156. I Understand (A Smile and a Ribbon)

DAY ONE-HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX

This is a commentary.  I had a very long conversation with a friend recently to try a diffuse some misunderstandings, frustrations and so on.  It’s awakening to find so many misunderstandings towards things that seem so simple, as if we were both speaking totally different languages while using basic vocabulary, when we want things to just feel easy (Holy Ghost Tent Revival makes life feel easy to me: like I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re all just okay.)

At the end of the day, it’s alright.

I gave myself a time limit of 25 minutes to fully complete this.

Recordings used in this installation:

Holy Ghost Tent Revival clip from their song Get Over Yourself intro on their album Family

A Smile and a Ribbon (Prudence by Robert Wells, Mark McIntyre) (Liberty Records, Inc.)

Getting Around in Spanish for a Quick and Easy mastery of Everyday Words and Phrases (Holt)

Hop Scotch Polka from Old Time Dance Show – Dick Rodgers and his T.V. Recording Orchestra (Decca)

(Burned  huge pot of beans making this one. Sigh.)

I Understand (A Smile and a Ribbon)

149. The Edible House (T.S. Eliot)

DAY ONE-HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE

Hello there.

This song is short.  It consists of:

1. A few seconds from a record called Great Ghost Stories from Troll Records.  This particular bit comes from “The Mysterious Shipwreck” narrated by Ralph Bell.  I found it at a thrift store, and I used it at a live show as well.  It’s become very useful.

2. An exercise of a collaboration between me and the poetry of T.S. Eliot (I am using The Centenary Edition).  I would write a line then look up the next within my T.S. Eliot book that I felt fit, write another line myself (or if I was really stuck took a word from another line of his) back and forth, then, for the last of the four lines, I would find a line of Eliot’s that rhymed with the last word of the second line and had to use it completely.  I also had to use the first line I read, I couldn’t look for another one forcing me to fit it into the melody.  (creating an A/B/C/B rhyme scheme – is that right?).

I tried several different samples from this record, though I haven’t been through the whole thing.  This was the one that stood out the most to me at the moment.  I gave myself a time limit: I had to finish (from recording sample to the last apple-S) by the time the battery on my dumb computer dies (which isn’t very long… maybe 45 minutes).  I decided to use an effect on the vocals and purposely widened the vibrato to make it feel more unstable and wiry…

In an attempt to avoid a fade-out ending I just cut it where I thought it might best serve it… it’s a little ineffective, but good enough for the time limit set.

The Edible House

What’s an edible house?

If you can’t get it back?

Let us go, you and I

When the wind blows water white and black

We have lingered so long

But you knew you are not

Unsend letters of thanks

Gathering fuel in vacant lots

With the twist of the knife

It will find its way home

Reminiscence comes

He shall be washed as white as snow.