ageing

an aging hand, courtesy of my latest iPhone mimicking-old-photos app, Strut Type (in turn, courtesy of the LA Times, which had a feature on it).  And curiously, also courtesy of`Lida and Lacey, who were talking about Gabriel Orozco's website in class, and he had some rather fine hand images on it.

But also contemplating the fact that this was the same hand that I had in 1976, and it's got a great deal older since Emmylou Harris's Pieces of the Sky was released the previous year.  Pieces of the Sky was one of the three records that I played endlessly in '76 when I was revising for finals (the other two, just so you know that I knew how to keep cheerful, were Lou Reed's Berlin and Ry Cooder's Into the Purple Valley, interspersed with my first and last serious musical venture, some John Clare poems which I set to Very Bad (but presumably Harris, and Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell influenced) acoustic accompaniment.  At least it was one way of learning some poems to regurgitate in the exams.  Tonight we went to see Emmylou perform (wonderfully) at UCLA - an audience full of people our age, and with Harris admitting to being a grandmother, and forgetting the words to one song ... Hard not to weep at "Boulder to Birmingham" (the geography of which meant nothing to me back in the mid '70s: I thought it ws something metaphorical about moving big stones around, I think) - not just because it's a sad song in its own right, but because there was so very much of the past hanging there, in every phrase.