Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Step by Step, and an Ounce at a Time

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[Image: Beast of Burden, a sculpture by Sarah Perry. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Burlap Sack

A person is full of sorrow
the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
We say, “Hand me the sack,”
but we get the weight.
Heavier if left out in the rain.
To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The mule is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.
What would it be to take the bride
and leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thick ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

(Muriel Rukeyser)

…and:

I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses — that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

(Pablo Neruda)

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Midweek Music Break: Theme-Park Earworms

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The Missus and I took a much-needed mini-vacation this past weekend, trekking off to central Florida for (among other things) our first visit to the other theme park in that neighborhood. We love amusement parks and fairs (county, state, you name it), but neither of us is a big roller-coaster fan; most of the rides at our destination park were pure roller coasters, or adaptations of the genre. And if you look through the place’s Web site, you will observe that pretty much all the happy, screaming people in the photos are no more than half our age, and the majority much younger.

Still, we found plenty to do, although we spent only about five or six hours at the park itself (counting a full dinner).

The single activity I spent most of the four days engaged in — other than driving, haha — was reading. It felt almost irresponsible, reading so much. I finished one book I’d been reading for weeks; started and finished another in the next 24 hours; and put a huge dent in a third. I read for hours at a clip. (Of course, it helped that I’d sorta-but-not-quiiiiiite-finished this draft of Seems to Fit a couple days before. The very last chapter still needs work, but even so, my head was largely empty of responsibility to my own story.)

Anyway, headed into the midweek I got thinking about theme- and amusement-park music. Usually — at least to my mind — this music is associated with carousels, merry-go-rounds, whatever-you-call them, and often has that characteristic hurdy-gurdy sound. (The rides’ up-and-down round-and-round rhythms favor short songs played over, and over, and over, and over…) When I was a kid, a carousel appeared on the streets of our own town every now and again in summer, and the single number I remember it playing was (maybe unsurprisingly) “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.”

Wikipedia says:

[It was] written in 1937 by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin. It is best known as the theme tune for the Looney Tunes cartoon series produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, used from 1937 to 1969.

Here’s one Looney Tunes rendition, not the opening-titles instrumental but as sung by an early version of guess-who in “Daffy Duck and Egghead” (1938):

But the cartoon version was (is) waaay too fast to be played by any carousel other than one about to fly apart at its welded seams. The one I remember was paced more like this disturbing version from television’s old Lawrence Welk Show:

(The cartoon version of the song, though, provided me with the title for Merry-Go-Round. The sequel to that, called Merrily We Roll Along, gets its title from the theme song for the Merry Melodies cartoon series — also by Warner Brothers.)

Now it occurs to me that another carousel song was adapted for use in short comedies from the same mid-1930s era: “Listen to the Mockingbird,” the first theme song for The Three Stooges’ films. (They later switched to “Three Blind Mice,” but I’ve never heard a carousel play that one. Maybe the transference works in only one direction.)

At any rate, no matter how much I enjoy theme and amusement parks, especially those in central Florida, I can never dissociate them from this song:

Yeah. That (the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair) was the first place I ever heard it, too — maybe fifteen, twenty years before first re-encountering it at Disney World. What a surprise *cough* that it stayed with me during all that time in between!

In the above clip, the voiceover celebrates how many languages sing the song during the ride. Of course, the more languages in which it’s sung and instruments on which it’s played, the more times the maddening tune must be played, and the more desperate the riders grow to be freed from the little boats they’re trapped in. I like to imagine the Disney crew in their white short-sleeved shirts and ties, brainstorming around a table in a bar in late-1950s Southern California, laughing, growing ever drunker as they call out, “We’ve gotta do it in Sanskrit!” “Wait — Tagalog!” “Don’t forget Urdu!” “Old Norse!” “Pygmy Bantu!”…

I opted here not to use any of the videos which play all of “It’s a Small World.” If you’re a glutton for punishment, you’ve got a lot of them to choose from.

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Midweek Music Break: BettySoo, “Never Knew No Love” and “Boxcars”

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Like Patty Griffin (to whom I’ve seen her compared), BettySoo knows how to love a musical note, how to hold it, shake it, and/or bend it for maximum emotional effect. Like Griffin, she specializes in a genre which both is and is not quite country, folk, pop, and/or rock. And like Griffin, the woman knows how to write a song.

All of which triggers a bit of cognitive dissonance when you find out that BettySoo is a five-foot-tall, apparently twenty-something Korean-American. Say what?!?

Let’s start this off with one of her own tunes, the driving “Never Knew No Love.” The video’s unofficial; while L.A.-noir-style film stills at first glance might seem a long distance away from the lyrics, the combination (“Never knew no man like the one you been missing / Never knew no love could break love’s vow”) actually works pretty well.

Lyrics:

Never Knew No Love
(BettySoo)

When the sun’s still beating down September
Can’t touch your toes to the pavement in the afternoon
Swinging out front, wondering whether
Sins of the summer gonna come
Catch up with you soon

Never knew no dirt didn’t come off in the kitchen
Never knew no stain like the one you’re hiding now
Never knew no man like the one you been missing
Never knew no love could break love’s vow

Fan my face but the moving just makes me hotter
Try to sit still as the creek down by the way
That dry bed ain’t seen no fresh water
Spent the last two months drying out without the rain

Never knew no dirt didn’t come off in the kitchen
Never knew no stain like the one I’m hiding now
Never knew no man like the one I been missing
Never knew no love could break love’s vow

Can’t go back to the water’s edge
ain’t no water…
Can’t go back to his arms
ain’t no water…
Can’t go dip beneath the glass surface
ain’t no water…
Can’t dry off in the summer sun

Never knew no dirt didn’t come off in the kitchen
Never knew no stain like the one I’m hiding now
Never knew no man like the one I been missing
Never knew no love could break love’s vow

Now dial the energy way down. Here she is with dobro-/guitarist Doug Cox, in a twosome they call Across the Borderline, performing Butch Hancock‘s “Boxcars.” Again, this does not appear to be an official video: it’s barely a video at all, just a single still photo which gradually fades in from a black background (and eventually fades back out). I think this helps to focus the mind on the lyrics, the shambling-blues rhythm, and the undiluted talent running out of the speakers.

Lyrics (note: these are the original lyrics; BettySoo throws in numerous free-form twists and swirls of her own):

Boxcars
(by Butch Hancock; performance by Across the Borderline)

Well, I gave all my money to the banker this month
Now I got no more money to spend
She smiled when she saw me comin’ through that door
When I left, she said “Come back again”

Well I watched some lonesome boxcar wheels turnin’
down the tracks out of town
And it’s on that lonesome railroad track
I’m gonna lay my burden down

I looked for my little lady in the lost and found
But she had already been claimed
I’m gonna find me a ticket to ride
Through a town that never had no name

Nobody may care where I go tonight
But baby if the truth be told
I’m goin’ down to the railroad tracks
Watch them lonesome boxcars roll

[instrumental break]

I was raised on a farm the first years of my life
And life was pretty good, they say
I’ll probably live to be some ripe old age
If that dirty dog death won’t stay outa my way

This world can take my money and my time
But it sure can’t take my soul
An’ I’m goin’ down to the railroad tracks
Watch them lonesome boxcars roll

There’s some big ol’ Buicks by the Baptist Church
Cadillacs at the Church of Christ
I parked my camel by an ol’ haystack
I’ll be lookin’ for that needle all night

You know there ain’t a gonna be no radial tires
turnin’ down the streets of gold
I’m goin’ down to the railroad tracks
Watch them lonesome boxcars roll

[instrumental break]

Have you ever hear the whistle on a fast freight train
beatin’ out a beautiful tune
If you ever seen the cold blue railroad tracks shinin’
by the light of the moon

If you ever felt the locomotive shake the ground
I know you don’t need to be told
Why I’m goin’ down to the railroad tracks
Watch them lonesome boxcars roll

I know even less about playing or singing music than I do about why music works. But really, that is some stringwork there. And that is some voice.

___________________________

Addendum: Something about “Never Knew No Love” sounded familiar to me… not the lyrics but the actual sound, the music. I might be thinking of early-1990s Melissa Etheridge. “,” maybe. Or, no, even more, “Ain’t It Heavy”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Ain’t It Heavy. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:24 long.

[audio:aintitheavy_melissaetheridge.mp3|titles=’Ain’t It Heavy’|artists=Melissa Etheridge]
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Do We Ever Really Get It?

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[Image: looking up into the Ring Around a Tree playspace/bus shelter in Fuji, Japan. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.

(Pablo Neruda)

…and:

We must know that it is not enough just to see what the Mind is, we must put into practice all that makes it up in our daily life. We may talk about it glibly, we may write books to explain it, but that is far from being enough. However much we may talk about water and describe it quite intelligently, that does not make it real water. So with fire. Mere talking of it will not make the mouth burn. To know what they are means to experience them in actual concreteness. A book on cooking will not cure our hunger. To feel satisfied we must have actual food. So long as we do not go beyond mere talking, we are not true knowers.

(Takuan Soho)

…and:

If you were to put aside what you know because of what other people told you, how much of what you know do you truly know for yourself?

(John Tarrant)

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Midweek Music Break: Carlos Santana (and Peter Green)

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He sounded like nothing else on the rock landscape at the time. When you first heard Carlos Santana’s music, your mind did a little double-take: What is that?!? Afterwards, it pretty much made no difference which song you encountered: above all, you could count on that guitar, cutting like a singing knife through the jazzy, infectiously smoky rhythms.

“Black Magic Woman” (from the 1970 Abraxas album) had been written a couple years earlier, by the great blues guitarist Peter Green in Fleetwood Mac’s original configuration. As Wikipedia notes:

…[A] curious blend of blues, rock, jazz, 3/2 afro-Cuban son clave, and “Latin” polyrhythms, Santana’s arrangement added conga, timbales and other percussion, in addition to organ and piano, to make complex polyrhythms that give the song a “voodoo” feel distinct from the original.

The version of the song on Abraxas actually opened and closed with a riff on a melody called “Gypsy Queen,” by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gábor Szabó. It’s a little like eavesdropping on some ritual in a Caribbean jungle clearing. Here’s Santana:

Lyrics:

Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen
(by Peter Green; performance by Santana)

[instrumental]

Got a black magic woman
Got a black magic woman
I’ve got a black magic woman
Got me so blind I can’t see
That she’s a black magic woman
She’s trying to make a devil out of me

Don’t turn your back on me baby
Don’t turn your back on me baby
Yes don’t turn your back on me baby
Stop messing round with your tricks
Don’t turn your back on me baby
You just might pick up my magic sticks

[instrumental]

Got your spell on me baby
Got your spell on me baby
Yes you got your spell on me baby
Turning my heart into stone
I need you so bad, magic woman
I can’t leave you alone

And here’s the original, from Fleetwood Mac’s The Pious Bird of Good Omen (1969).

(This version is a lot shorter than many of the live-performance recordings available, such as those on YouTube.)

It’s been great to see Carlos Santana’s career booming again. This most recent phase, after a long dry spell (some of it without a label), kicked off with his 1999 album, Supernatural — particularly, the hugely best-selling single with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas: “Smooth.” Says Wikipedia:

On Billboard magazine’s rankings of the top songs of the first fifty years of the Hot 100 singles chart, “Smooth” was ranked as the number-two song overall (behind only “The Twist”) and the number-one rock song in the history of the chart.

Here’s the video:

Lyrics:

Smooth
(by Rob Thomas and Itaal Shur; performance by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas)

Man it’s a hot one
Like seven inches from the midday sun
I hear you whisper and the words melt everyone
But you stay so cool
My mu equita my Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa
You’re my reason for reason
The step in my groove

And if you say this life ain’t good enough
I would give my world to lift you up
I could change my life to better suit your mood
Cause you’re so smoothAnd just like the ocean under the moon
Well that’s the same emotion that I get from you
You got the kind of lovin’ that can be so smooth
Gimme your heart make it real
Or else forget about it

I’ll tell you one thing
If you would leave it would be a crying shame
In every breath and every word I hear your name calling me out
Out from the barrio you hear my rhythm from your radio
You feel the turning of the world so soft and slow
Turning you round and round

A hot time in that city, hmm?

 

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The Whole Sweet World Is a Garden

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[Video: Rowlf and Fozzie collaborate, after a fashion — and much to their surprise — on an instrumental version of “In an English Country Garden“]

From whiskey river:

The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there.

It might be good to open our eyes and see.

(Thomas Merton [source])

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What’s in a Song/Midweek Music Break: “Blue Skies”

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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!

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Midweek Music Break: “Michael Meets Mozart”

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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.

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What Did the Dormouse Say?

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[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 Ptolemy

I 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])

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