 "Et la tendresse? Bordel!"
Perhaps few people will catch this opening allusion to an old French film that wove some tragi-comic love stories together in quite a captivating way -- but I'm looking to the future, both on the Log and in my life.
My "to-do list" for the week became so long that apart from the friends on it, it's beyond me to catch up on everything planned before returning to work. But I am keen to reinstate Oren Bloedow and his woman, along with her very own French touch.
The photo of the couple taken by Neuvo Hemp in 2000 in New York comes from the Blackacres site created for fans of much of what they have done since. The pieces I wrote particularly on Jennifer Charles preceded the losses of a month-long Log crash and weren't included in the restoration of most missing entries because I wanted to do some of them better. However this was swiftly followed by my own falling apart and then the huge crash by my Mac, which also needed refomatting. All that has only just come together again.
Even if there's no time now to reinstate the mysterious workings of deep love affairs so honestly -- or amusingly -- conveyed in music the way the wonderful Jen has so far this millennium, I would like to know more about the next pair, who are French, before the week's out.
Chucking both these pictures on line from inside a folder called "rhino" -- for those technically mad enough to check out things like my "page source" -- shouldn't send anyone to the Worldwide Fund for Nature. I know some were alarmed when I became a highly endangered species myself! With Oren and Jennifer there's no risk of that, though theirs still remains something of a cult following only and they deserve more.
It's hard to write up Elysian Fields well since in three of their albums, from 'Queen of the Meadow' in 2000 to the delectable 'Bum Raps and Love Taps' released just a few months ago, the couple have increasingly turned a deeply intimate relationship into a more public musical experience.
They have shared their affair with an intelligence and a style that's pretty unique, so the listener or audience is incited far less to any "voyeurism" than to new insight into the Big L as a force for good, the way this can happen with other people's love stories when they draw out what we have in ourselves. After all, why are romantic tales, real or imagined, so popular in the first place?
 For now, however, that particular "rhino" file despatched to my Mac disk somewhere across the Atlantic is named for Rinôçérôse, who put so many accents in the one word I'm relieved to have a French keyboard while they're very close to the top of the iTunes bestsellers here. The Rinôçérôse group's own "official" web site (they have several about them, like the New York pair) comes in three languages. Tuesday night found me right in the mood for Patrice 'Patou' Carrie's and Jean-Philippe Freu's sort of "tone poems" for our time, especially with some good bonuses on the newly available iTMS France version.
For columns that may wrap up a week before I go back to work, I've begun reflecting -- with the help of such musicians -- on some similarities between these early years of our new century and a similar time frame in the last, which preceded one of the most terrible of global conflicts. I shan't tell you it's the same world, but people's basic needs haven't changed ... and nor have a few instincts on how to meet them.
"Et la tendresse? Bordel!" It's been many years since I was a kid while The Beatles reminded everybody that 'All you need is love'. After my recent experiences and talks I've had with people about my life and their own, I've rarely been so acutely aware how easy it is for us to lose sight of the simplest of truths and how vital it is in tough times for young people to be encouraged to dream and to be tough in holding on to their own ideals.
I shan't be logging nearly as often as sometimes I did.
There's a whole lot of world out there! Plenty in it still feels new to me while I reset my compass, so I've chucked a small handful of revisited log pieces into a "projects" dossier, to get on meanwhile with reading a copy of big school project the Kid's done with a couple of classmates.
To take on a survey 'L'Image de la Femme de l'Antiquité à nos jours' ('The Image of Women from Antiquity to Our Times') was an ambitious task at their age and the
outcome is a good and timely piece of work. Adults often tend to be dismissive about how perceptive the late teenage mind can be.
What I've kept of stuff I myself wrote in such years surprises me sometimes, when I recognise in it the insight I still stand by many decades later. And any world where your children remind you what your own ideals always have been and where they first came from can't be so bad!
But what then of Rinôçérôse and the return to "tone poems" -- and more -- in the music of our day? That's for the second part of this chapter...
12:47:54 AM link 
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