Filmed our second flamenco video last night. I feel as if I made a different mistake on each take but that’s dancing, I guess. I’ll post the video once the best take (i.e. the one each of us made the minimum of mistakes in) is chosen and edited. In the meantime, here is the obligatory […]

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This was the book for which I had the most difficulty choosing a passage to read.  I had sections that I’d performed successfully before, but they tended to be long, require explanations, and lack any shorter sections that had internal arcs.  This latter is very important in readings, at least for me, because I want […]

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Here’s the second installment in my collaboration with my husband on “words and music”. This passage for COLD HILLSIDE is the most description-heavy of the excerpts I chose for this project.  It’s the first introduction to the fey and I wanted to try to capture their elusive, unreal qualities before the later part of the […]

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We see a fair bit of live music, mostly because we have subscriptions to three different series (one classical on Sunday afternoons, one modern music series, and one mix of everything from Bach interpretations to a tribute to Frank Zappa). In 2019, I counted 22 shows on the calendar. Needless to say, 2020 has not […]

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This is definitely my year for reading books by musicians.       My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love by Dessa (one of my favourite musicians ever) is about love, about trying to cure love with science, about family, about writing, and about the life of being a […]

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After reading Tracey Thorn’s memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, I went in search of some of her new music and found her 2018 release, Record.  One listen to the song “Sister” and I was hooked. The rest of the album is just as good and includes songs about babies (Cos I didnt want my babies/until I […]

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By sheer coincidence, I’ve read three books by musicians in the last month. I can recommend all of them. First up, Clothes, Music, Boys by Viv Albertine of the seminal punk band The Slits. This is a wry, raw, funny, and honest look at clothes (she provides a list of what she wore), music (wanting […]

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One of the not-to-be-missed events of the year is the annual ChiSeries Christmas bash.  This year, the theme was “Putting the X in Xmas” and included some incredible contributions, including: Madeline Ashby doing a biblical rendition of “Go the Fuck to Sleep” David Demchuk, very dapper,  traumatizing us for for life with the story of […]

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My “to do” list says “Blog post this week”.  It says that every two weeks (or three, if I push it off).  But I’ve got nothing. So here’s a song, by the wonderful Barry Andrews of Shriekback, from his solo piano album Haunted Box of Switches, Vol 1 & 2.   Sue me.

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I first heard Dessa (aka Dessa Darling, aka Margaret Wander) listening to one of Welcome to Nightvale’s live podcasts. She and Paper Tiger performed “Call off Your Ghost” and I thought, well, that’s pretty cool, I should find out more. So I did, and discovered that Dessa is a singer, composer, songwriter, rapper, and spoken word artist […]

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