Some of my favorite musicians are releasing new music very soon (or have released music news of which never made it to me, sigh) so I thought a music post would be nice.

Peter Gabriel's version of David Bowie's Heroes from his album of cover tunes, Scratch My Back & http://www.musicforrelief.org/ for Haiti:

Sade's Solider of Love (which I didn't like at first but it has grown on me considerably).

I wasn't a fan of her early work, but man o man did I wear grooves into the cds of Lover's Rock and Love Deluxe!

The very creative, but delightfully odd, Joanna Newsom The Sprout & the Bean

The indescribable Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds funky Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Haiti Update

Because some of you asked, the man who was trying to reach his pregnant wife did make contact with her. She hurt her leg but is otherwise alright and he is on his way to Haiti.

The woman who didn't hear from her young daughter has heard from her. She and her immediate family members are battered but fine.

Others had cousins, uncles, aunts who died in the quake. Another man told me he had heard that cousins & acquaintances buried in rubble text-messaged from their cell phones that they were alive only to die, still buried, still unrescued.

And Pat Robertson, for all his un-Christlike non-charity, can go to hell.

Pray for Haiti

I am a self-professed info junkie, but the images coming from Haiti have been too awful, too much to bear. I’ve been avoiding them best I can, scanning headlines and catching just the quick bits of details off the various infostreams. How can your heart not break seeing such things?

The good folks at work are collecting for AmeriCares (which is getting 100% of what we collect) while our customers are being so very big hearted and generous as Americans are.

It’s easy for us to get worked up about asking every customer for a donation as this awful event hits home particularly strongly since a number of our fellow employees are from Haiti.

One man told me he has many deaths in his family before walking away, trying to regain his composure. A woman told me she hasn’t heard from her young daughter or parents and had to come to work to get away from thinking about it. Another man, who’s been trying to get a plane to Haiti to find his wife who is 8 month pregnant, told me one day he had 6 bodies waiting for him and the next day he now had 8 bodies waiting for him.

I don’t know how they do it. The anguish is written so deep on their faces, but they go on. I am reminded of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Testing Tree”:

In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

Links:

AmeriCares

AmeriCares on Charity Navigator

Madison Scott Bell’s NYT article Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler

Nothing like a nice clean desktop....

It's the little things in life.