A Right to Sing the Blues

Here's a real classic, not surprisingly best performed by Billie holiday, although I like this chill Maxine Sullivan version too: I've gotta right to sing the blues / Gotta a right to moan and sigh / Gotta right to sit and cry / Down around the river.

I do too, gotta right to sing the blues at Vera Korman's farewell party, sitting on the dark Jaffa beach among burning candles, with salt in my hair and a glass of Methode Champagnoise in my hand. I Gotta right to sing the blues even at Guy Yanay's birthday party, laying on a floating mattress in the middle of a decadent Herzliya Pitu'ach swimming pool, with pretty girls dancing to Khaled on the grass nearby, brochettes of grilled lamb held in their slender fingers.

I gotta right to sing the blues standing inert at night by the railing of the stage at Barzilai, looking down at hundreds of bodies as they shift dreamily to dub music. I gotta right to moan and sigh waking up in the morning, logging on to Lin's blog and finding out that I'm dead. she killed me or whatever was her old concept of me as part of her process of moving on. On the same morning I get a beautiful letter from the coast of British Columbia, it contains the word "sodade".

Sodade
Sodade
Sodade,
Dess nha terra Sao Nicolau

Sodade - a Cape-Verdean slave's longing, the purest known form of the blues. So I'm not really close to death this morning, but nor am I at all very close to British Columbia, Jaffa's Khooni coffee gives me heartburn and crumbles of Halva in the fridge go too well with it and the day outside is just too goddamned sunny and overly friendly. What to make of all the good stuff not seeming so good? what to make for lunch? Drop it, go get some hummous. It suits this day, say what you choose / I've gotta right to sing the blues.