I'm in a peculiar mood. It's been a night/early morning of trying to pin that mood down and to define it in a post for the weekend.
I reviewed the clips I took in September at the Oregon Zoo in Portland but have decided we need software to edit them. We had some great programs that we lost when our hard drive crashed last year and haven't reinstalled or replaced them.
One of the Zoo clips got me to thinking about water and that led to my reading quotes about water for at least 45 minutes. I saved some of my favorites from that particular escapade but they aren't right for a post given my need for a stranger expression of feeling.
I began looking at You Tube clips of various singers and musicians, skipping from one musical genre to another, still feeling unsettled. Then I remembered Marianne Faithfull and how I loved her music in the early 1960s (I still have her 1965 self-titled album) and of the sketchy knowledge I had of her troubled life in the decades that followed. It amazes me how much material, both video and written, there is on the Internet about this woman. I've looked at a good portion of it and think that the three videos I'm posting would basically tell her story even if they were the only existing bits of information about her.
The Wikipedia article about Marianne Faithfull gives a fairly in depth appraisal of her life decade-by-decade. She's lucky to have survived all that the article traces. Truly, the best word to describe her would be survivor. From Wikipedia :
Alanna Nash of Stereo Review was impressed with the autobiographical tone of the 1990s live album Blazing Away album's, noting "Faithfull's gritty alto is a cracked and halting rasp, the voice of a woman who's been to hell and back on the excursion fare—which, of course, she has. The reviewer extolled Faithfull as "one of the most challenging and artful of women artists."
This post doesn't exactly suit my mood but what can I say? Of all the ideas I entertained, the things that popped into and out of my head and dashed before my eyes in these past few hours, this aging survivor known long ago as This Little Bird offered a churning mix of memory, fascination, horror, and admiration. That'll do for the weekend.
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8 comments:
Wow! I really didn't know much about Ms. Faithful, except some vague sense of her being connected to the Rolling Stones. (I was raising a couple of kids, married to an accountant, and living in Grants Pass, Oregon during the 60s. Sort of out of it all.) Thanks for telling her story so beautifully - great clips.
So that's the mood you've been sensing in some way. Sometimes it takes something like this to capture the whole thing. And with that realization and expression it (the mood) may shift and you'll sense more or perhaps something altogether new.
had never heard of marianne, but like her music. Blessings from Costa Rica
This is a brilliant blog, I will read you in the future -I wish you a nice weekend and i hope so that everything will be okay - sends greetings to you - Steven May
Sharry,
So interesting that brief nutshell of you during the 60s.
I'm glad you appreciated the clips. I learned from them too because I really hadn't kept up with the changes in her life as time went by.
Your insights into mood are helpful and greatly appreciated.
Kathie,
Good that you liked the music and good of you to stop by. I'm wondering about the latest with you and will visit your blog soon.
Steven,
Thank you most kindly for your compliments about my blog. I believe I've seen comments from you at other blogs I visit, but just can't remember which one(s).
I'm sending greetings in return.
if you have windows vista, I believe windows Movie Maker is preloaded, which you can do some basic editing with. If youre still on XP, its probably free download at microsoft.com. If youre a mac person, you wouldnt have had that problem in the first place ^.^
Sometimes I wish that I had lived in the 60's. It seems like so much was going on, and that it was like really eventful and unprecedented. My parents also reminisce about that time period sometimes, it seems like things were so new and exciting...I wish I could have been born then :)
~ADam
Adam,
THANKS for your ideas for the editing. We still have XP and I hadn't thought about your suggestion.:)
The more time that passes I'm able to have a more balanced view of what the 60s entailed. When I read this commentary by my favorite columnist, Leonard Pitts Jr., written after this election even more came into focus for me. You can cut/paste:
http://www.freep.com/article/20081104/
OPINION03/811040322
all anyone here ever remembers of Marianne is her, Mick Jagger, THAT police raid and some rather vague and spurious stories about Mars Bars (best not to ask)
i know how you feel though - when you're trying to hit a particular feeling but can't quite scratch the itch in your brain. I've always been very internal - so people get quite frustrated with me for not being able to express the complexities in my head (but how can you express what you don't fully understand yourself?)
DFTP,
I guess what you're saying is that she isn't a favorite daughter of the soil. That's kinda sad.
Your last question: exactly!
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