Gawker pricked a totally latent memory today with an old Sesame Street clip that I haven't seen since, oh, just about the Bicentennial or so:
Of course, at the tender age of three or four I wouldn't have known Philip Glass if he had walked out of our TV set and bopped me on the head, but in watching this today I distinctly remember being as mesmerized by the music as with the visuals, and trying to chant along.
I've been thinking a lot in the past year or so about how where--and how--you choose to live affects your energies: creative energy, intellectual energy, physical energy, all that. Some places are utterly exhausting, in every possible way, even if you try to make the best of them. (I've lived in a number of those.) And some places that should, or could, be wonderful places of retreat don't live up to their potential if you don't put in your own time and effort into making them so. (I'm in the actively striving stage.) Sometimes you create something wonderful, even if the larger environment doesn't quite sing. And sometimes you visit someone, or you read about someone else's abode, and you think: Yes. This is what I am aiming to cultivate on my own terrain.
Just before the onslaught of all the holidays, I was thinking about all this when I came upon a lovely profile of our friends Roswell Rudd and Verna Gillis in the New York Times just before Thanksgiving that affirmed these thoughts about creating a home that is a place of refuge and recharging. The fact that they have a tremendous love story doesn't hurt, either.
Our merry little band of three spent a good deal of the Christmas break catching up on releases that we didn't have a chance to listen to in the year past. (Ah, regrets and resolutions...)
In any case, the Official Good Time Disc of the past week, and heretofore regretfully and completely overlooked on my part, is Shantel's Disko Partizani!, which was released on Crammed this fall. The title track is my least favorite (see if you feel differently; the rather excruciatingly heavy-handed video is up at YouTube). If you dig Gogol Bordello and Balkan Beat Box and all that, check out Shantel's heavily Greek/Turkish spin on the genre.
(I must admit that I love the tenth track, "Immigrant Child", in particular, not in small part because it uses the old rembetika tune "Sto Cafe Aman"--the song which inspired the name of this blog.)
Happy 2008!
