Alluvial Gold via YouTube

Being a longtime bliss-ninny I've spent a lifetime panning for peak-experience Gold in the alluvial deposits of culture. Anything to stave off despair - despair wrought of misspent time, energy and materials. The world's and mine.

YouTube is a particularly rich cache of nuggets because, as we all now know, it's an enormous deposit collected by other bliss-ninnys - some discerning, and some not so.

I can't say I've ever found anything that remotely approaches the despair-defying amperage of this recording of Dionne Warwick - performing Alfie for German TV and a live audience. There's so much crackling -some would say divine- energy coursing through and radiating from Warwick that, toward the tune's conclusion, she can be seen sensuously rubbing her hands together as if to pleasure herself with her own charge-carrying corona. Or shedding excess electro-magnetic plasma in anticipation of more to come at the songs climax.

Oddly enough, some of the best amplified blues performances ever recorded were taped in Germany. Could it be that our best black performers, when they go abroad to perform, blossom beneath a rain of popular and critical acclaim. The kind of unconditional love and acclaim they are harder pressed to come by in their country of origin.