#hark!

[etsimpensiusuror]

i love the trend of web weaving on tumblr because it’s a gateway to translation. you all are doing comp lit and translation and it’s beautiful. please keep doing it. make connections across time. remind us that every feeling has been felt before and we’re just feeling it in translation. over and over again.

[nthattemptatit]

So I guess I now know why Jonathan’s last name is Harker!

[brockilly]

peter griffin is so joyous and yet so misunderstood... that goofy, lopsided smirk of his has the power to heal wounds you didn’t even know you had. he fills our hearts with hope and laughter-- not once having asked it in return. that is joyousness. that is love.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Andrew Bird & Mary Lattimore Live Show Review: 12/5, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Andrew Bird & Alan Hampton

BY JORDAN MAINZER

A few songs into this year's first Gezelligheid show--Andrew Bird's annual series of winter concerts at the Fourth Presbyterian Church--Bird mentioned that when he put on an Ella Fitzgerald recording when spending time with his family, his niece asked, "Why are you playing Christmas music?" To her, Bird posited, all old music sounded like Christmas music. It's a fairly easy misconception to understand. After all, the feelings you most associate with Christmas, holiday, or wintertime music in general--warmth, joy, familiarity--are often inherent qualities of songs that clearly are from a distant past. A great classic song can make you feel nostalgia for a time you didn't even experience. It's that phenomenon that Bird took advantage of most on Thursday night.

Bird & Hampton

Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Alan Hampton, Bird played both original and cover favorites from his recorded catalog. Highlights of the former included Armchair Apocrypha's plucky "Plasticities", the minimal "Pulaski at Night", and the swaying "Alabaster" from holiday album Hark! He culled multiple times from his deep well of tunes by Vince Guaraldi and beloved Americana duo The Handsome Family. Midway through the main set, Bird took advantage of returning home and invited Evanston-based longtime collaborator Nora O'Connor on stage. Though O'Connor has long been a backing vocalist for the likes of Bird, The New Pornographers, and The Decemberists, she and Bird actually played a deep cut she recorded with him, a version of Bob Dylan's "Oh Sister" from Bird's 2007 Soldier On EP. The three musicians on stage broke the song down, a capella style, before Bird built it back up with his violin.

Bird

But it was Bird's most recent releases of covers that ended up perfectly encapsulating the allure of the past. In May, he shared Sunday Morning Put-On (Loma Vista) with the trio of Hampton and drummer Ted Poor, a collection of jazz standards (plus one original) interpreted through Bird's unmistakable aesthetic. Bird knows that stringed instruments best emulate human voice, but on Sunday Morning Put-On, he explores the extent to which applying bow pressure on his violin strings can recall the rich sounds that result from blowing air into the mouthpiece of a horn instrument. Early in his set on Thursday, Bird and Hampton performed the Trio's rendition of Johnny Green and Edward Heyman's "I Cover the Waterfront", a song that's been recorded by the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday. Starting with violin, Bird's fluttering followed the original's vocal line; by the time he started singing, his bowing undulated like a tenor saxophone. The performance was eerie, uncanny, and time-bending.

Bird & Hampton

In October, Bird and singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham released Cunningham Bird (Loma Vista), a track-by-track recreation of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks' pre-Fleetwood Mac record Buckingham Nicks. For many in the crowd, even among the pop music aficionados, it was their first time hearing the songs at all: Remarkably, Buckingham Nicks is long out-of-print and not on any streaming services, save for some unofficial uploads to YouTube. Bird and O'Connor duetted a strummed, stripped-down, faster-paced version of "Races are Run". On both Cunningham Bird and on Thursday, for "Crystal", Bird inverted the gender of the lead singer, Cunningham and O'Connor, respectively, singing Buckingham's words, Bird harmonizing Nicks' parts. And there's a fun connection between Sunday Morning Put-On and Cunningham Bird, which is John Lewis' "Django", a song that not only did Bird and his Trio cover on the former but that Buckingham and Nicks covered for their album--meaning Bird also reinterpreted Buckingham and Nicks reinterpreting jazz. The version that led into "Races are Run" Bird played on Thursday was firmly the Cunningham Bird version--after all, Poor's drums are key on Sunday Morning Put-On--but the song's inclusion as a standard that can be adapted in many different ways underscored the very concept of Gezelligheid: conviviality, coziness, fun.

Bird & Hampton

Mary Lattimore

Opening for Bird was harpist Mary Lattimore, a musician who has demonstrated over the past several years that combining classical training with clear experimentation and a sense of humor can, too, result in something fun and beautiful. Lattimore, gifted her harp by Chicago-based factory Lyon & Healy, performed tracks from her dense back catalog, many of which had a story associated with them. She wrote Hundreds of Days' "On the Day You Saw the Dead Whale" after, yes, seeing a dead whale in a coastal California town where she was at a residency. "Wawa By The Ocean", included on her 2017 Collected Pieces compilation, was inspired by her holy routine of buying a hoagie from the Philadelphia-born convenience store/gas station chain and eating it on the Jersey Shore. (Upon finding out about the song, Wawa headquarters sent Lattimore a care package.) "Til a Mermaid Drags You Under" aims to reflect the duality of dark and light in the surf town where it was recorded with Slowdive guitarist Neal Halstead, for 2020's Silver Ladders. On Thursday, hearing the songs' contexts gave crowd members a starting point, either as a lens through which to take in the song or as a challenge to see if they could empty their heads and get lost in the pure sounds emanating from the stage. Lattimore, meanwhile, used synths and looping not to trick and lull you into layers, but to show you how she was manipulating the sounds in real-time, as tangible as her plucks and scratches of the harp. At one point, during Hundreds of Days standout "It Feels Like Floating", ambulances were outside driving down the street, sirens on, but the crowd was subsumed by Lattimore's playing. The harp didn't drown anything out by volume, but like Bird's violin would do later, it enraptured a group of people who had walked through the doors of the church to nestle in the safety of memory and imagination.

Lattimore

Lattimore

[confused-bisexual]

[the-ominous-owl]

rio being amused by agatha's shenannigans.

[grechkathekasha]

(“sailor song” by gigi perez starts playing)

[mioakem]

the imagery in this part of the ep was actually insane like this is genuinely beautiful

[itberice]

[timelessbian]

she fucked the grim reaper, she made a baby from scratch, she's a con artist and a scammer, she blew up the hindenburg, she sank the titanic, she served cunt, she's annoying and mean, she's traumatized, she's thee jolene, situationship so bad she's gaining custody of twins in the afterlife, she's even a lesbian!! agatha harkness most character of all time

[sapphicwitch]

When you actually have to do the job you applied for after lying about how capable and great you are on your résumé

[etsimpensiusuror]

i think we as a people moved on from this moment in hannibal too fast. are we not created in his image? musnt god feel powerful when he kills? does he not feel powerful? oy vey.

[remarkingonit]

"My mother needs me home." (x Agatha All Along, S01E09)

[church-of-lilith]

what if you were GAY and your girlfriend was the personification of DEATH and then your SON died and she had to reap his SOUL or whatever because it was her JOB and then you never forgave her but she still LOVED you and then you projected your GRIEF onto a random teenager while battling through DEATH trials with PATTI LUPONE

[something-boring]

@poliscisexciting

Star trek show inspired by DS9 called Deep Space 99 where they really are in deep space in the middle of fucking no where not even near a planet or any stars just floating in the vast expanse of space with nothing to do. The outpost has a crew of just 10, and the entire 24 episode series is just about the station officers having a The Light House style homoerotic mental breakdown, starting sexual charged fights and hallucinating having sex with aliens due to the sheer terrifying isolation they're in.