Month: June 2004

music

Firefly Light: Small Flames Burn It All

Posted on by littleREDelf

:::
am i your pussycat?
i know what’s new
it’s the oldest hat in the book
we can’t get fast enough to go backwards
to take a second look

~ Animals on Wheels – Sam Phillips
:::

On Monday, June 21st, Zoey and i went to see Sam Phillips in concert with Eszter Balint at The Ram’s Head in Annapolis. It was a warm night and we donned our best red and black clothing. i even dragged out the leather pants and the wavy hair for the evening.

Eszter Balint was an interesting creature – she had this smallish frame and short dark hair. Somewhat atonal, offkey and definitely offbeat. Apparently, she has a fledgling movie career now turned music career. She was in a few of Jim Jarmusch Films (Trees Lounge, Stranger Than Paradise). Originally from Hungary, she plays violin and sings bittersweet, semi-caustic lyrics. Nothing wildly abrasive, only that she makes you think of broken glass and Comet cleanser and that flophouse excuse of an apartment you stayed too long at, going rent poor in New York. She reminds you of that time you layed next to an abusive lover who could really shine on that rare occasion – the one you had to try desperately, daily to talk yourself out of. To leave would mean to slough off a few layers of skin, like escaping from a bear trap, that or you layed awake at night watching their chest rise and fall and their eyes flutter as you considered killing them while they slept. Eventually you get smart and write a bunch of songs and tell morbid jokes about it.

Then there is the sweet sting of unrequited love in Sam Phillips music. She is a self-described torch singer. “Torch” both for tortured and for carrying a torch for that person you love who does not love you back. She could be swaying in front of a big band, a delicate-voiced thrush, in a small 40’s club with round tables and plenty of bourbon. Her music is wholly transporting, minimalistic with inventive percussion, small upright piano and brilliant violin punctuated by swirling Beatle-esque melodies and sharp lyrics honed with such an economy of language that they sing like paging through old photos and love letters from that time you spent in Paris with a beautiful stranger. She stood like a porcelain figure all in black, her hips curved slightly back in straight pants, the hind quarters of a silky fox, bellted by a thin shimmer of ribbon, her blouse drooped forward, a bowl to catch the song and spill it out to the upturned mouths of the audience, a small black jacket revealing the small of her back, strong for the carry.

She told cleverly crafted stories, read letters, used a handheld tape recorder as a musical backdrop for one song and looked piercingly around at the audience through a small curtain of blunt-cut blonde hair. She was wonderfully described once as “part savant, part naif, and part waif – seductive by thirds” and her music like a “subtle insistence.” Her “voice is very cool and often icy but it’s also expressive and interesting.” Her “music is mostly austere and thoughtful but it’s also enjoyable and sometimes quite catchy.” Sam Phillips is full of cagey, romantic observations even in her speech . . .

After singing “Draw Man” which she described as a “strip tease in reverse” she looked out at us, addressing the women in the audience growling, “do you know what i mean?” Some murmurred, some laughed, some howled and catcalled.

Her pedigree is also impressive, having left the world of Christian music (under the given name Leslie Phillips) she teamed up with husband/producer T Bone Burnett (producer of O Brother Where Art Thou) for a total transformation and has recorded with Elvis Costello and Gillian Welch.

Zoey and i exchanged glances and tear-soaked faces at points in the evening. Somehow a firefly got into the venue and hovered above her, blinking pale green, a magical sort of completely right moment. We came away from a performance that Zoey described as “hot.” And it was . . . truly.  As hauntingly deep as dreams and desire, we left the world for awhile and came back with the simple advice that we “shouldn’t work so hard at love – just have fun.”

friends, technology

30 who?

Posted on by littleREDelf

Today. i am 32. i don’t feel any different, i still think i look young. but this has been an extremely long week . . .

Zoey arrived here Sunday with her father, a Ryder truck and all of her belongings. she and Brooks and i have spent the week moving into our new house, with her living space in the loft, setting up the areas, drinking quite a good spell, watching movies, trying to adjust and relax which has been nearly impossible what with all the work and storage facilities and pianos to move and well . . . the rest of it as you can only imagine and would be a crashing bore to read.

last weekend i installed the best processor my motherboard would accept and upgraded my memory. i have 2 60GB harddrives: one with the OS on it and the other simply to store a series of drag and drop folders containing things such as documents, email, music, folders, programs, drivers, web site backups, etc. because i refreshed my speed, i decided to install a fresh, reformatted copy of XP. took the time to establish that the back up was done and the folders were intact. unplugged the backup drive so as not acccidentally overwrite it, reformatted, re-installed, plugged the drive back in, the BIOS saw them both but then – the drive wouldn’t access, it made a noise that sounded to me, not as catastrophic as a head crash, but more like a mechanical failure, like the arm couldn’t go across and read even though the disc was spinning, but perhaps not fast enough.

Well – i spent the whole night crying and flipping out, woke up with swollen eyes, skipped work and overnighted the drive to Drive Savers who are the best in the business in Data Recovery. i can only hope it’s all still intact and the estimate ($500-$2700) is based on the completeness and complexity. these guys take the plates apart in an anti-static lab environment and rebuild the data, transfer it to a new disc or burn it to the media of your choice (in my case DVDs.) these guys have dealt with discs that have endured fire damage, been tossed out car windows while encased in a laptop, submerged underwater, even shot. i can only hope mine is straighforward, uncorrupted retrieval.

losing that amount of important data is devastating. i feel like someone has erased 7 years of my life, or gave me a frontal lobotomy, or my house has burned down. the moral of the story is backup. keep a backup of your backup. and bakup your secondary backup to media that is not only different but stored elsewhere.

even so, there is also and exchange when things go wrong, things also go well in transition . . .

while some die, others are born and live . . . the Polyphemus moth’s egss that i wrote about previously have hatched. 20 egss, 18 caterpillars hatched, 5 now have survived to their second instar and are still eating and growing and dropping much frass (poop) i have also successfully mated two other species and contained their eggs and am waiting for them to hatch. soon i’ll have to build them a proper house for rearing as well.

today is my birthday, i have to go to work, my office is a tower of boxes around me, my moths are fluttering in a glass enclosure nearby, and i will let them go today since they have given me their gifts.

more sweetness to come later, but for now, i find myself green again, crawling the length of a leaf and eating slowly all Summer, waiting to spin some silk and to sleep in the Autumn.

nature

One eye in a sea of many . . .

Posted on by littleREDelf

This is a Polyphemus Moth, one of the largest of the Giant Silkworm Moths, although not the largest North American moth, the Cecropia Moth (Hyalophora cecropia).

Because of the large eyespot on each hind wing, this moth is named after Polyphemus, the legendary Cyclops from Homer’s Odyssey who lived in a cave and tended sheep and ate straying sailors.

From the outside, or underneath, when they are closed, the Polyphemus moths’ wings look like dead leaves. But if this moth is disturbed too much, it may drop onto the ground and flop its wings vigorously. It will snap its wings open as an anti-predation mechanism intended to expose the large eyespots which mimic an owl’s eyes which can startle a predator, such as a squirrel or bird. After a while the moth will cease flopping, then continue to “warm up”. Silk moths are so large that they must warm their flight muscles for a minute or two before they can fly. They do this by shivering and in doing so, the flight muscles vibrate in opposition to each other rather than in synchrony as they would in flight.

The first time I ever held a large Silkmoth I thought the trembling was fear . . . it’s really just getting ready to fly. I guess we are always trembling before something big is about to happen, before we must take flight.

The moth I have pictured is a male, which you can tell by the larger, fan-like antennae. Today, my boss called me to the back office where he pointed out a strange creature hanging from the eaves. as if by miracle . . . it was a female, of the same species. Shortly after I captured her, she laid eggs! I collected them and took her home to meet the male I had.

Now—the eggs she laid may be infertile—I will know in a few days if they collapse. There is also a good chance they may be viable, in which case this is the caterpillar of the Polyphemus Moth. Then I will be fortunate enough to witness the whole cycle through pupation and rebirth again, with fine, unbattered specimens for later.

This moth is born without mouth parts. It does not eat. There is nothing I can do to preserve it. This is a feature that constantly amazes me. All of its energy and food will have been stored up from all the eating it did as a caterpillar. It will mate and it will lay eggs and it will die.

A rainstorm came tonight, windy and cold, whispering around the house. I let the moths out of their enclosure, they crawled over my hands, scaled the length of my arm, crawled up my neck and lit off from the top of my head into the air of the room, the cats watched and I forbade them to leap or attack. I put them away and they flailed helplessly, battering against the edges of the world. could I keep them, knowing they die soon anyway and I would be left with their colorful cases? could I watch them die or come back to find them this way—colorful, then pale and ragged?

I opened the front door, opened the cage and the male found its way out immediately fluttering somewhere above the rain into the treetops. the female dragged herself lightly along, her abdomen a heavy half-moon curved to lay eggs, looking more tired, flagged, drugged, close to sleep. I wonder how I will find her in the morning.

I have to respect a creature whose ending life cycle seeks only to love briefly and to die. It spends 10 to 14 days in its tiny white infancy, eats its own shell after being born and then begins to eat everything it is presented, absorbing all it can. it sheds itself five or 6 times, each one called an “instar” and then it crawls away to hide, spins a cocoon in August or September and sleeps until May or June where upon emerging a shriveled childlike thing again, it will blossom fully and live briefly.

This is so much like us—we spend our first years helpless and hungry, we take everything we are given, swallow it up whole, we shed our skins several times trying to be stars and by the time we know, by the time we are calm and nearly perfect, our days left to love and to live are considerably short.

Best to keep our eyes open at night, to flap around for attention to prove we exist, to shiver for warmth and work our muscles to gather internal strength when we must finally take our leave, and to leave knowing we have loved.