Regular whiskey river Friday post coming up shortly. In the meantime, in case you haven’t seen it already, another of those going-/gone-viral instant Web sensation videos to put a Friday grin on your face:
To begin, if you don’t already know of the songwriter/performer Jason Mraz and his song “I’m Yours,” you might want to watch this:
With or without watching that one, though, you need to watch this one:
[This is Part 2 of a two-part series about the song “Cry Me a River,” made popular, originally, in a recording released in 1955. Part 1, about the song’s history, appeared a few days ago. As I indicated there, if you hope to learn anything from this about the Justin Timberlake song of the same title, you should proceed down the street and rattle the next doorknob.]
You hear the expression every now and then: Party A is complaining bitterly about the course his life has taken, or about the weather, or about the cancellation of a favorite TV show… whatever. The complaint falls upon the ears of Party B, an especially unsympathetic listener, who often has what B believes to be even sorrier woes. B sneers and says something like: Yeah, yeah — all right. Cry me a river, why dontcha.
One measure of the phrase’s popularity: the Urban Dictionary offers no fewer than three user-supplied definitions and colorful examples (not counting references to any songs by that title; the following is copied and pasted unchanged from the UD, so brace yourself for offenses to the Mother Tongue and good taste):
to tell a moaning person to shut up and that you dont care.
your cat got ran over and your giro is late, Cry me a river love!
…an expression that means i’ve been through worse, you’re being a drama queen
person: omg my chihuahua is sick
you: cry me a river loser both of my dogs are dead.
Said in response to some ones sob story. Shortened from the full statement of “Cry me a river, build a bridge and GET THE FUCK OVER IT!”
Very old saying predating any Justin Timberflake warbles or other pop culture references. Interestingly still in common use today.
Whinger: My cars broken down and Im poor and I lost my job and my wife left me and when she left, she ran over my dog.
Cold Hard Bastard: Cry me a river buddy, cry me a river.
Whatever the specifics: Isn’t that a great metaphor?
At the Yahoo! Answers UK site, one poster provided my favorite creative explanation (an example, btw, of a mondegreen) for the phrase’s origin:
It’s actually ‘Crimea River’. An English soldier was writing home during the Crimean war and wrote “It’s terrible being away from home. I miss you all. I hate this Crimea River, it’s so dirty and depressing, but it’s the only water we have”. When his wife read it out loud to his children, they mistook the words for Cry Me A River and not Crimea River.
Source(s):
My very own Great Grandpa.
As for covers of the song, other than Julie London’s, since its official publication in 1953…
[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]
On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.
But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…
(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)
Here’s the story:
…at least until the next revival: are werewolves the next It Creatures?
I have not read the Twilight series of books. But as I understand it, the new film, New Moon, features some sort of apocalyptic face-off between the vampires — brooding Edward and his ilk — and the werewolves.
(This premise seems to me to have been lifted from the Underworld series, starring Kate Beckinsale — but those films no doubt lifted from some other source, and so on, and so on. For a genre so heavily featuring the uselessness of mirrors, the supernatural-near-human-monster films seem to indulge in an awful lot of self-reflection.)
Anyway, I just learned of the impending (February 2010) release of a remake of the old Universal Horror film The Wolf Man, starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo Weaving.
Bobby McFerrin is brilliant. (And so are his audiences. It’s just that he’s the one onstage.)
[Hat tip to Janet Reid.]
An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot of this post, for those of you who don’t know of it — or just want to see it again.
I remembered this skit this morning, after an episode of complicated human-canine choreography. (A cat was involved as well, peripherally — and perhaps in confusion.)
The Missus and I share one car, which works well for us (with some periodic adjustments) maybe 97% of the time. But boy, that remaining 3% is a killer, and today definitely fell into the 3% basket. Without getting into the details, here’s what had to happen:
The solution I came up with: I’d stay home with Sophie until The Missus got back with the car; this would help keep Sophie calm, or at least distracted. And because that part of the plan required separating dog and housecleaner as much as possible, we’d stay isolated in the upstairs offices (which we clean ourselves). And that part of the plan required that I get not just Sophie, but all her… her appurtenances upstairs with us. (This would be the same upstairs area where our dog-phobic cat lives, by the way. And where Sophie never visits, therefore, except accidentally.)
Some of the appurtenances involved:
I also needed to take my shower and get dressed for work, pack up the various bags we bring with us each day, get a few things out of the housecleaner’s way, leave a note for her on the front door so she wouldn’t be freaked out by the footsteps and (probable) barking and yelping and reprimanding and pleading overhead, write a check for her, be sure I had a bottle of water for myself — and ditto my Blackberry, to keep me entertained (on the Web) while, as I hoped, Sophie would be entertaining herself.
I had one hour to do all the above. And I wanna tell you, I was sweating when done.
And you know what? If you want to completely reverse the behavior of a hyperactive little dog, this appears to be a great approach: disappear into the bathroom for a half hour and emerge clean and completely dressed; run around furiously, snatching up all of said dog’s everyday sacred objects and carrying them off to forbidden territory; setting up the hated collapsible gate at the top of the stairs; grabbing said dog herself and depositing her on the far side of said collapsible gate, in said forbidden territory; clamber over the gate yourself; flop (soaked and interestingly perfumed) onto the floor, alongside said dog; and there pluck from your shirt pocket a small black rectangular object which you immediately start poking at, madly, with your thumbs.
Worked great, I tell you. Instant and total physical inertia of the canine sort — the opposite of confusing a cat, in fact. And even though it didn’t last, it was thoroughly satisfying for those few minutes.
__________________
Here are the Pythons and their Confuse-a-Cat skit (and here’s the transcript, if you’d like to follow along):
From whiskey river (first stanza):
Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripèd bag,
or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh,
God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, —
mothers and fathers don’t die.And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be
kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window
with your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy
having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
(Edna St. Vincent Millay)
…and:
How I Became a Ghost
It was all about objects, their objections
expressed through a certain solidity.My house for example still moves
through me, moves me.
When I tried to reverse the process
I kept dropping things, kept finding myself
in the basement.Windows became more than
usually problematic.
I wanted to break them
which didn’t work, though for awhileI had more success with the lake.
The phone worked for a long time
though when I answered
often nobody was there.Bats crashed into me at night,
but then didn’t anymore.The rings vanished from my hand,
the pond.I stopped feeling the wind.
One day the closets were empty.
Another day the mirrors were.
(Leslie Harrison [source])
Per agent Janet Reid, who called her post “Stop what you’re doing and watch this” (a title which is hard to improve on, and I didn’t even try):
As Janet says, for some context you can read this blog post.
My review of this book is now online, over at The Book Book.
Short version:
One issue has already come up, related to my review rather than to the book itself. I wouldn’t mind hearing from others about it. Which is: Did I go too far in using asterisks to hide certain keywords (including the title’s most important word) from the hungry, Google-fed appetites of spammers, link farmers, and so on?
I really don’t know. Thought about it for weeks, in fact — and finally decided to err on the side of caution, mostly since I’m not the unlucky soul who’d be responsible for scrubbing away all the comment spam, and/or turning comment moderation on.
Opinions?
Thomas Pynchon’s newest hit the bookstores a week ago. Penguin Press’s description:
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog
It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there… or… if you were there, then you… or, wait, is it…
Here’s the trailer — narrated by Pynchon himself (but don’t expect to see him!):
(“Twenty-seven ninety-fi— Twenty-seven ninety-five? That used to be, like, three weeks of groceries, man. What year is this again?” Ha!)
There’s even a Wiki set up — and active! — for the new book already.
At Amazon, they’ve got a listing (“Exclusive!”) of the soundtrack Pynchon himself supposedly chose for the book, including:
Amazon provides links from most of these songs to MP3 previews/downloads and/or pages of information about the artists or songs. But there are also a number of unlinked ringers in the list — tunes which I would be very surprised to find on any real playlist. Tunes like:
Pynchon’s in his 70s now; I wonder how long he can keep this up? In any case –for its length, fewer than 400 pages (versus hundreds more for nearly all his other titles) if for no other reason — if you’ve postponed reading anything by the guy, this might be the one to start you off. It’s not likely to be dull.
Update: A couple more items (for now; wouldn’t be surprised to find more later)…
First, Wired has put up an interactive Google Map of Los Angeles-area sites which figure in Pynchon’s work — Inherent Vice and others. And by “interactive” I don’t mean just the usual zoom-and-slide Google Maps controls: you can actually make additions yourself, if you’re suitably well-informed and/or obsessive. (Wired‘s capsule summary of the book, by the way: “The Big Lebowski meets The Big Sleep.”)
Second, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” blog has confirmed that it is indeed Pynchon himself doing the voiceover. They hired a voice-recognition expert, and armed with his affirmative response managed to wrench a confession out of the Penguin Press PR folks. Ah, but is it possible their “expert” is maybe a wishful-thinking Pynchon fan? Nah:
We should point out [voice-recognition guy] Primeau is an unbiased witness, having never read Pynchon (“I don’t know this guy but it looks like he has some history as an author,” he said). Nevertheless, if he hasn’t been taken by the man’s work, Primeau is intrigued by his voice, which he describes as “a tobacco-driven soft rasp.”
