Categories
Charleston, West Virginia Music & Songs Plants and the Emerald Kingdom Uncategorized Videos

Ferris Wheel (video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3ZTHLzpYCw

Definitely, I would say this is the song that describes me most, except that I have never thought of myself as green, except for maybe one short year, when I was trying to get in touch with the spirit of music, and I figured it was somewhere in between the colors blue & green, so I gave away all my pink & white things to trade them in for blue & green ones.

I even wore a stretchy blue teddy bear sweater on my head as a hat. I was very poor and it was on clearance for $1, so I just hoped no would would notice the little sleeves. I also tried to eat as much black licorice as possible & scent everything with anise & fennel, which seemed to me (along with lilac) to be the most musical scents, due to their twisted nature.

Music is a twisty sort of thing that connects what is real to what isn’t. Like an affirmation in reverse, music is a channel through which bad things can exit reality. You should never sing about anything good, because you might spin it out of existence.

Music expands our reality in a horizontal direction. It can’t connect us to upper or lower realms, but rather opens the door to realities that are parallel to our own. I think of these as the etheric worlds- where beings similar to the ones in storybooks live. Beings who are eternal, amoral and tied in to the same physical reality as us. Especially those semi-transparent humanoid beings who are around 4 feet high.

But none of this relates to this song, which was written more recently and not during that blue & green time. It was a song I heard while sleeping, which turned out to be the time of a lunar eclipse, which makes sense, given its silvery feeling. I don’t think of the moon as being only silver though, but also green since it turns everything into goo, just like the primordial green ooze that the world came out of.

Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in primordial ooze and struggling to come up for a breath of crisp air.

*

The moon a crescent in the sky
The world a carpet down below
He came to place me on the ferris wheel
His face a shadow in the show.

Green. Green.

Pull back the curtain and you’ll find
An empty room that know one knows
Shake your head and climb the ferris wheel
This is the world that you will come to know.

Green. Green.

I thought the flowers they would one day, one day
I thought the leaves and trees would one day call me home.

You take my hand just like a leaf
You show my foot just where to go
You help me climb upon the ferris wheel
You point down at the world below.

Green. Green.

Mostly, I think it is a really bad idea to include photographs of husbands. Not to mention that James values his invisibility. And yet… for the sake of context, I feel he needs to make a yearly appearance. After all, most of my adult years my identity has been that of a wife (to him + a previous husband) & not so much an individual.

But of course, I am trying to defy nature by changing that which is just one reason why including any photographs of James is a bad idea.

Categories
Minerals, Mountains, Crystals, Ice, and White Music & Songs New Hampshire Uncategorized

Desert Squirrels

 

Spirit of a plant talks to a nude womanSoon, I will be done with my project of posting up (almost) all of the songs I have written. I’ll be glad when it is over. I am sure I will keep writing songs, but I am not sure that I will keep blogging about them. That part is hard work. I have plenty of things to say and share, yet none of them ever seems quite true. I mean… they are true… and yet never entirely true. Pictures and songs can feel true to me, but statements of opinion and fact always have a fractured quality- they never encompass the whole picture, just a carefully selected fragment. So how do you choose which aspect to express, which way to portray reality? I don’t know.

Many people seem to have their angle on life worked out. Their personality and opinions stay relatively consistent from day to day. I’m not exactly sure what my take on life is, nor how I fit into it. I don’t know if I’m a democrat or a republican. I don’t even know if this life is a dream we’re all going to wake up from, though I suspect it might be.

But still, I try to say something, because it drives me nuts when I go to a concert and the musician just plays their songs without talking. It’s like french fries without salt. Bland. Seeing their human personality helps me to get my bearings and make sense of their music. So that’s why I try to say something.

Still, once I am done with this initial round of recapitulation, I plan to let my self off the hook for a while, to post songs and pictures without having to place a logical frame around them. Let someone else try to make sense of things for a change.

Oh yeah, this song is called Desert Squirrels. It is about the desert.

Download MP3: Desert Squirrels

Categories
Music & Songs Santa Fe Uncategorized

Greensleeves

 

Guatemalan Baby carrying plants on head.At some point while living in Santa Fe, I decided I had to change my favorite colors if I wanted to be a true musician. Pink would no longer do. I felt that blue- with a little green mixed in- was the true color of music. The true purpose of music, as I saw it, was to tap into parallel realities so that the expanse of our everyday world could be increased. Blue is open and expanding, while green gives things a wicked twist helping us to see things from non-human perspectives.

I see life as a big green expanse of land with roads cut through it. Life itself may be grand, but our perceptions, thoughts, and even emotions are generally limited to travelling the roads that have been carved out by others. Sometimes this can get a little claustrophobic, depending on how many roads we have access to. A limited view of life can also cause pettiness and greed, as we try to grab as many donuts as possible from the tiny tray in front of us. Some people try to expand their reality through drugs, but if you’re not  careful you could end up off-roading it and never finding your way back. Some people join spiritual cults and religions, which helps to liberate pieces of them while locking the unacceptable parts in cages. But music, on the other hand, is just about communicating with new realities while trying to keep your feet planted in your current one. That way you can gradually learn about new roads to travel, and even find some places to build new ones.

So, I thought blue-green would help me accomplish this. Too bad I was so poor that the only way I could change favorite colors was to buy a blue teddy bear sweater I saw on clearance, and wear it on my head like a hat.

Download MP3: Greensleeves

Categories
Kentucky Minerals, Mountains, Crystals, Ice, and White Music & Songs

Nobody Lies

 

Another song about somebody all alone in a world of ice struggling to keep their will to live alive…

 

Dead woman floats in the river, her eyes open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download MP3: Nobody Lies

Categories
Earth, Pink, Mothers, Love Music & Songs New Hampshire

Earth

One day- I don’t remember why- I was feeling the need to get in touch with the Earth.  So I sat down to begin wondering about her and right away this song started playing in my mind.

Mary holds baby Jesus, wrapped in royal blue blanket.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download MP3: Earth

Categories
Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts Music & Songs New Hampshire

Cool Hands

A song about strangulation. Because when faced with too much meanness, we can build up defense systems so suffocating that it can be hard to know if we died by somebody else’s hand or our own.

Ominous hand strangling a woman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download MP3: Cool Hands.mp3

Categories
Music & Songs Nashville Plants and the Emerald Kingdom

Jade, Jade

This song is inspired by the plant world,

and also by a sense of feeling alone in what seemed to be, at the time,

Where am I? Mountain climber reaches plateau, filled with cowbirds, flying plants, and skeletons. an indifferent and challenging world.

Download Mp3: Jade, Jade

 

 

Categories
Kentucky Minerals, Mountains, Crystals, Ice, and White Music & Songs

Ice Man

 

Another song about someone dying from hypothermia.  It was inspired by this magazine cover…

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE. Survival: Who lives, who dies, and why. Why do I like songs about people dying from hypothermia?  Because as humans, we need our world to stay just the right temperature.  We lose our ability to live if things get too hot or too cold.  Sometimes, we compensate for an excess of warmth or an excess of coldness in ways that prove detrimental to us later… for example, if our lives feel too cold we might engage in excessive risk taking or drama making, or if things feel too hot and chaotic we might isolate ourselves and hide behind a computer screen.

But, there is only so much we can compensate for, and eventually these hostile forces overtake us.  When there is not enough love and nobody seems to care about us, we can compensate for a while, but eventually the ice creeps into our soul and we lose the ability to move, to reach out, to feel, to care, and finally even the will to live is extinguished.

It makes me think of the following poem by Robert Frost:

 

 

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Download MP3: Iceman

Categories
Minerals, Mountains, Crystals, Ice, and White Music & Songs New Hampshire

White World

 

This song is called “White World” and it is about… well, on one level, like many of my songs, it is about people lost in a frozen world, struggling to maintain enough body heat to stay alive.  On a metaphorical level, it is about the struggle for perfection and goodness, and how it can sometimes run counter to the struggle for survival, growth, and even love.  Ideals are beautiful, but also cold and inhospitable.  Everything that enchants us with an image of perfection, can also leave us disenchanted with the way things are.  If there was no ice in the world, no dedication to purity and goodness, then maybe the world would heat up into a chaotic, fiery  hell.  But, if there is too much ice- when the attachments to moral, spiritual, or aesthetic values grow too strong- it becomes harder and harder for any life to flourish.

Personally, I do believe that there is a world where the Platonic Forms live, a world of perfection and beauty, but I do not think humans could survive there for very long.  I think it is the world of minerals, and there are places on Earth where this world can be visited- at the North and South Poles, and also at the top of any mountain that stretches above the tree line.

This song was recorded by James Prendergast, who is playing guitar. 

Download mp3: White World

This is a picture of me on the top of Mount Washington, New Hampshire.  I was very excited to be beyond the tree line for the first time ever!

Julien Aklei on Mount Washington Summit