Saturday night music...

 album cover for Incorruptible by Lavender Diamond

What a nice album Incorruptible Heart is, a really, really nice album that just sounds so sincere you can't help but like Lavender Diamond immediately. I can't put my finger on why it's such a refreshing album...maybe just because every song is somehow a throwback to girl groups, Linda Ronstandt and even a little bit Karen Carpenter, but with modern sensibilities.

There are sooo many stand-outs on here: "Everybody's Heart's Breaking Now" (highlighted in Amazon's Free Music From Artists On The Rise) is spectacular! I figured when I went to listen to the rest of the album it wouldn't measure up, but boy does it! "I Don't Recall" is as sweet as a soda shop, but not at all precious. "Teach Me How To Waken" is airy, almost mystical, definitely haunting. "Forgive" is downright gorgeous and "Perfect Love" is quite adorable, in a Connie Francis kind of way.

Lavender Diamond's frontwoman Becky Stark's distinctive voice makes the album unforgettable. When she was seventeen, her vocal teacher told Becky her ribcage was too small for classical singing, but I beg to differ, especially on the last track with its echoes of opera. Closing with the lovely "All The Stars," Incorruptible Heart is perfectly titled. Can anyone who sings like this be anything but good-hearted? I love, love, love this album! :)

Here's what allmusic.com has to say, as the review actually appears on the website (no paragraph breaks):

Review by Fred Thomas  [-]

Upon their emergence in the early 2000s, Los Angeles-based Lavender Diamond were immediately lumped into the "New Weird America" movement that included warped indie folkies like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Vetiver, among many others. The band, based around the creative force of bandleader Becky Stark, wasn't quite all the way weird, folk, feral, or drugged-out enough to fit into the confines of the New Weird ghetto, but their achingly positive songs soared with childlike simplicity and a crushingly beautiful straightforwardness in Stark's lyrics and lush vocals. Maybe the nakedness of the songs weirded people out enough, and not offering enough of a context or a gimmick to fit in with the Sufjan Stevenses or Clap Your Hands Say Yeahs of that particular moment in time, Lavender Diamond were shuffled off to sit with the weird kids at the freak folk table. Returning after a five-year space between records with Incorruptible Heart, all the elements of Stark and company's uniquely direct sound have been brought into higher definition, still relying on both playfulness and open-hearted honesty in the songwriting, but bringing with it a refined sophistication absent on earlier work. Songs like the piano-driven "Forgive" and "Oh My Beautiful World" with its update on girl group sounds bring Stark's voice into the forefront, as usual, but here they bear a sadness or world-weary understanding that was missing in the band's more naïve songs. Production was handled by OK Go's Damian Kulash Jr. and Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann, and it's apparent from signature blown-out drum sounds and a combination of dazzlingly psychedelic yet crystal-clear touches. While being relatively spare, Incorruptible Heart sounds huge. "Light My Way" flirts with electro-pop, but sounds a little out of place next to more stripped-down songs. M. Ward shows up to duet on the whimsically upbeat "Perfect Love," which may be a little too giggly and cute for its own good in comparison to the rest of the album, which comes off in turns as mysterious as some of Kate Bush's moments of storminess or as somber as Nick Drake's early orchestral pop bummers. Album opener "Everybody's Heart's Breaking Now" sets the scene of the album with its gorgeously simple electric piano and melancholic ripples of delayed percussion and pulsing electronics bounding like rocky waves beneath Stark's voice. Lavender Diamond still aren't weird enough for their wild-eyed brethren, but maybe a little too weird (or more likely not quite disposable enough) for Target commercials. Incorruptible Heart exists, much as the band does, in an in-between space that's not easy to pigeonhole. There's always been an inexplicable brightness to Stark's songs, and here that light is near blinding, even when the songs themselves aren't particularly happy. This long-labored album is a thoughtful and contemplative breed of off-kilter pop that becomes both more interesting and increasingly complex with repeat listening.

I have been thinking about love (and all its different forms) for longer than I should today. Most likely, it's the books in my life right now. Often, for me, they offer something real life rarely can. More than not, they are ridiculously unrealistic and therefore can only set you up for disappointment when you come back to earth.

Sometimes, though, they offer what you need at just the right moment even if the plot has nothing to do with you, the sentiments can.

Taxi To Paris has turned out to be one of the best love stories I've read in a while. It's probably also one of the most unusual ones and definitely, through most of it, the saddest.

In the early stages, the sadness is all about each woman's isolated feelings and the need to eradicate what she feels for someone she can't be with in any kind of way. The main character, in particular suffers:
 

If ever a thought of her entered my mind, I hunted it promptly to extinction.

 

The novel is unique because it takes a premise that is usually one big dangerous cliché ("Pretty Woman") and makes it grim and gritty, far more fragile and not only believable and far from romantic, but somehow necessary to the storyline.

And, as with any two people coming together as a possible couple, there's always conflict:

It seemed that there were never two free minutes in which we could just be together calmly and happily. Every time, something unpredictable happened.

Prostitution would seem to be the elephant in the room, but it's actually love and how foreign and inaccessible it is to a woman who has never really known it and the person who wants to share it with her.

 

“Then I can’t love you either?” I said it for her. “Do you think that my love for you depends on the availability of your body?”

 

 She looked at me mutely. Her eyes were desperate. She was incapable of expressing what she felt, but she would’ve loved to do it. She said more with her silence than I would ever have thought possible

What should I do with all my love if I couldn’t give it to her?

 

She came after me, first hesitantly, then with long, fast steps. She took me in her arms. I stood there, desiring nothing else. "Stay with me," she whispered, choking on her tears.

 

 There is so much here that surprises me with its easy to relate components, but none so much as when the narrator decries the "other fish in the sea" advice people always give those who have just lost in love:

 

I’d remain alone instead. That situation seemed the most desirable to me at the moment. If I couldn’t have her, the difference didn’t seem that great.

 

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much conflict and going back and forth that by the end the reader is almost dizzy...yet it's a pleasant, gentle kind of vertigo.

There's always a risk in romancing the impossible, but here it works, precisely because it isn't romance so much as a very long and very painful journey to love. I guess that sounds so corny, but it's what I get from Taxi To Paris.

So many books, so little time...

It does not pay to start cleaning your place by starting with the bookshelf, _never_ does it pay. If you're like me, you end up on the floor with a beloved book from your past and you open it to a random page, begin reading and get lost all over again.

 

Darn you, books, I'm supposed to get things done today!

 

The academics in Marilyn Sides' lovely, funny first novel, The Genius of Affection, are preoccupied with gardens and love... in that order. Toward the end of the book, Sides comes right out and says it: "Martin looked around the yard and said to Lucy, 'It's the urban pastoral.'" An urban pastoral indeed: Everyone lives in gritty Boston, and they all tend their plots like crazy. The Lucy in question is a biographer (with a passion for showy annuals) who's just turned 40 and had decided it's time to get her domestic life in order and find a partner. If the hunt for a husband sounds like familiar territory, don't think Sides doesn't know it. Jane Austen hangs over the novel like a friendly spook, and is invoked in the novel's opening lines: "How lucky, how comforting to have a lover on one's fortieth birthday. Lucy Woolhandler had managed, at the last minute, to meet that deadline. The idea of such a deadline she knew to be ridiculous. She wasn't living, was she, in an updated Jane Austen novel, where the problem was to get the pathetic heroine married, not at twenty-two or twenty-five, but forty?" Turns out, of course, that's just where she is living.

Three suitors court Lucy--the most favored of them is a gardening historian, the least favored plants a hundred prissy white tulips in prissy straight rows. Sides employs the time-tested Austen strategy (not to say formula) where the emergence of the "right" suitor heralds the emergence of Lucy's most "right" self. This is a novel of middle age: its characters don't change, they come to know themselves. Sides, author of the acclaimed story collection The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife & Other Tales, cleverly shows how Lucy's search for love is also a search for a new way of living. Lucy desires dailiness, she grows "nostalgic for everyday life." At 40, she no longer wants the grand gesture, she wants the small, repeated gesture that grows beautiful with time, as in a garden, or a well-made novel. --Claire Dederer

Oh, this book!....

 

This likable book kicks off with the wild premise that a teenage girls' letters to the boys she's liked in the past are accidentally mailed one day.

 

It's a unique and intriguing plot point that could make you cringe if you have ever actually sat down and written a letter to a crush you never intended to send (a surprisingly therapeutic tactic that I find keeps you from blurting your feelings out in real life.)

 

I was drawn in immediately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also worth reading is Do Not Sell At Any Price by Amanda Petrusich:

 

 

 

 





It's chock full of information and just a fascinating read for anyone who loves vinyl, plus I'm finding out about neat publications I had no clue existed:

http://www.vjm.biz/

I was in a pretty bad mood and then "Put A Little Love In Your Heart" by Jackie De Shannon came on my iTunes shuffle when I was driving home to get something I left on my way to work. How nice a world it would be if we all could follow the words to this song a bit more. I was down because I overheard a homophobic comment this morning and it bummed me that the same person who says it never gets spoken to about using the word(s) she does fairly regularly.  Hearing the song unexpectedly , I remembered that I promised myself I wouldn't get upset over this any more, that it's up to me to react as calmly and peacefully as I can when stuff like that happens.  Homophobic people are never going to change so I might as well just accept it. I just wish that the people who are anti-gay realize it's far easier for them to change what they say than it is to for gays and lesbians to change who we are. I also wonder if people in the workplace would still say these things if they knew some of their co-workers are gay. I vow, though, to try harder loving everybody, not just the ones who are easy to love...love, not hate, is the best way to get through this life.   Think of your fellow man lend him a helping hand put a little love in your heart. You see it's getting late oh please don't hesitate put a little love in your heart. And the world will be a better place and the world will be a better place for you and me you just wait and see Another day goes by and still the children cry put a little love in your heart. If you want the world to know we won't let hatred grow put a little love in your heart. And the world will be a better place and the world will be a better place for you and me you just wait and see Take a good look around and if you're lookin' down put a little love in your heart I hope when you decide kindness will be your guide put a little love in your heart. And the world will be a better place and the world will be a better place for you and me you just wait and see put a little love in your heart each and every day put a little love in your heart there's no other way put a lttle love in your heart, it's up to you put a little love in your heart...