Rosenbush Cafe

Some days it pays to let the emotions out and cry like a baby and what better way than through music? Today's update: Glenn Miller (Moonlight Serenade; Chesterfield Radio Show 11-27-40), Count Basie (April in Paris), The Crykle (Red Rubber Ball), The Beach Boys (Wild Honey), Every Mother's Son (Come on Down to My Boat Baby) and The Rolling Stones (Sympathy for the Devil). The Playlist Player is available down the right sidebar below the menu and is updated often.

Weekend additions include: Todd Rundgren’s delightful - and long - “Singring and the Glass Guitar,” which is both a musical adventure and soulful fairy tale that evokes pleasant memories of my uni days, and his “Couldn’t I Just Tell You” from the 1973 LP “Todd;” Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” a song that one can never tire of unless they are reaper-phobic; Albinino’s “Adagio,” just to keep my classical roots well watered; Infected Mushroom’s “Albibeno,” which reminds of Utlimate Spinach in its psychedelic weirdness; Traffic, with “I Can’t Find My Way Home,” in case anyone gets lost on their journey to enlightenment, or to the mall bookstore; and Buddah Bar III mideastern esthetics with Tamally Maak and Amr Diab.

Enjoy your weekend and promote musical sanity whenever you can.

I have updated my Playlist Music Player which you’ll find on the right sidebar at the bottom on the page.

Enhance your reading experience with newly added artists including: King Crimson, Suzanne Vega, David Bowie, Vilvaldi, Tchaikovsky, Kraftwerk, Van Der Graaf Generator and Annette Peacock. I have set the player to shuffle so you’ll never know which tune is next; however, you can select specific songs. There is a wide range from classical to jazz, instrumental, psychedelia, rock and vocalists.

Irving Berlin’s 1913 profound song of loss is performed here by Henry Burr, a great singer who specialized in sad songs, which were the rage in early 20th Century music. Berlin wrote the song to get over his grief after his wife died right after their honeymoon.

This weekend, while looking through my collection of 78s record collections, for my RCA Victor Talking Machine, re: Victrola, I selected this particular piece for use in my new ongoing work of fiction, tentatively entitled, “Love Song of the Sirens,” which is first heard after the opening scene. The story is set in 1959 Los Angeles and combines film noir and Greek Mythology. It is my first new story idea in years, and while it is a grueling process to start something from the sub consciousness after years of writing and rewriting the same old stories, I am excited by the direction of this drama; once the characters and story arc begins taking on lives of their own the work becomes more ecstasy than torture.

A woman, distraught over the unexpected death or her innamorato, Jacques, in a Las Vegas jazz club (naturally I will not divulge why or how he dies since that is a major leitmotif), has traveled to LA, where she believes the person responsible has gone, and while walking down a deserted street hears this song coming from the upstairs open window of a private detective’s office. The woman, Gloria, presented as a quintessential femme fatale, is wearing a hat decorated with the merle bronzé, a Brazilian blackbird, a popular, albeit disturbing piece, from the 18th Century, since it often contained an entire bird. Gloria has been looking for a private detective and once she hears “When I Lost You,” knows she has found the person who can help her in a quest to seek revenge.

That, of course, is a mere minor plot device; the story is more profound and complex than a simple murder mystery and traverses a landscape populated with unconventional characters with secretive schemas.

The story hybridizes mythos with the popular detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and contains subtexts of jazz and blues music, beat poets, esoteric themes of world mythology, the world of surrealist art and German Expressionism. As an avid lover of mythologies I have constructed my own variation on myths. This allows for a continuation of a popular story that, as with many mythological themes, is wisely left open to interpretation as to what happened to the principal characters after the conclusion of their story.

As I work on this I will be off ether more and consequently not updating as often; however, I am not gone forever, except in an existential realm of creativity, but devoting my energies to the muse of inspirit.

“Sanity is a madness put to good use.” George Santayana, Spanish-born philosopher

Into the Cosmos

Chavela Vargas Keeps Us Sane

Great performance in Madrid

Native Beauty