From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V13 #27 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Saturday, December 26 2009 Volume 13 : Number 027 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [pt] Merry Christmas!!! [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal)] [pt] I forgot to ask . . . [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal)] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:21:37 -0600 (CST) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: Re: [pt] Merry Christmas!!! Merry Christmas! Thanks for the kind words, Lou. I've been wanting to add a post in response to woj's recent comments, but too much life seems to happen all the time. As she helpfully described on the interview DVD that came with the Midwinter Graces CD, she's broadened the concept of a holiday album to include various manifestations of a festival of light, which I find fascinating and subversive. So I don't have any problems with her having put out the album. In case anyone owns but hasn't bothered to watch this half hour interview on the MG DVD, it's certainly well worth your time. I found it to be a fascinating and detailed interview. She seems to be giving more information in recent interviews, so I'm sorry to have missed some of them. I will say that the general idea of a festival of light would be more akin to an archetype, and the Christmas or Hanukkah dressing on it--or that of any other specific solstice celebration--would be more the archetypal image placed onto it. So the Christian Christmas celebration isn't what Tori is elevating as such, she's more interested in celebrating the underlying archetypal concept of birth from death, light from dark, etc. That's all primal stuff. I've enjoyed the album a lot overall, but find the big band number repetitive and jarringly out of place, so of course that's the one she decides to perform on Letterman. I do like the arrangement of the horns, if not so much the song itself. Maybe some of the same players who she loved from the studio recording were at the Letterman performance, since the horns for the track were recorded in NYC, as I recall from some interview. This Letterman will be rerun Monday, BTW, for anyone who missed it. My cable froze for five minutes during the break after the song the first time (thank you, you Comcast bastards!), so I missed Dave making a fuss over her, and look forward to seeing that on Monday night. Oddly, as Carla Bley released an album in 2003 which paralleled Scarlet's search for America , Carla released a Christmas album this year, too. I attended two concerts on the recent U.S. Tori tour, but had not managed to write anything on them. I was taken aback by the first one enough that I wanted to attend a second one after they had more concerts under their belt before commenting publicly, then in the end I had no great insights to feel that I had much worth saying. I will now say it anyway. The D.C. concert of 1 Aug 2009 struck me as having a higher degree of planned showmanship than I'd ever experienced at a Tori concert, and I say this even as I expect it will leave some confusion and misunderstanding. I'm not really sure how to explain myself with clarity on this, but it was partly the sweep of Tori's attire, which had an extravagant amount of material to it, and partly due to arrangements that ostentatiously shifted focus from one player to the next. My dominant sense of this concert though, was that Tori had *finally* made the conscious shift to a place of recognizing that the old manner of leaving her band members to make up their own parts, and to trust that they would all fit together from night to night with an ever higher degree of musical richness, might not be nearly as likely to bear fruit as it did in the old days when Steve Caton was with them. A mere two weeks later in Philly, and the three of them had come to play their newly more specified parts with more naturalness, and it was a much better concert. Philly was the next to last U.S. date on the tour, so I have to feel the Europe concerts would have been performed at a still higher level. I hope you folks over there--and those in Boston and the other later U.S. dates-- appreciated it. Lou seems to have. Good deal. As for this list, I wish it were more active, but I also think I crave something I can't have; that being an ongoing Tori music discussion at a more learned and engaging depth than I've ever seen maintained anywhere online, and I want to participate in it without needing to write for hours to do it. For some reason, PT seemed to have a higher content-to-dross ratio than other places I've seen, although maybe Toriphoria's forum is wonderful. I don't want to need to subscribe just to read it, so I'll probably never know. But if there's a place where people have serious Tori conversations and few pointless ones made up of circling around the bleeding obvious or irrelevant, many thanks in advance for letting us know of them. I've pretty much come to accept that I have some good friends with whom to discuss Tori and other music, and I feel lucky enough having that--and this list I can post to once in a while. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:03:21 -0600 (CST) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: [pt] I forgot to ask . . . Does anyone know what the big metallic symbol was on the piano for the Letterman performance? It was just over the Boesendorfer logo on the side of the piano near the high end of the keyboard. Really wacky. Thanks to anyone who knows. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V13 #27 *************************************