Not all that long ago I posted a sound track or a pheromone or some damn thing about a very talented musician, Sara Bareilles. She has become a favorite of mine with songs like "Gravity." I would be wild about her music even if I had not since discovered that I have 2 degrees of separation with her through my daughter Adrienne, lately of LA.
But this weekend I found something special. We've all seen scenes like this before. Permutations of them are in Jimmy Cliff's The Harder they Fall, in every movie ever made about a country legend, from Coal Miner's Daughter to Walk the Line and in great books like Peter Guralnick's Elvis bio.
But here it is in real life, the real life of someone who has just now been pouring her passion into her art day after day, week after week, year after year, and here is the moment where she makes the sweet transit from hope to heaven.
Can anyone with a creative bone in his body not be inspired?
It is just an unbelievably cool moment.
Meanwhile, back here on Sherman Street in Tip O'Neil's old neighborhood....
Okay, tough segue here, but can I crow for just a minute? Can I?
Yes. Thank you.
I mentioned a day or two ago that I've been getting some writing done and feeling good about it.
There's this little article that I wrote 3 weeks ago as little more than a market test for a prospective book. I posted it and priced it at $2.99. It does not have a catchy title or any steamy scenes. It is called "20 Effective Steps to Publishing a Kindle Edition of Your Book or Document: How to Connect Your Amazon Kindle Book with Readers." See what I mean?
Well, this morning it is #278 on the Amazon bestseller list for Kindle books of all subjects, categories, and lengths. That is not top 10 or anything like that, and it may not last more than a few hours, but for this fleeting moment means it is surrounded on the Amazon list by much weightier books like Blaze by Stephen King, Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, The Overlook by Michael Connelly, The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford and A Free Life by Ha Jin. (I didn't include any links to those boys, because I don't want those ornery cusses trying to leapfrog me!)
I have a lot of work left to do, since the article is just one chapter of Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex: Using the Amazon Kindle's Publishing Platform to Unleash a 21st Century Movement of Writers, Readers and Publishers. (Have you noticed that I don't whisper my titles?)
So I will keep at it. But one of these days maybe I will have to pull over to the shoulder of the highway so the band and I can listen the first time our single gets played on the radio!
One day when I was 16 my Bible teacher at Mount Hermon handed me a book called The Beautiful Losers by some guy named Leonard Cohen. There was a 10 pm "lights out" curfew for juniors so I stayed up all night in the bathroom reading it. I had never done that before, but I didn't want to leave the strange, spiritual and carnal world Cohen had created in some far-off place, was it Toronto or Montreal?
Like I say, I had never heard of Cohen. Then the very next summer I took my girlfriend to see Judy Collins at the Melody Tent in Hyannis and who was playing the piano? Yep, Leonard Cohen. Things that make the world seem smaller. It was her concert, but as the concert went on one could sense that the guy playing the piano meant a lot to her. Finally she asked him to sing a couple of songs with her, and this was one of them. His voice was not strictly melodious, but hey, after Dylan, anything goes. He is a talented guy, and when I say there is also something a tad lucky about him I do not mean to denigrate his enormous talent in any way. Maybe lucky like Sam Shepard is lucky, or even Lyle Lovett.
This video is nice. When I look more closely, it almost seems to be my life.
0 comments:
Post a Comment