Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Mysteries of Potential

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Alternate-reality game 'mood board'

[Image: a “mood board” generated by a team brainstorming the design of an alternate-reality game (ARG). Found it here. Click to enlarge.]

From whiskey river:

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

The Unwritten

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it

to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this

(W.S. Merwin [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 1 (1951-52)

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For weeks recently, intermittently, I had been musically fixated on a song which I’d known for, well, decades. And I probably hadn’t heard it in decades, either. Even worse: my normal solution to the problem of an earworm is to simply listen to the song several times. Couldn’t do that in this case because… well, I didn’t know the name of the song, or on what album (if any) I might have heard it. I didn’t know who performed it. It was an instrumental, so I couldn’t seize on the lyrics to simply do a search. All I knew, apparently intimately, was the sound.

Which really made me crazy. The melody and rhythm and performance were not unpleasant, by any means; in fact, they swung smoothly, sweet-dreamily, with heavy doses of strings and woodwinds accented here and there by percussion and horn. They felt… Latin.

Yes, I know: whole Web sites and smartphone apps exist to help in cases like this. You hold an iPod or MP3 player up to a microphone, say, and the software analyzes the tune to guess at the song (and sometimes the artist). Or you can play a piano, guitar, or harmonica (or — I guess — a trumpet! even a Mellotron, or a Novachord!) into the mike. In some cases, you can simply sing into the mike, or hum, or even just plain whistle; this would require one of those rare solutions (since I didn’t actually have a copy of the song to play). But I’ve gone the perform-it-yourself route before. Maybe your singing, humming, whistling is up to snuff. Mine? Put it this way: Can you imagine the humiliation of running software which all but stares at you, gimlet-eyed, in disbelief and frank confusion?

So then one Monday night a few weeks ago The Missus and I succumbed to the allure of a PBS pledge drive. We’ve donated before, separately and together, but never at the level required to get one of their premium “gifts”: a DVD, say, or a large-format coffee-table book, or a collection of CDs. On this occasion, what pushed us over the edge was a sort of vicarious nostalgia for music of some other generation: we sprang for a six-CD collection of pop and “easy listening” music of the 1950s. Back then, we were both too young really to know this music. But the gods knew we’d heard plenty of it, coming from the speakers of record player, transistor radio, and hi-fi system…

Think Patti Page and Perry Como, Mantovani and the McGuire Sisters, all the guy-group vocalists (many of them named to identify their number, usually four: the Four Lads, the Four Aces, the Four Coins).

Think, oh, say, Leroy Anderson, and “Blue Tango.”

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ADMIN: Sending Long RAMH Posts to Your Kindle

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I’ve added a new feature to the blog which, in one respect, gives me something you could easily call pause. But on balance I think it’s a good thing:

You probably already know you can subscribe to RAMH either via email or using some blog-subscription application like Google Reader (soon to go away), Feedly, etc. (See the “Subscription Options” area in the right sidebar, just below “Hats Recently Chased.”) But if you don’t want to subscribe to the blog that way, just want to save occasional individual posts for later offline reading, wouldn’t that be nice? After all, I do tend to write awfully long posts…

At the foot of each post at the site — also on each non-post “page,” as WordPress calls them (like the About page, for instance) — you’ll now find a little button, which looks like this:

'Send to Kindle' button

It does pretty much what you’d expect: transmits the corresponding post’s content to your Kindle-reading device. (This can be either a Kindle (duh), or a smartphone/pad Kindle app. Unfortunately this does not yet include the Amazon Cloud Reader app for desktop PCs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that got added at some point.) When you click on it, you’ll get the usual Amazon page which prompts you for your login credentials. If you’ve got more than one reading device, you can select it at the next screen.

…and a moment or two later, you’ll have that post at your disposal for offline reading.

Now obviously, actually using this feature on a very short post — like this one, or like Thursday’s cartoon-and-commentary post — doesn’t make a lot of sense. And if non-textual/-pictorial content is important, you probably won’t find it anywhere on the target device; I’ve got my most recent Midweek Music Break post open in my Android app at the moment, and it includes neither (a) the video clip, nor (b) the two little audio-player widgets which let you stream music and spoken content to your browser.

Note 1: If you have the secret RAMH square-bracket decoder ring, though, you can still listen to the audio clips I post here.

One other caveat: As you may know, when you’re looking at the RAMH home page in your browser, not every post appears in its entirety. (For instance, the weekly whiskey river Friday posts show only the selected quotations from whiskey river for that week.) In order to continue reading the rest of the post, you click on a Continue reading link (or of course, you can click on the post title to see the whole thing.) The caveat is that the send-to-Kindle button also appears on the RAMH home page below every Continue reading link: clicking on one of these buttons sends to your device only the portion of the post visible from the home page, not the full post. To send the full post, you must have the full post open in your browser, and click the send-to-Kindle button there.

Either the Amazon folks will eventually provide workarounds for the above, or I’ll figure out some other approach.

So what’s the thing which gives me pause? Just this: it requires you to use Amazon’s own little porthole to the content. True, you don’t need to own a Kindle per se. But requiring the use of any vendor-specific technology, even if in the form of apparently benign smartphone or pad apps, doesn’t feel like a comfortable fit to me.

Note 2: You can also read a post later by using the “Share/Save” button which has been at the foot of every post for years now. However, this doesn’t really let you read it offline; all it really does is make a link available to be clicked on. I don’t know, though. Maybe it’s a small distinction.

I’d be curious to know what any of your experiences might be with this, especially if you try it out using something other than a plain old Kindle or Android smartphone. If you’re using a Kindle Fire, can you see the audio widgets/videos? If you’re using an iPhone?

Particles of Moments, Waves of Life

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[Video: trailer for The Heart & The Sea, a 2012 feature by Australian filmmaker  Nathan Oldfield.
See the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one; that each flower owes it to itself to fade for the sake of its fruit; that the fruit, unless it falls and dies, cannot assure new blooms, so that spring itself rests on winter’s grief.

(André Gide [source])

…and:

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

(André Gide [source])

…and:

Up Jumped Spring

for Nana

What’s most fantastical almost always goes
unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.
Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee
your night, creameries your dream factories.
Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest
means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave
of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth
can still be the same earth our ancestors walked.
Chemistry strains to connect our hemispheres.
The right and left sidelines our brain forms
in the rain this new world braves – acid jazz.
The timeless taste her tongue leaves in your mouth,
stirred with unmeasured sugars, greens the day
the way sweet sunlight oxygenates, ignites
all nights, all daytimes, and you – this jumps.
Sheer voltage leaps, but nothing keeps or stays.
Sequence your afternoon as dance. Drink spring.
Holding her hard against you, picture the screenplay.
Take time to remember to get her spells together.
Up jumps the goddess gratified, and up jumped spring.

(Al Young [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt, “Only in Songs/Night and Dreams”

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Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merrit

[Photo: Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt]

As far as I’ve been able to tell, this duo first met following a concert by classical pianist Dinnerstein. Country-ish singer-songwriter Merritt wrote of that experience:

I talked with Simone the day after I saw her play an intimate concert in New York City. Her father, painter Simon Dinnerstein, talked with me for a moment after this show. He had caught me trying to wipe tears off my face while Simone played. It was such a pleasure to meet such a tremendously talented, disciplined, thoughtful musician. “I’m going to practice much more,” is what I told myself after we talked.

Later in 2008, the British magazine Gramophone brought them together again, nominally assigning Merritt to interview Dinnerstein about “Second Album Syndrome” (4MB PDF). (The interview seems to me much more like an extended, who’s-interviewing-whom back-and-forth.) Says the article’s intro:

As Merritt interviewed Dinnerstein and they shared their experiences, they immediately hit it off. Both are passionate about music, are around the same age, given to genuine self-reflection, and share a common friendship and fanship with the starry country singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams. By the end of the evening, they were already chatting about the possibility of a musical collaboration. Americana Bach, anyone?

By January, 2011, they were sharing a stage in concert at Duke University and talking about an upcoming album (the one which they just released this week). Later that year, Dinnerstein took a turn as “guest DJ” on NPR:

“I tend to be introspective,” she says. “I tend to like music that is sensitive, slow and I like stuff that’s kind of dreamy.”

Dinnerstein’s also drawn to musicians who pursue her own aesthetic, especially those rhythmically free ones who are not afraid to tug on the musical line — expanding or contracting it — as a means of expression.

Among the music she chose for that program was Merritt’s “Feel of the Moon.” (With Judy Collins’s “Suzanne,” the only non-classical selection.)

Now, finally, we’ve got the (first?) product of all that mutual admiration: their collaborative effort, Night.

It may seem a curious mixture, on the surface. Merritt’s own compositions are scattered among a handful of pure-classical pieces, as well as a couple of original songs by others. In the video below, the duo perform the first two songs from the album: one of the Merritt-penned numbers, and Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume” (“Night and Dreams,” here sung in an English-language translation).

Curious mixture or not: the instruments these two wield (not by any means excepting Merritt’s sweetly penetrating voice) are things of powerful beauty.

In all honesty, until a few days ago I’d never even heard of either performer. Jules, over at 7-Imp, just casually mentioned in a post that she looked forward to a new CD coming out this week — she didn’t name the artist or the album, just provided a link. Because I trust Jules’s musical tastes, I clicked right on through to that article at the NPR site. I’m so glad I did; thanks (again), Jules!

I was rushed at the time, though, and had a chance to listen only to the duo’s version of the traditional “Wayfaring Stranger”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Wayfaring Stranger. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:38 long.

[audio:wayfaringstranger_simonedinnersteintiftmerritt.mp3|titles=’Wayfaring Stranger’|artists=Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt]

From the first notes, I pretty much knew I’d be buying the whole album.

_____________________________

Bonus: For almost five years, Merritt has hosted a podcast of interviews for radio station KRTS, in Marfa TX. (That link takes you to the iTunes page for the series.) The program, called Marfa Spark, or just The Spark, puts Merritt together with people who work in various art forms (musicians, artists, broadcasters, photographers…). From a note at The Spark‘s site:

I speak with an artist, regardless of genre, about how they make their work and their lives. How is meaning is made of making things? What does it look like to be an artist over a lifetime? What kind of wisdom is necessary? What is learned from the working?…

After five years of The Spark episodes, I have found that my guests, all making their own distinct work and way, encounter so many of the same shadows and joys, but are often off doing their own thing and don’t realize what all they have in common. Their lives are as unique and inspired and carefully hewn as the work they love to make. I make this collection of conversations with these incredibly creative characters — pioneers of sorts — because I have such a wonderful time stumbling upon them, losing myself in their work, and then asking them for tea. Like proof of life off the map, they comfort me, inspire me, make me brave and send me back to the world with a little wisdom garnered for making my own handmade string of paper days.

(Isn’t that great?)

In July 2008, sometime after first speaking with Dinnerstein, Merritt invited her to The Spark. Here’s that interview, nearly a half-hour in length:

[Below, click Play button to begin The Spark: interview with Simone Dinnerstein. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 27:35 long.

[audio:thespark6_merritt_dinnerstein.mp3|titles=’The Spark: interview with Simone Dinnerstein’|artists=Tift Merritt]

Spirits Tossed, Lost, Messed Up, Redeemed

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[Lyrics here; see additional notes at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (which seems to have had a rough week):

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

(Philip Roth [source])

…and:

Willow flowers, snowflakes, the same . . .
They’re feckless.

No matter whose garden they fall in,
They’ll always follow the wind away.

(Yuan Mei [source])

…and:

What does it feel like to be alive?

Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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Waypoints

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Oldest known world map: Mesopotamia/Babylon, 700-500 BCE

[Image: possibly the oldest surviving map of the world. Mesopotamia/Babylon, about 700-500 BCE. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The spiritual life — or the writing life — depends above all on fidelity to objects.

I wrote that sentence and looked out the window. It has rained for three days and in today’s sun the late roses strain, soggy as wet tissue, toward light coming just in time. Fidelity, I was saying, to objects…

Whatever your eye falls on — for it will fall on what you love — will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.

It doesn’t matter how unprepossessing the world we look at, though it may seem to the lust of the eye that blue sky and late roses are more amusing to look at than dead winter growth. This mistake I make over and over.

(Mary Rose O’Reilley [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Crosby, Stills, and Nash (with a twist), “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”

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Numerous times here, I’ve alluded to my late blooming as an appreciator of rock music. This strikes many people (including me) as an oddity for someone who headed off to college in the late ’60s. How could I have slept through the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, et al. ad infinitum? (My freshman-year roommates thought it hilarious that I came equipped for college with the complete oeuvre of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.)

Crosby, Stills, & Nash: 1969Eventually I got on board, and I hope the phrase “of course” is understood. The first rock album I bought while in college (ever? holy cow, was I so out of sync that I can even seriously ask that question?) was Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s (pre-Neil Young) self-titled debut. Ye gods, but I loved that album. I’m not even sure what made me get it in the first place. It may well have been recommended by the guy in the next room, named Bruce, who was the only person I ever knew who’d actually attended Woodstock; Bruce was funny, mild-mannered, smart as heck, and — like me — a fish-out-of-water Northeastern US native attending a college in North Carolina. Our suitemates from the South tended to favor rather louder music, which I had difficulty adjusting to, but it’s easy to imagine Bruce off-handedly saying something like Listen to this… and putting (say) “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” on a record player.

And what a “song.” As Wikipedia notes, it’s a true suite of several songs. I imagined that that word merely punned on sweet. It did that, all right — “it” meaning both the song itself, and the Judy in question (Collins). But it also met a more formal standard. The mood and the rhythm wandered all over the place from verse to verse, without becoming chaotic. Steven Stills seems to have poured into it everything he could think of, musically and lyrically, without straying outside the country-rock lines.

(When you consider that he apparently wrote it almost explicitly in desperation to keep Collins from leaving their relationship, you maybe can see why he’d throw everything into the mix.)

What a performance, for that matter. Among the other things Wikipedia asserted which I didn’t know: “CSN actually formed in order to record ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.'” Stills’s emphatic guitar, the almost weirdly perfect harmonies… Well, now I’m straying into wordlessness; the thing still transports me. (If they’d chosen any other song to open the album, I wonder if I’d have ever listened to the rest.)

Anyway, here’s the song:

[Below, click Play button to begin Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (CS&N). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 7:24 long.

[audio:suitejudyblueeyes_cs&n.mp3|titles=’Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’|artists=Crosby, Stills, & Nash]

Edit to add (2013-03-16): [Lyrics]

Vitamin String Quartet: Tribute to Crosby, Stills, Nash & YoungSo anyhow, a couple days ago I was enjoying revisiting the song (and the album it came from) when I came across another version of the song — a possibility which would have struck me as ridiculous a moment before. This is by a group known, implausibly, as the Vitamin String Quartet.

I had something of a hard time pinning down who, exactly, the Vitamin String Quartet comprises. (It seems that the membership changes every now and then.)

But information lies thick upon the ground when it comes to wondering what music the VSQ has recorded. They’ve recorded a bazillion rock songs… all arranged (obviously) for string quartet.

I mean, really — they’ve recorded a LOT of albums, not to mention songs. (One site I saw online concluded that at least one of the Wikipedia entries, however, was bogus. Which makes one wonder.)

Here’s the VSQ’s take on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” — almost exactly the length of the original:

[Below, click Play button to begin Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (VSQ). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 7:26 long.

[audio:suitejudyblueeyes_vitaminstringquartet.mp3|titles=’Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’|artists=Vitamin String Quartet]

A funny old world humans have made for themselves, isn’t it?

Update (later in the day): There’s a really good behind-the-scenes/making-of story about this song here at Sound On Sound. (It’s an interview which will probably hold even more interest for readers who, like, actually know about music.) One of my favorite bits:

It still gives me goose bumps when I listen to that recording, aware that [Stills] blew through seven-and-a-half minutes with all the time changes, all the pauses, all the everything in just one take,” [engineer Bill] Halverson says. “No edits, no nothing.”

 

Clumsy Delights, Deftly Managed

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'Duck with Slinky - 1,' by user SteveTaint at sxc.hu

[Image: “Duck with Slinky- 1,” by user SteveTaint at sxc.hu]

From whiskey river:

The Afterlife

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals — eagles and leopards — and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(Billy Collins [note: first stanza not always included in quotations around the Web])

…and:

It’s a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.

And that’s wonderful.

Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.

And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that’s magic.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

…and:

Living is all clumsy delights. Sitting here in this room, for example, listening to you turn pages, overhearing you breathe.

(Seon Joon [source])

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