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Until just a few days ago, I was unaware of this recording by Joni Mitchell of William Butler Yeats' monumental modern poem, "The Second Coming." And, now that I am, I'm not really sure what to think.
Ms. Mitchell is well known for a wide strain of crankiness - ask those who have attended her concerts (she walked off at Live Aid in Giant Stadium in 1986 to the bemusement of myself and 55,000 other attendees), ask Bob Dylan, ask record executives, ask the Woodstock Generation, ask Madonna (and Grace Slick and the estate of Janis Joplin) ... well, you get the idea.
Still an artist is an artist and, though I'm not real sure that this recording is anything if not her opinion of where we are now (ok, W.B.'s opinion, too, of where we were then), it is arguably one which happens to be at least in part true (as with some of the above - eh, Woodstock generation?).
What is beyond doubt is she has given us some of the truly great music over the last handful of decades. Here is a 30 minute concert from 1970 which shows the range of her talent early in her career:
Still an artist is an artist and, though I'm not real sure that this recording is anything if not her opinion of where we are now (ok, W.B.'s opinion, too, of where we were then), it is arguably one which happens to be at least in part true (as with some of the above - eh, Woodstock generation?).
What is beyond doubt is she has given us some of the truly great music over the last handful of decades. Here is a 30 minute concert from 1970 which shows the range of her talent early in her career:
In closing, I suppose it might simply be best to let Mr. Yeats speak for himself, and all of us, in what is, if not the greatest, one of the greatest poems of the 20th century:
The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
---------------
best,
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well, well
coming home in the rain...
god of the poor *
translated by David Lanoue
* Note by David Lanoue: Issa, who was poor, fancies that the "poverty god" (bimbô-gami) was his special tutelary deity. Like the poet, this god can't seem to catch a break. According to Shinto belief, in Tenth Month all of Japan's gods vacate their shrines to congregate at the Izumo-Taisha Shrine. The god of the poor trudges home in the rain.
Bimbō-Gami - God of Poverty
best,
Don
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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 168 songs
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