Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Midweek Music Break: Benny Goodman Orchestra, “One O’Clock Jump”

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Count Basie wrote this iconic Big Band number in 1937, and played it as his theme song for half a century. Almost every other band of the time recorded its own version; the one presented here made its appearance at the Carnegie Hall debut performance of the Benny Goodman Orchestra, in January, 1938.

Over the course of its six-and-a-half minutes, the performance is apparently structured as a series of solos (we’ll get back to that apparently in a moment), by piano, tenor saxophone, trombone, clarinet, and, well… something else:

You might be curious what the “jump” in the title refers to. Wikipedia provides several hints, without fully answering the question:

  • Jump music — more properly, jump blues — “was an extension of the boogie-woogie craze.” (An example of boogie-woogie music previously covered here was “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”… featured, of all things, in a whiskey river Friday post in 2010.)
  • “Jump accomplishes with three horns and a rhythm section what a big band does with an ensemble of sixteen,” and
  • “The tenor saxophone is the most prominent instrument in jump.”

In Goodman’s version, saxophonist Babe Russin does play a central part. Easily the longest solo comes from Goodman’s clarinet, and Jess Stacy on piano and Harry James on trumpet stake out their own territories with characteristic assertiveness.

But — and here we get back to that apparently mentioned a few paragraphs ago — the real star of the performance is the rhythm section. You may not even notice it through much of the song, although it’s always there, pumping the whole thing along. But at around 5:09 it takes the stage almost exclusively, in an astonishing, all but exhausting run of something like thirty* cycles (bars?) of nothin’ but rhythm, the clarinet and other instruments simply twining around in embellishment.

Just for comparison, here’s one recording by Basie’s own band. It’s shorter and faster, but unmistakably the same song:

___________________________

* I’ve counted them several times, but keep getting swept up in the music and losing my place. Thirty is the number which crops up most often, heh.

P.S. No, the image at the top of this post doesn’t really have anything to do with this song. But I cracked up at the title. The singer pictured at the bottom right is Ruth Etting, who recorded one of the very earliest versions of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (as featured at the bottom of this post).

Getting There, Happily

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[Image: A-Maze-ing Laughter, by Yue Minjun. More info in the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

If someone gave you a device with which you could see entire worlds just by holding it in front of your eyes, worlds of such beauty and complexity that they took your breath away, wouldn’t you want to show this device to everyone you knew?

(Ann Patchett [source])

…and:

Late August

This is the plum season, the nights
blue and distended, the moon
hazed, this is the season of peaches

with their lush lobed bulbs
that glow in the dusk, apples
that drop and rot
sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands

No more the shrill voices
that cried Need Need
from the cold pond, bladed
and urgent as new grass

Now it is the crickets
that say Ripe Ripe
slurred in the darkness, while the plums

dripping on the lawn outside
our window, burst
with a sound like thick syrup
muffled and slow

The air is still
warm, flesh moves over
flesh, there is no

hurry

(Margaret Atwood [source])

…and:

A great many people don’t know how to laugh at all. A man can give himself away completely by his laughter, so that you suddenly learn all of his innermost secrets. Laughter calls first of all for sincerity, and where does one find sincerity? Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth. A man’s mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone’s character won’t be cracked for a long time, then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I’m not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how he weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he’s a good man.

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky [source (slightly different wording)]

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Alternative Seeings

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[Image: Rembrandt, Portrait of Jan Six (etching, 1647). You can trace this etching’s progress through
several other versions — six, actually — using a little slideshow at the site of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.]

From whiskey river:

Entrance

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(Dana Gioia (after Rilke), from Interrogations at Noon)

…and:

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

(Elie Wiesel [source])

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I Am Curious… Rock

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As you probably know, the Mars rover Curiosity includes, among its impressive onboard chemical-analysis instruments, a powerful laser. The idea is to focus in on small pebbles here and there on the Red Planet’s surface; from a distance of a few meters, the laser can zap a spot on a pebble very briefly, but strongly enough that it heats up, emitting gases and tiny particles whose chemical spectra can then be analyzed.

The JPL/NASA team announced early this past weekend that they’d singled out the first target for testing, a tiny little pyramid of basalt at first simply numbered N165… and, shortly, renamed Coronation. The scheduled moment of zapping was Sunday.

Of course, as with any public event, this one brought the Internet wags out in force. Of particular interest at the moment is the Twitter feed of a user named N165 aka Coronation. The first few tweets went up on Saturday (read from the bottom up):

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Writerly Tics, and The Willy-Billy Touchy Botfly

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The careful writer of novels, I regret to report, knows no rest; he can never indefinitely regard a final draft as final. At best, he arrives at the first printing stage. As soon as such a (haha) finished object comes out of the box, he opens it, a-tremble with anticipation… unerringly to a page on which:

  • he’s assaulted by that bit of awkward phrasing which, goddammit, he’d been meaning to tidy up ever since that sentence’s first draft, like, fifteen goddam years ago; and/or
  • a character named Lewis is referred to as “Louis”; and/or
  • a historical or scientific factoid which he knows to be false shrieks at him in mad hilarity, because he didn’t know it was false until last week; and/or
  • the Latin phrase pro bono appears as pro boner; and/or
  • etc.

All of which weighs on my mind today because even though Seems to Fit‘s first printing remains hypothetical, even as I noodle around with the book’s marketing campaign, such as it is, I continue to tinker with the work itself. Among this morning’s tasks: the global spellcheck.

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Miracles of Confusion

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[Image: a grainy photograph of a couple of volcanoes someplace. (Maybe another
planet.) Or are they? See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance —
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Tour

Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or — we had no way of knowing — he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.

(Carol Snow [source])

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Neither Here Nor There

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[Image: a frame from Between Two Worlds, the 2009 film by director
Vimukthi Jayasundara. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.

We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

(Abraham Joshua Heschel [source])

…and:

Social Security
(excerpt)

Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of winged dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

(Terence Winch [source])

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A Chocolate Break Thursday

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…in lieu of a Midweek Music Break, and to compensate (sorta) for a postponed whiskey river Friday.

My brother alerted me to this news from the other day, from Estes Park, Colorado. Although the key video is probably playing at numerous spots around the Web, I think this is the best — notable for the enthusiasm not only of its creative, persistent main subject, but also of the reporter:

The Missus and I will be out of town for a couple days. I’m hoping to post the whiskey river thing Saturday; in the meantime, do yourself a favor and dream of chocolate. (Also fur.)

 

Curiosity’s “Seven Minutes of Terror”: Best Explanation

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This video has been out for awhile, but I still find it entertaining. It’s a bunch of NASA folks explaining all the things that have to happen exactly right in order to get the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), a/k/a Curiosity, safely from space to the Martian surface. It’s way more complicated than the landings of earlier rovers: this one is the size of a small car, weighs about a thousand pounds, and is (per the device’s full name) chock-full of chemical-analysis and other testing instruments.

One of the cooler items on board: a rock-blasting laser. It can focus in on a rock several meters away, and vaporize it — filming the dust, which will tell it [something or other] about the material the rock was made of.

(On the other hand, I have a little science-fiction scenario in my head: say there are two single-celled organisms remaining on Mars, on the whole planet, following eons of extinction. Say these two have just successfully mated, and reproduced single-celled organism . The happy family is all excited, of course, and starts to plan for the future of their species on, oh no!, on exactly the wrong pebble…)

As you probably know by now, the landing seems to have gone off without a hitch. So, so cool.

Update, 2012-08-08: Just saw this cartoon in the e-newsletter for The Funny Times, which pointed out that both Gabby Douglas and Curiosity stuck their landings.

 

You Gotta Look If You Wanna See

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[Image: conceptual design/sketch of the Look-See Tree, by Ally Reeves (2007). For more
information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish — my echo, my twin —
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can’t help traveling together.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see?

Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up — mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale — the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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