Music – Page 47

Choose Your Own Poisons

April 3, 2009 by John 14 Comments

From whiskey river:

We’re fools whether we dance or not,
So we might as well dance.

(Japanese proverb)

…and:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

(Richard Feynman [in his 1974 CalTech commencement address])

Not from whiskey river:

Fool’s Money Bags

Outside the long window,
With his head on the stone sill,
The dog is lying,
Gazing at his Beloved.
His eyes are wet and urgent,
And his body is taut and shaking.
It is cold on the terrace;
A pale wind licks along the stone slabs,
But the dog gazes through the glass
And is content.

The Beloved is writing a letter.
Occasionally she speaks to the dog,
But she is thinking of her writing.
Does she, too, give her devotion to one
Not worthy?

(Amy Lowell [source])

Now let’s look back a few years, to the revivification of John Travolta’s career, post-Pulp Fiction. In 1996 he took the title role in Michael: a vacationing archangel. In fact, this is the last vacation Michael may take (according to some rulebook which angels must follow), so he wants to make it a good one. (An angel who wants to vacation on Earth? you’re thinking. He replies, “Whatever they say, you can never have too much of Earth.”) He travels across country with a group of staffers for a gossip/tabloid magazine, and on the way they stop at a roadhouse…

A fun blog post probably awaits me, or somebody, on the subject of “classic scenes from non-classic films.” This scene in the roadhouse is wonderful — I was very surprised I couldn’t find it anywhere online but at an Italian site. In any case, it answers pretty definitively the question an alien might ask: “Why do people dance, anyway?” (Michael is like a flystrip which, when dangled in the air, catches only females.)

It doesn’t hurt that the music (lyrics below) likewise ties into the theme of this week’s Friday post, especially the Japanese proverb.

Lyrics:

Chain of Fools
(words and music by Don Covay;
performance by Aretha Franklin)

Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
Five long years I thought you were my man
But I found out I’m just a link in your chain
You got me where you want me
I ain’t nothing but your fool
You treated me mean oh you treated me cruel
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools

Every chain has got a weak link
I might be weak child, but I’ll give you strength
You told me to leave you alone
My father said come on home
My doctor said take it easy
Whole bunch of lovin is much too strong
I’m added to your chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain,
Chain, chain of fools

One of these mornings the chain is gonna break
But up until then, yeah, I’m gonna take all I can take
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools

Dogs, Lions, and Fish (Oh My!)

March 20, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.

(Milarepa)

Not from whiskey river:

The End Of March
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost…
A kite string?–But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of–are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
–a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source (pages 15-16)])

…and:

[Read more…]

Morning Instructions

February 27, 2009 by John 7 Comments

From whiskey river:

On Angels

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

(Czeslaw Milosz)

[Read more…]

What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)

February 19, 2009 by John 13 Comments

Excerpt from Hoagy Carmichael's 1st draft of 'I Get Along Without You Very Well' [This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists — appeared on Tuesday.]

Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 years earlier, and the sheet music as published bore two signs of this past:

The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
Following Carmichael’s name as the songwriter appeared the note, “Words inspired by a poem by J.B. (?)”

Why “Except Sometimes”? Who was J.B.? And why that trailing question mark?

[Read more…]

Comment Madness

February 18, 2009 by John 9 Comments

Attention readers: exciting news!

Sorry, folks, the commpetition (snort, cackle) is now closed. The winner is Tessa, of Nuts & Mutton.

And heck, I’m feeling so expansive right now that I’ll even toss the pen I use to sign it into the box.

As you can see from the partial screen capture at the left, Running After My Hat has to date received 999 approved comments (including pingbacks).

For the author of the 1,000th comment, I’m giving away a prize: a signed copy of my next book.

Fire away!

_________________________

TERMS AND CONDITIONS:

Void where prohibited by law.
John reserves the right to do things like post-date comments or otherwise shuffle them around if, like, say, a complete stranger on a random drive-through just happens to catch this post and sprays the comment box with text.
…which isn’t to say he WILL, only that he MAY.
Family of RAMH crew members not eligible.
…or, possibly, eligible.
As any regular reader here knows, my “next book” is at this time merely a possibility.
It’s the thought that counts.

What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

February 17, 2009 by John 10 Comments

[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song’s composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.]

There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is one — in which they “overstuff” their lyrics’ lines with extra syllables.

This is similar to what, in poetry, is called sprung rhythm: “verse” which mimics the rhythm of natural speech.

It also calls to mind a sly little bit of business by Alexander Pope. In demonstrating the awkwardness of so-called alexandrine meter — twelve syllables per line — Pope once, as Wikipedia says, “famously characterized the alexandrine’s potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine.” One of these two couplets goes:

A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

See the way that second line seems overloaded with syllables? That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting at here.

In a song, though, the effect can be either subtler or more ponderous, as the words follow the underlying instrumentation — and depending on the singer’s skill. It’s not like we’re just reading the words on a page, free to imagine, if we want, that the line breaks and meter don’t count at all: it has to “sound right.”

So let’s start out with the lyrics, then, to “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (Hoagy Carmichael*, 1939):

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.

I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.

What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

[Read more…]

Haunted by What’s Inside

February 13, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn’t their feelings, their work and love — especially love.

(Alberto Giacometti)

Not cited at whiskey river, but the above quotation continues:

…They read the newspaper maybe ten minutes a day, they see that a satellite is orbiting around the moon, and then they immediately start talking again about work, and love. And not only that: often somebody will commit suicide because of love problems. And that means that if an individual would rather die than live without a person he loves, then the power of emotion does still dominate the world.

(cited by Reinhold Hohl in Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures)

[Read more…]

Finding What’s Important, Holding onto It Once Found

February 6, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

(Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You)

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle — why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn’t possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy (oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.

(by Wesley McNair, from The Town of No and My Brother Running)

…and — simply because Wesley McNair has landed in my mind, swooping in out of nowhere, and now I keep finding more of his stuff I love — this:

[Read more…]

Deciding to Stop; Deciding to Start Again

January 30, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

I remember the word and forget the word
                   although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
                   uncomforting as Braille.

We are our final vocabulary,
                   and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There’s only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There’s only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
                   making it otherwise.

(Charles Wright, Negative Blue)

…and:
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“Shoulda Thoughta That.” And the Worst. Songs. Evah.

January 27, 2009 by John 7 Comments

One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was my idea!”

Over at the Writing Well Is the Best Revenge blog, a recent post starts out by touching on a similar phenomenon: encountering ideas they’ve never had, but wish they did. Specifically, they talk about the Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter, which provides reports of recent book deals. BIG book deals.

I know it’s, what, masochistic? Not because I begrudge anyone the fabulous deals they made–oh no way! If books are getting purchased and publishers are humming along, I’m all for it.

No–what’s masochistic is the constantly recurring thought that I am unable to suppress. And that is: oh–I should have thought of that.

Or worse: Oh, I COULD have thought of that.

We won’t even discuss “I DID think of that, years and years ago, but didn’t do anything about it” [Ed. note: viz., The Missus’s lament] because that way lies true madness. (Two little words: Animal Planet.)

Which leads them — gotta love it, someone else is easily distracted, too — to consider the announcement of the sale of Christopher Bowles’s book, Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart:

[Read more…]