Arthur Russell - "Close My Eyes". When I think about the special light of human beings, the angels' kiss-on-the-lips, the soul or spirit that probably-doesn't-but-maybe-does hide in our chests, I think of this. The way these modest parts - a song sung plainly, a strummed guitar, - can feel as lovely as dawn, as beautiful as night, as sensuous as laying in the fields with a lover, listening to the corn grow. Why are we so blessed that this unsophisticated, basic thing is able to touch us? I can think of no answer except that perhaps we were given a gift.

Arthur Russell - "What It's Like". And okay so let's fast-forward to the thousandth day that they lay in the fields. Let's fast-forward to a decade after they first rested in the tall grass. He calls her into the sanctuary. "Kate, I've been touched by the Lord," he says. "I don't need you anymore." This sounds like a horror but really it's just honesty. It's just the truth, grasped at. What follows is sloppy country blues, anguish and confusion, the Reverend rending his clothes and crying, "I didn't know that love would strike me blind". But I think Kate, his lover - she leaves long before the sax solo. She leaves before he begins to weep. Kate, she learned long ago. This is what it's like.

[buy Love Is Overtaking Me, a remarkable collection of songs by Arthur Russell]

---

Elsewhere:

Jez Burrows is now shipping screenprints of his beautiful Destroyer's Rubies "information graphic". But more beautiful still - and I'm very belated in writing about it, - is his and Lizzy Stewart's I Am The Friction. They are stories inspired by drawings & drawings inspired by stories, and while the works are funny and weird and melancholy, more than anything it feels like a love-letter from friend to friend, a shared smile, the kind of collaboration that comes from many hours by the same lamps. It's a handsome thing to hold in your hand, to read and enjoy, but it also makes you long to slip into the moments of its making; eyeglints, gifts, ink on fingers.

Rest in peace, Odetta.