Alien You

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From whiskey river:

One Source of Bad Information

There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

This child has to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

When you think about it, it’s not easy to keep from just wandering out of life. It’s like someone’s always leaving the door open to the next world, and if you aren’t paying attention you could just walk through it, and then you’ve died. That’s why in your dreams it’s like you’re standing in that doorway, and the dying people and the newborn people pass by you, and brush up against you as they come in and out of the world during the night. You get spun around, and in the morning, it takes a while to find your way back into the world.

(Rick Moody, from The Ice Storm (film version) [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Haunting Songs

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I noticed a few months back that The Missus and I have a favorite way to describe certain music. Haunting, one of us will say, and the other will nod. A very haunting sound. Haunting lyrics, aren’t they? And so on.

The ingredients which go into making a song haunting, vs. all the other ways it might be described? Beats me. (Meant to ask The Missus this morning but forgot. I’ll check with her later.)

But I think there’s a dark(ish) sound, in the first place, maybe with some eerie instrumental hook — strings often seem to play a part — and the vocals might be artificially vibratoed. The dominant pitch needn’t be creepy-low; I think, for example, that some of Loreena McKennitt’s high-pitched quavering music might be called haunting. (There’s one, “The Mystic’s Dream,” included at the foot of this post.) Maybe it’s got something to do with minor keys or blue notes (possibilities I’d entertain more seriously if I had any idea what the terms, y’know, meant).

Anyway, here are a handful of examples from the oldies stack. The first is “Any Day Now” (1962), performed here by Chuck Jackson.

Any Day Now
(by Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard; performed by Chuck Jackson)

Any day now I will hear you say “Goodbye my love”
And you’ll be on your way
Then my wild beautiful bird you will have flown oh
Any day now I’ll be all alone (whoa-oa-oa-oa-oa)

Any day now when your restless eyes meet someone new
Oh to my sad surprise
Then the blue shadows will fall all over town oh
Any day now love will let me down (whoa-oa-oa-oa-oa)

Oh my wild beautiful bird you will have flown oh
Any day now I’ll be all alone

I know I shouldn’t want to keep you
If you don’t want to stay-ay
Until you go forever
I’ll be holding on for dear life
Holding you this way
Begging you to stay

Any day now when the clock strikes “Go”
You’ll call it off
And then my tears will flow
Then the blue shadows will fall all over town oh
Any day now love will let me down ’cause you won’t be around

Don’t fly away my beautiful bird
Don’t don’t fly away

My second nominee du jour would be Johnny Rivers’s “Poor Side of Town,” from 1966:

Poor Side of Town
(Johnny Rivers)

How can you tell me how much you miss me
When the last time I saw you, you wouldn’t even kiss me
That rich guy you’ve been seein’
Must have put you down
So welcome back baby
To the poor side of town

To him you were nothin’ but a little plaything
Not much more than an overnight fling
To me you were the greatest thing this boy had ever found
And girl it’s hard to find nice things
On the poor side of town

I can’t blame you for tryin’
I’m tryin’ to make it too
I’ve got one little hang up baby
I just can’t make it without you

So tell me, are you gonna stay now
Will you stand by me girl all the way now
With you by my side
They just can’t keep us down
Together we can make it baby
From the poor side of town

(So tell me how much you love me)
(Come be near to me and say you need me now)

Oh, with you by my side
This world can’t keep us down
Together we can make it baby
From the poor side of town…

And finally — in a completely different vein — we’ve got Janis Ian’s big hit from 1975, “At Seventeen.” (Since this is pretty much just acoustic and vocals, I offer it as an example whose hauntingness derives from the lyrics and the performer’s voice rather than any studio effects.)

At Seventeen
(Janis Ian)

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
and high school girls with clear skinned smiles
who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth

And those of us with ravaged faces
lacking in the social graces
desperately remained at home
inventing lovers on the phone
who called to say Come dance with me
and murmured vague obscenities
It isn’t all it seems at seventeen

A brown eyed girl in hand me downs
whose name I never could pronounce
said Pity please the ones who serve
They only get what they deserve
The rich relationed hometown queen
marries into what she needs
with a guarantee of company
and haven for the elderly

Remember those who win the game
lose the love they sought to gain
in debentures of quality and dubious integrity
Their small-town eyes will gape at you
in dull surprise when payment due
exceeds accounts received at seventeen

[instrumental]

To those of us who knew the pain
of valentines that never came
and those whose names were never called
when choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
when dreams were all they gave for free
to ugly duckling girls like me

We all play the game, and when we dare
we cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
that call and say Come dance with me
and murmur vague obscenities
at ugly girls like me, at seventeen

What songs haunt you? Is it just their subjects? What is it about their sound?

Real-Life Dialogue: Wardrobe Culling Edition

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[The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. He has stayed home from work on this day to prepare a guest bedroom for painting. In this guest bedroom is a closet, and in the closet are His clothes. All of them. Woven shirts, knit shirts, jeans, suits, ties, socks, underwear, shoes… It’s not a particularly big closet. It makes sense, on this occasion, to go through the stuff folded or hanging in there, putting aside usable-but-old stuff for Goodwill donation, throwing away unusable-and/or-old stuff, and just generally… organizing — since He will have to completely empty the closet for painting, and then refill it when the painting’s done.]

She returns home from work.

She: Did you get a lot done?

He: Uh-huh. The bags in the hall are all trash. I’ll take ’em out in a little bit.

She goes to the guest bedroom to inspect the results. She returns, smiling.

She: Didn’t it feel good?

He: Uh…

She: You know — straightening up the clothes. Getting rid of the stuff you don’t wear anymore. It always makes me feel renewed and refreshed whenever I do that.

He: Let me put it this way: there were shirts in there that I bought before we’d ever met.

She: But that—

He: Yeah. Twenty years ago.

She: Sooo…

He: Right again. I can’t say I’ve done this often enough to recognize any patterns at all.

She: [silence]

Admin: Clearing Up Some RAMH Clutter, Part 4

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Updated theme’s in place.

Some slightly flaky stuff going on, mostly due to my (BAD) habit of putting posts into more than one category. There are also a handful of customized styles I want to carry forward from the old theme to the new. Hope to fix those things at some point, but for now I’ll just leave the floor open for questions and comments, especially of the “Feature X doesn’t work anymore!” or “Uh-oh, you overlooked Y!” varieties.

???

(Oh, btw — using the Reply link at the foot of a post, even an old one, should now successfully create a threaded conversation, with succeeding comments indented/nested below the preceding ones. However, any earlier comments replied to under the old theme do NOT thread. No comments have been lost, but the, uh, the threadability didn’t affect any older conversations.)

Clear

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Not unusually for a Sunday, I took The Pooch for a longish walk this morning. The temperature had broken this week, and it was only in the high 70s. A couple of neighbors took advantage of the opportunity to fire up lawnmower and chainsaw, but few people otherwise had yet ventured out.

It was such a nice walk.

Still, I couldn’t help wishing the sky were a little less immaculate, less perfect. More strangely, I found myself wishing that even a single airplane would cross it. I didn’t want to remember that other clear blue morning sky. I didn’t want to forget the airplanes.

____________________

Update: The day has also brought my politically more outspoken friend FLJerseyBoy out of whatever hole he’s been hiding in for three-plus years. He’s suddenly popped up again at A Dog Starv’d, with a different take on it.

Admin: Clearing Up Some RAMH Clutter, Part 3

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Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll switch Running After My Hat over to its new look. For anyone interested in such matters, I’ve prepared some screen captures to give you an idea of what to expect. Below, I’ll include an annotated version of some of those screen captures in this post, highlighting various features.

If you’d prefer to test-drive it yourself, feel free to just head over to the test site. You’ll find it to be not particularly full-featured: for example, it includes only a few months’ posts, comments, categories, and so on.

And I don’t think you’ll be able to post comments, but am ready to be surprised :).

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Something in the Air

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[Image: at left, all the Earth’s water collected into a single ball, about 865 miles in diameter; at right, all the Earth’s atmosphere in a single ball, about 1240 miles in diameter, assuming sea-level pressure. (source)]

From whiskey river:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

(Edward Abbey [source])

…and:

All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy: So I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze.

(Mumon Ekai [source])

…and:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

(Yamamoto Tsunetomo [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Switched-On Bach

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If not for 1968’s Switched-On Bach, I’m not sure I’d ever have paid much attention to classical music. I don’t know why I bought the album, unless in fascination with the sheer weirdness of the concept. As far as I knew then, no one within shouting distance of my life listened to classical music. I didn’t read record reviews. I played no instruments. I knew even less about electronics than I did about music.

The album cover certainly caught the eye. That’s it at the right (click to enlarge), with slightly altered text, as originally approved by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, the album’s creator. Bach stands before an unmistakably non-contemporaneous keyboard, which itself stands before an array of electronic boxes bedecked with switches, lights, meters, and input/output jacks. In his right hand he holds a pair of stereo headphones; on his face, a look of surpassing confidence which seems to say, Surprised? Don’t be. This makes so much sense, and I’m quite proud of it.

For this Midweek Music Break, I’ve selected not one or two, but three numbers from the album:

  • “Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29”: The very first track on the album announces, from its first dizzying avalanche of notes through the nearly symphonic conclusion a few minutes later, If you think electronic music sounds like atonal, unmelodic, disharmonious beeps and squawks, think again.
  • “Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068”: If the “Sinfonia” swept listeners up in the sheer exuberant joy of the Moog synthesizer’s (remixed, and re-remixed) multi-tracked sound, this piece (track ) calmed them down, reassured them, with what sounds like a lullaby of light woodwinds.
  • “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”: If you had to choose Bach’s “greatest hit” for modern listeners, this might be it. At latter-day weddings it’s often played at a stately, formal, almost dirge-like pace. Carlos’s interpretation is more sprightly — not coincidentally, as Bach himself apparently preferred.

For those of you who might want to listen to the three selections back-to-back, I’ve set up the audio-player thingum that way first. If you just want to hear an individual piece, I’ve added separate, er, thingums below the playlist version.

[Below, click Play button to begin selections from Switched-On Bach. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. These pieces, taken together, are about nine minutes long.]

[audio:01sinfoniatocantatabwv29_waltercarlos.mp3, 02aironagstring_orchestralsuite3bwv1068_waltercarlos.mp3, 06jesujoyofmansdesiring_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Selections from Switched-On Bach’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:27 long.

[audio:01sinfoniatocantatabwv29_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:33 long.

[audio:02aironagstring_orchestralsuite3bwv1068_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:58 long.

[audio:06jesujoyofmansdesiring_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

Not only a musician and musical technician, Carlos also demonstrates great skill as a photographer of solar eclipses (she’s a self-confessed “coronaphile”) — and holds a deep and abiding interest in maps, especially as projected to or from a sphere. Her Web site is a favorite of mine just to wander around in, on all these (and other) topics.

______________________

Note: About the album cover… You may have noticed the weasel-wording, “as originally approved by its creator.” The cover shown above was not the very first one, though. In that one, as you can see over there at the left, Bach was seated, not standing. Click on that image for a blow-up, and you’ll see why Carlos didn’t like it. Yeah. Bach’s got his lips pursed and eyes a-goggle — apparently bemused in the extreme, if not outright horrified. Remember “Look What They’ve Done to My Song”? (If not, see here; scroll to the video at the bottom.) Yeah. That.

Furthermore, the headphones he’s wearing? They’re plugged into the synthesizer… specifically, to an input jack. Carlos, an electronics wizard as well as a musician, must’ve about keeled over.

On the “A” Word

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[Image: “Left-Hand Rule.” For an explanation about something other than the subject of this post, see this page at the University of Maryland’s Department of Physics site.]

…or: what It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has to do with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

(Well, no, not really. The post started out to connect that movie and that book, and I may return to that intention at some point. But it morphed out from under me as I worked on it. In the meantime, one of the signal virtues of the Brain Pickings site, I think, are the “…or what [X] has to do with [Y]” subtitles on many posts. I’ve always wanted to do that; the opportunity presented itself; and, well…)

The RAMH regular who comments here as whaddayamean –short for her blog’s charming mouthful of a moniker, Whaddaya mean, do I have room for dessert? — has been mulling over The “A” Word. It is, of course, about. As in:

What’s your book about?

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Admin: Clearing Up Some RAMH Clutter, Part 2

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Briefly: for anyone who’s interested, I’m going to be experimenting with various new “looks” at a special subsite of this one. (I’ll make a bigger announcement when I’m ready to take this live.)

Currently, I’ve imported to the test site only posts and comments and so on from January 1 2011 through the “Admin: Cleaning Up Some RAMH Clutter” post of a week go. Thus, some links to older posts won’t work. Audio files won’t work, at all (although the little “play” widgets appear onscreen). And other stuff will be just plain weird until I fix it. (E.g., a lot of themes seem to have non-hierarchical/nested category lists. I hate that.) Remember that whatever you see there will be transient, until it’s not. :)

In the meantime, feel free to post any comments here if you see anything you like, or anything you don’t like. I probably won’t be paying much attention to comments over at the other place, especially since I haven’t set up reCaptcha or other anti-sp*m measures.

 

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