From: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org (shindell-list-digest) To: shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: shindell-list-digest V6 #110 Reply-To: shindell-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk shindell-list-digest Tuesday, May 18 2004 Volume 06 : Number 110 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [RS] distribution and labels [Jim Colbert ] [RS] if six was nine... [Jim Colbert ] [RS] Re: Last Fare and Land of the Living [Terry McLain ] [RS] Re: shindell-list-digest V6 #109 ["Cheryle St.Onge" ] [RS] Mystery of music/poetry/art [ThisWasPompeii@aol.com] Re: [RS] Mystery of music/poetry/art [rfoxwell@wso.williams.edu] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 11:34:31 -0400 From: Jim Colbert Subject: [RS] distribution and labels > For what it's worth, we heard a lot about Richard's decision to move > from > Shanachie to Signature Sounds, but little about his decision to go to > Koch. > I think it's an interesting decision, and I'd appreciate whatever > information RIchard or his representatives would like to pass along on > this > topic. > > Yeah, I had hoped we could have been a little more in the loop, too. I found reading about the arrangement they had worked out with Signature as far as the ownership of the music, paying for the recording, etc. quite interesting in the past. I also find it uplifting to think that sometimes the artist wins, you know, which is what it sounded like with the previous arrangement, but I guess that deal was no longer deemed as viable? Who knows. And Vuelta, eh? The first studio album proper whose title does not refer to a place, more or less. As I believe you pointed out in trivia a few years back, eh, Mr. Frey? Also, is Koch not both a major distributor of independent music AND a label per se? That may explain some of the confusion with past references to things being on Koch. - -jim ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 11:37:14 -0400 From: Jim Colbert Subject: [RS] if six was nine... > The only thing that jumps to mind is the shift in the number of the > brigade to > which the narrator belongs. In "Courier" it is the Ninth Brigade, if > memory > serves, whereas it is the Third Brigade on "Blue Divide". (Perhaps > I've mixed > those up.) I wonder if there is any significance to this; I have > heard Richard > use both numbers in different performances, and during one performance > I > *believe* I heard him sing "Sixth Brigade". I may be making that up, > however, > as my memory is wont to do. Maybe Richard just likes multiples of 3. > (Like in > saying that his children are 6 and 9, hmm...) > At one of the shows we saw a few years back, he said basically a civil war history buff had busted him on it, that there was no 9th brigade (or whichever is on BD.) So he changed it. But apparently sometimes forgets. Jim ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 11:59:01 -0400 (GMT-04:00) From: Terry McLain Subject: [RS] Re: Last Fare and Land of the Living It occured to me that "Last Fare" and Lucy Kaplansky's "Land of the Living" both move through the NYC landscape during the 9/11 aftermath in a taxi. On one hand this could be seen as a small coincidence. On another hand, it also suggests the usefulness of a cab as a way to be in those incredible moments before it all became hard-coded into a generally-accepted framework of experience. The terror, maybe loss of faith, caused by the ambiguities and the confusion of reactions to those ambiguities is what both songs might be about. I need to listen to "Last Fare" some more, and relish that assignment, but "Land of the Living" stops me cold every time I hear it. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 11:02:24 -0500 From: "kunigunda" Subject: [RS] Re: WFUV Oh no! Not again! I missed it! How do I get on the list rather than the digest? I'd like to switch. I would have seen this notice had I seen the email yesterday. Obviously my second attempt at a sticky note failed. Despondent in KC, Carrie > Hey All.... > > This might help people on the immediate list, but not on the digest I guess... > > Wfuv is re-broadcasting the interview Richard did with Claudia Marshall at > 8pm tonight. > It was quite a good interview and Richard plays "Hazel's House" and "The Last > Fare Of The Night" ( if my memory serves)... so check it out if you can. They > do webstream... > > www.wfuv.org ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 12:25:24 -0400 From: "Cheryle St.Onge" Subject: [RS] Re: shindell-list-digest V6 #109 Songs, art and baseball should never be elaborated on!! I am a photographer, a devote RS fan but not a musican A wonderful photographer Sally Mann was interviewed in the NYT and asked very directly to explain an image she made made of her son. It was a beautiful black & white 8 x10 picture of a bit mark both sets of upper and lower teeth marks pressed into a child arm. Something as children we have all done. The image is simple and transports us to some many places. Once S. Mann explained it in detail, how she had this idea and then asked her child to do it again so she could make the picture - well I think the image lost its ability to move us. Many things are best left as simply they are presented. C. St.Onge ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 13:07:22 -0400 From: "Isabel Frey" Subject: [RS] Life and Death When I first heard "Last Fare of the Day," I didn't realize the 9/11 connection. To me, it was simply a song about the sorrow of death and the joy of birth. I imagined one of the woman's parents had passed away, while in the spring a new baby was born to another family. Even though I know now what it is really about, I prefer to think of it the other way - just the normal cycle of life and the little things that tie us all together. The other meaning is just too depressing. I have not researched it, but I think the change in Arrowhead may be because someone had pointed out that the brigade referred to in the original version never actually existed. I seem to remember some discussion of that a long time ago. Isabel _________________________________________________________________ MSN Toolbar provides one-click access to Hotmail from any Web page  FREE download! http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 13:09:29 EDT From: ThisWasPompeii@aol.com Subject: [RS] Mystery of music/poetry/art In a message dated 5/18/2004 11:37:32 AM Central Daylight Time, c.stonge@comcast.net writes: Many things are best left as simply they are presented. Indeed. The late poet A.R. Ammons had this to say: Q: I've always wanted to ask you if you believe in things that are mysterious and inexplicable, because of your interest in science. (Ammons has a BS in biology.) Do you believe in things that can't be explained...can't be explained by our senses, and can't be explained by science...such as God...or ghosts...or an afterlife? Ammons: Why, I think that all things are inexplicable. I think that explanation is a kind of definition or use of the mind which is so limiting in itself, that what it clarifies always is a small aspect of any given thing, so the explanation never, you notice, never becomes complete. We're never satisfied with the explanation. And I think one of the great potentialities of poetry is that while it moves on the surface with image and color and motion and sense, it develops not an exposition finally, but a disposition, that is the whole poem is finally there. Once the whole poem is there, you can't blurt it out in a single syllable. It seems to me that what art does, and what explanation can't do, is it stops. The poem ends. And at that point, it becomes a construct, a disposition rather than an exposition, and it is silent at that point and indefinable. And this cures us of the fragmentation that words have imposed on us from the beginning. You see, by the use of words and sentences and sense, we're able to break down a silent world into certain clear things to say about it. But then we need to be rescued from the fragmentation we've made of the world, and we do that by art, by putting these motions back together and actually reaching the indefinable again. At that point it may be that the poem turns into feeling or to impressions or suggestions or hints or intuition, but anyway, it's not a piece of knowledge that you put in books, but something you encounter, something you live with as if it were another person, as you come back again and again to a piece of sculpture and just stand there...and be with it. When we get to that point in a poem, where we be with it rather than ask what it means or explain how it got there, then we are back with the indefinable; we are restored to ourselves, and feeling can move through us again. Donna in KC http://hometown.aol.com/thiswaspompeii/myhomepage/profile.html We share life's joys when sober Drunk, each goes a separate way Constant friends, although we wander We'll meet again in the Milky Way - --Li Po, 701-762 AD ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 13:46:27 -0400 From: rfoxwell@wso.williams.edu Subject: Re: [RS] Mystery of music/poetry/art Definitely, the line between analysis and appreciate is ever-moving, fuzzy, and entirely subjective in any case. This listserv has seen a number of discussions on "artistic analysis": if and when it is inappropriate, whether or not the very term is contradictory, etc. I've never agreed with the view that songs should be left "as they are", simply felt instead of picked apart. To me, there is something in the art of analysis that enhances the beauty of the songs rather than destroying it. Art is synergistic, to be sure, with the whole of a song/painting/whatever far outweighing the sum of its parts...but that does not mean that an investigation of the contribution made by those parts lessens the impact of the whole. Rather, it can help "shine" the whole, make it fit together and glisten all the more brightly. Such is my view, at any rate, and such is my brand of musical/artistic appreciation. My intention in provoking discussions like this is to kindle interest in the beauty of the songs, to enhance their overall impact with an exploration of the language used, not to reduce them into collections of rhymes and meters. (For those Tolkien buffs out there: whenever this issue comes up, I am always reminded of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond and Gimli's moving speech to Legolas, about how using mining and masonry to manipulate the natural beauty of each cave, working with the individual gems and stone, would not destroy the overall magnificence of the Caves; rather, it would bring out heretofore undetected subtleties and enhance the natural wonder of the Caves, working *with* the undefinable beauty rather than against it.) ------------------------------ End of shindell-list-digest V6 #110 ***********************************