SOUNDTRACK: BUCK CURRAN-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #17 (May 1, 2020).
I’ve never heard of Buck Curran, an American guitarist living in Bergamo, Italy, “the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe.”
Years ago, Curran met Adele Pappalardo while on tour, fell in love and started a family. They have a son about to turn three years old and another child due in August. “We’re trying to survive,” Curran says. “And be positive,” Pappalardo adds. Soon residents in Italy will be allowed to use parks, visit relatives and attend funerals.
This Tiny Desk is blurbed by Lars Gottrich (which explains why I don’t know this guy–Lars travels in the obscure). He sums up the music of Curran perfectly:
There’s a burning darkness to these songs, as Curran’s rough-hewn voice and droning psych-folk melodies curl like smoke, but there’s also a desperate hope that cracks the surface.
His songs are slow and droney without a lot of change ups. Adele sings backing ooohs and aahs on the new “Deep in the Lovin’ Arms of My Babe” and “New Moontide” from 2016’s Immortal Light. I preferred this song because it opened with some lovely guitar harmonics. Although it’s about six minutes long and most of that six minutes sounds the same.
Adele leaves and he plays “Ghost on the Hill” which is getting its debut live performance. He ends with an instrumental, “Blue Raga.” It has some really interesting chord progressions and is my favorite song of the set.
[READ: January 2020] The Soul of an Octopus
S. bought me this book for Christmas because she knows how much I enjoy octopuses (it’s not octopi–you can’t put a Latin ending on a word derived from Greek).
This book was absolutely wonderful.
It opens with Sy explaining that she was heading from her home in New Hampshire to the New England Aquarium. She had a date with a giant Pacific octopus.
She summarizes some of the reasons why octopuses are so cool
Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.
This is all so fascinating to me because when I was a kid, I feel like octopus were boring, scary, purple blobs. Why didn’t we know they were so cool?
Probably because people didn’t know much about octopuses until fairly recently. In fact, we are still learning a lot about them. Like that one three-inch sucker can lift 30 pounds–and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 suckers.
The first octopus she meets is named Athena. She is two and half years old and weighs 40 pounds. Her head is about the size of a small watermelon.
When they open the tank, Athena oozes over to investigate. She is red with excitement and quickly engulfs Sy’s hands with her tentacles. Her suction is gentle but insistent and her her dominant eye swivels to look at her.
That part alone was an amazing thing to read and is something I would just love to experience some day.
Octopuses realize that humans are individuals. They like some people; they dislike others. If they dislike a person they may shoot a jet of salty water at them (they mostly use the funnels for propulsion, but it works well to annoy people as well).
Sy tells us about Sammy, a Pacific octopus in Seattle who was able to open a baseball sized plastic ball that unscrewed. He was also able to screw it back together. When they gave him another toy with parts, he would remove the parts and hand them to the anemone in the tank with him. The anemone would hold on to the pieces for a while, tasting them, and then spit them out.
Speaking of feeding, octopus feed by having their food travel along the length of their tentacles, from outside to in where their beak is. It is presumed they have receptors on all of their suckers so they are tasting the food all the way down to their mouth.
The book is not only about octopuses, though. Sy also introduces us to the several of the staff at the Aquarium. Scientists that she comes to regard as friends–she also relates some of their own personal crises. There’s also a young girl volunteering there. Her personal story is remarkably touching, adding a whole lot of unexpected emotional heft to the book.
There’s also a lot of other creatures in the tank with the octopuses. Sy watches a sunflower sea star come over to where an octopus is being fed. A sea star has no eyes, no face, no brain (as an embryo the sea star starts to grow one, but apparently thinks better of it and instead forms a neural net around the mouth). Amazingly whenever the octopus gets anew toy, the sea star tries to take it away from him. How can creature with no brain want things?
What else is cool in the aquarium? The electric eel which sets off the voltmeter when it sleeps–the eel was dreaming!
Sy relates the story of Marion Britt was the first person to hold the 13 foot long, 300 pound anaconda. The only reason more anacondas don’t attack people is because people tend to stay away from them. When she started at the aquarium, there were three anacondas that no one would touch–their heads had to be restrained if people were to move or care for them. They hated it. Marion learned how to deal with them and the snakes were happier (and gave birth in captivity for the first time).
These wonderful foreign creatures are amazing to behold and Sy’s closeness to them really makes these stories personal. The book, which is so full of wonder and enchantment, is also emotional. When Athena dies (octopus live about 5 years), it is really sad. But, aquariums need new animals, so Athena is soon replaced by Octavia.
Octavia was caught in the wild off the shores of British Columbia and shipped via Fed Ex. She was likely 2 and half years old and didn’t seem to like human company.
After several attempts to get Octavia to interact, she finally did, grabbing Sy and pulling on hr hard. It wasn’t an attack, it was an investigation. After many more visits, Octavia seemed excited to see her.
When Octavia lays scores of eggs, it can mean only one things–she is nearing the end of her life–Octopuses lay eggs soon before they die and they tend to them with all of their last energy before dying They didn’t think Octavia was old enough but she is and that means her time is short.
That means they need a new octopus to replace Octavia. The next octopus she meets is Kali, a baby. Kali’s head is the size of a grapefruit. Kali proves to be friendly (and adorable). But the biggest surprise comes from Kali–when she is found dead unexpectedly. I’m telling you there’s some amazingly emotional moments in this book.
This can only mean a new octopus named Karma.
Also included in the book is the story of the New England Aquarium’s massive renovation (and how they managed to move all of the animals safely). Where do you temporarily store an octopus?
There’s also Sy’s attempts at scuba diving (some good, some not so much). She made me immediately want to scuba dive but when she revealed the troubles that people can have she immediately made me not want to go. I really enjoyed the excitement she felt as she went into the waters for the first time and came across octopuses in their natural habitat.
The book asks the aquarium workers if they think it is right to take octopuses out of the water away from their homes. They believe that it is. We can learn so much more about them in captivity (as we have learned so much about them in just the last few years). They are also much safer in the aquarium. A wild octopus’ life is short and dangerous. The ones who are captured are treated very well.
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