Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Midweek Music Break: “Bad Moon Rising”

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Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic gets most of its airtime around Halloween, maybe for obvious reasons: its association with John Landis’s great 1981 horror film An American Werewolf in London. Interestingly, in the film the song doesn’t get played in its entirety. Instead, the soundtrack plays just a few lines from the opening — almost as a joke — leading into the onscreen (and non-CGI) transformation of actor David Naughton from cute and charming lad to homicidal creature of the night.

“Bad Moon Rising” is also a favorite of disaster groupies, maybe for even more obvious — literal — reasons. Natural calamities have figured prominently in the news of late, and that business about rivers overflowing, earthquakes and lightning, well, it’s almost too perfect.

(If you’ve not been following the extinction-level-disaster/government-coverup-conspiracy chatter about the comet and/or brown and/or “dark” star Elenin, well, oh dear. You may have missed your last chance to survive. I recently saw a lengthy YouTube video, uploaded a few months ago, with a timeline of coming events. The fellow who made it claims that August 1 was the cutoff date — the last practical day to head for a cavern in the Ozarks to join with other believers prepared to live underground for at least a year. Even if you left on time, though, if you don’t arrive with an RV or U-Haul full of food, tough. They have no room for hungry, screaming, latecoming leeches.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Bad Moon Rising. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:20 long.

[audio:badmoonrising_ccr.mp3|titles=’Bad Moon Rising’|artists=Creedence Clearwater Revival]

Lyrics:

Bad Moon Rising
(Creedence Clearwater Revival)

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad times today.

[chorus:] 

Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

[chorus] 

All right!

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

[chorus] 

[repeat chorus] 

And for those who haven’t seen American Werewolf in London, here’s the five-minute lead-in to the transformation scene, right up to the point where Landis (having had his little laugh) abruptly cuts off the song:

The transformation scene itself took a little over two minutes, and you can find several clips of that here and there around the Web. (This one superimposes the full song over the scene, which in fact simply included sound effects and the character’s, um, vocalizations.)

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Transparent, or Just Unseen? Silent, or Just Unheard?

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[About the image: one of several models of “bubble buildings” available from French firm BubbleTree. I originally found this written up at the DesignSwan site.]

From whiskey river:

A Suite of Appearances / iv

In another time, we will want to know how the earth looked
Then, and were people the way we are now. In another time,
The records they left will convince us that we are unchanged
And could be at ease in the past, and not alone in the present.
And we shall be pleased. But beyond all that, what cannot
Be seen or explained will always be elsewhere, always supposed,
Invisible even beneath the signs — the beautiful surface,
The uncommon knowledge — that point its way. In another time,
What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted
To say that language is error, and all things are wronged
By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be
Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.

(Mark Strand)

…and:

I am pleased enough with the surfaces — in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind — what else is there? What else do we need?

(Edward Abbey)

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What Did the Dormouse Say?

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[Image: T-shirt available from the Skreened store. Of all the images of this moment which I found online, the original Tenniel still seemed best. Disclaimer: I have no interest (vested or, ha, shirted) in the store other than this photo of this T-shirt.]

From whiskey river:

Brotherhood
Homage to Octavius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and:

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed…

They never shut up.

(Kurt Vonnegut [source])

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Slow Enough (To See the Large in the Small)

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[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)

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

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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.)

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From the Dark Side

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I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about the writing workshop I participated in, fifteen-some years ago.

An odd cast of characters, maybe: three writers of poetry and literary fiction then seeking their graduate degrees in English, with an emphasis on creative writing; one writer of comic action stories (think Carl Hiaasen, maybe with a touch of Elmore Leonard); one writer of horror and science fiction…

…and I.

I was the only one who’d published a book to that point, my mystery Crossed Wires. But I didn’t think of myself as a “mystery writer.” (Crossed Wires‘s prose and structure, I think, suggests the crooked posture of a writer in a genre he knows he’s not suited for.)

I didn’t know how to classify myself. My reading tastes were all over the map. I’d read a great deal of science fiction while growing up; liked reading mysteries and thrillers; had been bowled over by the caliber of the romances published by friends*; was moved and challenged by fiction I read in The New Yorker and similar magazines.

Horror? Well, I’d read a lot of horror comics when I was a kid. I didn’t mind “scary movies,” but didn’t get many chances to see them (other than classics from the ’30s). When I got older, I read some King and Koontz, and — on the strength of the paperbacks’ striking covers — I read some of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series. But for the most part, horror fiction didn’t interest me. Beyond what seemed a core of authors with wider aspirations and deeper, more complex psychologies, y’know, It Was All Just Blood.

But the SF/horror writer in our workshop kept bringing to us his inventive little fantasias of things gone frighteningly wrong. And this got me thinking: I wonder what it’s like to write horror? So I tried it. Once.

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The Gravity of the Everyday

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[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)

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“An Echo That Did Not Die Away”

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[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])

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You Never Know

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[Image: “Untitled #153,” by Chris Marker. For more information, see the note at the foot of this page.]

From whiskey river:

Only Once

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body — halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

(Denise Levertov [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Scott Joplin’s “Solace”

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I caught 1973’s The Sting on TV recently. By now, I’ve seen it often enough that the kick of the plot has pretty much evaporated, leaving behind the not inconsiderable on-screen pleasures of watching the cast at work. (Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan, I just learned from Wikipedia, did not have to fake his limp: “Shaw had slipped on a wet handball court at the Beverly Hills Hotel just a week before filming began and had split all the ligaments in his knee.”)

To which I’d have to add, always, the textural pleasures provided by the soundtrack.

It’s hard not to like Scott Joplin’s ragtime music, which — though already out-of-date in the real-world 1930s — somehow “sounds” right to our ears for that period. It’s so… so… so bubbly, y’know?

But one song always stood out in my mind as the best of the lot — and although Joplin wrote it, it didn’t even sound like ragtime, to my uneducated ears: “Solace.”

[Below, click Play button to begin Solace. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:34 long.

[audio:solace_joplin.mp3|titles=’Solace’|artists=by Scott Joplin-Marvin Hamlisch on piano]

The complete title of the song is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade”; published in 1909, it was, says at least one source, “the only work by Joplin to employ a tango rhythm.” Which caught me completely by surprise — not that my ears are any smarter about tango than about ragtime. But when I heard “Solace,” I just couldn’t picture a couple of sleek and smoldering Spanish dancers clinched together, eyes locked, as they swirled about on a dance floor.

According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, however, the “Solace”-as-tango story isn’t quite that straightforward:

[Solace] is a four-minute gem of a habanera, which, as one might divine from the word, has roots in Havana. There is also in Solace something of the tango form, which, though distantly related to an African folk dance tradition, is more recently of the same Latin extraction as the habanera. Solace is, then, a true musical mish-mash…

Fans of George Bizet’s Carmen are invited to sit back, listen to Solace, and enjoy the same gently rocking habanera rhythm as is heard throughout the Frenchman’s famous Habanera.

So, since you, too, may wonder about that comparison… here’s Bizet’s “Habanera”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Habanera (from ‘Carmen’). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:11 long.

[audio:habanera_bizetcarmen.mp3|titles=’Habanera (from Carmen)’|artists=Bizet-London Festival Orchestra]

How about that?

[At the time this posts on Wednesday morning, I’ll be in mid-air, en route to a four-day reunion with my sisters and brother. If all goes as planned between now and then, though, another of these magically pre-created missives will appear on Friday. I will be checking in online “for real” from time to time, too, both here and via email.]

 

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