Running After My Hat

Consider the Things We Miss (Then Consider Our Missing Them)

February 15, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: Where Are You, by user “code1name” at the sxc.hu site]

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge — none of that tells us very much.

(Paul Auster)

…and:

My Love
(excerpt)

It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon —
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share; but we’re always wrong.

(Don Paterson [source])

…and:

The Storm

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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What Lies Beneath

February 8, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[Image: lunar surface, color-enhanced, per results of the NASA GRAIL mission.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

“My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps on doing bad, dumb things.”

“Your soul and your what?” he said.

“My soul and my meat,” I said.

“They’re separate?” he said.

“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”

“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”

“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people — get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

(Kurt Vonnegut [source])

…and:

Eyes-Shut Facing Eyes-Rolling-Around

Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.

That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.

Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.

Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.

Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.

Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.

(Jelaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) [source])

…and:

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Honeycutters, “Boneyard”

February 6, 2013 by John 1 Comment

As you probably know, or can tell, I listen to music quite a bit. But I don’t listen to it consistently throughout the day or week, and I don’t listen to it, well, with intention. Not for the most part, anyhow. But as the calendar pages turn over towards mid-February every year, that changes: for each of the last seven or eight Valentine’s Days, I have given a different custom “mix CD” of music to The Missus.

Now, her tastes run to music she already knows (although, as I have pointed out, at some point she didn’t know any of it). So I try not to get too adventurous with my selections for a given mix (the theme of which changes every year).

Nevertheless, around now annually I often find myself wandering around little back alleys of music and musicians I didn’t know about.

Thus, today’s Music Break selection, from The Honeycutters.

Oh, no, uh-uh: it’s not suitable for a Valentine’s Day mix. Certainly not such a mix for The Missus, anyhow. The only personal connection I could establish, in fact, is completely coincidental; I didn’t know, until I’d already heard and decided to use the song, that The Honeycutters are based in Asheville, NC.

The Missus and I love Asheville and the surrounding area, out of all proportion to the amount of time we’ve actually spent there. (That may total up to maybe a week all told, in the twenty years we’ve been together.) Part of the attraction might be called extrinsic, stemming from our history rather than from anything about the place itself. (It was the first locale we visited together which neither of us had experienced alone. And, not to put too fine a point on it, we, uh, well, we didn’t get out of the hotel very much on that first trip.) But oh, my, the place itself… The architecture, the history, the layout of the various neighborhoods, the culture, the pace, the climate, the trees and mountains: it all spelled home to us, instantly.

Still, no: The Honeycutters’ “Boneyard” won’t appear on The Missus’s playlist this year.

But I will say this about the song: its sound and its lyrics kick the bejeezus out of most songs purporting to be about love. real love, love with a tides-in/tides-out history. From the opening notes (in which singer-songwriter Amanda Platt seems at first to channel Carly Simon at the start of “Anticipation”), through the complex but sweet non-stop picking of lead guitarist Peter James, and into the fragile, all-too-brief mandolin of Tal Taylor, this music would not let me go. Toss in a nuanced storyline whose narrator has both imagined what might have been and realized what she’s already got, and, well, it’s no wonder the song turned my head.

(Platt is one of those songwriters who (a) doesn’t feel obliged to rhyme her lines or make them follow a predictable meter, and (b) has a voice that can carry it off. Both of these ingredients, together with her… well, with her sensibility make her songs very easy to listen to.)

“Boneyard” closed the group’s 2009 debut album, Irene. A successful Kickstarter campaign a few years ago enable them to record and release their second, When Bitter Met Sweet, in 2012.

[Below, click Play button to begin Boneyard. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:46 long.]

[audio:boneyard_honeycutters.mp3|titles=’Boneyard’|artists=The Honeycutters]

[Lyrics]

By the way, the rest of Irene doesn’t sound much like “Boneyard.” Recognizably the same band performs it all, true, and they sound equally great on all the tracks. But most of that album tends to the honky-tonk end of the spectrum — I bet The Honeycutters do a great live show, especially in a small venue. In what I’ve heard of When Bitter Met Sweet, however, the music (as in “Boneyard”) seems to favor late-night sessions at a kitchen table, with no more than a few people sitting around.

Mung-Bodied: A Reverie

February 5, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: schematic of a “Rube Goldberg” solution to the challenge of waking up a laptop, by a fifth-grade physical science project team. For details, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

When I was a kid, one of the things which could — without fail! — get all of us laughing was for somebody to go all suddenly and unintentionally tongue-tied. Mung-tongued, we called it. In a little one of his stand-up bits, Steve Martin asked the audience rhetorically something like this: Are you ever talking along and all of a sudden your tongue gets away from you and ywannguhmelizzorwhat? (I laughed at that, too.)

But you know what? The tongue finds lots of company among the other muscles.

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Cold. So Cold.

February 1, 2013 by John 13 Comments

[Image: “ice-creeksicles,” by Jeremy Hiebert. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Winter Afternoon by the Lake

Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,
Late January. No birds. No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped. Perhaps

You died suddenly earlier today. But the thin
Moon says no. The trees say, “It’s been this way
Before, often. It’s cold, but it’s quiet.” We’ve experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting back

The hide flap. A voice says: “It’s old. You’ll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, ‘Stay as long as you like.'”

The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we’re
Ready to re-enter that stillness. “Not yet.”

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Stan Freberg’s Musical “Parodies”

January 30, 2013 by John 8 Comments

Wikipedia’s got an interesting article on the musical parody genre: “borrowing” the lyrics or music of existing songs, and recasting them with different music or lyrics, respectively. Usually (as the ‘pedia points out) this is done with humorous intention — think Weird Al Yankovic — and that’s what this post is about. Apparently though, the intention isn’t always to induce laughter, especially when it comes to lifting music from old folk songs and like sources:

Bob Dylan took the tune of the old slave song “No more auction block for me” as the basis for “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

(Talk about a whiplash response when I read that little tidbit. I mean, I know Dylan has great respect for old music. Still…)

Anyhow, parody may be unique among the various forms of satire in that we can’t always tell what’s being made fun of. Is it the melody? the lyrics? a particular performer, or even a specific performance? The humor seems to rely strictly on the upending of expectations: we have to know the song to get the joke, and we have to know it well enough to recognize what’s been changed. (I guess from a certain perspective, even the work of this group — contemporary songs performed in old-fashioned styles — could be considered parody.)

Stan Freberg — the comedian, writer, all-around wizard of words and pop culture who flourished on radio and television in the 1950s-60s — seemed to specialize in a particular form of not-quite-parody: poking fun at the process by which recordings are made in the first place. It was almost as though he’d at some point heard Song X, Y, or Z, and thought: Wow. I bet THAT made for some interesting sessions in the studio…! The classic Stan Freberg musical piece featured a nearly note-for-note reproduction of some popular song… and a performer openly at explosive loggerheads with his accompanists or studio technicians. These little three(ish)-minute gems of artistic melodrama tended to conclude with hurt feelings, slammed doors, or worse.

Here’s an example. Around the time of Freberg’s heyday, Harry Belafonte contributed his “Day-O” (a/k/a “The Banana Boat Song”) to the library of pop-music earworms:

Freberg accepts the song’s virtues at face value; as I said, the guy really could perform. But he imagines the singer and his backup musicians having to deal with a producer or accompanist who perhaps woke up that day on the wrong side of the bed (if so, maybe with a soaring hangover):

[Below, click Play button to begin Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:30 long.]

[audio:bananaboat_dayo_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)’|artists=Stan Freberg]

Freberg loved what instruments could bring to a piece. (One of his parodies took on “Dueling Banjos”: “Dueling Tubas.”) He could also imagine, though, that instrumentalists and vocalists didn’t always see eye-to-eye on how best to interpret a song. A classic example is his take on “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; by the time this fictional recording session ended, vocalist and assertive drummer were practically at each other’s throats:

[Below, click Play button to begin The Yellow Rose of Texas. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:26 long.]

[audio:yellowroseoftexas_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’The Yellow Rose of Texas’|artists=Stan Freberg]

Finally: in late 1955, The Platters recorded one of their biggest hits, “The Great Pretender”:

Freberg apparently listened to this and wondered not about the obvious performers — the lead vocalist and ooo-ooo-oooh background singers — but about one member of the accompanying band. Like, jeez — the poor piano player: he had to play the same note, over and over and over and over… But what might the session have been like for real, given the “cool” of popular pianists at the time?

[Below, click Play button to begin The Great Pretender. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:22 long.]

[audio:thegreatpretender_stanfreberg.mp3|titles=’The Great Pretender’|artists=Stan Freberg]

That little twist at the end — the sudden re-introduction of a troublemaker from another parody — is one of my very favorite Stan Freberg moments.

By the way, although I’ve used the past tense above, Stan Freberg at age 86 still crops up from time to time, lending his voice (and no doubt writing) talents to videos, kids’ shows, and documentaries.

Mindflow

January 25, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Mountains and Rivers Without End: For information about this image,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is the relationship of thinking to reality? As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to “know” another, and to what extent would this be possible?

(David Bohm [source])

…and (excerpt):

There is smoke and grease, there is
the wrist’s exhaustion, there is laughter,
there is the letter seized in the clock
and the apple’s tang, the river
sliding along its banks, darker
now than the sky descending
a last time to scatter its diamonds
into these black waters that contain
the day that passed, the night to come.

(Philip Levine [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Bedquilt Ramblers, “(You’ve Got to Walk That) Lonesome Valley”

January 23, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: still from the game Kentucky Route Zero, Act 1: the Equus Oils service station]

Other than as a Kickstarter supporter from a couple of years ago, I’ve got no particular vested interest in the newly released computer game Kentucky Route Zero, Act 1 (of a planned five to be released over the next year). (Yes, all right — I’m also invested in it as someone who hopes to be a satisfied player very soon now: I’ve only just downloaded the game.) One interesting feature of the game is the makers’ commitment to music — particularly, atmospheric music, some traditional bluegrass and some original.

The action in KRZ, as it’s already becoming known, takes place in rural Kentucky. The protagonist is on a quest of sorts, which involves traveling about on the very mysterious Route Zero of the title. Along the way, he encounters a variety of characters (eventually including one Junebug, a country singer who just happens to be… a robot).

Today’s selection is one of the numbers on the soundtrack, by a group about whom I’ve been able to learn close to nothing, at least outside the context of any association with the game. (I suspect the group’s name may just function as an umbrella covering a house band recruited just for KRZ itself.) The Kickstarter project page, for what it’s worth, says only:

The music for the game will be performed and recorded by a local (Chicago) experimental folk group, and will consist of slow, spacey arrangements of bluegrass songs.

Aside from bluegrass, the game’s soundtrack seems to consist of electronic setting-the-mood tone poems. A couple of months after making its modest Kickstarter target, Cardboard Computers told supporters in an April, 2011, status-report e-newsletter:

As the last icy hours of March creep away from the American Midwest, we’re warming our headphones with some weird, warbly digital audio files shared with us by Ben Babbitt. Ben is a Chicago-based musician working with us to create the music of Kentucky Route Zero. Along with singer Emily Cross and bassist Bob Buckstaff, Ben is recording six old bluegrass songs for the game as the Bedquilt Ramblers.

…As [protagonist] Conway and his companions explore, they’ll encounter the Bedquilt Ramblers performing in just about every area. The band functions as a checkpoint or a save point, to help map out the world and remember certain locations for fast travel later.

As for today’s song: the Second Hand Songs database of cover versions says that it’s traditional, recorded as far back as 1930 by the Carter Family. Wikisource sets the first recording at 1927, by David Miller. In any case, it’s been covered by many country, folk, and bluegrass artists. (In addition to those listed by Second Hand Songs and Wikisource, I know of versions by Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio, and it appeared on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as rendered by gospel group The Fairfield Four.) The Bedquilt Ramblers here claim a spot among their predecessors’ melancholy, almost fatalistic number:

[Below, click Play button to begin (You’ve Got to Walk That) Lonesome Valley. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:19 long.]

[audio:youvegottowalk_thebedquiltramblers.mp3|titles=’You’ve Got to Walk’|artists=The Bedquilt Ramblers]

[Traditional lyrics, per Wikisource]

Even though the delivery is being stretched out over a year, and even though it’s taken the two-man operation which calls itself Cardboard Computers two years instead of the expected nine months, from the reviews I’ve read so far Kentucky Route Zero already has all the earmarks of a gaming classic. If you’re at all interested in mystery (as opposed to puzzle or conventional adventure) games, or for that matter in sound design, it might be worth the small initial investment — $7 just for Act 1, or $25 for the lot — to explore the game’s own lonesome valley. (Versions available for PC, Mac, and — huzzah! — Ubuntu/Linux computers.)

“Yes, But Isn’t the Obvious Wonderful?!?”

January 22, 2013 by John 3 Comments

Headline and lead-in from the msn.com home page as of this morning:

10 of the weirdest-
shaped homes around

One owner lives in a home modeled after Tolkien hobbit
houses & another used geometry to design her abode…

Yes, I know it’s nit-picking. But I am trying (and failing, in a major way) to conceive of a house whose design and construction did not rely on geometry. :)

Sciuridaceous* Appreciations

January 21, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Here in the US, January 21, 2013, presents a veritable bounty of reasons to celebrate. It’s the (celebrated) birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; it’s the (celebrated) quadrennial ceremony of the inauguration of the President; and, Wikipedia tells me, it is also National Hug Day — when we are supposed to hug everyone we feel like hugging (and, presumably, everyone else can just go to hell… especially, presumably, if they try to hug us).

And (apparently since 2001, per the efforts of a wildlife professional named Christy McKeown) January 21 is also Squirrel Appreciation Day.

Here in our little well-treed suburban corner of north Florida, we live in a neighborhood pretty much owned and operated by squirrels. The Missus and I have come to identify particular favorites. Most recently, we focused on a little guy who had some horrible wound in his side — a long, apparently poorly-healing gash which didn’t seem to diminish his enthusiasm for life. The Pooch and I, for a time, often encountered a half-tailed squirrel; in my mind’s eye, I imagined that he’d lost the uttermost portion to a run-in with an automobile tire. (The squirrels here are madly jealous of cars’ monopoly of the streets and cul-de-sacs, and challenge it at every opportunity.) And every now and then, a new one seems to discover the joys of frequenting a house with large, stucco-exterior walls. They can spend hours walking around with their heads pointed straight up, down, or sideways, defying gravity, all Spiderman-like.

We also have our share of squirrel tragedies, of course. Some weeks, we seem to see more two-dimensional than -three-dimensional squirrels on the asphalt. And sitting out on our screened back deck, over which soar many tree limbs, we’ve seen what happens when one daredevil or another ever-so-slightly miscalculates a change in wind direction, a stirring of a branch, at just the wrong moment before leaping aboard the inter-tree mid-air express.

(A one-pound or less rodent may be a small animal. But when it drops to a wooden deck from thirty or forty feet up, I’ll tell ya: Wham! doesn’t do the sound justice. It always surprises us when they immediately jump to their feet, sort of shake their heads with little whubba-whubba-whubba cartoon movements, and scamper away.)

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