my heart is a glorious machine;

The most glorious mess of a thunderstorm just roared over the hills -- all blinding rain and howls of thunder and the thick scent of sweat and dust rising, expelled, from the earth. The sky's been green. I had to light all the candles I could and shrug into my white lace skirt (to go with, you know, my folkloretastic Vampires Beware t-shirt...), and now I feel rather compelled to share with you the music I was listening to when the brunt of the storm hit, which happens to be this crazy raucous Victorian street punkfolk, with lots of group shouting and singing saw and accordion and stuff. ♫ "Honey in the Hair" by Blackbird Raum. This is totally research for my novel. Totally. In, um, a frame-of-mind sort of way? I have to get into young Rue Caruthers*' mind somehow, yes? And this is exactly what he would have listened to. No really. (Also wondering, really, how close might street music have got to this back then? Research topic three hundred and nine: London musical culture, high and low, at the turn of the century.) Also, er, apparently Stuff Mr Caruthers Would Have Listened To As A Young Victorian Punk is my new musical kink (see also: Arcade Fire, Rose Kemp, Pale Young Gentlemen, Patrick Wolf, Dark Dark Dark... are you kidding, of course I'm making a mix).

On the subject of the ever-present Novel, I wrote this bit late last night, and upon waking it seemed awfully anachronistic. Thoughts?


Er, on the subject of music and also vampires... this is the first song that's properly mine that I've properly recorded. ♫ Black is the Colour of My True Love's Heart, in which, as usual, I hear a traditional ballad and just know there's an alternate version out there in which he's a vampire and she has to kill him what is wrong with me. Anyway, there's a flaily first attempt at music production in here, too, consisting of me making weird noises with my mother's African thumb piano and then manipulating and repeating them in two different ways. I don't even know if it works, I've been messing with this song for so long.

How can anyone travel by aeroplane without shouting, my God, my God, what a miracle this is? 

I love flying. As I only manage to board a plane every four years or so, I frequently forget this, but it's fantastic. I love airports, and strange people, and all of the weird compact convenience things that a plane requires (weird tiny bathrooms! tiny packets of pretzels! orange juice in cans! little trays! overheard compartments! why do I love these things? I don't know), and most of all the flight itself, looking down over the world flooding down below you -- mountains look strange and crumpled from far above, cars look as though you could tumble them into piles with a fingertip, clouds cast strange shadows down on the world -- and once we came upon a city -- I think it was when we were descending towards Minneapolis -- and from above you could see all of the skyscrapers crowded together in one little patch, a toy city you could scoop up in your palm. At night the world glimmers. And the sun was beginning to set as we descended towards Seattle, the sun reaching through the windows, the length of it skimming golden across the waters, sharpening the tiny window-glittering sides of buildings. And the Alaska mountains from the air, dear God! White and craggy, plummeting into sharp valleys of some other world: and once I looked down and firelights were glimmering on the mountainside, and it was one of the most magical things I have ever seen.

Also, the whole three flights I had this Martha Tilston song going through my head, as well as this by the Paper Raincoat.

Travel seems to be reinforcing my cautious estimate that people are awesome. I had so many wonderful people offer help and good talk, from, hey, the guy from church, Ernie, who offered to drive me to Pittsburgh (he was picking up his wife at the airport and her flight arrived two hours after mine left -- coincidentally, she was coming from Hawaii. oh, opposites!), to the woman who picked up the water bottle I dropped and made sure I didn't forget it, to the couple in the tram from the main airport to the concourses helping me find my way, the male flight attendant on my first (tiny tiny!) plane from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis who grinned at me and complimented on my nifty folk-festival bag (it's all brightly coloured and has tassels and sequins -- but in a nifty Asian way and not a trashy American way -- and embroidery and room), to the friendly young woman also on her way to Anchorage -- but to climb Mt. McKinley! And then there was Geoff, who may have been flirting with me (ack... I take all friendliness at face value, but he did walk up to me and shake my hand before sitting next to me in the waiting area, and later he asked about my dating life...), but he was very nice, and kind of overwhelmingly impressed with my life as a homeschooler (I forget how we got to that topic).

I find myself somewhat shocked, because nothing seems to have gone wrong. None of my flights were delayed -- two arrived slightly early! -- and I didn't lose anything and my luggage made it to Alaska (the last two times I flew it got lost and I didn't get it back for a day or two; okay, so the last time was nearly three years ago and the time before that was ten years ago) and I didn't sit by anyone weird (mostly twenty-something men who wanted to sleep and/or listen to music the entire time). I did have this bizarrely spazzy flight attendant on my last flight -- I have no idea what was going on (or what she was on!), but she made all of the announcements in kind of a weird voice, and sometimes she would start laughing uncontrollably for no reason I could tell and had to shut off the intercom. I mean, not in a creepy crazy sort of way, but -- you know in films when people are on the phone or something and in G-rated films there's usually like an animal or small child tickling them and in, er, more grown-up films they're being snogged or something and it's very distracting but they're trying not to let the person on the other end of the phone know about it? It sounded a lot like that. I don't even know, you guys.

Anyway, flew into Anchorage at a little after eleven -- which was a little after three on my body's time, but the whole day was so surreal in terms of time passing that it didn't really feel that time at all (how strange it was to look down at my iPod clock telling me that it was eleven at night, and the sun only just beginning to set! the strange thing about flying long distances is that time seems to cease to have meaning; it's kind of relaxing, in a way). Kyra was waiting at the luggage claim in a Blue Sun t-shirt, and we hugged and I almost fell over and eventually we drove to her house and talked for two hours or more until we finally fell asleep. And now I am typing in her living room, waiting for her to wake up, and enjoying the lovely quiet of the house.

Some observations:

i. My father is kind of adorable. Also, his music taste is made of win. (My father's taste in music is primarily responsible for my taste in music, though we listen to quite a lot of entirely different things. My adoration of all kinds of alt folk and traditional folk music is all his doing, though. I grew up singing along to his Steeleye Span tapes.) He's cleaning out his office and blaring the Strawbs' Hero & Heroine, and I have no idea why I have never stolen this album from him before. RECTIFY POSTHASTE. (Aww, now he's playing Once!) 

ii. I'm beginning to worry that the Evangeline story is only a really good excuse to hunt down a lot of alt. traditional folk. However, it does mean that the mixtape I will perfect and post at the end of the month will be really fantastic and full of artists nobody's ever heard of, yay! (Also, freak folk/neofolk/New Weird America is my favourite. thing. ever. We were made to be together, we were!)

iii. Speaking of which? I FOUND MY VAMPIRE BALLAD. After I watched Wings of Desire and alas, did not have the soundtrack at all, I started playing the only Nick Cave I possess on repeat, which is a duet with PJ Harvey I got off audiography ages and ages ago -- the old traditional ballad "Henry Lee" (lyrics), and eee, is it ever fantastically applicable to vampire seduction, except that she only stabs him, she doesn't eat him. Oh well, the version in my altverse could easily be slightly different. Anyway, it is fabulously atmospheric and I heart it to bits. ...I seem to have this problem with loving murder ballads too much, c.f. my wild love for "Little Sadie" in all its cheerfully psychotic glory.

iv. Apparently I am quite ridiculously A SAP. Like, I have had "Full of Grace" stuck in my head today? And I get all flaily and sniffle and yell "ANGELLLLL!" at inappropriate moments? IT IS BAD, I AM TELLING YOU. (Since when did I ship Buffy/Angel this much, anyway?) Also I have this absurd need to write fanfiction. OH HELP.

v. Twilight calendars attract the weirdest people. Seriously. I have had much weirder not-customers since we started displaying them prominently. Several times elderly women have picked them up dubiously and just sort of looked at them, like, "the undead? is that what the kids are into these days?". Also there were Real Live Twihards in handmade Team Edward t-shirts wandering around my kiosk today, at the most caffeine-raging stage of thirteen, and I was beginning to plan out emergency escape routes in my head ("if they make a rush for the front display, I can duck behind the register -- I think it's bulletproof? -- and these keys can totally be turned into a weapon if things get really dire!").

Annnnd the people at FYE keep moving Edward around, and he glowering sinus-infectionly at me all shift today, aieeeeeee. I'm beginning to construct a theory that sparklepires contract some kind of Death Flu which presents itself with symptoms very much like vampirism, except with more sneezing and, um...glitter? That bit's hard to fit it. Then again, it's hard to fit into the original context.

I'm hoping someone will, like, knock over a bunch of CDs, and Edward will be all "THESE ARE NO LONGER ALPHABETISED. AND ALSO YOU CRACKED THE COVER OF THIS JOSHUA RADIN, YOU CRETIN. PICK IT UP." and have to climb out of the poster to go fix them and THEN HE WILL STOP WATCHING ME ALL DAY? 

So yeah: life = job job job job nano job sleep. I am staying up late tonight to write. ...Except so far it has mostly been catching up on the two days of LJ that I missed, good heavens. Tomorrow I plan to: touch up my hair, take some books back to the university library up the hill, SLEEP, bake a cake (what? I really want cake), mayyybe pick up a bottle of Vampire Red Manic Panic at Sally's because they were closed when I got out of work today, NaNo, and possibly attempt to clean the pit which is my bedroom, which I have been putting off in favour of NaNo for weeks now. Argh.

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

charismitaine  assigned me S.

strange things - abigail washburn & the sparrow quartet.
   In April I saw Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet play at Merlefest; it was hands down the best concert I have seen in an age. This was the first new song I heard them play: I had to remind my heart to keep beating. I want to call it "apocalyptic". Or possibly "an unholy marriage between Appalachian gospel and a string quartet". Two banjos, a violin, a cello, and Miss Washburn's incredibly versatile voice.

the swell season - the swell season.
   One of my favourite instrumentals -- this one you can nearly taste. It's autumn somewhere in Europe, long ago, and trees are leaning over a lake. Maybe you're looking out of the window, maybe you're dancing so slowly and listening to the time-worn floorboards creak beneath your feet. Piano, guitar, violin, cello: magic.

shadowland - sarah slean.
   As I mentioned in my review of The Baroness, I wish this had been the closing song rather than the penultimate: it sounds like the end of the story, the denouement after the final epiphany, and it's achingly lovely. Love, the only alchemy / Love, the killer of despair / Love, the true nobility / Love, the armour angels wear

scars - hannah fury.
   This is a far-away spooky gently disquieting haunted wood reworking of "Scarborough Fair". Lovely.

say it to me now - glen hansard.
   So, I totally did buy my dad the soundtrack to Once for Father's Day, and he loves it, and I'm so glad! This song is a testament to the power of simplicity -- one voice and one guitar carrying so much emotion and so much range, sort of as if Patty Griffin's Living With Ghosts was recorded by an Irish bloke.

So, I'm listening to Sarah Slean's The Baroness, which is really a delightfully atmospheric album -- in some ways it's very different from her previous two "mainstream" albums; it's got much more of a '20s-'40s cabaret aesthetic, without so much of the spooky, brazen witchiness that characterised Day One in particular, although you get a hint of that in "Sound of Water", currently my favourite song on the album, with its baroque string arrangement and the way it builds, the rich way Sarah's voice ribbons around the lyrics, the slightly dischordant piano melody; and there's also a darker, more solemn echo of that in the penultimate"Shadowland", which I think made me teary when I had my initial listen late at night with the candles and the open window. Some other particular highlights are the opener "Hopeful Hearts", which has fantastic dynamics, jolting seamlessly from delicate to battle cry (it's also totally my Angel Investigations song now. ...Shut up.)* and the quietly yearning "Please Be Good to Me" -- but I think this is the sort of album that slowly grows on you, quietly, until you realise how lovely in full it really is. (In fact I am liking it even more as a whole than I did the first time I listened. Which is good. Albums that are static are never good.) Sarah Slean still sounds like the soundtrack to a fantasy novel, but it's a subtler fantasy, maybe a 1930s ghost story, set in the heart of some vivid, magnificent Canadian city.

My only quibble is that I really wish the album had ended with "Shadowland", which is really a climactic, apocalyptic-hope sort of song if I've ever heard one -- "Looking for Someone" is good, and I don't necessary want it not to be on the album at all, just -- somewhere else. "Shadowland" brings the perfect closure, and it's so haunting that you almost don't want that mood to shift into something else. Love, the only alchemy / Love, the killer of despair / Love, the true nobility / Love, the armour angels wear.

Also? Bonus track! I've just got hold of it, and I'm very pleased, because it does have the spooky brazen quality of songs like "When Another Midnight", "The Score", or "Vertigo", and I hope someday Miss Slean will make an entire album that sounds like this, with the slight mad-circus bent. Mmmm.

parasol - sarah slean.
i'm courting a madness
i cannot explain

* If this were a professional review I would probably not include that bit. Probably.

so, was gone much of yesterday at a friend's birthday party, which was a murder mystery (yes, lady_moriel , it was exactly like You Are The Murderer in Shifts!), and a sleepover, and I enjoyed myself fantastically, only now I seem to have run out of energy and socialisability. it's deeply perplexing, because simultaneously I feel very lonely and also as though I need to curl into myself, completely alone, and find all the proper angles and corners again. anyway, this is mostly to say That's Where I've Been, and also that I might be a bit absent for a day or two, as I shall likely be hobnobbing with Alessandra, who just got back, hiding from small girls (sister's birthday party tomorrow, yikes), and catching up. and, oh, sleeping. ;) (run-down later, because the past week has had several writeable tidbits.)

edit: browsing Facebook, and the most recent several status updates all seem unhappy, so I should like to issue a general f-list hug, because you lot are lovely. have some music bits banging about in my mediafire queue. cheer up, emo f-list. ♥

j'y suis jamais alle - yann tiersen.

born - over the rhine.

all you need is love - the beatles.

some surprise - lisa hannigan & gary lightbody.

she lost feeling in the ends of her fingers - linford detweiler.

us - regina spektor.

rowing song - patty griffin.

underneath the stars - kate rusby. 

Today I got a package from the marvellous charismitaine, full of books (including The Ladies of Grace Aideu and a Trina Schart Hyman-illustrated The Sleeping Beauty and new-to-me books to get to know!) and cosy gloves + armwarmers and bookmarks and a button and A VIENNA TENG T-SHIRT. Which was too small for her and fits me exactly and aslkhglhg!

So, have been functioning and not functioning in rather dizzying succession, and have been mostly scanning the internet in a sort of haze and not getting anything done. (Sounding familiar yet?) The good news is that I saw Serenity and it was fantastic (and I really really do need to say something more concrete about both Firefly and Serenity eventually...another one of those things I Am Going To Do Later. Actually, probably when my laptop comes home. Then I can, you know, write about Simon's waistcoats when I should be sleeping.)

So, in lieu of an actual post, here's some music I've been listening to lately.



Today it was windy and rainy and dark, and a few hours ago I slipped out of the house with my cloak on and ran around outside staring at the trees, blazing in orange and gold -- the two great orange trees across from our parking lot have carpeted the road with leaves. And it was dusk and the clouds were so thick and dark and stormy and there was rain of water and rain of leaves and it was perfect. The world rarely looks the way it seems to in photographs and films, but tonight glimmered with the sorts of lights and shadows and contrasts that you don't believe exist. I ran barefoot up the back road and along the base of the hill and the wind whipped me round and I was gloriously chilly and wet. The rest of the day was unexceptional, but this evening made it magical.

For once, I think I am going to answer memes before I forget they exist. You will want to read this: there is free music within. (Aha, I know how to lure!)

Today we were in the car, and I was listening to Kate Bush, and suddenly we drove past this overgrown bit of woods, with tangley trees and long long grass and stones and wildflowers, dipping down into the earth, all shade-grown and dappled, with a twisted long-dead tree bough in the middle of one little hollow, and I had a brief flash of one of my wonder moments -- it was the sort of place where, if you walked into it at the right time of night or day, maybe under the right moon or arrangement of stars and spheres, the world behind you would disappear, and you'd find yourself in another one entirely.

Happy twentieth birthday to

lady_moriel , my favouritest vampire! ♥ There is fic in the works (um, sort of), but...er...you know my track record with such things, and, um, hopefully you'll get it sometime before your twenty-first, anyway. Ack. Many happy returns & all that, although I have no idea what that return business is all about--perhaps that the birthday and Christmas gifts which you want to get rid of will still have the tags attached and receipts intact? 

Here is some music, mostly stuff I...promised to send you a really long time ago and never actually got around to sending, or stuff you asked for and I forgot to even respond, or stuff that is just nifty and you should totally have it. (Which is kind of a lot of categories for five tracks. Bear with me here. Oh, and anyone else is welcome to download these; I'm not forbidding you. They're just mainly for Kyra, is all.) 

Look Up - Stars
Black Horse and the Cherry Tree - KT Tunstall
Sincerely - Deb Talan
Psychobabble - Frou Frou
Spring - Richard Shindell



I am incredibly out of sorts just now; rather, I have been most of the week, and am Not Getting Anything Done, and life is pretty much general botheration just now, except the edges aren't really sharp enough for that. Agh. Which, yeah, you can see I haven't been posting anything: this is because I have no original thoughts in my head, or my mind is rife with cheap wangst.