Running After My Hat

ADMIN: Connection Problems?

June 4, 2011 by John 6 Comments

[breaking usual Saturday-morning silence]

Please let me know via comment or email if you are having difficulty accessing Running After My Hat.

Note: By “difficulty” I don’t mean flat-out impossibility — it might be just extreme sluggishness, unresponsiveness, and so on. All but impossibility counts — especially if there’s been a notable change in that direction! (If you, and only you, have ALWAYS had this problem, well…)

I’ve received one comment to this effect already, but it came from China-based Froog. He’s accustomed to late May/early June slowdowns: [irony alert on] for some reason [irony alert off] the authorities there become exceptionally nervous around this time every year, screwing down the lid on Internet access even more than usual. But this year some pages have proved unloadable for him.

No idea if this is something anyone else has experienced. Haven’t made any recent changes to the blog’s theme or plug-ins and so on. Still… Just wanted to check.

[returning to customary Muzak soundtrack]

Slow Enough (To See the Large in the Small)

June 3, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: Still from Institute Benjaminta (1995), by the Brothers Quay. For an interesting interview with them about it, see this page at the Electric Sheep site.]

From whiskey river:

In reality there has never been a day in our lives (and maybe not one hour or even one minute) when something happened that did not eventually lead to significant results. However, in the onward rush of events it is usually hard to see these patterns.

(Manjusvara (David Keefe), Writing Your Way [source])

…and:

There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography — scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days — while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.

And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origins and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.

(Bruno Schultz, Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass)

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Josephine Baker and “J’Ai Deux Amours”

June 1, 2011 by John 25 Comments

Froog posted the other day on great movie songs, taking inspiration from the American Film Institute’s (AFI’s) “100 Years – 100 Songs” list of 2004. He pointed out some strange omissions (even considering the raw list of four hundred nominees from which the hundred were selected).

I’m not much surprised that no songs from the soundtrack of 1991’s Henry & June made either list. (It was probably considered a non-American and maybe even “non-fictional” film, violating some of the criteria listed at the foot of this page.) A pity. No matter what you thought of the film’s NC-17 rating — the first ever! — or of its caliber as a film, the music which accompanied everything onscreen was (I thought) a model of how to match musical sensibility to a particular film’s time, place, and “feel.”

Nowhere does this match seem truer than in the recording of Josephine Baker’s “J’Ai Deux Amours” (“I Have Two Loves”) which closed the film.

It made a canny signature song for Baker in general, and (sixty years later) for Henry & June in particular. The title — in English, “I Have Two Loves” — cuts in several directions at once. The “two loves” (per the song’s lyrics) are not human loves but geographic and cultural ones: “my country and Paris.” Baker herself was a black American who utterly bloomed in pre-World War II France, especially Paris. Still, says Ethan Mordden’s The Guest List:

Baker’s two loves were not, as one might think, America and Paris. The number was introduced at the Casino de Paris, in 1930, in a scene laid on the African shore, where Adrien Lamy played a French colonist who wants to take native girl Baker back to France. Composer Vincent Scotto and lyricists Géo Koger and the Casino’s producer, Henry Varna, wrote this number for Baker as a woman torn between Paris and Africa. Further, to the French, “mon pays” means “my province” as much as “my country.” Thus, Baker’s two loves never included America.

But even without the full lyrics, “things” are happening with the title alone:

The film (based on Anaïs Nin’s book of the same name) is about Nin’s relationships with American author Henry Miller and his wife, June: Anaïs to Henry, Henry to June, and Anaïs to June (all vice-versa, of course).
Baker was (fairly famously) bisexual; for her to declare in song I have two loves was virtually an open wink at this reputation.

Yet I fell in love with this song — this performance of it — way before I knew any of that. I’m not especially one way or the other about it until about two minutes into its three-plus-minute length. But suddenly, Baker’s trilling voice is joined by a man’s (Adrien Lamy, mentioned above, and pictured at left), and for most of the rest of the song he assumes responsibility for the lyrics. Baker “merely” accompanies him, in a wordlessly vocalized run of counterpoint and harmony which twines sinuously — like some exotic Beaux-Arts species of vine — around and within the pauses of Lamy’s voice. It’s really, for me, among the most memorable ninety seconds of music I know — especially given that I understand no French myself!

Here are Josephine Baker and Adrien Lamy, singing of their two loves:

Lyrics:

J’Ai Deux Amours
(by Vincent Scotto and Geo Koger; performance by Josephine Baker and Adrien Lamy)

On dit qu’au delà des mers
Là-bas sous le ciel clair
Il existe une cité
Au séjour enchanté
Et sous les grands arbres noirs
Chaque soir
Vers elle s’en va tout mon espoir

J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris
Par eux toujours
Mon cœur est ravi
Ma savane est belle
Mais à quoi bon le nier
Ce qui m’ensorcelle
C’est Paris, Paris tout entier
Le voir un jour
C’est mon rêve joli
J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris

Quand sur la rive parfois
Au lointain j’aperçois
Un paquebot qui s’en va
Vers lui je tends les bras
Et le cœur battant d’émoi
A mi-voix
Doucement je dis “emporte-moi!”

J’ai deux amours…

Translation (approximate, of course :) — corrections more than welcome!):

I Have Two Loves

It is said that above the seas,
Over there under the clear sky,
Exists a city, where the stay is enchanted,
And under the big black trees,
Every evening,
Towards it tend all my hopes.

I have two loves
My country and Paris.
By them always
Is my heart ravished.
My savannah* is beautiful,
But why deny that
what puts a spell on me is Paris,
Paris in its entirety.

Seeing it one day
Is my pretty dream.
I have two loves,
My country and Paris.

(Repeat)

My savannah is beautiful,
But why deny that
what puts a spell on me is Paris,
Paris in its entirety.
Seeing it one day
Is my pretty dream.
I have two loves,
My country and Paris.

When at the distant shore
I sometimes see a ship depart
To him I extend my arms
And heart beating with excitement,
Whisper softly, I say, “Take me!”

I have two loves…

_____________________________
* “My savannah“? Yeah. I think this probably refers to the home of the African “native girl” described by Mordden’s interpretation. Generalized, if so, you can probably just read this phrase as something like “my home” or “the place I came from.” (In Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of the song, My savannah becomes Manhattan.)

Oceanic Complications

May 27, 2011 by John 7 Comments

[Video: “Ten Things I Have Learned about the Sea,” by Lorenzo Fonda. One of whiskey river‘s posts this week was based on the text in this video. For more information, see the Vimeo page.]

From whiskey river:

Clam

Each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its
place in the universe is not found out. Like us, they
have a heart and a stomach; they know hunger, and
probably a little satisfaction too. Do not mock them
for their gentleness, they have a muscle that loves
being alive. They pull away from the light. They pull
down. They hold themselves together. They refuse to
open.

But sometimes they lose their place and are tumbled
shoreward in a storm. Then they pant, they fill
with sand, they have no choice but must open the
smallest crack. Then the fire of the world touches
them. Perhaps, on such days, they too begin the
terrible effort of thinking, of wondering who, and
what, and why. If they can bury themselves again in
the sand they will. If not, they are sure to perish,
though not quickly. They also have resources beyond
the flesh; they also try very hard not to die.

(Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Old Crow Medicine Show

May 25, 2011 by John 11 Comments

A stray comment from Jayne yesterday reminded me of this wonderful band, classified by Wikipedia as folk, alt-country, bluegrass, Americana, and old-time. For a 2006 NPR interview/profile, on the other hand, they were dubbed “punk Americana.” (If you play together for ten or fifteen years, you’ve got lots of opportunities to stretch the walls of the pigeonholes everybody wants to put you in.)

They’re one of those groups with no apparent ambition to superstardom. But like many such groups, they always seem to crop up somewhere: on the concert and festival circuit, Prairie Home Companion, Austin City Limits… When Emmylou Harris was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, Old Crow Medicine Show was on hand to sing her in.

Here’s “Down Home Girl,” originally released in 2006 on an EP of the same name and included a month later on their Big Iron World album. When I first saw it, I thought the video had been shot in New York City; more likely — and more, duh, obviously if so — it’s New Orleans.

Lyrics:

Down Home Girl
(Old Crow Medicine Show)

Well I swear your perfume, baby, is made out of turnip greens
Every time I kiss you girl, it tastes like pork and beans

Even though you’re wearing those uptown high heels
I can tell from your giant step you’ve been
walking through the cotton fields

Ohhhhhh you’re so down home girl

Every time you monkey, child, it takes my breath away
Well, every time you move like that, girl,
I got to get down and pray
Girl, you know that dress you’re wearin’ made out of fiber glass
Every time you move like that, girl, I got to go to Sunday mass

Ohhhhhh you’re so down home girl

I’m going to take you to the muddy river and push you in
So I can watch the water roll on down your velvet skin
I’m gonna take you down to New Orleans, down in Dixie land
So I can watch you do the second line with
an umbrella in your hand

Ohhhhhh you’re so down home girl…

(Ha! to the old fellow’s comment which follows the song.)

One After Another, After Another, After Another…

May 20, 2011 by John 14 Comments

[Image: scene from Northlandz, the world’s largest model train layout
(Flemington, NJ). Photo by Vlad Bubnov, on Flickr.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

In the Moment

It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,
the kind that gives you no choice
but to unbutton your shirt
and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.

And if a glass of ice tea and a volume
of seventeenth-century poetry
with a dark blue cover are available,
then the picture can hardly be improved.

I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,
and two black butterflies
with white and red wing-dots
bobbed around my head in the bright air.

I could feel the day offering itself to me,
and I wanted nothing more
than to be in the moment — but which moment?
Not that one, or that one, or that one,

or any of those that were scuttling by
seemed perfectly right for me.
Plus, I was too knotted up with questions
about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.

What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?
Why did John Donne’s wife die so young?
And more pressingly,
what could we serve the vegetarian twins

who were coming to dinner that evening?
Who knew that they would bring their own grapes?
And who was the driver of that pickup
flying down the road toward the lone railroad track?

And so the priceless moments of the day
were squandered one by one—
or more likely several thousand at a time—
with quandary and pointless interrogation.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being
inside the green pod of time,
but that was not going to happen today.
I had to admit to myself

as I closed the blue book on the face
of Thomas Traherne [*] and returned to the house
where I lit a flame under a pot
full of floating brown eggs,

and, while they cooked in their bubbles,
I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink
to see if that crazy glass
had anything special to tell me today.

(Billy Collins, from The Trouble with Poetry, and Other Poems [source])

…and:

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

(Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life)

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Wynton Marsalis’s Classical Trumpet

May 18, 2011 by John 8 Comments

[Below, click Play button to begin Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro (Haydn) . While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:20 long.]

[audio:trumpetconcertoineflatmajor_i_allegro_haydn_marsalis.mp3|titles=’Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro (Haydn)’|artists=Wynton Marsalis]

These days the man concentrates, as far as I can tell, exclusively on jazz (recording, playing, mentoring, producing). But my first exposure to him was through his recordings of classical music.

Of course, I’d already decided to like trumpet — cf., the “Midweek Music Break” on Herb Alpert of a few weeks ago. But I can no longer remember how I stumbled on this Marsalis album. (He won a Grammy both for it and for a jazz release in 1983 — the first artist to pull that off.) I didn’t (as far as I know) know anyone who listened to classical music, and knew (know) almost nothing about it myself. Still, I loved it from his first note.

Sometimes, I like to imagine music as the soundtrack for a scene in a movie. In this case (Haydn’s Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro), Marsalis’s trumpet — that instrument at once so bright, so sharp, so soft, so unambigous — seems to tell the story of some master artisan or craftsman who takes complete, speechless joy in every second spent with his avocation. Even the little off-the-script Marsalis improvisation which begins at about 5:05 or so, leading to the piece’s conclusion — even that seems to capture such a person in a flight of free-association fantasy as he stands back to consider how to add one last touch to his handiwork.

If you like it, too, feel free to enjoy the second (andante) and third (allegro) movements of the same concerto:

[audio:trumpetconcertoineflatmajor_ii_andante_haydn_marsalis.mp3, trumpetconcertoineflatmajor_iii_allegro_haydn_marsalis.mp3|titles=’Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I (Allegro)’, ‘Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: II (Allegro) (Haydn)’|artists=Wynton Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis]

Look at that baby face in the album cover. That album’s liner notes, from a 1982 Newsweek profile called “Young Man with a Horn,” included this commentary about his jazz playing:

The most memorable appearance at the 1978 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was the most unexpected–a skinny kid with glasses and a trumpet who ambled onstage one day during the mid-afternoon lull, hiked up his horn and blew the top off the jazz tent. One minute he sounded like Dizzy Gillespie, unleashing torrents of sixteenth notes at blinding speed. The next he throttled down into the middle register in an imitation of Miles Davis cool: whoever this local kid was, he was going places.

He was all of twenty-one years of age when this album (his first classical one, and just his third overall) came out. Precocious much?

The Gravity of the Everyday

May 13, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Photo, “What’s Important,” by Valerie Everett. Found on Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety —

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light —
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

(Mary Oliver)

…and:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic — decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

(Louise Erdrich, from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems)

[Read more…]

Real-Life Dialogue (The Wind Beneath My Wings, the Garage Sale Beneath My Feet Edition): A Fragment

May 8, 2011 by John 7 Comments

[The scene: a home in a suburban development in North Florida, USA. At a computer upstairs, He stares at a blank screen which represents, in fond theory and — for the moment — ebbing hope, a page in a novel-to-be. He wears headphones, volume turned up louder than normal to mask the downstairs haggling, laughter, and scrapes of wooden furniture on concrete floor.]

She calls His name, loudly, from the foot of the stairs.

He: WHAT?!?

She: Are you selling these shoes?

He: [pause] “Shoes”?

She: Shoes! These shoes! Are you selling them?

He: [confused] I don’t know wh—

She: Shoes. Brown. Made by Dexter. Lace-up shoes.

His eyes go out of focus. He recalls the shoes in question: He had bought them for Their honeymoon, in the far north, because they’d seemed rugged and tundra-worthy. The last time He’d worn them had been when He last did anything resembling yard work, when Tyrannosaurs ruled the cul-de-sacs and saber-toothed cats, the rooftops. Over the years, the shoes had become crusted with (on the outside) dried mud, grass clippings, fertilizer, accumulated grime, the dust of a nearby bursting asteroid, and (on the inside) a salty rime of ancient perspiration. Those shoes. Someone wants to freaking buy—?

She: [impatient] Never mind! If you can’t remember them then I’m selling them!

The blank screen now mocking Him, He shakes his head but cannot reply.

“An Echo That Did Not Die Away”

May 6, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: a communications “satelloon.” For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

(C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [source])

[Read more…]