Pages

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Always Go To The Funeral by Deirdre Sullivan

Always Go To The Funeral

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, "you're going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family."

Deirdre Sullivan grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and traveled the world working odd jobs before attending law school at Northwestern University. She's now a freelance attorney living in Brooklyn. Sullivan says her father's greatest gift to her and her family was how he ushered them through the process of his death.

So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.

That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, "You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Deirdre Sullivan grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and traveled the world working odd jobs before attending law school at Northwestern University. Sullivan says her father's greatest gift to her and her family was how he ushered them through the process of his death.


Article about my friend, GJ Charlet

'Humans need the ritual of saying goodbye': the Covid life of a small-town funeral director


Winter solstice, 2020. We got this far.

Awesome survival library. Tons of great reading and learning for free.
Photo by Android Jones Art 












Just love this outdoor performer, Feodor Grigoryev.
Feodor Grigoryev is a freelance musician from Saint Petersburg in Russia. He has been a professional musician since 1989.

Feodor plays a slightly unusual instrument which he calls the “Bottlephone”. The instrument is something you’ll never forget once you’ve seen it played live. It consists of 24 bottles suspended in the air on strings. When Feodor hits the bottles with a “stick” or “beater” the bottles produce a sound. Each bottle is filled with a varying level of water, which tune them to make different notes when hit. Similar to The Glass Harp.

Feodor's website.
His YouTube channel

Fedor grigorev bottle pianist - street music. Playing on Bottles in Bergen Norway


Paper snowflakes

How Previous Epidemics Impacted Home Design


So interesting to see
Knowing Morse Code can be handy


































How the FBI Destroyed the Careers of 41 Women in TV and Radio

At the dawn of the Cold War era, dozens of progressive women working in radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from their industry. Carol Stabile explores this shameful period in American history.

It's a lovely time of the year to dream about tropical sunlight, swimming, floating in the Caribbean Sea, ahhh.
Coral reef fish

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Connie Converse, poetic songwriter

 One of my favorite albums.













Connie Converse - H

ow Sad, How Lovely
(Full Album)



0:00 - Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains) 2:30 - Johnny's Brother 5:17 - Roving Woman 7:58 - Down This Road 9:42 - The Clover Saloon 11:55 - John Brady 13:42 - We Lived Alone 14:58 - Playboy of the Western World 18:59 - Unknown (A Little Louder, Love) 19:34 - One by One 21:40 - Father Neptune 23:46 - Man in the Sky 27:50 - Empty Pocket Waltz 29:50 - Honeybee 31:24 - There is a Vine 32:59 - How Sad, How Lovely 35:38 - Trouble I love the video's comments too.


























Elizabeth Eaton Converse was born in Laconia, New Hampshire, in 1924. She grew up in Concord as the middle child in a strict Baptist family; her father was a Baptist minister. She attended Concord High School, where she was valedictorian and won eight academic awards. She was awarded an academic scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After two years' study, she left the College and moved to New York City. During the 1950s she worked for the Academy Photo Offset printing house in New York's Flatiron District and lived in Greenwich Village. She started calling herself Connie, a nickname she had acquired in New York. She began writing songs and performing them for friends, accompanying herself on guitar. Her music came to the notice of animator and amateur recording engineer Gene Deitch, who had made tape recordings of artists like John Lee Hooker and Pete Seeger in the 1940s. Deitch made a number of tape recordings of Converse in the kitchen of his house in Hastings-on-Hudson in the mid-1950s. But she failed to attract any commercial interest in her music. Her only public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on "The Morning Show" on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which Deitch helped to arrange. In 1961, she left New York for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother Philip was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She worked in a secretarial job, and then as Managing Editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution from 1963. Her only musical involvement continued to be playing for friends at parties. By 1973, Connie was burnt out and depressed. Her colleagues and friends pooled their money to finance a six-months' trip to England for her. The journal, which meant so much to her, had left Michigan for Yale at the end of 1972, after being "auctioned off" without her knowledge. She was facing the need for major surgery. In August 1974, she wrote a series of letters to her family and friends, talking about her intention to make a new life somewhere else. By the time the letters were delivered, she had packed her belongings in her Volkswagen Beetle and driven away, never to be heard from again. In January 2004, Gene Deitch -- by then 80 years old and living in Prague since 1961 -- was invited by New York music historian David Garland to appear on his radio show Spinning on Air. Deitch played some of his own recordings, including one of Connie's songs, "One by One". Two of Garland's listeners, Dan Dzula and David Herman, were inspired to try and put together an album of Connie's music. There were two sources: the tapes in Deitch's collection in Prague, and her brother Philip's collection of recordings which she had sent him in the 1950s. In March 2009, How Sad, How Lovely, containing 17 songs by Connie Converse, was released by
Launderette Recordings.


Sad Lady EP

by Connie Converse

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

      $4 USD  or more

     

1.
Sad Lady 02:00
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

about

All tracks recorded circa 1954-1956.

"Sad Lady" and "Sorrow Is My Name"—both previously broadcast but never released—are joined by Connie's gorgeous (albeit impromptu) arrangement of the traditional ballad "The Ash Grove." The EP closes with two of her doubletracked arrangements ("Down This Road" and "We Lived Alone," both previously released in different form on 2009’s "How Sad, How Lovely") that shed new light on her songcraft and melodic sensibility.

This album is dedicated to the memory of Gene Deitch, whose spirit and boundless enthusiasm had the power to inspire strangers, to change lives, and to help preserve the musical legacy of Connie Converse, along the way.

credits

released June 26, 2020

Music and Lyrics by Elizabeth Eaton Converse
Artwork by Zachary Scheer
Recorded by Connie Converse and Gene Deitch
Mixed and Mastered by David Herman and Dan Dzula on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, at Good Studio, Brooklyn
Produced by Dan Dzula & David Herman


<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 470px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=366699163/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://connieconverse.bandcamp.com/album/sad-lady-ep">Sad Lady EP by Connie Converse</a></iframe>

Connie Converse, Lost and Found

A play based on her life was released about three years ago, and a documentary is online. More and more frequently are re-workings of her songs; a concert, various contemporary covers and a tribute album are the most notable. Musicologists even speculate that she may have been one of the earliest modern singer-songwriters of her genre, and wonder if she should be credited for it.

Connie Converse is a lesson to be learned, an enigmatic talent, and a remembrance of a foggy past. Most of all, though, she is a creator. She reminds us that even when all seems lost, it never is; time is never a detractor. Her loving lyrics and commentary on what womanhood is and should be has not ceased to be relevant since the 1950s. I encourage any womxn to take an hour and let her play; you’ll feel it. Converse may be lost to us now, but she’s living once more.


Podcast:

Episode 4 — Connie Converse Walking In the Dark