Another of those words-would-be-superfluous videos… This was one of the numbers performed at this year’s “Nykerk” singing competition, at Hope College in Michigan: a Wizard of Oz medley:
Damn. Now I want to see the movie again.
“What If You Get a Question Wrong?”
[Image: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch
(click image for a much larger view of the whole triptych)]
From whiskey river:
You Learn
You learn.
After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises,
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
and you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure.
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn. And learn.
With every good-bye you learn.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
…and:
This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.
To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.
(Terry Tempest Williams [source])
What You Find in the Cracks
[For information about the above image(s), see the note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
from Late Gazing, Looking for an Omen as the Sun Goes
I.
The window’s dark. Roll back the curtain’s waves.
What’s to be done about sunsets?
Climb up and stand in some high place,
lusting for a little more twilight.
(Yuan Mei [source])
…and:
Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?
We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.
(Jack Kornfield)
Hanging in the Sky
[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:
This is the Dream
This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.
(Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems)
…and:
Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.
(Sam Keen, from Apology for Wonder)
…and (italicized portion):
You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.
(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)
Everybody* Believes in Music
Lyrics:
Atheists Don’t Have No Songs
(Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers
Christians have their hymns and pages,
Hava Nagila’s for the Jews,
Baptists have the rock of ages,
Atheists just sing the blues.Romantics play Claire de Lune,
Born agains sing He is risen,
But no one ever wrote a tune
For godless existentialism.For Atheists,
There’s no good news,
They’ll never sing a song of faith.For atheists,
They have a rule,
The “he” is always lowercase.
The “he” is always lowercase.Some folks sing a Bach cantata,
Lutherans get Christmas trees,
Atheist songs add up to nada,
But they do have Sundays free.Pentecostalists sing they sing to heaven,
Coptics have the books of scrolls,
Numerologists can count to seven,
Atheists have rock and roll.For Atheists,
There’s no good news,
They’ll never sing a song of Faith.In their songs,
They have a rule,
The “he” is always lowercase.
The “he” is always lowercase.Catholics dress up for Mass,
And listen to, Gregorian chants.Atheists just take a pass,
Watch football in their underpants.
Watch football in their underpants.Atheists, Atheists, Atheists,
Don’t have no songs!
Thanks, Jules. And thanks to Pacificvs (Adrian Covert) for the lyrics! (Also see John Kinney’s comment on the Pacificvs post, which stitches together a more complete version of the lyrics from several different performances he found online.)
______________________________
* …and not only Mac Davis and friends.
Utterly Irrelevant Pop-Music Interlude
The pop trio Hanson never, I believe, threatened to encroach on my radar in the 1990s. I knew of them — they were hard to miss entirely — but they seemed too, I don’t know, insubstantial or something.*
This video from their latest album makes me think, like, Hmm, maybe it’s past time to pay attention… Some of the comments at YouTube say pretty much the same thing. My favorite one begins: “What the hell? At what point did Hanson become awesome?” Ha!
Of course, it doesn’t hurt — from my perspective — that I can see the cross-references not just to The Blues Brothers Movie, but also to The Temptations, Aretha Franklin…
(Lyrics below the video.)
Lyrics:
Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’
(words, music, and performance by Hanson)Well, I gave you love, you know it
So when did you outgrow it?
And decide that you would find another man
Well, you’ve been out there shakin’
Tell the boys you’re chasing
When you get home, I’ll be the bigger manI’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’ other than youI ignored your reputation
‘Cause you send my heart racing
You think I would always be the fool
Well, I’ve run out of patience
For this sticky situation
You won’t find me crying that we’re throughI’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’ other than you
It’s sad to say, but baby everyday
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’ other than you
It’s sad to say, heyWell, if you’re not too proud to beg
I could give you some respectThat tune you’re humming is never gonna change
You didn’t have to do what you did
I didn’t think you’d end it like this
‘Cause the love I’ve got is better than what you gave
Well, I’ve got girls in line
Waiting for these arms of mine
Listen up to what I sayI’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’ other than you
It’s sad to say, but baby everyday
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’
I’ve been thinking ’bout somethin’ other than youHey, hey, I took my best shot
I’ve had enough of your tainted love you give me everyday
I tried to limit the lonely nights
But darlin’ please, c’mon, c’mon
I’m not gonna make that same mistakeYou’ve been out there foolin’,
but I’m not thinkin’ about you
I’ve been gettin’ the love that moves me,
while you’ve been getting around
You’ve been out there foolin’,
but I’m not thinkin’ about you
I’ve been gettin’ the love that moves me,
while you’ve been getting around
You’ve been out there foolin’,
but I’m not thinkin’ about you
I’ve been gettin’ the love that moves me,
while you’ve been getting around
___________________________
* He said, recalling the depths and heights of his own thoughts and sensibilities, not just when he was in his own late teens but also twenty-thirty years later, when Hanson was at their peak popularity.
What’s in a Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2)
[Another entry in an occasional series about American songs with long histories. This one follows Part 1, about the history of the composition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” You can read Part 1, posted last week, here.]
[Video clip above assembled from the first film version of Roberta (1935); Irene Dunne sings it here. Later in the film, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance to an instrumental version, and their dance is what people usually remember from the film. This clip’s uploader helpfully tacked the dance scene onto the vocal: it begins at around 4:03 into the clip.]
By the time the 1940s rolled around, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” had already established itself in the pop songbook. According to at least one observer, pianist Joe Bushkin of the Tommy Dorsey band, it provided the pivotal moment on “the night Frank Sinatra happened.” (Something of a storyteller, Bushkin apparently told the story many times; the details below come from Sinatra! The Song Is You, by Will Friedwald.)
Weird Week… and a Music-Language Mystery
Boy, does this feel like a long time between posts or what?!
An insane week at work. Busy early mornings. A week of fascinating blog posts t0 read from all my usual haunts (ha ha, no pun intended) — generally yours. Little to no spare time at night. It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya. A conspiracy.
I’ll be back tomorrow for a real post — the usual end-of-week whiskey-river-inspired rambling. And then at some point over the weekend, I hope to finally (!) put up Part 2 of the What’s in a Song entry on “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
Working on the latter has proved to be a lot harder than usual (and that’s saying something). I have almost too much information to draw on (at least if I’m to stay below the 2,000-word absolute maximum length I’ve set). One fascinating little nugget has turned out to be something of a mystery, but really just a side issue from the central topic; I thought I’d turn it over to RAMH readers for help — especially any of you who know something about songwriting and/or music at more than just a listener level.
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and numerous other popular songs, as it happens, apparently are considered examples of verseless songs. Obviously, this term doesn’t mean that they lack lyrics. And just as obviously, my assumption that the word verse equates roughly to stanza is completely off the mark.
Can anybody explain for me what that means?
As background, one of the most complete explanations I’ve read is from a book called What to Listen for in Rock: A Stylistic Analysis, by Ken Stephenson. Although primarily concerned with rock, the book does refer to other genres, like show tunes, to illustrate and explain key concepts. In this case, it says (bleeping over a lot of jargon):
The portion [of “Over the Rainbow”] starting with [“Somewhere over the rainbow, Way up high”] is actually only the chorus of the song; the verse, not sung by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and thus largely ignored or forgotten, begins with the words “When all the world is a hopeless jumble.” Similarly, few of the millions who know Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas (1940) remember — or have ever heard — the verse, which begins with descriptions of the sunny weather and green grass of Southern California in December… Now, a chorus intended to be independent of a verse must have not only length but formal complexity as well… In many songs from this period, “Over the Rainbow” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” included, the chorus has taken on a multisectional form itself.
I don’t get it. Maybe in the case of “Over the Rainbow” — for which lyrics apparently exist for something called the “verse,” apart from the rest of the song — I can sorta kinda almost accept that “Somewhere over the rainbow/Way up high” is… something else. But what makes “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” verseless?
Et Çe N’est Pas Bon, Ma
[Image taken from a full photographic composition by Brandon Voges of the Bruton Stroube studio; see the note at the bottom of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Picnic, Lightning
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident
(picnic, lightning) when I was three.
— LolitaIt is possible to be struck by a meteor
or a single-engine plane
while reading in a chair at home.
Safes drop from rooftops
and flatten the odd pedestrian
mostly within the panels of the comics,
but still, we know it is possible,
as well as the flash of summer lightning,
the thermos toppling over,
spilling out on the grass.And we know the message
can be delivered from within.
The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body’s rivers,
the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens —
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white,and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone,
the small plants singing
with lifted faces, and the click
of the sundial
as one hour sweeps into the next.
(Billy Collins, from Sailing Alone Around the Room [source])
…and:
Expectations of goals and rewards (such as Enlightenment) are recognized for what they are: last-ditch attempts by the ghostly self to subvert the process to its own ends. The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego. We can put into words only the question it poses. And then let go, listen, and wait.
(Stephen Batchelor, from Buddhism Without Beliefs [source])
What’s In a Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (1)
[One of a continuing series of posts on American popular songs with long histories. As is usually the case, this one on the history of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” will be was followed in a couple days by Part 2, about some of the cover versions.]
Where Were You in ’62?
So asked one of the taglines to George Lucas’s 1973 film, American Graffiti. The question both pinpointed the time of the film’s action and suggested that the film would be even better if the audience brought their own memories along to the theater.
Yet the hit soundtrack which followed wasn’t so neatly nailed down: it mashed together hits released between 1953 to 1964 (!). Hence — given the way that blocks of AM Top 40 radio playlists were constructed back then — these songs were unlikely to have been broadcast exactly that way during the single day of the characters’ lives which the film depicts.
The Graffiti soundtrack also failed to include many artists who would have been on the air over that twelve-year period — notably Elvis Presley. The idea of releasing a soundtrack album of original hits tied to the release of a film wasn’t new, but music producers and rights holders were suspicious of the payment plan proposed by studio lawyers: each song’s owner(s) would get a flat, and equal, amount. (Indeed, Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” was included, despite the rights issues, by the expedient of re-recording it just for the album.)
In any case, chronologically midway through that block of years, along came “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” recorded by The Platters in 1958 and topping the charts a year later:
[Below, click Play button to begin Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:39 long.]
[audio:smokegetsinyoureyes_platters.mp3|titles=’Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’|artists=The Platters]
Lyrics:
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
(Kern/Harbach)They asked me how I knew
My true love was true
I, of course, replied,
Something here inside
Cannot be denied.They said someday you’ll find
All who love are blind
When your heart’s on fire
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes.So I chaffed them and I gayly laughed
To think that they could doubt my love,
Yet today my love has flown away
I am without my loveNow laughing friends deride
Tears I cannot hide
So I smile and say,
“When a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes.”
(Above lyrics transcription per songwriter Jimmy Webb’s study of pop music composition, Tunesmith, probably using The Platters’ cover as a guide. Slight variations do crop up in others, though.)
Like many people who lived through the ’50s and ’60s, I imagine, I’d always thought that to be the version of the song. It was certainly the only one I’d ever heard. And could any performer possibly have handled such lyrics and music with more authority than The Platters’ lead singer, Tony Williams?
Little did “My Generation”-centric I realize that the movie tagline might just as well have read: Where Were You in ‘32?
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