bellascribe

This was a line I found myself writing in something today and knew at once — and stopped — that it was one of those cases of projecting onto your characters. You know, like She stared blankly, unable to come up with a single thing to say; or He went into the kitchen and began preparing lunch; etc.

Yeah, I know it’s hot everywhere, it’s hot in Charleston, in Charlottesville, but the difference is that I wasn’t expecting it to be like it is here. I wasn’t expecting to be here.

So that’s one reason for the lack of entries here, wishing to avoid grousing about being here. Which leads to a whole other thing, of inhibition and self-consciousness, which points in the direction of this blogging activity becoming just as stultifying as any other obligatory activity. Who wants that? (Not I.)

Another reason is that I have been writing, working quite a bit, trying to find a rhythm here. I don’t mean the freelance work, words for money; I mean the real work. Which is on top of the making money stuff. And that hasn’t left a whole lot of words for here.

Talking about the fiction, and some poems, beginnings is not something I do, or can do, while I’m in the thick of it. If you write, you already know how that is a death knoll to the energy.

What else can I share then… I learned Joni Mitchell played and temporarily stayed in Charleston, this after one of those synchronicities of three: (1) out in Big Sur, seeing again some of those well-known photos of Joni, and Graham Nash, at Esalen, and I think maybe the Monterey Pop Festival (here’s one of them of Robert Altman’s); (2) seeing a vinyl copy of (the excellent) Hejira for sale at Mole’s Record Exchange; (3) watching, DVD, Copying Beethoven — it was okay, bordering on not — which made me think of Joni Mitchell’s song for Beethoven “Judgment of the Moon and Stars.” (Not unsurprisingly, there’s a YouTube video for the song here.) After these events, I re-watched the PBS American Masters DVD, Woman of Heart and Soul, and was struck anew by the fact of her going on her own, solely, as a young woman around the country playing at these unknown places, which she’d also booked herself. I liked how she talked about a “tempering by fire.” How she was an only child but had “chosen many brothers along the way.” How she called music she wrote later out in Laurel Canyon “kitchen songs.” Her reply to young aspirants who ask for advice, “Do you want to be a star or an artist?”

I since found the CBC archives online, Joni Mitchell: All Sides Now, where you can find the segment — in a very young voice — on her time in Charleston, Cockroaches and Drunken Sailors.

Also, she’ll have a new album out via with the Starbucks’ “Hear Music” label; and there’s a Herbie Hancock tribute project. But you can find all that at her website.

As she tells interviewer Malka in this radio clip, Mitchell’s trials and tribulations sometimes involved playing fairly seedy gigs. She remembers playing at one club where they offered her free accommodation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so pleasant. “All night long, there were drunken sailors banging at my door for Gladys,” she recalls with a faint chuckle, “and the floors had been sprayed with kerosene for cockroaches.”