[Hat tip to the Speak Coffee to Me blog’s consistently brilliant selections in its Ad of the Week series]
Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All
[Video: classic moment from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre]
From whiskey river:
We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs — people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])
…and:
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
(Jorge Luis Borges [source])
Midweek Music Break: “St. James Infirmary”
Laissez les bons temps rouler, eh? And among the songs often regarded as “typical New Orleans,” we have the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.
No way could I even begin to match the masterful job of documenting its history which Robert W. Harwood undertook with his I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. One hundred ninety pages. Subtitle (all by itself practically a foreword to the book): Investigations in the Shadowy World of Early Jazz-Blues in the Company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a Host of Others, and Where Did This Dang Song Come from Anyway?
Briefly, though (and thank you, Wikipedia):
“St. James Infirmary Blues” is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”)… “The Unfortunate Rake” is about a sailor who uses his money on prostitutes, and then dies of a venereal disease…
The title is derived from St. James Hospital in London, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy.
Doesn’t sound much like an invitation to party, does it? No good times rollin’ here! But then we find these relevant lyrics, almost sketching for us a picture of a completely classic New Orleans funeral march:
“Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don’t smell me as they bear me along.“Don’t muffle your drums and play your fifes merrily,
Play a quick march as you carry me along,
And fire your bright muskets all over my coffin…”
Here’s “The Unfortunate Rake,” in a suitably mournful interpretation by A.L. Lloyd (vocals) and Alf Edwards (concertina) (complete lyrics here):
[Below, click Play button to begin The Unfortunate Rake. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:59 long.]
[audio:unfortunaterake_alloyd_alfedwards.mp3|titles=’The Unfortunate Rake’|artists=A.L. Lloyd & Alf Edwards]
By the time Louis Armstrong got hold of it, “The Unfortunate Rake” had morphed into a mysterious What exactly is going on here? sort of song. Now it’s no longer the rake, but his woman laid out in the hospital. And the guy? Well, the sound is right. But the words? He’s strangely, awfully damn ready to sing his own praises…
I went down to the St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So cold… so sweet… so fairLet her go… let her go… God bless her
Wherever she may be
She can look this wide world over
But she’ll never find a sweet man like meWhen I die Baby in straight-lace shoes
I wanna a boxback coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the boys’ll know that I died standing flat…
[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Louis Armstrong). This clip is 4:46 long.]
[audio:stjamesinfirmary_louisarmstrong.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Louis Armstrong]
Finally, we have straight-up instrumentals — no need for any of these to retain a single lugubrious scrap of “The Unfortunate Rake.” This is sweetly swinging Allen Toussaint, on the piano:
[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Allen Toussaint). This clip is 3:51 long.]
[audio:stjamesinfirmary_allentoussaint.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Allen Toussaint]
The Usefulness of Bad Things
[Cartoon found at the site of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland.]
From whiskey river:
Bad People
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks — what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams — that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god — who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge — can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
(Robert Bly, Morning Poems [source])
…and:
We think hitting the ground, knocking over the barrier is a mistake, but the ground we hit, the failure we experience is not a mistake. The world is endlessly mysterious, experience is profound to a degree that will always surprise us. But it is never a mistake. To foster even a meager appreciation of that (and when we’re in the midst of a fall, meager is pretty big) is to begin to practice, to raise the bodhi-mind. It is the decision to stop complaining and to start paying attention. Contained in the fall is exactly what we need to stand. Everything we need is available, but we have to invite it.
(Bonnie Myotai Treace [source])
The Fundamental Things Apply
[Below, click Play button to begin well, playing. During this time, volume control will appear at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:22 long.]
[audio:lovewalkedin_errollgarner.mp3|titles=’Love Walked In’|artists=Erroll Garner]
On March 1, 1991 — twenty years ago yesterday — I got an email from a stranger who’d downloaded and read an unpublished story of mine.
The story in question, “The Last Supper,” was a slender-little-nothin’ of a horror story about a church congregation who disposed of each pastor, when they tired of him, by consuming him at a communal covered-dish meal. My new correspondent just wanted me to know (a) she had enjoyed reading it and (b) in a word, Eeeeewww…!
Gross-out aside, the tone of the note was a little fangirlish. And in my reply, I — who’d written but not yet published a mystery about an email stalker — was simultaneously a little puffed-up and evasive.
Unfortunately, neither of us retained a copy of that first exchange. We both remember it, though — oh yes we do. And we both remember (in sometimes excruciating detail <g>) the long-term effects…
Erroll Garner’s piano provides the soundtrack to this post: “Love Walked In.” Seven years after George Gershwin composed the music, Ira Gershwin added the lyrics, the first verse of which goes:
Nothing seemed to matter any more,
Didn’t care what I was headed for.
Time was standing still,
No one counted till
There came a knocking at the door.
The rest fits, too.
Love you, Baby.
[Comments closed for this post, obviously.]
The Nonexistent Kavalier & Clay Film
This is almost heartbreaking to watch — because the film it’s promoting (by director and cinematographer Jamie Caliri, of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) hasn’t (yet) been made.
(And if you haven’t read Kavalier & Clay yet, well, now you’ve got one more reason to do so.)
Notice What This Post Is Not Doing
From whiskey river:
The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds
(Daniel Goleman, quoting R.D. Laing [source])
…and:
You know, all mystics — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion — are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
(Anthony de Mello [source])
Midweek Music Break: The Mellotron, and The Moody Blues
[A view of the interior of the Mellotron M400. Click the image to enlarge. To learn more about how the Mellotron works, see this page (where I found this image) at the Candor Chasma “information about Mellotron, Fairlight and other vintage keyboards” site.]
A dim little back corner of the cabinet which houses musical-instrument history is occupied by an odd device called the Mellotron. It was an early “synthesizer,” sort of. But it didn’t create the sounds of other instruments artificially, by generating electronic pulses and sending them directly to amplifiers and sound boards. The Mellotron played strips of audiotape, several seconds in length, on which had been recorded a host of musical instruments: at its simplest, one note per instrument per strip of tape. Choose your instrument and press a key on the keyboard; the corresponding tape strip moves over a playback head; and out comes the sound of that instrument playing that note. When you release the key, the tape is repositioned so the playback head returns to the beginning of the strip.
(It puts one in mind of that Samuel Johnson wisecrack: “It’s like a dog dancing on its hind legs. The wonder is not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.”)
Where Worlds and Art Forms Overlap: The Icebook*
I feel somewhat at risk of turning this joint into one of those blogs which serve as dumping grounds for videos, rather than actual words. But some videos just demand circulation, y’know?
This came to me by way of an email message from my great blog-friend, Froog, who just knew it would appeal to me. (Actually, he suggested that I save it for a Friday whiskey river-themed post. But I think it deserves a spotlight (no pun intended) of its own.)
From the Vimeo page where you can find the original of the below video, from the minds and hands of artists Davy and Kristin McGuire:
The Ice Book is a miniature theatre show, a pop-up book that comes to life as if by magic.
It tells the story of a mysterious princess who lures a boy into her magical world to warm her heart of ice. It is made from sheets of paper and light, designed to give a live audience an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation.
And, at The Ice Book‘s own site, you can read of the behind-the-scenes process they used in assembling what is, apparently, a traveling show.
I always had the dream of creating a theatre performance that opened up like a pop-up book. A show that would mix video projections with live actors to create a totally immersive experience. We wanted to create a full scale, life-size theatre production.
The idea for the Icebook was to create a miniature maquette for this dream — a demonstration model to show to producers and other funders in the hope that they would give us some money to make the full scale show. (And we still hope that this will come true one day!) The Icebook has since however, grown its own legs and turned into a miniature show all by itself. An intimate performance for small audiences.
Thank you, Froog!
____________________
* Whether this should be a two-word phrase or a single word seems uncertain. I opted to go with the one-word variation, per the title as it appears in the video.
Perspective, Proportion, Sweet Spot
[Image: “Perspective,” a portion of Engineered Biotopes; this was an entry in a 2010 Greek architectural competition called “Piraeus Tower 2010 — Changing the Face/Façades Reformation.” For more on the competition, and this entry in particular, see this page at the Bustler architecture/design site.]
From whiskey river:
To My Doppelganger
You were always the careful one,
who’d tiptoe into passion
and cut it in half with your mind.
I allowed you that, and went
happier, wilder ways. Now
every thought I’ve ever had
seems a rope knotted
to another rope, going back
in time. We’re intertwined.
I’ve learned to hesitate
before even the most open door.
I don’t know what you’ve learned.
But to go forward, I feel,
is to go together now. There’s a place
I’d like to arrive by nightfall.
(Stephen Dunn [source])
…and:
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])
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