Music Monday: A Week of Giving Thanks

This being the week of Thanksgiving, I wanted to start off today keeping the attitude of gratitude in the forefront. With that in mind, here are "Thankful" by Josh Groban and "Gratitude" by Nichole Nordeman.



Thankful (lyrics)

Somedays we forget
To look around us
Somedays we can't see
The joy that surrounds us
So caught up inside ourselves
We take when we should give.

So for tonight we pray for
What we know can be.
And on this day we hope for
What we still can't see.
It's up to us to be the change
And even though we all can still do more
There's so much to be thankful for.

Look beyond ourselves
There's so much sorrow
It's way too late to say
I'll cry tomorrow
Each of us must find our truth
It's so long overdue

So for tonight we pray for
What we know can be
And every day we hope for
What we still can't see
It's up to us to be the change
And even though we all can still do more
There's so much to be thankful for.

Even with our differences
There is a place we're all connected
Each of us can find each other's light

So for tonight we pray for
What we know can be
And on this day we hope for
What we still can't see
It's up to us to be the change
And even though this world needs so much more

There's so much to be thankful for




Gratitude (lyrics)

Send some rain, would You send some rain?
'Cause the earth is dry and needs to drink again
And the sun is high and we are sinking in the shade
Would You send a cloud, thunder long and loud?
Let the sky grow black and send some mercy down
Surely You can see that we are thirsty and afraid
But maybe not, not today
Maybe You'll provide in other ways
And if that's the case . . .

(Chorus)

We'll give thanks to You
With gratitude
For lessons learned in how to thirst for You
How to bless the very sun that warms our face
If You never send us rain

Daily bread, give us daily bread
Bless our bodies, keep our children fed
Fill our cups, then fill them up again tonight
Wrap us up and warm us through
Tucked away beneath our sturdy roofs
Let us slumber safe from danger's view this time
Or maybe not, not today
Maybe You'll provide in other ways
And if that's the case . . .

(Chorus)

We'll give thanks to You
With gratitude
A lesson learned to hunger after You
That a starry sky offers a better view if no roof is overhead And if we never taste that bread

Oh, the differences that often are between
What we want and what we really need

So grant us peace, Jesus, grant us peace
Move our hearts to hear a single beat
Between alibis and enemies tonight
Or maybe not, not today
Peace might be another world away
And if that's the case . . .

(Chorus)

We'll give thanks to You
With gratitude
For lessons learned in how to trust in You
That we are blessed beyond what we could ever dream
In abundance or in need
And if You never grant us peace

But Jesus, would You please . . .

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Christmas On the Square

The temperature has been in the teens and twenties for most of the past week here. Today the sun came out and warmed things up a bit. It made it up to about 38 degrees, so I decided to go downtown and walk around the courthouse square. It has been decorated for the Christmas season, and I wanted to take pictures of it to share with you here. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, there is always a parade through our town welcoming Santa and the Christmas season to town. Christmas music is piped outdoors over the square every day for those visiting the shops around it.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

If you'd like to see some more photos of my town and of the square, click here.

To view other slide shows that I have made, click here.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

Every day, my Portuguese grandmother would part her long grey hair down the middle. She'd make two braids then wind each braid up like a pinwheel. Using bobby pins, she'd fasten a pinwheel above each ear. Then she put on her bib-apron and went to the kitchen. When she wasn't in the kitchen she might be sitting in front of the television set watching The Guiding Light or As the World Turns. She didn't speak English, but she understood what was going on in those soaps!

I remember her making Portuguese Sweet Bread. She would be leaning over the table kneading (and kneading and kneading!) an enormous ball of dough. When the dough had been kneaded, she would put it in a big bowl and cover it with a clean towel. After the dough had risen, she'd lift a corner of the towel and poke two fingers into the dough. If the indentations stayed, it was ready to be baked. Into the oven! At Easter she put an egg on top of the dough before baking. That was the best bread ever! This is my grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day in 1916.

I like to make bread. My hair isn't long enough to braid, I don't wear an apron (hence my food-stained t-shirts), and I let my Kitchen Aid to do the kneading. Couldn't be much easier.

Oh, wait... it could be easier!

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Five minutes? Artisan bread? The bread with the slashes in the crisp and crusty, floury, perfect-looking bread? The kind of bread that I would love to be able to bake and bring to the table?
In their book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, authors Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois tell us how to mix up a batch of wet dough and store it in the refrigerator - for up to two weeks! On baking day, cut off a piece of dough, form it, let it rise for 20 minutes and bake! If you're having company, cut off a big piece of dough... if it's just you in the mood for some delicious bread, cut off a small piece!
No, this isn't a picture from the book. No, I didn't run down to the bakery and take this picture to impress you. I baked it last night! The crust on this bread was so crunchy, so crackly, so perfect!

If you want to have fun and bake bread that looks like this without going here or here, all you have to do is order the book from here!

In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.

No 160 - Being There Director - Hal Ashby

A few months ago, hell it may have even been a year, I was in BlockBusters in Wantage when I found a load for films for £1.... One of these was The Life and Times of Peter Sellers starring Geoffrey Rush. I thought it looked quite good, and it was cheap so I bought it. And guess what folks.... IT WAS GOOD, a very intense performance from Rush and a really interesting look at the life (and death) of Peter Sellers. One of the central themes of the film follows Sellers as he wishes to have people take him seriously. His main quest is to have the book 'Being There' made into a film. Ever since then, I have wanted to watch the film.... so I am glad that Islington library was able to aid me.

I had no real idea what this film was going to be about. My main reason for watching was solely the fact that Sellers had wanted to make this film for so long as he related to the central character of Chance. So. as I came into this film blind, with no knowledge of what was going to happen ahead of me I feel I am in the perfect position to talk about my first impressions of this film. I loved it!
I was really taken by the central character of Chance, who is gloriously literal and naive and ignorant of everything except being a gardener. I think it is fair to draw parallels between this film and Forrest Gump as they both feature an 'idiot' making a massive difference to the people around him and subsequently to American as a whole. What this film has going for it that Gump didn't have is the simple addition of Sellers. As good an actor Tom Hanks is, he does not have the same amazing ability of being a fully convincing character actor, whilst Sellers fully inhabits his characters and makes them real - sometimes to the detriment of his own sanity (again I'm using Life and Death as a point of reference.... I just feel that I should mention it more because I bloody love the film and it is not in the list). Because of this, the film has a subtlety which Gump just can't touch. It is a film where, essentially, nothing happens and in films like that the cast and the characters have to be perfect. That is where the film truly shines. Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas play the marvellous couple who adopt Chance and they are truly fantastic in their roles of an Old man who comes to terms with his death and his younger wife who finds an release for her pent up passions. However, like all his films this is Sellers's show, but could be the best individual performance of his career. To see an actor so famed for his outlandish caricatures play such a subtle and nuanced character is truly fascinating, I can't help but feel that this helped pave the way for Jim Carrey to be in The Truman Show or for will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction.

Whilst this film isn't a comedy per se, their are sublimely comic moments - most of these coming from Chance wondering unaffected through his surroundings meeting ever more important people. They take his musings about gardening to be deep, meaningful a highly metaphorical statements about the state of America. This leads to massive levels of paranoia as the president can find no information of him having ever existed, whilst the rest of America endear to him and wish he could lead the country with his straight talking and fable like beauty with words.

It is also a very gentle film, Chance is constantly referred to as Chauncy Gardener due to MacLaine's Eve mishearing him say 'Chance the Gardener' the first time. Therefore, as he becomes more prominent in the public eye and background checks are made on him, no information is found. As Chance lives out his gentle unassuming life the CIA, FBI and Washington Post are trying desperately to find any information about him. And failing.
Even when they do find out that he is not a financial or political genius, and he is in fact just a gardener, it is not used as a negative twist in the film. They confront Chance with their knowledge and he admits it and walks off. Chance is too naive, too unaware of his surroundings to ever be in any trouble. It is a concept which is encapsulated by the final scene. At this point I wish to do something I never thought I would ever do, quote someone off the IMDB forum. But I feel it is OK, because they in turn are just paraphrasing the book on which Being There is based.
"Chance walks on water because he doesn't realize that he can't".
All the situations in this film are pretty much impossible - the concept of a simpleton like Chance moving through America's upper echelons of power is sublime in its ridiculousness (let us just not comment on old George W at this point), so the final scene where Chance walks across a lake to tend to a tree makes perfect sense. There is no way Chance should have been able to get through any of the scenes in this film, yet he does. So why not manage this final unachievable feat.
This is a man who is so naive that the world fails to affect him, and in this aspect even the literal laws of nature re not able to stop him.

Apart from that, I have only a couple of small points I want to make for the film:
Firstly, there is a really odd subplot in which the President is convinced that Chance will replace him as president and starts to worry, losing his erection. Cue some very dramatic cuts (sometimes mid sentence) from Chance's social hobnobbing to the President and his wife laying in bed together discussing why he can't get it up.... I didn't understand that.

Secondly, I just wanted to mention that there is a really cool version of Also Sprach Zarathustra in this film. The Original Strauss version is mostly famous for being the theme to 2001, so it is fitting thay this awesome Jazz funk version by Eumir Deodato is played as Chance leaves his master's house for the first time. It is Chance's exploration of a whole new world...

And it is really cool in bangin' retro way....

Young Lust

Bounding behind "Goodbye Blue Sky" on the album and "What Shall We Do Now?" in the movie, "Young Lust" bursts into life as "a pastiche of any young rock and roll band out on the road" (Waters, 1979 interview). The music is so vibrantly cliché and the vocals so infectious that the song, while lampooning the sexually driven, big-guitar-rock songs and bands of the time, transcends its mold and becomes a lively entity unto itself. Although Waters' original song recounted the singer's cautious sexual exploits after school, "hanging around outside porno movies and dirty bookshops," the collaboration of Waters, Gilmour, and Ezrin quickly turned the song into a rollicking melody recounting Pink's entrance into rock and roll super stardom. And what better way to show celebrity excesses than through the eyes of yet another sex-driven star. Yet there's little wonder as to why Pink explodes into his new personage: in terms of album chronology, he has just left his overprotective mother, his school, and the life he knew, all of which oppressed the development of Pink's individuality. In the total absence of any boundaries whatsoever and with his newfound power as a celebrity (we never really do find out HOW Pink became a star…but that might be besides the point), Pink bursts through the rules placed on him throughout his life and recklessly embraces all that he was never allowed to experience. As the cliché says (which is appropriate for this purposefully stereotypical song), he simply immerses himself with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Though the song is relatively simple in terms of narrative (it's mainly used to detail the sexual exploits of rock star Pink whose every sexual fantasy is explored in every town that his tour stops in), the very style that Floyd uses to convey the message contributes to the deeper undertones of the album. It's interesting that Waters described the song as a pastiche, a literary imitation usually for the sake of satire. In one way, the pastiche technique is used to criticize a certain type of music or lifestyle without blatantly attacking it. To use a literary example, many of the chapters of James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses parody other writers, books, and cultural trends of the time in an attack on what Joyce arguably saw as the degeneration of intellectual thought and literature. Although Joyce never mentions a specific writer or book in these parodic sections, his views are loudly proclaimed and his aim is nearly unmistakable. So too is the aim of Pink Floyd's "Young Lust," a parody of every rocker whose used his celebrity for sex and drugs, whose ego is as large as his image, and whose only care is the pursuit of carnal pleasure.

Going beyond sheer parody, Floyd interestingly uses this technique to further define Pink's character. The very fact that the song is an imitation of popular rock music of the 70's reinforces Pink's lack of individuality at this time in his life. Up until now, he has been molded by his mother, his school, and life itself into a model civilian void of nearly all traces of distinctiveness. In the movie Pink is punished by his teacher for writing poetry, restrained sexually by his ever-watchful mother, alienated from much of society because he has no father; all of the above have only contributed to the flimsy mask of personality, each incident painting a feature onto the mask rather than adding depth to his character. Fittingly, the first song of his new independence is one that is so full of rock clichés (the gruff, sexual voice; the catchy, melodic hook; the polished guitar solo) that it's hard to grant just one person credit for writing the song. It not only recalls popular musical trends at the time but the vocals are also reminiscent of an earlier Floyd tune called "the Nile Song", according to a Waters interview. Pink is not just a mere shadow of 70's rock and roll but he's also a shadow of his creators' earlier music. But it's only after he fully erupts that Pink finally comprehends the hollow shell that he is and the void of individual nothingness underneath, a realization that further contributes to the completion of the wall and the destruction of whatever self there once was.

While the song's position on the album denotes a more natural sense of newfound sexual freedom, one might argue that its position in the movie is much more dubious, casting the song in a retaliatory light. By this argument, Pink turns to the sexually willing groupies in order to get even with his unfaithful wife whose infidelity he has just discovered in "What Shall We Do Now?" Pink stays in his trailer for most of the song, only emerging momentarily when he sees a pretty female fan that catches his eye. Although he is obviously annoyed with her when she tries to get his autograph, he nevertheless takes her back to his hotel room, insinuating that he originally intended to do something with her, that is until he has another one of his "turns" in the next song.

One might also argue that the movie sequence is little more than an extension of the album version, "serious[ly] romanticizing" the life of a rock star (Waters, DVD). The majority of the song's scenes do little to advance the plot, mostly showing the excesses of celebrity life in the numerous women, abundant food, and flowing champagne before concluding the song with the groupie following Pink back into his trailer. Despite the scenes' apparent frivolity, there are a few subtleties that rescue the video from being nothing more than justification for sex jokes and female nudity. It's interesting to note that despite this being Pink's sexual anthem (at least on the album), he is probably the character with the least amount of screen time during the song. His absence from the majority of the footage creates a physical separation between the viewer and the character, one that quite possibly parallels Pink's feelings of abandonment and detachment after having discovered his wife's unfaithfulness. This sense of disconnection is further emphasized by the few times Pink is on screen. When the viewer is offered a glimpse of Pink, it is usually through the window of Pink's trailer, producing yet another wall of separation between the viewer and Pink as well as Pink and the rest of the world. Rather than joining his own backstage party, he sits by the window and indifferently watches the festivities outside of this trailer through a dark pair of sunglasses, yet another wall of separation between the external world and himself. Even when he does emerge from his trailer at the end of the song, he quickly retreats back into it when he finds that the female groupie is just another faceless fan in search of an autograph and a wild story. Interestingly, the fan is more persistent than one might expect, trying to take off his glasses to "find out what's behind [his] cold eyes" and following him into his trailer and eventually back to his hotel room, even after Pink has blatantly expressed his exasperation with her. Coupled with the groupie's resemblance to his wife (at least in my opinion…which is perhaps why Pink was drawn to her in the first place), the fan acts as yet another extension of the wife's insistent attempts to try to break through Pink's wall and truly connect with him. But just as Pink eventually drove his wife to having an affair, he will also drive the female fan away from him before she even glimpses what's behind his disguise in "One of My Turns."

Jane at Home Live

Jane at their apogee brings into focus all their subtle qualities that had by this time made them the most groovin' German band which didn't really fit into the Krautrock category with their rather simple but effective brand of heavy blues/rock on this spaced out August 1976 live performance at the Niedersachsenhalle in their hometown of Hanover, Germany. Loathe it or love it it's all here , stoned out vocals, lofty guitar freakouts, pulsating Hammond organ and the cumbersome beat which made the Jane sound so distinct. Next to Grobschnitt's Solar Music Live this is the penultimate German live rock album hands down and the only Jane album to achieve gold status. Searing versions of Daytime and Hangman off their first LP Together as well as the ballad Out In The Rain from the Here We Are LP burn with even more passion than the originals along with excerpts from Fire, Water, Earth & Air plus an extended 20 minute epic entitled Windows which was not released on any of their studio albums is included here exclusively for the home crowd. Not a directionless jam but actually one of their strongest compositions with impressive use of synths!

Much to the chagrin of long time Jane fans Daytime was left out of earlier single CD re-ssues but is included in a January 2009 double CD re-issue along with several bonus tracks taken from a contemporary WDR Radio broadcast. All of Jane's cool friends can now come together in the sun once again! Not only one of the best live German albums but one of the best live rock albums to emerge from the seventies period. Indespensable. A headphone album if there ever was one. (Sursa)

Jane

Considered to be one of the great German spacerock bands of the 70's. JANE plays a Progressive rock navigating between a breathtaking guitar solos, powerful keyboards, polished and mighty arrangements and an almost constantly dragging tempo added up to the typical JANE's touch and were characteristic for a melodic hard rock that had no equal in Germany. Their music sometimes is close to PINK FLOYD works or close to groups like ELOY. "Together" (underground hard rock) and "Between Heaven & Hell" (space rock) are their classic releases and the recommended purchase. "Fire, Water, Earth and Air" is quite a bit different, sounding more like PINK FLOYD (partly "Meddle", partly "Momentary Lapse of Reason") and ELOY. "Between Heaven And Hell" is the best album I've heard of them. "Here We Are" and "Age Of Madness" are supposed to be other good ones.(Sursa)

1972 Together 3.77 (29 ratings)	1973 Here We Are 3.41 (16 ratings)	1974 Jane III 2.65 (11 ratings)	1975 Lady 2.93 (13 ratings)
1976 Fire, Water, Earth and Air 3.39 (17 ratings)	1977 Between Heaven and Hell 3.49 (13 ratings)	1978 Age Of Madness 2.53 (7 ratings)	1979 Sign No. 9 2.64 (4 ratings)
1980 Jane 3.17 (3 ratings)	1982 Germania 1.92 (4 ratings)	1986 Beautiful Lady 1.50 (3 ratings)	1996 Resurrection 1.25 (3 ratings)
2002 Genuine 2.57 (3 ratings)	2003 Shine On 1.73 (4 ratings)	2007 Voices 2.52 (3 ratings)

JANE Live Albums

1976 Jane at Home Live 4.01 (16 ratings)

1990 Jane Live '89 3.67 (3 ratings)

2002 Live 2002 3.77 (2 ratings)

JANE DVD & Videos

2008 Tribute To Peter Panka 4.00 (1 ratings)

JANE Boxset & Compilations

1977 Waiting For The Sunshine not rated

1977 Crowns not rated