Ars bloggica.

We're home from walking the dog.

Me: I gotta blog. I gotta think of something to blog about.

The historian: . . . right--

Me: I don't think you understand how hard that is! Pulling a topic out of thin air.

TH: --I do get it. Because I never do it.  Whereas I, when I write, I just have to rely on . . . (rustling--he's in the kitchen, looking for an article in the paper. Or something.) . . .

Me: [what? facts? research?]

TH: (faintly)...things.

Me: [--and there it is.]

What I'm working on.

This week we heard Dianne Reeves at our jazz series. One of the songs she sang was one that Cy Coleman wrote, with lyrics by Peggy Lee, "I'm in Love Again." (You can here Reeves sing it here.)

It's the kind of song that is called a "standard," or if it's not, it's exactly like the kind of song they call a standard--a beautiful melody set against an unpredictable chord progression, but usually with a very conventional song structure--verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc. The beauty of the lyrics is in how they're delivered and not necessarily just in the words themselves. For instance, I give you this:

I’m in love again
And the feeling’s not new
Yes I know the signs
And I know what to do

It’s a highway
that I have traveled through before
So I know all the curves
and I’ve come back for more

I’m alive again
I can wake up and sing
Nothing bores me now
I enjoy everything

Here I go again
The way that I always do
Cause I’m in love again,
All over again, with you

Not so amazing, right? But that third stanza: "Nothing bores me now/ I enjoy everything"--which sounds utterly prosaic--when Dianne Reeves sang it, she broke in between "enjoy" and "everything," which made everything sound like a revelation.

Well, all that? and these facts--that Peggy Lee came from North Dakota, and her name was Norma Dolores Egstrom; her home was a violent one, and she started her career as a singer when she was just a teenager; that she wrote lots of music and in some ways shaped the delivery of more than a generation of female singers--and something something about how amazing Dianne Reeves is--all of that will be a poem, maybe. Right now, it's called "Everything." Or maybe "--everything." Don't hold your breath, though. It might take awhile.

New career plan #119: pattern-maker.

In a profile of designer Rick Owens in the issue of The New Yorker that came to my mailbox today (also arriving: tickets to the Ben Folds concert on April 24!, the Nordstrom catalog, other crap), I read this:

"Owens left Otis-Parsons [art school] after two years, to study pattern-cutting at a trade college. He began creating costumes and sets for local artists and performers, members of what he has called 'the wicked Hollywood hustler-bar world.' For four years, he worked in knockoff houses in Los Angeles, copying in cheap fabrics the work of well-known fashion designers. The experience proved invaluable. Many designers never master the difficult art of pattern-cutting, and the originality and sophistication of Owens's clothes--his ability to plant seams in unexpected places and to hang fabrics on the bias so that the cross grain clings to or drapes dramatically from the body--derive from his years in the knockoff mills. 'Picasso did classic figure drawing in the beginning, and then, after that, he's abstracted,' Owens told me. 'You can't convincingly get abstract until you really know the fundamentals. It's the same thing with pattern-making. You can't start distorting things unless you kind of know what you're doing.' As Cathy Horyn wrote last week in the Times, in an admiring review of Owens's Fall 2008 collection, 'A designer who controls his pattern making can say the most with his clothes. It's just like a writer with language.'"

"Just like a writer with language." Ta-da! Where's a trade college that teaches pattern-cutting?