"But she upended expectations once more, surviving and soon returning to a passion project she had been working on..."

"... a spoken-word album of recitations of classic Romantic poems. For one last time, she allowed a glimpse of the other side to inform her art, and the uncompromising tone of her voice: 'I sound more vulnerable,' she told me in an interview at the time, reflecting on her performance of Alfred Tennyson’s 'Lady of Shalott,' 'which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.'"

From "Marianne Faithfull Made an Art of Upending Expectations/The singer, who died on Thursday at 78, spent decades in the spotlight exercising a very specific and subversive power" (NYT).

You can, like me, download the entire album — "She Walks in Beauty" — here, on Spotify.

By the way, my favorite episode of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast is the one about "Lady of Shalott."

Do you listen to poetry on Spotify? Any recommendations? I was just enjoying "The Best Cigarette" yesterday. Check out "Nostalgia."

Goodbye to Marianne Faithfull.

She had 2 such distinct stages in her singing — the sweet 60s ideal of youth and then the scarred, raspy fully mature woman.

"Marianne Faithfull, a Pop Star Turned Survivor, Is Dead at 78/A fresh-voiced singer and Mick Jagger’s muse in the 1960s, she went on to experience more than her share of hard times before emerging triumphant" (NYT): "What I’ve been trying to do, and I think I’ve done it rather well, is bring the persona — or what was a false persona in the beginning — and me together.... I’ve got the right voice for me.... It gives an edge to everything. I don’t have to act out. I just have to open my mouth and there it is."

"She wrote in her autobiography that Bob Dylan tried to seduce her by playing her his latest album, 'Bringing It All Back Home,' and explaining in detail what each track meant."

"(It didn’t work. 'I just found him so … daunting,' she wrote. 'As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.') Jagger had more luck, and for a few seemingly glamorous years they were a generational It Couple. But there were tensions from the start, and Faithfull wasn’t sure she was cut out for the wifely muse role that, even in such bohemian circles, she was expected to play...." From "She’s Marianne Faithfull, Damn It. And She’s (Thankfully) Still Here. The British musician has had several brushes with death in her 74 years. But Covid-19 and its long-haul symptoms didn’t derail her latest project: a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets" (NYT). 

I was interested in that — "As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me" — because isn't that the way gods from Olympus actually behave in the story? No, no, they proceed directly to rape. I'm thinking of Leda and the swan — that sort of thing.

There would need to be some new telling of a Greek myth with a god like the one Faithfull described, not lording his godliness but explaining lyrics on his new album — earnestly imagining that she would turn her favor upon him because he visualized the "diamond sky" and "haunted, frightened trees."

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

50 years ago today: John Lennon met Yoko Ono.

As John told it:

I got the word that this amazing woman was putting on a show the next week, something about people in bags, in black bags, and it was going to be a bit of a happening and all that. So I went to a preview the night before it opened. I went in - she didn't know who I was or anything - and I was wandering around. There were a couple of artsy-type students who had been helping, lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and was astounded. There was an apple on sale there for two hundred quid; I thought it was fantastic - I got the humor in her work immediately. I didn't have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humor got me straightaway. There was a fresh apple on a stand - this was before Apple - and it was two hundred quid to watch the apple decompose. But there was another piece that really decided me for-or-against the artist: a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says 'yes'. So it was positive. I felt relieved. It's a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say 'no' or 'fuck you' or something, it said 'yes'.

Why did Josh Marshall title his column "The Trumpian Song of Sexual Violence"?

This is a very verbose thing that Josh put up at Talking Points Memo yesterday. I slogged through it, even read some sentences aloud to Meade to test the intelligibility of the multiple negatives and piled up phrases:

The simple fact is that there's no evidence or logic to the idea that anyone who doesn't already hate Hillary Clinton with a passion will believe that she is culpable in some way for her husband's acts of infidelity against her.

But what's up with the title to his column? There's no music to Marshall's prose. There is a musical metaphor at the very end: 

As I've written in similar contexts, when we look at the messaging of a national political campaign we should be listening to the score, not the libretto, which is, like in opera, often no more than a superficial gloss on the real story, mere wave action on the surface of a deep sea. You're missing the point in trying to make out the logic of Trump's attacks on Clinton. The attacks are the logic. He is trying to beat her by dominating her in the public sphere, brutalizing her, demonstrating that he can hurt her with impunity.

Oh, I get it. He shouldn't attack her. That should be seen as sexual violence. If you listen to the music. Not the words. Hmm. Not any logic. Just how it feels. I know how I felt reading this piece, on the wave action of the deep sea that is Josh Marshall. Kinda seasick.

But to answer my question up there in the title. I think he meant to evoke the great song from "The Threepenny Opera," "Ballad of Sexual Dependency." Here's Marianne Faithfull's version:



Here are the lyrics. Read along and contemplate. Count how many times you think sounds like Trump and how many times you think sounds like Clinton and how many times you think Idiots, all of them....

An artsy-fartsy photo project lifts the lid on that "Death" box in your psyche, almost causes me to start another new blog, and gets us back to how John met Yoko.

"Philip Seymour Hoffman looks chillingly vacant in this tintype photo he posed for at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 19, just two weeks before his death Sunday from an apparent heroin overdose."

I had noticed that set of Sundance tintypes — here, at Esquire — but I'd passed on blogging it because it seemed artsy-fartsy. I like the one of Sam Shepard. That takes advantage of the effect nicely. (The movement of the subject causes the hair to resemble a white bird in flight.)

The Philip Seymour Hoffman one is among the best in the group, but how can you separate the old-timey artsy-fartsiness from all of your emotions in that box in your head labeled "Death" that this picture now opens?

But wasn't that the artsy-fartsy idea of doing tintypes in the first place — to take people alive today and position them in a past so long ago that they all look like people who must certainly now be dead and to plunge us into an angsty state of awareness that all of the pictures of ourselves and everyone we now love will some day be pictures of the dead?

Sting, "Girl from the North Country"... Mark Knopfler – "Restless Farewell"...

Jackson Browne, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit
"...  Bryan Ferry, "Bob Dylan’s Dream"... Carly Simon, "Just Like a Woman
"... Bad Religion, "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue"... My Chemical Romance, "Desolation Row"... Ke$ha, "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
... Taj Mahal, "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream"... Dave Matthews Band, "All Along the Watchtower"... Kris Kristofferson, "Quinn The Eskimo"... Eric Burdon, "Gotta Serve Somebody"... Marianne Faithful, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"... Pete Seeger, "Forever Young"...

The full list. The one I'd be most interested in hearing? Oddly enough, it's Taj Mahal doing "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream"... which just by chance is kind of Thanksgiving-appropriate:

I was riding on the Mayflower
When I thought I spied some land...
“I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Here at Meadhouse, it's pre-dawn and we're eating pancakes. (We just invented peanut butter pancakes.) I'd give you an Amazon link for that Bob Dylan cover songs album so you could buy it, but it's not available yet. Feel free to buy something else at Amazon. For example, here's Taj Mahal album I really like. Listen to the title track.

Here I lie, in my hospital bed....