Archives for 2014

Missing the Point (or Nearly So)

May 2, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “irony at BBworld,” by user bionicteaching (Tom Woodward) at Flickr.com.
Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

West Wind
(excerpt)

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks — when you hear that unmistakable pounding — when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming — then row, row for your life toward it.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

The History of Poetry

Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel like raising our voices
Just a little, or sometimes during late autumn
When the evening flowers a moment over the western range
And we imagine angels rushing down the air’s cold steps
To wish us well, if we have lost our will,
And do nothing but doze, half hearing the sighs
Of this or that breeze drift aimlessly over the failed farms
And wasted gardens? These days when we waken.
Everything shines with the same blue light
That filled our sleep moments before,
So we do nothing but count the trees, the clouds,
The few birds left; then we decide that we shouldn’t
Be hard on ourselves, that the past was no better
Than now, for hasn’t the enemy always existed,
And wasn’t the church of the world always in ruins?

(Mark Strand [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Laura Nyro

April 30, 2014 by John 3 Comments

Laura Nyro (pronounced Nero): it’s a name I haven’t heard anybody mention in probably forty years. But there was a time when she was it, as a performer but mostly as a songwriter. She looked like a spooky-contemplative Joan Baez — Joan Baez by way of Leonard Cohen — but whether you ever laid eyes on an album cover or not, you knew Laura Nyro.

If you’re of a certain age, the list of big hits she churned out in just a few years, especially for others, seems almost too much to believe: “And When I Die” (Peter, Paul, & Mary, and later Blood, Sweat, & Tears as well); “Blowin’ Away,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Sweet Blindness,” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (the Fifth Dimension); “Stoney End,” (Barbra Streisand); and “Eli’s Comin'” (Three Dog Night)…

Other songwriters who have asserted her influence over them: Ricky Lee Jones, Todd Rundgren, Melissa Manchester, Joni Mitchell, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, and Stephen Sondheim, who said of “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “In economy, lyricism, and melody, it is a masterpiece.” …If you’re interested, go to Google Books and pair her last name in a search with that of just about anyone else writing pop music in the late 1960s-early ’70s. Heck, just put “Nyro” alongside the word “songwriters.” It’s amazing.

One interesting factoid I didn’t know when setting out to create this post: Nyro biographer Michele Kort reports that when Blood, Sweat, & Tears’ lead vocalist Al Kooper left the band, Nyro — encouraged by the band themselves — toyed with the idea of replacing him. That would have been a heck of a potent combination.

Most interestingly, as reported in a 1970 LIFE Magazine story, Nyro could not actually write music. She relied on others to transcribe her tunes to notation:

Musicians, they want to know about the bar, and all of that… and I don’t know any of that. I have my own language. I think of music in terms of colors, and shapes, and textures, and sensory things, and abstractions. But once I have the instruments to work with, I can do a lot of things. You can take a string, and strings can be brazen, or they can be sweet, that can be pale. I would work on textures like that.

As for performing publicly, especially for large audiences, Nyro generally declined opportunities to do so. Reportedly, both The Tonight Show and David Letterman tried (unsuccessfully) to get her to appear on their stages. At the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, she seems to have imagined hearing, among the crowd noise, a chorus of boos — and left in tears. Whether she actually heard them or not — conflicting reports, ambiguous recordings of her performance, all the rest — it marked her for good. (She didn’t appear in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop, but you can see a portion of her set thanks to the Criterion Collection and YouTube. I’ve embedded that clip at the foot of this post.)

She first showed up in a 1968 album of her own, and quit music just four or five years later. For good, she said, and at first she pretty much stuck to her word. She came back a few times in the 1970s and ’80s (including some live albums), but never again hit anything like that early plateau. She died in 1997, not quite 50 years old, of ovarian cancer.

—

Nyro’s voice, like her songwriting and her “vibe,” was sui generis. If you think of that list of hit songs — and the performers who made them hits — you may get a sense of the voice she apparently had in her head when she composed them, which was her own voice. It could soar, pierce through cinderblock dorm walls (as I know from first-hand experience), and her tempos could suddenly zig-zag slower or faster, not always but often catching you by surprise.

I’ve got a selection of four of her songs here today: one a little more offbeat, and three of them probably familiar. The offbeat one has one of my favorite song titles ever, I think (especially for ambiguity): “When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag.”

Of the others, my favorite — the one I can most easily call to mind in her voice, rather than someone else’s — is “Sweet Blindness.” In a song about drinking, you just don’t expect to find complex, subtle words and music:

Oh, sweet blindness
A little magic, a little kindness
Oh, sweet blindness
All over me

Please don’t tell my mother
I’m a saloon and a moonshine lover
Come on baby, do a slow float
You’re a good looking riverboat
And ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

Is that great or what?

(You can find lyrics to “When I Was Freeport…” here; for the others, lots of places around the Web will be happy to serve them up for you.)

[Below, click Play button to begin ‘When I Was a Freeport (etc.)’. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This playlist is just about exactly 13 minutes long.

[audio:wheniwasafreeport_lauranyro.mp3, eliscomin_lauranyro.mp3, stonedsoulpicnic_lauranyro.mp3, sweetblindness_lauranyro.mp3|titles=’When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag’, ‘Eli’s Comin”, ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, ‘Sweet Blindness’|artists=Laura Nyro]

________________________

About the Monterey Pop appearance: You can judge for yourself. The gods know I’m no authority on the interpretation of recorded sound, but I don’t pick up any booing here:

The Truth in Sudden Joy (and Vice-Versa)

April 25, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Interior with Sudden Joy (1951), by American surrealist Dorothea Tanning. This is as reproduced in grayscale for a 1990 Bomb Magazine interview. To see a (smaller) version in color, click on the image; to see the grayscale somewhat larger, click here.]

From whiskey river:

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

(Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems [source])

…and:

I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

[Read more…]

ADMIN: Temporary Site Funkiness

April 24, 2014 by John 5 Comments

The good folks who support the popular WordPress software — used by a bazillion sites, including Running After My Hat — recently introduced a new version. It’s not the first time they’ve done so, not by a long shot, and it’s not even a “major” upgrade.

But it has played holy hell with working on blog posts, for me and many others.

One reason for WP’s popularity is the huge variety of plugins and extensions which independent developers have built for it over the years, to add features to the way blogs run and are built. Another reason is the proliferation of easily installable (and then customizable) themes; think of these as design templates. Put these two reasons together and you’ve got a single big reason why WordPress support can’t identify, in the new version, anything in particular which might be causing problems for bloggers. It seems to work just fine for many… and for many others, it seems to work just catastrophically badly.

I’m somewhere in the middle.But what doesn’t work is driving me crazy.

WP support offers to bloggers the only solution possible under the circumstances: turn off all plugins and extensions, and set aside whatever theme you’re using — falling back on the default theme for the new version. Then add back into the mix each feature you want or need, one at a time, testing how things go before trying the next. When it breaks again, voilà! — you’ve found the source of the offending glitch(es).

IMPORTANT: Note that none of this applies to site visitors. You don’t have to do anything. These instructions apply just to the people who blog with WordPress (create and update posts, design sites, and so on) and are experiencing problems.

As I said, it may be — is — the only solution possible. But it also has the potential to become one tedious slog, during which one familiar feature or another of the site stops working. (Just for starters, as long as the custom theme is disabled, everything will look different — very, very different.) Please bear with me during this time. I will probably start tinkering with this sometime over the weekend. (And — who knows? — maybe the problem will turn out to be something easily fixable.)

—

I do have a couple of advantages in the fight:

First, RAMH certainly doesn’t carry a lot of user traffic. So it’s not like many, many people are going to be inconvenienced.

And second, I’ve been working with software a looooong time. (Just this past March was 35 years.) I’ve got some ideas about how to test and diagnose the problems a little bit at a time, based on the nature of the problems I’m having.

(For example, none of my problems seem to be with the site interface as viewed by visitors/readers — “only” with the admin/behind-the-scenes elements. So it’s unlikely that, say, the little audio-player thingum I use for playing music here needs to be disabled.)

Still, it’s going to be a pain in the rear. I’ll probably create tomorrow’s whiskey river post using some other software, then just copy-and-paste it into the editor here, all at one go. After that, even before, don’t be surprised if something you’re used to seeing at the top right here suddenly disappears, or moves to the bottom of the page, or whatever.

RAMH@6: Discoveries (A Playlist, and a Rumination)

April 20, 2014 by John 15 Comments

[Image: 19th-century drawing by A. Roeseler for “the German Punch,” Fliegende Blätter.
Posted on Flickr by user “digitalsextant.” For the whole three-panel thing, click the image.]

I wondered what I’d write about for Running After My Hat‘s sixth anniversary — because, damn it, I was determined to write about something rather than let it pass completely unremarked.

Before I get into the gist of my answer to that question, I thought I’d offer you up a playlist of a variety of music from posts here. Each link in the below table takes you to the post where it was featured; the links open in a new window or tab, and the corresponding posts almost always include (or link to) lyrics, if appropriate. (If you just want to see the post title and date, hover your mouse over the link without clicking on it.) The songs follow no particular sequence, except that (in my estimation) they sound pretty good in this order.

A little audio-player thingumabob appears below the track listing. Feel free to ignore this, or use it as a soundtrack for what follows.


#	Artist	Song	Time
1	Nicola Benedetti	Concerto for violin and strings in D/”Grosso Mogul” I. Allegro	5:28
2	The Staple Singers	Slippery People (Club Mix)	6:38
3	Lenka	The Show	3:56
4	Ariana Grande	Tattooed Heart	3:15
5	B.B. King	One Shoe Blues	3:15
6	Shook Twins	Rose	2:58
7	Old Crow Medicine Show	Down Home Girl	3:47
8	Rising Appalachia	Swoon	2:30
9	The Black Keys	Lonely Boy	3:13
10	Dominant Legs	Make Time for the Boy	5:12
11	Santana (w/Rob Thomas)	Smooth	2:33
12	Caitlin Rose	Pink Champagne	4:06
13	Emmylou Harris/Rodney Crowell	Spanish Dancer	3:45
14	Big Bad Voodoo Daddy	Mr. Pinstripe Suit	3:39
15	The Rankins	Movin’ On	3:27
16	Carrie Rodriguez	Lake Harriet	3:12
17	Lucky Soul	Upon Hilly Fields	3:55
18	Red Molly	Wayfaring Stranger	5:42
19	Tom Waits	Hold On	5:34

…and here’s the playlist-player doo-dad itself. (Total length of all songs together: ~78 minutes. So, yeah: settle in.)

RAMH@6: Discoveries

[Read more…]

Little Figures, Big Contexts, and the Distance Between Them

April 18, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Video: Ariana Grande, “Tattooed Heart.” I’m probably making people sick of this performance.]

From whiskey river:

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and:

Why We Tell Stories
(excerpt)
for Linda Nemec Foster

I

Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

(Lisel Mueller [source])

[Read more…]

At Root

April 11, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Video: launch trailer for the puzzle game Antichamber. I haven’t played it (yet), but the object
seems to be to keep moving forward — when the answer to the question, “Move forward
from where?” changes constantly. The game’s designer says that it has an end… despite the appearance
(to me) of an edgeless, centerless geometry of edges and centers.*]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Isle of Mull, Scotland

Because by now we know everything is not so green elsewhere.

The cities tied their nooses around our necks,
we let them without even seeing.

Not even feeling our breath soften
as clumps of shed wool scattered across days.

Not even. This even-ing, balance beam of light on green,
the widely lifted land, resonance of moor
winding down to water, the full of it. Days of cows
and sheep bending their heads.

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.

Where else do we ever have to go, and why?

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and:

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

…and:

Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed.

And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be.

I don’t want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” It is never too early, either.

(Anna Quindlen [source])

[Read more…]

The Space That Contains the Stalk I Call Me

April 4, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Homeward Bound,” by Luc De Leeuw on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river gone by:

The irony and tension fade away, and I am home once more. I don’t want to ruminate on happiness. It is much simpler and much easier than that. For what has remained untouched in these hours I retrieve from the depths of forgetfulness is the memory of a pure emotion, a moment suspended in eternity. Only this memory is true in me, and I always discover it too late. We love the gentleness of certain gestures, the way a tree fits into a landscape. And we have only one detail with which to recreate all this love, but it will do: the smell of a room too long shut up, the special sound of a footstep on the road. This is the way it is for me. And if I loved then in giving myself, I finally became myself, since only love restores us.

(Albert Camus [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

The Resemblance Between Your Life And A Dog

I never intended to have this life, believe me —
It just happened. You know how dogs turn up
At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.

It’s good if you can accept your life — you’ll notice
Your face has become deranged trying to adjust
To it. Your face thought your life would look

Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.
That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.
Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,
Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.
You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,

But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.
Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,
Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

In his book On Having No Head, Douglas Harding pointed out that our actual experience of life is of being a stalk, the body, which ends at the chest and shoulders, upon which sits the entire universe. We can’t directly experience ourselves as having a head; we simply assume we are looking out through the eyes in our head because we see others doing that, and when we look in the mirror, that’s what we see. But our experience is of an undifferentiated world of colors, shapes, textures, sounds, feelings and sensations, all existing in one reality, roughly in the spot where we think of our head as being. All that exists, exists on top of the stalk that I call me.

The truly amazing next step in this realization is that the stalk I call me is included in the total existence that extends outward from the top of the stalk. My actual experience is that nothing is separate. I cannot say that any one thing is separate from any other one thing because they all occupy the same space — the space that exists, and contains, the stalk that I call me.

(Cheri Huber)

[Read more…]

Feeling Your Way

March 28, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: cartoon by David Sipress, from The New Yorker (July 31, 2000). Original here.]

From whiskey river:

Goods

It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

298

A monk said, “In the day there is sunlight, at night there is firelight. What is ‘divine light’?”

The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”

(uncredited [source])

[Read more…]

This Just In: Fox, ESPN Bracing for Niffleist Protests

March 23, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

NEW YORK (March 23) Supporters of the National Football League — dubbed “niffleists” — have pledged to “bring baseball to its knees” unless television networks make certain changes in broadcasts of professional baseball games.

The Major League Baseball (MLB) season opens at the end of March. Games are carried by the Fox and ESPN broadcast and cable networks.

“To be fair, I personally haven’t watched a baseball game since 1957,” said unofficial niffleist spokesperson Alfredo de Darque. “We just think it’s past time for the networks to acknowledge that baseball doesn’t have a lock on the word ‘rulebook.'”

When reporters asked what sort of changes in MLB broadcasts niffleists would like to see, de Darque suggested three:

Umpires must wear uniforms featuring vertical black-and-white stripes.
Winning coaches must be doused with Gatorade. (De Darques said, “But we’d accept tins or pouches of chewing tobacco, as long as they’re national brands.”)

And, most controversially:

“Whoever’s holding the ball may be tackled by one or more members of the opposing team.”

Still under consideration by the niffleists: rubberized baseballs. Said one source, “We believe in our hearts that balls designed this way will ‘spike’ much better than the current models.”

De Darque insisted, “Every single one of our rules is just as valid as any of theirs.” When asked if the NFL would accept counter-proposals to introduce baseball rules to football games, he said, “Well, no. Certainly not on Sundays, anyway. They’re sort of sacred to us.”