19
Oct
Last night while disinterestedly watching Ringer, I randomly thought to myself, I wonder if there have been any updates on JoniMitchell.com recently? This is the kind of thing I think about when I’m alone. I couldn’t begin to speculate when the last time was that I’d visited the site, but I had the sudden burning need to know if there was any news about Joni. The last thing I’d heard was a few years ago, when Joni announced that she was suffering from some crazy-sounding shit called Morgellon’s Disease, in which you feel fibers trying to poke out from beneath your skin or some such insanity. This did not bode well.
But upon checking out her official website, I discovered that Joni has actually been spotted more in the last few weeks than in the last few years combined! Clearly my years of fandom have bestowed me with some kind of telepathy. The (AMAZING!) photo above, of a very healthy-looking (and fiber-free) Joni standing between Bonnie Raitt and Hilary Clinton, was taken at a recent Los Angeles gala honoring Bill Clinton (the Clintons named Chelsea after Joni’s song “Chelsea Morning”). This picture makes me happy. Click here for more pics of Joni at the gala, and here for a blog entry by Jane Fonda in which she discusses meeting Joni for the first time recently (as well as a pic of them together).
I wish all of this publicity was leading up to new music (her last album, Shine, was released by the Starbucks music label in 2007 and was pretty much a disaster), but according to a filmmaker who asked Joni to appear in a documentary about the Greenwich Village folk scene, she received a message from Joni’s management saying, “Joni wishes you the best of luck, but she doesn’t do anything regarding her career any longer.” WOMAN YOU ARE IMPOSSIBLE.
