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| . . . MP3 | |||||
| . . . 1999-07-17 |
Since I don't give a flying bleep about electronic noodling, MPEG-3 audio searches have left me alone and palely loitering. And if I can get something on a CD, I'd rather buy the CD. But here's why I love the format:
| . . . 1999-08-18 |
Gosh, I like the Internet: Tom Parmenter, famous father of the Parmenter boys, easily identified one of my mystery MP3 files as "Troubles, Troubles" by Clarence "Frogman" Henry; on the same day, one of the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.1950s habitués identified the "holler billy goat" song as "Hide and Go Seek" by Bunker Hill. Amoeba Records, here I come.
| . . . 1999-08-24 |
Tom Parmenter noted that the mysterious "Billy Goat" song, now identified as "Hide and Go Seek" by Bunker Hill (nom de secularism for a Mighty Clouds of Joy vocalist), sounds like "a compendium of schoolyard rhymes.... 'Went down the road, the road was muddy,' that has the jump-rope rhythm." In turn, I noted that, like some other of my favorite blues, rock'n'roll, R&B, and hip-hop songs, it blends a bit of dirty dozens into its kids games. Tom again:
"Toasts" are another member of the family. I'm surprised no one has put together an album of Titanic-related toasts and tunes. Supposedly, Jack Johnson was denied passage and the wreck was retribution. I also have a song by the Johnny Otis Show (under the name of Snatch and the Poontangs) on the alleged presence on board of the legendary Shine, who *could* have saved them all, but concluded "there's better pussy on yonder shore".Strange that Frogman's hits should both be so peppy and so gloomy. Here's a cat so talented he can sing like a girl *and* a frog and he ain't got no home in the one song and he's contemplating suicide in the other, so deep are his troubles.
.... I'm listening to this hip folk balladeer jazz rocker street singer guy Hirth Martinez and two of these songs are so *damn* entertaining, one of them called "Mothman Samba", about said mysterious creature.
| . . . 1999-08-29 |
Fragments of Buster Keaton's vaudeville memories are buried under the talking-heads of a typically frustrating NPR program. The original tape -- of great scholarly and minimal commercial interest -- is a perfect example of the sort of thing that should be compressed and made available for downloading. (Courtesy of Looka!)
| . . . 1999-09-05 |
Guillaume Apollinaire and Ron Padgett seek venture capital to implement the Moon King's recently patented proposal for iMics, a sort of Webcam for streaming audio:
The flawless microphones of the king's device were set so as to bring in to this underground the most distant sounds of terrestial life. Each link activated a microphone set for such-and-such a distance. Now we were hearing a Japanese countryside....Then we were taken straight into morning, the king greeting the socialist labor of New Zealand, and I heard geysers spewing hot water.
Then this wonderful morning continued in sweet Tahiti, at the market in Papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of New Cytheria wandering through it -- you could hear their lovely guttural language, very much like ancient Greek....
Terrible noises of the street, streetcars, factories -- we seem to be in Chicago and it is noon....
The angelus rings at the Munster in Bonn and a boat with a double chorus singing passes along the Rhine on its way to Coblenz....
| . . . 2000-03-28 |
Advances in fake personalized license plates sold in truck stops technology
I'll be released on my own recognizance as soon as I can remember my name. And to help me along is that fine new web service, APageLinkingToLotsOfSoundClipsWithPeoplesNamesInThem.com (via Lake Effect).
It makes me want to record the audio from every movie ever made and then carefully snip out and compress every line that mentions a person's name and then upload them all. And not many web services have managed to do that!
| . . . 2000-04-26 |
| In New York in the 1980s you could always tell it was safe to talk to someone about music if you saw FM antenna wire tacked up all over their apartment, 'cause that meant they were trying to drag in from Upsala College, East Orange, New Jersey, the reluctant signal of WFMU, the radio station so hip that its program guide was a zine -- a pretty good one, too, especially when it came to graphics, what with Kaz DJ-ing there and bringing his fellow RAW artists along for the ride. In 2000, Upsala is upsadaisied, there are no oranges in Jersey, Your Old Pal Irwin is calling himself just plain Irwin with a last name of some sort attached, and I'm dragging the signal across a much longer wire. But at least the signal is better! |
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| . . . 2000-06-09 |
Gosh Darn the Pusher
One of the few things I don't like about MP3-mania is the way that the big software concerns have positioned it as a way to pirate CDs. I mean, what I love about MP3 is that it's a convenient cheap durable way to preserve and play audio that's otherwise available only on inconvenient or not-so-durable media: cassette-only recordings, old 45s and 78s, very out-of-print LPs.... But Real and Microsoft and MP3.com concentrate solely on making it easy for moving CD tracks to the computer, and since CDs are already pretty convenient and durable and are less likely to be out of print, it's hard not to see that as encitement to piracy.
In fact, one of the first free pieces of software that did convert non-CD-audio to MP3 files, BladeEnc, was hassled right out of binary distribution by big business monkeys. Conspiracy theory, anyone?
For alternatives, go to The Sonic Spot and Transferring LPs to CDR. My current toolkit: Wave Repair for recording and LAME for compressing.
+ + +
And for results, we're proud to announce the acquisition and sharing of:
| . . . 2000-06-14 |
Movie Comment: Gold Diggers of 1937
The last of the Gold Diggers (the finale's martial glitter may explain why there wasn't a Gold Diggers of 1939) but the first to center on the glamorous world of life insurance. Evereh-body! (270 KB)
You'll get pie... in the sky...
You'll get pie in the sky
When you die! die! die!...
| . . . 2000-09-12 |
 | a peculiar intelligible language Perhaps because so much of my life centers around no one knowing what the fuck I'm talking about, I've always enjoyed the company of animals who attempt conversation. My favorite dog, an elegant Sheltie bitch named Foxy, used to mimic human speech with a complex set of muffled ladylike coughs -- sounded like Mimi in Russian.... And at present I live with a plush and cobby black cat, Emma, who'll exchange declamations and outraged kvetches pretty much as long as I care to keep 'em coming. Who needs Slashdot? |
| . . . 2001-03-10 |
| Zeke Manners & His Gang Leo Ezekiel Mannes, a native Californian, became Zeke Craddock of The Beverly Hillbillies before moving to New York to become Zeke Manners, The Jewish Hillbilly. |
| His songs were covered by the Andrews Sisters, Hank Williams, the Byrds, Robert Byrd, and broke up the Calvanes. He worked as a radio DJ, hosted television shows like "Rhythm & Happies," appeared in his nephew's movie Lost in America, and, of course, contributed to the "Beverly Hillbillies" soundtrack. "At Mr. Manners's request, he was buried 'as a hillbilly.' He wore a baseball cap celebrating the Spice Girls, red suspenders and purple glasses from a 99-cent store. A cigar was in his pocket." |  |
| . . . 2001-05-26 |
When life gives you scraps, make collage
I gained new insight into the miracle of heterosexuality yesterday when I first read "A fixing on rotation" (via Bovine Inversus) while first hearing The Vernon Girls' "You Know What I Mean" (via alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.1960s). Insofar as I can, given my limited web space, I'd like to share the experience with you....
| "You Know What I Mean" by THE VERNONS GIRLS (Sha la la la la la. Sha la, la la la.) Messt1 this boy he started to tuh-wist me. Ooooh! -- uauchghh! (phlegm-hawking sound)2 Well, you know what I mean. | I became his fi-nance fixer, Paid for everything while he Twisted like a cement-tuh mixer With every ohther girl but me. Ooooh! - uauchghh! (phlegm-hawking sound) Well, you know what I mean. | Spends my dough but more to resist him3 He was awful cute you see. When my loost's run out, that twister's Dawn4 away and run out on me. Ooooh - wackgh! (disgusted sound) Well, you know what I mean. | When you're tempted, don't-uh you linger. Just remember he can twist Some gehls round his little finger And you might be next on his list. Wagh-khchh. (ladylike phlegm-hawking sound) Well, you know what I mean. So I said to him, Mary, like, I said, lissen 'ere y'flirt, I said what d'you think you're doin'? But 'e went awn! Twistin'! In fact he twisted the legs off me, I couldn't.... |
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| 1. A peculiarity of this Liverpudlian variant is its transformation of a terminal "t" to "ss." Thus, "met" to "mess," "loot" to "loos." 2. The only pre-1977 use of spitting as a hook in pop music? 3. Obviously wrong, but it took me so long to realize that what sounded like "five months" was actually "finance" that I despair of solving this problem. 4. Dialect, mannerism, or mistake? Topic for further research. |
| . . . 2002-01-16 |
| No Pictures |
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| . . . 2002-02-24 |
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McTell played blues songs not because they were blues but because they were popular, and he handled them superbly not because he was a blues musician but because he was a pop musician. In fact, when I first heard him twenty-some years ago, his eclecticism and detached engagement reminded me more of the Kinks than of any of the bit of blues I knew.
Now I can place him more accurately in the songster tradition, and more specifically among an assortment of drawling, danceable, dry-eyed tragicomedians that include Robert Wilkins and Blind Blake: simultaneously down-home and show-biz slick, languid and virtuosic, aiming above all for an appearance of natural aristocratic ease. (Peaks of energetic enthusiasm are typically expressed by McTell with a laconic "That made me sweat.") When need arises, I usually group them under the (admittedly unsatisfactory) umbrella term jug band, although determined taxonomists vivisect their seamless sound into more established categories like "folk," "blues," "ragtime," "vaudeville," "gospel," "hillbilly," or "hokum."
But McTell remains unique, with a uniqueness that tends to be overlooked because it can't be successfully mimicked or explicitly credited. McTell wasn't a composer of songs but of line readings; a master of nuanced affect, he's as phrase-intent as Webern. I've heard maybe a dozen versions of "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie," but no others flaunt hooks to match McTell's shifting vocal delivery and breaking-glass-organ "mess-arounds" (probably played on the headstock of his 12-string guitar); his demand for that "gal over there with that rrrred frrock on" exults in its peculiar lasciviousness as much as Ian Hunter's demand for "you there! with the glasses!" The structure is a given; the joy is in the details.
McTell himself said of his most strikingly original composition, "Dying Crapshooter's Blues" (1.9MB MP3): "I had to steal music from every which way you could get it to get it to fit." Although the criminal's mock testament has a history ranging from Villon to "Streets of Laredo" and "St. James Infirmary," McTell's three years of tinkering resulted in a structure part recitation, part theater -- a three-act pop opera complete with opening fanfare.
In it, he achieves a kind of fantastic naturalism: the reporter enchanted by the sordidness of his own fantasy, breaking in with interjections to remind us of the frame story, smoothly shifting back into the observer's world during what's chanted as one long limber line, the front-rhyme of "North" and "no" sealing the transition watertight:
Twenty-nine women outta North Atlanta no little Jesse didn't pass out so swell....
And then the deadpan summary of Jesse's farewell: His head was aching, heart was thumping,Moving to full-throated song again for the "moral" and the "memorial":
Little Jesse went down bouncing and jumping.
Folks, don't be standing around old Jesse crying:
He wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he dies.
One foot up and a toenail dragging,
Throw my friend Jesse in the hoodoo wagon.
Come here mama with that can of booze.It's not rural music, and it's not nightclub music; not exactly earthbound, but nothing close to ethereal. McTell is the ideal musician for the dreamy grimy rubbery urbanity of archy & mehitabel, for E. C. Segar's Thimble Theater (or for the early Fleischers' Popeye -- they never found a scorer as perfect as Cab Calloway was for Betty Boop), for the silent comedies of miracle-working white-faced saints with dirt-blackened hands....
Dyin' crapshooter's blues, I mean
The dyin' crapshooter's blues.
ResponsesJesse Anderson kindly writes: Just a little note about the 'breaking glass organ' in Pinetop's Boogie Woogie - I'm pretty sure that this was McTell hitting the strings below the bridge rather than above the nut. It'd be hard to get that much volume out of the strings at the headstock. This is an uncommon sound because it can't be reproduced in pin-bridged guitars - that is, guitars whose string ends go into holes in the guitar top just behind the saddle. But McTell's 12 strings we often more 'trapeze' style bridges - as you can see in the 2nd and 3rd pictures on your page, the string ends are passed through bracket connected to the bottom of the guitar, and there is a short section of string between this bracket and the saddle that could produce these high tones. |
| . . . 2002-02-26 |
There is, I think, a critical term which can cover McTell's character-driven vocals, his interest in performance rather than songwriting, his playfulness and close observation, even his eclecticism, and it isn't "blues," but "negative capability."
What goes on to distinguish McTell from Keats's idealized poet (if not from Keats himself) is the intelligence he brings to the job, an intelligence he's unwilling to sacrifice to sentimentality or method acting. How to marry the empathic and analytic impulses, fleshly weakness and rational judgment? In a dance rhythm, of course, but how else?
How else but with our old acquaintance irony? And McTell's is a particularly supple and slippery irony, clinging to bring out the subtleties of each gesture. It leaves him lightfooted and assured, free to underplay or overplay as seems appropriate, less chameleon than cosmopolitan: a human of many parts.
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But -- on sacred ground or not -- sardonic observation is allowed to run riot in "God Don't Like It," whose monstrous church lady bad-mouths each tippling member of the congregation and clergy while her quailed minion McTell peeps assent beneath her glare.
Returning from sheep to goats, comic distance also softens the sting of "Southern Can." An ancestor to the mellow thuggery of G-funk, its celebration of woman-beating is burlesqued by its own hyperbole and reduced to near whimsy -- like the little sword-swinging man in the Thurber cartoon -- by McTell's vocals, which are held to a light drawl even when he claims "I'm screaming." What's being observed here, with amused-but-absorbed detachment, isn't violence but the threatener of violence.
The best example of McTell's dry-eyed empathy and focus on the telling detail may be "Little Delia" (2MB MP3). It's another ballad with a varied history, but here McTell's adaptation doesn't emphasize the narrative. Instead, he fractures it into a collection of vignettes rippling forwards and backwards from the central drop-in-the-bucket -- a verse is accidently repeated without noticeable damage -- each principal and accessory given a piercing glance and passed by.
He changes the story's protagonists to professional lowlifes -- gamblers, "rounders" -- and then emphasizes their typicality, most insistently in the single-line chorus (that lyric form beloved of Yeats) "She's one more rounder gone." No one is granted dignity -- Delia's parents seem less upset by Delia's death than by her not having the decency to "die at home" -- and Delia herself is utterly disposable, only of interest to a court that, in turn, is only interested in punishing her unrepentant killer. But everyone is granted their given moment of fully-engaged attention, and in her very disposability Delia seems to drag an entire implied world of arbitrary injustice down with her. At her deathbed, as at Jesse's, McTell approaches transcendence through (as Manny Farber wrote of His Girl Friday) a sort of voluptuous cynicism.
Delia, Delia, take no one's advice.
Last word I heard her say was: "Jee-zus Christ!"
| . . . 2002-10-07 |
Happy Hour for Depressives
For a limited time only, you can punch back those Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are with the big hit of the Comics Journal message board, "It's a Great Life (If You Don't Weaken)," recorded by Sam Lanin & his Orchestra on November 26, 1929. That same day, long-time Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane assured his readers that "All the really important millionaires are planning to continue prosperity." Six days earlier, he'd predicted "It ought to be a good year"; by January 1931, he was looking at the bright side: "Sometimes when things go wrong, it is a comfort to be reminded that nothing matters very much. If the earth fell toward the sun, it would melt like a flake of snow falling on a red-hot stove."
| . . . 2003-01-16 |
"And he was a nice fellow, shy. His face was so pretty, so soft." - Fats Domino, 2002
Those who think rock is about the frenzied masturbatory rhythms of the teenage male prefer Little Richard; those who think it's about being an asshole redneck prefer Jerry Lee Lewis; those who think it's about white boys impersonating black men why the fuck should I care what they prefer, let 'em wait for Eric Clapton. Most experts of the time agree that the true King of Rock and Roll was Fats Domino, who maintained rhythm and groove alike with magisterial ease, who crossed race categories, who chicks dug, and who was (unlike some people I could mention, and although Billy Lewis sure tried) inimitable. (Elvis's "Blueberry Hill" is one of his weakest '50s recordings: stripped of hokum, he sounds shrunken, pale, pathetic, lost.)
The thing is -- this presumptuous and cumbersome thing is -- with all my denials and hedging, I do think there's a way Elvis Presley divides the world into before and after, a way in which he originates the "rock music" genre, and that in a way (and in the way) it connects to American racism. It's just not a straightforward way.
Elvis's own straightforwardness misleads us. As cultural critic Tuesday Weld says:
| . . . 2003-01-27 |
Hauled to the stars with enough rope to end three lifetimes, Presley trailblazed new methods of failure as he had new methods of success.
Although show biz had cast up amateur singers before, they had first achieved celebrity by other means. (Still plenty of Louis Prima over there, by the way.) Presley's Dean Martin fixation may seem unaccountable at first, but aside from the shared baritone and the movie acting, I think Dino supplied a model for anti-professional showmanship: a pretense of casual contempt for the artificiality of the situation, conveyed via goofed-on or forgotten lyrics and idiot patter.
In Elvis's adaptation, minus, of course, any genuine sense of security. Such insolent nonchalance was something a show-biz pro earned through a lifetime of hard work and hard heckling; it wasn't something to ape directly. Elvis Presley, like that later king Rupert Pupkin, applied himself to the aping as if it was the point of the work.
And, like Pupkin, he proved that the audience couldn't tell the difference. No wonder the Rat Pack despised him: his version of "cool," like his version of "Hound Dog," was "frenetic," "nervous," "lame," and very successful.
Quite a few rockers since have taken that stance toward public appearance, albeit with different influences (ranging from the Goons to Burl Ives) or with more open hostility (Johnny Thunders, now there was a showman!). Elvis was a studio creation, though, and it's on the studio that his influence really clung.
Lieber and Stoller again:
"The thing that really surprised us was we were used to working in the studio where we had to get four sides in three hours, and here were these guys who came in and, on studio time, they would take a break, they would have peanut butter sandwiches and orange pop and joke around -- we would sing other people's songs, do a gospel number just to loosen up, there was no clock. Frequently we'd have what we thought was a take, and he would say, 'No, let me do it again,' and he would just keep doing it. As long as he felt like doing it.... In many ways he was a perfectionist, and he could be very insecure, but in other ways he was very relaxed in the studio -- a strange combination."It may have seemed strange in 1957, but it would get awfully familiar. The rats had taken over the lab.
Though he didn't live long enough for a full-out Dr. Jeckyll, Buddy Holly was tinkering with home recording even before the decade ended. Eminent later examples include the "what do you wanna do?" "I don't know; what do you wanna do?" songwriting of the Beatles post-1965*, Bruce Springsteen (who explicitly cited Elvis to justify his own extravagant quest for the absolutely perfect accident), and the post-punk Clash. Even basic training at a hit factory as strictly run as Motown couldn't guarantee immunity: witness the horrific ends visited on the very different spontaneities of self-expressing Marvin Gaye and dancing machine Michael Jackson. All forgetting that their favorite records were bashed out quick, first-to-fourth take, everyone in a room together....
Presley's attempts at re-enacting the fortunate chance began at Sun; he even dramatized the process in his first self-parody. There were more to come.
First the "real," drawn from the unprofessional. Then the professional simulation of the real. On the Memphis album, he managed the most remarkable artifact of his career: a self-portrait (in covers) of a hollow mask; the emperor stripping down to his clothes. After Memphis, the real had its revenge. Simulation became parody; parody became upstaged by the reality of its imperfections; reality constricted to frustration, embarrassment, and fear.
In his final signature numbers, there was no more reaching for ease or grace or goof. Instead, he bellowed against the closing of the light like a barfly Mario Lanza. A last ditch effort to prove he did have talent, this adulation could be justified....
What a mess.
| * | No coincidence that Elvis Presley's best LP and John Lennon's best LP are both spiritual autobiographies of (in Lester Bangs's phrase) "gauche and wretched majesty." No coincidence, for that matter, that rockers Bangs and Meltzer found it impossible to stretch the semi-documentary form of the blurt to book length. Or, probably, that I find it so difficult to wrangle any prose-shape longer than might fit comfortably into a conversation. |
| . . . 2004-03-15 |
| "Someone Wants You Dead" World of Pooh According to the wall clock, it was done at half-past five. | On any serious political issue, at least half of American voters don't agree with you and a significant minority would like you to drop dead. With each strong opinion you hold, the number of voters who disagree with you and the number of voters who would like you dead grows. If you hold three or more strong opinions, no one you agree with will ever win a nationwide election. (Unless they've successfully hidden their intent.) Since I hold at least three strong opinions, my vote is usually decided by who'd like me dead less. In a race between Dianne Feinstein and John McCain, say, I'd vote Republican, since they'd both like me dead but Feinstein works harder at it. Ralph Nader, too, would shuffle a grim pavan upon my grave. On the other hand, although John Kerry isn't fond of me, he wouldn't go out of his way to do anything about it. Kerry for President! |
On ya, Ray. Course, I'd always thought of voting in terms of who I'd like to see dead the least. In which case, yeah, yeah, whatever: Kerry for President.
A nobler algorithm, but I'm old enough to remember that voting for a presidential candidate doesn't necessarily lengthen their lifespan.
are you the ray davis-- who makes the manoala's???????????
be well
walk softly
les
| . . . 2004-07-12 |
For years now, while marching to work or performing some low-grade chore, I've had this little song occasionally pop into my head.
Well, more of a chant. A really lame 1978 British punk band attempt at ska sort of thing, or a really lame garage band attempt at a Joe "King" Carrasco polka.
| "Guilty Party Time" (No MP3 available at any time) Guilty (Repeat with pronoun variation) |
It could be worse, but still I wish my subconscious would find a safer message to simmer.
Atomized junior's tenacious subconscious has provided what might have been the source material for my tenacious (and derivative) subconscious's work.
| . . . 2004-08-30 |
As for the words that have miscarried in the printing (which I believe are not many, though some there be in all writings), I doubt not but they may be rectified easily in the reading by any reasonable capacity that will but cast over again their eyes, where they apprehend the defect to be, applying it to the sense of the rest, which in my opinion is a better way for direction than to set down the errors in the latter end of the book, since few people will take the pains to compare both places together, being rather willing to let the faults die to their memory than to busy themselves with trouble in another's concernment, especially having enough already in the story for their leisure or recreation. This being all I have to say, I bid you farewell.- "To the Reader" from The Princess Cloria by Percy Herbert, 1661
heyman I was you need to understandpipe and reading and what the hell's this I keep these parts of my life separate ok I was at tofu hat slurping mp3's down the pipe and there's yer scribbling hand again...so get TV back on topic OK , yer gonna get all ubiquitous an everything then do it
Speaking of TV, during my recent AWOL I got my first ever — in ten years of web publishing!— poison-keyboard message:
you're a thoughtless geek and your mindless comments on verlaine and television lack insight or truth. plus you are gay.
The fella's a more astute textual critic than sexual therapist, I'm afraid.
| . . . 2004-09-19 |
Critics and teachers try to explain the frame tale as if it was somehow for the reader's comfort.
In fact, readers are just as happy without it. When they retell, they extract the "real" story's plot and discard the shell — their own frame as reteller is sufficient, thanks. All a movie adaptation typically needs, if anything, is a title sequence of flipped creamy heavy-stock pages. On the best seller's enticing cover, "As Told To" is kept in small print if it's in print at all.
No, a frame benefits the builder. Construction starts more smoothly with explicit boundaries set and with the burden of justification deferred.
Experiment yourself. Make up a story aloud. Then try starting it with "The other day this guy at work told me". Or pretend it's a folk tale or a translation. See how much easier that was?
Try singing straight out:
"A woman's a two-face: a worrisome thing who'll leave me to sing the blues in the night."Feels kinda stupid, don't it?
Blackface, like any dangerous modality, requires more art than straight delivery. Arlen's ethnic superiority tickling the ivories right alongside his gleaming cuff links. "America The Beautiful" versus "This Land Is Your Land". I heard Janis Joplin sing "Go Down Moses" one time, very early on. It was electrifying precisely to the degree it was untheatric. Cross-modality but genuine grief and hope. Arlen's just cooning around.
Comparisons are odious. But if you gotta assign points, my understanding was that Harold Arlen wrote the tune and Johnny Mercer wrote the words (and sang it with, you're right, not a lot of oomph).
Mercer was a clever guy, but my own favorite mainstream 1940s pop blackface-without-makeup singer-songwriter is Hoagy Carmichael, who at his worst borders Mick Jagger territory. Hard to resist Hoagy, though that affected accent sometimes makes me want to try, and though I guess Fats Waller managed it.
There was an animated cartoon, a buzzard, he was flying along and singing: "Ah'm a bringin home a baby bumble bee, ba doop ba doop, ba doop-a-doop a-doop."
I can't hear "Blues In The Night" without thinking of it.
The "Arkansas Traveller" lyric you're reaching for goes, as I remember:
I'm bringin' home a baby bumblebee.
Won't my mama be so proud of me?
The name of the buzzard was (depending on whether you talk to Mama, Bugs Bunny, or Bob Clampett) Killer, Beaky, or the Snerd Bird. I don't think of him when I hear "Blues in the Night," but I do think of him an awful lot.
UPDATE: My readers are a superior (or at least select) bunch, and the initial anonymous responder tones down with great grace:
My apologies to Howard Arlen and his heirs and afficionados. I saw this thing on PBS? Where Al Jolson was trying to justify his "Mammy" schtick? Then the screen started doing this low-light-level throb, I started getting sleepy...
Well said. Just try to imagine what PBS would make of any of us, and imagine the conclusions viewers would draw.... (N.B.: I am much taller in person.)
| . . . 2006-10-23 |
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| "Carve Dat Possum" by Sam Lucas (with an assist from "Go Down, Moses") (as performed by Harry C. Browne & Peerless Quartet, 1917) The possum meat am good to eat. Carve him to the heart. You'll always find him good and sweet. Carve him to the heart. My dog did bark and I went to see Carve him to the heart. And there was a possum up that tree. Carve him to the heart. I reached up for to pull him in. Carve him to the heart. The possum he begun to grin. Carve him to the heart. I carried him home and dressed him off. Carve him to the heart. I hung him that night in the frost. Carve him to the heart. The way to cook the possum sound: Carve him to the heart. First parboil him, then bake him brown. Carve him to the heart. Lay sweet potatoes in the pan. Carve him to the heart. The sweetest meat in all the land Carve him to the heart. Carve that possum, Carve that possum, children. Carve that possum, Carve him to the heart. Oh, carve that possum, Carve that possum, children. Carve that possum, Carve him to the heart. | As environments grow harsher, biodiversity becomes chaff. It's winnowing time again. A good time to know one's species. Couple years back, the Fantagraphics web site posted a recording of a Nixon-era on-stage interview with stogie-chompin' obscenity-tossin' 100%-pure-bitter Walt Kelly. I recollect one moment in particular, when, after repeated attempts to get him to admit to harboring some last splinter of child-like wonder and hope, Kelly roared, "So what you're saying is I'm a fairy." Having worked on Pinocchio, Kelly knew from fairies, so I guess we can take his word he wasn't one. Me either. I'm more a Jiminy Cricket type, 'ceptin I remain one of those folks Jiminy bets don't believe that. Riddle me, riddle me, rot-tot-tote.... Squirrels have been suggested as an avatar, but I feel no bond to the greedy beggars. I admire the white bear, but my wagging jaws lack tenacity. And The Man's best friend, like poor poopy Hitchens, uplifted from brick-dodging junkyard dog to yapping Corgi, I pity you. You can't beat them, so you join them. Once you join them, they beat you more. Now they beat in sport instead of in earnest, but still it's more. Also "a deer in the headlights of history" I'm not. I'm not so decorative, nor so herbivorous, nor so ignorant of trucks. Nor am I a pedigreed, primped, and tenured gerbil, exercising my wits against a bell and mirror and sleeping on a bed of shredded Marcus. A scavenger of garbage, a hisser, a sulker, urbanized but un-urbanable.... When nuance becomes an established technique of sabotage, us quibblers feed the revolution only in the most literal sense. We try to play possum and find we're playing Shmoo. But I got nowhere else to go, so still I go Pogo. It's what's for dinner. Berkeley, California – Wien, Osterreich. For Phil Cubeta. |
I think it would fly as a rap: "I'm the real Walt Kelly / I really rock 'em / I'll shoot you dead / An' ya won't play possum" etc. - RQH
An old friend anonymously inquires:
But what about Daffy Duck?
"When have I last looked on the round dot eyes and the long wavering bodies of the little black ducks of the moon?"
Josh Lukin triangulates:
First time I read Swamp Thing 32, I cried for five days straight. But I would not have objected if anyone'd thought my lachrymosity had a different orientation.
Phil declines.
| . . . 2007-11-19 |
Pop critics never paid much attention to Smokey Robinson's work from the 1970s and early 1980s. Maybe it's because a couple of his biggest hits were weak and written by other hands. And I guess Pure Smokey, an attempt to apply Norman Whitfield naturalism to middle-class family life, may be too peculiar for most tastes. (Although anyone capable of swallowing Mott the Hoople....)
But Smokey's Family Robinson, Where There's Smoke..., Warm Thoughts, and Touch the Sky all sound (and feel and move) like an Apollonian auteur at a comfortable peak. Off the singles-and-touring treadmill, Smokey's voice gained suppleness. Unlike the empty-pated yodel-birds who still rule contemporary R&B, he was able to maintain intellectual focus across a long groove. And whereas most quiet-storm songwriters travelled from point A to point A with an extended loll at point A, Robinson found a way to structure the new expanse.
Twist endings hadn't been all that uncommon in country or soul 45s — two lovers, both of them are you — but unless delivered by the most extravagantly soulful of voices, their effect was shallow: a startle, a novelty.
Instead of jokes, Robinson began to produce simulations of realistic emotional shifts, and the sting in the tail usually carried an anodyne. In numbers like "Into Each Rain, Some Life Must Fall", from behind an ostentatiously presented, ludicrously threadbare conceit, Smokey pulls a magically affecting image. Starting as post-separation lament, "Heavy on Pride, Light on Love" builds into a frenzy of middle-aged lust; starting from rarified sentiment, "Touch the Sky" reaches the same destination. As a collector of romantic-vengeance songs, I'm fondest of "The Hurt's On You," which seems at first like the usual smarmy sarcasm, then pivots on a single line into an expression of genuine empathy — of community, even.
But as pure concept, the most remarkable example is his belated answer to "The Love I Saw in You (Was Just a Mirage)": If nothing lasts forever, than our love can achieve the immortality it desires only by embracing impermanence.
Castles made of sand
Don't let our love be like
Castles made of sand
Blown about by strong ocean breeze
Scattered, scattered, in a million tiny pieces
Unstable
Unable
Washed away when the tide starts to change
And nothing left, no, nothing, no trace of where it stood
Weak foundations
Mere imitation
Well
If our love is made of sand
Then let it be a desert land
A desert land
Let it be strong and free
And wide and warm
Like a desert land
Let it be strong and wild
And free and warm
Like a desert land
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Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2004 Ray Davis.
