Last Saturday, with my wife Suzanne and son Alex, I heard these folks at Fitzgerald’s, a wonderful club in Berwyn (just outside Chicago) that I’ve been going to since long before Alex, now twenty-five, was born. Some people, if given the chance to be anywhere in the world on a Saturday night, might choose Paris. Others might take Rome. London would likely get some votes, New York too. For me, last Saturday anyway, there was nowhere I would rather have been than Berwyn.
A lot of stuff like this, at least on the surface, I can’t stand. This I love. Why? Well, for starters, there’s the way the voices interweave. Then there’s the way the words sound. Take the hook, for instance: “I want to be surrounded by the sound.” And, too, there’s the presentation, disarmingly modest. Nothing’s oversold.
Her life, she said, was an out-of-tune piano played with passion.
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This evening I sat listening to five presidential candidates offering their imaginary solutions for a country that doesn’t exist.
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“Imaginary maladies are much worse than the real ones, because they’re incurable,” an old friend who walks with difficulty was telling me.
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Much of what our eyes see and our ears hear is lost in translation.
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“An alarm clock with no hands, ticking on the town dump,” is how he described himself.
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They gave the nice old gentleman I met at the bake sale several medals for the misery he caused in some country that no one could find any longer on the map.
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I bet all our elected representatives in Washington spend a great deal of time in front of mirrors admiring themselves. They lift their noses and chins, stare straight ahead without moving an eyebrow or a muscle, then nod their heads gravely and smile to themselves as they go out to meet the people.
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He sat on a bench in Washington Square Park whispering something extremely confidential to his dog, who sat before him with ears perked, wagging his tail cautiously from time to time.
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The crosses all men and women must carry through life are even more visible on this dark and rainy November evening.
Bryan Ferry’s new album, TheJazz Age, which features songs from Roxy Music, as well as his solo career, refashioned as 1920s-style jazz instrumentals, is one of the stranger concept albums I’ve encountered in a long time—which I mean as a compliment.
Bryan Ferry, “Don’t Stop the Dance,” TheJazz Age U.K. release, 11/26/12; U.S. release, 2/12/13
music clip of the day 