We’re asking you to dig a little deeper today. Our lovely new header inspired me to do some YouTubing today, looking for some videos of the great ladies of jazz. Listening to Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, I can’t help but compare them to current musicians. It seems like producers today are hell-bent on ironing out the wrinkles and polishing the flaws out of everything we see and hear. In doing so I think we lose something: the depth of the human element. It’s hardly a new thing, this striving for perfection, but I think we’ve gotten too good at it.
My question to you is this: What is it that reminds you of the beauty of imperfection?
Dinah Washington, Teach Me Tonight
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If we’re talking about something from pop culture, Treme. Especially the music of Treme, recorded live. I’m no New Orleans geek, nor a jazz fan in any depth, but this kind of music wouldn’t be what it is without the imperfections. And I think the show tried to mimic this, in a fictionalized way.
Don’t laugh, okay? This is a silly silly privileged thing.
The freckle on my left hand. It’s big and centered right in the middle and as a kid/teenager I HATED it. Not that I didn’t have a ton of freckles elsewhere, or other imperfections, but that one fricking freckle just represented ALL of my imperfections in one little round spot. What I freak I was. Who had a freckle on their hand? No one on the pages of YM or Seventeen, that was for darn sure.
But then my freshman year of college, someone asked me for directions and without thinking about it, I looked at down at my hands to make sure I had my rights and lefts correct. And it hit me, that was how I learned left from right. My freckle. And even though I knew left from right in my head, my freckle confirmed it for me. Kept me going in the right direction.
After that, silly as it is, I’ve come to cherish my freckle. It does represent my imperfections. And that’s just fine. Because I am imperfect and the world is too. But I have my freckle to keep me from turning the wrong way.
Sadly, as I get older, my freckle has faded a little. And I miss it. But I suppose that there is something to be learned from its fading as well.
I like my home to be less like the photographs in the magazines (eh hem, Dwell, Architecture Digest) and more like something touched, used, loved. So the floors may be clean, the window sills dusted and the pillows off the floor but the lamp will not be perfectly center on the end table. The magazines will not be neatly arranged on the coffee table. And you can bet I left my tea mug on the table from last night and no, I have no intentions of putting it in the kitchen sink (not the dishwasher) until later tonight.
That’s imperfection. :) And I love it.
Every crooked zipper and puckered seam I’ve ever sewn. Which is most of ’em.
I love looking at high-quality, un-retouched, candid photographs of people around the world. People are so beautiful — ALL people — and it’s unfortunate that the images of men and women to which we are so often exposed are doctored to the point that they are barely recognizable as living, breathing, beautiful, flawed human beings.
Oh god, and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDETRq_IM5M
Van Gogh. Perfectly imperfect and oh so heartbreaking.
The scratchy crackle between songs on a record. Nothing reminds me more of being a child than that.
The sound of a record being played is really fantastic. There’s something so warm and touchable about it. It reminds you that human beings made this, like physically made this, at every step — recording, selling, playing, when you had to get up and turn the record over.
Some of my very favourite drawings are from people who can’t really draw (if that makes sense). They’re flawed in a million different ways, but I just love them. Maybe because they don’t filter the same way…
For music? I found an mp3 many, many years ago of an older — obviously very inebriated — man (I used a lifeline and called a friend — Terry Mechan) singing “Wild Rover” in a pub. It’s raw, off-kilter, slightly off-key; but it’s also so joyful that I can’t help but smile and sing along.
I will have to check that out, “Wild Rover” is one of my favorites – especially when sung in a scratchy voice.
Happy birthday!
This http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtgUbJN8oPE
Billie’s toward the end of her life and so is Lester Young, her bff/musical soulmate. They hadn’t been on speaking terms for awhile but they came back together for this performance and you can see how they connect and reconcile and I love the tenderness and the playfulness and the beauty of the whole thing, even as she looks weak and her voice wavers, and Les can only stand up for his solo. I watch it whenever I’m feeling down.
The beauty of imperfection? My garden, in particular my perennials.
Aw, agree. And on that note, Ikebana, which to me is a gorgeous smashing together of perfection and imperfection in a way that hyperventilates its own beauty, freaks out, and then lives on anyway.
I’m pretty excited to be going to see this Beauty tonight (and to be going on a New Friend Date):