Have You Found Another Sweetheart?

Congratulations to Scott Woods, who completed his sixth straight 24 hour poetry marathon. I was there, witnessing the halfway point. It was a rough three hours.

Two other people, Paul and Joanna were there with Scott for nearly the whole 24 hours. Congratulations to them as well. At 8AM there were four of us in the room, Paul and Joanna were dozing off and Scott was falling asleep on the mic so I had to clap appropriately, tell Scott what the last words he read were and look more awake than anyone else.

Donuts helped and Scott got through those trying hours and made it through the rest of the day to conclude the marathon with a strong hour of his own work.




Day Four - A Song that makes you sad.

So many choices here.

Nick Hornby, in High Fidelity, sad it best, "People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobodies worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."

As Captain Kirk said in Star Trek V, "I need my pain!"

We seek out the sad in our music listening, perhaps to find common ground with the musician. They've been sad too, and can express it through song better than we can.

This was a tough call. No one does sad better than Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura. She'll be back later in the month.

Today I'm going with this interpretation. Words by Woody Guthrie, music by Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy. This song guts me every time. Tweedy's vocal pulls me under the sand and Bennett's under acknowledged arrangement keeps me there. Billy Bragg's in the mix too. It's from Mermaid Avenue Volume One, one of the best records of the past twenty five years.