IT'S SUCH A PERFECT DAY, I'M GLAD I SPEND IT WITH YOU

Today, The Grandma had a meeting with some old friends who she hadn't seen for a long time. It was a fantastic rencounter and they were talking about their lives during these last years. 

For The Grandma, it was a perfect day, as perfect as the Lou Reed's song, the wonderful New Yorker singer, who was a great fan of Gabriel Ferrater's works, the Catalan poet.

Lou Reed is one of The Grandma's favourite singers and she remembers strongly when, in 2007, she could listen to him with his wife Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith in the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City reading Catalan poetry. It was an amazing experience, it was another perfect day, like yesterday.

More information: Institut Ramon Llull

Lewis Allan Reed (March 2, 1942-October 27, 2013) was an American musician, singer and songwriter. He was the lead guitarist, singer and principal songwriter for the rock band the Velvet Underground and also had a solo career that spanned five decades. The Velvet Underground achieved little commercial success during their existence, but are now regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock music.

After leaving the band in 1970, Reed released twenty solo studio albums. His second, Transformer (1972), was produced by David Bowie and arranged by Mick Ronson, and brought mainstream recognition.

After Transformer, the less commercial Berlin reached No. 7 on the UK Albums Chart. Rock n Roll Animal, a live album released in 1974, sold strongly, and Sally Can't Dance (1974) peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, but for a period Reed's work did not translate into sales, leading him deeper into drug addiction and alcoholism.

Reed cleaned up in the early 80s, and gradually returned to prominence with New Sensations (1984), reaching a critical and commercial later career peak with his 1989 album New York.

Reed participated in a revival of the Velvet Underground in the 1990s, and made several more albums, including a tribute to his mentor Andy Warhol. He contributed music to two theatrical interpretations of 19th-century writers, one of which he developed into an album. He married his third wife Laurie Anderson in 2008, and recorded the album Lulu with Metallica. 

More information: Lou Reed

Reed's distinctive deadpan voice, poetic lyrics and experimental guitar playing were trademarks throughout his long career.

Lewis Allan Reed was born on March 2, 1942 at Beth El Hospital, now Brookdale, in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. Reed's family was Jewish; his father had changed his name from Rabinowitz to Reed. Reed said that although he was Jewish, his real god was rock 'n' roll.

In 1964, Reed moved to New York City to work as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records. That year he wrote and recorded the single The Ostrich, a parody of popular dance songs of the time, which included lines such as put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it. His employers felt that the song had hit potential, and assembled a supporting band to help promote the recording.

The ad hoc band, called The Primitives, included Welsh musician John Cale, who had recently moved to New York to study music and was playing viola in composer La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, along with Tony Conrad. 

Cale and Conrad were surprised to find that for The Ostrich, Reed tuned each string of his guitar to the same note, which they began to call his ostrich guitar tuning. This technique created a drone effect similar to their experimentation in Young's avant-garde ensemble. Disappointed with Reed's performance, Cale was nevertheless impressed by Reed's early repertoire, including Heroin, and a partnership began to evolve.

Throughout the 1970s, Reed was a heavy user of methamphetamine and alcohol.

In February 2000, Reed worked with Robert Wilson at the Thalia Theater again, on Poe-Try, another production inspired by the works of a 19th-century writer, this time Edgar Allan Poe.

More information: Brain Pickings

In April 2000, Reed released Ecstasy. In January 2003, Reed released a two-CD set, The Raven, based on it. The album consists of songs written by Reed and spoken-word performances of reworked and rewritten texts of Edgar Allan Poe by the actors, set to electronic music composed by Reed. It features David Bowie and Ornette Coleman.  A single disc CD version of the album, focusing on the music, was also released.

Reed had suffered hepatitis and diabetes for several years. In October 27, 2013, he died fat his home in East Hampton, New York, at the age of 71. 

More information: ABC

 

 

 Music should come crashing out of your speakers

and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever 

preconceived notions that listener has.

Lou Reed

PATRICIA LEE 'PATTI' SMITH: 'PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER'

Patti Smith

Today, The Grandma is preparing to close another year. Tomorrow, 2018 is going to end and she is summing up the present year, full of good and bad things, as always.

Every time that you lose a loved person, you cannot consider that that year has been a good one but you must have enough force to continue with your own life because living is the best present that you can offer to all those people who have said us goodbye.

It has been a difficult year for The Grandma but she is a person who grows up with difficulties and she always looks at the future with passion, trust and hope. Yes. She is an optimistic person and she thinks that the best is always coming.

Prepare you for this New Year. It will be a year full of new emotions and hard moments, but it will be the beginning of a new age of freedom because as Patti Smith says, People have the Power, and we are going to use it to work for a better society with a fair justice and hope for the hopeless.

December, 30 is the anniversary of one of the most amazing singers and activist, Patti Smith, an artist who was born on a day like today in 1946 and who The Grandma admires a lot. She wants to talk about her, her music, her activism and her interest in Catalan Literature.

Before talking about Patti Smith, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 58).

More information: Order of Adjectives-Adjectives with -ed or -ing

Patricia Lee Smith, born December 30, 1946, is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.

Called the punk poet laureate, Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song is Because the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five in the UK.

Patti Smith & Bruce Springsteen

On November 17, 2010, Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. The book fulfilled a promise she had made to her former long-time roommate and partner, Robert Mapplethorpe.

Patricia Lee Smith was born in Chicago to Beverly Smith, a jazz singer turned waitress, and Grant Smith, who worked as a machinist at a Honeywell plant. The family was of part-Irish ancestry and Patti was the eldest of four children. At the age of 4, Smith's family moved from Chicago to the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, before her family moved to Pitman, New Jersey and later to The Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, New Jersey.

At this early age Smith was exposed to her first records, including Shrimp Boats by Harry Belafonte, Patience and Prudence's The Money Tree, and Another Side of Bob Dylan, which her mother gave to her. Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964 and went to work in a factory. She gave birth to her first child, a daughter, on April 26, 1967, and chose to place her for adoption.

More information: Patti Smith

In 1967, she left Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, and moved to Manhattan. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a bookstore with friend and poet Janet Hamill. She and Mapplethorpe had an intense romantic relationship.

By 1974, Patti Smith was performing rock music, initially with guitarist, bassist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on guitar and bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl on piano.

Patti Smith Group produced two further albums before the end of the 1970s. Easter (1978) was her most commercially successful record, containing the single Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Wave (1979) was less successful, although the songs Frederick and Dancing Barefoot both received commercial airplay.

Through most of the 1980s Smith was in semi-retirement from music, living with her family north of Detroit in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. In June 1988, she released the album Dream of Life, which included the song People Have the Power.
 

Patti Smith & Joan Baez

In 1993, Smith contributed Memorial Tribute (Live) to the AIDS-Benefit Album No Alternative produced by the Red Hot Organization.

In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record Gone Again, featuring About a Boy, a tribute to Kurt Cobain. That same year she collaborated with Stipe on E-Bow the Letter, a song on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she has also performed live with the band.

After the release of Gone Again, Patti Smith recorded two new albums: Peace and Noise in 1997, with the single 1959, about the invasion of Tibet, and Gung Ho in 2000, with songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father. Songs 1959 and Glitter in Their Eyes were nominated for Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition to Smith's influence on rock music, the Minister also noted her appreciation of Arthur Rimbaud. In August 2005, Smith gave a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake.

More information: Poetry Foundation

Smith is the subject of a 2008 documentary film by Steven Sebring titled Patti Smith: Dream of Life. A live album by Patti Smith and Kevin Shields, The Coral Sea was released in July 2008.

On September 10, 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in the city, Smith played an open-air concert in Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, commemorating her performance in the same city 30 years earlier. In the meantime, she contributed with a special introduction to Jessica Lange's book 50 Photographs (2009).

Patti Smith was one of the winners of the 2011 Polar Music Prize. She made her television acting debut at the age of 64 on the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent, appearing in an episode called Icarus. In 2011 Smith is working on a crime novel set in London. I've been working on a detective story that starts at the St Giles in the Fields church in London for the last two years, she told NME adding that she loved detective stories having been a fan of British fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

More information: Faena

In 2016 Smith performed People Have the Power at Riverside Church, Manhattan, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now. She was joined by Michael Stipe. On December 10, 2016, Smith attended the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm on behalf of Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Furthermore, Smith has been a supporter of the Green Party and backed Ralph Nader in the 2000 United States presidential election.

Smith, Reed & Anderson in Made in Catalunya

She led the crowd singing Over the Rainbow and People Have the Power at the campaign's rallies, and also performed at several of Nader's subsequent Democracy Rising events. 

Bruce Springsteen continued performing her People Have the Power at Vote for Change campaign events. In the winter of 2004/2005, Smith toured again with Nader in a series of rallies against the Iraq War and called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.

Smith premiered two new protest songs in London in September 2006. Louise Jury, writing in The Independent, characterized them as an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy. The song Qana was about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana. Without Chains is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp for four years.

In 2007, Smith participated with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in Made in Catalunya a cultural Catalan festival in New York City where she read some fragments of Catalan poetry written by the most admired Catalan poets.

More information: Institut Ramon Llull

In 2015, Smith appeared with Ralph Nader, spoke and performed the songs Wing and People Have the Power during the American Museum of Tort Law convocation ceremony in Winsted, Connecticut. She performed Wing again in 2016 in homage to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks during the First they came for Assange... event at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, to mark the 4th year of Julian Assange's attempt to avoid prosecution by taking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Smith was raised a Jehovah's Witness and had a strong religious upbringing and a Bible education. She left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining. In response to this experience, she wrote the line Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine in her cover version of Gloria by Them.

She has described having an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism around the age of eleven or twelve, saying I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer, but that as an adult she sees clear parallels between different forms of religion, and has come to the conclusion that religious dogmas are ...man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not.

More information: Patti Smith Interview-Advice to the Young

It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged 

in the hands of the people, not rock stars.

Patti Smith

LOU REED: OH, IT'S SUCH A PERFECT DAY, IT'S SUCH FUN!

The Grandma in the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 2007

Yesterday, The Grandma had a meeting with some old friends who she hadn't seen for a long time. It was a fantastic rencounter and they were talking about their lives during these last years. 

For The Grandma, it was a perfect day, as perfect as the Lou Reed's song, the wonderful singer who died on a day like today in 2013.

Lou Reed is one of The Grandma's favourite singers and she remembers strongly when, in 2007, she could listen to him with his wife Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith in the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City reading Catalan poetry. It was an amazing experience, it was another perfect day, like yesterday.

More information: Institut Ramon Llull

Lewis Allan Reed (March 2, 1942-October 27, 2013) was an American musician, singer and songwriter. He was the lead guitarist, singer and principal songwriter for the rock band the Velvet Underground and also had a solo career that spanned five decades. The Velvet Underground achieved little commercial success during their existence, but are now regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock music.

Lou Reed

After leaving the band in 1970, Reed released twenty solo studio albums. His second, Transformer (1972), was produced by David Bowie and arranged by Mick Ronson, and brought mainstream recognition.

After Transformer, the less commercial Berlin reached No. 7 on the UK Albums Chart. Rock n Roll Animal, a live album released in 1974, sold strongly, and Sally Can't Dance (1974) peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, but for a period Reed's work did not translate into sales, leading him deeper into drug addiction and alcoholism.

Reed cleaned up in the early 80s, and gradually returned to prominence with New Sensations (1984), reaching a critical and commercial later career peak with his 1989 album New York.

Reed participated in a revival of the Velvet Underground in the 1990s, and made several more albums, including a tribute to his mentor Andy Warhol. He contributed music to two theatrical interpretations of 19th-century writers, one of which he developed into an album. He married his third wife Laurie Anderson in 2008, and recorded the album Lulu with Metallica. 

More information: Lou Reed

Reed's distinctive deadpan voice, poetic lyrics and experimental guitar playing were trademarks throughout his long career.

Lewis Allan Reed was born on March 2, 1942 at Beth El Hospital, now Brookdale, in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. Reed's family was Jewish; his father had changed his name from Rabinowitz to Reed. Reed said that although he was Jewish, his real god was rock 'n' roll.

In 1964, Reed moved to New York City to work as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records. That year he wrote and recorded the single The Ostrich, a parody of popular dance songs of the time, which included lines such as put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it. His employers felt that the song had hit potential, and assembled a supporting band to help promote the recording.

Lou Reed in an Andy Warhol's creation

The ad hoc band, called The Primitives, included Welsh musician John Cale, who had recently moved to New York to study music and was playing viola in composer La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, along with Tony Conrad. 

Cale and Conrad were surprised to find that for The Ostrich, Reed tuned each string of his guitar to the same note, which they began to call his ostrich guitar tuning. This technique created a drone effect similar to their experimentation in Young's avant-garde ensemble. Disappointed with Reed's performance, Cale was nevertheless impressed by Reed's early repertoire, including Heroin, and a partnership began to evolve.

Throughout the 1970s, Reed was a heavy user of methamphetamine and alcohol.

In February 2000, Reed worked with Robert Wilson at the Thalia Theater again, on Poe-Try, another production inspired by the works of a 19th-century writer, this time Edgar Allan Poe.

More information: Brain Pickings

In April 2000, Reed released Ecstasy. In January 2003, Reed released a two-CD set, The Raven, based on it. The album consists of songs written by Reed and spoken-word performances of reworked and rewritten texts of Edgar Allan Poe by the actors, set to electronic music composed by Reed. It features David Bowie and Ornette Coleman.  A single disc CD version of the album, focusing on the music, was also released.

Reed had suffered hepatitis and diabetes for several years. In October 27, 2013, he died from liver disease at his home in East Hampton, New York, at the age of 71. 

More information: ABC

Music should come crashing out of your speakers

and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever 

preconceived notions that listener has.

Lou Reed

SUZANNE VEGA: JUST DON'T ASK ME HOW I AM

Suzanne Nadine Vega

Suzanne Nadine Vega (born July 11, 1959) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer, best known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.

Two of Vega's songs reached the Top 10 of various international chart listings: Luka and Tom's Diner. The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA, and was the song used as a test during the creation of the MP3 format.

More information: Suzanne Vega

Vega has released nine studio albums to date, the latest of which is Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers, released in 2016.

Suzanne Vega was born in Santa Monica, California. Her mother, Pat Vega, née Schumacher, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish origin. They divorced soon after her birth. Her stepfather, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, also known as Ed Vega, was a writer and teacher from Puerto Rico. 

Suzanne Vega in Barcelona (2008)

When Vega was two and a half, her family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. She was not aware of having a different biological father until she was nine years old. They met for the first time in her late 20s and remain in contact.

She attended the High School of Performing Arts where she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977. Suzanne discovered the music of Laura Nyro who was a huge influence on her.

At the age of nine she began to write poetry. She was encouraged to do so by her stepfather. It took her 3 years to write her first song, Brother Mine, it was ready at the age of 14. It was first published on Close-Up Vol. 4, Songs of Family, along with her other early song, The Silver Lady.

More information: The Guardian

Vega hasn't learned to read musical notes, she sees the melody as a shape and chords as colors. She focuses on lyrics and melodic ideas, for advanced features, like intros or bridges, she relies on other artists she works with. Most of her albums, except the first one, was made in such cooperation. She claims that 80% of the songs she started writing get finished.

The most important artistic influence on her work comes from Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Some other important artists for her are Paul Simon and Laura Nyro.

I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios, the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us, and the feeling of ritual the classes had. 

Suzanne Vega