murmurations 006
taps mic is this thing on?
Happy Bealtinne! Welcome, really and truly and finally, to spring!
Every year I know it, but every year I relearn it - everything feels hopeless in February (and, this year, in March), but eventually the light comes and the flowers bloom and I write a melodramatic poem in my notebook that begins with the line “the birds are singing and I think I might live.” (It did kinda feel that way this year though, ngl.)
I do think I did a bit of a better job this year than usual of trying to just work on little things so I wasn’t continually tilting at windmills in the cold darkness, but I really want to get to a point in my life where all I need to do from November through February is eat, sleep, and read. Maybe that would help me hate winter less.
So far we’ve been to two Bay FC games this spring, and they’ve both been great fun. They’re evening games, which around here means they’re chilly games, but they’ve got a nice set up with good parking and a whole area dedicated to food trucks so you can drive down, get parked, and then get dinner before the game. Sometimes I think about how there was a single Chinese restaurant in the town where I grew up and you had to drive across state lines to Kentucky if you wanted something as exotic as Thai, and then I look at the line of food trucks with pupusas and katsu and sushi and falafel and other things I wouldn’t have known how to pronounce and marvel about how different it is for all the little kids swarming around me with shawarma in one hand and women’s professional sports merch in the other.
We’ve also got tickets to a bunch of the games in the inaugural season of the Golden State Valkyries, which I’m so excited about. I’ve never been to the Chase Center - we saw the Warriors at Oracle Arena several times, but Chase is further away and more expensive, so we’ve never made it happen. But I’ll admit that I’m kinda perversely thrilled that the first time I’ll be there is to see the first ever game played by the new women’s team, and won’t have anything to do with the Warriors at all. (I’m still pissed at them for trading Klay and Wiggs, but I’ve given in and am watching the playoffs - this series against the Rockets has been exciting so far.)
In March we got to see both Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, which was amazing, and Voces8, who were also amazing. Gillian Welch is a long time fav of mine — my friend Stacy introduced me to her music when we were in high school or maybe early college, adding to the list of cultural touch-points I owe to Stacy. (See also: RENT and the X-files.) They were terrific live, on the last show of their tour promoting a new album, and just brought the house down. Can’t recommend them and their albums enough.
Voces8 is a group I learned about more recently, though I don’t recall how. I’ve always loved choral music, and their work is just unmatched. They don’t tour in the western US that often, so I was really grateful that we caught them — I’d tried to see them a few years ago and the show had been sold out, but this time we were able to grab tickets to see them in the Mission Dolores Basilica in San Francisco, which has absolutely insane acoustics. They have an extensive collection of recordings on their YouTube channel, so I listen to them during a lot of work days to keep myself calm and present as I deal with whatever fresh corporate hell has arisen. I also listened to them a lot during the very stressful parts of 2020-2022, so I’ve ended up in that awkward place you get to with musicians/artists where they mean a tremendous amount to me, but I don’t exist for them, which always makes saying “hi” after a show challenging. How do you say “I listen to your music so much I can pick out everyone’s individual voices and also hearing you sing makes me feel like I’m transcending” without sounding like a terrible creeper? You can’t, really, so I didn’t, because social propriety; I went with something useless like “thanks so much for all your music” instead. Oh well.
I also highly recommend the new EP from one of their tenors, Blake Morgan - it’s all of them singing, but he’s done the arranging of the pieces, and the writing of at least one of them. Mitt hejerte alltid vanker is absolutely gorgeous, and Shall We Gather At The River will knock your fucking socks off. Listen to it loud.
Windows: Reimaginings by Blake Morgan
The poem for April is You Will Hear Thunder, by Anna Akhmatova.
I’ve been invited to speak at the Weeknight Writers Storycraft Sessions virtual conference at the end of May on Dealing With Entrepreneur Overload, which I’m really excited to do! It’s definitely been a learning and growing process for all of us at the press as we figure out how to work effectively from a distance and around all of the other things in our lives, and I’m happy to share what we’ve learned over the last three years and change. You can follow me on bluesky for more information and links to the conference as it gets closer!
Having officially given up on reading 60 books this year and reducing my goal to 52, I’m already at 29, so who knows what will happen. This has been hugely abetted by me tearing my way through The Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell. I’d watched the first couple of seasons of the Netflix show a couple years ago, and found it entertaining (and pretty, thank you very much, Alexander Draymon), but hadn’t kept up with it. I grabbed the first novel on Libby earlier this year, though, and just kept going. They’re quite bloody, and they do that thing books in series so often do where they have to reintroduce the characters and catch you up on what’s been happening periodically, but the characters are fun and they deal with an often overlooked period of history that I find fascinating, so I’ve been having a good time. Not sure what I’ll do when I run out of them, but that’s at least another four or five books away!
I also rediscovered my love for Hemingway via The Sun Also Rises. No, I’m not being sarcastic.
The Six of Blades was the first card we shot for Journey into the Tarot that involved another person, which was a whole new challenge. We ended up eventually having a whole assortment of other folks in a number of the other cards, but this was the first time I had to deal with shooting two people at once, and while I do think a few of them turned out okay enough, it was definitely a learning experience for me, and probably not my best work if I’m honest.
You can read what she (here) and I (here) thought of it at the time, or see all of the photos we took for this card here.