I make a point of reading Flea’s One Good Thing blog, because her postings generally do one of two things (or both): they make me laugh out loud, or they make me reflect on the human condition.
This post: Stevie made me do both. In it she talks about a documentary – Stevie – and muses on the real-life characters and the events that occur around them. I haven’t seen the documentary, but her description of the events and her reflection on how us humans can behave for good or ill makes me want to seek it out. The mainspring for the events in the documentary is how someone who was abused as a child can often grow up to be an adult who also abuses.
That got me thinking about an old Dory Previn song, The Empress of China:
i tell you how i hate you
in the voice my father used
you answer with your mother’s worn cliches
and in another life
your father hears his wife
and i see his fury blazing in your gazean echo hears an echo
and my mother’s fist is raised
the hand i clench at you
shows her distrust
the way one behaves
is determined in the graves
of all the great grandparents
gone to dust
I used to be playing Dory Previn’s records all the time in the early 1970s. I had the distinct feeling that she was slightly insane, but she had the soul of a poet and wrote eerie unsettling songs:
did jesus have a baby sister?
was she bitter?
was she sweet?
did she wind up in a convent?
did she end up on the street?
…
did she long to be the saviour
saving everyone she met?
and in private to her mirror
did she whisper saviourette?
Whatever happened to Dory Previn? According to this web site, she’s still with us, for which I am glad. But, I think the opinion on this page comes closest to expressing my own feelings on the subject.
Postscript: Dory Previn issued her own protest against the Iraq War in March 2003 – you can download it from here.
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