topotales

wave of colored glass
trapped rawness inside real: one
moment without end

(Bon Iver, The Wolves)

highway lights scroll by
spread wide open like blistering buds
behind the sockets of eyes: the scalpel
cry: what is dry is barren

blink the smoke of these sleepless dreams away
blink your gaseous instrument and heroic veins away
blink your virtue and your blame away

and all other passing static

it is gone
it is all gone
it is all gone

(Lisa Gerrard)

YahSU, EfcareeSTO!  BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST you should press play on the embedded video - there isn’t anything to watch there, it’s just a soundtrack for the post. 

I’ve been in Athens on business for the last couple of days.  Shuttling between the hotel and the office, I haven’t really seen enough of Greece to make any detailed observations yet.  But it feels like a wonderful country.  

It is always an emotional relief for me to be back in the Mediterranean - people are brown (I simply feel more at home surrounded by brown people), warm, friendly and helpful.  There is a frail, floating wisp of sea-air sniffable in this city, just every now and then - enough to tempt you into taking your socks off, but not enough to drug you into lassitude.  When I stepped out of the taxi at my hotel, after chatting all the way here with the driver, he carried my bags right up to the reception desk.  Then he took my hand in both of his huge hands and said “I am Theopolous.  I welcome you to Greece and hope you enjoy each moment of your stay very much”.  And he was one hundred percent sincere.  There is plenty of noise in the street.  Everybody is smoking everywhere (except me, sigh).  The sun is shining.  

 Now the work portion of my trip is over, and I will have all day tomorrow to explore the city.  I can’t NOT see the Acropolis, and Plaka seems to be the other must-do.  Normally I’d save the touristy tidbits for after I’ve made a bunch of friends, but I’m short on time. 

 I miss my love, but there’s something inside of my soul that quietly (ok, sometimes not so quietly) pines and waits for times like this- when I am alone in an unknown place, the outsider - to come alive.  It swells and dervishes in the joy I experience simply being and observing everything in a new place, my energy standing at full attention, busy searching out and finding the subtle nuances in behavior that I love so much to analyse.  

So, I have been running this beautiful Fleet Foxes song, Mykonos, through my head over and over in anticipation of tomorrow- I can’t wait to walk all across this city holding the hands of ghosts and trying not to smoke! 

 A note about the Fleet Foxes: this one of a few bands that writes lyrics and music for the soul.  If you like Mykonos, you should definitely listen to this song too.

I like few singers passionately.  Most of them, admittedly, are women.  All of them write poetry which sounds like music.  I actually have quite a few friends who are making this kind of music - what I consider magical, true music that seems so rare this day.  The kind of music that goes right to your heart with a wrench and the toolkit.  I guess it’s what they used to call ‘folk’.

What I find hardest to believe about these amazing friends of mine is their lack of fame.  Not that I want to see them on the red carpet anytime soon; for purely selfish reasons: I love to secretly love the artists I enjoy.  I like to cuddle up with them when I’m sad or depressed or lonely.  I stick them in my ear buds and somehow that equals my heart.  But it occurred to me that you guys might have friends making music like this too, and maybe we could work out some kind of a deal?  Because I’m feeling needy and raw lately.  And I need as much soul-harmony as I can get!

So here is one of my good friends for you, Carrie Lennard.  I first met her when she came with her dad in the early nineties to Finca la Mota, the B&B I managed in South Spain, on a bicycle tour.  One evening, late and (most of us) drunk, she sat at a barful of tough, working farmers and horsemen from Alhaurín el Grande.  All of these guys know their Flamenco; this is how we spent most of our late evenings - singing and telling stories (all of us speaking over one another at full volume) with flamenco guitar-chords providing emphasis from the corner.  After a lot of yelling, negotiating and hand-gestures, somebody finally, hesitantly loaned her a guitar.  Within thirty seconds flat Carrie had all of those guys yelling “OLÉ” and every single one of us in the bar had tears in our eyes.

Will you make the trade even for me?  If you feel like it, send me music or poetry from one of your friends who should be famous but somehow, mysteriously hasn’t “made it” past you into as many hearts and souls as they can… yet.  And please, if you send anything- make it something that will balm the ragged parts of a soul.  I need it right now.

For more from Carrie, drop me an email and I’ll be sure to put you in touch.  Her first album; Kayla (my favorite) is available as linked in the name.

(post to be edited later to add pics)

As usual when it comes to music, I may be a little late to the party on this.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t brought my jug of tequila and a whole lot of enthusiasm.

I discovered the new Portishead album (Third) while in the US last month.  I listened to it while driving the length of Cape Cod.  It took some getting used to.  It carried me on a journey ever inwards; an uncomfortably intimate journey.  It made me twelve years old.  It made me want to comfort Beth Gibbons.  It made me feel comforted that music could reach that deep inside of me, to see twelve year old me through a prism of all the ages I have been.  Every time I listen to it, I find something new to love.  I highly recommend it.

I’ll edit this post later to add more detail, but I didn’t think anyone who would read my blog should live another minute without hearing at least one song from the album.