Running After My Hat

Midweek Music Break: Harry Belafonte, “Lead Man Holler”

June 11, 2014 by John 2 Comments

Promotional poster for Island in the Sun. Lurid, eh? Note the helpful logo-ish device at the top right, depicting a, y’know, actual island literally in the sun. Just in case you hadn’t already gotten the message!

You may be surprised — as I was — to learn that this week was once designated as “Harry Belafonte — Island in the Sun Week.”

Of course, this wasn’t a true national celebration but a promotional ploy for the film which opened this week in 1957, starring Harry Belafonte (also James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Dorothy Dandridge, and Michael Rennie). The film needed whatever promotional help it could get, because the Alec Waugh novel it was based on had ignited an uncomfortable firestorm of controversy, especially around the US South.

(The South Carolina legislature threatened to fine any movie theater which showed the film $5,0000. It was banned outright in Memphis. And according to the Turner Classic Movies site, “in New Orleans, the American Legion launched an unsuccessful campaign to halt the film’s screening on the grounds that it ‘contributes to the Communist Party’s aim of creating friction between the races.'” But the protests against it reached at least as far north as Minneapolis. Not that any of this actually hurt its box office much: it was the sixth biggest-earning film of the year.)

So what was the big deal?

If you didn’t know any of the cast, and didn’t know anything about the book, but relied solely on the poster above for information about the film, well, you might still have the question. I mean, look at them: about as homogeneous as it’s possible to be, ethnically speaking.

An illusion, of course, thanks to some artful work with color saturation, lighting, and watercolors. The main character, Harry Belafonte’s David Boyeur, is an up-and-coming black labor leader and politician on the fictional island of Santa Marta, during its transition from English colonial to black rule. (Strike 1 for the film’s chances in the mid-’50s South.) Boyeur develops not-quite-a-relationship with wealthy white socialite Mavis Norman (strike 2), but at least it goes nowhere — ultimately broken off, for both of their noble sakes. (They never quite kiss, even.)

(At least, that’s how the film works out — a hastily cobbled-together outcome, the book having ended with a real Boyeur/Mavis relationship.)

And finally, throw in a handful of other interracial twists: Boyeur’s principal antagonist, white Governor Maxwell Fleury (James Mason), is exposed as the grandson of a black man; Maxwell’s sister Jocelyn (Joan Collins) becomes pregnant, doesn’t want to saddle her white lover with an interracial love child… but is relieved to find out that at least her and Maxwell’s mother was white; and Maxwell’s aide Justin (Stephen Boyd) develops a romance with the mixed-race Margot (Dorothy Dandridge). Indeed, Jocelyn and Margot wind up moving with their lovers to England, where they can perhaps put all the societal judgment behind them. (Strike 3, and maybe by now we’re even working our way into the next inning.)

The film came out while Belafonte was at a popular peak, and featured two songs — the title song, and “Lead Man Holler” — to whose composition he had (at least in theory) contributed. They became two of his biggest hits.

“Lead Man Holler” itself might be called a cadence calypso number: one meant primarily to supply a rhythm to manual laborers working repetitive tasks. It reminds me a lot of some of the call-and-response chants Boy Scout leaders and drum majors, with their charges, used to sing out during parades when I was a kid, e.g.:

You ain’t got no friends on your left!
(Your LEFT!)
You ain’t got no friends on your right!
(Your RIGHT!)
Sound off!
(SOUND off!)
Cadence count!
(CADENCE count!)
One, two, three-four…
(One, two… THREE-FOUR!)

However, various sources I’ve checked point out that while Boyeur’s singing does guide sugar-cane workers in their jobs, it’s hey, Harry Belafonte up there: almost inexpressibly handsome, gleaming, and (wouldn’t you know it) apparently directing at least part of the rhythmic sing-song at a photo of Joan Fontaine…

Subtext. When it comes to “race” (whatever that is) — at least in the US, especially through a Hollywood filter — there’s always subtext.

[Lyrics]

At Sea

June 6, 2014 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “It Wasn’t Unfulfillment, But Rather Conscious Decisions on Their Path to Happiness,”
a photo by user “skrubu” (Pekka Nikrus) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace [source])

…and (same link as above):

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles — to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are — is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is simply because we are here. The situation can be likened to that of a group of intelligent fish who one day begin wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe, they suggest, there are many other worlds, some of them completely dry, some wet, and everything in between.

Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

(Alan Lightman [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Ond day someone noticed there were stars but no words, why? I’ve asked a lot of people, I think it is a good question. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the bluegreen shoots and the plant called ‘audacity’ that poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

(Anne Carson [source, but quoted here and elsewhere])

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Missing, Lost, Never Found

May 30, 2014 by John 3 Comments

#478162483 / gettyimages.com

From whiskey river:

The Talmud asks the question, “Who is wise?” and gives the surprise answer, “Someone who learns from everyone.” We recognize humility in others by finding something that we can learn from them. Do you hear them? Are you paying attention? There’s something you can learn from everyone, something that only he or she knows, that only he or she can teach you.

It’s like each person’s life has the pieces of a 1,000 piece interlocking jigsaw puzzle. In my experience, no one seems to get issued a complete puzzle. Everyone’s puzzle is missing, on average, seven pieces, and these puzzle pieces are distributed randomly into other people’s puzzles. We spend our lives walking around saying, “Do you need a puzzle piece with a little yellow in the corner and a red line running through it?” Then we meet someone, and he or she says, “Oh, my God, I’ve been looking for it all my life.” We say, “I don’t know what to do with it, I wound up with it, take it, it’s yours.” It’s rarely the author or featured speaker who has your puzzle pieces; it’s usually someone who has a bit part in your life whose name is not recorded in the program.

(Rabbi Lawrence Kushner [unconfirmed source for this version, but see, e.g., this])

…and (italicized lines):

Moonlight

Now comes the white-striped, sharp-nosed digger of dampness
in her black and oily coat.
All night in the moonlight she has been wandering
the stony beach; now she steps
into the gardens and under the street light
like a flat cat.

Her eyes gleaming and her tail aloft, she is afraid
of nothing — not dogs, not policemen who see her
and do not remove themselves from their cruisers, but sail on
down the dark roads.

Everything is famous for something: the eagle for power,
the fox for cunning.
This one we know for her temper and also her smell,
which comes from the wicks of fire.
Yet once I watched and heard her, deep in the woods,
humming to herself as she carried
leaves into her humble house, that was nothing
but a scratched-out hole.

Take care you don’t know everything in this world
too quickly or easily. Everything
is also a mystery, and has its own secret aura in the moonlight,
its private song.

If you meet her
don’t be afraid, just stand still.
And, while you let her stare you down,

notice how she stamps her pretty, little feet.
Notice how she shines.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Confused Reality

May 23, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

From whiskey river:

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.

(William Saroyan [source])

…and:

The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long and drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts. They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl, those in the lead calling out yeee!, those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?

(Chuang Tzu [source])

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Early, Late, Later, Too Late

May 16, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Image: illustration from The Sneetches and Other Stories, by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel).
For the complete tale of “Too Many Daves,” see below.]

From whiskey river (operating in terse mode this week, apparently):

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just … come out the other side.

Or you don’t.

(Stephen King [source])

…and:

Waking at Night

The blue river is gray at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Try to be reasonable in the way you grow, and don’t ever think it is too late. It is never too late. Even if you are going to die tomorrow, keep yourself straight and clear and be a happy human being today. If you keep your situation happy day by day, you will eventually reach the greatest happiness of enlightenment.

(Lama Thubten Yeshe [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Arkells, “Coffee”

May 14, 2014 by John 2 Comments

Arkells is* something of an “it” band, from Hamilton, Ontario — but only in the sense that a band’s “it-ness” can span several years. In Arkells’ case, this span would range from their first Canadian tour in 2008, through 2010 (Juno New Group of the Year), through 2012 (Juno Group of the Year), to now (preparing to release their third album (High Noon) on the heels of a new EP (Arkells Sing Motown). From what I’ve read of them — granted, in only the past week — I’d have difficulty begrudging them an ounce of success: they’re, well, good guys making good.

The group’s name comes from Arkell Street in their hometown, where they apparently grew up and first started playing music. If you visit Google Maps’ Street View, you can “walk” the length of the street in a few minutes: three blocks of modest brick homes with trim, treed lawns. It’s not one of those streets that make you think, y’know, troubled neighborhood.

The good-guyness certainly shows in the 2013 video for “Coffee.” I loved the writeup about it on the band’s blog:

Before we hit the old dusty trail to begin our European tour, we are very happy to share with you our newly finished “Coffee” music video. Shot in Hamilton, ON, last Christmas, this video features not only the chips off the ole blocks, but the old blocks themselves. This was our fathers’ first time shooting a music video, and our directors Dave Dunham and Karl Dilpelino, did a great job capturing the senior members of the Arkells family. We had a great time spending the day shooting with our dads…

(“Our fathers’ first”: FIRST. Ha!)

The song itself has no particular association with Hamilton, with fathers, or with fathers’-and-sons together. For that matter, the association with coffee is almost incidental, simply supplying a context, a venue, for the story to play out. It’s just a classic straight-ahead-rock torturous-breakup number, in which the narrator — openly or not — can’t help digging at the wound: You left me for that other guy? What’s it like when you’re with him? It’s an interesting, self-revealing clutch of behaviors he imagines for the new guy: “Does he hit you? Does he hold you? Does he listen? Or cut you off when you’re speaking?”

The guys’ fathers don’t seem inclined to torture themselves about anything at the moment, unless it’s technology. I’d like to report that yes, the “old blocks” themselves were really playing guitar, drums, etc. Alas, I don’t know!

[Lyrics]

________________

* The third-person singular is the right verb form, right? I can never decide about this. I mean, if I said “Arcade Fire is…” I’d never give it a second glance. But “Arkells” (or “Pixies,” etc.) — well, befuddlement. Sometimes it seems like everything is at least 25% more difficult than it needs to be.

Extraordinary Visions. Ordinary Miracles.

May 9, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

Peter Beard: Self-Portrait in Mouth of Crocodile

[Image: “Self-Portrait in Mouth of Crocodile” (1965) by photographer-adventurer Peter Beard (who had earlier shot the 15-foot crocodile alongside Lake Rudolph in Kenya). One source says that while the photograph was being set up, “the insides of the freshly dead crocodile began to contract, nearly crushing [Beard’s] legs.” The photo almost certainly inspired the rather problematic “Crocodile Eating Ballerina,” Helmut Newton’s 1983 photo (see the “Lot Notes” tab at that link).]

From whiskey river:

The Happiest Day

It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn’t believe. Our children were asleep
or playing, the youngest as new
as the new smell of the lilacs,
and how could I have guessed
their roots were shallow
and would be easily transplanted.
I didn’t even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.
So we sat on the porch
in the cool morning, sipping
hot coffee. Behind the news of the day—
strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere—
I could see the top of your dark head
and thought not of public conflagrations
but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder.
If someone could stop the camera then…
if someone could only stop the camera
and ask me: are you happy?
perhaps I would have noticed
how the morning shone in the reflected
color of lilac. Yes, I might have said
and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken but the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not romantic and is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to:

…for here there is no place
That does not see you. You must change your life.

(William Olsen [source]; last two lines by Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

[Read more…]

Missing the Point (or Nearly So)

May 2, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “irony at BBworld,” by user bionicteaching (Tom Woodward) at Flickr.com.
Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

West Wind
(excerpt)

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks — when you hear that unmistakable pounding — when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming — then row, row for your life toward it.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

The History of Poetry

Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel like raising our voices
Just a little, or sometimes during late autumn
When the evening flowers a moment over the western range
And we imagine angels rushing down the air’s cold steps
To wish us well, if we have lost our will,
And do nothing but doze, half hearing the sighs
Of this or that breeze drift aimlessly over the failed farms
And wasted gardens? These days when we waken.
Everything shines with the same blue light
That filled our sleep moments before,
So we do nothing but count the trees, the clouds,
The few birds left; then we decide that we shouldn’t
Be hard on ourselves, that the past was no better
Than now, for hasn’t the enemy always existed,
And wasn’t the church of the world always in ruins?

(Mark Strand [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Laura Nyro

April 30, 2014 by John 3 Comments

Laura Nyro (pronounced Nero): it’s a name I haven’t heard anybody mention in probably forty years. But there was a time when she was it, as a performer but mostly as a songwriter. She looked like a spooky-contemplative Joan Baez — Joan Baez by way of Leonard Cohen — but whether you ever laid eyes on an album cover or not, you knew Laura Nyro.

If you’re of a certain age, the list of big hits she churned out in just a few years, especially for others, seems almost too much to believe: “And When I Die” (Peter, Paul, & Mary, and later Blood, Sweat, & Tears as well); “Blowin’ Away,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Sweet Blindness,” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (the Fifth Dimension); “Stoney End,” (Barbra Streisand); and “Eli’s Comin'” (Three Dog Night)…

Other songwriters who have asserted her influence over them: Ricky Lee Jones, Todd Rundgren, Melissa Manchester, Joni Mitchell, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, and Stephen Sondheim, who said of “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “In economy, lyricism, and melody, it is a masterpiece.” …If you’re interested, go to Google Books and pair her last name in a search with that of just about anyone else writing pop music in the late 1960s-early ’70s. Heck, just put “Nyro” alongside the word “songwriters.” It’s amazing.

One interesting factoid I didn’t know when setting out to create this post: Nyro biographer Michele Kort reports that when Blood, Sweat, & Tears’ lead vocalist Al Kooper left the band, Nyro — encouraged by the band themselves — toyed with the idea of replacing him. That would have been a heck of a potent combination.

Most interestingly, as reported in a 1970 LIFE Magazine story, Nyro could not actually write music. She relied on others to transcribe her tunes to notation:

Musicians, they want to know about the bar, and all of that… and I don’t know any of that. I have my own language. I think of music in terms of colors, and shapes, and textures, and sensory things, and abstractions. But once I have the instruments to work with, I can do a lot of things. You can take a string, and strings can be brazen, or they can be sweet, that can be pale. I would work on textures like that.

As for performing publicly, especially for large audiences, Nyro generally declined opportunities to do so. Reportedly, both The Tonight Show and David Letterman tried (unsuccessfully) to get her to appear on their stages. At the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, she seems to have imagined hearing, among the crowd noise, a chorus of boos — and left in tears. Whether she actually heard them or not — conflicting reports, ambiguous recordings of her performance, all the rest — it marked her for good. (She didn’t appear in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop, but you can see a portion of her set thanks to the Criterion Collection and YouTube. I’ve embedded that clip at the foot of this post.)

She first showed up in a 1968 album of her own, and quit music just four or five years later. For good, she said, and at first she pretty much stuck to her word. She came back a few times in the 1970s and ’80s (including some live albums), but never again hit anything like that early plateau. She died in 1997, not quite 50 years old, of ovarian cancer.

—

Nyro’s voice, like her songwriting and her “vibe,” was sui generis. If you think of that list of hit songs — and the performers who made them hits — you may get a sense of the voice she apparently had in her head when she composed them, which was her own voice. It could soar, pierce through cinderblock dorm walls (as I know from first-hand experience), and her tempos could suddenly zig-zag slower or faster, not always but often catching you by surprise.

I’ve got a selection of four of her songs here today: one a little more offbeat, and three of them probably familiar. The offbeat one has one of my favorite song titles ever, I think (especially for ambiguity): “When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag.”

Of the others, my favorite — the one I can most easily call to mind in her voice, rather than someone else’s — is “Sweet Blindness.” In a song about drinking, you just don’t expect to find complex, subtle words and music:

Oh, sweet blindness
A little magic, a little kindness
Oh, sweet blindness
All over me

Please don’t tell my mother
I’m a saloon and a moonshine lover
Come on baby, do a slow float
You’re a good looking riverboat
And ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

Is that great or what?

(You can find lyrics to “When I Was Freeport…” here; for the others, lots of places around the Web will be happy to serve them up for you.)

[Below, click Play button to begin ‘When I Was a Freeport (etc.)’. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This playlist is just about exactly 13 minutes long.

[audio:wheniwasafreeport_lauranyro.mp3, eliscomin_lauranyro.mp3, stonedsoulpicnic_lauranyro.mp3, sweetblindness_lauranyro.mp3|titles=’When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag’, ‘Eli’s Comin”, ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, ‘Sweet Blindness’|artists=Laura Nyro]

________________________

About the Monterey Pop appearance: You can judge for yourself. The gods know I’m no authority on the interpretation of recorded sound, but I don’t pick up any booing here:

The Truth in Sudden Joy (and Vice-Versa)

April 25, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Interior with Sudden Joy (1951), by American surrealist Dorothea Tanning. This is as reproduced in grayscale for a 1990 Bomb Magazine interview. To see a (smaller) version in color, click on the image; to see the grayscale somewhat larger, click here.]

From whiskey river:

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

(Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems [source])

…and:

I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

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