Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Midweek Music Break: Henry Mancini, “Baby Elephant Walk”

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Sometimes on a stray cable-TV broadcast, still, you can catch a glimpse of the 1962 film Hatari! (Yeah: exclamation point and all. The word is Swahili for “danger,” so the emphasis is important, damn it.) John Wayne plays the leader of a group of hunters in Africa, who capture wild animals for sale to zoos. Their collective path intersects — as paths will do — with that of a wildlife photographer, played by Elsa Martinelli, who’s been hired by one of their clients to document the haul. Complications ensue: a rhinoceros escapes and must be recaptured, the photographer falls in love with Wayne’s character, and so on.

Hatari! doesn’t make many lists of the best films ever — even just those starring John Wayne, or directed by Howard Hawks. But it did make one memorable contribution to pop culture: the Mancini song which is the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.

For obvious reasons, despite the title resemblance, the song has nothing at all to do with an Elizabeth Taylor film, Elephant Walk… which was made in 1954 and set on a plantation on Ceylon.

Apparently the film had a rather, um, casual script. Several key scenes were added on the spot, using footage shot around the production camp which had no reference in the screenplay. The rhino, for instance, really did escape and really did have to be recaptured; those scenes in the movie were unscripted — the honest-to-gods things happening.

And three of the baby elephants in the animal “cast” really did fixate on Elsa Martinelli. (You can see one of the little guys with her in the photo at the left, captured in a moment of delicately Freudian intimacy.) Hawks just happened to capture the incident, during a break in the film’s nominal real action. And Mancini took his cue from that lucky break. From Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music:

On the one hand, the sight of three pachyderms forming a conga line behind Martinelli and following her down the slope to the water’s edge put Mancini in mind of circus music; on the other hand, the syncopated shuffling gait of the animals suggested a boogie-woogie rhythm to him, eight beats to the bar… An electric circus calliope set the meter, then an E? clarinet played the droll, perky melody. Timed perfectly to the whole self-contained scene, this music shapes what was really a random incident into a film highlight.

According to a footnote in another source, “Mancini himself claims that the music for the ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ sequence kept the scene in the film.”

Be that as it may, “Baby Elephant Walk” sticks in the mind waaaaay more tenaciously than anything else about Hatari! (In a way, it deserves an exclamation point of its own.)

While working on this post, it suddenly occurred to me that an old TV game show from around the same time had a theme song also called “Baby Elephant Walk” — an entirely different song, but likewise memorable (in a piping, earwig-gy way). I was wrong about the title, though. The game show I remembered was “The Match Game,” and the theme song, “A Swingin’ Safari,” by Bert Kaempfert… coincidentally written the same year Hatari! came out. (An abbreviated cover by Billy Vaughan went to #13 on the Billboard chart.) Something peculiarly African-game-hunt must have permeated the air of 1962.

You Are (Barely) Here

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Sometimes when working on the Saturday Propagational Library serial I get a little overwhelmed thinking about the distances and time scales involved. While I try to keep things roughly “factual” — or factual-ish, anyhow — by referring as needed to one online source or another, it can really help to have a graphical tool available to bring it into perspective.

The Number Sleuth site has conveniently provided one such tool, with its “Magnifying the Universe” feature:

(For a more static but a little more easily digestible view, they also offer a plain old enormously long poster-style image.)

This perspective of relative sizes can change your perspective of everything: what’s important, what’s fair, what “change” means, what’s “old” and “young,” what’s worth remembering (and worth forgetting), what it means to age, what’s funny vs. deadly serious…

And I like the implied interrelationship between space and time, especially at the most gigantic scales. Let’s say you’ve got a way to measure the distances from yourself to greatly distant objects — some way which does not (obviously) require you yourself to travel that distance (using an odometer which clicks over every giga-parsec or so). Let’s say you take as a given the (still conventional) notion that nothing can move faster than light. One implication of this is that the universe is not just at least as far across (in radius) as the most distant object you can see; it’s that the universe is also at least that old. So if the most distant visible object in the heavens is a light-year away, the light from that object has taken a whole year to reach your eyes… and the universe is at least that old.

Therefore, if (as seems to be the case) the most distant visible object is around fourteen billion light-years away, then…

We can also infer the presence of objects even farther than we can actually see, from the effects of those yet-farther objects on what we can see. Imagine Aeolus, the God of Intergalactic Breezes, sitting on his throne way the hell out there beyond observable limits. We can’t see him but can guess he’s there, because of the way the most-distant-visible objects dance around every time Aeolus sighs (probably out of loneliness) in this direction.

If your head can stand even more interestingness, consider the theory that the universe is expanding, and indeed accelerating in its rate of expansion. According to this theory, although the speed of light still marks an upper limit, it does so locally, on a more or less “small” scale — implying that the space between objects may expand more rapidly than light speed. Thus, at that fourteen-billion-light-years horizon, things are constantly crossing over the line into invisibility and, ultimately, unknowability.

Consider the similarities between all this and (say) the way in which things, people, and experiences pass from our individual (or collective) memory.

Consider the grand themes of art, literature, and music, from the small and personal to the most sweepingly “universal.”

Consider sharing those themes with Aeolus and, if Aeolus creates art of his own, his sharing his themes with us…

 

The Propagational Library (10): Striking a Match

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The latest installment in the weekly serial story called The Propagational Library appears here:

…in which The Librarian, and a certain author, have their minds turned inside-out.

If you’ve never read any of the series, please consider visiting the Overview/Table of Contents page before diving headlong into this chapter.

Caught by Surprise

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[Image: a key (and classic) moment in Fritz Lang’s 1931 thriller, M: the murderer, played by Peter Lorre, learns he’s a (literally) marked man.]

From whiskey river:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

(Milan Kundera [source])

…and:

When It Comes

Any time. Now. The next minute.
Years from today. You lean forward
and wait. You relax, but you don’t forget.

Someone plans an elaborate party
with a banquet, dancing, even fireworks
when feasting is over. You look at them:

All those years when you searched the world
like a ferret, these never happened — your marriage,
your family, prayers, curses. Only dreams.

A vacuum has opened everywhere. Cities,
armies, those chairs ranked in the great
hall for the audience — there isn’t anyone.

Like a shutter the sky opens and closes
and the show is over. The next act
will deny that anything ever happened.

Your hand falls open. It is empty. It never
held a knife, a flower, gold,
or love, or now. Lean closer—

Listen to me: there isn’t any hand.

(William Stafford [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Deana Carter, “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

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[Image: Deana Carter, circa 1995]

A bit of urban folklore which I sort of remember (and sort of don’t) from years ago, regarding a difference between the sexes: Boys roll; girls fold. The rolling-and-folding in question was (supposedly) of paper programs for events like football games, concerts, and church services. (I may have mixed up the verbs and subjects — I can see it either way — but I think I’ve got it right.) Whether or not the folklore is true is almost beside the point: it’s so simply expressed, and it’s such a… such an interesting — outright weird — idea, that we instinctively feel it should be true.

Another such formulation I’ve heard has probably a bit more common experience behind it, and it’s certainly got the popular-songwriter vote sewn up: Guys use love to get sex; women use sex to get love. Because, y’know, guys are lying heels and women are shameless vamps; as soon as either side gets what they want, they show their true colors.

Accounts (often weepy) of evidence for that general truism — and the sense of betrayal which follows — may litter the pop-music landscape. But I can’t think of another song* with a premise quite like today’s Midweek Music Break selection, the title track from Deana Carter‘s debut album; it sings not of heartbreak, but of annoyance at a partner far too boneheaded to know the rules of the game, let alone to play along:

[Lyrics]

I’m definitely not a fan of the video for the song; if I’d seen it before hearing the song, you’d probably never be reading this post. From all evidence, Deana Carter is a very good-looking woman, with something of Naomi Watts about her. But in that video, she shines not at all as an actress. She’s dressed and made up — and acts — way too cutesy (almost winking), as though we need her help to get the joke. (And if we still don’t get it, at least we’ll think she’s adorable.) At any rate, she treats the role that way right up until the closing shot. Finally, in that moment, she seems to become the narrator, at last capturing a genuine sense of disbelief in her own naivete (and yes, the guy’s ignorance).

The song does make me wonder about the counterpart from a male point of view… Maybe just, “I said that I loved you, for this?”

___________________

* Nominees gratefully received, though!

 

Caught Up

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I can scarcely believe it: my Google Reader feed now has only THREE unread items in it now (and one of them is my own Propagational Library installment from yesterday, so even that unread is provisionally not in quotation marks). It’s taken me a month to clear the backlog.

Granted, in order to get to this quasi-virginal state I had to completely drop subscriptions to a bunch of fascinating-but-way-too-frequent-to-read-religiously feeds (I’m looking at you, Brain Pickings), and also do blanket “mark all as read” clearings of certain other stacks that I just couldn’t bear to cancel (hello, My Old Kentucky Blog and Bad Astronomer!).

And granted, I still owe comments on some recent posts by, like, actual friends (hang on, Suburban Soliloquy!).

And granted even furthermore, dry desert winds blow through some of my favorite bloggish haunts, which I hope are not actually ghost towns despite the piles of tumbleweeds blocking entry to the saloon (hellooooo, Mature Landscaping???).

Still, it feels good.

(But damn — what if I missed something important?!? Better go switch the Reader view to All (rather than merely Unread) Items so I can check…)

 

The Propagational Library (9): “But What About Me?”

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The latest installment in the weekly serial story called The Propagational Library appears here:

…in which The Librarian asks the most important question we ever ask —
and puts a pretty big dent in the answer (or it puts a big dent in him).

If you’ve never read any of the series, I encourage you to head over to the Overview/Table of Contents page before diving in.

 

What Doesn’t Change

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[Video: “Every Day the Same Dream,” based on the Flash-based game of the same name]

From whiskey river:

I do not believe the meaning of life is a puzzle to be solved. Life is. Anything might happen. And I believe I may invest my life with meaning. The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise. If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and wonders shall never, ever cease.

(Robert Fulghum)

… and:

Formaggio

The world
was whole because
it shattered. When it shattered,
then we knew what it was.

It never healed itself.
But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared:
it was a good thing that human beings made them;
human beings know what they need,
better than any god.

On Huron Avenue they became
a block of stores; they became
Fishmonger, Formaggio. Whatever
they were or sold, they were
alike in their function: they were
visions of safety. Like
a resting place. The salespeople
were like parents; they appeared
to live there. On the whole,
kinder than parents.

Tributaries
feeding into a large river: I had
many lives. In the provisional world,
I stood where the fruit was,
flats of cherries, clementines,
under Hallie’s flowers.

I had many lives. Feeding
into a river, the river
feeding into a great ocean. If the self
becomes invisible has it disappeared?

I thrived. I lived
not completely alone, alone
but not completely, strangers
surging around me.

That’s what the sea is:
we exist in secret.

I had lives before this, stems
of a spray of flowers: they became
one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon
visible under the hand. Above the hand,
the branching future, stems
ending in flowers. And the gripped fist —
that would be the self in the present.

(Louise Glück)

…and:

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

(Alain de Botton)

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The World Was Too Much With Them All

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I just finished reading Susan Orlean‘s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Aside from the heart (and I mean heart) of the main story itself, after something like ten years of borderline-obsessive research Orlean managed to weave into the book dozens of little stray details about the lives and personalities of the many people whose lives drifted into and out of the great movie and TV dog‘s* orbit. Here’s one such side story.

Background: TV producer H.B. “Bert” Leonard ran into financial difficulties and ended up owing his lawyer, a man named James Tierney, a ton of cash. To partially settle the debt, he gave Tierney his shares of two TV programs whose rights Leonard had retained over the years: Naked City and Route 66. Orlean writes:

…this cinematic windfall couldn’t distract [Tierney] from his own troubles. A year earlier, in 1992, one of his clients told him he needed some cash. The client owned a number of valuable paintings, including a Monet and a Picasso, and, he explained, if the paintings disappeared, he could file a $17 million insurance claim for them. Tierney agreed to help him out. By their arrangement, Tierney broke into the client’s house and stole the paintings. Then he gave the paintings to a young lawyer in his firm for safekeeping. The young lawyer decided to stash the paintings in a warehouse in Cleveland.

Unfortunately, the young lawyer also had some problems, including a volatile ex-wife, who happened to be the first California highway patrolwoman to pose for Playboy, a jealous girlfriend, and a crack cocaine addiction. He was also, evidently, unable to keep a secret and ended up telling both his ex-wife and his girlfriend about the stolen paintings; they, in turn, both informed on him to the police, each hoping to beat the other to the $250,000 reward being offered for information on the case. When the young lawyer was arrested, he immediately pointed the police back to Tierney. Before long, Tierney ended up in prison and lost his law license, his house, and his marriage.

No word on whether either the ex-wife or the girlfriend scored the hoped-for reward. I did love this story, though.

____________________

* Technically, that should be dogs’ — plural possessive — as Rin Tin Tin was and continues to be played (in film, on TV, in hundreds of personal appearances) by a whole list of German shepherd dogs, from only one or two paternal bloodlines. The current incarnation is up to somewhere around Rin Tin Tin X or XI.

Midweek Music Break: David Byrne and Brian Eno, “Home”

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Several of Running After My Hat‘s regular commenthood are overhauling what “home” means to them:

Nance — and Mr. Mature, of course — are caught up in readying their house for a (dearly longed-for) sale. Marta — amongst writing a flash-fiction story every day this month, and competitive skating, and teaching, and the gods know what else — has moved with her family into their first house, with all the attendant packing and unpacking, inspections, signings of documents, painting, arranging and re-arranging, and re-assessment of what counts (and how much). And in a turn almost unimaginable, at least to me — having followed his blog for four years — Brit ex-pat Froog prepares to leave China altogether, bound for… Lithuania? Uruguay? parts unknown (but presumably with no shortage of watering holes)?

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson:

Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world — whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over — eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment — they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has happened. Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

From Brian Eno, writing on davidbyrne.com (speaking of 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today album):

This record was born as a dinner conversation. While dining in New York with David and some other friends, I mentioned that I had accumulated a lot of music, which, despite my intentions, I had never formed into songs. David volunteered to give them a try…

Upon starting this project, we quickly realized we were making something like electronic gospel, music in which singing becomes the central event, but whose sonic landscapes are atypical of such vocal-centered tracks.

David Byrne himself adds:

The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliché. The results, in many cases, are uplifting, hopeful, and positive, even though some lyrics describe cars exploding, war, and similarly dark scenarios.

These songs have elements of our previous work — no surprise there — but something new has emerged here as well. Where does the sanguine and heartening tone come from, particularly in these troubled times? …some of my lyrics and melodies were a response to what I sensed lay buried in the music. My task was to bring forth into language what was originally non-verbal. In the end, we have made something together that neither of us could have made on our own.

This particular number, I think, doesn’t fall quite into the “electronic gospel” genre. There’s a nearly martial, rolling-snare-drum effect which plays well behind Byrne’s vocals, and that voice verges on strident. But the lyrics speak of both the universal and the deeply personal meanings of home. Especially when the song is overlaid (as here) by dozens of still photos of dozens of types of houses, it’s easy to imagine an utterly different performance: solo, acoustic, nothing at all electronic — a plucked string fastened at one end in the present day and at the other, deep in history.

[Lyrics]

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