The Coffee Song (The Frank Sinatra Collection)

Frank Sinatra • Ring-A-Ding Ding!

Music to drink your morning coffee with.

Frank Sinatra: Coffee Song

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Hyperballad

Björk • Post

msodradek:

—Björk, “Hyperballad”, Post (1995).

She sleeps. I don’t wake her up. Why don’t you wake her up? It is my sorrow and my happiness. I’m sorry that I can’t wake her up – that I can’t put my foot on the burning threshold of her house – that I don’t know the way to her house – that I don’t know in which direction the way lies – that I move constantly away from her, powerless like the leaf carried away from its tree by the autumn wind. And furthermore: I was never on this tree, a leaf in the autumn wind, but from no tree. – I am happy that I can’t wake her up. What would I do, if she would rise, if she would get up from bed, if I would get up from bed, the lion from his lair, and my roar break into my frightful ear.

Sie schläft. Ich wecke sie nicht. Warum weckst du sie nicht? Es ist mein Unglück und mein Glück. Ich bin unglücklich, daß ich sie nicht wecken kann, daß ich nicht aufsetzen kann den Fuß auf die brennende Türschwelle ihres Hauses, daß ich nicht den Weg kenne zu ihrem Hause, daß ich nicht die Richtung kenne, in welcher der Weg liegt, daß ich mich immer weiter von ihr entferne, kraftlos wie das Blatt im Herbstwind sich von seinem Baume entfernt und überdies: ich war niemals an diesem Baume, im Herbstwind ein Blatt, aber von keinem Baum. – Ich bin glücklich, daß ich sie nicht wecken kann. Was täte ich, wenn sie sich erhöbe, wenn sie aufstehen würde von dem Lager, wenn ich aufstehen würde von dem Lager, der Löwe von seinem Lager, und mein Gebrüll einbrechen würde in mein ängstliches Gehör.

—Franz Kafka, Nachlaß (Posthumous Writings), probably Autumn 1923.

(via byronic)

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S18 Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day

Various Artists • When Love Speaks - The Sonnets

For those among you not yet sick of sonnets, I present this, the third edition of recorded sonnets: the famous 18th, sung by none other than Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music (and post Roxy Music) fame:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

— Shakespeare

[From the compilation album, When Love Speaks]

I have it from my sources that Kateoplis is a fan of Roxy Music.

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Music to Hear, Why Hears't Thou Music Sadly

Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Shakespeare • When Love Speaks - The Sonnets

I hear you asking: what would it sound like if the South African choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo (the one that sang with Paul Simon on Graceland) did a rendition of a Shakespeare sonnet?

You have your answer. Read the following sonnet (the 8th) as you listen. A “true concord of well-tuned sounds” indeed.

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,
Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.

— William Shakespeare

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