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.
`
