From: owner-joni-digest@smoe.org (JMDL Digest) To: joni-digest@smoe.org Subject: JMDL Digest V2012 #1878 Reply-To: joni@smoe.org Sender: owner-joni-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-joni-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk Unsubscribe:mailto:joni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe Website:http://jonimitchell.com JMDL Digest Tuesday, December 25 2012 Volume 2012 : Number 1878 ========== TOPICS and authors in this Digest: -------- Zadie Smith piece ["Mark" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:29:18 -0800 From: "Mark" Subject: Zadie Smith piece I just got around to reading this piece this morning. This captures so beautifully the way Joni's music affects me: 'This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy - if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It's not a very civilized emotion. I can't listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or on an iPod, walking the streets. Too risky. I can never guarantee that I'm going to be able to get through the song without being made transparent - to anybody and everything, to the whole world. A mortifying sense of porousness. Although it's comforting to learn that the feeling I have listening to these songs is the same feeling the artist had while creating them: "At that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes." That's Mitchell, speaking of the fruitful years between Ginsberg at the abbey and 1971, when her classic album "Blue" was released.' And this is a wonderful expression of what I believe about Joni as an artist: 'We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move. Sometimes the battle becomes so violent that a perversion in the artist can occur: these days, Joni Mitchell thinks of herself more as a painter than a singer. She is so allergic to the expectations of her audience that she would rather be a perfectly nice painter than a singer touched by the sublime. That kind of anxiety about audience is often read as contempt, but Mitchell's restlessness is only the natural side effect of her artmaking, as it is with Dylan, as it was with Joyce and Picasso. Joni Mitchell doesn't want to live in my dream, stuck as it is in an eternal 1971 - her life has its own time. There is simply not enough time in her life for her to be the Joni of my memory fovea. The worst possible thing for an artist is to exist as a feature of somebody else's epiphany.' Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. Mark in Seattl ------------------------------ End of JMDL Digest V2012 #1878 ****************************** ------- To post messages to the list, sendtojoni@smoe.org. Unsubscribe by clicking here: mailto:joni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe -------