Tales from the Microbial Laboratory

~rip~

When I had my blues radio show, back at Virginia Tech, boy did I love playing this song.

Bo Diddley, you will be missed.

~moanin'~

So I haven't spoken in awhile, in a long while, about my pending Airstream lifestyle. 

It's still out there, on the horizon (and literally in the back corner) - and tomorrow morning I meet with my architherapist and I'm hopeful. 

When my Mother's cancer started spreading...over a month ago now...I decided that the new house was something that would happen - when it happens.  It's given me time to accomplish a few things that will ultimately make Airstream Life more pleasurable.

(I know, I know - you're thinking - what could make such a luxurious life...more luxurious?)

Now, living in a 27.5 foot aluminum trailer is sounding nicer and nicer as time goes by - it sounds, well, - simple - and today in lab meeting I caught myself saying that I'll probably be spending alot of time in a chair, under the Airstream's awning, drinking any beer that is on sale and sold in cases.  I can see it.

So I've been, over the months, simplifying. I'm getting by with less and less.

It's not such a bad thing, really - it isn't. 

But the most exciting thing that I have accomplished of late is that I have copied all of my CDs into my iTunes library - over 25 GB's worth.  I love it.  I've never been a huge fan of iTunes, but I am now a huge fan of easy - and so now all of my CDs are packed away - yet I still have access to everything - and I also now have an adapter for my car so I can play my iPod through my car speakers. 

I feel so musically organized.

And having all of this music - all of my music - with me in the Airstream is extremely comforting.  I would hate to be musically-deprived.

(Now, if I could only squeeze my clothes washer and dryer in there somehow...).

But music!  It's a must.

Charles Mingus.  Moanin'.  Even in the Airstream.

   

~the vegetable orchestra~

The world is indeed a strange and interesting place.  (I'll never look at my vegetable garden again in quite the same way.)

The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra.  (And to think that I went to Vienna and only went to the opera).  From their website:

The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.

~sometimes, on a Saturday morning~

Sometimes, on a Saturday morning, you just need to get out of bed and stick in a CD that one of your graduate students handed to you (while saying 'hey, this will cheer you up!") and just dance in your kitchen.

Kitchen dancing is perhaps the most therapeutic thing there is, except for, quite possibly, planting hydrangeas (which comes next).

Imitosis - Andrew Bird

He’s keeping busier
He’s bitten stones
His imaginations and his palindromes
It was anything but hear the voice
Anything but hear the voice
It was anything but hear the voice
That says that we’re all basically alone

Poor Professor Pension had only good intentions
When he put his Bunsen burners all away and turned
Into a playground a petri dish of single cells that would swing
Their fists at anything that looks like easy prey
Nature show that rages every day it was bound, a part his intuition
Say
We were all basically alone

And despite what all your studies had shown
What was mistaken for closeness was just a case for mitosis
Weighed deception or mercy
Where others train for the show
Tell me doctor can you pull my file
‘Cause he just wants to know the reason why

Why do they congregate in groups of four
Scatter like a billion spores
And let the wind just carry them away?
How can gametes be so mean
Our famous doctor tried to glean
As he went home at the end of the day
In this Nature show that rages every day it was bound apart of his intuition
Say

Despite what all your studies had shown
What was mistaken for closeness was just a taste of mitosis
She fatal doses, malcontent to osmosis
Weighed deception or mercy
Where others will pay for the show
Well doctor can you pull my file
The reason why.

James and Luciano

Sometimes you just have to sit back, listen and marvel at how strange and interesting a place this world truly is...James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, Modena, Italy, 28 May 2002.

~gardens and gifts of music~

The night-blooming cereus that is happily flowering this week in my South Carolina garden is the same plant that I had years ago, that sat on a brick wall at the front of my house in Blacksburg where I lived when I went to graduate school.  The garden was simple, a few pots of geraniums (I remember one with beautifully variegated leaves) and a few cactuses, including the night-blooming cereus.  My boyfriend during that time tended this little garden with me - and he is someone that I have maintained a friendship with throughout the years.  I think, hopefully, that most of the people that enter into our lives leave a trail of gifts behind them (even if untentional) - perhaps ones that are not noticeable at first - but that become apparent throughout the years.  This person definitely left me with the gift of music - the gift to appreciate music, all types, all tempos - as he dragged me, reluctantly at first, into the student radio station at the university (WUVT) for the first time.  Two years and alot of music later, I signed off from my last blues show 'No Escape from the Blues', turned in my thesis and left Blacksburg.  During that time I grew to love John Coltrane and Duke Ellington and Ruth Brown and The Dead Kennedys and Sam & Dave and Muddy Waters - I even grew to love Doc Watson and country music with lyrics that made me laugh but that I grew to love.  What a gift that was, that trail of music.

Tonight, after returning home (yes, I did remember to attend my own class this afternoon) and letting the dogs run around for awhile, I came inside and got a call from this friend (you can find him over at 3Dsound).  We had talked months ago now about him posting podcasts on my blog - it was a tad selfish of me to make such a request:  first, it would keep me from even boring myself with some of these posts, and second, I missed the exposure to a wide variety of wonderful music that he always managed to find.  We never did podcast posts (the whole illegal thing) - but on an evening where I find myself feeling world weary he suggested that he start contributing music posts to my site - a suggestion that I jumped on and am thrilled about.  The music will be eclectic, basic, quiet, fast, traditional, obscure, familiar - in other words, who knows what it will be.

I'm looking forward to his posts.

Bonnie R.

There sure is alot of power in music.

Tonight I went to see Bonnie Raitt, with special guest Jon Cleary, at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center.  All I can say is: 

It made me miss New Orleans, it made me miss living on the Gulf Coast, when on the way to New Orleans for a night you could stop off at the Florabama for a beer (and if you're lucky, or unlucky, catch a mullet being tossed on the beach), where I learned about hurricanes after flying in on the last flight into Pensacola (after taking my 8-yr old niece camping on the Blue Ridge parkway where I learned that she suffered from motion sickness after her sweet little self barfed all over the back of my former college roommates car) before they closed the airport for Andrew and I found the surge had my boat above it's pilings and where I found a strange gentlemen trying to save my boat, which together we did (even though I still learned how to repair fiberglass after the storm which is never a bad skill to have) and boy how do I miss that sugar sand when I sink into the pluff mud off the South Carolina coast, and yes, it made me miss Michigan and watching storms come for miles and it made me remember that night, after a long, long day in the lab when I got home to the farmhouse to find two of my three dogs missing from the dog pen (that was more of a sheep pasture complete with a barn) and a note from my ex saying that after three months of being apart he had rethought the whole dog thing and wanted two of them (if he had taken the pointer he knew it would have been a death sentence, and one that I could have defended in court) and to this day I won't leave my dogs outside when I'm gone and although he brought one of the two back (Handsome Lloyd - also known as Lloyd of Laingsburg), it has forever made me wonder how couples with children walk out of a relationship because I can't imagine how painful it must be because the dog-thing nearly destroyed me, and then I thought about change and so very much of life is about change and that my mother's lung cancer diagnosis has made my family confront change over the past month in a way that I could never even have imagined and as I told a friend today ('yes, we've had the conversation about how she wants her funeral') I thought about how one might as well meet change head-on because it's gonna happen no matter what, and Elvis is a perfect example of that.

The power of music. 

And the power of sugarsnap peas, blooming away without a care in the world.  And if that isn't enough, I just read that there's potentially another habitable planet out there.  What about that.

 

'Don't push me...'cause I'm close to the edge'

Twenty-five years ago?  Wow.  Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five - original 1982 vinyl in a plastic sleeve - saved from my blues radio days when I was in graduate school at Virginia Tech.  The Message - great song.  First hip-hop song, first DJ, first MCs inducted into the R & R Hall of Fame - tomorrow will be a big day for them.  And for Patti Smith (love her) and R.E.M. (who, in the early '80's, I begrudgingly helped set up at a bar called 'Daddy's Money' in Blacksburg, Va - a little after their single 'Radio Free Europe' came out and just before 'Murmur' was released in 1983 - I was in the middle of a big experiment in the lab, but the student radio station was sponsoring them - and it was my turn to help the band set up - there was a horrible showing, and we just sat around drinking beers, waiting for people to show up - imagine that now...).  I've got alot of good music on vinyl - and someone mentioned recently that you can get something that takes vinyl and transforms them to MP-3 format directly - and I'm thinking boy, now how fun would that be?  Especially since I'm now an official nano-iPod freak.

Guy, Joe, John, Lyle, and Marcia

Another camellia - this time it's Camellia japonica 'Sea Foam'.  An absolutely beautiful formal double - and the first 'formal' form that made it into my garden.  I purchased it the day after a friend, Marcia, passed away on her 53rd birthday - a year and a week after she had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma.  I've mentioned before my tendency to splurge on plants at times of stress - and so we could add trauma to the list too, and losing a friend is pretty traumatic.  But now, for the past three years - when I see this camellia blooming, I smile and think of Marcia - and it oddly helps, makes me feel like a part of her is right here in my garden - looking perfect (like she always did).

It's funny how certain things - a camellia, a song - or a painting - takes us to another place.  It's a wonderful magic trick really, especially since it's often so unintentional.  Last night I was fortunate to be able (at the very last minute) to get tickets to hear a wonderful group of songwriters - Lyle Lovett (who I'd seen before) and three other guys that I've always enjoyed but never seen perform live - John Hiatt, Joe Ely - and the amazing Guy Clark.  What a nice show.  All four performers were sitting on a chair - all in a row - and took turns with a song, and then they'd join in from time-to-time.   I've always loved John Hiatt - since I started listening to him during my last few years in graduate school.  When I left Michigan for a postdoctoral position in Florida - I won't ever forget my friend and I pulling the U-Haul out of the drive of the farm and farmhouse that I'd lived in for the past five years - 100 acres of central Michigan heaven and a 10-room farmhouse with 30 single-pane windows.  I couldn't imagine leaving the place.  But it was 5 am, we had a long drive ahead of us - and the first thing we did was play Hiatt's 'Drive South' as loud as we could as we drove down Colby Lake Road for the very last time.

I didn't say we wouldn't hurt anymore
That's how you learn, you just get burned
But we don't have to feel like dirt anymore
Though love's not earned, Baby it's our turn
We were always looking for true north
With our heads in the clouds, just a little off course
I left the motor running, now if you're feeling down and out 

CHORUS:
Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love
Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love 

I'm not talkin' 'bout retreatin' little girl
Gonna take our stand, in this Chevy van
Windows open on the rest of the world
Holdin' hands, all the way to Dixieland
We've been tryin' to turn our lives around
Since we were little kids, it's been wearin' us down
Don't turn away now Darlin' lets fire it up and wind it out 

CHORUS 

BRIDGE:
I heard your mama callin', I think she was just stallin' 

Don't know who she was talkin' to, baby me and you
We could go down with a smile on, don't bother to pack your nylons
Just keep them pretty legs showin', it gets hot down where we're goin'
We were always looking for true north
With our heads in the clouds, just a little off course
I left the motor running, now if you're feeling down and out
Come on baby drive, come on baby drive south, come on baby drive south 

CHORUS 

So, sitting in the North Charleston Performing Arts Center (in the next-to-last row of the whole place) - I finally got to see Hiatt perform that song - and I couldn't help but remembering every last detail of that early morning in July in Michigan when I was driving south myself.  And when the performance ended last night - on a song (Step Inside this House) performed by Lyle Lovett that was supposedly the first song that Guy Clark ever wrote - you just couldn't help but think that there was an awful lot of talent up on that stage.  It all made me think about the power of words and the power of images - both in our past, present and future - and this morning when I noticed that my formal white camellia was once again in bloom, I couldn't help but think about a day just over three years ago now.

Download Marcia.doc

Ruth Brown, 1928-2006

I've always loved Ruth Brown.  I didn't get to know her  music until I was in graduate school, working on my MS degree - and a boyfriend talked me into doing a radio show on our college station.  It was a non-commercial station - where anything and everything was played - and I landed a blues slot.  We had albums then, and were just transitioning to CDs - and there were stacks and stacks of old albums that I'd sort through on off-hours.  Then one day I came upon a R&B compilation album, I don't even remember which one it was, but one track was a rendition of Ruth Brown singing "Snap Your Fingers" (I believe the song was originally recorded by Joe Henderson).  I think now (if you can find it), you can hear that song on a 1972 album titled "The Real Ruth Brown."  I don't have the '72 album, but I do have her on some tapes of my old blues show.  I think I played that song as often as I could - I don't know what it was about it, but it was definitely something about the way she sang it.

Ruth Brown died yesterday, at the age of 78, in Las Vegas.