Joni Mitchell Shine

Mitchell’s album will be something of a revelation to young people who might buy it at Starbucks when it’s released tomorrow if they listen to it and read the lyrics. Mitchell, the original singer-songwriter, presents herself in stark contrast to the dodo-brained warblers of this generation. She’s cynical and doesn’t mind expressing it.

n my favorite song, “Bad Dreams,” she begins by painting a happy picture: “The cats are in the flower bed/A red hawk rides the sky/I guess I should be happy/Just to be alive...”

But then the other foot falls, and it’s a doozy. When I first heard the next line, I actually laughed out loud. All I could think was, You tell ‘em, Joni:

“But we have poisoned everything/And oblivious to it all/The cell phone zombies babble/Through the shopping malls…”

And that’s just for starters. She observes: “You cannot be trusted/Do you even know you're lying/It's dangerous to kid yourself/You go deaf and dumb and blind.”

Mitchell plays nearly all the instruments on the album herself, and does all the singing. And while the lyrics are harsh indictments of modern culture, Mitchell serves them up with grace and style. Her jazz renderings and melodies are gorgeous, and she even manages to weave in hooks and choruses as she delivers the bad news. This takes the bite out of what could have been stridency. A couple of listens, and songs like “Hana” and the clever “If I Had a Heart, I’d Cry” are hard to forget.

Astronomers Locate Cosmic Birth Canal. God is a Woman

[...]
"We already knew there was something different about this spot in the sky," Rudnick said. The region had been dubbed the "WMAP Cold Spot," because it stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched by NASA in 2001. The CMB, faint radio waves that are the remnant radiation from the Big Bang, is the earliest "baby picture" available of the Universe. Irregularities in the CMB show structures that existed only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
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Joni Mitchell

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

Damn Good News!

In an October 2006 interview with The Ottawa Citizen, Mitchell "revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade," but gave few other details.^[7] Four months later, in an interview with The New York Times, Joni said that the forthcoming album, Shine, was inspired by the war in Iraq and "something her grandson had said while listening to family fighting: 'Bad dreams are good--in the great plan.'"^[10] Early media reports characterized the album as having "a minimal feel....that harks back to [Mitchell's] early work," and a focus on political and environmental issues.^[9] The album will be released in Fall 2007.^[11]