Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Midweek Music Break: Water Music

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[Image: “The Death of Diarmuid, the Last Handful of Water” (1945), by Jack Butler Yeats.
The title alludes to the ancient Irish tale known as The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne.]

One of my favorite playlists is called “Water Music”: songs about and/or titled in such a way as to emphasize good old H2O — rivers, oceans, rain and snow, teardrops, wading-swimming-surfing-and-diving… It’s also one of my biggest, most wide-ranging playlists (if burned to CD, it would span several disks). It amazes me how much music, across all kinds of genres, references the stuff in a non-peripheral way — not always literally, but often as metaphor for something else.

This week, with Hurricane/Tropical Storm/what-have-you Sandy on my mind, bits and pieces of that playlist keep jumping out at me. A great many of those songs could fit quite nicely with the headlines of the week, and I thought of songs that hammered at the literal (if not — haha — littoral) use of “water” and related terms. Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”; the Doobie Brothers, “Black Water”; the Sons of the Pioneers, “Red River Valley”; “Bridge over Troubled Water”… “Tracks of My Tears”… our old friends “Cry Me a River” and “Wade in the Water“; and — whoa — Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising.”

But you know what? It’s kind of tacky to go that way: almost jocular, almost making light of what Sandy has wrought. (For much the same reason, I’d imagine, CNN has reportedly banned the term “Frankenstorm” from its broadcasts.)

Instead, let’s turn to Warren Zevon, who grabs for much more than the literal in his “Fistful of Rain”:

[Lyrics]

The Haunting

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[Video: scene from 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise,
starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn. More below.]

From whiskey river:

In This

In this house you would come to believe
in ghosts and lives beyond the grave. Here
noises configure themselves into the voices
of those who’ve gone. “Cyril!” calls a wife
lost to cancer; a dead dog’s nametag chinks
against the brass of her collar; the creak
of an opening door, a footstep
on a warped floorboard, and someone
you’ve loved comes to breathe your name
once again, and now in Autumn the wind
moaning beneath the eaves, and the small tornadoes
of leaves lifted in frenzied gusts
scratch against the window late at night
like the feeble clawing of all our loves
wanting to come back, wanting to make us
believe that we can ever be reunited.

(Mikey Fatboy Delgado [source])

…and:

Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment.

That is why we often fear to open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much.

(Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment [source])

…and:

There is the sound of dust heard over the telephone.
There is the sound of a piano with a faint heart
coming from below, a hell where people are happy.
There is the sound of someone standing on the grave
of someone they do not know and do not care about.
There is the sound the same person makes
standing on their own grave.
I love the sound of the iron on the ironing board
turning on and off, waiting for someone to come.

(Mary Ruefle, from “Refrigerator” [hear her reading the whole poem here])

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Midweek Music Break: Jimmie Vaughan et al., “Six Strings Down”

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Bonnie Raitt was playing nearby this weekend. We didn’t get to see her, sadly, but I thought this week I’d feature a selection from her most recent album (Slipstream, released in the spring).

Unfortunately, in the process of looking at videos of her music I fell down a very deep rabbit hole. (I’ll feature Slipstream in a later post.) I gotta tell you: the woman has played gigs with an unbelievable range of fellow performers, including this gem from the mid-1990s.

Blues-guitarist great Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash in 1990. In 1996, a pantheon of fellow blues artists got together for a tribute concert, later released as a DVD; the emotional high point was the number below, “Six Strings Down,” written by Jimmie Vaughan (who also does the lead vocals) in honor of his brother. Playing and singing with Jimmie Vaughan are Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Dr. John, Art Neville (on keyboard), and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s own band, Double Trouble.

Whoa.

[Lyrics]

Shadows Over Stuff

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“It’s me. I was just calling to tell you that there is a big white cloud coming.”
Cartoon by French cartoonist Voutch, from his 2007 collection, This Is as Bad as It Gets. (Click to enlarge.)

From whiskey river:

From Here to Eternity

One day you wake up
and your life is over.
But it doesn’t mean
you have to die.
It means last October was yellower
than this, and this the yellowest
anyone can remember.
It means you have produced enough tears
to fill, to one-eighth of an inch
of the top, Lake Baikal,
and now someone would like to swim.
It means what it meant
to listen to the teacher
tell the story of Dante and Beatrice
and break down crying in the middle,
because his wife was taken away by the police
last night, you so happy
to be dismissed early
you and your pals broke out
a pack of cards on the tram.
It means you are more interested
in the shadows of objects than objects
themselves, and if asked to draw anything
you would only need charcoal
to convince the world
it is waiting, in the shadows
of things, and you will wait back.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living.

(R. H. Blyth, from Haiku, Vol. 1)

…and:

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,
And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,
Acquire their forms before we do.

(Osip Mandelstam, from “Octaves: 7”  [source])

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Patterns: The Pi Man

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This is the first of an occasional series of posts centered around my fascination with patterns: visible patterns, audible rhythms, simple habits of being.

How I first came to read science fiction is anybody’s guess. I don’t think any of my friends read it, and I can’t remember any adult steering me in that direction. Possibly, the main draw was that the town library (as I recall) maintained a completely separate section for fantasy and SF — completely separate, that is, from the age-defined “children’s books” and “adult books” sections. Unlike those in the kids’ area, the F/SF section’s books weren’t big-format with lots of pictures. They had lots of words, like the inch-thick (and beyond) monsters of the adult section. But, unlike with the adult section, the librarians didn’t care how old you were. No one took F/SF seriously enough. How could anyone, even a child, possibly come to harm of even the psychological sort by reading about adventures in science, space, and time?

Of course there was plenty of conventional SF available — space operas, mad scientists, that sort of thing. But every now and then, especially in the SF anthologies of short stories, you’d come across something which really made your little pre-high-school brain jump to its toes, throw its arms wide, and turn inside-out. One such story for me — one of the most disturbing stories I’d ever read, remaining so for a long time — was Alfred Bester’s 1959 tale called “The Pi Man.”

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The Dawning of the Light

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[Image: from Underground, by David Macaulay (click to enlarge). A very disorienting drawing at first, even when you know the premise (a detailed exploration of the underside of a city): you’ve got those tiny little people at the bottom, but what’s with the vehicles moving around that right-angled surface above…? Oh, wait: you’re looking up — through the street — they’re not on the walls.]

From whiskey river:

Leaves

1
Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it’s not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony
isn’t lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it’s about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
because of course nature is always renewing itself —
the trees don’t die, they just pretend,
go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

2
Is it deliberate how far they make you go
especially if you live in the city to get far
enough away from home to see not just trees
but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high
speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were
in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:
so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks
like rain, or snow, but it’s probably just clouds
(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder,
given the poverty of your memory, which road had the
most color last year, but it doesn’t matter since
you’re probably too late anyway, or too early –
whichever road you take will be the wrong one
and you’ve probably come all this way for nothing.

3
You’ll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won’t last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives —
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You’re on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won’t last, you don’t want it to last. You
can’t stand any more. But you don’t want it to stop.
It’s what you’ve come for. It’s what you’ll
come back for. It won’t stay with you, but you’ll
remember that it felt like nothing else you’ve felt
or something you’ve felt that also didn’t last.

(Lloyd Schwartz [source])

…and:

“You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day…

“It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then…

“…and then — ah — we open our eyes and the day is before us and… we become ourselves.”

(Jerry Spinelli [source])

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Something Happened (or Threatened to (or Didn’t))

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[Image: untitled photograph by David Solomons, from his 2009 book (and gallery show) Happenstance.]

From whiskey river:

The next suitable person you’re in a light conversation with, stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.

(David Foster Wallace [source])

…and:

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and starts
to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her leaves
like a woman in love with winter, dropping the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light
stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,
or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Musical Sister

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I’ve always admired — been in awe of — families with a history of hands-on musical skills. I’m not talking here about famous musical families like the von Trapps, the Partridges, the various Hank Williamses, and so on. And I don’t mean simple (or involved) appreciation of the art.

No, I mean the families with casual stories like, well… Stories about taking violin lessons while growing up in Brooklyn, from a little old lady on the corner who lived next door to a little old man who gave trumpet and accordion lessons, etc. Or about singing in a church choir as a kid, and going on to a successful career in music.

Among the four of us kids (as we still think of ourselves, a half-century-plus later), none of us has ever shown much inclination to participate in music. My brother and I can rightly be considered fans of music, but — except for monkeying around with harmonicas — have pretty much held the practice of it at arm’s length. The Elder Sister? I honestly must say I know almost nothing about her musical tastes or interests. (In the car, she’s likely listening to a talk show or an audiobook.) It’s not hard to imagine her favorite musical sound takes the form of a fanfare heralding her entrance into a room. (He said, grinning-ducking-and-running.)

As for The Younger Sister: ah yes. In her case, maybe the appropriate title isn’t “the musical sister,” but rather “the musicals sister.” Because from the time she was only yay high (as we used to say), she has loved musical theater.

I’ve sometimes mentioned, here at RAMH, her childhood habit of listening over and over and over to the original cast album of My Fair Lady — how I’d learned every word of those songs, long before I ever really “got” the story. To that, though, one would fairly have to add:

  • Oklahoma! (and any other Rodgers & Hammerstein production)
  • Fiddler on the Roof
  • Gigi 
  • West Side Story
  • anything in which Shirley MacLaine danced (a Juliet Prowse phase also took up part of the timeline)
  • …and, well, really pretty much any production whose cast members sometimes burst into song and dance.

She visits RAMH fairly regularly, and I will confess to baiting posts occasionally to draw her attention. Mentioning Fred Astaire will do it. Ditto Judy Garland, or Gene Kelly, or… well, you get the idea.

But beyond music in comic (or tragic) scripted contexts, she also has fixated over the years on a handful of recording artists (Barbra Streisand, especially). I thought of this last week when I heard that Andy Williams had died; I’m not sure, but The Younger Sister may have had a distant crush on Williams. (I believe she thought he was cute, and/or had been charmed by his soft, slightly high-pitched laugh — never far away on his TV variety show.) Here’s a mini-playlist, about 10-1/2 minutes long, of some of Williams’s most popular singles:

  1. “Emily“
  2. “Red Roses for a Blue Lady“
  3. “Days of Wine and Roses“
  4. “Moon River“

[Below, click Play button to begin an Andy Williams mini-playlist. While audio is playing,
volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This mini-playlist is 10:24 long.

[audio:emily_andywilliams.mp3, redrosesforabluelady_andywilliams.mp3, daysofwineandroses_andywilliams.mp3, moonriver_andywilliams.mp3 |titles=’An Andy Williams mini-playlist’|artists=Andy Williams]

(Boy — is that old-fashioned or what? The classic mid-1960s “easy listening” arrangements, I mean, complete with strings and backup singers.)

As a bonus, here’s another interpretation of “Moon River” — arguably the first interpretation — by Audrey Hepburn, accompanying herself on guitar, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I believe the tapping noise at the beginning is writer Paul Varjak — played by George Peppard — at his typewriter, about to be distracted, probably for life, by the thin, lilting voice of his neighbor on the fire escape.

[Below, click Play button to begin Moon River (Audrey Hepburn). While audio is playing,
volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:35 long.

[audio:moonriver_audreyhepburn.mp3|titles=’Moon River’|artists=Audrey Hepburn]

Happy birthday, Sis. It’s not my fault it’s a day late; it’s your fault that your birthday came too early this year to be considered “mid-week”!

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