Via some very clever multi-tracking, audiences in seven cities sing Ben Folds and Nick Hornby’s “A Working Day” sorta-kinda “together”:
(You might also want to see the Huffington Post‘s recent interview with Folds, about the video and other things.)
Archives for July 2011
What’s in a Song/Midweek Music Break: “Blue Skies”
Few people remember the short-lived 1926 musical Betsy anymore, although its music and lyrics came from powerhouse songwriting duo Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. There’s a reason few people remember it: Rodgers and Hart had written nothing memorable for it. (A Hart-related site calls it “a beautifully mounted mess, top-heavy with ensemble numbers in the Ziegfeld fashion.” Among those numbers, for instance, was a performance by someone called the Harmonica Symphony Orchestra. Umm, okay.)
Few people remember its star, either, one Belle Baker. (That’s her over at the right.) But at the time, she was enough of a force that when she didn’t care for the music, she could simply ignore the show’s — and the show-business — realities… and, in Act 2 on opening night, just start singing a song which Rodgers and Hart themselves hadn’t written. To say they were surprised probably understates the case. [*]
The surprise was “Blue Skies,” written by Baker’s friend Irving Berlin. Apparently he’d been kicking it around in his head for some time, just hadn’t had the proper occasion to commit it to permanent form. Baker’s complaints about her solos in the show gave him that occasion.
It was an immediate hit. Reportedly, the audience on that opening night so loved the song that they required twenty-four encores of it. For her part, Baker was delighted but also a little unnerved; says Wikipedia (alas, without attribution for the moment):
During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row.
I bet that moment really tickled Rodgers and Hart!
Spacestruck
[Video: “The Voyager Interstellar Record,” a YouTube playlist of all the sounds on the so-called “golden record” sent into space with the two Voyager interstellar spacecraft. For more information, see the note below.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Lost in the Cosmos:
The Last Self-Help Bookor
The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos
or
How can you survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians
or
Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?
or
Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life
[etc.]
(Walker Percy, from Lost in the Cosmos [source])
…and:
II
Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.
(Diane Ackerman, from “We Are Listening,” in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter [source])
