I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anything by The Coup before, and probably will find excuses not to do so again. But this was too entertaining to keep to myself. I’ve always thought of Patton Oswalt as one of the most interesting and consistently watchable comedians in the business — the video sort of cements that impression in my mind.
Story Up My Sleeve, May 2013: Wrapping Up
I had no specific objectives at the outset: just wanted to post an excerpt from a different story — any story — on each day in May. My only real guideline was: don’t feature any author’s work more than once. Over time, though, some observations emerged:
Gender
I can’t remember the exact timing, but back around the beginning of the month I first heard about the online kerfuffle — the male Wikipedia editor, who was systematically working his way through the alphabetic list of “American authors” and moving any who happened to be women out of that general category and into the more specific “American female authors” category. (Not simply ensuring they were in both, mind you.)* I’m not generally quota-driven in such matters, but this whole thing appalled me. While brainstorming the Story Up My Sleeve selections, within a couple of days I decided I would alternate male-female authors throughout the month. I more or less stuck to this. (Final tally, not counting the Midweek Music Breaks: fourteen stories by men, thirteen by women.) But then I ran up against…
Medium
Most of the stories this month, obviously, were in prose form. But it occurred to me early on that I might easily interweave the Midweek Music Break series with the short-story one. So on May 8 through May 29, the Wednesday posts featured story songs. But this tripped me up gender-wise; my story list at that point had just featured Carson McCullers and was about to do Damon Knight, and my first song selection was Gordon Lightfoot… Totally confused at trying to work out the permutations, I decided to more or less relax when it came to the music. (For the record, it featured two songs by men; an “anthology” of songs sung by a musical-film cast of women; and a duet sung by a woman and a man.)
Genre
Something that surprised me: I probably could have done nothing but science-fiction stories all month. I kept thinking of other favorite SF (and fantasy) tales I wanted to include; what’s funny about this is that I haven’t read SF/F stories regularly for years. Finally, I just had to force myself to be disciplined. (For what it’s worth, stories from the American South presented me with the same dilemma — and solution. Hence, no Faulkner.) I also decided to mix things up some on this score, too, although literary/classic stories generally predominated.
Bottom line
In a tweet she posted after Friday’s entry, Jessica Francis Kane hinted that this Story Up My Sleeve project might become an annual one, undertaken by more than one individual (albeit on just one day in May, not throughout the entire month). I can’t offer an opinion about that. But I will say that doing it this way once certainly felt right to me. Coming up with roughly 30 stories felt difficult at first; obviously, or so I told myself, I’d bitten off too ambitious a chunk to chew, let alone swallow. By mid-month, though, I cringed every time I realized I’d run out of May before I ran out of stories.
Poetry and novels get all the glamour and red-carpet walks; if we’re not paying attention, short stories can feel almost like afterthoughts — like conjunctions, prepositions, and other function words to the rest of literature’s complete sentences. A claim like “I’m about halfway through my next novel” fairly roars in people’s imaginations; saying you’re far through your next short story just squeaks.
But y’know, short stories are a wonderful form. (Even the conventional novel implicitly acknowledges as much: what’s a chapter, really, if not a short story?) If you seek breadth of reading — diversity of voice, style, and theme — you could do far worse than starting with an anthology… whether lifted from a bookshelf, or pulled from your sleeve.
__________________________
*I did read this guy’s account of his reasoning, and even sympathized and agreed with it on some levels; when doing research, it generally does help me to start with a more specific category (“beetles,” say, vs. “insects”), and drill down from there. But I can’t imagine requiring others to do so. Just for starters, non-native speakers of a given language may not know whether a given name says to start in the women’s list, or the men’s. (I myself can never remember without hesitation that Chinua Achebe was a man, or that Michiko Kakutani is a woman.) You might as well categorize authors by hair color or shoe size. And why not drill down even further? If you know that Faulkner was left-handed (no, I have no idea) and had brown hair, why label him simply as a male author? Why not move him into the list of southpaw brown-haired male authors from Mississippi, and leave the generalists to stumble around in the dark?
On Medium: “The Great Google Books Hack”
I’ve posted a new entry by this title over at Medium.com. Excerpt:
…my ignorance of and fascination with music sometimes lure me into bizarre alleyways of research. The lighting there is poor. Steam hisses up from manholes and storm sewer grates, clouding the air. Sounds are muted, and the air redolent with aromas you pretend not to recognize. Simple nearby geometric shapes, when squinted at, resemble fantastic architecture seen at a distance. If you’re not careful where you walk, you can easily trip on big chunky-Gothic cobblestones of imagination…
It may be of interest to you if you’re interested in:
- blogging;
- the Midweek Music Break series here;
- online research;
- obsessions and preconceptions;
- country music;
- embarrassing public confessions; and/or
- humor, of a sort.
It relates directly to a RAMH post from this week — sort of the story behind that post, a story which I at first swore to myself I would never share. (Because, y’know, I prefer to publicly present only my competent side.) But, well, it’s a good story.
Story Up My Sleeve #29 / Midweek Music Break: “Golden Ring,” by Tammy Wynette and George Jones
[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page. Today’s selection also serves as the final weekly Midweek Music Break featuring a “story song,” in keeping with the “May is National Short Story Month” theme.]
I don’t listen to a lot of country music. But even I know this: story songs lie as thick on the ground in Nashville as in any other musical landscape, and more thickly there than anywhere except over the ancient wooded hills and valleys of folk music. (The latter probably wins only because of a thousand-year head start.) You have no doubt seen those mind-boggling lists of country-music song titles, real and imagined; if you scan through any of them you’ll find entire story lines suggested in just the titles of, who knows, 90% of them.I’ve never seen this phenomenon explained anywhere. (I’d like to believe it signifies something artsy and profound like “the powerful universal, cross-genre appeal of story-telling,” but who knows?) Whatever the reason, selecting a country song to feature during this month of story songs felt at first as though it might be almost too easy — so easy that I almost stayed away from country altogether. But today’s selection, “Golden Ring,” just — no pun intended — fit.
It fits, obviously, with the whole “month of stories” theme. George Jones, the male half of the original duet, died just a week or two ago. Its history suggests current events here in the US: as first conceived by the songwriter, Bobby Braddock, it was about the effects of a gun — not a wedding band — on the lives of a series of owners. Heck, the song even came out during the month of May, in 1976. (Wikipedia helpfully notes in a gossipy aside that this was 14 months after Wynette and Jones’s own real-life divorce.)
But it carries a hidden subtext, as well — at least for today, and at least for me. None of the lyrics are relevant for this purpose except the chorus’s last line, the one that suggests the twining of love around that simple bit of jewelry. About that line, I’ll just say: happy anniversary, Baby.
[Lyrics]
Story Up My Sleeve #22 / Midweek Music Break: “Stan,” by Eminem
[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background post. It’s also the third weekly Midweek Music Break featuring a “story song,” in keeping with the “May is National Short Story Month” theme.]
I admit it: I know almost nothing about rap. So much of the content seems to be about issues I can’t connect to, for one reason or another, and I’ve possibly just spent too much time listening to melody to care that much about rhythm exclusively. (After a moment’s pause, I realize that you can lump these two “reasons” together as the Geezer Defense.)Anyhow, as little as I know about rap in general, so much less do I know about any given rap performer. Eminem has certainly made himself hard to ignore, though. And as I worked through various online lists of story songs (it’s a popular blog and Q-and-A forum topic), I kept coming across references to this number. The title character is not just a fan of the narrator, Eminem, but a fan ultimately obsessed to the point of danger: to himself, to his girlfriend, to his baby she’s carrying. From his room, wallpapered with Eminem’s concert and publicity photos, he keeps composing rambling bipolar letters to his idol, growing ever more frustrated that he never gets a reply. The tale ends (as story songs tend to) in tragedy and irony, as Eminem finally sits down to write a return letter — only to realize that the guy he’s writing to is the very fan who’d recently driven off a bridge (with his pregnant girlfriend locked screaming in the trunk of the car), leaving behind for Eminem a melodramatic, delusional taped message.
Omitting some of the more violent imagery and language, this sanitized version of the song and video clocks in at around 25% shorter than the full eight-minute epic. (That version is also on YouTube; I haven’t watched it, but apparently — judging from the comments there — the audio in the longer one, too, is bleeped no less heavy-handedly than this one.) The lyrics I’ve linked to below, though, are as far as I know the full and unedited ones. Favorite moment: when Stan, speaking into the tape recorder while he drives, suddenly realizes that if he dies in a crash he won’t be able to mail the thing to Eminem. (To me, this hints that he doesn’t really mean to kill himself and his girlfriend, and maybe just drives off the bridge in panicky indecision rather than deliberation.)
The video takes the tell-the-story-literally approach, with some artful touches in photography, lighting, and effects, but nothing very much like moody symbolism or implication. Actor Devon Sawa plays the Stan character; British singer-songwriter Dido, whose song “Thank You” is sampled for the chorus, takes the role of Stan’s girlfriend.
[Lyrics] (explicit)
Story Up My Sleeve #15 / Midweek Music Break: “Cell Block Tango,” by John Kander and Fred Ebb
[Continuing to combine the Story Up My Sleeve and Midweek Music Break series for Wednesdays in May…]
Doing this Story Up My Sleeve series has reminded me of a forgotten pleasure: the reading of short-story anthologies. I’ve never been able to read, cover-to-cover, an entire anthology of stories by a single writer (although I came close with John Cheever); but I’ve read the entirety of many anthologies of stories by multiple writers. I just haven’t done so in a long time.
So when casting about for a song to feature today, I was delighted to suddenly think of this number, from the Kander & Ebb musical Chicago. The lyrics present an anthology of six short-short stories, each with a different first-person narrator; while the stories are spoken rather than sung, each has a certain built-in crescendo-to-climax as the “murderesses” take turns describing their crimes murders, and as each story is told the other women sing the background refrain: He had it coming.
[Lyrics]
(Those lyrics are a little squirrely, so to speak. I began with lyrics commonly found around the Internet, but must’ve spent at least 45 minutes stopping the song, adjusting the lyrics, re-starting and backing up in the song to make sure I had it right so far, continuing, stopping again… (The lyrics I had obviously came from some production other than the film. Maybe they were the original lyrics as published, I don’t know. They sure didn’t fit flush with the lyrics as sung.) Finally I just said the hell with it and posted what I had to that point. :))
Story Up My Sleeve #8 / Midweek Music Break: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot
I thought I’d take liberties with both of these ongoing series’ themes in order to combine them. This may continue for the next few Wednesdays, as well — creating, in effect, a weekly post on story songs.
In general outline, here’s what we do (more or less) know:
Midweek Music Break: Linda Ronstadt, “Trouble Again”
For reasons which may (if I’m lucky!) become obvious in a few days, I recently combed through RAMH to see when I’d featured this song here. I couldn’t believe what my eyes (via the Search feature here, or via our Google overlords) insisted to be true: never. I’d never even mentioned it in a comment. It appears in not a single draft post. The absence didn’t just defy expectations; it defied explanation — seemingly defied reality itself.*
I mean, seriously: I love this song.
When the album on which it appears came out, in 1989, I pretty much bought it automatically, knowing very little in advance: it was Linda Ronstadt, after all. And (look at that cover photo!) it clearly had nothing to do with her several previous albums — the Nelson Riddle collaborations on old standards, and so on — all of which I’d respected and listened to, even repeatedly, and even really, really liked… without ever falling in love with any of them.
So Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, unheard, seemed on the face of it a return to form.
Which turned out to be, well, not quite true. Don’t get me wrong: much of it sits very pleasantly in the ears, and Ronstadt is joined on several numbers by the silken-voiced Aaron Neville. (That collaboration seemed to draw the most commentary and praise from critics, and resulted in the album’s biggest hit singles… and not one but two Grammies for duet performances, in 1990 and ’91.) Brian Wilson (Ronstadt told one reviewer) added fifteen parts just to one song.
But wowie, when I heard this number — as far as I can tell, just Ronstadt and the musicians — I think I almost passed out. I’d bought the album on cassette tape back then, of course; and I was single at the time, so spent a lot of time in the car by myself, to and from work, on road trips and family visits, simply to the store and back. I listened to the whole thing — this number in particular — over, and over, and over. I listened to “Trouble Again” so many times that I knew exactly how many internally-clocked seconds it took to rewind to the beginning. Nothing else quite like it appears on that album. I don’t know why it was never released as a single.
Aside from the music, from the start I very much liked the meaning — the story — in this song. “I’d be so pure if it hadn’t been for YOU” isn’t a unique theme, by any stretch. But every other example I can think of features a man singing of or to a woman who (he claims) led him astray: that “Trouble Again” stands the standard narrative on its head makes it worth hearing on its own, specific performance aside. Its protagonist even shares all those guys’ defensive self-delusion.
(Lest you think that Ronstadt’s simply covering a male-written song: nope. It’s a cover of a song by Karla Bonoff, who also penned a good number of other songs which have marked Ronstadt’s career.)
One note in particular really lingers in the mind — It. Is. Amazing — but I’ll let you discover it for yourselves:
[Lyrics]
The note in question was one of two which imprinted themselves on my brain around the same time. The other I already discussed a good while back, down towards the end of this post; there, Carly Simon rounded off “I Get Along Without You Very Well” with a lingering (and lingering, and lingering…) tug on the heart. But Ronstadt here powers through with a furious, sustained outburst of bitterness which — in the lyrics’ context — means above all not to let “you” get a word in edgewise.
For the record, here’s Karla Bonoff’s own version. Obvious differences between Ronstadt’s and Bonoff’s voices aside, all the essential elements are in place (including, not least, the storyline). The note here, however — at around the 1:30 mark — lasts for only couple of seconds (vs. Ronstadt’s ten-second blast). It’s missing the righteous fury:
_____________________________________
* Actually, I have shared it off the board with a couple of long-time RAMH readers. Yeah. That had to be what I was thinking of — because of course it couldn’t possibly be ascribed to a hiccup of memory…
Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 1 (1951-52)
For weeks recently, intermittently, I had been musically fixated on a song which I’d known for, well, decades. And I probably hadn’t heard it in decades, either. Even worse: my normal solution to the problem of an earworm is to simply listen to the song several times. Couldn’t do that in this case because… well, I didn’t know the name of the song, or on what album (if any) I might have heard it. I didn’t know who performed it. It was an instrumental, so I couldn’t seize on the lyrics to simply do a search. All I knew, apparently intimately, was the sound.
Which really made me crazy. The melody and rhythm and performance were not unpleasant, by any means; in fact, they swung smoothly, sweet-dreamily, with heavy doses of strings and woodwinds accented here and there by percussion and horn. They felt… Latin.
Yes, I know: whole Web sites and smartphone apps exist to help in cases like this. You hold an iPod or MP3 player up to a microphone, say, and the software analyzes the tune to guess at the song (and sometimes the artist). Or you can play a piano, guitar, or harmonica (or — I guess — a trumpet! even a Mellotron, or a Novachord!) into the mike. In some cases, you can simply sing into the mike, or hum, or even just plain whistle; this would require one of those rare solutions (since I didn’t actually have a copy of the song to play). But I’ve gone the perform-it-yourself route before. Maybe your singing, humming, whistling is up to snuff. Mine? Put it this way: Can you imagine the humiliation of running software which all but stares at you, gimlet-eyed, in disbelief and frank confusion?
So then one Monday night a few weeks ago The Missus and I succumbed to the allure of a PBS pledge drive. We’ve donated before, separately and together, but never at the level required to get one of their premium “gifts”: a DVD, say, or a large-format coffee-table book, or a collection of CDs. On this occasion, what pushed us over the edge was a sort of vicarious nostalgia for music of some other generation: we sprang for a six-CD collection of pop and “easy listening” music of the 1950s. Back then, we were both too young really to know this music. But the gods knew we’d heard plenty of it, coming from the speakers of record player, transistor radio, and hi-fi system…
Think Patti Page and Perry Como, Mantovani and the McGuire Sisters, all the guy-group vocalists (many of them named to identify their number, usually four: the Four Lads, the Four Aces, the Four Coins).
Think, oh, say, Leroy Anderson, and “Blue Tango.”
Midweek Music Break: Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt, “Only in Songs/Night and Dreams”
[Photo: Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt]
As far as I’ve been able to tell, this duo first met following a concert by classical pianist Dinnerstein. Country-ish singer-songwriter Merritt wrote of that experience:
I talked with Simone the day after I saw her play an intimate concert in New York City. Her father, painter Simon Dinnerstein, talked with me for a moment after this show. He had caught me trying to wipe tears off my face while Simone played. It was such a pleasure to meet such a tremendously talented, disciplined, thoughtful musician. “I’m going to practice much more,” is what I told myself after we talked.
Later in 2008, the British magazine Gramophone brought them together again, nominally assigning Merritt to interview Dinnerstein about “Second Album Syndrome” (4MB PDF). (The interview seems to me much more like an extended, who’s-interviewing-whom back-and-forth.) Says the article’s intro:
As Merritt interviewed Dinnerstein and they shared their experiences, they immediately hit it off. Both are passionate about music, are around the same age, given to genuine self-reflection, and share a common friendship and fanship with the starry country singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams. By the end of the evening, they were already chatting about the possibility of a musical collaboration. Americana Bach, anyone?
By January, 2011, they were sharing a stage in concert at Duke University and talking about an upcoming album (the one which they just released this week). Later that year, Dinnerstein took a turn as “guest DJ” on NPR:
“I tend to be introspective,” she says. “I tend to like music that is sensitive, slow and I like stuff that’s kind of dreamy.”
Dinnerstein’s also drawn to musicians who pursue her own aesthetic, especially those rhythmically free ones who are not afraid to tug on the musical line — expanding or contracting it — as a means of expression.
Among the music she chose for that program was Merritt’s “Feel of the Moon.” (With Judy Collins’s “Suzanne,” the only non-classical selection.)
Now, finally, we’ve got the (first?) product of all that mutual admiration: their collaborative effort, Night.
It may seem a curious mixture, on the surface. Merritt’s own compositions are scattered among a handful of pure-classical pieces, as well as a couple of original songs by others. In the video below, the duo perform the first two songs from the album: one of the Merritt-penned numbers, and Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume” (“Night and Dreams,” here sung in an English-language translation).
Curious mixture or not: the instruments these two wield (not by any means excepting Merritt’s sweetly penetrating voice) are things of powerful beauty.
In all honesty, until a few days ago I’d never even heard of either performer. Jules, over at 7-Imp, just casually mentioned in a post that she looked forward to a new CD coming out this week — she didn’t name the artist or the album, just provided a link. Because I trust Jules’s musical tastes, I clicked right on through to that article at the NPR site. I’m so glad I did; thanks (again), Jules!
I was rushed at the time, though, and had a chance to listen only to the duo’s version of the traditional “Wayfaring Stranger”:
[Below, click Play button to begin Wayfaring Stranger. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:38 long.]
From the first notes, I pretty much knew I’d be buying the whole album.
_____________________________
Bonus: For almost five years, Merritt has hosted a podcast of interviews for radio station KRTS, in Marfa TX. (That link takes you to the iTunes page for the series.) The program, called Marfa Spark, or just The Spark, puts Merritt together with people who work in various art forms (musicians, artists, broadcasters, photographers…). From a note at The Spark‘s site:
I speak with an artist, regardless of genre, about how they make their work and their lives. How is meaning is made of making things? What does it look like to be an artist over a lifetime? What kind of wisdom is necessary? What is learned from the working?…
After five years of The Spark episodes, I have found that my guests, all making their own distinct work and way, encounter so many of the same shadows and joys, but are often off doing their own thing and don’t realize what all they have in common. Their lives are as unique and inspired and carefully hewn as the work they love to make. I make this collection of conversations with these incredibly creative characters — pioneers of sorts — because I have such a wonderful time stumbling upon them, losing myself in their work, and then asking them for tea. Like proof of life off the map, they comfort me, inspire me, make me brave and send me back to the world with a little wisdom garnered for making my own handmade string of paper days.
(Isn’t that great?)
In July 2008, sometime after first speaking with Dinnerstein, Merritt invited her to The Spark. Here’s that interview, nearly a half-hour in length:
[Below, click Play button to begin The Spark: interview with Simone Dinnerstein. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 27:35 long.]
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