The Propagational Library (5): The Two Gabes

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See the latest installment in the ongoing Propagational Library series, here:

…in which Kali comes calling.

[Note: this installment is longer than the previous ones, for reasons partly to do with content and partly to do with momentum. You may prefer to print it out and read it offline. But it’s still less than 4,000 words long, and it’ll still take you a heck of a lot less time to read than it took me to write. :)]

If you’re unfamiliar with the series at all, you might prefer to start with the Table of Contents/Overview page.

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The Calm at the Core of Disorder

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[Lyrics]

[Video: “Saints & Liars,” by Pony Boy. See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with.

(Jusan Ed Brown)

…and:

A Settlement

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

It’s all a show, a deception. Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all. You give in out of habit. You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat. It is all empty back there. There is only one way to learn this lesson, though. The words on this page won’t do it. But look within and watch the stuff coming up — restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain — just watch it come up and don’t get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.

(Henepola Gunaratana [source])

[Read more…]

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Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer

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[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia]

When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. The mass media hadn’t quite figured out what “mass media” might mean. Television still felt like an extravagance. Pop-culture artifacts from the early decades of the 20th century could still be found lying around in basements and attics, waiting for (re)discovery by kids with maybe a little too much time on their hands.

One such sort of artifact in our household was 78rpm record albums. I have no idea from which side of the family most of these things might have come to us — or, rather, to the cardboard boxes in the second-floor “storage room” and in dark back corners of the basement. If they were Big Band-related, odds were good that they’d arrived trailing in Dad’s wake. But the others…?

We had a couple of records by Arthur Godfrey, for instance, including one on which he and a would-be comic country-singin’ group sang an embarrassing number called “Slap Her Down Again, Paw.” (That was the refrain, in a narrative about an adolescent girl who’d stayed out later than her parents allowed — but finally came in at sunrise.)

And we also had a collection of recordings on a musical instrument called the Novachord.

Like the Mellotron (covered here in a Midweek Music Break some time ago), the Novachord was an experimental keyboard instrument straddling the analog/digital divide. Wikipedia says only about a thousand were manufactured by Hammond (the organ company) between 1939 and 1942; production lapsed during World War II because of the shortage of parts, and never resumed afterwards because, apparently, the thing just hadn’t caught on anyway.

I don’t ever remember Mom or Dad playing the Novachord records on the family hi-fi (or later, stereo). But I listened to them myself, for some reason, and often enough that one song really lodged in my head. The label identified it as “Estudiantina,” a waltz by a composer named Émile Waldteufel. Although (as Wikipedia says) Waldteufel is considered a French composer, he was born in Strasbourg — as German a city as a French city may be, right down to the geography. (And his surname is German, meaning — I love this — forest devil.)

Given all that, maybe it should not surprise that “Estudiantina” — certainly as rendered by the Novachord, in the hands of someone named Collins H. Driggs — has so much a lilting, oomp-pa-pah beer-hall quality:

Maybe the main reason why this performance struck me with such force was that I recognized the tune well before I heard it from the Novachord recording — and even then, when I must’ve been only ten or twelve years old or so, I recognized it for an unlikely reason: it provided the melody to the advertising jingle for (yes!) a Germanic-sounding brand of beer, Rheingold. That’s Miss Rheingold* of 1949 in the ad over there on the right. I can almost hear “Estudiantina” tootling from her concertina, which perhaps sounded much like the Novachord: thin, reedy, and rather, well, burbly. I can even almost hear her singing the jingle — whose words, indeed, included the announcement: My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer…!

Background: When I set out a couple days ago on this general topic, for no reason that I can put my finger on, I had exactly two facts at my disposal:

  • The word “Novachord.”
  • The remembered connection between that old 78rpm record, and the Rheingold jingle.

I certainly couldn’t remember the song title, “Estudiantina.” And I don’t think I’d ever even registered the name of Émile Waldteufel.

But as I continued to think about the recording, I vaguely remembered that the overall album title coupled Novachord somehow with the word magic. It wasn’t Novachord Magic… nor The Magical Novachord… it was… was… was it The Magic of the Novachord?

And folks, I wanna tell you: I just about fell out of my chair when a quick check of Google led me to that very album on iTunes.

I love the Internet.

________________________

* The very first Miss Rheingold, in 1940, was Jinx Falkenburg. (I might have been able to invent that name, but I’d never have had the nerve to use it in a story. Too implausible.) Her autobiography, Jinx, came out in 1951, but apparently went out of print long ago. (Hers, I’d wager, is a potential best-selling story in search of the right biographer or filmmaker, especially in our beautiful-celebrity culture.) There are many pictures of her online (and yes, Jinx appears to have been something of a minx), but one of my favorites is the one at the right. She is here not signing the accordion, as it appears. She’s signing a short snorter. You can be forgiven for not knowing what a short snorter is; according to the site of The Short Snorter Project (where I found the photo), it is:

…a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met. The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920’s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink (a “short snort”, aviation and alcohol do not mix!).

Did I say, I love the Internet?

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Paying Attention to Continuity Traps

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[Found at Basic Instructions]

[Warning to those of you who haven’t already read chapter 4 (“The Room”) in the Propagational Library series: this post contains a spoiler or two.]

As you may know, I’m sort of creating my Propagational Library series on the fly. Which means, among other things: failures — things overlooked in the rush of creation and a quick follow-up editing pass — will be immediately obvious to a dispassionate reader. While working on Saturday’s installment, which involves the effects of a weird high-tech chamber upon a person sitting within, I had what struck me as a cool idea. This is captured in the following passage:

Dolly Burghar, nee Magaziner, sat down on a vinyl-covered stool inside a steel-toothed box… Her husband Matthew flipped a switch, turned a knob, whatever. Two minutes later, the steel box was empty.

Cool! The lady vanishes! But this cool idea presented me with a problem (unseen at the time). Later in the same installment, my protagonist, Gabriel Naude, had to undergo a brief demonstration of the box (which he calls “the room,” in quotes). Even though it was a scaled-down, non-full-power demonstration, I could not afford for him to vanish. Because even later, in an upcoming chapter, he will need to be both inside and outside the box, simultaneously, during a full-scale, sustained use of “the room.” Fixing my problem will involve one and/or two courses of action, when and if I turn this into a real honest-to-gods (and hypothetically) publishable story:

  • I can tinker with the “Dolly Burghar Magaziner” scene, so that she doesn’t disappear (probably by having her “just” die); OR
  • I can figure out some alternative to the later planned scene, with Gabe and Gabe-Prime (let’s call him), so that the one inside the box also disappears.

(From another perspective, you may observe, both of these are Band-Aids — attacking symptoms rather than underlying causes. If I made up my mind to outline the entire story at once, or at least the next few chapters in advance, then possibly I could avoid such lapses. Practically speaking, the likelihood of such a decision on my part approaches zero.)

I’m thinking of this little glitch as evidence of more than just a continuity mistake. It’s a continuity trap: getting snagged on, and dazzled by, some shiny little detail thrown into the pathway by one’s devious subconscious — sufficiently snagged that I lost the thread of what had to happen. It’s like suddenly finding yourself in a room of your home and wondering how you got there… then looking down to see you’ve got an unrecognized ball of aluminum foil crumpled up in your hand. You want to go, Wait wait wait WAIT a damned minute! and start the last three minutes all over again.

________________

P.S. After writing the above, I searched for “continuity trap” to see if I’d invented a new phrase. Fat chance! E.g., this (on continuity traps in film shots). Or this (on continuity traps in comics). Etc., etc.

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The Propagational Library (4): The Room

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See the latest installment in the ongoing Propagational Library series, here:

…in which Gabriel Naude, having learned of the imminent and certain
destruction of Earth and all life, begins to gets a sense of how he may “help.”
(What “help” he can offer, though, remains an unanswered question.)

If you’re unfamiliar with the series at all, you might prefer to start with the Table of Contents/Overview page.

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Conversations, Sacred and Profane

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[Image: photograph of a massive (115″ x 53″) jigsaw puzzle, by Clementoni, of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (also known as Venus and the Bride, but subject to various other interpretations as well). The puzzle contains over 13,000 pieces. I almost used this image instead, for no other reason than (a) the title and (b) its depiction, at the lower right, of the Polish Saint Maximilian Kolbe, canonized in 1982 as the patron saint of drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalists, prisoners, the pro-life movement, and in general — get this — “Our Difficult Century.”]

From whiskey river:

The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.

(Simone Weil [source])

…and:

Transience is the most general phenomenon of the cosmos. Change is the only changeless reality. Seasons, livelihoods, personal relationships — all of these will change. Our experiences in life are transient and relative. Only death is certain, completing the cycle of life that begins with birth. By meditating upon this truth, we recognize that we, too, are manifestations of transience.

When we understand this teaching deeply, we become humble and sincere. We treasure each moment and endeavor to do our best. We feel less stress and become more accepting of the diverse phenomena of life. If something good happens we can feel the joy and be thankful. But we know that the conditions for the situation will not last forever, and we do not become attached to the feeling.

We will simply consider every moment and every experience as a blessing.

(Ilchi Lee [source])

…and:

I asked the river
About its destination
And came out lucky:
It babbled about nothing
And never came to a point

(Gyosen [source])

[Read more…]

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Real-Life Dialogue: Vita Brevis Edition

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[The scene: North Florida, USA, the interior of a car — not their own — currently occupied by a human couple and a micro-canine. It is around 6:00 pm: He and She, with The Pooch, are on their way home from work. They left work early today in order to rent a car (this one) so that they could leave their own car at their mechanic’s for its periodic maintenance the next day: they needed to get to both the car-rental agency and the garage before either place closed at 6. The evening before, they left work early in order to meet with their handyman to discuss the next round of “projects.” This came on the heels of the second weekend in a row on which they had overnight guests, on the weekdays between which they had various medical and other appointments, following weeks of, well, more or less the same. And it came before a day on which two medical appointments were scheduled, as well as the need — of course — to return the rental car and pick up the owned one before either place closed at 6.]

He: Did you read my Facebook status update today?

She: You posted something on Facebook? But no. I almost never look at Facebook during the day.

He: Oh.

She: Well, what did it say?

He: I forget the exact wording. It was long, I remember. Something like “I’d really like to have a single week, just a straight seven days, when nobody in the household has any doctor or vet appointments, handyman or other home-improvement projects, holidays, overnight guests, car repairs, laundry to do, overslept alarm clocks, power or Internet outages, computer problems…”

She: So what you’re saying is, you don’t want life.

He: Huh?

She: Life. All of that is just life. You don’t want any of it.

He: No. I’m not saying I don’t want any of it for good — forever. I just want a single, simple week of—

She: And why do you care if I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, or if The Pooch has to go to the vet or the groomer?

He: What do you mean, why do I care? Of course I care if you’ve got to see a doctor or if she—

She: It doesn’t affect you.

He: Of course it does. We’ve only got one car. We do this thing several times a week where we have to meet up during the day just to hand the car off, or one of us has to stay home to meet with a service person, or we’ve both gotta leave work early or get to work late because—

She: It’s life. Those things happen.

[Time passes. They get home, watch a little TV, read the mail, rough-house with The Pooch, fix dinner. As they’re preparing their separate dinner plates at the kitchen counter, She suddenly speaks, from behind Him.]

She: Damn it.

He: What?

[He turns to see what the problem is. She is trying to tug a napkin from the holder — just one napkin. She does not succeed. A dozen napkins come with the napkin She’s tugging on, and apparently leap from the napkin holder to drift, like unseasonable maple leaves, to the floor.]

He: A little, mmm… problem? [He bends to pick up the napkins from the floor.]

She: I was trying to take a single napkin. And then this—

He: Y’know, that’s life. Things happen.

She: [Pause for dramatic effect, and to see if He will look at Her; He will not. However, His shoulders are shaking and snorts issue from beneath his mustache.] You know, if you were a little closer I’d slap you.

 

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Midweek Music Break: The Essex, “Easier Said Than Done”

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In 1961, a couple of US Marines stationed in Okinawa — Rodney Taylor and Walter Vickers — formed a vocal duo with the slightly odd name “The Essex.” Shortly thereafter, they were reassigned to Camp LeJeune in North Carolina; there, they added a couple of their fellow leathernecks, Billy Hill and Rudolph Johnson. They even encountered a woman Marine performing in the base club for non-commissioned officers; they liked the way her voice sounded, and convinced her to join their act.

Still on active duty, the quartet (Johnson left after a few months) set out to polish their routines, eventually recording a demo tape of ballads to send around to the big-name labels. Roulette Records expressed interest in recording them — they’d have to audition, of course, but if that went well… Except for one thing: what song to audition with? The problem, see, was that Roulette specifically asked for something a little snappier than the ballads on the demo.

Vickers had a friend, William Linton, who worked in the base communications office. Linton claimed to be a songwriter, so they asked: Could he come up with something suitable for their audition? Together with another friend, Larry Huff, Linton cobbled together a short little thing called “Easier Said Than Done.”

At the audition, as it happened, they didn’t perform “Easier Said Than Done.” (The group themselves didn’t much care for it, in fact.) The Roulette producers liked their sound nonetheless, and agreed to release their first single, called “Are You Going My Way?” For the flip side of the single, they requested — yes — “Easier Said Than Done.” But now The Essex had another problem: although they’d recorded fragments of the song, they’d never recorded a full-length version — even just a couple minutes long, the bare minimum for a 45rpm recording.

Out of the editing room emerged the “B” side, spliced together from multiple takes and pieces into a single, barely-two-minutes-plus chunk… And that pastiche, maybe needless to say, quickly swept the record’s “A” side into oblivion.

“Easier Said Than Done” is one of my favorite oldies, for its sheer crackling energy. No wonder it’s got that energy: the rhythm, Linton maintained, came from that of a teletype machine in the office. I also love the way the lyrics — mostly monosyllables — fit so well into every little niche of the music, and Humes’s delivery taps them into place there. Yet I think it’s also got one of the most disappointing finishes of any oldie. Before I knew the above story about the splicing-and-cutting, I’d always thought it sounded like the songwriters, exhausted by what came before, had simply run out of gas on the last line.

Anyway, here’s 1963’s “Easier Said Than Done,” by The Essex. The teletype rhythm — close to the actual sound — is in the insistent background duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh (bass? rhythm guitar?) playing behind the other instruments and vocals.

[Lyrics]

The Essex didn’t hang around together for more than a couple of years before their military schedules forced them to head in different directions. And after “Easier Said Than Done,” their sales pretty much spiraled downhill; that hit had sat comfortably at Billboard’s slot for two weeks, but their next best-seller, “A Walkin’ Miracle,” made it –briefly, a couple months later — only to #12. (A 1995 “Best of” compilation somehow pulled together a couple dozen songs, but I don’t recognize any of the others; of the 24, five are identified on the back of the album as “previously unissued tracks.”) Anita Humes attempted a solo career, but that never really came together, either.

Only one other song I know of includes a background like this one: a so-called “Light Classical” piece, 1950’s “The Typewriter Song,” which literally uses that “instrument” with an orchestra of more conventional ones. (Its composer, Leroy Anderson, also composed “The Syncopated Clock,” the Christmas hit “Sleigh Ride,” and other just-short-of-novelty pieces.) Here’s the Boston Pops and a brief version of “The Typewriter Song,” YouTubed over images of… well, you can probably guess:

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The Propagational Library Series Overview/Table of Contents

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For anyone interested, I’ve set up a whole separate  RAMH area (as it were) just for stuff about the Propagational Library series I recently started. The main impetus was realizing that every new installment needed to include links to all the previous installments, which seemed crazy even (or especially) to my fussbudget self. So the new series overview includes a Table of Contents, right at the top. Each future installment will contain a “Previous” link to the ONE which preceded it, and when I add a new installment I’ll add a “Next” link at the foot of the preceding one.

The overview also includes a bit of woolgathering background about the series in general.

Note, too, that the main navigational menu on every page at the site now includes (at the top right) a link to the overview:

Presumably this will force me to continue the series for a while. :)

 

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The Propagational Library (3): A Barrel of Monkeys

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[Here by accident? You might want to first read what came before: Introduction, Chapter 1: The Finding, and Chapter 2: Kali.]

Gabe knew, by now, he had little chance of returning productively to the darkroom for the rest of the afternoon and evening. He was a little hungry, not remotely famished (and not at all sure he saw the point in eating, maybe ever again). But he told the Lanes of a WorldKitchen a few blocks away which offered good delivery service; it specialized in Kazakh and Samoan cuisines, as well as the rest of the chain’s full menu. If they wanted, they should feel free to order something and have it brought here, on Gabe’s tab. (Later, he’d think how funny that must have sounded — offering to pay a fast-food check for Matthew freaking Burghar‘s daughter and son-in-law.)

Then, on the pretext of cleaning up some chemicals he’d left open, he went downstairs to the basement and into the darkroom. There he switched on the safelight, extinguished the overhead CCFLs, and sat on the stool in the murky half-light to gather his thoughts.

By the time the doorbell rang — the WorldKitchen delivery — he’d returned upstairs, made vague, forgettable small talk with the Lanes, and sharpened his questions. The tins of darkroom chemicals downstairs remained open.

—-

[Continue reading here.]

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