[From the mind of Ze Frank.]
What’s In a Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (1)
[One of a continuing series of posts on American popular songs with long histories. As is usually the case, this one on the history of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” will be was followed in a couple days by Part 2, about some of the cover versions.]
Where Were You in ’62?
So asked one of the taglines to George Lucas’s 1973 film, American Graffiti. The question both pinpointed the time of the film’s action and suggested that the film would be even better if the audience brought their own memories along to the theater.
Yet the hit soundtrack which followed wasn’t so neatly nailed down: it mashed together hits released between 1953 to 1964 (!). Hence — given the way that blocks of AM Top 40 radio playlists were constructed back then — these songs were unlikely to have been broadcast exactly that way during the single day of the characters’ lives which the film depicts.
The Graffiti soundtrack also failed to include many artists who would have been on the air over that twelve-year period — notably Elvis Presley. The idea of releasing a soundtrack album of original hits tied to the release of a film wasn’t new, but music producers and rights holders were suspicious of the payment plan proposed by studio lawyers: each song’s owner(s) would get a flat, and equal, amount. (Indeed, Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” was included, despite the rights issues, by the expedient of re-recording it just for the album.)
In any case, chronologically midway through that block of years, along came “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” recorded by The Platters in 1958 and topping the charts a year later:
[Below, click Play button to begin Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:39 long.]
[audio:smokegetsinyoureyes_platters.mp3|titles=’Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’|artists=The Platters]
Lyrics:
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
(Kern/Harbach)They asked me how I knew
My true love was true
I, of course, replied,
Something here inside
Cannot be denied.They said someday you’ll find
All who love are blind
When your heart’s on fire
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes.So I chaffed them and I gayly laughed
To think that they could doubt my love,
Yet today my love has flown away
I am without my loveNow laughing friends deride
Tears I cannot hide
So I smile and say,
“When a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes.”
(Above lyrics transcription per songwriter Jimmy Webb’s study of pop music composition, Tunesmith, probably using The Platters’ cover as a guide. Slight variations do crop up in others, though.)
Like many people who lived through the ’50s and ’60s, I imagine, I’d always thought that to be the version of the song. It was certainly the only one I’d ever heard. And could any performer possibly have handled such lyrics and music with more authority than The Platters’ lead singer, Tony Williams?
Little did “My Generation”-centric I realize that the movie tagline might just as well have read: Where Were You in ‘32?
Even I Didn’t Miss the Closed Captions
[“Bottle,” by Kirsten Lepore]
It’s hard enough to tell a complete story with words…
Un Momento, Por Favor
[Image found at What My World’s Like]
From whiskey river:
Visiting the Graveyard
When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiarbut not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,which they do
very quietly,
it’s in an unknowable language —
I can catch the tonebut understand not a single word —
and when I open my eyes
there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.
(Mary Oliver, from Red bird [source])
…and:
…Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion.
We have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible. And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word now, we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline calibrations on the watch.
As a result, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because we believe that the present is always instantly vanishing. This is the problem of Goethe’s Faust. He attains his great moment and says to it, “Oh still delay, thou art so fair.” But the moment never stays. It is always disappearing into the past.
Therefore we have the sensation that our lives are constantly flowing away from us. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to waste; time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of clocks, we feel that we have a past, and that we know who we were in the past — nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were — and we believe we also have a future. And that belief is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply us with everything we’re looking for.
You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.
(Alan Watts [source, in slightly different form])
“What Time Is It?” “Time to Wish You Were in Prague.”
Per Eileen of Speak Coffee to Me, this awesome* video of a projection on the Prague Orloj, an “astronomical clock tower.” “The 600 Years” refers to the number of years since the clock was first built — years which pass by as you watch the video:
It’s the handiwork of a project known as The Macula, “dealing with the relationship between image, sound and audience.” If you follow that link to their site, be sure to nose around some to view more of their other work… including similar projection-on-buildings pieces.
The logistical problems they had to solve to make this overwhelm my brain. Just getting the perspective right had to be a matter of a lot of experimentation and calculation.
_________________________
* The word is here no cliche.
Why Do Good?
[Image found at the Volunteering England site]
Yesterday’s New York Times (online edition) carried a new entry [JES: link now fixed!] in their “Opinionator” series of weighty questions: “Is Pure Altruism Possible?”
At a certain level, this is the stuff of unresolvable university-level dorm/roommate bull-session debate. The arguments against “pure altruism” seem cold-bloodedly obvious — even if taken to the extreme. Someone who knowingly and apparently willingly sacrifices his/her own life to save someone else’s, well, aren’t they just acting out of a desire to feel good about themselves, to show off as it were, to be noble and be sure we know it? The author of the column (Judith Lichtenberg, a Georgetown University professor of philosophy) isn’t so sure, though. She concludes:
Altruism is possible and altruism is real, although in healthy people it intertwines subtly with the well-being of the agent who does good. And this is crucial for seeing how to increase the amount of altruism in the world. Aristotle had it right in his “Nicomachean Ethics” [link added]: we have to raise people from their “very youth” and educate them “so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.”
But yes: that right there, that troublesome “ought.” How much does altruism just (or “just,” in quotes) fulfill a sense of obligation — of mere duty, per society’s “rules” — as opposed to a genuine sense of self-sacrifice?
And if you’re not ready for philosophy today, or at the moment, can a purely altruistic character ever work in fiction? Must they all have dark and selfish sides in order to be believable? Can dark and selfish characters sacrifice themselves without sacrificing credibility?
______________
Update: Querulous Squirrel, who comments at RAMH often, has come up with a fictional diarist — one Serena Passion — whose most recent entry brooded about those who like to think of themselves as (but never quite are, in SP’s eyes) good people.
Update #2: Duh! For reasons I can’t explain, I used a link not to the Times Opinionator column, but to a post on Froog’s blog. Corrected. Apologies to those who might have been confused, and also to Froog (who perhaps wondered why his stats had mysteriously nudged upward for 24 hours).
Just Who Do You Think You Are, Anyway?
[For information about the video, see the note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
There is never anything more truthful
Than what you yourself make of it
Except the possibility that is always there
Behind you, at the back of the mirror,
Behind the brain, in back of the universe —
And that also as you will make it.
(Peyton Houston, from The Changes [source])
…and:
When you find yourself asking, irritably and rhetorically, “Why the hell does he keep doing that?!” — I strongly recommend you answer the rhetorical question. The causal story revealed in the answer, which always has roots outside the person, might reduce counter-productive blaming and contempt, and it will give you vital information about how the behavior might be changed.
(Thomas Clark, from Encountering Naturalism)
…and (italicized portion):
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.
(Alan Watts, from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
Val-deri,Val-dera
[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]
[Below, click Play button to begin The Happy Wanderer. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:17 long.]
[audio:thehappywanderer_timothyseaman.mp3|titles=’The Happy Wanderer’|artists=Timothy Seaman]
The Missus and I have a favorite, half-kidding/half-serious theory about the modern world: that it’s set up to drive its denizens (especially us) crazy. Just in case you haven’t noticed: the pace of life never slows down, and there’s more and more stuff to fill every minute, and every bit of it is urgent and ever more resistant to prioritization. Music is louder and faster, TV commercials more obstreporous, money tighter, our friends and families both frailer and more distant, food and drink more dangerous, streets more crowded and more polluted (despite new regulations every year pretending to fight both traffic volume and air pollution), “communication” trivially easy and also easily trivial, civic discourse threatening to run off the rails at every nerve-jangling second…
Furthermore, of course, no one we know is getting any younger — a situation thorned with a thousand frustrations all its own. Speaking for myself, I am certain that gravity is much stronger than when I was a kid, and air resistance much weaker, and objects theoretically meant to be held in the hands seem aerodynamically designed these days to leap away and down to the floor almost as soon as I touch them.
And knowledge? Pfft! When it comes to knowledge, the situation really gets dire. Computers and networks grow ever more stubborn, refusing not only to play with one another but to play with me, dammit. I can download books tens of thousands of times faster than I can read their first chapters. Facts once gluey slither around in my head like greased marbles…
Note the peculiarly Baby-Boomer view of the world: if something hasn’t been set up to make life easier, it’s because we must be beset by enemies, entire wicked cabals of them, bent on keeping us from whatever we want at the moment. Because, you know, it’s all about us.
This crazy-makingness, I am convinced, is tied in somehow with the laws of thermodynamics. You know: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, at best just turned into other forms of matter and energy. The total amount of matter (or energy) in the universe is a constant. All that. Because, see — so my theory goes — the total amount of information in the universe is a constant, too. When you move 150 pounds of information from a blog to Twitter, let’s say, it remains at 150 pounds total — just diffused and vaporous and spread out so no one can see the whole anymore, just the individual molecules…
It Went Right By You
[Image: “Lodz, PL, 1994.” A photo by Mark Pimlott from his 2008 exhibit, All Things Pass,
at Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (click for original)]
From whiskey river:
Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.
(Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin [source])
…and:
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night.
(John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara [source])
…and:
Sleepless
Can’t get clear of this dream,
can’t get sober.Spring breeze chilly
on the flesh: me all alone.My orphan sail
finds the bank
where reed flowers fall.All night
the river sounds
the rain falling:
listen.
(Yuan Mei, from I Don’t Bow to Buddhas [source])
When Neurosis Calls
We all could use a miniature Bob Newhart in our brains…
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