05/02/07
The Cadillac of Bands
Bone dry here -- haven't seen a rainy day in weeks, maybe months!
OK, I'm back. Sorry to be gone so long, but Never Never Land is a long way off, and it took awhile to return. Miss me? Probably not. I missed this though. Other things were pressing, so I had to give it a rest. But now ... . It feels great!
The year was either '73 or '74 -- y'know, the Dark Ages. Vinyl records, analog clocks, hardwired phones and big gas-guzzling cars. One Caddy was named the Fleetwood (I think). Supposedly a smooth ride. I wouldn't know. But that was the time (college freshman) I was watching a late-night TV program called The Midnight Special. I was at home for vacation or a break of some kind, and the Special featured a band that a lot of people had all but forgotten: Fleetwood Mac.
It was named for its drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and bass player, John McVie. They were the rhythm section for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in the late 60s, when Eric Clapton was the lead guitar man. (If you ever lay hands on the CD of that recording -- get it! The Clapton solos will blow your mind, especially if all you know of him was, say, "If I Could Change the World.").
Fleetwood and McVie formed a steady backing team, and when the Bluesbreakers roster changed (as it always did), Mick and John joined up with Peter Green and (I think later) Danny Kirwan to make their own band -- Fleetwood Mac. They were best known for "Albatross" -- an instrumental -- but Green reportedly had some mental problems and dropped out of the music business suddenly. The band was left with Kirwan, who (I think) brought in someone else to help the band recover. They recorded one of the great folk-rock albums of all time: "Kiln House" (Again, get this one!). A shy-sounding vocalist on one or two of the tracks was John's girlfriend, Christine Best.
The band I saw that night on TV blew me away. They'd found a sensational session guitarist to record and tour with them (I forget his name) and were backing their second record with their new lead singer/songwriter, Bob Welsh. The sound was totally different -- something I've never heard before or since from anybody. Atmospheric guitars, deep and melodic songwriting, harmonies from Welsh and now Christine (now Christine McVie), plus that incredibly solid, pulsing backbeat from the band's namesakes. I had to buy the album.
I also had to wait a few weeks for it to come in (record shipments were slow in those days), but I nailed it at the first opportunity. I wasn't dissapointed at all. "Mystery to Me" was one of the best records I'd ever heard (at the time, anyway. My vinyl is long gone, and I don't have the CD.) The song that blew me away the farthest was "Hypnotized." (It even mentioned my state! In those days, North Carolina got mentioned by anybody outside stock car racing about as often as Albania does now). The song's about how easy it is to get put under a spell by a tall tale you want to hear very badly.
I kept waiting for the band to hit it big, appear on the national prime time TV, etc. But it never happened. The concert tour is now said to have been one of the biggest business disasters in rock history. Everything reportedly that could have gone wrong, did -- including (as I recall) Welsh's decision to quit the band for a solo career. The articles I read about it in Rolling Stone (by then, easy to get) and the other music mags pretty much wrote off Fleetwood Mac as a band.
Were they ever wrong. The three remaining band members (the lead guitar guy went back to session work, if memory serves) eventually hooked up with a duo experimenting with a new hybrid of contemporary folk, soft rock, and Appalachian "old-time" music. (Old-time music is the "hill country" music recorded before Bill Monroe invented bluegrass. Think "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") This hybrid did not have a name at the time, but it acquired one many years later: Americana.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham helped John, Christine and Mick record a very successful comeback album. The follow-up record to it was called "Rumors." It stayed at Number One on the Billboard album chart longer than any previous release in recording history. Only Michael Jackson's "Thriller" beat it (OK, bad pun) several years later, with the help of Quincy Jones and MTV.
Personally, I preferred the old "Mystery to Me" band (knowing me, I would). But I was glad all those taunts I had to endure in college ("You like what by who?") came back to haunt the taunters, when they fell all over each other to get a copy of "Rumors."
BTW: Remember how I said the song "Hypnotized" is about how easy it is to fall under a spell? I'm sure you've all seen the gimmick about how the mesmerizer waves a gold pocket watch on its chain in front of somebody to "hypnotize" them. It came from old Westerns, where the snake-oil salesman would pull out a pocketwatch and wave it in front of some poor farmer to more easily deprive him of his wallet. You see, in the 1880's, gold watches were about as rare and as desireable as ultraportable computers are now. It isn't the waving of the watch in your face that hypnotizes you, it's your secret desire to have the watch in the first place (or cool, high-end computer, Maserati, whatever).
Next time: Heartbreak City.
05/03/07
Down Lonely Street, to ...
Crack Crack went the lightning as the clouds rolled in -- and then rolled out, leaving nary a drop.
Alas, errors to report in last post: Wikipedia says Jeremy Spencer was the other guitar man in Fleetwood Mac, but joined before Kirwan, wasn't brought in by him. It says her name was Christine Perfect, not Best. (Hey, if you're perfect, you're best, right? So I was close.) Bob Weston was the guitar guy for Mystery to Me. Wiki also says Fleetwood joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers after Clapton left the band. OK, but I could have sworn was Mick on the cover of that Bluesbreakers album, the one with Slowhand reading a comic book. ("Seems like a dream ... got me hypnotized.")
Now (cue sudsy violin music) we turn to tonight's story: (Music rises emotionally) "Heartbreak Alley" ...
I forget her name. I know that's not good, but it was a name I just had to forget ... to hide the pain *sobs* OK, enough of the soap opera thing: I probably did repress her name, but gimme a break, it was 30 years ago this month! What can I say? The brain sand is starting to pile up. (Is that what he's calling it now? Brain sand?)
She was very pretty, bright red hair, milk white skin, a little German dumpling. She sang like an angel, studying voice at my old alma mater (Go Heels!). We dated, as only undergrads at a big campus can: on campus. One of the concerts we went to drove us both out of the room at intermission. John Cage (yeah, that John Cage) was premiering some work he'd done for piano, written, as he was describing it, about the zodiac. Cage would explain each piece, then a lady, with a nice blue print floor-length dress (think Haute Earthmother) with long black hair cascading down her back past the piano stool, would play it. Lord the atonality! Remember, I'm the guy who actually liked Ornette Coleman in high school (as he always reminds us!)! Hearing this stuff set my teeth on edge! Starting with the molars! She asked to leave first, and I just said something like the 70s version of "Right behind you!"
She asked me to come to her junior recital. I did, and was she grand! I probably should have capitalized on that at the reception, or something like that (He clearly knows nothing!), but I didn't.
Not too long after that, a guy was chasing me in the co-ed dorm I was living in at the time. It was a brick X tower (how appropriate) with guys on one side of the X and girls on the other. The sides were joined by a reception area/elevator room/mixer spot, with the girls' side locked tight after a certain time at night. This guy, I thought he had something from the toilet in what he was carrying, and so I ran like crazy down the guys' side, into the reception/elevator room, and then into the girls' side (which was what this guy was actually trying to do to him). It was daytime, but on a weekend, when you could get into trouble going there without permission from one of the girls. I was screaming curse words, partly to warn anyone watching that this guy had something in that little bucket, partly to make it look like a joke so I wouldn't get into too much trouble. The door to the far side stairwell (the fire escapes were at each end of the X) was blocked by somebody (one of the girls, Mercurius?), so I turned and got hit with a bucketload of clean water in the face. The girls were laughing their (OK, enough of that!) off. Except for one. Yeah, you guessed it. She was clearly horrified. I didn't even run down her side of the hallway! (She didn't need to, dumbass! Your voice carried plenty ... .)
I later went to my girlfriend's door and apologized, trying to maintain boyish charm (O, brother! Where art thou?). She was gracious, but clearly wanted me to leave. The guy with the water bucket never pulled another trick. He never had before. In fact, I barely knew him. But did he know her? I was way too fracking stupid at the time to ask myself that question.
The following Monday (the water chase happened on a Sunday -- see how it's working?), she cut me dead walking to class. I mean dead. She made sure she avoided me after that. It was near the end of classes, and I was graduating, so that was that. What I'd done wrong was brag (not in a bad way, we had only held hands and pecked goodbyes while "dating") to the guys weeks earlier that I'd gotten some really classy girl interested in me -- and they'd apparently set out to fix that one, and fix it good! None of the guys admitted to it, but I'm sure, looking back now, they were winking at each other behind my back.
Was it love? No, it wasn't head-spinning, earthmoving, mindbending, timestopping (OK, we get it!) stuff ... those experiences are not stories for me to tell here (to protect the innocent -- them!) But it was nice. It felt good. It felt natural.
I should have just stayed on the guy's side to let him hit me in the face with the bucketwater! D*** co-ed dorms!
And that (violins begin to fade) is the end of tonight's story. Tune in again, next time, for "Heart of Glass."
PS: I don't want anyone thinking yesterday's Fleetwood Mac post had any intentional political overtones. It's true, a certain successful political campaign in 1992 used one of the band's songs as its theme. The spouse of the successful candidate then is running for that same office now. How I vote is my business, and it has nothing to do with my musical taste, or political taste, for that matter. (Remember, I covered politics as a reporter for many years. You gotta look past politics on important votes. Maybe I'll post on what I mean by that someday.) Anyway, back to college days: some friends of mine who teased me about liking Fleetwood Mac pre-Rumors actually loaned me a cassette of an early album of theirs: "English Rose," I think was the name. Mick Fleetwood was in drag on the cover. I think my 'friends' implied a joke in there somewhere, but I ignored it and loved the music. "Albatross" was on this thing, along with some killer Peter Green guitar on the hard blues tracks.
05/05/07
Glassy Eyed
Clouds moved in, then moved out. No rain.
Here where I live, there's this festival every year that draws the art crowd big time. It's called Spoleto, after a town in Italy where founder Gian Carlo Menotti started the thing. A few years after the festival came here (as best I recall -- this was all many years before I moved here), the city started a parallel festival for the rest of us, called Piccolo Spoleto. Anyhow, it's coming up, and downtown stores put up window displays every year in a contest about the festival's (the big one's) theme. The year's theme is illustrated every year by the official poster, and the 2007 poster/theme gave the window-dressers a challenge. It's a portrait (taken from a well-known Avedon photo, I think) of New York composer Phillip Glass. The portrait does not use brush or pen. Instead, it uses the artist's thumbprint -- hundreds of them -- to make up something that actually looks like the sleepy-eyed Glass in his salad days. Some windows just punted, and did something else. At least one got the point. I'll tell you what I think the point is, after this review/reminiscence (did I spell that right?) about one of Glass's recordings that a rock, folk, blues and jazz listener might actually like.
I'd heard a lot about Glass, but his records were utterly unobtainable in the vinyl days, outside of college towns, in my part of the world. And I never dared spend on records at college, unless they were two-dollars-ninety-nine, or something like that. Glass got articles, even in Rolling Stone, as I recall -- but mainly he was for the New York art crowd. A record he put out on CBS (that's right, the Eye had a record label, way back) changed all that. It's called "Songs from Liquid Days." The thing about this record is that, yeah, the songs are Glass's music. But people like Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and David Byrne are writing the lyrics. No trap sets or electric guitars, but still, stuff you could listen to, if not actually jam to. It honestly sounds like a poetry "open mic" night set to this strange, repetitive music. I'm listening to it now, because the vinyl (which had, as I recall, a great sound) is long gone. I scored the CD (though I really can't afford to, but ...) for a ten, because the copy was old (circa 1990) and the store wanted to get rid of it. (There's a tweak to getting good sound out of old CDs I'll get to in a minute.) Anyway, when I bought the record, my 'cool' cred was shot to hell. I'd let myself go during the newspaper career (cough, cough) because I thought I needed to be that way. I think buying a Bob Seger record was about as far out as I got back then. After that, I got an education later in more edgy material while selling records, but I really didn't dig the stuff the other employees liked that much. They thought I was a hick. (Charlie Haden notwithstanding -- I lied about doing that, anyway. [See much earlier post for evidence of my sin.]) I'm not sure they were wrong. I'm not sure they still aren't. (I can't figure out the double negative I just wrote.) Anyway, I got my groove thang back with the purchase of "Songs from ... ." Too bad nobody but me cared. (They don't care now either!)
Don't my neuroses and insecurity stop you from giving "Songs from ..." a spin. It carries the minimalist thing into the mainstream, as far as that can go, anyway.
Glass is not usually atonal: his thing is to take little elements of music and repeat them in different registers, keys, instruments, etc. And then start another one and roll in and out of the first one. They keep repeating until you get a sense of layers of sound. The best example of this that I can think of that you might have already heard is Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." This record was a stoner favorite my freshman year in college. (The narrow hallways in that dorm gave "just breathe" new meaning!) I pretty much had the record memorized at one point. You don't have to be "on" anything to like "Tubular Bells." Or "Songs from ... ," either, though lyrics like "We gradually became aware/Of a hum in the room ... /It went ooooommmmm" might make you wonder ... . (I actually think the lyric in "Changing Opinon" refers to early efforts at home recording and the problems you get into.)
BTW: The tweak on pre-1995 CDs is to clean the edges with a bit of water and really mild cleanser (no alcohol or ammonia!), then take a water-based, green magic marker and rim the edge with several coats of the green ink. Get it really dark by letting each coat dry a minute first. This emulates the edge coating on mirror glass. Most CDs from early days (1985-95) need it, because of less accurate mastering or manufacturing at the time. I would imagine doing that before ripping would help, as well. It's a waste of time on modern CDs -- the industry fixed the problem long ago. Oh, yeah, if you've got room on your Windows computer, I think ripping into WMA Lossless is worth it for sound quality. But if you want to transfer WMA Lossless music to a portable, you'll probably need a Zune.
Glass came from a school of composing philosophy that used small pieces of music, not even complete melodies or themes, as elements, and by the composer repeating them in different ways, but changing them slowly, you kind of get sucked into the sound. I recall attending a concert featuring a Steve Reich piece for violins I think was called "Tape Loops." When the music finally resolved into a peaceful chord, you thought you'd hit nirvana (the place, not the band, although ...).
So, this one window display downtown had thumbprints all over the window itself and sheets of music meant for children learning piano that repeat little themes (think "Chopsticks" but better). I think it hit the idea of the poster, which (again, to me) is to translate the aesthetic of Glass and Reich into visual art, and probably add homage to Glass's early big works that were said to be musical portraits of illustrious people ("Einstein on the Beach" etc.).
Glass has written lots of music for movies ("The Truman Show" is one), so maybe that's another way to get into his sound. He's premiering something for Spoleto, so that's the link there.
05/07/07
Glen Campbell played twangy guitar on this ...
It finally rained, then the clouds moved out and this high wind started. It feels like March outside.
Just cranked my late-night headphones all the way up to hear the 'wall of sound' on a late-night show music feature. It told me something: I have to write about a record album that haunts me to this day. The first LP I ever bought: "Pet Sounds."
The album is on my all time faves list, which was I think the second or third post to this particular journal, back in late October. I still have the vinyl. There are only three or four I kept, just as mementos: Baden Powell's "Solitude on Guitar," Stevie Wonder's "The Secret Life of Plants," Robin Kenyatta's "Girl from Martinique" and Julian Bream's first lute record, a live one with Peter Pears. (yes, the same type of thing Sting did last year. I like Sting, but I don't think he gave Pears any competition in the singing-quality department.)
I've actually gone through the masquerade of trying to sell my "Pet Sounds" to collectors, until one finally told me it was far too battered to be believed, much less collectable. What's a little unique about it is that it's actually in mono. Capitol Records had a huge row with Brian Wilson over his recording "Pet Sounds" in mono. What's wrong with stereo? Nothing, but you need mono for the true "wall of sound" effect Wilson was going for. Capitol won the argument, but my copy is proof that Wilson actually got what he wanted at first.
Why was he going for the Phil Spector sound in the first place? Wilson's record is about young love, and for him, that meant Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee movies, wall-of-sound soul records like "River Deep, Mountain High," the head on your (if you're a guy) shoulder after the big game on Friday night, the whole late 50's/early 60's middle America bit. (That's why Wilson threw a fit when the label stuck "Sloop John B" on his masterpiece -- it's irrelevant and wrecks the continuity, almost. It actually provided a little needed comic relief before flipping the vinyl over at the end of the first side.)
Wilson was writing "Pet Sounds" after he retired from active performing with the Beach Boys. (His live-act replacement is pictured on the back of the original album cover, pretending to swallow a samurai sword.) Wilson teamed up with a lyricist who would later quit the music biz and become a psychologist. (A hint of Tony Asher's future career is given in the Pet Sounds number "I Know There's an Answer.") With all that time to devote to creative work, Wilson set out to make a record that would be a statement, tell a story in songs, and be a real monument to the immense creative talent he'd worked so hard, largely on his own, to develop.
"Pet Sounds" turned most people off at the time. It had quirky songs with non-rock instruments like tympani and glockenspiels, featured dense orchestrations, and even included a strange sounding electronic instrument called a theremin {actually an Electro-Theremin}.
When I first heard the song the theremin is on, it was in the family rec room on the family console stereo. The song's called "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times." On hearing the lyrics for the first time, I was immediately seized with uncontrollable sadness, but I held back somehow for hours, until bedtime, when the song kept replaying in my mind. I distinctly recall shoving my head into my pillow to stifle my howling sobs until I fell to sleep. I knew immediately when I heard that song, which is about as good a description of 'existential alienation' as I've ever encountered, that I could relate to that feeling totally, but could do absolutely nothing about it. I was 12 years old.
Since then, the album has essentially stamped its coin on my existence, in many ways. It set me on a course I can't get get off of -- being sort of like caught on the train disappearing into the Doppler effect at the end of "Caroline No." Even now, I write poems about love that are sequenced into stories, I maintain an acute "ear" for the unusual in music, I let my inescapable feeling of existential dissonance protect me from many of life's troubles (sometimes too well), I found in "love lost" a sense of victory that I can't sweep away. I let it sweep me away, instead.
I'm not saying I'm a better person for having bought and essentially absorbed Brian Wilson's masterpiece at such an early age. No way. I am saying this recording became an ineradicable event in my life. And, even though he'll never read it, I'd like to thank Brian Wilson personally for Pet Sounds. This record did not make my life better or worse in some ethical sense -- its music and lyrics just began to give my life a sort of context, essential for finding meaning therein. That's what art is for. Thank you, Brian.
"Pet Sounds" is on my list of all time faves because of its quality and its enduring effect on me. I'm listening to it now on CD (the modern-day stereo version, which is nice). But the record does not have anything near the grip that held me forty years ago. Now, it's just good music I recall fondly. I think that means growth. I hope so.
Speaking of growth, Brian Wilson has been labeled "the Mozart of Rock" because of his compositional ability. I've long felt that the label, like almost all labels, was misapplied. If anything, Wilson was "the Bela Bartok of Rock" -- as the Hungarian composer was also fond of using unusual instrument combinations, conservatively applied dissonance, and many other things that show up (uncannily, to me) in Wilson's music. One other odd connection: Bartok frowned on "electronic" instruments. But if you listen to one of the movements in (I think) "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste" you'll hear the string section emulate a theremin.
BTW, if you think theremins are strange esoterica (they're the woo-ooo sound in the original Star Trek theme), think again: the late Bob Moog built theremins as a hobby since his youth, and he even offered them (along with an effects pedal called a "MoogerFooger") for sale until he regained the legal right to resume manufacturing MiniMoogs just before he died. There's even someone in California (I forget her name -- hope she's still around) who could apparently play a bass theremin and make it "walk." A theremin basically is a wooden shoebox with some odd antennae sticking out of it that create an electronic field. You play it by (carefully) waving your hands around in the air. No frets, no fingerboard, no nothing. When Wilson put it on rock records, people thought he'd completely lost his mind. No, he was just way ahead of his time. Everybody else's misunderstanding (as a result) is what can drive you crazy.
05/08/07
Follow up
Rain tonight ... thanks to an offshore system (weird-looking).
Just a couple of notes on the past few blogs:
I can't find anything composed by Steve Reich called "Tape Loops." That doesn't mean much, considering my research capabilities, but something did catch my eye: an early composition for violin and a reel-to-reel tape machine, or four violins. It's called "Violin Phase." I heard eight violins playing this thing I recalled years ago, so they could have just doubled it. I don't know. BTW, someone I've blogged about before has used a tape machine as part of the music: Baden Powell. His first LP ("Tristeza on Guitar") features a track in which he plays a kind of counterpoint to his own pre-recorded playback -- recorded at 71/2 IPS, but played back at 15 IPS, so it's naturally an octave higher. Sounds like two guitars. Don't know what Reich may have done with tape in that case. I'm already curious. (Tempted to write "already Mer-cur ...," but no.)
The "walking bass" thereminist mentioned in last night's (err ... this morning's -- long night) post is named Pamelia Kurstin. Wikipedia says she's going strong in Europe. May even have a solo CD out someday. {she did}.
Last note: I usually come back and touch things up to a post a day or so later, mainly to clarify any unintentional ambiguities that may have slipped in. So, they're not always staying raw -- just to make sure. For instance, I think I wrote last night that I'd read Bela Bartok frowned on using electronic instruments in his compositions, as if he had made that allowance in the first place. Of course not. He (as I recall) just didn't like them, period. So I came back and fixed the entry.
Part of the beauty and the curse of "live" journal-writing is that it's kind of a moving target. You are your own editor, in most cases, so things somebody else would vett in a professional situation you have to do yourself, and it may be a day or two before you catch them. But I also like to keep things a little rough, so if I misspell something or have a stupid-sounding phrase -- as long as what I meant is relatively clear, I'll leave it alone. I may correct myself in a follow-up or a title, just as a joke. That ain't the pro way, but this is my journal, so ... .
05/11/07
The Awful Truth
Nice weather after the storm moved out earlier this week.
I guess my memory is completely going, along with all my organizational skills. Now, when I need them ... .
Once upon a time, I had the neatest desk of any reporter at the second newspaper I worked for. I also had the biggest (in terms of sheer size) beat. I started out with the messiest desk, with only me knowing what was under which layer of pulp. I was literally snowed under by paper -- press releases, budgets, notebooks, the works. People laughed at me. I laughed at me. I was a joke.
Then, the person who had the beat before me just mentioned incidentally one day that she used only pencil for Rolodex entries (this was way long time ago, folks). It set off a brainstorm in my head. Forward organization -- what a concept! I flew into a new realm for me: I could create my own organizational system!
First, colored pens for different governmental agencies on the folder tabs (no hanging files -- the desks they had for us were nice, and used drawers spaced for Manila folders). Then, each agency got a file for the same subject all had to tackle -- budget, utilities, personnel, recreation, whatever. Then, each agency got special folders that were individual to them -- for particular "hot" issues, like "annexation."
Then, there were miscellaneous files, things I needed for my work. Then, there were files about general news subjects, and so on. Various colors or key words linked something in the file to or from something on the big desk calendar we all got every year. I spent a week when not writing stories just getting my Rolodex in order, using the same system above.
My Rolodex began to travel the newsroom; my calendar kept getting "borrowed" or copied, my desk was riffled regularly. I had to put my foot down. I got a 'tude about my desk, or "work environment." It won me no friends, but it kept me sane.
Once I began learning the broadcast news business, I took those skills to a new level. I had to: my first news director was a neatnik -- a nice guy, but a compulsive neatnik. Everything, and I mean everything, had to be in its place. At all times, unless you were using it, and then you had to put it right back.
When I got a job at a bigger station, I faced another challenge -- time. I had to remember to do certain things at certain times without having anyone to remind me -- having, in fact, lots of people to distract me. I missed several "feeds" before I learned the system I'd all but forgotten -- forward organization, but time-based.
I went through several jobs at different stations, and I ran into all sorts of organizational messes -- people just getting by on what little they could in some personal way that suited them for then, but, if something hit the fan, they would be lost. I always got the rep of getting things organized, because, over the years, I'd become obsessed with newsroom organization and I'd go around to organized people, just picking up tricks on getting things done. My last real day in the business was spent taking the entire file of news copy for the year (a huge pile) and getting them in perfect chronological order!
At home, I've always been the opposite. Stuff was where I laid it last. Or had kicked it. Total slob -- and I mean total. I don't mean I've been a "typical guy" about it -- I mean I've been a complete fracking pig!
Now that I'm home-based, I've never taken the time or made the effort to take the essential and basic and really easy-to-understand leap that I am going to have to get my organizational fetish-freak on, serious big time, at home! (I don't do slang well. Sorry.)
And I have got a pile of crap to dig out from under. A pile! What am I going to do?
Funny thing, all my files on my computer are very well laid out -- and my e-mails related to what work I've managed to get are all where I need them. But phone and snail mail and clothes and blankets (from the winter) and books and cards and freebie-gadgets and glasses and vids and CD's and back-up discs and old bills and receipts and -- oh, my .... What am I going to do? I've never had to actually get my actual life together before. NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BTW: I looked at my little cache of vinyl LP's I keep as mementos last night. What I had was more than I thought. One just sat there laughing at my disorganiational stupor: "Songs from Liquid Days" by Philip Glass. Huh. Another one, some Monteverdi music conducted by Nadia Boulanger, a French music teacher who set up a school just for (I think) Americans in Paris. Glass, Quincy Jones, and even Aaron Copeland were among her students. Now, If I'd just kept that Don Cherry thing he'd done for JCOA and that blank-cover copy of Albert Ayler's Last Album ("Again comes the rising of the sun ... .") Those early Keith Jarrett's would have been nice, too. *Sigh*
5/18/07
"We're Number One! "We're Number One!"
Cool for May, and a bit windy. Storms blew through yesterday, now "Blue skies, nothin' but blue skies ... ."
All plans to "turn my life around and get organized" lasted about a day and a half. What little I did looks nice though. New shower curtain has me sneezing less. Got me to thinking about the best organized life I've ever seen -- a little too well organized for its lead character, and me too. For most, this amazing one-time summer series on CBS was polite Brit allegory; for me (Mister Please-Disorganize-My-Procrastination himself) it was a portrait of cold horror.
Ah, the late sixties and early seventies. There were only three networks, and there wasn't anything else (we didn't get a PBS translator [a type of relay transmitter] in our area till, I think, '71. Snowy Julia Child and Joyce Chen -- foodies from early days. There was more, but that's another post.) What the bigs did (and they're getting back to it, but it ain't the same) was spend money to air something different for summertime audiences. CBS did the best job, in my opinion. It really was the Tiffany Network then. The first really nice summer series was an import from Britain -- "The Prisoner." It starred Scottish actor Patrick McGoohan in the title role. He'd gotten famous stateside two years or so before, playing in a weekly series called "Secret Agent." The show was way cool (for a ... hmm, 12-year-old, stretched out on the carpet in front of the screen), and it featured theme music from Mister American Bandstand Boy himself, Johnny Rivers. The song has a mad opener of a guitar riff straight from Major Twang. (Rivers recorded a longform live version of the song on his "Whiskey A-Go-Go" LP {I think that's correct} that featured a wild guitar solo). Anyway, "Secret Agent" itself was pretty standard TV suspense fare, but it didn't really do a James Bond on the lead character quite the way McGoohan later claimed. His character did have a couple of hot girlfriends he had to betray, though. Maybe that was what McGoo didn't like. I dunno ... .
"The Prisoner" was McGoohan's take on what was wrong with his Secret Agent Man character, and the whole concept of spy shows. It turns out ol' Patrick was a dyed-in-the-Shetland old-style libertarian who thought the nanny state was taking over (and this was nearly forty years ago!). The show featured another red-hot rock track (an instrumental) for a theme, showing a no-audible-dialog sequence (mostly) that set up the show's premise. This Secret Agent Man zooms into work at his tree-lined High Street office in his Lotus (or was it a Vaux ... I forget. A true open-wheel two-seater with no roof at all) who screams at the boss and quits. He heads to his swanky apartment to think over his next step, pours himself a drink first to settle down, and things ... get ... foggy ... .
Ol' Pat wakes up in a squeaky clean and really small apartment in some place he finds out is called The Village. Everybody has a number they have to wear on big round badges that feature the same odd symbol -- a old-timey bicycle with a big front wheel (I forget what you call those things). I'm going purely from memory here, but Patrick Number Whatever (I think it was 69, no kidding! I'll have to check.) finally finds out who's in charge -- it's Number Two! "Who is Number One?" McGoohan intones gravely at the end of each following ep's intro. That's the big question. I'll let you get the DVD set (this is from the black-and-white days, guys) to find out who Number One is -- but a feature of the series is that each episode had a different Number Two. The final ep features Leo McKern reprising an earlier Number Two role, and this last ep will leave your head spinning! It did mine. I recall thinking about it for days, and I could come to no conclusions. It was the oddest series end I'd ever seen! (Actually, it's been copied mucho since -- I'll be expecting something similar from Lost someday. That series -- while it's got its original "Twists and Turns" angle, is not completely original. The Prisoner was there first.).
The really chilling thing about The Village was its utter sterility. And puerile falsity. And utter control of everything. Every step was controlled, every word recorded, every step watched -- and every so-called "right" that every "citizen" had was purely bogus. And if any "citizen" disobeyed, became "difficult," caused a ruckus, or tried to escape, he or she got swallowed by a giant white (I guess it was white) balloon. The show had some set creepy music that played while the camera with an "inside the bubble" POV showed each vic slowly being suffocated by the rubbery balloon. It would eventually swallow the unfortunate rebel.
One ep actually had ol' McGoo getting goo'ed by The Bubble, but he kind of held his breath and rolled out of it. Even at that, he woke in the hospital -- groggy, brainwashed and barely breathing. He eventually broke the hold of The Bubble by the ep's end, but not of The Village -- not then, anyway.
The series had a lot to say -- too much for most people, including me. This thing was way, way, way, way ahead of its day -- and I'm sure anyone watching the vids now may well be shocked at its prescience (did I spell that right? LJ has a spellchecker, but all I get is gobbledegook when I try it. Maybe the spellchecker is trying to tell me something. Maybe, it's The Village ... oh, no. Is that a big balloon? NO! Gurp...)
Summer specials were worth looking forward to back in the day. I remember genius mad comic David Steinberg had a great summer series, years before SNL or SCTV aired ("Boo-gah-bah-GAA!"). Another was a music-variety show actually by The Manhattan Transfer. No, they weren't the regular guests -- they ran the show! ("Tuxedo Junction ... U..S..A!") What we get now summers is UnReality TeeVee.
The Village had TV with nothing but bilge on it.
OK ... "Who is Number One?"
05/19/07
Your Penny for My Farthing
Weather same ... nice, but sneezy.
Memory changes things, doesn't it? I've got some fixes and additions for last night's (this morning's) post:
The spy series Patrick McGoohan was originally in was called "Danger Man" in the UK. Though McGoohan played pretty much the same character in the "The Prisoner" -- he later said the high-concept series was no remake of "Danger Man/Secret Agent." In the opening sequence, McGoohan's character is driving a Lotus 7. They knock him out with some kind of gas, not a spiked drink. The first ep's intro had no dialogue, as I remembered, and it did have some in subseqent ep's, also as I remembered. But the intro dialogue was a lot longer than I recalled. It contained (and I can still hear McGoohan declaiming this in my head) the famous sentence: "I am not a number! I am a free man!" McGoohan's character's number was 6, not 96. (Though it's interesting to report that Mercurius_21 heard a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "If 6 was 9" playing in a bookstore recently. That may come up in a future post. The song itself is an anthem to individualism and personal independence -- to which Mercurius_21 is an obvious devotee. He is not a libertarian, no matter what he says. Am I? Hmmmm.) The big-wheel bike is called a penny farthing. It was the logo of The Village, but it apparently was not on the number badges of the citizens. The floating/bobbing security device that I called The Bubble was called "Rover" in the series, though I don't remember it having a name. It was white, though the series was apparently shot in color. We may have just had a b&w TV at home at the time, but CBS may also have aired the series in b&w, because of incompatibilities between US and UK broadcast-color systems at the time. My memory of the show is definitely black and white.
All the info is found (plus way more) in the Wikipedia entry on the show. It's interesting to note that when the series was aired in England, the reaction to the final ep was a lot like mine, except more vocal. McGoohan apparently had to go into hiding for a while to avoid trying to explain it all. There has been some fictional output as a result of "The Prisoner" -- notably a graphic novel called "Shattered Visage." With that last thought ...
Next time: Season 8 and The Dark Tower.
05/20/07
Graphic Entertainment
Near perfect weather, less sneezy (or better medicated).
I posted sometime last year (back in the November archive, I think) about my experiences running a specialty comic book store during the worst winter in modern history for that part of the country. And I think I may have made a disparaging remark or two about "fanboys" -- adult males who act worse than 12-year-olds when it comes to comic books (at least). Now, they all have their revenge. I am a fanboy. I'm proud of it. The world can't take that away from me, either. *sniffs a falsely cocky sniff* Two stories have sucked me in and made me an addict.
I can now admit I only pretended to be looking at the Classics section of the bookstore, because from there I could just work my eye over to the comic book section, if I sort of bent my head backward just a little (a little more, a little more, ow! that crick hurt!, oops! almost fell on my ... ). I guess I was pretty obvious, so it's such a relief to now confess that I really wasn't interested in books I was made to read in high school. I wanted to see that mad wild cover on the new X-men limited series! (Cyclops is back! Wow!)
Now of course, harrumph, I can't be seen buying those things. No, I just look at them (trying hard not to bend the cover any around the staples -- lookin' out for muh fanboy crew!) with pain only a permanent 12-year-old can muster. I can allow myself the more respectable "graphic novels" or "limited series" that bookstores are now putting on the regular mag shelves. I can march to the stand, after a few minutes of pretending to be reading the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly or The New Republic, while I'm really aiming at that last copy (hiding behind a muscle-car mag) of The Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower is Marvel's take on a series of books written by Stephen King on a hero he calls "The Gunslinger." Set in a future dystopia, the young gunslinger Roland Deschains begins to learn the hazards of his father's craft, where the only weapons left are six-shooters from the Wild West. It's written by someone who's spent a lot of time cataloging the details of the novels in a book of her own, and this limited series contains some of her writing about the "Dark Tower-verse" or whatever it's called (My copies are in the other room and I'm posting past my downstairs neighbor's bedtime, so I can't get up to check unless it's, like, to heed the call. No, I'm just drinking water. For now).
(Mercurius_21 won't review this series, or the other one he's eating peanut butter to afford this year, because I'm sure there are other, and better, places for that. He's just so enthusiastic about actually living like a kid he can't contain himself.)
The other one I'm carrying to the register with my head held high is the long-awaited Season Eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I pore over each one of these again and again, savoring every panel -- just like those guys I thought were such poor wretches so many years ago when I was running that shop in Tobac Town. Now that I'm a poor wretch myself, I must say it's a liberating experience. Plus, it's great to see Joss Whedon (a confessed fanboy himself -- though I'm sure he has a better term for it) put in all kinds of trivia only people like us really enjoy. The first issue in the series features characters who look exactly like Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Foggy Nelson (Matt Murdock's law partner in Daredevil). A character who strongly resembles the general that chased The Hulk around in those early issues is also carefully rendered so a true fanboy would not fail to notice. Nobody cares about this stuff but us fanboys, and it's what we live for, truly.
After the stories of Roland Deschains and Buffy Summers are told, what next? There are many others I'm salivating to read. So where will this juvenalia end? I don't know. After all, Peter Pan is more than just peanut butter.
05/27/07
Zoom Zoom
Still cool for May. Got a little rain yesterday (?) clouds today ...
Indy's coming up -- and it's making me look at cars again ("as Dreamland's comin' on -- Dreamland, Dre-ee-ee-eamland!").
Down heah in the Southlan' we used to see impo'ted sports cars about as often as we felt earthquakes. Anything "imported" had the label "Made in Japan" -- which then was not a good thing. The oil embargo hit when I was in college ... the first Honda Civics (these things would fit inside a modern Civic -- and leave room for the driver!) with their spare tires sticking out the back hatch lid were almost always yellow. I think I remember seeing an orange one while I was at the Hill. They would go 100,000 miles easily on nothing but regular oil changes -- utterly unheard of in domestic vehicles.
Not too long after that, the Reagan recovery started -- ending the Carter inflationary "malaise" (he had low budget deficits, though, as I recall). People who had some money down South got more as economic development began picking up steam for the first time since the textile boom in the 1920s. And in the tiny mill towns I lived in -- some doctors and lawyers began driving 921's around town -- once and a while, you'd even see a red 911 parked next to a 20's era three-story brick house renovated into offices. One lawyer had a Saab -- a new black one, not a rust bucket belching gas from the 70s with tye-dye cloth covering the holes in the upholstery and flower decals in the back windows. One of my editors was on his second 100,000 miles in his original Civic.
Muscle cars did not return to the scene, at least where I lived, until the 1990s. State capitol reporting brought hourly sightings of Boxters, 6-series Beemers, and two-seat Kompressors. I salivated in anguish at these sculptured beauties. But it actually all began right in my backyard. I was reporting in a town (man, 15 years ago!) when BMW decided to build a bplant there to make roadsters. The subsequent sports car was all the rage as soon as the cars started coming off the production lines in the mid-90s. I got a bad neck crick yanking my head at all the custom-colored ... s zipping past my usual walk routes in those days.
Like all American boys of my time, I was fascinated with cars early. My dad didn't buy a 'stang, he had a pal selling Chevvies those days, so he opted for a blue Camaro -- the first one, a kind of compact of the day. A big green monster followed two years later -- eight cylinders of raw Camaro power tore down the new interstates being built in our area. I didn't wreck it -- no one let me drive this low slung behemoth unsupervised!
For some reason, though I was born and raised at the nativity of stock-car racing with what was then called a Grand National track fifteen minutes away, I never cottoned much to Junior'n'em's sport. I listened to races rabidly on radio on Saturdays (that's when they were run then) but I was just as rabid for the hourly updates in (I think) '64, when Phil Hill and his team drove the first Ford to race at LeMans in the prototype category. This GT car was a beauty! (I still have the Matchbox version I bought back then.) The racing mags I bought at the coin shop up the street from the store my dad ran raved about all the new American cars entering the European sports scene -- as well as the Lotus team that came to Indy that year (or maybe it was '63 -- I'll have to check.) The mags drooled the following year over two new entries in the Grand Touring scene -- the Shelby Cobra and Jim Hall's Chapparral -- gorgeous and powerful, the pair of them! Bruce McLaren introduced the Lola not long after, another dream machine to watch.
There were no videos of these races back then -- just a few film clips on the Wide World of Sports. No in-car cameras, no color pictures, even! But the crude entertainment technology of the day only served to enhance a boy's imagination. WWoS occasionally did a Grand Prix or GT race -- but with cameras the size of small refrigerators mounted on tripods that had to be hand-swiveled by two people, it didn't look like much after the starting flag fell. Frustrating, but imagination-firing. Oh, the wait for the stills of the races in Road and Track three months later!
But as time went on, the racers I rooted for began dying. McLaren, Jim Clark, and others, died in crashes. The new cars -- regardless of marque or formula -- had outstripped the tracks they were running on, and did not have the reliability on a par with their performance -- both of the technology and of the drivers. Other drivers began quitting, or going into smaller race cars, or maybe not racing as much. Jackie Stewart, Dan Gurney, Graham Hill, etc. just didn't seem to appear as often as they had in the heydey. (Though Gurney made an F1 run with the American Eagle.)
Now, races are overall much safer. Though some drivers still tragically die in races, the accidents are much more survivable. They are safer for fans, too. The second year (again I need to check) Jim Clark drove his Lotus at Indy -- a horrible starting lap crash killed two drivers and some fans as flaming car parts flew into the stands. There were calls for huge safety revisions (I recall a Jackie Stewart article in SI when I was in high school had recommendations that many thought could kill the sport -- but they were eventually implemented for the most part, I think), but not until a crash a few years later that sent a huge wheel into the stands that killed or injured several people, did things get serious at Indy, at least as I recall. Oddly, F1 racing got much safer after a champion driver (Nicky Lauda) actually survived a burning crash. However, he was disfigured for life. He did many interviews as he recovered, and F1 racing got safer -- again, as best I recall.
I fell away as a fan of motor sports as I got older, and as other things began to take my interest (those miniskirts made the girls look a lot sleeker than a BRM!), but every time I even see a Honda 2000, some engine in the back of my memory roars to life, if only for a second.
05/27/07
Victory Lane
Weather same -- nice, but dry.
How 'bout that? I mention Jim Clark, and then a fellow Scotsman wins Indy! I watched the whole thing -- for the first time in years. Exciting race, though made short by the weather.
In researching Wikipedia to make all the inevitable fixes from the last post, I realized something: those other drivers didn't quit racing or slow down after Clark died -- I just lost interest after Clark was killed in a practice run for a car in 1968. He won Indy in 1965. There was a lot of hubbub at the time about Clark's death being unnecessary (he was testing a F2 car for employer Lotus -- but he was a F1 champion!), but I don't know what the facts warrant. I just remember not caring about racing after that. Today's victory may have been made in Clark's honor (well, that's what Ashley Judd said, anyway! I ate supper and took a walk after that, so I don't know what the victor himself said.).
Bruce McLaren did not drive Lolas -- he had his own car, and the company is now one of the greatest marques in F1 racing. Bob Bondurant may have driven Lolas. I couldn't figure out why I got the two cars confused. They don't look alike. That said, McLaren had some sleek CanAm and F1 racers in the 60s, as did Lola. The mental image I had, though, turns out to have been of the Lola T70. I had the name of the Ford car correct -- simply the Ford GT, but it was also known as the GT40.
It would have been nice to have spelled "Chaparral" correctly. That company built many a fabulous looking CanAm and prototype racing car in that era, but my mental image turns out to have been of the Chaparral 2A, with its especially distinctive, grilled rear-end -- which is about all competitors saw of it.
As for Porsche, I'm not sure what I saw people driving back then other than vintage 911s, but I believe it was the 914. There was at that time another, more affordable Porsche made for the American market -- I can't remember the number -- but it had a very poor reputation as a car. That wasn't what I had in mind, so it must have been the 914. The 912 would not have been a new car then.
(Mercurius curiously failed to fix his worst gaffe from the last post -- leaving out the name of the famous BMW z3 roadster. Now, why would his memory glitch on that? Twice? Hmmm.)
Next time: the best folk song ever written.
05/28/07
Judy and Suzanne
Weather the same -- drought becoming an official possibility here.
A few days ago I spotted a Judy Collins CD for five dollars. Easy decision. I'm not a buyer of female folksingers that much, but Judy Collins is different. And the CD includes one very unique song.
Judy Collins had a voice (it has dimmed a bit with age) that just cut through the AM radio waves like a sacred sword of utterly pellucid beauty. I bought her 'greatest hits' LP at Bankertown's only classical record store downtown (the only record store downtown then) in something like 1971. The guys who ran it liked Judy's voice so much, they stocked her records with their otherwise "longhair" collection. Her voice was clear, clean, bright, soft, bluesy but with spot-on tone. The CD I now have reveals to these more mature ears that Judy could also modulate in and out of keys like a classical vocalist must, but maintain an easily digestible folk style. ("Cook With Honey" is playing now.)
Judy had successful hits in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Not a lot of them, but always well-chosen songs that became instant radio classics. One song on the CD (probably on the LP, too) is the greatest folk song ever written: "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen. The song is a near-perfect lyrical portrait that sounded cryptic to people like me, and even a little heretical, then. But its haunting melody just won't turn you loose, and the mysterious lyrics are an instant grabber, but, like the melody, are so thought-provoking, they won't let you go, either. Music-writing pro's work for years to get a smooth style full of hidden "hooks" (discussed in a much earlier post), but here was a young Canadian poet who builds songs that hook you with no "hooks" at all! The power of the music is in its very simple structure: chord progressions that invite the listener into an intimate mystery the poet is sharing with you, with words so intimate you feel he is speaking directly to you personally -- even if you're listening with a batch of other people in the room! This strange gift of Cohen's was the subject of another song, one said to have been written about him: "Killing Me Softly." It was a hit when I was in high school (or maybe college) for an all-time fave for me: Roberta Flack. Her version of "Suzanne" I clearly recall in my head, even now, while I'm writing this listening to Judy Collins sing "Send in the Clowns."
I did a little homework this time before writing on Cohen and his song. It seems the subject of "Suzanne" is well known, and she was even the subject of a story on the CBC last year. She was at the time living homeless in a camper (really funky looking thing) in Venice, California. Her picture in the internet version of the story I found shows her to be a still-beautiful, but eccentric, free spirit. I imagine someone stepped forward quietly to help her out after that story ran, so here's hoping Suzanne's still doing OK.
Anyway, the story or something else I read led me to unwind one of the song's more trivial mysteries: "She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China." Why this struck me as odd as a teen was hardly anyone served tea hot to me then, and on those rare occaisions, it was a spice tea without milk. I couldn't imagine having any with oranges -- lip-pucker city! Cohen told an interviewer that she took him up to her and her husband's boho place in Montreal (toney spot now) and made him some tea as a gesture of hospitality. Cohen called it "constant tea." He obviously meant Bigelow's "Constant Comment" tea, widely available now and (I'm sure) then. It's recipe includes tiny bits of dried orange zest mixed in with the pekoe.
Anyone who's been to Montreal (I have! It was the only big trip I've ever been able to make with my own money -- September 1980.) At that time, more so in Cohen's salad days, Rue de Bonsecours was very historic and quiet, a good ways down the hill from the clubby Latin Quarter (where Cohen probably stayed). I recall the Chapel of Our Lady of the Harbor in that old town neighborhood, which (as I recall) features a statue of Jesus holding out his arms to the harbor itself. A statue of The Virgin also sits outside. Very beautiful, but only readily accessible (as I recall -- at least at that time) from the St Laurence river or its shoreline. The street entry is actually the back of the chapel! (I think that's right, anyway.)
Leonard Cohen's song today still haunts and even teases the mind with its utter accuracy, its tender edge, its sincere simplicity, its mesmerizing power. The best folk song ever written. Cohen may be here for the American premier of the Philip Glass work I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Glass composed music to Cohen's latest book of verses: "The Book of Longing" -- which he wrote while a monastic on Mt Baldy. The world premiere either has been or soon will be in Cohen's native country.
05/31/07
Utterly Utter
Same weather -- change may be on the way, though. Kind of iffy.
In rereading the last few posts (and several others), the mistakes don't bother me as much as they used to. One thing does stick out like a zit on the nose -- repetitively repeating myself.
It's one of those things I never catch the first time, hardly ever the second time, and by the time the third time it comes around, it's past time to move on. It's often called "redundancy" -- which (OK, hang on a minute -- yeah, there it is! Thank you, COED.) actually means "superfluous," but is often used to indicate repetitive expressions, like the word "time" in the previous sentence. The word "time" isn't something you can just cut out and still have the above sentence make sense, but it's a word you should replace with a synonym for the second occurrence in a sentence. Using the same word or phrase over and over again is a problem I've always had as a writer, and editors have complained about it to me ever since I handed in my first paper in high school English class.
However, there is one type of so-called "redundancy" that is interesting, though a little subtle. It's called "recursion" -- the actual name of the writing anomaly I'm writing (there I go again) about tonight. But actual recursion can have a symmetry to it that can suggest some underlying (even unconscious) intent. In the Koran, Mohammad recites what I'm calling symmetrical recursion a lot, "Allah calls (God's people) with a call," "(Allah) will help you with a help," "believe as the people believe," etc. It's actually been suggested that this is a part of the inner structure of the Koran: the Arabic words for "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful" have an element of symmetrical recursion in their syllables.
This recursion is not limited to Islam: think of a Hebrew name for God. Christianity? What's a parable?
A type of recursion also occurs (sorry) in science and mathematics. Recursive algebra is supposed to be the basis for modern computers (a book I've had for years but only recently had the courage to try and dig into is Rosa Peter's "Playing with Infinity." She was a pioneer in recursive math. The book is not about that, though. Yet.) Part of the GNU/Linux operating-system platform is also recursive in name: "GNU" is an acronym for "GNU, Not Unix." The Debian Live CD I bought a couple of years back that I've previously mentioned has a neat slide show about fractal geometry -- also recursive (as far as my pathetic math mind can discern, anyway).
In short, repeating words repetitively the way I do is bad. But get a rhythm going, and you might just have something else.
BTW -- The Spoleto Festival I mentioned a few weeks back is now going strong. I try and find the free stuff -- and I've already gotten one event confused. I'm probably not alone in this -- but it still ticks me off! I worked my 'tude down by walking and "judging" more theme windows. More of them now, and some really good ones, too! My new fave uses big portraits "painted" with hundreds of different colored bottle caps (plus lots of classic snapshots of Cohen in the mix). Another one nearby themes Cohen's "Book of Longing" nicely with the official poster. Yet another superimposes a big red thumbprint over the poster (on glass, get it?). I was wrong about the poster, though. Turns out the artist also used his forefinger's print to make Glass's image. (You think Glass may use recursion? I'm thinkin' it!)
06/??/07
And What It Is Aint' Exactly Clear
Thunderstorms and rain and lightning and cold air and weirdness and ... now it's sunny and feels like late April.
Yes, "paranoia strikes deep" (I ought to know). But so do (fortunately) other things ... .
The Spoleto Festival has come and gone, and I made only one (free) event (OK, two -- I was a volunteer for another). Still, I kept up with things, much easier with blogs and such nowadays. The American premiere of Phillip Glass's "Book of Longing" apparently went over well, though, as with all things related to this composer's career, not without controversy. Some apparently expecting Stravinskian abstractions were disappointed, some apparently wanting soft Scriabinese mysticism wondered what the deal was. This composer's life's work will likely take many years to sort out -- if so, proof that he's really that good.
One of the articles I stumbled over related to my personal pursuit of poetry (as self-therapy, self-definition, self-whining, whatever you want to call it). It seems the director of the festival does not think much of adding poetry readings (by national major lights) as a marquee event. The one event I attended and the other I volunteered for were no-cost poetry readings, so this issue is germane.
Here's my two cents (all in one old copper slug -- yes, there was a two-cent piece at one time): The director is right. The only people with the patience to sit through a poetry reading are poets (at least as far as the general art-ticket public goes). Reading poetry is a performing art -- but it's a subtle one, and its audience is limited to those who are part of the art. It's also a private pursuit not expressly designed for public reading -- though in America (unlike Europe, from what I hear) public readings are the main vehicle for poets to showcase their work.
But the festival's highlight event (if the poster was any indication) proves both sides in this mini-debate are right: Leonard Cohen's poetry was at the heart of Glass's work -- but it had to be interpreted and contexualized and enhanced by the performance art of music to sell tickets. Cohen's "Book of Longing" (the book) was also a success -- but it featured the poet's sketches and prints and such along with the text. If you want to sell poetry to people besides poets and critics -- you need to "bundle" it with one or more "performing" arts first. And you need to do a really good (read: sincere) job of it, to boot.
OK, two cents' worth done. And that's all it was worth.
But just to stay even with the theme of this live journal, let me recount something from college days before posting. I can't remember the author's name (he was said to be one source Joyce used for "Ulysses") except that he was French and that I found a translation of his main book in the university library. It asserted that Homer used ship's logs to structure the "Odyssey" epic, along with similar things that he felt were essential to the narrative. He also stated that the original text began with Odysseus recounting his adventures in the hall of King Alcinous (I know I didn't spell that right), which is, like, Chapter 11 or 12 of the current text. This critic said the rest of the poem was added centuries later by other writers.
The reason this stuck is that I was messing with poetry back then, and this one image stayed with me: he claimed Homer must have "performed" his epic in the halls of Hellenic monarchs centuries before Greek writing was invented (or adapted from Semitic syllable-signs {OK, another book}). This French critic suggested that Homer must have used music and some kind of mime or dance to illustrate the narrative as it went along. I could see this happening in my head; it was so clear. Except my head-image was on a modern "black box" stage with a hoary Homer in a tee and jeans chanting his poem with a classical guitar man beside him and some leotarded modern dancers moving around the stage, even around him (OK, the stage had procenium, so not a black box exactly). I thought, "this could work!" Maybe not big-ticket stuff, but still ... .
Forgive me for dropping the pontiff's tiara on my head once again, but this is something that has just stuck in my head for weeks, and it had to go somewhere. (Mercurius_21 is listening to Rhett Miller's "The Instigator" while writing this -- keep that in mind.) Anyway, for what it's worth ... .
06/05/07
Reading is Selfish Fun
Cloudy, got a bit more rain after deluge from Barry over the weekend.
Back in the day (when M_21 says that, he means when he was 21 or so, unless he sets a time frame.) I was big on summer reading. I liked to read (still do), and summer was a time to read stuff that I could impress people with come fall. I was dating (sort of, a 70s thing) a girl who was into two things (as far as I could tell), bridge and William Faulkner.
I frankly did not get Faulkner. I tried reading him just to get along with her, but it was no use. Actually, I had read "The Sound and the Fury" earlier (on a teacher's recommendation) and ate it up. The novel had strong narrative, broken all to bits, and steam of consciousness prose that my Ornette edge loved. Faulkner could write as skillfully as anyone I'd ever read (OK, that wasn't saying much -- but it's still true), and he fed me challenges that made me think hard. Up my alley, for sure.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said by me for the books my (sort of) girlfriend adored: "Light in August," "Intruder in the Dust," "Absolom, Absolom," and a whole batch of other "classics" of Southern Gothic. They were (to me, OK?) turgid, pained, twisted and in general a real b**** to sit through. I squirmed in the chair across all of the above (almost -- gave up on "Absolom") the summer K also tried to teach me bridge. I was hopless at that, too. Games are hard for me to learn, for some reason. Ping pong I got, but stuff with rules like marbles (way long ago) and bridge just leave me out of it. Sort of reminds me of another literary girlfriend (sort of -- had lots of those) who "adored" Hesse. The glass bead game of "Siddartha" and life in general I just never got -- also faked my way out of reading that "classic", too.
I hate to be hammering big post-hippie faves of the 70s novel set, but I just wasn't part of the scene. Summer things I tried, really tried to read included "Weymouth Sands" (Powys) "Portrait of a Lady" (you know who), and hmmm, there was another table-thudder in there somewhere, but I forget. They lost me, frankly. Over my head. I was truly disappointed, 'cause I was really looking for bragging rights on those. (We English lit folks are a strange lot -- but you knew that already, right?)
Frankly, I never really got over the Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff I read in high school summers. Excellent classic adventure fic that's full of the real twist-and-turn stuff, not the whatever that masquerades as such you often see on tee-vee nowadays. ERB was a master of flashback. His way of doing it so consistently just bent time. Not something you're going to have to read for a degree (hope not, anyway) but still, fabulous summer reading. I'd heard his "Pellucidar" series was underrated, but I never tried it.
Modern stuff? I read "Practical Demon-Keeping" some summers ago and loved its irreverence and spirit. Moore's other stuff looks good, too, especially "Lamb." Maybe someday. There's another guy out there who looks enticing from the stacks at the mega-stores, but I forget his name (it'll occur to him eventually, don't worry). Yet another I've "read-at" while standing who looks interesting to me is DeLillo. Those are not recommendations. Do your own thing, for sure.
Since I'm into my second (third, fourth, fifth) childhood, I've got to say something about comics. I'm really liking the current "Red Data" X-Men series by Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo. Superb artwork and excellent way-out-there storytelling! (If the trailers and clips I've seen for Spiderman III and FF II are any indication -- movies are in big trouble. One guy with a word processor and another with a pen-and-pencil set outdoing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of 35mm and digital footage in bang-for-buyer's-buck quality -- just wrong. Or maybe not.) The "Young X-men" line also looks good, too, for the same reasons. I know Joss Whedon is doing yet another X-men line (they confuse me), but the art for that one is not my "cup" (not to knock it -- clean lines and clear images are really all you need, and that one has both).
Hey, enjoy. But enjoy for yourself. Reading is a private pleasure, and doing it for bragging rights or to please someone else just doesn't work.
06/08/07
At Long Last, The Synapse Connects To ...
Nick Hornby.
... and it was, uh, "New X-men," not "Young X-men" ...
Oh, yeah, hot and super muggy.
06/11/07
It's Spelled "Absalom, Absalom," You Idiot!
Plus, the Hesse novel referred to is "Magister Ludi," or "The Glass Bead Game," not "Siddartha." (All this should teach M_21 to actually read the books he's writing about, but don't expect him to change.)
Otherwise, hot as hello and even more humid.
06/16/07
Instigating Failure
Rain gone ... mild and sunny -- way cool for this time of year. No complaints.
One CD by a modern artist I bought some years back is Rhett Miller's "The Instigator."
At the time I confess I did not understand the "cool guy" deal -- it seemed the opposite of anything I would know anything about, just as I did not get the "preppy" thing when I was in college. I'd heard part of one song on a TV show I liked in '03, and I just blindly bought it.
There's Miller on the cover, looking coolly dazed and confused from under his greasy surfer's mop (I'm sure that's not what it's called). The songs are all about one Eastern Establishment college guy's quest for sex, love, or whatever close to it he can find.
Catchy (not quite "hooky") pop with a stinging (sort of Dylan) folk-rock beat, each song details "The Instigator" and his attempts to get things going his way. "Our Love" is one side of a conversation, in which the Instigator tries to convince his lover that their relationship is much better than their friends' but ends up detailing his own previous screwed-up affairs. "This is What I Do" offers an apologia for his songwriting career, couched in descriptions of even more ex-girlfriends, as if falling for or chasing them prompts the songs that he is reduced to trying to earn his bread and butter with. "Come Around" is a come-on song (one of many on the disc) that turns on the Instigator's love frustration. The other songs follow the general pattern of the Instigator's pursuits and the nutty people he runs into pursuing them.
My favorite is my favorite for a good reason: I can relate to it. "World Inside the World" is a nicely written ballad that likely takes place on his or her or somebody else's couch as the Instigator tries to sweet-talk his date into getting even sweeter. In the last stanza comes the best part, in which the Instigator tries to convince his date that he's read a Don DeLillo novel and understood it "like they'd written it to me." This come-on is a tried-and-not-so-true thing in which the guy uses his modern lit course (which he may or may not be sleeping through) to ummm ... "get some" by invoking that generation's novelist icon. In my day, it was Thomas Pynchon. No I didn't read him, either, but that didn't stop me from trying him and others so many times during and after college (fill in the blank with the author of choice -- I even tried using Henry James once and got humiliated so badly it still hurts today. The only Henry I'd been reading was Henry Miller. No, guys, that's not one you should use. Unless you want to wind up in the ER.). Needless to say, my attempts had absolutely no effect whatsoever, except in me getting laughed at or led on (and then laughed at later). Calling myself a fool in this live journal has been done so often already it would be tiresome to do it once more. I know no word for how stupid this is: thinking with your thing and still trying to use your brain. I guess "ridiculous" will have to suffice.
The next best song on the CD to me is the last one. "Terrible Vision" has some fabulous harmony parts in which the female backup singers seem to mock the poor Instigator from behind the imaginary dorm's (or maybe frat hall's) hear-through wall as he all but begs for "it" one final time. The song fades into some dissonant chiming as the Instigator is "let down" gently once more. At least that's my interpretation, based on very sound previous experience (the sound of the door softly snapping shut in my face).
The CD is also a model of production and engineering by the best in the business: Jon Brion, producer; the superb Bob Clearmountain, mixer; and the incomparable Bob Ludwig, mastering engineer.
Though this release is probably not considered a modern classic by the iPod set, it sticks with me because Miller has done a consistently good job creating songs around his "Instigator" persona. Whether part or all of it is autobiographical is irrelevant -- it's clearly done through a persona, so listeners can possibly hear the song's actual message woven into the framework of yet another failed (or failing) affair of the heart (or whatever). I (in my pontiff's tiara) would only suggest Miller try weaving even more ideas into songs built around any future personae. "The Instigator Returns?" I wish him well.
06/17/07
Ah, Me ...
Much warmer and muggier, with sunny skies.
It may be clear from Mercurius_21's last post, if you read between his lines a bit, that what he's really afraid of is not rejection. He thinks rejection is funny. What he's afraid of is acceptance. Because if that happened, he might actually have to grow up.
06/19/07
Credit Overdue (plus, a personal take on a tragedy)
Hot, muggy, cloudy.
In a much earlier post (way back in last year's archives) about how I was a kid who had to settle for the not-so-popular Marvel comics when I was 12 or so, because somehow other kids or their older siblings got to them first at the one place in my little town that sold them. However, some of the titles I had to "settle for" were far more cutting-edge than I realized at the time.
One I've already mentioned in that old post or another one obviously was one I knew was ahead of its day -- Jim Steranko's "Nick Fury -- Agent of SHIELD." At that time, for sales and distribution reasons, Marvel put two superhero stories in one title, in some cases. Nick Fury shared Strange Tales with "Doctor Strange -- Master of the Mystic Arts," while Iron Man and Captain America also shared a comic that I think was called "Tales to Astonish." Both were legacy titles from when Marvel Comics was a publisher of science-fiction comics only.
I've already posted on how masterful Jack "The King" Kirby was in doing Captain America (a hero he helped create in the 40's), but Gene Colan also did very well with Iron Man, both old hands who were masters at telling very short stories. (The "Marvel way" is said to have been Stan Lee giving capsule plots to the artists, who would then flesh out the story in pictures, and Lee would add dialog and "block" narrative. Lee was also a master at adding "insider" footnotes in his Stan The Man persona, making readers a part of the family, in a sense.)
Jim Steranko's difficulties fitting Nick Fury into (I think) 12 pages has been described by others (try Wikipedia). Meanwhile, the other title in "Strange Tales" was left without an artist when the great Ditko (apparently in a huff) quit the company. Doctor Strange was not a big seller, so the job of "pencilling" was left for a time to Marvel's house colorist, Marie Severin. Though a little shaky at first, this talented lady began fleshing out Lee's plot summs in a quiet, intuitive way that fit Doctor Strange to a 'tee.' Marvel was also known for setting the stories in New York, rather than some make-believe Gotham or Metropolis. Doctor Strange's brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village was rendered well by Marie Severin, and she made the essential female characters much more than evil witches and damsels in distress. I think Marie was also "inking" (usually done by a second artist skilled at draughtsmanship) her own pencils and, as house colorist, she was also adding color.
Unfortunately for Marie, only men drew comics in those days, even the romance titles aimed at girls. So her stint was temporary. Steranko was allowed to take Nick Fury to its own 24 page book. Dr Strange also went solo, and Marie Severin was replaced by a talented "inker" whose original pencils at the time revealed somewhat less talent. At least to me. Marvel's first true scriptwriter, Denny O'Neill, was also assigned Dr Strange. It changed the comic completely. And not for better, again, at least to me.
The experience as a reader soured me on comics, and I began buying only Steranko's Nick Fury -- the most original comic of its day, by far. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, I was 14 by then, and other interests began to take hold. When Steranko quit comics entirely, I quit as a buyer -- only to resume for a year almost twenty years later, and then again almost twenty years after that.
The reason I'm going into the Severin/Steranko days of "Strange Tales" is that I see the legacy of both artists in the comics I'm buying now. Though computers and better working conditions have changed the art and storytelling dramatically (a pun I'll take), if you look at X-men (the title), New X-men, Buffy Season 8 or The Dark Tower -- The Gunslinger Born these days, you can see what I mean. These older artists should be given their due, IMHO. They helped make the best in modern comics exciting to read for adults as well as young people*, and they should be commended. (Steranko is in the Comics Hall of Fame -- I'm not sure about Severin. Her brother John may be there.)
*By "young people" I don't necessarily mean children. Gunslinger and Season 8 -- while no more intense than prime TV "process" shows -- are IMO inappropriate for very young readers. (And to M-21, "young" is a very fluid concept, relative to the individual.)
Let me also add a word briefly about the tragedy that befell Charleston last night. As a radio reporter years ago, I'd spoken by phone from time to time with some of the firefighters who died in that furniture store fire, just in the course of doing my job back then. When I booted my computer and lauched AOL to read the news this morning (I was writing and didn't see the evening news or listen to radio last night), I was shocked when I saw the headline. And I have thought about little else all day. I know no more about the story than what I've read on the 'net. But I can say the city, our region and the entire state is in a condition of emotional shock right now. My sympathies go to all the fallen firefighters' families and friends.
One more thing, and then I'll post. I'm planning on taking a vacation from this live journal for a while, just to concentrate on other projects and let my "blogging" batteries recharge. I'm not going to Never Never Land this time, just taking a break. See you when I return.