Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Intersections Close By, Milestones Passed

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[Image: the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 and the New York City skyline at night (January, 2011)]

From whiskey river:

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

(Alain de Botton [source])

…and:

IV

A man is walking in a field
and everywhere at his feet
in the short grass of April
the small purple violets
are in bloom. As the man walks
the ground drops away,
the sunlight of day becomes
a sort of darkness in which
the lights of the flowers rise
up around him like
fireflies or stars in a sort
of sky through which he walks.

(Wendell Berry [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, with Warren Haynes, “I’d Rather Go Blind”

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[Video from In Performance at the White House: Red, Hot, and Blues]

[Video above not working for you? In its place, I offer you the audio only:]

[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_tedeschitruckshaynes.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Tedeschi Trucks Band w/ Warren Haynes”]

[Original lyrics, by Etta James]

I first encountered the name Derek Trucks within a few years after I’d moved down here. Some kid was doing a show at a club in town — an amazing blues guitarist, said the newspaper preview, and only a teenager: 14 years old or so. How amazing? He’d toured with Buddy Guy. He’d performed with the Allman Brothers. The kid was hot.

[Aside: I’ve got something like a third- or fourth-order connection to him, too. His uncle, Butch Trucks, is the drummer for the Allmans. When Butch was in elementary school, he attended a dance with my Missus-to-Be on his arm — his very first date.]

Susan Tedeschi has had some kind of career of her own, dating back to her childhood. She grew up listening to blues and gospel music, and eventually played Austin City Limits and Lilith Fair. (Her voice, says Wikipedia, has been described as a blend of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin. I don’t believe even that does it justice.) She also toured with the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and, well, the Allman Brothers.

Trucks and Tedeschi married in 2001, and continued their separate careers. Recently, wanting to minimize their kids’ exposure a typical touring-musician family’s lifestyle, they set up a studio in Jacksonville, FL, and formed their own band, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Their first album, Revelator, came out last June; it’s a killer, and I’d intended with this post to cover a couple of tracks from it for you.

But in doing a little research about it I stumbled on the above recent performance on the PBS special In Performance at the White House: Red, White, and Blues. Tedeschi and Warren Haynes share the vocals while Trucks’s slide guitar tears up the instrumental lead, on “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

The song itself, co-written and first recorded by Etta James in 1968, holds legendary status as one of the best, most successful B-side recordings in pop-music history. The A side was an even bigger hit, “Tell Mama.” In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, James says that she never liked “Tell Mama.” (“I didn’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the one you come to for comfort and easy sex.”) But about “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she relates this story of label executive Leonard Chess:

When Leonard heard the song the first time, he got up and left the room ’cause he started crying. That touched my heart. Other cats I know would have wanted me to see them cry, just to show me how soulful they were. I liked that Leonard did his weeping in private. […] When he came back in the room, he said, “Etta, it’s a mother… it’s a mother.”

It does no disservice to James’s memory — she died shortly before the above video was recorded — nor to the talents of Tedeschi, Trucks, and Haynes, to say that this performance lives up to the song.

Just for completeness, here’s the reference version — Etta James’s mother of a performance:

[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_ettajames.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Etta James”]
____________________________

Note: Hat tip (and a deep bow) to my little brother for introducing me to Revelator.

Back from a Break

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[*crickets*]

Wow. Amazing how quickly TheGoogle turns its back on you when you just, like, step away from the blog for a few days…

(Well, to be fair, I’d stopped thinking about TheGoogle during that time, too. Chicken, meet egg.)

Regular broadcasting to be resumed tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll just be tidying up a bit. Shaking out the already dusty sheets draped over the furniture. Resetting the thermostat. Putting the kettle on. And revisiting you, whoever you are.

 

Laughing, Refreshed, in Its Face

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[Video: scene from The Princess Bride — the Man in Black faces off against his cleverest adversary, Vizzini the nearly-inconceivable Sicilian. You can find a transcript (among other Vizzini-isms) at this IMDB page.]

From whiskey river:

To get through this life and see it realistically poses a problem. There is a dark, evil, hopeless side to life that includes suffering, death, and ultimate oblivion as our earth falls into a dying sun. Nothing really matters.

On the other hand, the best side of our humanity finds us determined to make life as meaningful as possible NOW; to defy our fate. Everything matters. Everything.

It is easy to become immobilized between these two points of view — to see them both so clearly that one cannot decide what to do or be.

Laughter is what gives me forward motion at such intersections.

We are the only creatures that both laugh and weep. I think it’s because we are the only creatures that see the difference between the way things are and the way they might be. Tears bring relief. Laughter brings release.

Some years ago I came across a phrase in Greek — asbestos gelos — unquenchable laughter. I traced it to Homer’s Iliad, where it was used to describe the laughter of the gods. That’s my kind of laughter. And he who laughs, lasts.

(Robert Fulghum [source])

…and:

I lounge on the grass, that’s all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town,
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-
where I have never been before.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Ramsey Lewis Trio, “The ‘In’ Crowd” and “Wade in the Water”

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[Image: Ramsey Lewis, by Kagan McLeod. (Original here, at McLeod’s blog of “music-themed ink drawings” called Oooh, and I Like It.) McLeod says in the comments there that he drew this “straight to ink,” without benefit of pencil sketch; both this technique and the drawing per se, I think, parallel the experience of listening to Lewis himself.]

When we hear people refer to the 1960s, we think of upheaval: the remaking of music and politics, the overturning of what we thought we knew about family and art. But the ’60s had another side, and it’s one of the reasons why (I think) the TV show Mad Men has been such a hit: under the surface of frothing water swam small schools of fast, sleek, and, well, non-splashy fish, making their way through the culture without apparent effort…

Reportedly, it was a coffee-shop waitress who suggested that the Ramsey Lewis Trio add to their repertoire a tune called “The ‘In’ Crowd.” (It had been a recent hit for singer Dobie Gray.) The song’s chorus pretty much summed up its theme:

I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
I go where the in crowd goes
(Do-do-do)
I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
And I know what the in crowd knows

Lewis and his group did an instrumental take on the song while recording an album at Washington DC’s Bohemian Caverns nightclub in 1965. (None of the trio sang, really. But I understand that you can hear bassist Eldee Young vocalizing here and there as he’s transported by the music and rhythm. Can’t hear it myself, but you may be able to pick it up.) That recording, nearly six minutes long, became Lewis’s first gold record:

With the same personnel, he followed up with another pair of gold records a year later. The first covered The McCoys’ 1965 hit, “Hang On Sloopy.” The second took the spiritual classic “Wade in the Water” and turned it inside out — from an assertion of the blessings of baptism, to one of the blessings of moving through water in general: the blessings of cool:

Note: You can find another cool-jazz take on “Wade in the Water” in a whiskey river Friday post a few years ago, in a video by “Barefoot Contessa” singer-organist Rhoda Scott.

Plugged Right Between the Eyes

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I’ve been following the Letters of Note blog for a good while now. The curator/editor, Shaun Usher, collects samples of real letters — often but not always from “famous” people — on matters of real import, and/or in styles worth sharing.

Today’s entry features a 1914 letter from Jack London to a young aspiring writer named Max Fedder. Fedder, apparently, had written a letter to London, a fan letter as we might call it nowadays, and enclosed a story of his own. No doubt he hoped for encouragement from his hero, if not actual praise.

From London’s first sentences, if not quite his first words, that hope must have flown out the window — or, finding it closed, crashed right into the glass and dropped senseless to the floor:

Oakland, Calif.
Oct. 26, 1914

Dear Max Fedder:

In reply to yours of recent date undated, and returning herewith your Manuscript. First of all, let me tell you that as a psychologist and as one who has been through the mill, I enjoyed your story for its psy­chology and point of view. Honestly and frankly, I did not enjoy it for its literary charm or value. In the first place, it has little literary value and practically no literary charm. Merely because you have got some­thing to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form. Medium and form you have utterly neglected…

Ouch, ouch, ouch. Objectively regarded, it’s a terrific letter, in fact — long, articulate, utterly non-generic, and frank. (See the whole thing here.) Somehow, though, I suspect that Max Fedder didn’t draw much comfort from any of that.

I’m trying, and failing, to think of any communication I’ve ever received remotely like it, from anyone. This doesn’t reflect on — haha — the grandeur of my works; it’s because I’ve been far much too nervous to offer them up for comment, unsolicited, to anyone at all. (To say that this complicates life for someone aspiring to write for a living greatly understates the case.) London’s response is exactly the kind I’d fear most.

How ’bout you? Are you the Give it to me straight, Jack, and don’t mince words! sort? Or the Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me! sort?

And if you were in Jack London’s shoes, can you imagine writing a response like his?

The Propagational Library: A Brief Lull

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I’m not going to be writing (i.e., posting) new installments in the series for a couple of weeks; the next piece will be written and posted, if all goes well, on Saturday, April 21. (I’ll still be doing other stuff at Running After My Hat during that time, though.)

In the meantime… A few people have mentioned that being able to read the series offline would make it easier to catch up with. So, a little experiment in e-publishing: you can now download the entire series to date as a single e-document by visiting this (password-protected) page:

The Propagational Library: Downloads

(Password is this blog’s four-letter abbreviation, capitalized as shown in the blog’s title at the top of and elsewhere around this page.)

As of today, the e-formats available are:

  • PDF (Adobe Reader, most Web browsers)
  • .mobi (Amazon Kindle)
  • EPUB (B&N Nook and other e-readers)

I’ve got confidence (more or less) in the PDF and Kindle formats. Those of you with Nooks or other e-readers, well, I want to hear what your experiences are, too; however, I may or may not be able to help diagnose, let alone fix, any problems encountered with these alien devices :). Support for images, in particular, seems a little inconsistent from one format to the other.

In any case, bear in mind that I’m still at the just-playing-around-with-it-all stage. Later downloads will no doubt look and function better than earlier ones. But obviously, I hope, I do want to know if you cannot use a particular format at all.

Thanks as always for reading!

 

Endistanced

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[Video: zooming in from a Milky Way-wide view all the way to galactic cluster NGC 3324, dubbed the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for its resemblance to the profile of the Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet. Music by John Dyson; original video at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) site.]

From whiskey river:

And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

(Stephen Graham [source])

…and:

Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble eminent statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies, corroborates, explains each separate piece.

(Arthur Machen [source])

…and:

The World Loved by Moonlight

You must try,
the voice said, to become colder.
I understood at once.
It is like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze,
braced in stone. Only something heartless
could bear the full weight.

[The above poem’s] source was a sentence written by Chekhov in a letter to a young writer: “If you want to move your reader, write more coldly.” The advice is chilling, true, and rich, I think, and leads in many different directions of thought. This poem follows one of those directions: that if one were to imagine a world in which there were mythic, conscious deities, then those beings would have to be very cold, very detached, in order to bear seeing what they must see in the course of any given day. So much suffering, so much foolishness, so much anger. To be able to watch that at all — and even more, to play some active role in its continuance — would demand total heartlessness. It’s the same lack of pity that Virgil demands of Dante as they tour the regions of Hell. Pity, the ghost-guide tells the poet, is forbidden. It is true for the contemporary writer as well, and for any seeker after truth. A certain detachment is needed to look the fullness of life eye to eye; yet that very detachment is what permits the viewer to feel things fully, to know them without blinking.

(Jane Hirshfield [sources: poem and commentary])

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What L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries Saw Out His Window (Three-Minute Version)

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A time-lapse film of the view outside James Stewart’s rear window, in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of that name:

Very, very cool!

(See the creator’s own site for additional details. And if you don’t know the film at all, you could do worse than to start with Roger Ebert’s looking-back review from 2000. Of course you could also do better, and just rent or borrow it yourself. :))

Midweek Music Break Playlist: Windows to the Soul

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[Image: girl, dancing, in giant eye costume. Note the hands: one giving “thumbs-up!” sign,
one holding a cocktail. I have no idea if this is an advertising image or what; found it at a couple
of places, never with any explanation.]

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the Play button. Total playlist length: around 31 minutes.

Though most of us don’t hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes… It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes’ elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn’t, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.

(Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses)

Windows to the soul, right. That’s what they say about eyes, anyhow. Which, if true, is good news for everybody but (poor) liars.

I poked around to see if anyone knew, definitively (or even convincingly) who first came up with the “windows to [or of] the soul” metaphor. Best guess, as far as I can tell, seems to be that it came from Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations. I’ve found a translation of that work (by Andrew Peabody, in an 1886 edition) at the Internet Archive. The passage there (in a chapter called “On the Contempt of Death”) reads as follows:

Therefore it is that often, when hindered by being absorbed in thought or by some morbid affection, we neither see nor hear, though both the eyes and the ears are open and in a healthy state, so that it may be readily inferred that it is the soul that sees and hears, and not those parts which are like windows of the soul, but through which the mind can perceive nothing unless it be actively present.

When you pick this apart, it’s actually pretty plain that he’s lumping the eyes in with the ears as windows of the soul. But let it pass, let it pass, and give the guy the benefit of the doubt: after all, windows are predominantly an architectural feature which serves the eyes.

Whether they’re good or bad for people facing interrogation, eyes are without question a godsend to songwriters. If, as Diane Ackerman says, 70% of our sensory wiring is given over to support of vision, it’s easy to imagine that at least 70% of our music deals with it in some form or another. It (haha) focuses on the orbs themselves, or on the things the orbs perceive; the songs are full of color, light, shadow, and of course blindness. (Let’s not forget Talking Heads’ “Cross-Eyed and Painless.”) And given the other pop-music preoccupation — love, et all the cetera that goes with it — songs often deal with the color the lover sees when he sees the beloved’s eyes. Indeed, try to substitute in a song title any other sensory organ or its sense in place of the eyes and vision and you wind up with ridiculously Daliesque imagery: “Doctor My Ears”; “I Only Have Sniffs for You”; “Taste Bud of the Tiger”…

(As a thought experiment, I turned it around: pick some other art form, and some other sense, and try to think of examples of that art’s preoccupation with that sense. It’s not easy — although I suspect you, clever readers that you are, could run off a dozen examples.)

This was a difficult mix to put together — way too many choices. We take vision very, very seriously, and the eyes are everywhere in our songs.

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