Mixtape – Happiness and the Blues
Here is today’s mixtape in the effort to live the words of Goethe, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
1. A Song
Jon Batiste is a delight and a genius. Really, needs no introduction. Here is his version of Für Elise.
I’m really looking forward to his solo album Beethoven’s Blues. From an article on AP News:
“There is a division, he said, in a popular understanding of music where “pristine and preserved and European” genres are viewed as more valuable than “something that’s Black and sweaty and improvisational.” This album, like most of his work, disrupts the assumption.
Contrary to what many might think, Batiste said that Beethoven’s rhythms are African. “On a basic technical level, he’s doing the thing that African music ingenuity brought to the world, which is he’s playing in both a two meter and a three meter at once, almost all the time. He’s playing in two different time signatures at once, almost exclusively,” he said.”
2. A Poem
Imagine Sisyphus Happy
Nicole Sealey
Give me tonight to be inconsolable.
so the death drive does not declare
itself, so the moonlight does not convince
sunrise. I was born before sunrise—
when morning masquerades as night,
the temperature of blood, quivering
like a mouth in mourning. How do we
author our gentle birth, the height
we were—were we gods rolling stars across
a sundog sky, the same as scarabs?
We fit somewhere between god
and mineral, angel and animal,
believing a thing as sacred as the sun rises
and falls like an ordinary beast.
Deer sniff lifeless fawns before leaving,
elephants encircle the skulls and tusks
of their dead—none wanting to leave
the bones behind, none knowing
their leave will lessen the loss. But birds
pluck their own feathers, dogs
lick themselves to wound. Allow me this
luxury. Give me tonight to cut
and salt the open. Give me a shovel
to uproot the mandrake and listen
for its scream. Give me a hard face that toils
so closely with stone, it is itself
stone. I promise to enter the flesh again.
I promise to circle to ascend.
I promise to be happy tomorrow.
This poem appears in Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey.
You can hear the poem read by Sealey here.
3. A Picture
In my first book of poems lo these many years ago, I wrote a poem about Paula Modersohn-Becker. So whenever something new pops up about her, I’m always curious. And there is an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, titled, “I Am Me” which just opened. (October 12, 2024 — January 12 2025. From the Art Institute’s site:
“Together these works, and the exhibition’s title, which comes from one of Modersohn-Becker’s letters, show an artist deeply invested in both artistic and personal expression and self-determination. “I Am Me,” she wrote. “And hope to become that more and more.””
PMB was the first woman to have a museum dedicated solely to her work.
What struck me all those years ago, reading her letters, was her deep desire to “become someone.” And she did but only much later was her work properly recognized, and her radicalness, and her ambition. She was really the first western woman to paint a nude self-portrait. She died at the age of 31 in 1907.
On a last trip to Paris in 1906, during a productive time of painting, she wrote to her sister Milly: “"I am becoming somebody – I'm living the most intensively happy period of my life."
The experiment of gravitating toward a song, a poem, and a picture is an interesting one to me. I feel like every time they speak to each other in interesting ways, though I hadn’t really planned anything. Probably you could put any three together and they’d say something to each other. I love this whole cross-pollination between the arts, and wish for more of it in real life. But because that can be difficult to arrange, I’m glad to do it here, virtually.
For me, these three choices speak to allowing all the feelings, happiness, the inconsolable, the blues. How do we author our gentle birth, is the question in the Sealey poem, and PMB lands in happiness, though it’s swiftly taken from her just as she moves into a self she has yearned for. JB…one holds one’s breath at the virtuosic talent wondering what new heights he’ll reach.
