On the Inside, Looking In

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From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Real-Life [Movie] Dialogue

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[Above still depicts the Martian “war machines” devastating the California countryside. In the foreground lies a small propeller-driven spotter plane of terrestrial origin, which has crash-landed — as they are wont to do at the peak of military operations against aliens.]

So last night we’re watching the 1953 Hollywood version of The War of the Worlds, starring Gene Barry and directed by George Pal. First time I’d seen it in a long time — and, more importantly for me, the first time I’d seen it with closed captioning.

The first scene I’ll highlight occurs early in the film. Somewhere in the hills outside Los Angeles, a “meteor” has crashed to the Earth. Fearful for some reason (this is around the time we sat down to watch it, so their motivation isn’t clear), the people of the nearest town have picked three men from among them to stand guard around the thing.

(Obviously they’re not that fearful, since all the rest of them then adjourn to a barn dance.)

The three men engage in some conversation which pegs them as, like, not scientists. The “meteor” starts to make a pinging sound, like a sonar device, and one of them draws the obvious conclusion:

That’s not a meteor — it’s a bomb!

At this point they notice something strange about the “bomb”: it has something on the top which looks like a hatch or manhole cover. As they watch, this hatch cover begins to turn… slowly…

[Following dialogue is all by one speaker.]

That’s no bomb. Bombs don’t unscrew!

[Hatch cover continues to turn… and turn…]

It’s the darnedest thing. It keeps unscrewing!

Eventually, of course, the hatch opens and a colored, three-lensed “eye” comes out on a long stalk. So now they know they’re dealing with something pretty seriously odd — probably, well, Men From Mars. They determine to approach the meteor bomb extraterrestrial vessel on foot, with white flags, because “everybody knows” a white flag means the bearer intends no harm. But they still have a problem. Luckily, one of them has an immediate solution:

Guy : What do we say to them?

Guy #2: “Welcome to California.”

So things go rapidly to hell from that point forward, as you can imagine even if you haven’t read the book or seen the film. But the US military, with help from their counterparts elsewhere, notices that the big levitating “Martian war machines” behave similarly wherever they land. They always come down in threes, for instance, and then there are those artificial eyes with three lenses — modeled on the Martians’ own three-eyed selves. Perhaps the people of Earth can use these observations to combat the aliens… if only they could figure out some of the remaining mysteries…

Military officer: Pattern-wise, one lands, then two, making groups of threes joined magnetically. Is that possible?

Scientist (Gene Barry): If they do it, it is.

Eventually, the government and military decide to use the “atom bomb” (which presumably isn’t unscrewing) against the aliens. Everyone in the (surviving) central cast and a bunch of other people (who are a little dumber and hence don’t take cover behind walls and such, and come to be tossed around like rag dolls in the shock wave) don radiation-proof suits and goggles so they can observe the explosion. As they watch, a PA system’s loudspeaker counts down the minutes and seconds:

Four minutes to bomb time…

Indeed.

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Thinking Good

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[Caption: “I want you to start thinking good thoughts about someone new at our house. I want you to start thinking good thoughts about a pussy cat.” Cartoon by George Booth, from his 1975 collection, Think Good Thoughts About a Pussy Cat.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Sojourns in the Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal — then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
— but we have changed, a little.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

(Robert Bly [source])

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Hauntings

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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 awhile

I 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])

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Do Not Distract the Artist

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Single-minded in pursuit of your ideals, are you? Think you’re putting a lot of time into your writing, your painting, your kids, your life? You call yourself dedicated?

Ha!

Or so I thought when I saw the video below. The maker claims to have spent 1500 hours on this not-quite-four-minute project, an estimate which I see no reason to doubt. But think about that 1500 hours… all those minutes and hours of mapping out every frame, shifting the (many) Lego bricks a little in one direction or another, shooting a frame or two per position… over… and over… (Let alone the time spent at the outset, encasing the human being in Legos.)

Granted, this rymdreglage person may not have a steady job, or kids, or… or… or… Still: sheesh.

I think the video can probably be appreciated even by people who don’t know anything about the eight-bit console games (original Nintendo Entertainment System, etc.) to which this an homage. Some advice before playing it back, though: turn the volume down a bit, and bump it upwards only if you really want. The music stops just short of inducing seizures in small children and animals.

[Hat tip to Lifting Fog (slogan: “visibility is improving”), which I’d read even if I weren’t related to one of its co-authors.]

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Sleeping, Waking, and Grimmer Things

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From whiskey river:

Waking at 3 a.m.

Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn’t matter — even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

And if awakening is also already present, inescapably and everywhere present from the beginning, how can the emotions not be part of that singing life of grasses and fish and oil tankers and subways and cats in heat who wake us, furious and smiling, in the middle of the brief summer night?

(Jane Hirshfield)

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A Little Learning, a Little Yearning

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[Image above shows the Parthenon, and its reflection in the facade of the New Acropolis Museum. Click image for more information and the original photo.]

From whiskey river:

Just Thinking

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot — peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

There is a bitter aftertaste when one swallows the truth, sometimes. It may be years before it becomes apparent, so long that you’ve forgotten that first taste, but it does come. It comes when, having thought you swallowed truth whole, what you got was only a morsel. Further, the spreading bitterness derives from understanding that what you thought was true was, actually, true, but not in the way you thought or wanted it to be.

(Terrance Keenan [source (p. 169)])

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Inherent Vice

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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:

  • “Bang Bang” by The Bonzo Dog Band
  • “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles
  • “Desafinado” by Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto, with Charlie Byrd
  • Elusive Butterfly by Bob Lind
  • “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra
  • “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys
  • The Greatest Hits of Tommy James and The Shondells
  • “Happy Trails to You” by Roy Rogers
  • “Help Me, Rhonda” by The Beach Boys
  • “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd
  • “It Never Entered My Mind” by Andrea Marcovicci
  • “Motion by the Ocean” by The Boards
  • “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger)” by The Doors
  • “Quentin’s Theme” (Theme Song from “Dark Shadows”) performed by Charles Randolph Grean Sounde
  • “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” by The Rolling Stones
  • “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies
  • “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen
  • “Telstar” by The Tornados
  • “Tequila” by The Champs
  • “There’s No Business Like Show Business” by Ethel Merman
  • “Volare” by Domenico Modugno
  • “Wabash Cannonball” by Roy Acuff & His Crazy Tennesseans
    “Wipeout” by The Surfaris
  • “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys
  • “Yummy Yummy Yummy” performed by Ohio Express

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:

  • “Just the Lasagna (Semi-Bossa Nova)” by Carmine & the Cal-Zones
  • “Skyful of Hearts” performed by Larry “Doc” Sportello
  • “Soul Gidget” by Meatball Flag

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.”

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What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (2)

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[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — which focused on the song’s composition and lyrics — appeared on Wednesday.]

How many times and by which performers has “Begin the Beguine” been covered? It is to laugh.

The most comprehensive list I’ve seen was on the page of information at the WICN radio station’s site which I mentioned in Part (1) of this post. That list includes around 118 names “and many others” (I can’t swear to the count — I counted it once but am damned if I’ll put myself through that again :). Among those names — and aside from the dozens of Big Bands who jumped on the song following Artie Shaw’s success with it — were artists as varied as Chet Atkins, Liberace, Frankie Lyman & The Teenagers, Julio Iglesias, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Lalo Schifrin, Mario Lanza…

One thing you notice from many of these covers is how heavily their pacing and rhythm have been influenced by the Shaw swing-band version. But how close was that version to Cole Porter’s intentions?

Let’s refer again to Porter himself, who once wrote of the dance called the beguine (emphasis added): “I was very much taken by the rhythm of the dance, the rhythm was practically that of the already popular rumba but much faster.” Compare this with the writeup by the anonymous WICN writer (emphasis added): “It is similar to a rumba, but slower, with dance moves performed smoothly and deliberately. Like many Latin dances, the beguine emphasizes the ability to roll the hips to evoke sensuality while performing the steps.”

(Yeah — no wonder so many artists have covered “Beguine”: apparently there’s enough leeway for them to do whatever the heck they want with it.)

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