Saturday night shivers...

 

Boy, does this song sound good. I love that feeling you get when you hear a song for the first time and you get shivers all through your soul..."Keep In The Dark" sounds like something the Monkees might have done if they had worked with the Zombies and jumped into the present to hang out with Spoon or Tame Impala. I can't get enough of it! :)

 

 You can watch the video here:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99U9-zRHXf0

Jessica Lange shined in season two, where she played ruthless Sister Jude. Tricked by the monsignor with whom she runs a hospital, she is placed in the very same asylum she once tortured her patients in and slowly becomes humbled, undergoing one of the best character transformations ever on television.

Tomorrow night the Golden Globes air on NBC. Ever since "American Horror Story" began in October of 2011, Jessica Lange has been a favorite with the Golden Globes. She's nominated again this year and though I think AHS has been very uneven this season (and just way too out there, even for this normally grotesque show) there are still moments where Jessica Lange is mesmerizing.

Whether her character Elsa is having a major hissy fit because she didn't get presents worthy of her on her birthday or she's seriously miffed that no one values her talent as much as she does, there are also wonderfully vulnerable moments (rare though they are) where she questions her humanity or takes care of her "monsters" the way a loving mother would her children. Those are the scenes this year that can remind viewers just how talented Ms. Lange is...

A recent article from the New York Times gets it best:

At 65, Ms. Lange is a seductive, sinister hoot in all her “American Horror” impostures — the actress glows with matriarchal mystique. Her women have different accents and back stories, but they share many of same preoccupations with age, power and loneliness. The redeeming underlay of every season is in the characters, who are strangely real even when enacting the most extreme flights of fancy and brutal violence, Ms. Lange most of all: Her heroines are feathered in madness and satire, but each one carries a glint of inner truth — the actress manages to slip some poignancy into all these gargoyles without dimming their brio.

You can read more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/arts/television/its-jessica-langes-show-on-american-horror-story.html?_r=0

Solace in song

 

I think a certain amount of exhaustion comes with being counter to who you are and that a day at your own place with no one else around to put your game face on for can be one that is very peaceful.

It's not phoniness I'm talking about (I really do like people) but trying to be outgoing when you're truly (no matter whether anyone would believe it or not) very shy.

I'm doing laundry (that's not so peaceful since the agitator continues to cause problems and I have to run and fix it more than once in a cycle) and listening to Triumvirate by Lewis and Clarke, the moniker for Lou Rogai, who sounds like what you would get if you mixed Nick Cave with the Nationals. It's quite a lovely album to have playing on a cold afternoon.

One song, in particular, grabs hard at your heart and fills your soul with the voice of someone who would understand your pain.

An article from Huffington Post captures the album quite well:

Its ambition and scope make Triumvirate somewhat difficult to classify, but alas, one must try: If a steel worker from Pittsburgh had a child with an organic vegetable farmer from Western Oregon and that child, after being trained in both vocations, was sent to a liberal arts school to study classical literature and music theory, Triumvirate, 15 years later, might be the album she/he would create. This is not Rogai's story, but it speaks to the aesthetic of his new record. Amid the burnished strings and sumptuous piano lines there is a gritty, agrarian ethic pulsing through Triumvirate. One feels the reverence for landscape and labor at its core; its beauty is not effortless, it is workmanlike, earned like a harvest wrested from black soil. In the sparse and stirring "The Reach and the Grasp" Rogai sings in a pleasantly rusted, undulant tenor:

The hills have hearts in lonely dawn/And we're listening to its pulse/In a cadence of stormy march/We count the miles between the claps/The lines are etched into the shell/It's the genius of design/There's a feather frozen still in the waterfall/Will you take it as a sign?

For Rogai, there is an order and instruction to be found in nature if one has the poise and patience to observe it. The origin of Rogai's fondness for landscape isn't hard to pinpoint, he lives on the fringes of a National Park in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania where he swims, hikes, records and runs his label. His music is informed by the grandeur he wakes to each morning--rivers and mountains, the skyward arcs of hawks and falcons--all the splendor we can lose sight of when we're suffering. Rogai suffers less now. He lives with his son and fiancée, and his love for them was pronounced in the two discussions we had in preparation for this piece. In both phone calls, Rogai effusively updated me on his son's growth in school, music and life. Today Rogai is clean-shaven, with considerably shorter hair. He and Showalter have reconciled and since collaborated on a forthcoming Lewis & Clarke song, and a new calm now mingles with the lingering wildness in Rogai's eyes. You can see it in the superb short film, A Map of a Maze (directed by Kevin Haus, shot by cinematographer Dan Papa) made to mark the release of Triumvirate, or the recent session he recorded for Fogged Clarity in an abandoned stone chapel near his home. In each video, Rogai has the look of a man who has survived to create something special.

You can read more here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-evans/lewis-clarke-discover-red_b_5829924.html


Also wonderful is "Let's Be Still" off the head and the heart's album of the same title. It's gorgeous and amazingly peaceful. I love it so much:

The lyrics all together:

You can get lost in the music for hours, honey,
You can get lost in a room.
We can play music for hours and hours
But the sun'll still be coming up soon

The world's just spinning
A little too fast
If things don't slow down soon we might not last.
So just for the moment, let's be still.

You can get lost in the music for hours, honey,
You can get lost in a room.
We can play music for hours and hours
But the sun'll still be coming up soon.

The world's not forgiving
Of everyone's fears.
The days turn into months, the months turn into years.
So just for the moment, let's be still

There tearing down
So we can rebuild
And all this time
Is just circles in my mind
So just for a moment,
Just one moment,
Just for a moment let's be still
Just for a moment let's be still
Just for a moment let's be still
Just for a moment let's be still.

The world's just spinning
A little too fast
If things don't slow down soon we might not last.
The world's not forgiving
Of everyone's fears.
The days turn into months the months turn into years.
So just for a moment, let's be still

Just for a moment let's be still.
Just for a moment let's be still.
Just for a moment let's be still.
Just for a moment let's be still.

Just for a moment let's be still.
Just for a moment let's be still.

A writing exercise, but also good advice...

I’m old school Dean Koontz. Watchers and Lightning are two of my favorites, not just of his, but of any writer. In his heyday (largely considered to be the late 80s into the mid 90s), Koontz was the king of suspense, often rivaling his unofficial competitor, Stephen King with bone-chilling moments and characters you really cared about.

Watchers, in my mind, works so well and has remained unforgettable, not just for the nail-baiting suspense, but for the colorful characters and the intriguing approach Koontz takes with the age-old theme of good vs. evil.

The story begins with Travis Cornell, a former Delta Force operative who is backpacking in a canyon near his home when he encounters two drastically different creatures who have escaped from a science lab. One, a sweet golden retriever with the kind of smarts your usual canine just doesn’t have and the other, a horrific creature (we’ll later discover is called the Outsider). Travis rescues the dog and takes him home.

But it doesn’t end there, of course. Travis eventually meets a very shy and traumatized young woman named Nora. Dog, man, and woman eventually find themselves on the run, not only from the Outsider, but from federal agents (who are not necessarily friends of the law) on a mission to find the lab escapees.

Where Koontz’s later works often strike me as contrived and even repetitive, Watchers is first-rate. There is an oddly moving (deeply moving, in fact) scene where we learn that during their time in the lab, both Einstein and the Outsider were forced to watch Disney movies featuring Mickey Mouse. Both of them grew quite fond of the famous furry guy, and later when the Outsider sees something with Mickey Mouse again, the reader witnesses a flicker of humanity in an otherwise inhuman monster. It captures the good vs. evil motif quite nicely without being over-the-top or artificial.