Jessi Klein's NotBlog

It is time for me to go to bed but before I do I just wanted to put this up, one little mouse for everyone to enjoy.  I have written before about my love for Amy Winehouse which is ongoing.  And I am so sad that she’s having all these wackity crackity problems.  I think with all the nonsense (or Nunsense, if you love off broadway shows) there is now a part of the populace that is kind of turned off to discovering her or understanding that she is really fucking unbelievably great.  Oh, it pains me how much I love her.  And I maintain, in spite of everything, that she is still GFTJ.* 

In any case, I know clicking on a link is kind of a drag, but do not be a dumb dumb, just click ON THIS.  This is Amy singing “Teach Me Tonight” a few years ago, pre-beehive, when she was just emerging and before the pipe smoking.  She still had hot legs and good boobs and a sweet baby fat face anchored by that shnoz I adore (I admit I’ve always wanted a reverse nose job – I kinda wish mine was bigger.  At least wider.  I love big noses.  I hate small noses.  I hate them.  I hate them in the same way I hate Dominos Pizza.  Just fucking passionless, useless.)  In any case, this clip gives me a major case of chills, full on arm-hair-up-chills.  I love her red nylon eighties jacket and her little sway and the way you can tell she’s feeling the sexiness of the song.   I love the way she jumps around at the end all excited like a little kid.  This is what’s in there!  Still, I believe.  

It’s always a melancholy thing.  To meet someone whose full loveliness is now obscured for some reason.  Whose glow only sweeps over you now and then, like a lighthouse beam pulsing and then receding through the fog of a mysterious hurt which you can feel more than really understand.  Probably we are all as adults a bit dimmed by some bad business.  But here’s to songs and random blogged bits of youtubage brightening us day by day.

OK.  Off to brush teeth and do an under the pillow spider check and then tuck in.

Feel better soon Amy.  Feel better soon everyone.

(*Good For The Jews)

When that song “Put Your Records On” by Corinne Bailey Rae came out a couple of years ago I liked it but also didn’t like it.  I liked it because it was infectious and sweet but I didn’t like it because I feared for it.  It had that slightly annoying girl powerey-Cosmo-Fun-Fearless-Female vibe where I just knew it would end up as the song in a trailer for a movie starring Kate Hudson or someone else of her craptastic ilk.

Maybe a year after I hear that song I went to the movie Venus, which starred Peter O’Toole and maybe twenty people saw.  I really, really loved this movie.  I really genuinely did.  He got nominated for an Oscar, which he absolutely should have gotten, but then he lost, and I remember some people made fun of the shot of Peter O’Toole looking a bit sad at the Oscars when they didn’t say his name, for which all those people should be kicked squarepeg in the balls, even the girls.

Anyway, all the songs in the movie were Corinne Bailey Rae songs.  Some are from her album, some were only released on this soundtrack, and they are not so much Cosmo-ey as they are just simple and lovely and gorgeous.  (I think “gorgeous” was the final word in the script, and it’s a give-the-chills last moment.)

So  here is my favorite song by her.  It’s a slightly wintry song, what with the rain and the mention of the radiator.  When she says the line about “we sat inside by the radiator watching old black and white films” I get this weird feeling like she’s somehow singing about a memory I never told her.  Maybe it’s because I grew up in one of those NYC apartments with a radiator that made steamy whistley clinkey noises in the winter.  I loved those noises, I loved those pipes.  The radiator sound makes me think of home and my mom and hot soup and old New York winters when it would reliably fucking snow every year, a good boot topping snow like it meant business.  And this song kind of combines the mom/soup memory with a different being in love/sex memory, which on one level sounds just awful, but on another level, is maybe wonderful.  Isn’t this what we feel for our soul mates, really – a combination of mom/soup/sex/love?

Anway here is the song.

(I realize this site increasingly is just becoming the doorstep in which the cat that is me drags a little dead mouse to the person who is you.  And the cat is thinking, “I so sincerely hope you like this mouse,” and you are thinking, “Silly cat thinks we’ll like this stupid dead mouse!” and the whole situation is heartbreakingly awful.)

So.

I.

Just saw.

Stevie Wonder.

At the Hollywood Bowl.

Last night I am in a rickety sad little taxi coming home from Burbank airport after a fun week in NYC, and as I always feel in these sad taxis after fun weeks in NYC, I am resentful of the relentless cold fluoresence that is LA’s strip malled landscape.  It is late, I am tired, and feeling just about the same color blue as the lit up 7-11 signs whirring past.

Then:

We ricket down Highland past the Hollywood Bowl marquee.  This marquee is coldly fluorescent like the rest, but still, it flickers forth these warm words:

JULY 7:  STEVIE WONDER

So I called a friend and we went.

It was.  Amazing.

I could go on and on, and maybe tomorrow I will, but for tonight, I will just say, that around 10:15pm, on a beautiful warm night in California, I sat outside with a glass of sangria in my hand as Stevie Wonder, accompanied by the harpist from the Philharmonic, stood up from the piano to sing “If It’s Magic.”  My favorite song.  And in this moment, with the iconic arc lights of the bowl glowing brightly pink with real non fluorescent electricity, I felt one hundred percent perfect joy.

Happy Monday.