We Become Birds (R.I.P. Michael Smith)

Feel Good Friday is taking a break this week, and my intended post about my birthday celebration is put on hold until Monday, so I can publicly mourn the loss of Michael Peter Smith, a brilliant singer-songwriter who passed away this past Monday, August 3, 2020, of colon cancer.  According to this article, he was diagnosed in June 2020, and had been in home hospice the last few months.

Michael Smith has been compared to John Prine, in that his songs were unique and his talent underappreciated (but those who did know of his gifts were devoted followers).  He was hilarious and gregarious on-stage and more quietly private out of the limelight.  I had the pleasure of hosting him twice, the first time in my Heart's Desire house concert series (my living room!), on May 8, 2002... and the second at the Labyrinth Cafe concert series (in a co-bill with Nick Annis) on May 9, 2010.  His songs and stories were captivating, and his shows were pin-drop quality.  We didn't want to miss a word of hilarity (tears-streaming-down-the-face variety) or poignancy (eliciting a different kind of tears).  Exquisite and literate.

Smith's original compositions pendulumed from the ridiculous (Zippy and The Princess and The Frog) to the sublime (There and, of course, The Dutchman).  I recommend taking the time to Google his videos on YouTube and reading his lyrics (not at all a comprehensive list) here.  "A master craftsman", someone recently called him.  A major understatement.  We will miss you, Michael Peter Smith... 💔

NR:  A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (engaging in a one-on-one book club with a long-distance, long-time dear friend... 😍😍😍 )

SONG:  We Become Birds by Michael Smith (with Anne Hills)

BOOK:  Songwriting by Michael P. Smith (not actually a book, but a CD.  Michael talks.  Part Master class. Part musical memoir.  All Michael!  The long awaited recording.  Singer/songwriter Michael P. Smith reveals the inner workings of his songwriting process, tells stories: from first song and first guitar, to the inspiration for (and secret source) of his best known song The Dutchman, and performs this, and other songs, with distinctive Smithesque style. This winning recording offers a glimpse of this singular artist’s musical landscape, confirming why he remains a master in the American folk lexicon, revered the world over.)

POEM:  The Man with The Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens (below are the first three stanzas, of thirty-three.  The entirety can be found here.)

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'

The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

And they said then, 'But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.'

II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings

[Michael’s songs (he actually had a show called And the Poet Sang, created for the Poetry Foundation) set poems by F. Garcia Lorca Five in the Afternoon, Wallace Stevens Blue Guitar, Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral Swallow and Pablo Neruda, Irish poetry Songs of the Kerry Madwoman chamber opera, poems
by Patricia Monaghan, and Chinese Tang Dynasty poets Painted Horse. Passages from Robert Cole’s The Spiritual Lives of Children were transformed in We Become Birds.]

QUOTE(S), both by Michael Smith:  "I realize my life was totally complete and everything I asked for in my life was there. Was there for me. And I felt so grateful. I felt so grateful. I had a wonderful true-life adventure." 

“If people sing my songs after I’m gone, they need to get the chords right.”

The Jackson Song (Patti Smith)

Just today in a CNN.com article:  

"I don't think we have the luxury of talking about a second wave right now because we have not gotten out of the first wave," CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said. "And it's not clear that we will get out of the first wave. Instead of actually having a true ebb and flow, it may just be micro and macro peaks for the foreseeable future."

The pandemic shows no signs of weakening in the US, said Michael Osterholm, head of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

"I think this is more like a forest fire. I don't think that this is going to slow down," Osterholm told NBC's Chuck Todd during an appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"I think that wherever there's wood to burn, this fire's going to burn -- and right now we have a lot of susceptible people," Osterholm said. "Right now, I don't see this slowing down through the summer or into the fall. I don't think we're going to see one, two and three waves. I think we're going to just see one very, very difficult forest fire of cases."

Then again, at times it's hard to remember we're in the middle of a pandemic.  I have fallen into the complacency of entertainment and information, penduluming between TV (movies and documentaries) and reading, recently falling down the Joan Didion rabbit hole.  I was familiar with Didion already (her writing style is uniquely honest yet complicated) and, when my mom's second husband Ralph was killed in a car accident, I sent her The Year of Magical Thinking, about Didion's husband's death and the grieving process afterward.  When my mom died and I was cleaning out her house, I brought her copy back for myself, and related to it during my own period of sadness, even quoting one of the passages in my blog on July 19, 2009 (the day my mom died).

"Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be... After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.' " ~ Joan Didion

I recently watched The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary on Netflix about Didion, which inspired me to read many of her books of essays (on hold now at the library), as well as Blue Nights, about the death of her daughter Quintana, not too long after her husband's passing.

TV can be crap and escapist, but it can also be educational.  All my life I have vowed to have at least one new growth opportunity daily.  thankyoujesus for the library and cable/internet television...  :-)

Song (which Patti herself sang) and poems (two of Quintana's favorites) below are mentioned on p. 163 as being included at her funeral service, six weeks after her death on August 26, 2005.


SONG:  The Jackson Song by Patti Smith (lyrics in link)

BOOK:  Blue Nights by Joan Didion

POEM(S):  Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry – the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.


New Hampshire by T. S. Eliot

Children’s voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head.
Between the green tip and the root.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Today grieves, tomorrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling, swing,
Spring, sing,
Swing up into the apple-tree.

QUOTE:  "What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead." ~ Euripedes 

Show Us Your Books (Jimmy Fallon and the Tonight Show crew)

[My library books:  everything in the basket was checked out previously, and is now due back June 1; the five on the right had been on reserve B.C. (Before Coronavirus), and I was able to pick them up today...  :-) ]


I am positively hyperventilating.  Our library re-opened.  Well, only for walk-up/drive-up service, but it made my day/week/month!

- Beginning May 18, library staff will call customers with reserved items to let them know their items are available for checkout via our new Walk-Up/Drive-Up Service.
- When arriving to pick up materials, customers should call the library when they are in the parking lot.
- For Walk-up Service: Library staff will exit the library and place the customer’s items on a table. Customers can then approach the table and retrieve their items.
- For Drive-up Service: Library staff will exit the library and hand the items to the customer through their car window. To ensure a safe and efficient hand-off, items will be placed in plastic bags.
- Customers must wear a facial covering to participate in this service.
- Customers returning items are encouraged to deposit them in the library’s book drops. 


For the record, I will never be book-deprived (when the library closed in late-March, I had 25 checked out) but, previous to the self-isolation, I loved being able to reserve a book as I thought of it, which placed it on hold and sent it to my local branch, where I was able to pick it up at my convenience when they let me know it was ready.  That service has not been available for the last six weeks or so, understandably.  Going there today to return the 20 or so we had checked out (the book drops were closed during this time as well), and scoop some up on reserve, made me feel a bit closer to "normal" (whatever that means these days).

Also, you will notice A Very Stable Genius, the book about Trump, on the far right in my photo above.  Even more relevant now, right?!?

Speaking of relevant, I can so relate to the meme below.  I love my husband, but... this absolutely describes the scene on our balcony Every. Single. Morning.  Ack!

SONG:  Show Us Your Books by Jimmy Fallon and the Tonight Show Crew (song begins at 10-minute mark)

BOOK:  Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh

POEM:  The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

QUOTE:  “Solitude is the greatest treasure, and through it you can rebuild your life, reorder your life, and solve life’s problems.” ~ Sunday Adelaja