go through an average day as an adult – when the weight of the current world rests on a kid, it must feel overwhelming.
There’s a path I’ve planned (And you don’t even know it)
To the promised land (And you don’t even know it)
You won’t understand (And you don’t even know it)
Cos you’re my backing band (And you don’t even know it)
Whenever I think back to my days in grade school, it is usually fraught with the anxiety and dread that being in school and around other kids always produced. Once comfortable with a group, I could relax and shine, but there was so much work and energy required to get through the nerve-wracking first few days that the trauma would linger and be inextricably wound into any enjoyment I might have found. When you’re a kid, life should be mostly about that joy.
I’ve got the dreams, I’ve got the style
I’ve got the moves to make you smile
So kiss my ass goodbye
‘Cause I’m gonna be the one
Instead of finding joy in the present moment, I began to craft a world in my imagination, a world that could be fully accessed from anywhere at any time, but only reaching its fullest form when I could be alone, in solitude, conjuring scenes of fantasy and play and beauty. On my walks home from school I would inhabit this secret world, which was more exciting and grand and dramatic than the boring trappings of school and the dull doings of my classmates.
You’re in my lane, you’re in my light
Get out my way, I’m taking flight
And I ain’t coming back
‘Cause I’m gonna kiss the sun!
For my entire schooling stretch, even into college, I would maintain this secret world. Though I made some decent strides to integrate the imaginary dreams and wishes into the mundane reality in which I so often found myself, I wouldn’t fully merge the two until I was well into adulthood. Some days it’s still a struggle, and on those days I put on a song like this and feel the inspiration to be my authentic and genuine self for all the word to see. Dragging it into the brutal light of day, and allowing all the plumage and fire and majesty to assert itself, I listen to the music, do a little twirl, and make my merry way. In defiance there is power. In self-proclaimed majesty there is might. In the imagined world of a scared kid, there is a way out.
Singer/songwriter and performer Tom Goss is set to take the world by storm this September, as he has a string of live performances coming up, as well as new music. Upcoming Double Trouble tour dates can be found at his official website here, and that new work ‘Enemy of Good’ is set to be released on September 23. Today he is crowned Dazzler of the Day because no one dazzles quite so earnestly and exquisitely, eliciting smiles and joy and laughter, which is the secret to any artist’s happiness. Catch him live while he’s on the East Coast.
PS – Bonus points for the jockstrap, and the banana.
He was just about the only part of the MTV Video Music Awards that I could stomach for a few moments last night (I aged out of enjoyable engagement with MTV at least a decade ago), and his outfit of oodles of red layered sheer fabric was a feast for the eyes, as much as his melodies and voice were a feast for the ears. This is Conan Gray, who was by far the most fabulous part of last night’s MTV festivities. Check out his website here for more of his work, and further evidence of why he is the Dazzler of the Day.
There was something waltz-like about the piece. It stirred a little dance and a little dream.
A little darkness, and a bit of shadow. Dark like the iron shavings we would watch assemble in wondrous form atop a magnet in grade school. Dark like the nights near the end of summer, when the canopy of full tree leaves stretches wide and far to obliterate the most noble efforts of the moon. Dark like the secrets we keep in the name of protection and solace. Dark like the secrets we keep in the name of shame.
The summer is slowly slipping away in the night. The heat doesn’t hold its trance like it did just a few days ago. And yet we hang on, even as we grow weary – instinct and hope acting as much as habit and laziness. A week ends and begins, and August is about to depart for another year.
Ruminating upon this piece of music, I am challenged to do something – anything – to keep going. Creation beckons. Inspiration whispers. A shift is signaled by a change in atmosphere. The music keeps time. The world shudders and lets go of the dark.
Some music is too moody to be heard during the day. It goes too deep with its words, or turns too sinisterly in its bassline. This is one of those songs, appropriately entitled ‘The Night’, and perfectly suited for a spell of nightswimming. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to get into the pool at least once a day. Not every summer has been as lovely and warm as this one, and I don’t want regrets haunting me in the winter to come.
There is no swimming on a winter’s night.
Summer tells a different tale, allowing for outside loveliness beyond the midnight hour. Summer carries Korean lilacs on its breeze, just as it begins. Summer dapples moonlight on little crests of water – in the pools, the streams, the ponds and lakes, and especially the sea. Summer intoxicates in a way nothing ever could or would.
Summer keeps its secrets in the night, insidiously burying them during the bright sunlight of day. Like slugs and bats, they come back out when the cloak of darkness has safely pulled itself around the edges of the evening, feeding on the good and the bad. Summer is selective sometimes, teasing with clouds and wet air, delivering with lightning and stormy destruction.
Floating in this water, bathed in this light while the night encroaches with deliberate obliteration, I am suspended in a way that feels like what I imagine flying might feel like. There is a weightlessness to swimming that I’ve always loved, a relief and obfuscation from the pull of gravity. An escape from the physical laws of earth is not a typical flight most of us get to take, but swimming allows everyone to experience a few moments of freedom. Indulging in that, I move to the deepest part of the pool and gently paddle, just enough to stay afloat.
A birthday tucked into the tail-end of August, in the last full month of summer, floats by and disappears into the night. No nightingale sings ‘Happy Birthday’, and I wouldn’t understand the nightingale’s song anyway. Another piece of moody music to close the night.
The fading remnants of a supermoon hung in the air as our dinner party broke up at almost 2 AM. Andy and I saw our guests to their car, and looked up to the sky, where this scene played brilliantly out. I believe this was the Sturgeon Moon, another gift of August (which has been exceptionally kind to us thus far). It brought to mind a Matthew Sweet song that saw me through a few tricky college years, back when I didn’t quite know who I was, back when I couldn’t quite face who I was.
Those August moons of my youth crossed overhead, exploding in their light – that light that was always so vital in the darkness of an August night. For several reasons, an August night too often feels darker than any winter night – a strange phenomenon in the season of sun – and one that is a small price to pay for the glories of summer we are otherwise granted. We let the dark nights go, sweating and worrying through them, and if we’re lucky enough to see the morning, we forget how dark they were.
It is told by those who tell such things that this Sturgeon Moon is to be the last of the Super Moons this year. Did we channel all the good energy and dispel the bad? Did we soak in its power and drink in all of the proverbial moonshine? Full moons are usually troublesome, but there are some who believe we simply need to harness their energy the right way. I don’t think I’ve found the right way just yet, even though decades have passed since I first heard this beautiful song.
The song memory brings me back to being in Boston. On certain nights, at certain times of the year, the moon hangs in a specific space in the sky. It shines in through the bedroom window, and just kisses the foot of the bed. Once upon a time, unknowing people believed being bathed in moonlight could be the cause of such things as lunacy (from the root ‘luna’ meaning moon). I always flirted with disaster that way, seeking out the moon bath whenever I could, glad to have its reflected echo of sunlight in the middle of a dark night.
On those nights, when the moon peeked in and invited me out, I tentatively slipped a toe into its light, then a foot, then a leg and a thigh… we danced, the moon and I, and whether it was a dance with the devil or an angel, I only know it made me dizzy and exhilarated and defeated – always defeated – by its power and might and whatever secrets it saw – the very secrets that I bared and revealed beneath its intoxicating light. My college years were cloaked in such secrets, buried in silent screams, and only brought to light in a song like this.
Matthew Sweet sang to my younger self, when no one else could touch or reach me, and like a lullaby it was comfort and consolation. When I was 23, all I wanted was my 46-year-old future-self to reveal the secrets to all the questions and doubts and worries I had. Now that I’m that future-self, I find I have less knowledge and understanding than I did then, when not knowing was its own sort of wisdom. It feels like I’m going backward, and perhaps that’s the way it should be – cresting over the hump of middle-age and returning to that happier place of not knowing or understanding things, but simply being at peace with them. Finding the happiness where you can find it, taking pleasure and joy when and where they arrive rather than trying to force or create them. I like that view now. I like the not knowing.
And I like the moon.
Water lapping at the edges of the pool and sun lapping at the edge of a shade tree.
A fun and funky pop song rife for a summer playlist.
Vision hazy from chlorine, water, and sunlight.
A summer’s day, perfect for being nothing more or less than a summer’s day.
And the albatross of our own myths and histories, tethered to our necks, even in the happiest light.
Summer is not the time to get too deep. There will be time enough for that in the fall. For now, a sunny song and a water dance. Lose your illusion, lose your inhibition, lose your swimsuit…
This piece of music, written by Hector Berlioz, is from the Ball Scene in Fantastic Symphony. Unsure of whether the world will ever be able to safely throw a grand ball again, the mind modifies and creates a smaller-scale version in a fantastic dinner gathering where the desired intimacy of a large party is conjured with smaller scenes and intricate tablescapes.
This is fantasy. A brief bit of mind-play built within and upon the imagination – the most sacred and fertile ground of all. Palaces, cities, countries, and worlds have been erected there ~ there, where there is no limit, no physical or scientific boundaries, no laws or restrictions or mandates – and once you understand the power that resides within each of us to imagine, the bounds of the real world don’t seem to matter as much.
This is why I never minded waiting around in airports or sitting alone in a quiet room or being a passenger on a five-hour drive. My imagination has been a place of refuge since I was a child, and I’ve fostered and fed it every day of my life. It allows for a sense of contentment and entertainment that almost everyone else I know lacks, and seeks to find in various ways. Not that my way or theirs is better or worse or demanding of comparison. There is room enough to make our different methods through our lives. Personally, I find my mind’s imagination an easy way to access contentment when the mundane reality of the world puts us in situations that aren’t pleasant or fun. One can fight and stubbornly rage against them, or one can accept them and go into a different state of being – whether that’s through meditation, deep breathing, or some fantastical lark that’s half memory and half dream, and entirely made up in one’s head.
Like all responsible members of humanity, I’ve had the latest Beyoncé album ‘Renaissance’ on repeat this entire week. This is the summer soundtrack we’ve been waiting for, and Beyoncé delivers like only she can. Fresh and piping hot, the latest remix for lead single ‘Break My Soul’ features none other than Madonna and manages to feel almost like an afterthought in the appropriately titled ‘Queen’s Remix’. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for this miraculous album. It channels 90’s drag balls though the lens of a powerful black woman, and finds the ‘Summer Renaissance’ of the dance floor its saving grace and salvation. Not unlike the way Taylor Swift’s ‘folklore’ defined the summer of 2020, Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ is the sonic boost that will see us through the dazzling summer of 2022. For that, and a record-breaking career of influential and bad-ass moves, she is our Dazzler of the Day. Check it all out at www.beyonce.com.
Beyonce Renaissance publicity photos (2022)
CR: Carlijn Jacobs for Parkwood Entertainment
August is a time for fairy tales, and for remembering things in rosy hues that could never quite have existed the way we think they did. It is for those childhood memories that begin with the song on a boombox, way back in the 80’s when my generation brought the boombox over our heads and screamed out our declarations of love – innocent, misguided, and as wonderful as youth affords us all for the briefest of times. This song sounded out from cars and stereos in some beautiful summer from childhood, before I could really know the wonder of love…
Jumping into the pool, I heard bits of the song playing from the shade of the slate-floored patio. The radio was our only source for new music then, but I was still too young to pay much attention to anything beyond a catchy melody. Words were indecipherable to my ears, and even when we figured them out (after debate and argument) I couldn’t tell you what was being said – certainly not the first brush with love. Summer was too light for such cares, and I wanted to perfect my mid-air somersaults off the diving board rather than fiddle with some silly notion of romance.
I swam around him, circling his legs as they strode through the shallow end, watching his trunks flutter next to his white skin. I felt like shark and prey in one – the hunter and the haunted, for no one was hunting me in those days – and he was blithely unaware of my gaze – or maybe he wasn’t, and the safest recourse was to pretend he was. I imagine my rendering of his perfect body was different than an objective survey might yield with hindsight. It didn’t matter – he was the epitome of male beauty – his blond hair darkened slightly as he dove underwater and displayed his strength with sure strokes through the pool’s dappled light.
It was a time of innocence – the way summer should be, the way it sometimes still is – and the looks from the boy I was at the time were hidden beneath the refracted light of the pool. This neighborhood Adonis would swim by unbothered save for my furtive glances, seeking out the glances of young women who could cast their own spells in ways I couldn’t replicate no matter how much I tried.
He came only a couple of times that summer, but those visits are embedded in my mind – the very first recognition that I found men attractive, the first troubling inkling that I was decidedly unlike any of the other boys. How I wanted to share what I was feeling with someone else, but already I knew it was wrong, so I held it secret and I held it safe, allowing it to exist only at the bottom of a pool, beneath rippling sunlight, in sad and muffled silence.
