In the News – Page 11

The Mutable (and Not Mutually Exclusive) Real

July 17, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Chameleon,” by Johannes Stötter. For more information, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

I would argue that if consciousness exists, it can’t be obliterated; thus we borrow from consciousness in order to become (to get an identity), and we return what we borrow as egos to the greater conscious field when we die, so that’s what happens to “us.” The real question then is the fate not of our consciousness but of our personal identity.

You know, science’s definition of us is that a light goes on, a light goes off, and it wasn’t even a light, but that’s like not existing at all. And we do exist — in the sense that we are not just interdependent with everything else in the universe; we are everything else in the universe, and ourselves too. That’s why we exist at all, why we have a personal identity. Likewise we are not just everything else in the universe; we are one probabilistic form even of ourselves. At each moment, all of our other selves, making different choices and experiencing themselves differently exist elsewhere as well as in deep latency in us, and in states just as physical as ours. They bail us out of this mess, but we bail them out of their messes. We support one another eternally. The light we share never goes on, never goes off, and that’s the Soul.

(Richard Grossinger [source])

…and:

This Might Be Real

How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?

(Sarah Manguso [source])

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Weekend Music Break/What’s in a Song: Various Artists, “The Skye Boat Song”

July 11, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: opening title sequence from the Outlander television series]

The Missus and I have been watching, with pleasure, the Starz TV adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels. The pleasure is personal, since we both know Ms. Gabaldon. (As we have since her first drafts of individual paragraphs in what would become the first of the book series, twenty-five years ago.)

And the pleasure is also aesthetic, I guess you could say — of particular interest, today, the music.

When I first heard the Outlander theme song, I was dazzled — the lyrics, melody, arrangement, and accompanying visuals during the open credits: all seemed of a piece. Mysterious, mystical, wistful… all those adjectives that I thought to apply as well to (say) the closing title theme in The Return of the King.

Here are the lyrics:

Sing me a song of a lass that is gone,
Say, could that lass be I?
Merry of soul she sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

Sing me a song of a lass that is gone,
Say, could that lass be I?
Merry of soul she sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye…

It fits the story, sorta-kinda, and features a disappearing lass, and lots of rich imagery. (Outlander‘s protagonist is a 1940s-era British nurse who falls through a sort of temporal discontinuity into the Scotland of the 1740s.) From the start, I — grammar nerd alert! — liked about the theme that the lyricist used the first-person singular pronoun for those end-rhymes… exactly as s/he should have.

But then during the season finale episode, one thing suddenly grated on me. They hadn’t used “I” consistently perfectly. Last line of the middle stanza: see it? a subjective me. ARGH. You lazy bastards, I thought. And you were doing so well…

As one does, over the next day or two I looked to the Internets for support from others outraged by such minutiae.

…and, um, well… I was wrong. (Sorta-kinda.)

—

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Mother’s Day Music Break: Sinatra – All or Nothing at All

May 9, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

Sinatra, 1970s -- maybe even the farewell concert

Something a little different for me for a Sunday… I’d like to open it by welcoming the lady herself, should she find her way here. Happy Mother’s Day (again), my iPadding and supposedly [N]-year-old Mom!

This playlist consists of twenty-one Sinatra recordings. I’ll explain my reasons for their selection and sequence later in this post. For now, let’s just set the music going, shall we?

Per usual with these RAMH mixes, the little audio-player thingamabob follows the playlist itself, below.

Here we go:

sinatra: all or nothing at all / mother’s day 2015 edition
— 1971 “farewell” concert set list —
#	Title	Album	Time
1	All or Nothing at All	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	3:45
2	I’ve Got You Under My Skin	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	3:33
3	I’ll Never Smile Again	The Best of Tommy Dorsey	3:12
4	Ol’ Man River	The Concert Sinatra (Expanded Edition)	4:25
5	That’s Life	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra
6	Try a Little Tenderness	Romance: Songs from the Heart	3:21
7	Fly Me to the Moon	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	2:30
8	Nancy (With the Laughing Face)	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	3:40
9	My Way	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	4:38
10	The Lady Is a Tramp	Classic Sinatra: Great Performances 1953-1960	3:16
11	Angel Eyes	Romance: Songs from the Heart	3:44
— bonus tracks —
12	Put Your Dreams Away	Greatest Hits	3:14
13	(Love Is) The Tender Trap	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	2:35
14	A Foggy Day	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	2:17
15	In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	2:47
16	It Was a Very Good Year	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	4:27
17	Love and Marriage	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	2:13
18	One For My Baby	Classic Sinatra: Great Performances 1953-1960	4:27
19	Strangers in the Night	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra
20	The Way You Look Tonight	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	3:22
21	Young at Heart	The Very Best of Frank Sinatra	2:54

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Knowing What You’re Looking At, Unsure of What You See

May 8, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: the image being discussed here — in which Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe somehow occupy the same face, morphing into each other depending on how closely you’re observing it — has been making its way around the Internets for a while now. The explanation comes to us courtesy of a YouTube channel called ASAP Science, “Your weekly dose of fun and interesting science.”]

From whiskey river:

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives — often surprising to you — helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others.

(David Eagleman [source])

…and:

Ordinary Days

The storm is over; too bad, I say.
At least storms are clear
about their dangerous intent.

Ordinary days are what I fear,
the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun

shining while a government darkens
a decade, or a man
falls out of love. I fear the solace

of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.
Someone is singing
in Portugal. Here the mockingbird

is a crow and a grackle, then a cat.
So many things
happening at once. If I decide

to turn over my desk, go privately wild,
trash the house,
no one across town will know.

I must insist how disturbing this is—
the necessity
of going public, of being a fool.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

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Book Review: Galore, by Michael Crummey

April 13, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

The bookish audience includes enough people, of sufficient diversity, that someone has surely been wondering, roughly, “Why don’t they ever publish any sweeping family epics anymore — spanning multiple generations, in some out-of-the-way location? The Australian outback, say? Or Mongolia, or the Argentine pampas? Or — heck, why not Newfoundland?!?”

I’ve never counted myself among the audience for that sort of fiction, so I’ve never asked a question like that — even rhetorically. Historical fiction proper? Oh, sure, that: I do like to read on occasion about a handful of characters in some (real or imagined) past time.

But big, sprawling family sagas too often seem (to me, from the outside) entirely too, well, Biblical. There’s a lot of begetting going on, of course — offstage if not on the page — so you’ve got a large cast of characters, and a lot of tangled relationships, and often big and actual historical events looping through and around all these private lives, and you’ve got to carry it all around in your head at once because at any given moment you may need to know that Daisy was Dorrie’s granddaughter — that’s Daisy, Doris’s daughter, the one married to Darryl, remember? the one with the misspelt tattoo reading “Darren” which was really awkward because Darren was actually her first and dearest (but now long deceased) love as opposed to Darryl, who was merely the most durable…

So what, then, was I doing reading Michael Crummey’s Galore?

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Revelatory Satisfactions

April 3, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: This is apparently not — as I’d thought — an observatory in Chile. Any of them. Rather, it’s atop Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. (More info here.) Duh. Photo by user Alan L, on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons License. (Click image to enlarge.)]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Such Singing in the Wild Branches

It was spring
and finally I heard him
among the first leaves—
then I saw him clutching the limb

in an island of shade
with his red-brown feathers
all trim and neat for the new year.
First, I stood still

and thought of nothing.
Then I began to listen.
Then I was filled with gladness—
and that’s when it happened,

when I seemed to float,
to be, myself, a wing or a tree—
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying,

and the sands in the glass
stopped
for a pure white moment
while gravity sprinkled upward

like rain, rising,
and in fact
it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing—
it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed

not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers,
and also the trees around them,
as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds
in the perfectly blue sky—all, all of them

were singing.
And, of course, yes, so it seemed,
so was I.
Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn’t last

for more than a few moments.
It’s one of those magical places wise people
like to talk about.
One of the things they say about it, that is true,

is that, once you’ve been there,
you’re there forever.
Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?

Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.

(Kevin Brockmeier [source])

…and:

Magic

We were talking about magic
as we drove along a crowded
Sunday highway

when the whirl of wings
made me turn
and a flock of geese
flew over our car
so low I could see
their feet tucked under them.

For a moment the rustle
of their presence over our heads
obscured everything

and as they disappeared
you said,
“I see what you mean.”

(Jenifer (“Sudie”) Nostrand [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Lynn Tomlinson, “The Ballad of Holland Island House”

April 1, 2015 by John 1 Comment

Says artist (and lyricist) Lynn Tomlinson at her site:

I came across the haunting image of a house standing alone in the water in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. Reading more about this house, I was struck by its story, and its relevance today, when so many communities are facing challenges from sea-level rise. The images I chose and the visual style reflects the artwork of Winslow Homer, Van Gogh, and Kathe Kolwitz, artists working in the late 1800s, the time period when the house on Holland Island was abandoned.

This video’s construction involved much more than that brief paragraph suggests: each frame was hand-painted in clay — not oil, watercolor, gouache, or other traditional medium — on glass. I’ll give you a moment to think about that — especially about the relationship between art and artifice, between real and ideal, between temporary and permanent, natural and man-made, and then and now…

On this page at a site called Sometimes Interesting, you can read many details about the island and its last house, with many photos (including what appear to be the last known photos before the house’s collapse beneath the waves). Wikipedia, of course, offers its own useful summary.

My favorite “fact”: Holland Island is not an island of rocky protrusions; it’s an island of clay and silt. Although Tomlinson does not (to my knowledge) say so explicitly, it’s hard not to draw a dotted line between that geology and the physical media at the heart of the visual one.

(Tomlinson’s film won 1st place in the Greenpeace USA “Postcards from Climate Change” Student Film Contest. And as you can see from the still frame of the Vimeo video about, it’s picked up a good number of other awards as well.)

—

Aside from the work of the animation itself, Lynn Tomlinson wrote the ballad’s lyrics. The music and the performance, though, are courtesy of a roots-music/Americana duo going by the name Anna & Elizabeth (surnames Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle, respectively). Their joint mission, says their Web site:

WE HOPE THAT OUR WORK

BRINGS LIGHT to old ballads, tunes, hymns, and the stories of everyday people.

HONORS the lives & creativity of those who have gone before us — ancestors, pioneers, friends, and dear teachers

PASSES THE TRADITION to a younger generation & encourages friendships across generations

INSPIRES people to make art in their own homes.

JOINS conversations with other artists & community makers — in learning how to create art that feeds, that brings people together to sing, dance, and ask the difficult questions.

Which, you might say, is a mighty big chunk of ambition to bite off. Nonetheless, they’re making a pretty sizable dent in it. A couple weeks ago, they released their second album of reimagined “old-timey” music. They are touring over the next several months, performing at venues up and down the east coast of the US, the Midwest, the Northwest; in the UK; in Canada.

Finally, both relevant and not to be sneered at: Anna & Elizabeth are aficionados of an old, old art form called “crankies.” Picture a story or ballad — a story song — told visually, by way of a series of consecutive panels… which are joined together in a looooong roll and hand-cranked through a frame to illustrate or comment on the passing scene and moments.

Not only their sweet-harmony performances and musical tastes, but also this affinity for frame-at-a-time storytelling, make them the perfect accompanists for Lynn Tomlinson’s video.

What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (3)

March 8, 2015 by John 15 Comments

Snippet from 'Goodnight, Irene' sheet music

[Image: snippet of “Goodnight, Irene” sheet music as commonly appearing around the Web. Yeah, John E. Lomax, co-author: like, Sorry about that, Huddie — you were a great chauffeur!]

My two earlier posts on this song (parts 1 and 2) packaged up, in short form, what I could learn of its early history. In this final installment, I thought I’d dwell on a few of the many versions of “Goodnight, Irene” recorded since Lead Belly first delivered it to John A. and Alan Lomax in the 1930s.

First up: let’s hear from Lead Belly himself.

As much as any song did, “Goodnight, Irene” (or as he first referred to it, simply “Irene”) became Lead Belly’s signature song. He never made much money from it — in fact, the Lomaxes were named as “co-authors” of the song at first, and as a result probably made more from it than Lead Belly himself. (He died in 1949 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more or less flat broke.) Nor did it become much of a “hit” in any version he recorded; I have no way of knowing for sure, but at a guess I’d say that the rawness of his performance style never had a chance of joining the Hit Parade.

After his final release from prison — the Lomax legend says it was thanks to their intervention with the authorities, almost certainly overstating their influence — Lead Belly went to work as a chauffeur for them. This gave him a chance to see much more of the wider world than he probably could have found on his own. Poet E.M. Schorb paints a good quick picture of this phase of Lead Belly’s life, in this excerpt from his poem titled “Leadbelly”:

Even the Lomax bros, even them white boys,
they know Irene—you driving them through
New York traffic, them folkloring in back and you
being their folkloring black chauffeur.
You drink sharp liquor in Harlem, play
with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie
McGhee, the Headline Singers—radio too,
Hollywood and Three Songs by Leadbelly,
a French tour…

(Note: Schorb’s reference to the Lomax brothers isn’t 100% correct, since John A. Lomax was Alan’s father; to my knowledge, Leadbelly never chauffeured for John Jr. and Alan.)

As the poem indicates, among the performers he got to meet, befriend, and record with was the great blind blues harmonicist Sonny Terry. However, the 1943 version of “Irene” credited to the two of them together doesn’t — to my ear — feature Terry at all. (The album on which the song appeared did include Terry’s obvious contributions, and mentioned his name in the title; I’m guessing that’s the only reason his name is on this specific recording.)

[Read more…]

What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (2)

February 28, 2015 by John 6 Comments

[Part 1 of this series is here.]

I’d heard The Weavers’ “sad, wistful” closing notes of “Goodnight, Irene.” I’d forgotten about the song for thirty-some years, but then decided (I did know of the song, after all) to make it the subject of a post here. A simple Midweek Music Break post, at that — not a full-blown What’s in a Song monster…

And finally, after researching it some, and researching it some more, I’d actually found and listened to a recording — the first — of Lead Belly singing it for John A. Lomax in 1933.

Here it is again, so you don’t have to go back to the earlier post just for it:

As I said at the end of Part 1, this confused the heck out of me. Far from the poignant I’ll see you in my dreams of The Weavers’ version, the narrator sounds as though he’s threatening to get her in his dreams. So much for the implied sigh, hmm?

Luckily for me, Lomax — who called the song simply “Irene” at the time, probably because Lead Belly did — transcribed the lyrics then. The complete song which Lead Belly eventually recorded went like this, per Lomax’s 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly:

Irene

[chorus]
Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight
Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene,
I’ll kiss you in my dreams

Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I haves a great notion,
To jump in the river and drown.

Last Saturday night, I got married,
Me and my wife settled down
Now me and my wife have parted,
Gonna take me a stroll uptown

I loves Irene, God knows I do,
I loves her till the sea runs dry
And if Irene turns her back on me,
I’ll take morphine and die.

Quit your rambling, quit your gambling
Quit your staying out late at night,
Go home to your wife and your family
Sit down by the fireside bright.

I was wrong about that get, then: kiss, like The Weavers’ see, is all nice and sentimental. [But see the note, below.] So it was sad and dreamy after all—

But sheesh: chorus aside, the actual verses… We’ve got a guy who seems to have casually left his wife of less than a week, for what? for the life of a rambling man, maybe sometimes living with her and sometimes alone? But he still and presumably forever will carry a torch for her — to the extent of threatening suicide (by drowning, by morphine overdose) if he ever thinks she’s given up on him…

What the heck kind of song was this, anyway?

[Read more…]

What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (1)

February 21, 2015 by John 5 Comments

I haven’t done a post in this series for a long, long time. This one, in fact, began life as a Midweek Music Break — or so I thought — a year ago. But then things happened…

[Image: an interesting excerpt from the 1910 census records for Harrison County, Texas. Click the image to view the whole width of the census page, squeezed into your browser window; click here to see it really enlarged.]

When I heard “Goodnight, Irene” for the first time, I had no idea what I was hearing. It was one of those random drive-by TV moments, back in the early 1980s — the dark middle period of purposeful TV viewing: that period during which you might catch a scrap of something wonderful as you monkeyed with the (circular) channel selector, but if you hadn’t known about the show in advance, well, sorry pal — it was already gone.

The show in question was a PBS documentary about a folk-singing troupe, The Weavers. I didn’t know much about them; they’d peaked in the public eye years before I started paying anything like real attention to music. (Among their founding members, in 1940: Pete Seeger — bottom left in the photo over there, with the banjo. Him, I certainly recognized, but only as a solo performer.) By the time the documentary was made, the surviving members were elderly, and the Carnegie Hall concert it featured would be their last performance together.

So anyhow, the show is playing on the TV. Because I’ve tuned to this channel late in the program, almost the very end, their last song — the bittersweet finale — is almost done. In fact, I catch only the very last chorus:

Good night, Irene
Good night, Irene
I’ll see you in my dreams…

Huge applause from the Carnegie audience; a jumble of emotions fluttering over the faces of the performers.

What a sweet and wistful song, I think to myself. And then for thirty years I forget all about “Goodnight, Irene.”

In all that time, I knew the song was out there somewhere; those closing lines had stuck in my head, see? But it was gone, until I decided to make it the subject of (so I thought) a Midweek Music Break here…

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