The really important question (as cartoonist Shannon Wheeler reminds us) remains: what happens to your ideas once you get them?
[Cartoon scanned from April, 2013 issue of The Funny Times; click to enlarge]
Spirits Tossed, Lost, Messed Up, Redeemed
[Lyrics here; see additional notes at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river (which seems to have had a rough week):
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.
(Philip Roth [source])
…and:
Willow flowers, snowflakes, the same . . .
They’re feckless.No matter whose garden they fall in,
They’ll always follow the wind away.
(Yuan Mei [source])
…and:
What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
(Annie Dillard [source])
Waypoints
[Image: possibly the oldest surviving map of the world. Mesopotamia/Babylon, about 700-500 BCE. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
(Paul Auster [source])
…and (italicized portion):
The spiritual life — or the writing life — depends above all on fidelity to objects.
I wrote that sentence and looked out the window. It has rained for three days and in today’s sun the late roses strain, soggy as wet tissue, toward light coming just in time. Fidelity, I was saying, to objects…
Whatever your eye falls on — for it will fall on what you love — will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
It doesn’t matter how unprepossessing the world we look at, though it may seem to the lust of the eye that blue sky and late roses are more amusing to look at than dead winter growth. This mistake I make over and over.
(Mary Rose O’Reilley [source])
Clumsy Delights, Deftly Managed
[Image: “Duck with Slinky- 1,” by user SteveTaint at sxc.hu]
From whiskey river:
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals — eagles and leopards — and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
(Billy Collins [note: first stanza not always included in quotations around the Web])
…and:
It’s a weird thing, writing.
Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.
And that’s wonderful.
Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.
And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.
And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.
And that’s magic.
(Neil Gaiman [source])
…and:
Living is all clumsy delights. Sitting here in this room, for example, listening to you turn pages, overhearing you breathe.
(Seon Joon [source])
The Possibilities of Treeness
[Image: Tree on the Hill (2012), by Patrick Winfield. 24×23.5 inches, film and Polaroids on panel]
From whiskey river:
Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman, and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of [the feat]… You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.
(Paul Auster [source])
…and:
Tree
All day I waited to be blown;
then someone cut me down.I have, instead of thoughts,
uses; uses instead of feelings.One day I’ll feel the wind again.
A moment later I’ll be gone.
(Dan Chiasson [source])
…and:
We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we’re looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.
(Charles de Lint [source])
Consider the Things We Miss (Then Consider Our Missing Them)
[Image: Where Are You, by user “code1name” at the sxc.hu site]
From whiskey river:
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge — none of that tells us very much.
(Paul Auster)
…and:
My Love
(excerpt)It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon —
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share; but we’re always wrong.
(Don Paterson [source])
…and:
The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.
(Mary Oliver [source])
What Lies Beneath
[Image: lunar surface, color-enhanced, per results of the NASA GRAIL mission.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
“My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps on doing bad, dumb things.”
“Your soul and your what?” he said.
“My soul and my meat,” I said.
“They’re separate?” he said.
“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”
I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.
“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”
“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”
“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people — get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”
(Kurt Vonnegut [source])
…and:
Eyes-Shut Facing Eyes-Rolling-Around
Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.
That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.
(Jelaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) [source])
…and:
Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.
(Neil Gaiman [source])
Mung-Bodied: A Reverie
[Image: schematic of a “Rube Goldberg” solution to the challenge of waking up a laptop, by a fifth-grade physical science project team. For details, see the note at the bottom of this post.]
When I was a kid, one of the things which could — without fail! — get all of us laughing was for somebody to go all suddenly and unintentionally tongue-tied. Mung-tongued, we called it. In a little one of his stand-up bits, Steve Martin asked the audience rhetorically something like this: Are you ever talking along and all of a sudden your tongue gets away from you and ywannguhmelizzorwhat? (I laughed at that, too.)
But you know what? The tongue finds lots of company among the other muscles.
Cold. So Cold.
[Image: “ice-creeksicles,” by Jeremy Hiebert. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Winter Afternoon by the Lake
Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,
Late January. No birds. No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped. PerhapsYou died suddenly earlier today. But the thin
Moon says no. The trees say, “It’s been this way
Before, often. It’s cold, but it’s quiet.” We’ve experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting backThe hide flap. A voice says: “It’s old. You’ll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, ‘Stay as long as you like.'”The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we’re
Ready to re-enter that stillness. “Not yet.”
(Robert Bly [source])
…and:
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.
(Robert Bly [source])
…and:
There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.
(Neil Gaiman [source])
Midweek Music Break: Stan Freberg’s Musical “Parodies”
Wikipedia’s got an interesting article on the musical parody genre: “borrowing” the lyrics or music of existing songs, and recasting them with different music or lyrics, respectively. Usually (as the ‘pedia points out) this is done with humorous intention — think Weird Al Yankovic — and that’s what this post is about. Apparently though, the intention isn’t always to induce laughter, especially when it comes to lifting music from old folk songs and like sources:
Bob Dylan took the tune of the old slave song “No more auction block for me” as the basis for “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
(Talk about a whiplash response when I read that little tidbit. I mean, I know Dylan has great respect for old music. Still…)
Anyhow, parody may be unique among the various forms of satire in that we can’t always tell what’s being made fun of. Is it the melody? the lyrics? a particular performer, or even a specific performance? The humor seems to rely strictly on the upending of expectations: we have to know the song to get the joke, and we have to know it well enough to recognize what’s been changed. (I guess from a certain perspective, even the work of this group — contemporary songs performed in old-fashioned styles — could be considered parody.)
Stan Freberg — the comedian, writer, all-around wizard of words and pop culture who flourished on radio and television in the 1950s-60s — seemed to specialize in a particular form of not-quite-parody: poking fun at the process by which recordings are made in the first place. It was almost as though he’d at some point heard Song X, Y, or Z, and thought: Wow. I bet THAT made for some interesting sessions in the studio…! The classic Stan Freberg musical piece featured a nearly note-for-note reproduction of some popular song… and a performer openly at explosive loggerheads with his accompanists or studio technicians. These little three(ish)-minute gems of artistic melodrama tended to conclude with hurt feelings, slammed doors, or worse.
Here’s an example. Around the time of Freberg’s heyday, Harry Belafonte contributed his “Day-O” (a/k/a “The Banana Boat Song”) to the library of pop-music earworms:
Freberg accepts the song’s virtues at face value; as I said, the guy really could perform. But he imagines the singer and his backup musicians having to deal with a producer or accompanist who perhaps woke up that day on the wrong side of the bed (if so, maybe with a soaring hangover):
[Below, click Play button to begin Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:30 long.]
[audio:bananaboat_dayo_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)’|artists=Stan Freberg]
Freberg loved what instruments could bring to a piece. (One of his parodies took on “Dueling Banjos”: “Dueling Tubas.”) He could also imagine, though, that instrumentalists and vocalists didn’t always see eye-to-eye on how best to interpret a song. A classic example is his take on “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; by the time this fictional recording session ended, vocalist and assertive drummer were practically at each other’s throats:
[Below, click Play button to begin The Yellow Rose of Texas. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:26 long.]
[audio:yellowroseoftexas_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’The Yellow Rose of Texas’|artists=Stan Freberg]
Finally: in late 1955, The Platters recorded one of their biggest hits, “The Great Pretender”:
Freberg apparently listened to this and wondered not about the obvious performers — the lead vocalist and ooo-ooo-oooh background singers — but about one member of the accompanying band. Like, jeez — the poor piano player: he had to play the same note, over and over and over and over… But what might the session have been like for real, given the “cool” of popular pianists at the time?
[Below, click Play button to begin The Great Pretender. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:22 long.]
[audio:thegreatpretender_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’The Great Pretender’|artists=Stan Freberg]
That little twist at the end — the sudden re-introduction of a troublemaker from another parody — is one of my very favorite Stan Freberg moments.
By the way, although I’ve used the past tense above, Stan Freberg at age 86 still crops up from time to time, lending his voice (and no doubt writing) talents to videos, kids’ shows, and documentaries.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- …
- 136
- Next Page »
