Having lots of good songs ready for life's very rough times is important, if you want to pull through.
So if you skip the boring bit I'm about to write, you get pictures and some words about the VoWs that helped me over a bunch of bruisings and finally a big downer.
I'm still fragile; it's a bad sign when bawling brats too young to know better have me wanting to thump their parents, but finished that bit without bashing. Everyone in the pharmacy stared at me coming in, though, from a sudden storm well timed for a headful of bitterly tender, self-mocking nostalgia. I thought it was just my stylishly drenched looks, then realised that I'd unleashed, aloud, a filthy string of expletives.
"I'm ever so sorry," I said to the shop women. "It's not you or your customers here I was insulting, it's everybody's umbrellas: I hate the damned things, up and down every five seconds and nearly taking my eye out each time in these showers."
"You're used to it," one of the girls retorted. "You're English."
"Oh yeah? So why did I leave England behind nearly 25 years ago? And it wasn't just the weather. Anyway, they call you Frogs 'cos you're supposed to jump up and down in it."
That's untrue, but sufficed to see to the resumption of normal trade, no offence taken, including by the old lady with the most vicious-looking of the umbrellas but her thumb nowhere near the deadly button.
"What d'you want anyway?" the other girl asked, which made a nice change from politeness.
"Vitamins, in prodigious quantities, now I'm rich again."
You see, two or three local shops did let me have stuff on credit for a couple of weeks until that part of last month's mess was sorted out with the ... I'm close to using "bloodybank" as a one-word noun (like "fuckinfilosofy"), the "y" only needed to distinguish such ignoble institutions from healthier ones where staff admit frankly to trading in the life juices of our veins and arteries instead of sucking on it.
 Marianne Faithfull warns us with semi-poems of experience, a well-used voice to match, hindsight, and sometimes a bit of borrowing:
"Don't get up to open the door,
Just stay with me, here on the floor;
It's gonna get cold in the nineteen-seventies."
And so it did.
Now I feel lucky to be old enough to remember the 1960s she sings about sometimes on 'Vagabond Ways' (March 2002), and say "Yes, I remember everything too" (song to match: 'File it under Fun from the Past').
Magnificent Marianne (Swinging Chicks): today she just swings differently. I'm told, by a friend who says it's true, that during a recent television appearance, a somewhat tipsy Faithfull's first words were "Fuck the pope".
The fab 1964 pic is stolen from 'Musica & Memoria' (Italian, but also in translation), where there's hidden gold. Amazon UK's critic hears some stories of a "misspent youth" on a flawless album. I hear nothing "misspent". It wasn't always easy going, but is it ever?
The Sixties left many casualties in their wake, but modern Marianne is not among them. If you suffered and enjoyed the 60s yourself -- and even if you didn't -- this woman's memories live up to her name.
She's got nine years on me, but I was precocious, woke up when the television news became interesting in mai '68.
There may be real sadness and disillusionment on this CD, one of her finest, but Faithfull also throws in a dose of optimism as soon as you realise ideals people lived for then are neither dead nor naïve, they've become deeper and more mature to fight the backlash.
I'm glad to hear Marianne has survived with the grace, beauty and style I reserve usually only for the likes of my screen goddess, who entered my consciousness in those years, though she's a little less cautious with her language.
Maturity, I suppose, is having to acknowledge that though one of the people I love has just reminded me "life is an unknown adventure," mine no longer includes any chance of having hours of adventurous, sometimes deliciously slow sex on a floor strewn with Afghan rugs and colourful puffy cushions with ... sorry, I mean making love, of course, to ... Susannah York.
O dear, I've written her name again.
Yet I might still be wrong for in our day and age she could read this and agree it would be a wonderful idea. I very much doubt it, but you never know.
I'm finally getting over April.
I celebrated into the early hours ... guess where. Then I had to say "Stop! You've just spent most of your viable VoW budget for the merry month of May. Keep track and don't be unviable again." I'm glad my friends have stopped accusing me of selfish lunacy when I have sprees like that at the iTMS, now most understand that half the purpose of these hundreds of songs is to share the pleasure, staying just the safe side of record industry legislation I want to see overturned as much as many VoWs do.
If I don't always quite manage that, my motto is: "If you can't be good, be discreet."
While I'm in no rush for Tiger, I put QuickTime 7 (Apple) for Panther on the Mac as soon as it and its new "codec" were out, then coughed up the 30 euros asked for the Pro version immediately. You don't have to know what some of those words mean to read the small print, which says "QuickTime 7 for Windows Coming Soon" if you're still waiting. You may simply jump for joy if you've got good ears and eyes.
For me, the leaping started the instant I saw the chance to listen to the whole of Aimee Mann's spanking new album 'The Forgotten Arm' for free with splendid sound. As if this and other pleasures weren't enough -- check out the QT music guide and go "hooray" or green -- to help me to a state of post-bad, bad blues peeping out of shells, I found I could already buy Aimee's 'Arm' at the iTMS.
And promptly did.
Last night's package included not only more of the nostalgia I need for my memory circuits and the LP, but some very bright young things.
For the screenplay, I'd enjoy talking to Marianne Faithfull, since if she knows what the film's about and how I see another chance to make a better job of it all around us, I'm sure she would.
When you've been feeling like shit, which got worse once I'd poisoned myself with an Asian fish on Saturday night, and really don't want to lay it all on your friends, one of the bright young things deserves a special mention.
 I've been listening repeatedly to 'Storm' by Heather Nova. I grant you she's relatively well-known already, but is among several dozen VoWs to whom I think I'm addicted, craving for more. When she pours out her heart on 'Storm,' I could only marvel and say "Right on, kid! You have really got it, haven't you?"
I had no idea she was so "young", since immature is a world I'd leave well out of how she lets rip very hard-to-handle emotions, until looking beyond an accurate observation by another Amazon UK (CD link) reviewer:
"While Heather's voice is as sweet as an angel, she's clearly one that's been to hell and back. Not for her the syrup-strewn lusty love ballad."
Christopher Barrett (no relation) use the words I might because when it comes to sharing the worst as well as the best in life, Heather indeed has "been to hell and back", and has an intimate, imaginative way of telling it that comes as real friendship and comfort when you're there and want to listen to someone singing sense rather than wallowing in misery.
Better still, she knows and says the hurting's sometimes necessary if you want to live to the full.
It's less well-known than it should be that there's little worse for somebody who's genuinely depressed -- which I became after punches kept coming on all fronts every day for several weeks -- than sympathy without understanding or being told to "Snap out of it," since the latter is exactly what you usually intend to do and quite simply can't.
I may have been rude about the bank here and joked about other stuff too, but that was just one of a load of hard knocks, mostly of a kind I'll no longer log. It's not more confessionals you need here, it's results.
What I will say is that I lost my sense of humour, which is the most dangerous sign with me. I came perilously close to believing that in spite of a very long healing process often blogged as it happened, it was so bad I almost thought I could write off the "progress". But I didn't believe that since I knew I'd pull through it.
Life, for me, is no longer quite such an "unknown adventure" that when I have to I avoid entrusting my faith in myself to my friends and because they have come to believe in me, they keep that trust.
At such times, they show it. That's life.
Now I've found it in myself again, and also have more VoWs to thank than I can stretch time for tonight, I don't want to leave those who have yet to discover Nova's voice and her words with the impression she's only good for the bad days.
I can't say I've got a favourite CD of hers, since she sings beautifully, sometimes almost solo or subtle with her guitar, about a life as rich and varied as anybody else's.
I guess one reason I'm launched into this VoW project is that despite occasional remarks to the contrary since I yack so much, I'm a good listener. Thus it annoys me to read reviewers who accuse, say, Tori Amos, of sometimes being "melodramatic" and dismissing her. She can be, but so what? A lot of us have melodramatic moods occasionally. Tori Amos not only sings well, she's got great wordcraft. You don't write her off simply because you don't like it, you just say "She's not for me'.
People know that when I lose my sense of humour, I lose my sense of proportion. One of my closest friends can be a first-rate "drama queen", she's really good at it sometimes. I don't mind in the least, since she knows it.
So, like "soylentathowan" in 'Things that help me through...' I'd give two fingers to the people who can't take rare outbursts of melodrama and put Tori high on such a list of my own.
Some people's Amazon lists are so good you get to know them like friends whose recommendations for good listening you'd take more notice of than any reviewer. I've bookmarked several dozen.
Here are a couple of good ones, where the taste is so close to my own, I've put my money where their mouths are with VoWs hitherto unknown to me. Regret rate = 0:
- by 'sparksthatfly': Female vox: 25 to treasure (and their essence in 3 words)
- by 'ethertwist': grievously underexposed female artists.
That latter's hardly a title I'd resist, is it now?
And here's one for the Kid -- Daddy's already bought some of the albums and gets a kick out of them, but he's not always very "grown up":
by 'meelee18': Indy gurl and riot grrl heaven.
Darling, you think you've heard it all? When I switch on the "share" buttons, you're in for some fun, because frankly, there's nothing wrong with letting it hang out. Regarding that list, though; everyone defines "indispensable" differently. I have quite enough lust of my own to require such an outburst of other people's.
They're for fun, but in manageable doses.
12:18:40 AM link 
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