Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Unreal-Life Dialogue: Midweek Music (Emmylou Harris) Edition

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[The scene: A Saturday evening in mid-June, 2011. A living room in suburban northwest Florida, USA. A man and a woman watch TV — something the man has chosen, because it is his birthday. A knock comes at the front door; The Pooch begins to bark madly, as usual, except she is also spinning: something she does only when someone she loves (or knows she will love) approaches the house.]

She: I’ll get it.

[She scoops up The Pooch and opens the front door. There on the porch stands a radiant silver beauty of a woman. The mystery woman smiles; it lights up the threshold and foyer like moonlight. When the mystery woman speaks, it is with a soft, sweet drawl.]

Mystery Woman: Hey there Missus. I’m Emmylou. Mr. Simpson at home tonight?

She: Why yes. Yes, he is. Would you like to come in?

[Finally the man — who has heard nothing of the dialogue to this point — pauses the movie, a little annoyed that the rhythm of this great action-suspense-thriller heist flick has been interrupted.]

He: Is that the pizz— Holy shit.

MW: Hey there, John.

He: But you’re — you’re—

MW: Uh-huh. Just here to play something for you, if that’s all right.

[She retrieves an acoustic guitar from the porch, comes in, sits down and makes herself comfortable, and begins to sing.]

He: [Picking self up from floor] My God…

She: Hmm. Can I get you anything, Emmylou? Water? Glass of wine? Coffee?

MW: That’d be sweet of you, ma’am. Just water for now. [Turning to the man.] Like to hear somethin’ else?

He: Er, uh, well… [nervous laugh] That was a bit somber, y’know? Maybe something more—

MW: [not-at-all-nervous laugh] More up-tempo? More birthdayish?

He: Oh, I don’t want—

MW: That’s all right, not a problem. Thank you, Miz Simpson.

[Mystery Woman takes offered glass of water, drinks deeply. He is hypnotized by the way Mystery Woman swallows. He swallows a little, himself.]

MW: Let me see… OK, hit it, boys.

[A band magically appears behind her.]

MW: There y’go. [She laughs softly.] Just like candles: one Cadillac for each decade. Hope y’all liked it.

He: I— I—

MW: Anything else you’d like to hear right now?

He: Well, I know there’s no way for you to— I mean, that little thing you did with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch for O Brother, Where—

MW: You might be surprised what I can do.

[She snaps her fingers. The band disappears, and is replaced by a suddenly coalescing Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch.]

MW: Ready, girls?

[Below, click Play button to begin Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:57 long.

[audio:didntleavenobodybutthebaby_harriiskrausswelch.mp3|titles=’Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby’|artists=Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch]

[Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch ripple, turn translucent, and return to the ether.]

He: I— I’m speechless.

MW: Thank you. I’m so glad. I’m such a fan of your blog, you just don’t know. Especially that entry you posted back at the end of March. [Mystery Woman smiles. He falls to floor again.]

[Mystery Woman stands, leans guitar against the sideboard. Mystery Woman opens her arms, and He steps into them.]

MW: Y’all have a nice night, now.

[Mystery Woman leaves. He turns to She, who is impaling Him with a glare.]

She: You want to explain what just happened, “Mr. Simpson”?

He: Well, back in March, I wrote a post, sorta magic realis— No, forget it. I’m not sure I understand it myself.

She: [nods, apparently accepting this] I will say, that’s one beautiful woman.

He: Isn’t she, though? Isn’t she just? Have you ever seen hair like that? And that smile. [Shakes head.] And didn’t she look great in jeans? And the boots—

She: Okay, okay, enough of that. Back to the movie.

__________________________________

Hat tip to Jules for the NPR clip. Thank you again!

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Awake, Really Awake… for Good or Ill

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[Image: “Insomnia, or Nocturnal Awakening,” by “neosurrealist” artist George Grie; I found it here. Click the image for a larger view. More, in the footnote to this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Whale

It is 1970
and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,
running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale
beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean —

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers
overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
of muscle and bone —

the way life waits for us all
with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,

the sudden
jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
to cover his head with a clipboard
while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
turned away from the blast

and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

(Brian Turner, from Phantom Noise [source])

…and (including extra highlighted text):

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

(Richard Dawkins, from Unweaving the Rainbow [source])

…and:

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

(Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451 [source])

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It Calls Me On and On

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[Image: audio-animatronic scene at the 1960s-era Disneyland “Carousel of Progress” display. See yesterland.com for more information and a larger version of this image.]

From whiskey river:

The Bones
(excerpt)

…Shells were to shut out the sea,
The bones of birds were built for floating
On air and water, and those of fish were devised
For their feeding depths, while a man’s bones were framed
For what? For knowing the sands are here,
And coming to hear them a long time; for giving
Shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds,
And wrecks to plead for its sands. These things are not
Limitless: we know there is somewhere
An end to them, though every way you look
They extend farther than a man can see.

(W. S. Merwin [read the whole thing here])

…and:

We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary — or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro at incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?

(Henry Miller [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Scott Joplin’s “Solace”

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I caught 1973’s The Sting on TV recently. By now, I’ve seen it often enough that the kick of the plot has pretty much evaporated, leaving behind the not inconsiderable on-screen pleasures of watching the cast at work. (Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan, I just learned from Wikipedia, did not have to fake his limp: “Shaw had slipped on a wet handball court at the Beverly Hills Hotel just a week before filming began and had split all the ligaments in his knee.”)

To which I’d have to add, always, the textural pleasures provided by the soundtrack.

It’s hard not to like Scott Joplin’s ragtime music, which — though already out-of-date in the real-world 1930s — somehow “sounds” right to our ears for that period. It’s so… so… so bubbly, y’know?

But one song always stood out in my mind as the best of the lot — and although Joplin wrote it, it didn’t even sound like ragtime, to my uneducated ears: “Solace.”

[Below, click Play button to begin Solace. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:34 long.

[audio:solace_joplin.mp3|titles=’Solace’|artists=by Scott Joplin-Marvin Hamlisch on piano]

The complete title of the song is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade”; published in 1909, it was, says at least one source, “the only work by Joplin to employ a tango rhythm.” Which caught me completely by surprise — not that my ears are any smarter about tango than about ragtime. But when I heard “Solace,” I just couldn’t picture a couple of sleek and smoldering Spanish dancers clinched together, eyes locked, as they swirled about on a dance floor.

According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, however, the “Solace”-as-tango story isn’t quite that straightforward:

[Solace] is a four-minute gem of a habanera, which, as one might divine from the word, has roots in Havana. There is also in Solace something of the tango form, which, though distantly related to an African folk dance tradition, is more recently of the same Latin extraction as the habanera. Solace is, then, a true musical mish-mash…

Fans of George Bizet’s Carmen are invited to sit back, listen to Solace, and enjoy the same gently rocking habanera rhythm as is heard throughout the Frenchman’s famous Habanera.

So, since you, too, may wonder about that comparison… here’s Bizet’s “Habanera”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Habanera (from ‘Carmen’). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:11 long.

[audio:habanera_bizetcarmen.mp3|titles=’Habanera (from Carmen)’|artists=Bizet-London Festival Orchestra]

How about that?

[At the time this posts on Wednesday morning, I’ll be in mid-air, en route to a four-day reunion with my sisters and brother. If all goes as planned between now and then, though, another of these magically pre-created missives will appear on Friday. I will be checking in online “for real” from time to time, too, both here and via email.]

 

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Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All

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[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])

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Midweek Music Break: “St. James Infirmary”

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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 fair

Let 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 me

When 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]
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The Usefulness of Bad Things

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[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])

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The Fundamental Things Apply

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[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.]
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Notice What This Post Is Not Doing

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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])

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