Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Answers in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

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[Image: xkcd #936, on password strength. Click image to enlarge; see xkcd itself for the full six panels and the punchline.]

From whiskey river:

This accidental
meeting of possibilities
calls itself I.

I ask: what am I doing here?
And, at once, this I
becomes unreal.

(Dag Hammarskjöld [source])

…and:

Ch’ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
“For” and “against” are forgotten.

No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

(Chuang Tzu [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda”

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[Image: the valley of the Rhondda]

I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily featured in the section or chapter on which I was working at the time. Two characters, for instance, were World War II veterans, so (naturally) they listened regularly to Big Band/swing music… and so did I.

Actually, I took it further: one of the two preferred the smoooooth sound of Glenn Miller; the other, the more raucous Benny Goodman Orchestra. They argued about it periodically, one sarcastically, exasperatedly, and the other with gentle good humor.

Anyway, a handful of chapters scattered throughout recount the story of an eighteenth-century Welsh brewmaster named Emrys ap Rhys, and how he came to brew a particular ale which plays a significant part in S2F‘s storyline. Even Emrys had his own “My Music” sort of playlist, which may sound like a tall order… unless you know about the history of music in Wales.

Briefly, the Welsh love music, particularly choral music — and further particularly, choral music performed by men. The tradition goes back centuries, with much of the music composed and sung in the performers’ native Welsh language rather than English. As it happened, then, it wasn’t hard to build a good soundtrack for the Emrys chapters.

One tune in particular stands out.

“Cwm Rhondda” (Welsh for the Rhondda Valley, in South Wales — the Rhondda being a river there), like many tunes, isn’t in itself a song to be sung. It has no words of its own. Instead, the melody which goes by that name is used as a scaffold for the lyrics of a hymn: several hymns, in fact. Although the tune is sometimes described as the unofficial national anthem of Wales, the hymn has no lyrics of a typically national-anthemic sort. (Given the title, for instance, one might expect a praise song about Nature’s beauty on display in the countryside of South Wales.) Instead — at least in the versions I know of — the supplicant just asks God for help on his or her journeys through life and the world. Nowadays, the tune also underlies the chants of You’re not singing anymore! which erupt among Welsh fans, from time to time, when their football teams are on the field.*

(The specific circumstances calling forth this chant, apparently, are a form of Schadenfreude: delight in someone else’s troubles. If one’s culture encourages one to burst into song when things are going well, then a sudden turn in fortune tends to shut one up.)

My favorite writeup about “Cwm Rhondda” is the one on the h2g2 site. (This is the pre-Wikipedia and often much more informal online encyclopedia originally established by Douglas Adams as the Earthbound counterpart to the one described in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.) It’s tempting to quote the entire piece, but I’ll offer just this:

‘Cwm Rhondda’ is a belter of a hymn that defies one to sing it quietly… It is the very embodiment of hwyl, the Welsh love of homeland and of culture, and as such has come close to supplanting the official Welsh national anthem. This is especially the case at rugby ‘internationals’, where the faltering, bathetic, falsely-devout Land of My Fathers [JES: that’s the actual Welsh national anthem] is soon dispensed with in favour of something far more robust. England fans often respond with their own countermeasures, often the Negro spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, but soon buckle under the sonic onslaught of ‘huge gangs of tough, sinewy men… terrorising people with their close-harmony singing.’

Ha!

Anyway, here’s the Pendyrus Male Choir (Welsh-language version of their home page here), and “Cwm Rhondda”:

When the group hits and holds those high notes, it makes me wish I could join them in song. (Not a reaction I commonly have, which many people would consider a mercy of the gods deserving a hymn in its own right.)

Tracking down the lyrics to the above is complicated by my not recognizing spoken (let alone sung) Welsh. This page (about which I know pretty much nothing) suggests that it’s the hymn called “Lo, Between the Myrtles Standing,” which you can find in Welsh and English translation at Wikipedia.

(By the way, yes, I know: the tune “Cwm Rhondda” was actually composed in the early twentieth century, and thus would have been unknown to a real Emrys ap Rhys. So would his late-twentieth-century creator. :))

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* Videos of these mass outbursts constitute almost an entire sub-genre… and given the context (cellphone and other handheld video cameras; the natural rowdiness of crowds at sporting events; mass quantities of brew), their quality is, well, all over the map.

The Kindness of Every Split-Second

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[Image: display window of “mini-prints” taken with the Fujifilm Instax camera (originally from the Photojojo store). See note at bottom of post for more.]

From whiskey river:

You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, “Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.”

That’s what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it — or my observation of it — is temporary?

(John Green [source])

…and (italicized portion):

In the Storm

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks—
whose backs were also

covered with snow—
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the ducks’ tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

 out over the water,
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back

and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
stoop there, and live.

If someone you didn’t know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?

Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned,
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.

I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn’t a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness—

as now and again
some rare person has suggested—
is a miracle.
As surely it is.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Swept Away by (and for) Books

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My Old Kentucky Blog recently highlighted two of the films nominated for this year’s Oscar in the short-animations category. One of them really struck me, and I think it will really strike you as well — if you are someone who’s ever had a little jolt of excitement at opening a new book… or dreamt of adding one to the bookshelves yourself: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. (Note: it’s fifteen minutes long — fifteen well-spent minutes long.)

The filmmakers, Moonbot Studios, explicitly grant credit to their sources of inspiration: “in equal measures… Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books.” (As MOKB notes, you can find traces of Up there, too.)

 

Midweek Music Break: Loreena McKennitt, “Down by the Sally Gardens”

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Loreena McKennitt seems to love anything which hitches the adjective Celtic to the noun music. She’s traveled the world to record music both Celtic and Celtic-like, often (even on brand-new songs) using instruments which might have been recognized 2,000 years ago across the whole range of the Celts’ distribution. She’s certainly traveled farther afield than many performers nominally in her genre; with its odd but infectious rolling rhythms of ancient woodwinds and percussion instruments, her music often sounds more Middle Eastern or even sub-continental Indian than conventionally”Celtic.”

But her 2010 album, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, had her returning to the recognizable. Recorded at a historic temple in Ontario, it includes classics like “Brian Boru’s March,” the title song, and a RAMH favorite, “The Parting Glass.” Among them: “Down by the Sally Gardens.”

William Butler Yeats first published his poem called “Down by the Salley Gardens” (that’s “Salley” with an “e”) in 1899. Per Wikipedia, he claimed inspiration from the singing of an “old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo,” who apparently sang two or three lines, repeatedly, which stuck in the poet’s head.

About that one odd word in the title, at a site called, simply, The Irish Page, I found this information:

A salley is a willow tree. It was once common to have gardens of willows for osiers (willow rods). These gardens were kept to have material for basket-making and for thatch roofing of cottages. The Gaelic for willow is saileach, which comes from the Latin, salix for willow tree… One more use for willow is the bark, which contains salicylic acid from which aspirin is made. Use of willow bark as an analgesic was known since ancient times.

With one exception, McKennitt’s arrangement keeps it simple; the accompaniment (if I’m reading the track listing correctly) includes just harp, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, and uilleann pipes (okay, that one’s a stretch — Wikipedia: “the characteristic national bagpipes of Ireland”).

But McKennitt’s voice — wow. Whatever Yeats heard back in that Sligo village, however much inspiration he drew from the old woman’s words, I bet her voice didn’t raise the hair on his arms.

[Lyrics]

As an aside, this song’s lyrics — and of course Yeats’s poem — seem awfully close, up to a point, to those of an old Irish/Scottish/American folk/country/bluegrass song, “Down in the Willow Garden.” But as you can see from its Wikipedia entry, the story’s outcome, and the overall message, is quite different:

“Down in the Willow Garden,” also known as “Rose Connelly”is a traditional Appalachian murder ballad about a man facing the gallows for the murder of his lover: he gave her poisoned wine, stabbed her, and threw her in a river.

Part of wants to laugh out loud at the contrast between the songs, and part of me— Oh, hell. It’s just bizarrely funny in an Edward Gorey way. Or a Coen Brothers way, come to that:

Unquiet Large, Quiet Small

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From whiskey river:

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

(Dag Hammarskjöld, from Markings [source])

…and:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

(Wislawa Szymborska, from her Nobel lecture The Poet and the World [source])

…and:

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Dominant Legs, “Make Time for the Boy”

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From a group named “Dominant Legs,” what in the hell sort of music should we expect? Tina Turner in black leather, maybe?

I can’t say I have a ready answer to the question. But it wouldn’t have been, for me, something like this: a Lynchian, sweetly blissed-out, dream-dancing, burbling-organ, saxophone-accented, group-sing throwback of a pop song:

[Lyrics (courtesy of Ryan Lynch of Dominant Legs)]

By “Lynchian,” I don’t mean just that it reminds me, musically — right down to the finger snaps — of the song “Freshly Squeezed” (from the soundtrack to (yes, I know, sorry: again) Twin Peaks). I mean it literally: Dominant Legs’s sparkplug is a young man named Ryan Lynch (he’s the lead singer in the video, and also plays keyboard and guitar). He’s joined by Hannah Hunt, who sings and plays keyboard (she’s the blonde woman above); Andrew Connors (bass guitar); Garett Goddard (guitar); and Rene Solomon (drums and percussion). The young woman whose dream-trip this apparently represents is played by Raina Mieloch. I don’t know who operated the mixing board, but I hope he or she got paid overtime.

The group just released their first album, Invitation, a few months ago. (For another taste from it, see the video for “Hoop of Love.”) They’ve gotten a lot of favorable attention from critics, but “regular” folks seem split. It depends, evidently, on whether you did or didn’t get burned out on 1980s techno-pop. Maybe I’m just an easy audience, but “Make Time for the Boy” is already on my list of favorite 2012 earworms.

_______________

P.S. I assume someone will ask. So, just in case…:

[Below, click Play button to begin Freshly Squeezed. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:48 long.

[audio:freshlysqueezed_angelobadalamenti.mp3|titles=’Freshly Squeezed’|artists=Angelo Badalamenti]

The title “Freshly Squeezed” refers to this scene in the very first Twin Peaks episode (the song itself begins playing near the end of the clip). Even after seeing the scene probably a dozen times, I still grin throughout. Especially at the end.

“You Didn’t Forget the Words, Did You?”

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[Video: a zebra teaches a little girl to scat-sing. Found it at Zooglobble, home of “kids’ music worth sharing.”
Warning: do not visit that site if you are even mildly distractable.]

My Dad taught me many things about music, especially jazz, even (I’m certain) in ways which I have yet to understand or even recognize. But on one point he was (I believe) mistaken:

We were watching Ella Fitzgerald on some variety-TV show; after pausing for a musical break by the band, all of a sudden she burst into this chain of nonsense syllables: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah, ba-dadda-da-doo-da-DOO… (or whatever). Her eyebrows waggled like Mexican jumping beans, and she smiled slyly. Dad burst out laughing. “She always does that,” he said, “when she forgets the words.”

Like I said, I think Dad was wrong about that (especially given how enthusiastically he welcomed instrumental improvisation). But singers who depart radically from the composed lyrics must brace themselves for the inevitable skepticism. Judges on televised singing competitions lose patience with contestants who forget the words to the songs they’re singing. I’ve seen such contestants (and woebegone karaoke’ers) freeze, lock up hopelessly, stuck in a loop of flickering blankness. They stammer, neurons misfiring; they’re like desperate smokers rummaging through a drawerful of out-of-gas cigarette lighters. Sometimes, you can see on their faces, they know it’s coming even before they get there: they take off at a wild dead run at a gap they know they won’t be able to cross — they gallop right up to the edge and leap, bursting out in something like charismatic glossolalia: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah…

Then their eyes dart from side to side as they smile, weakly, as though to convince the onlookers: I’m doing this on purpose, y’know. “Norwegian Wood” can always be improved by some good scat.

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The Absorbing and the Absorbed

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[Image: a Menger sponge overgrown with vines, found here. Wikipedia explains how
to construct a real Menger sponge, noting — without elaboration — that the resulting
object “simultaneously exhibits an infinite surface area and encloses zero volume.”*]

From whiskey river:

You know when you see something like a marvelous mountain against the blue sky, the vivid, bright, clear, unpolluted snow, the majesty of it drives all your thoughts, your concerns, your problems away. Have you noticed that? You say, “How beautiful it is,” and for two seconds perhaps, or for even a minute, you are absolutely silent. The grandeur of it drives away, for that second, the pettiness of ourselves. That immensity has taken us over. Like a child occupied with an intricate toy for an hour; he won’t talk, he won’t make any noise, he is completely absorbed in that. The toy has absorbed him. So the mountain absorbs you and therefore for the second, or the minute, you are absolutely quiet, which means there is no self. Now, without being absorbed by something — either a toy, a mountain, a face, or an idea — to be completely without the me in oneself, is the essence of beauty.

(Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness [source])

…and:

… It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
… From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:

Rain on the river.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

…and:

I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers… The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

(Ken Kesey [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Booker T. and the MGs, “Time Is Tight”

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When people think of music in the 1960s-’70s, of soul music, they think automatically of the Motown record label. But there was a heck of a lot going on further south then, too, down in Memphis: the home of Stax Records.

Originally Satellite Records, the company was forced to change its name in response to a complaint from another, older label by the same name. The renaming took the form of a quasi-acronym, derived from the names of its two owners: Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton. Name aside, it carved out a niche for itself in a number of other respects:

  • The recording studio was located in a former movie theater, where the seats had been removed but the sloping floor remained intact. Wikipedia describes the resulting sound as “big, deep, yet raw,” and cites one music historian who who says that “because of the distinctive sound, soul music fans can tell often within the first few notes if a song was recorded at Stax.”
  • Stax’s stable of big-name performers tended to sound less slick than Motown’s: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett (whose music was released on the Atlantic label, but recorded and produced at Stax), Isaac Hayes…
  • …and even their “house band,” who provided backing for the big names, made a name of its own — as Booker T. and the MGs.
In a recent post at The Barstool, as he calls it for short, RAMH blog-friend Froog mused on his selections as the top five favorite basslines in popular music. In a comment to that post, he mentions that a bassline can be thought of as being of one of two types:
  • Hooks are “quite simple bass figures that are one of the most prominent features of the song”; while
  • Chuggers are “often even simpler bass parts, [which] because of that very simplicity… drive the song forward powerfully.”

Froog’s top five, he says, all qualify as “hooks.” I’ll take his word for it — I’m not familiar with all five of the performers he highlights, let alone those performances. But I totally recognized the concept of the “chugger.” It’s not the word usually associated with the MGs, but yeah — that’s their bassline. The more conventional word for it, I think, is groove.

Interestingly, Wikipedia has an entry on groove:

Groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic “feel” or sense of “swing” created by the interaction of the music played by a band’s rhythm section (drums, electric bass or double bass, guitar, and keyboards).

It goes on to include a comment by (presumably) a musician:

Steve Van Telejuice explains the “groove” as the point… in a song or performance when “even the people who can’t dance wanna feel like dancing” due to the effect of the music.

(This might be even more interesting — to say nothing of authoritative — if there were any reference to a “Steve Van Telejuice,” anywhere on the Web, other than in connection with this quote.)

By whatever (in)formal definition, it seems clear that the music of Booker T. and the MGs practically embodies the concept. The songs start with a bassline, and the melody of the organ and lead guitar twine around it. The bassline isn’t an afterthought, a complement to what we think of as “the song” — it’s practically the whole point.

Here’s “Time Is Tight,” from (among other sources) the soundtrack of the 1968 Jules Dassin film, Up Tight!:

The influence of the MGs went far beyond the Stax walls. The Beatles, among others, hugely admired the band’s sound. Wikipedia, again:

John Lennon was a huge Stax fan who fondly called the group, “Book a Table and the Maitre D’s.” Paul McCartney, like [MGs’ bass player Donald “Duck”] Dunn, played bass melodically, without straying from the rhythm or the groove… And as the story goes, after being locked away in the Memphis studio, when [Stax performers] embarked on the “Hit the Road, Stax!” tour of 1967, The Beatles sent limos to the airport and bent down to kiss [lead guitarist] Steve Cropper’s ring… Lennon was quoted as saying he always wanted to write an instrumental for the MGs.

Cropper (who co-wrote “In the Midnight Hour” and “Dock of the Bay”) and Dunn eventually would go on to appear in both “Blues Brothers” movies, and had otherwise successful solo songwriting and performing careers. (Drummer Al Jackson, Jr., was murdered in 1975.) As for Booker T. Jones himself, no worries — the guy is still going strong.

Want more? There’s a great post about Stax Records, including some photos I’ve seen nowhere else, at the excellent blog known as The Selvedge Yard. (Be sure to read the comments thread there, too.) And Steve Cropper mulls over his musical wanderings in a blog post at No Depression.

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Update, 2012-01-14, 9:15ish a.m.: It’s not uncommon for me to be prevented, by one thing or the other, from replying promptly to comments here at RAMH. What is uncommon: not regretting that I can’t reply promptly. This is one of those rare comments threads which I have thoroughly enjoyed watching develop on its own. Thanks, folks.

Now to dive in myself…

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