imtalkinghere

Birthing Her Music

Theresa Andersson says that early in her performance career she couldn't sing and play a tambourine at the same time. Talk about coming a long way!

                        

Bob Edwards

"Tell me about the video you made in your kitchen (two years ago)."

Andersson

"Oh, yeah. I made a video of the song Na-Na-Na in my kitchen because it was really difficult and exhausting to try to explain to someone what I do... it's hard to understand unless you can see it. So I put a simple video camera on my kitchen table and I stood in the corner with my set-up and I just did it. I put it up on iTunes purely so I could send it out to promoters and gigs and stuff like that. And then somehow it worked... a lot of people saw it... I didn't have to explain any more."

Bob Edwards

"How did you come up with this?"

Andersson

"It kind of started out of necessity. I was invited to tour Scandinavia... and I couldn't afford to bring a band, so I got my first loop pedal, because my main instrument is not guitar - To sit and play and sing with a guitar... I just thought it would be boring. It just wasn't my strength. I wanted to be able to incorporate more violin and more singing. So that's when I got my first looping pedal. -- I went over there and had a ball. I guess I discovered a lot about myself as a musician. Once I got it down, it just became part of my body. The combination of using all these electronics... it is a little bit like a dance."

Or maybe a lot:

Kurt Anderson

"Do things ever go wrong?"

Andersson

"Oh, yes! All the time."

Kurt Anderson

"Then why do a live mix each time? I think I'd be tempted to lock some in."

Andersson

"Now, where's the sport in that?!"

                                                                                               

Oh my. Oh my.

                                                                                           

Let's count just a few of the things to love in this story:

1. Necessity mothers invention. She is invited to return home to show her gifts.  Apparent lack leads, not to dismay (Oh no, I can't do this because I don't have what is the norm), but to creative-problem solving based on serving her strengths. Is this the way of wisdom or what?

2. Natural blossoming follows. She discovers that she enjoys her somewhat unusual solution and expands it to create her own unique form. Expansion requires  embodying. Awkwardness and accident transform themselves into a barefoot dance. Embodiment, that most feminine act: Body=Matter=Mater/Mother.

3. Continued pattern of expansion: a tight corner opens into the whole wide world. Once again, working with the simple means she has at hand, a low-tech demo (where words won't do the trick) in her kitchen's corner reaches a broad audience of viewers, and her career possibilities grow in ways she couldn't anticipate. Hestia would applaud the hearth metaphor here.

4. She embraces risk, playfully making welcome each unpredictable occurrence and "accident." This is the definition of aliveness. An artful discipline of giving each moment its due, because each one is a birth and birth is sacred

5. And when she takes the stage, is that a Celebration! or what?!                                                            

How shall we raise the Yin? Like this is how.

Ode to Joy*

Our friend Ahna (second from left) got herself a Girl Group!

  

*A new, recurrent feature here. Taking time to note things that just make me smile all the way through.

We are idiots here

Yes, it is official: idiots.

Recently, we've been having a lot of milk go sour. Granted, we don't drink a lot of milk - mostly just steamed for cappuccino or oatmeal - so it feels like it hangs around for a long time, but the milk was always turning before its expiration date. We changed where we located it in the refer. Still went sour. Altered the control to make the refer colder. Still went sour. I started having dark suspicions about carelessness at the neighborhood market. We bought our milk elsewhere. Went sour.

Then we started having oddities with the freezer side, and discovered a fairly huge block of ice on the floor of the freezer. The Greek said, "The door must have been left ajar one day."

"You don't get that much accumulation from one incident. That's been gathering there for some time."

"Well, there must be some problem with this refer's temperature gauge - between the milk issues and this. We'll need to get an appliance guy in here."

Last week,  there was an article in the Times about basic appliance care - necessary spring cleaning maintenance to keep everything functioning. Under refrigerator it said you need to vacuum the coils at least once a year. Single most important thing, it said. I read this aloud over breakfast as if it were about the discovery of a horse with fish tail.

"I've never vacuumed any coils," I said. "I never saw anyone vacuum coils during my entire childhood. I had no idea."

The Greek shrugged. News to him, too.

"How do you get to the coils on this one?" I asked.

"They are on the back."

"The article says something about getting under the refrigerator. How do we get under this one? Does that front plate come off?

He shrugged.

I mentioned it again this weekend. (Isn't this what three-day weekends are for?) 

Again with the shrugging.

A little while ago, the Greek arrived home from the food store. After putting things away, he came into my office holding something in both his hands. "Look," he said, as he approached my desk.

He seemed to have found a kitten. A kitten that was several months old, I'd say.

But as he came closer, I saw that it was a thick mound of dark sticky dust that overflowed from his two palms. He was working it as if it were a puppet.

"Look what I pulled out from the coils under the refer! ... As I was leaving the market, I ran into a guy driving a refrigeration truck. I asked him if he made house calls. ... He said, 'You really have to keep those coils clean.'"

So this GUY with his name embroidered on a striped shirt standing on a sidewalk inspired him  to action in a way that the New York Times and I failed to do.

Still... we are both idiots.