Tono and the Finance Company (Anthonie Tonnon) – Timing
All the credit goes to my local college radio station for introducing me to Anthonie Tonnon. I heard two different tracks from his most recent album, Successor, on this one woman’s show on Thursday mornings. I Shazamed those two so I could look him up later on and I think you might say I’m smitten.
Take this song, for instance. That charmingly different New Zealand accent singing, “I used to go for girls with better music collections than I have, providing they weren’t musicians…” Anthonie! Where were you when I was in my early 20s (oh, probably not born yet, hmm). Then he goes on to ask,
“How long ago did you split up with your boyfriend?
Does your blood still rush when you think of him?
Do you still kind of think that one day you’ll be back with him?
Oh come on, be honest!”
Oh come on, be honest!?! Here’s where that little Twitter exploding heart might actually be appropriate. Switch the genders and you have the story of my romantic misadventures all throughout college and my 20s. And if his songs about ill-fated relationships* aren’t your thing, there’s Marion Bates Realty, or Railway Lines, or Water Underground. Or if you’re a year out of college, Twenty-Three is for you.
I lose myself in his stories, sung in a voice that’s a little swoony. If you happen to live in the Los Angeles area, he’s playing at some French restaurant on Friday (11/6) and I think it would be well worth your time to check him out.
*Although, I don’t know how you can listen to a song like Skinny Jeans and not be taken in.
English majors or French students may know a lot about Rimbaud but I’m afraid my knowledge is limited to his reputation as an inspiration for musicians. I should really do something about that, I suppose, but I find that I rarely have the quiet needed.
I was recently asked what I’ve been reading and I answered that I had just finished Patti Smith’s M Train. In my circles, this is a no-brainer but it didn’t seem to register with the person who asked me. Immediately I thought about other books I’m planning to read, hoping maybe one of those would ring a bell. Probably not though as I’d really love to get my hands on Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. What can I say? There are a lot of really interesting books out written by women in bands I like. I’ll get to the poetry eventually.
The first week day of Daylight Losing Time and I am definitely feeling it. Someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to a desk top light called Happy Light and said we’re all crazy if we don’t buy it. Then she posted a picture of it on her desk, so it wasn’t just a sarcastic crack at the name of the light.
I clicked the link and looked at it, read the reviews, and left the tab open all day just in case I decided I might want to place an Amazon order. I didn’t, today, but even though I talk about how much the darkness gets to me, I have never seriously considered buying one of those lights before. I never knew anyone who actually had one and I was doubtful that it would truly make any difference.
My office has very bright overhead lights but it’s in the middle of a building and I get no natural light. I do go out at lunch and often I’ll have a meeting that gets me out of my office and in the daylight but I really don’t want this coming winter to get to me like last year’s did. A lot of that was the snow, no question, but even if the Happy Light only helped a little, wouldn’t that be worth the $40?
The Smiths – Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before*
NaBloPoMo, we meet again. I was really on the fence about it but I spent a fair amount of time dithering around online today and thought of some ground rules for myself to make this possible.
The bottom line is, I really love these kind of challenges. Last year when I did it for the first time, I often felt like I was falling short. Either I had connection problems or I was too hung up on finding some perfect song to use and would end up just wasting hours in the evening. I also went to New York twice for concerts and up to my mother’s for Thanksgiving. I’ll be doing those two things again this month so I needed to find some way to make it easier or else it would stop being fun.
I don’t have any drafts in progress but there are a few posts I’ve had floating around in my head for a couple of weeks that I held off on writing in case I decided to do NaBloPoMo again. There are some shortcuts that I’ve devised as well and I’m not above using them if time gets tight. And I have decided to be less concerned about repeating bands in a short time span. Last year I was really pleased that I managed to pick songs from a lot of bands I wouldn’t normally think of. I liked them all but often when I’m thinking of a post, it’s associated with a song that I have a closer connection to than some of the ones I wound up using. That’s the whole challenge piece of this and I like that part of it but I can also go easier on myself. If I’m posting every day then the ratio of frequency will probably stay the same, it’s just compressed. Chances are high almost no one actually listens to the song anyway so it’s all just for my own satisfaction. If I’m happy with it, then it’s good enough.
So, here we go! Anyone else doing it this year?
*One day I will make it to Manchester and I sincerely hope some enterprising music fans have created bicycle tours of all of the city’s major monuments. Sign me up.
So NaBloPoMo is in the books, or in the blog archive. I missed one day, probably one-third of my entries were posted after midnight (though if I haven’t gone to bed yet, in my mind it is still the same day), and many were so short as to hardly count as writing. If I do it again, I think it would go better if I planned a little ahead of time and had some drafts ready to be used on days when I couldn’t manage to get around to it, or was thwarted by internet connection problems.
The crappy connection is really a nuisance because I’m usually spending a bunch of time looking for a song before I start writing. On days when the song is already in my head and the entry is about the song somehow, either it jogs a memory or it’s related to something that’s happening, the post is easy and I can do most of it without the internet at all. Other times I don’t have a song in mind and it can take a lot longer to find the right fit, especially since I really try to mix it up and not just go back to my old standbys all the time. Hard to believe sometimes, I know, but I really do like finding new music and given that I had thirty days to fill up, this was the time to do it. Those days were really frustrating and time consuming when I’d have trouble just getting a video to load, let alone go back and forth between several while trying to decide on the one I wanted to use.
This month was also challenging because of all the things I crammed in. Two shows in one week that had me driving 3-4 hours each way, Thanksgiving up at my mother’s, and the kids had only one week that was a normal 5 days of school. I’m not sure who came up with the idea for NaBloPoMo (or WriMo for that matter) but I think a better month to propose would be March or April.
My main goal of blogging was never to be a writer. It was to have a way to share thoughts and ideas about music and bands, or tell a story about why a song had some deeper meaning for me. I used to do that in real life with friends but now my friends all live somewhere else and so writing became the only way I could keep doing that. I heard from one of my friends that even though some of these posts this month were skimpy (my words), she thought it was great to “hear” from me every day. If I look at this experiment as a way to make that connection with people and music, and focus less on whether my writing was the best it could be, then I guess it was pretty successful.
November 30, 11:45 p.m., NaBloPoMo, Lights Out, Words Gone.
Trolling through my Shazamed songs again. Spotty internet and having to wait until everything is done for the night has made this whole NaBloPoMo thing harder than it should have been.
We are not Black Friday shoppers. For one thing, we’re not morning people. Being in line at 6am to go shopping sounds like a nightmare to me. It’s also pretty rare that I’m in the market for anything that might be on one of those big sales. Plus the crowds, the short tempers, really, there’s just no appeal.
I know the day after Thanksgiving has long been the unofficial start of the Christmas season, or at least the shopping season, but I don’t like the way it’s been creeping in sooner every year. I noticed several stores that made a point of opening at 6pm on Thanksgiving day. How shitty would that be for the people working there? I guess they would at least get paid double time but I would sure feel cheated if it were me.
When I was growing up we would all go to my grandparents’ in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. My mom’s from a big family too and there would be lots of uncles and aunts and cousins. I remember years when we had the grown-ups table, the kids table, and the spill-over table when there wasn’t enough room at either to fit everyone. The day after was always time to hang with the family members you didn’t see often and play with the weird old toys at grandma’s house.
Perhaps if we’d stayed home for Thanksgiving, and the day after was just us in our own house, shopping would have become something that made sense when you had a day off anyway. But that was never our custom and I like having a little buffer between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I like taking the time to just enjoy it before rushing onto the next holiday.
Look at that album cover. Brrrr. It doesn’t matter that I know exactly what I’m getting out of winter in New England, I am never ready for its arrival. It’s not that I’m caught off guard, I just live in denial until the last possible minute. Why spend one second more than you’re forced to thinking about it?
I don’t really wish I could join the legions of people who love winter, or even those who tolerate it well and think it can be pretty. I am very content to continue singing the praises of spring and summer. And one thing’s for sure, if I ever moved to someplace that doesn’t have winter, I would never miss it. People have questioned me on that one but I have lived through more than enough winters to last me a lifetime.
As I sit here now, wrapped up in a blanket, the wind is blowing down the chimney and rattling the glass doors on the fireplace. Snow is falling and pelting the window screens making an icy sound. So it begins.
I didn’t post yesterday. I had been thinking of a post in my head during the day but by the time I got home from work, we’d put the kids to bed, I talked with my mother about Thanksgiving travel plans, and I finally could get a chance to write, I felt I had nothing to say. I was disgusted by the grand jury decision in Missouri yet anything I thought of to write felt like too little too late. I stayed up late reading articles and watching Twitter and kept coming up short when I tried to find the right words.
The post I had been mulling over during the day yesterday came to me courtesy of driving my daughter to school again. It was raining heavily and I decided I could just as easily drop her off and spare her the wait for the school bus in the rain. She started telling me about a project they are doing in school. They have been divvied up into groups and each group has to start its own country. It’s an interdisciplinary project so all of her classes were taking part. In math they discussed different monetary and economic systems, in science they had debates about the impacts of genetic modification and from there, whether or not the countries they were building should allow it. In social studies they discussed different forms of government, laws, and rights.
I started singing this song then said they should use it for their country. No, she said, they had to write their own anthem, both the music and the lyrics, for the music part of the project. I wondered to myself if the social studies teacher, who organized this whole assignment, is an R.E.M. fan. In any case, I feel like congratulating him. We don’t really get to start a new country up but getting the kids to put their heads together and think about it, and understand how many different elements there are, what the ramifications of different decisions will be, I hope it will be a lesson they can take with them.
It could be a lesson for us as well. It’s clear that our system is not just flawed but skewed heavily in favor of those in power remaining in power. By any means necessary, it sometimes seems. Is this a government of the people, for the people, by the people? A police force so heavily armed it looks like it belongs on a battlefield instead of a city street?
When I was a kid we had School House Rock on Saturday mornings in between cartoons. I grew up absorbing those little history and civics lessons to catchy tunes and believing that’s how our country really worked. I can recite (or sing) the preamble to the Constitution because of it. Sing along. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility…” Where is the justice? How can the police insure domestic tranquility when they are dressed for war?
So I go back to we the people, in order to form a more perfect union. I know it sounds sappy and simplistic but if we are ever going to achieve justice, it is going to be a lot of hard work. A lot of putting our heads together and thinking about the end results. There are no quick fixes. We need to work on the more perfect. A union that incorporates the view points of those who were left out of it when our father’s father’s father tried would be a good start. This can’t just be something we tell our kids to do for a school project. It has to be what engaged citizens just do because this land is the land of ours.
Noisy Cats 