Category: Uncategorized

One of my favorite things is “amateur” art. This is one of my favorite things I own. And I briefly knew the artist when I lived in Los Angeles.

I call this Bunny Lady, and I look at her every day.

Isn’t she great?

I have, by choice, a lot of mis-matched dishes. I found recently that I kept picking up pottery by Stangl, the maker of the two bowls pictured here.

I adore dishes, and I wish I was a potter (high on the list of dream jobs).

One of my favorite pieces is this slightly cracked bowl.

Does anyone know who made this?

There is no maker’s mark on the bottom:

But I love the color and the pattern. Anyone know?

When I was in 9th grade I bought my first records (yes, my mother was against records, so I was not allowed to buy any before then) at Sears, lol, and I bought one LP (London Town, by Wings), and the following 45s:
All Alone (Rita Cooledge)
Give a Little Bit (Supertamp)
Tired of Towing the Line (Rocky Burnett)
On and On (Stephen Bishop)
Telephone Line (ELO)
& Lovely Day (Bill Withers)

John Prine has Covid19 and is critical. Sending him love, hope you will join me.

It’s funny, people who only know me now may not know, but in the 70s, I was a Philly WIOQ listener (Adult Rock Era: Under Outlet, WIOQ evolved into an eclectic music format often described as “adult rock“. The station played a blend of softer songs heard on rock music stations, some deeper album cuts, a few top 40 crossover hits, and a bit of uptempo jazz. Leading air personalities on WIOQ in this era included John Harvey (“Harvey in the Morning”), Helen Leicht who hosted a show called “Breakfast With The Beatles” on Sunday mornings, David Dye, Ed Sciaky and Michael Tozzi. (Leicht and Dye are now the midday DJs for the adult alternative public station WXPN. The former continues her “Leight Lunch” program at noon, and Dye is the producer and host of the nationally distributed World Cafe.)Thank you Wikipedia….

I have fairly varied tastes; I love “old school” jazz; I love funk, some rap, some very pop/teeny-bopper stuff, and I might make this list of my current favorite bands (in no particular order):

• Cake
• Fountains of Wayne
• Jack Johnson
• Beatles
• Stones
• Kinks
• Chili Peppers
• Luna
• Sugar Ray…

But I think most folks in my life today wouldn’t associate me with a very folky sort of past. Loved me some deep cut Jackson Browne, Bonnie Rait, Joan Armatrading, CSN, Neil Young. Love them still, just kinda wore them out a little, and life takes you in different ways. If I were still with my first love, I’d still be right in that folky-rocky pocket. But love doesn’t stay; tastes change, and we don’t last forever, or even as long as we should, in some cases.

So sorry that we lost Adam Schlesinger, formerly of Fountains of Wayne (FOW), to Covid19. I adore FOW, and am so very sorry to know there will never be a reunion concert now. He was too young to leave us. I hope that John Prine will not soon join him.

I love your songs, John, and I wish you recovery, music, and love.

PS. Check out my previous John Prine post why don’t you?

Previous JPPost

At their best, it’s hard to believe there is any other kind of music besides this simple, graceful, chiming chug — the Guardian

Dean Wareham has an unlikely quiver of a voice that, for whatever ungodly reason, sounds as if he’s survived something his music alludes to but never gives away — Jerry Stahl

One of indie rocks’ most beloved live acts — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

One of Dianne Pearce’s most beloved acts – Dianne Pearce

I remember, in my late 20s, hearing Tiger Lily Girl played on the radio. From that moment on I have loved Dean and his band.

My favorite song is probably “Dear Diary.”

So try a little Luna, won’t you? And see what makes them just so charming 🙂

I’d rather be singing.

How about you?

I adopted my daughter from China, and from the time I met her I have felt like she has a very strong and interesting personality. Well, all mothers love their children, right?

I remember once, before I had my daughter, when I went shopping with a mom and her young daughter, and I was a little taken aback at how much the mom controlled her daughter’s clothing. It was not just that she, the mom, did all the choosing, it was that everything that the daughter picked out, the mom responded with statements like, I don’t like that. I’m not buying that. That’s a stupid outfit.  Those are not direct quotations, but the general spirit of the thing. I felt as if it wasn’t enough to deny her daughter the choosing of the clothes, it was the addition of insult to each choice, as if the mother just could not get over how horrible and stupid her daughter’s taste was, and wanted her to know, to be put in her place.

With my own daughter I have faced some clothing challenges: number one, by age three she had given up pants. No more pants. Only skirts, only dresses. No sneakers. No shorts.
This preference means nothing to me, but drives my own mother a little crazy I think. Many times she has sent my daughter presents of shorts, and each time my daughter has opened the package and been sorely disappointed. Frankly I think she feels unheard by my mom.

The second challenge of having a fashion-determined daughter, her friends and/or their moms/grandmoms. My neighbor has a granddaughter who sometimes comes and plays with my daughter, but my neighbor will not take my daughter anywhere in a dress, and her granddaughter has zero dresses. Usually my neighbor will invite my daughter, then send my daughter home in tears because she says, “You cannot do (insert any activity here) in a dress.” Then I walk over and ask, “Are you really saying she cannot go because of her clothes?” And my neighbor says, “I didn’t think you would want her to go in a dress,” careful dodge there. And then, finally, my daughter can go, at last, in her dress. But, we always do this dance, each time her granddaughter visits. I think it’s simply cruel. My neighbor calls herself a liberal, but she is blind to her own conservative controlling ways.

For my child, for my neighbor’s grandchild, and for all girls who are, fortunately and unfortunately, raised by women, women who often are passing down their anxieties, and their prejudices about who and what women can be, prejudices that they received as gifts from their own moms or grandmas or aunts or sisters, I’d love to see this kind of in-home harassment stop.

This is what I want to try to make myself do, to curb all my own little micro-agressions against my daughter.

I want to make a pledge:

~If my daughter is chubby, too thin, or perfect, I will bless her, and help her to understand, feed, and regulate her own appetites as it suits her.

~If my daughter’s outfit is clashing, too loud, too feminine, too masculine, or just not my style, I will bless her, and let her go out into the world and find her tribe.

~If my daughter does not do or say or think or wear or eat what I would do or say or think or wear or eat, I will bless her. Let her go; let her grow, I want to be the place she can come back to and always feel accepted. You never know, someday, at some party, some future Supreme Court Justice might just get her and hold his hand down over her mouth so tightly that she thinks she’s going to suffocate and die right on that spot. Or some boy or girl might marry her, and go about taking her apart with little insults, or big ones, little injustices, or big ones, piece by piece, until she is trapped and so fractured she cannot free herself. Or someday maybe everything will evolve around her into the most perfect world and the most perfect life. Or any spot on the line in between…. And because anything is possible I will pledge that, regardless,

~I will kiss her, bless her sweet head, and try my damnedest teach her that I am always the place that she can come to, can run to; I want to always be the nest, the place of no judgement, the place she’s loved best.

There is my dog, Oliver Possibly

There are my cats:

Mister Jones aka Baby Jones

Finnegan Henry

Rosie Posie

I also adopted two cats away from my mother, and she had named them, so they are single-named:

Henry and Boyfriend.

I have nicknamed Boyfriend “Lil-Pigeon”

because he coos, but truly he has but one name.

How many names (not including those little nicknames you apply later) do your pets have?

And, I am worried about it.

Does John Prine know? Do The Wallflowers know?

This weekend my daughter Sophie was at her art lesson, my husband Dave was fixing the headlight lightbulb on the car at somewhere not our house, and I was enjoying my alone-time by doing a lot of Devil’s Party Press work, drinking coffee, and enjoying some music on Alexa. Often I will ask Alexa to “shuffling songs by Jack Johnson,” but instead I had asked her to play John Prine as, for some reason, John (let’s just act like he and I know each other, why not? We should, anyway.) had popped into my head. After a considerable while of Alexa shuffling songs for me, I remembered one of my favorite songs by John, “Unlonely,” and I asked her to play it. She refused. Alexa is nothing if not capricious, and so she left me no choice but to stop working, and start searching for the song on “the Google” or any place else I could hear it. I found it, and now you can hear it too:

John Prine: Unlonely

And, as I am often wont to do, I replayed it… about a zillion times.

Then I took a shower, and while in the shower I kept singing it. And, on one go-round, I found myself mixing in the lyrics from another song:

The Wallflowers: One Headlight

At first I thought this might have been because Dave was out getting our headlight fixed.

Then I realized that the music, underneath the lyrics, the singing, was pretty freaking similar.

Go ahead, click back and forth between the two.

Does John Prine know?

Do The Wallflowers know?

I assume, with Jakob Dylan in the band, The Wallflowers know John Prine and his music. They would have to, right?

And yet, I never heard anything about this from David Dye, and David Dye would know:

David Dye

Add to that, now I was thinking about David Dye too, and wondering why he doesn’t look like he sounds… however the disconnect between voice and appearance is one I cannot hope to solve in this blog entry. No, no, no.

And then, my husband came home again, and I was telling him about the problem with The Wallflowers and John Prine. John Prine is too far away in style from the Pet Shop Boys for my husband ever to like him, and he felt the need to ask me if Eric got me interested in him. The answer is no. I was interested in John Prine before I ever met Eric, and that was because David Dye and Q102 got me interested in John. Eric, though, was a prior love of mine who was heavily into Irish music and Bluegrass. I never truly embraced the Irish music, but I did like quite a bit of the Bluegrass. I dated Eric for 10 years, and then I dated Mike the alcoholic, and then I married Dave. I had my other little relationships before Eric, but he was my first big one, and it was a big one.

And so this lead to me thinking more about Eric. He is dead now. Though he wasn’t an alcoholic (that I knew of) when we were together, he apparently died as one. Eric was my first big love, and, initially, when we found out we both liked music like John Prine and Bonnie Raitt, we were very compatible, and he made me very “unlonely.” I guess that part of what Eric did for me was to make me feel secure and attractive. I guess I made him feel secure in his own desirability, because he decided, in our later years together, to try it out and try it on with quite a few other women. I left him over the last one, and he seems to have married her at some point, all while never moving out of the house he bought for me, and then she left him, he was her 5th husband I think, and he proceeded to drink himself to death. It is hard, when thinking about Eric, not to romanticize the past, when we were both very young, and very in love, and he made me unlonely. And yet, I still have to think about the person who cheated on me over and over, and who finally had the bad luck to marry a woman who had divorced 4 times prior to marrying him, because she had cheated on her spouses over and over. And when she dumped him, I guess it broke his heart, or some part of him anyway. It broke him. He was broken and not unlonely, and so he medicated his pain quite heavily until he died quite messily. And it had nothing to do with me, except that if he could have been happy with the known, instead of feeling like he was missing something out there in the unknown, I probably would have made him unlonely for life. But, I never did.

And that story reminds me so much of the lyrics to “One Headlight”: