I know your soul is wild and free

Out of nowhere this gust of wind
brushed my hair and kissed my skin
i aimed to hold a bridled pace
when with love itself i came face to face 

pullin' back the reins 

trying to remain 

tall in a saddle 

when all that we had well 

ran away 

with a will of its own

i know your soul is wild and free 

                like this galloping inside me
                tossed by instinct and where we land
                is vast and certain of all that's planned 

you know, i finally learned to break the run 

and gently harness the love of someone 

yes, and equal parts of wait and trust 

is in control of the both of us

pullin' back the reins
trying to remain 

tall in a saddle 

when all that we had well 

ran away 

with a will of its own 

k d lang

While a Chesterfield burns

Tell me, folks. Are your gifs running a little slow and jerky? Mine are too, sort of, which is some sort of indication I'm not supposed to be posting 15 or 20 of them a day. Some are huge files, too, and I can't predict when that's going to happen. I'm at the mercy of Giphy, Makeagif and a new one called Facegarage (don't ask, but it made all those evangelical weight loss ones, so it's OK) and their individual peccadilloes. It's been my experience that gif programs are designed to break down sooner or later, especially the better ones. (Can you say Gifsforum?)

Speaking of peccadilloes. The image of a well-coiffed woman blowing out a langorous lungful of ignited tobacco leaves was once considered not only classy and elegant, but sexy. Coughing your lungs out in a pulmonary ward isn't. But who knew? So long as there was a smile in your smoking.

All these ads talk about "flavour". No one talks about the flavour/taste of a cigarette any more. In fact, no one talks about them period, because the whole subject has become taboo. But in these ads, people savoured their smokes with something like erotic pleasure. I do remember that stale, ghastly smell lingering on for hours, getting into your clothes and hair. And I never smoked.

At a certain point in the 1950s, health statistics began to come out that alarmed the big tobacco guys, so they rushed out ads that made their product seem safer. Figures were bandied about. "Recessed" filters made your smoke "cooler", "less irritating to the throat". Percentages, quarter-inches, mentions of tar and nicotene were reassuring to customers because, obviously, this little filter thingie here, this RECESSED filter, would take all the danger out of smoking. One ad even went so far as to say, "I want a treat, not a treatment". The guy would probably go on to get many treatments before the end.

Eventually, the real statistics leaked out: filters, low-tar-and-nicotene tobacco blends, and all that horseshit made not one bit of difference. Smoking cigarettes could be lethal, and there seemed to be no safe level. No one talks about smoking one or two cigarettes a day any more, because the assumption is that everyone is heavily addicted and blows through a pack or two a day.

And we won't get into the cost. I don't know how anyone can afford to smoke these days, but people buy tobacco before they buy food, so I guess it must be, uh, er, kind of addictive after all. The packages all have horrific warnings all over them, and photos of rotten lungs and people smoking through holes in their throats. I guess it happens.

My old addiction

My old addiction

changed the wiring in my brain

so that when it turns the switches

then I am not the same

So like the flowers toward the Sun

I will follow

stretch myself out thin

there's a part of me that's already buried

sends me out into this wind

My old addiction

is a flood upon the land

this tiny lifeboat

can keep me dry

my weight is all

that it can stand

So when I try to lean just a little
just a splash to cool my feet

oh that trickle

turns out fickle

fills my boat up

five miles deep

My old addiction

makes me crave only what is best

like these just this morning song birds

craving upward from the nest

These tiny birds outside my window

take my hand to be their mom

these open mouths

would trust and swallow

anything that comes along

Like my old addiction

now the other side of day

the springtime

of my lifestyle

turns the other way

If a swan can have a song

I think I know that tune
the page is only scrawl

and I am gone this afternoon

the page is only scrawl

and I am gone this afternoon

Like blood to chocolate: tears of love's recall

Love

Thing of might and dread

Stays the saviour and poison to all

Of heart and head

Love

Force of death and birth

Still lies naked when next to the truth

So spins the earth

The tears of love's recall

Like blood to chocolate fall

And love

The common salt of thirst

Runs like water that cuts through the lives

Of blessed and cursed

The tears of love's recall

Like blood to chocolate fall

The tears of love's recall

Like blood to chocolate fall

Valentine poems: an arrow in the heart

Valentine, O, Valentine / I'll be your love and you'll be mine,

We'll care for each other, rain or fine / and in 90 years we'll be 99.

-Ian Serraillier

If you won't be my Valentine / I'll scream, I'll yell, I'll bite.

I'll cry aloud, I'll start to whine / If you won't be my Valentine.

-Myra Cohn Livingston

Plenty of Love / Tons of kisses

Hope some day / To be your Mrs.

-Author Unknown

My love is like a cabbage / Divided into two

The leaves I give to others / The heart I give to you.

-Author Unknown

Valentines is near / Just wishing you were here

You will always be near / My heart will never be the same

-Jose Villalpando

Are we friends, Are we not / You told me once, but I forgot.

So tell me now and tell me true / So I can say I'm here with you.

-Author Unknown

Raindrops on our dresses / Sunshine on our face,

No matter what the weather / The look of love won't be replaced.

-Donna Wallace

I was lonely, sad, and blue / until the day that I meet you.

You came into my life and changed it around / turned my frown upside down.

-Author Unknown

To see my darling on his special day / Would put two Valentine wishes at bay.

Happy Birthday to him is the Valentine for me / Then two hearts once again get to share ecstasy.

-Lisa D. Myers

Someone asked me to name the time / Of when our love became sublime.

I searched high and low but could not find / It within the vast regions of my mind.

So now as I close it is time / Would please be my Valentine.

-Author Unknown

There's nothing in this world / That can express my love

You're as beautiful as an angel / And pure as a dove.

-Osman Espinoza

I searched high and low (as in one of the poems, above) to find Valentine poetry that is not terrifically bad (some of it is gross or obscene, which just does not do it for me), but truly mediocre. This is poetry with good intentions, poetry that doesn't KNOW it's bad. It's the Stairway to Stardom of Valentine verse, not quite rhyming, not quite NOT rhyming, with meter (if there is any) that is all over the place.

This collection appeared along with snippets by Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker ("one perfect rose"), which of course had to go. Some of these are by "known" writers, even known poets, which amazes me. The Florence Foster Jenkins of verse, perhaps?


I remember my crazy brother Arthur and I having a bad poetry contest which we called Peotry Korner. "Hey, that's spelled wrong!" one of our friends exclaimed. We were so dumb, and he needed to point that out! I think I may have won the contest with this:


"When skies R grey
and it precipitates
You remind me
of a load of wet hay.
Happy Doomsday -
glad you're not here."

I was briefly part of a truly hair-raising "writer's group" called Women and Words, in which the main goal seemed to be not writing by a variety of means. We drank sangria, we talked about our kids and household products, and then someone came up with an idea for fundraising: not an anthology of our writing, but a COOKBOOK! I noticed the group had a "poetry expert", a little old lady with her hair in a bun and a print dress, as if someone had rocketed back in time to the 1950s to collect her. "Doris is our poetry expert," someone said, and Doris colored, saying, "Oh no no no no no."


Several times I heard statements from people like, "I just can't stand all that modern poetry. It doesn't even rhyme." Sooner or later someone had to get up to recite. The poems were not unlike the examples above (and I'm sorry I'm sounding so mean - I know I am - but this was just so frustrating for me, as I'd had high hopes for the group helping to dig me out of the landslide of loneliness I was trapped in).


"Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky
Every time I see you I wonder why
Why you lift your wings and fly so high
Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky"


The standard response to a poetry reading was, to a person, "Oh that's LOVE-ly!". I wondered if that really passed for a critique. By this time I was afraid to get up and read my own self-absorbed laments, most written in abstract form.  I just now realized that a version of this gathering found its way into my first novel, Better than Life, in which a Christlike, charismatic stranger named Bob attempts to initiate the good ladies of Harman into the mysteries of Yeats and Kahlil Gibran.

I went to two sessions of this group, and at the second one it looked as if we had attracted some actual writers (and one of the ladies outright admitted, "Oh, I don't really do any writing, I just come along for the social part"). One fiercely beautiful black woman got up and cast webs of fire over the room, after which there was dead silence.


"Well," said the old lady expert.


"Keep working on it," said Bev, the unofficial matriarch (unofficial, my ass - everything she said was law!). The writer looked distinctly uncomfortable. Another writer had built the substructure for a play, showing a definite talent for discernment - what doesn't need to be there, in other words - thus constructing the foundation for a major work.


Not much comment there, either.

At a certain point, when I made the embarrassing admission I'd written a novel (a truly bad novel, though at the time I thought it was pretty good), someone exclaimed, "Oh, are you Margaret Gunn?" I wanted to say "ING". I had a weekly column in the local paper then, but it seemed she had only managed to read half of it. Another woman asked me, "What's the conflict?", something straight out of Writers Group 101. Obviously, it was the thing to say, the question to ask to show that you understood, that you Knew. I still don't know what it meant.

Oh, but I do remember one actual exercise - we were supposed to take a pen and paper and write down the name of our character, then write down EVERYTHING we could think of about them. There was even a questionnaire. Where they were born, when they were born, who their parents were, what they looked like, their shoe size, and blah blah blah blah blah. It was only later that I realized that trudging through writing a novel would be intolerable if you already knew everything. It's the finding out that is the thing. And if it doesn't interest you - fascinate you, in fact - then it sure as hell will not interest the reader.


Where is all this coming from? There's nothing wrong with drinking sangria and exclaiming "oh, that's lovely!" after every poem. But in a way, "writer's group" is a contradiction in terms. In my experience, giving yourself to the process is often horrendously lonely, to the point that I understand why so many poets commit suicide.
 

I don't know why I've done this for so many years, except that I'm not good at anything else. No, I mean it, or at least not anything I can do professionally. I haven't had anyone refer to my work as a "nice hobby" for a while now, maybe because they've given up talking to me altogether.


People fall away. They lose interest, or find they can't do it, bury their ambition where it festers and ruins their lives. I become sick of halting myself, to keep pace with their faux interest/dedication. They just stop, or they make themselves stop. I had a friend exclaim, when I made a friendly suggestion that she try keeping a blog, "What would I write about?" But it was her facial expression that cut me: baffled, as if I'd said "why don't you start a worm farm"; offended, as if I'd said "why don't you have an affair with your neighbor"; disgusted, as if I'd said "why don't you shovel shit for a living." And even at that, there was an aspect to her reaction that I can't describe, a mouthful of vinegar or something else awful, with her tone of voice full of "whaaaaat?" Not just incredulous, but ferociously judgemental. It was casting her own insecurity and frustrated ambition back in my face, not unlike the cobra-strike ploys used by my sister for years and years.

I had obviously said the wrong thing. But she had no idea why her reaction bothered me, which was even worse. That friendship died in a torrent of bile which made me realize her ambition had long ago been interred and was sending up noxious fumes of decay.


OK, I never expected to go on and on like this. Are there "real" writers" then, to be divided from the dabblers like the sheep from the goats? YES. Does this have anything to do with money or prestige or even getting widely published and becoming some sort of quasi-celebrity like that bitch who wrote Fifty Shades? Of course not.


It has to do with dedication, but it's something else. Painful as all this is, you can't live without it. I find I replicate my initial experiences of utter obscurity again and again, and the chances of this changing at my age are extremely slim. But I've come to realize that if I needed recognition, I would have quit long ago. Keeping on with it at this level of intensity would have been impossible. So it's something else that drives me, and, I suspect, almost every other writer.

I don't always like what I do. It's kind of like being married. Habit? Not quite. Just a need, something I can't describe or even get away from. It galloped away with me a very long time ago.


A long long long time ago when I was seeing a therapist, I was also listening (incessantly) to k. d. lang's brilliant Ingenue album (which I have started listening to again). I was talking to her about a certain song, how I felt it was much more than a love song.


"Why do you say that?"


I wasn't sure what I was saying.


"I think it's about her work. You know. . . not so much the singing as the writing."

I often wonder

is it so

All I am holding

wants let go

How could I manage

I don't know

I often question

Is it so

Life's contradictions

tend to grow

Spawning the choices

and the woe

But still somehow thrives this love

Which I pray I'm worthy of

Still somehow thrives this love

I often wonder

Is it so

Lessons of patience

are learned slow

Earnings of labour

may never show

But still somehow thrives this love

Which I pray I'm worthy of

Still somehow thrives this love

k. d. lang

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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Miss Chatelaine and other illusions

Would you have a little trouble believing this is k. d. lang? I do. It's from her infamous Ingenue album, which still ranks as (I think) the best of its kind (as if there is anyone else in that category).

Here she looks like an unusually attractive man in drag, or maybe a transsexual. She always did have aspects of beauty that she played on, like great cheekbones and a smile like the sunny slopes of her native Alberta. She could flip back and forth from exotically androgynous to just plain butch.

Here she reminds me, bizarrely, of January Jones in Mad Men, girl-next-door with a bit of sultry glamour thrown in. She could almost pass as Audrey Hepburn's aunt.

And here she is playing Loretta Young, probably the only time she has ever worn a prom dress.

Now comes the hard part. Here is k. d. performing the same song, Miss Chatelaine, a few years ago in Dublin. The raucous crowd sings along with her as she camps it up in a baggy white suit that really does resemble Wayne Newton's pajamas. 

\

Turn, turn, kick, kick!  k. d. has always danced during her songs - if you can call her boisterous knee-lifting and uninhibited little-kid-on-the-playground twirls dancing. But here she looks like a whole thundering herd. It's unfortunate.

I don't like to see great performers become parodies of themselves. All that thudding around barely resembles the girlish whirling-dervish moves of fifteen years ago. We don't expect time to stand still, but couldn't someone (for God's sake) dress her once in a while, or at least show her a video of herself? Beyond the screams and catcalls from the audience, I was deeply dismayed to hear that she wasn't singing very well. She was flat. This was something I hoped I'd never hear.

OK. So maybe she's Wayne Newton's. . . great-nephew?

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Crying. . . crying. . . crying. . .

This is one of those oh-my-god-i-never-thought-i'd-get-to-hear-this-again moments. This re-finding, rediscovery of buried treasure. The video goes back to 1989, and I had it on an old VHS tape, which of course eventually became unplayable.

k. d. lang kind of goes around in my life in one of those huge orbits, like hair styles, types of Purdy's chocolates, weight fluctuations, breeds of dogs, belief in God. Keeps changing and evolving and rounding the dark side of the moon, but somehow never quite goes away, because it can't. Try to throw it away, and it will boomerang and hit you in the face.

I figured something out as I watched and listened to this incredible performance just now:  it's Muriel, the protagonist of my novel The Glass Character, and her hopeless longing for the silent screen superstar Harold Lloyd.  "I thought that I was over you" is the heart-cry, the howl of the unrequited. Just when she is sure the rend in her heart has healed, well, he just shows up again, not unfriendly - as a matter of fact, he always seems glad to see her again - but he can't, won't love her. Never has loved her, and even if he did, couldn't possibly love her as much as she loves him.

This song is about the unattainable. I've always had a feeling lang's artistry springs from early abandonment: her father left the family when she was a young girl. Compare this to Streisand, whose father died when she was only a toddler. It leaves some trace on a voice, if the instrument is already exceptional. A something extra, ruby-dust and blood, and it makes for that subtle escalating, the reaching, each time she sings "crying. . . crying. . . crying. . ." , the hopeless anguish mounting and mounting until her voice soars and fills the hall and makes the audience burst into applause when she isn't even halfway through the song.

I wrote about this in The Glass Character, the same feeling, and I just realized it now. Goddamn it, I must tell you the process: I am only partway through the editing, and I don't know who wrote this! I don't even like parts of it, hate other parts, and put check marks beside others. I don't know why this is, and I don't even remember writing it, but Muriel cries too much. I'm having to ruthlessly reduce her tears, because I for one am sick of hearing her sniffle and bawl.

Have I ever lived through anything like this? I won't talk about it now, for it did not happen the way you might think. Well, actually it did. When you read the novel (and you WILL read it, won't you?), you might discover the dynamics of how it happened for me. It lasted five years, and for most of that time it felt like someone was steadily grinding out cigarettes on my heart.

No sex took place. Sex does take place in my novel, but not with Harold. So it's disconcerting to Muriel, who really doesn't get a lot of satisfaction that way. Just pining, endless pining. 

I used to say, about the greatest singers, if *I* could sing like that, I'd never have to see a psychiatrist again. Maybe a simplistic view, because God knows most of the popular singers of the day are melting down at a frightening rate. k. d. still sings, but I don't like her voice as much. She has always had certain mannerisms, and I call them "swoop, yodel and groan". She bends notes too much, or far more than she used to, and begins nearly every phrase with a groany little sound. Her "attack" is off and should be cleaner, saving the groans as an accent. The yodel, more of a  half-yodel or deliberate use of the break in her voice, sometimes shows up a bit too often or is too pronounced. I think she'd do just fine standing on an Alpine mountain with a goat. But never mind. We still have her recordings of when she was in her fiery prime. My favorites are still this song and Pullin' Back the Reins, a hairstanding wail of controlled grief and - yes, again - loss.  

I did see/hear lang in concert, quite a few years ago now when she was still singing exceptionally well. She is overwhelming. It reminded me, strangely, of going to a Renee Fleming concert and hearing the most extraordinary operatic soprano voice I can even imagine. When the audience was filing out, most of us still surreptitiously blowing our noses, I overheard a woman say, "If it had been any more, it would have been too much." That's how I felt about k. d. lang.

I know everyone talks about her sexual orientation and her look and her butchness (and this video is probably the only time you will ever see her in a dress). I'm not keen on her look, to be honest, but I don't care about it. She has gained weight and become stolid and, according to my husband who saw her sing at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics, "she looks like Wayne Newton." Yes, the baggy suits and Elvislike stance are beginning to seem alarmingly Vegas, and one hopes she doesn't pull a Celine Dion and glitz herself into oblivion.

Never mind. The song, the song! Artists express, not just what we all feel and can't say, but what is not supposed to be happening to us. That's an awful lot. The culture is a narrow box. Sex is everywhere, seemingly, but how embarrassing is it when you come right down to it? How awkward? How often does "the act" (always, always referring to penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse and nothing else) match up to the dream? How about never?

Which leaves me crying.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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k.d. lang - Pullin' Back The Reins (Video)

Just had to do some music today, I feel so played-out. As Oscar Wilde once put it (or was it Oscar Levant, or Oscar Mayer?), the two worst things in life are not getting what you want, and getting it.

Or, to quote Roger Sterling of Mad Men, the worst thing is seeing someone else get it.

I love this song because she is just turned inside-out and must be expressing some pretty heavy stuff. I once heard she was abandoned by her father as a child, a confusing heartbreak that inflicts the kind of unhealable wounds that make an artist.

As a young woman she fell in love with an older, straight, married woman, which must have been agony. This was the Athena that leapt fully-formed from the head of Zeus, the birthing of a supernatural being entitled Ingenue.

Yes. The divine wound that, for just one second, causes us to stop bullshitting (at least to other people) that everything is perfect in our lives. But try it. Try being vulnerable and see where it gets you. For every k. d. there are a hundred Marilyns (or Amys or Mindys or Anna Nicoles). Life under glass destroys people, though it's the thing we're all supposed to want.

To be Famous. To do something Really Impressive, while the really (really) impressive people insist it doesn't matter, that it's all art for art's sake, and that money is the least important thing of all.

So what is the most important thing of all?

I could say love, being an ageing hippie, and I know it for a fact, because it's all that's left when the rest of your life drops away under your feet. Being an instrument of love, embodying it, which I do very poorly, except perhaps when I am with my grandchildren who saved me from certain oblivion.

The least important? Posturing? Vanity? Narcissism? Shallowness? Fine, except that it seems to be exploding under the heady influence of social media.

The refrain goes like this: "My lfe's better than your life, my life's better than yours." It's typical for people to get very depressed after going on Facebook, but as with any other addiction, NEXT time is the charm, the next hit or drink or snort or click or "like" or "poke" or whatever-the-fuck, will do it for them, will get rid of this hollow howl once and for all.

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I was all right for a while

I was all right for a while
I could smile for a while

But I saw you last night
You held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say, "Hello"

Oh, you wished me well
You couldn't tell

That I'd been crying over you
Crying over you
When you said, "So long"
Left me standing all alone
Alone and crying, crying
Crying, crying

It's hard to understand
But the touch of your hand
Can start me crying

I thought that I was over you
But it's true, so true

I love you even more
Than I did before
But, darling, what can I do?

For you don't love me
And I'll always be crying over you
Crying over you

Yes, now you're gone
And, from this moment on
I'll be crying, crying
Crying, crying
Yeah, crying, crying
Over you

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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Kathy from Consort

I confess I am a recovering k. d. lang addict. Recovering, because I'm starting to think she's falling into her own cliches: the little groan at the beginning of the phrase; the breathless/breathy passages, the upswoop like a coyote or a cowboy yell, and (less frequently) the half-yodel. When she sang Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at the opening of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver (a very big deal for us: we live there!), she was on a big pedestal and dressed in a baggy men's suit. My husband said, "She looks like Wayne Newton."

It was true. She looks sort of puffy, and she doesn't smile much. I never expected her to stay androgynously waiflike (if there is such a thing), boyish with knife-trimmed nails, and cheekbones to die for. But I never pictured her getting this bulky, stolid like a middle-aged businessman at a Shriner's convention, getting lost in her (always-ugly) clothes. Long ago she was in a Canadian-made movie called Salmonberries in which she appeared, for a split-second, in the nude, and everyone revelled in the fact that she looked like a woman. Well, she IS, folks, no matter how gay or lesbian or woman-loving she may be. The physiological underpinnings are the same.

So, how does this affect my feelings for her? I don't know when I started to get turned off. Nothing ever matched her breakout Ingenue album, which I listened to about a billion times. Still Thrives This Love was my fave (and I'll try to find it), though there were no duds in it at all.

She's not quite phoning it in now, but the lang cliches are wearing a deeper and deeper groove, so that something has fallen down in and gotten lost. I think. She still has that legendary flexible voice, but it doesn't seem to speak to me any more. She doesn't produce the overtones that make a voice jump alive, and God, that swooooooping up to every note. Once in a while, attack it head-on, will you?

Nevertheless, this one is pretty good.