Via some very clever multi-tracking, audiences in seven cities sing Ben Folds and Nick Hornby’s “A Working Day” sorta-kinda “together”:
(You might also want to see the Huffington Post‘s recent interview with Folds, about the video and other things.)
What’s in a Song/Midweek Music Break: “Blue Skies”
Few people remember the short-lived 1926 musical Betsy anymore, although its music and lyrics came from powerhouse songwriting duo Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. There’s a reason few people remember it: Rodgers and Hart had written nothing memorable for it. (A Hart-related site calls it “a beautifully mounted mess, top-heavy with ensemble numbers in the Ziegfeld fashion.” Among those numbers, for instance, was a performance by someone called the Harmonica Symphony Orchestra. Umm, okay.)
Few people remember its star, either, one Belle Baker. (That’s her over at the right.) But at the time, she was enough of a force that when she didn’t care for the music, she could simply ignore the show’s — and the show-business — realities… and, in Act 2 on opening night, just start singing a song which Rodgers and Hart themselves hadn’t written. To say they were surprised probably understates the case. [*]
The surprise was “Blue Skies,” written by Baker’s friend Irving Berlin. Apparently he’d been kicking it around in his head for some time, just hadn’t had the proper occasion to commit it to permanent form. Baker’s complaints about her solos in the show gave him that occasion.
It was an immediate hit. Reportedly, the audience on that opening night so loved the song that they required twenty-four encores of it. For her part, Baker was delighted but also a little unnerved; says Wikipedia (alas, without attribution for the moment):
During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row.
I bet that moment really tickled Rodgers and Hart!
Spacestruck
[Video: “The Voyager Interstellar Record,” a YouTube playlist of all the sounds on the so-called “golden record” sent into space with the two Voyager interstellar spacecraft. For more information, see the note below.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Lost in the Cosmos:
The Last Self-Help Bookor
The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos
or
How can you survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians
or
Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?
or
Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life
[etc.]
(Walker Percy, from Lost in the Cosmos [source])
…and:
II
Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.
(Diane Ackerman, from “We Are Listening,” in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter [source])
Midweek Music Break: “Michael Meets Mozart”
Longtime visitors to RAMH know (as I have said) what I don’t know about music could fit, barely, into a large stadium. (A roofless one, so that the heap of facts and sensibilities inside can actually rise higher than the walls.) So for me to claim that some musical performance awed me — well, that doesn’t claim much.
But this…
Before seeing this piece, I was completely unfamiliar with pianist Jon Schmidt and cellist Steven Sharp Nelson, who collaborated on it. They’d intended to do a mashup, a “Mozart-style arrangement involving several songs by modern artists” — but couldn’t get permission to use the tracks they had in mind. The original composition they came up with instead, says one site, “[weaves] together inspirations from a handful of known influences, including Michael Jackson, Mozart and U2.”
Whatever the source(s) for the final product, yes, I am awed. It’s a dizzying, exuberant blend not just of musical genres but of virtuosity and special effects, both video and audio. (And it took twelve hours just to film.)
Here y’go:
From the YouTube page:
On the recording, Steven Sharp Nelson laid down over 100 tracks including cello textures never known possible. Every single sound on the video was made using only the instruments shown: piano, cello, mouth percussion and kick drum. We utilized some cool effects on lots of stuff… for example the U2-style delay on Steve’s pizzicato at the beginning.
The extra string on the electric cellos (the black cello has an extra high string and the white cello has an extra low string) allowed us to cover the full range of the orchestra. The deep bass drum sound is a bump on the body of the cello with a little help from some effects. The shaker sound was created by Steve rubbing rosin on his bow. The record scratch is Steve scratching a quarter on the strings… you get the idea.
Those two electric cellos look like musical instruments from the planet Tralfamadore.
Jumbled together with the other things in that stadium I mentioned: knowledge of musical notation. But I did glance at some of the sheet music for “Michael Meets Mozart.” Among the annotations interspersed between and within the staves:
- delete F if you can’t reach
- this is what the computer prints when you slide your right elbow up the keys
- let ring as long as possible with half pedal
There’s this, at the very top (whatever it means):
- chills up
and later (my favorite):
- Watch your fingers on the lid hit! (I found out the hard way)
Ha! And also: Le sigh.
What Did the Dormouse Say?
[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 PtolemyI 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])
Pottermore
From The Atlantic:
In a much-anticipated press event this morning, J.K. Rowling announced the launch of Pottermore, a new website meant to bring all-things-Harry Potter to the Web. It was revealed in a leaked memo yesterday that a central focus of the site would be an online gaming experience developed by the company Adam & Eve that will include real-world prizes such as magic wands secretly scattered throughout Britain and the United States. But the launch revealed that the site will be much more than that, though it does appear to include some gaming elements.
And here’s the woman herself:
More about JKR’s reasons for setting up Pottermore, and the interesting (to me!) discussion about which e-book format they’ll use, are at The Atlantic‘s site as well as elsewhere.
Midweek Music Break: “One Shoe Blues” (Sandra Boynton via B.B. King)
[Image: B.B. King and Boynton sock puppet]
I had occasion recently to be searching around for an image from the 1970s, the cover of possibly the biggest-selling greeting card in the planet’s (if not the universe’s) history. It was a cartoon, at the top of which was depicted a single hippopotamus, a small avian creature, and a pair of sheep. Beneath, in a charming apparently hand-lettered caption, it said:
Hippo Birdy Two Ewe
This search made me wonder what had happened to the artist, Sandra Boynton. I took it for granted she continued to work in some capacity, even though she — something like the J.K. Rowling of greeting-card creators — surely could have retired after her first few products hit the market.
She hasn’t retired, not at all. She’s certainly branched out, though. Among her other accomplishments, Wikipedia identifies her as a songwriter and I wondered what that was all about. Hence I came to her 2007 album (actually her fourth), Blue Moo: 17 Jukebox Hits from Way Back Never. The Boynton-crafted songs on it purport to be (per the subtitle) actual hits from some imaginary parallel universe’s past; the album as a whole is marketed as children’s music. The performers featured, though, include folks likely to be appreciated by adults in our own universe’s past (and present) — Steve Lawrence, Patti LuPone, Sha Na Na, Brian Wilson, and so on.
And buried in the middle, a true gem: “One Shoe Blues,” upon which B.B. King lavishes his signature attentions:
[Below, click Play button to begin One Shoe Blues. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:09 long.]
[audio:oneshoeblues_bbking.mp3|titles=’One Shoe Blues’|artists=B.B. King]
Lyrics:
One Shoe Blues
(by Sandra Boynton; performance by B.B. King)Well, I woke up this morning
Couldn’t find my shoe
Yes, I woke up this morning and I couldn’t find my shoe.
Although the right one is here, I need the left one too
(Yes, I do)
I can hear my mama calling.
She says it’s time to go.
Yes, I can hear my mama calling.
She says:
Really now, it’s time to go.
I say:
Mama, I can’t find one of my shoes!
And she says, Oh no. Not again.
I’ve got the one shoe blues
It seems they’re never gonna stop.
Yes, those one shoe blues.
Oh, they might never ever stop.
Mama says,
Just come along now!
One shoe.
Do you expect me to hop?
Did you look in the closet and under the bed?
Yes, I did
Did you look carefully in the closet and under the bed?
Yes, yes I did.
Try and think where you left it.
That’s what my mama said.
Last night I left it right here next to my other shoe.
I know I put it right here next to my other shoe.
I think somebody took it.
But I don’t know who.
No, I don’t.
I’ve got the
One shoe blues.
That’s why I’m singing this song.
I’ve got the
One shoe blues!
And so I’m singing this sad song.
You know it’s been
At least twenty minutes
That I’ve been looking in every possible place
For that…
Huh.
There it is.
I guess it was on my foot all along.
Okay, I’m ready to go now.
Anybody seen my coat?
If you prefer action, you can also see on YouTube a Boynton-directed video of the performance.
Boynton’s Web site, by the way, really impressed me. No flash, no dazzle (except that from the artwork). Just well-written, funny, unpretentious, and altogether artless in the very best sense.
The Shape of What You Live
[Image: “Angular Momentum,” from xkcd.com. The tooltip/”hover title” at the original page says: “With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)”]
From whiskey river:
Remembering
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
…and:
You’re really just an ongoing set of events: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. The awareness is keeping up with those events, seeing your life unfolding as it is, not your ideas of it, not your pictures of it. See what I mean?
(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])
Midweek Music Break: Pat Metheny, “Cherish”
Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has recently released a new album — What’s It All About. From the Nonesuch Records site:
After nearly 40 recordings under his own name, this is the first Pat Metheny album where there is not a single Metheny composition represented. This is a personal view of ten classic songs, some very well known, some less so, filtered through the harmonic and melodic ideology of a modern master with a most individual approach.
Of the three videos he’s released so far of performances from the album, this is probably my favorite. About it, Metheny himself says (at the same page linked above):
This was a huge hit in the late 60’s. One day i started playing around with it and while under the hood of the tune I found myself marveling at all the interesting moves that happen with the chords, especially on the bridge. And I used the same whole step modulation for the final A section of the song that was on the record, although I added a tag that is really not exactly derived from any obvious single point in the tune.
Gorgeous.
And, just for completeness’s sake, here’s the original, recorded in 1966 by The Association:
[Below, click Play button to begin Cherish. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:26 long.]
[audio:cherish_theassociation.mp3|titles=’Cherish’|artists=The Association]
A Conspiracy of Pages
[Etching: “The Hall of Planets,” by Erik Desmazières, #5 in a series of eleven illustrating an edition of “The Library of Babel,” by Jorges Luis Borges; click to enlarge]
From whiskey river:
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.
(C. S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory [source])
…and:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy?… Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
(Franz Kafka [source])
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