Me and My Guitar (James Taylor)

Crazy busy weekend, most of it music-related (shows and house concerts and folk club picnics, oh my!) - seemed like a good time to share the following article I've been saving... :-)

A Journey Shaped by a Guitar
The New York Times
By PETER GERSTENZANG
Published: February 22, 2008

EVEN though Nazareth, Pa., isn’t quite the holy city its namesake is, pilgrims with a musical bent still go there every weekday in search of a potentially spiritual experience. They head to a quaint brick building, lured by the promise of taking a tour at the C. F. Martin & Company guitar factory.

More than 200 guitars are made at Martin each day, many more than when the company first opened in New York City in 1833 (it moved to Nazareth in 1839). But for any guitar player or music lover, getting to see the basic stages in the creation of a Martin moves them powerfully, putting some in touch with emotions they might have thought too inaccessible to be reached.

Martins are arguably the most coveted acoustic guitar on earth — satisfied customers include Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Freedy Johnston — and wherever pickers and grinners gather to resurrect time-honored chestnuts, from “Helpless” to “Sugarfoot Rag,” there’s a good chance that there will be a Martin chiming in. A trip to the factory could almost be considered a journey to the Lourdes of twang.

The rest of the article can be found here...

SONG: Me and My Guitar by James Taylor

BOOK: Zen Guitar by Philip Toshio Sudo

POEM: The Guitar by Federico García Lorca (translated by Cola Franzen)

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.

QUOTE: "Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel." ~ Buffy Sainte-Marie

Sleep (Melissa Etheridge)

After months of festival preparation, hosting a house concert, the South Florida Folk Festival weekend, out-of-town company, back-to-back jaunts to the Luna Star Cafe (in addition to my regular life of a full-time job, running a concert series and various UU church commitments), I was finally able to get a good night's sleep - I got in the bed last night at 8 p.m. and woke up at 8 a.m. (a full twelve hours!).

My normal sleep cycle is 4 - 6 hours... and I feel so rested that it's actually disorienting - my weekend is laidback such that I'll go to a movie with my husband this evening (a date night long overdue), work on the BFC newsletter (as well as my laundry and housekeeping) Saturday and make it to Brian and Ellen's festival decompression party Sunday.

That's all... that's enough - gotta love January in South Florida (music overload!)... but I'm ready to segue back into normality (at least my version of it, which is still too frenetic for most... :-)

SONG: Sleep by Melissa Etheridge

BOOK: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon

POEM: City That Does Not Sleep by Federico García Lorca (translated by Robert Bly)

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.

No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

QUOTE: "Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer