Minutes of the Last Meeting

I used to give an assignment -- eavesdrop on conversations, and write down anything that you hear someone say in iambic pentameter. The purpose was to get poetry students away from the idea that metrical poetry has to be forced, or singsongy. I would tell them, at first this will seem impossible, but once you start hearing them, you'll hear them everywhere, and the real problem will become how to turn it off. Your girlfriend tells you, "I slept with your best friend the other night," and your response is, "That's great!" "It is?" "Yes, it's iambic pentameter!"

Anyway, one of the first times I gave this assignment, I decided to do it myself during a faculty meeting. I mean, you have to do something during a faculty meeting, don't you, to avoid going bonkers with boredom? So I started writing down lines, and pretty soon I had two pages of a notebook filled, and...I realized...a poem about academic life.

So here it is.

MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING

It wouldn't interfere with what we do;

I couldn't really poll the entire group.

Very, very briefly, here's the plan--

Elect the chairs of two committees first

(Able to run for these positions first)

Who'll want to lead the faculty towards greatness.

Within the AAC or SAC,

At least two people -- one is not enough –

The faculty at large will vote for chairs,

The AAC, I find, now having done it.

The AAC, last Monday, voted no

—Selected by the faculty at large—

And they pick someone who they think can lead.

Maybe the better thing would be to keep…

We have to somehow pull it all together.

Did everyone get a chance to sign the sheet?

There are seven searches underway

From a variety of different fields --

I know I’m getting questions all the time.

It’s not as academic a position,

The college writing program and the core.

There is the dean search, which is underway

A lot of applications were dismissed

This selection didn’t represent --

I don’t know anything about the search --

Is uppermost in everybody’s mind --

And in the end, of course, it’s Artine’s choice.

Ignore or Fight?

Back in the seventies, I was working in New York for a magazine, and in connection with an article, I had to go and talk to a guy named Alan Shackleton, who was a sleazy exploitation film producer.

At this time, there was a lot of press being given to rumors about a  "snuff film" made in South America, a porn film that ended with an actual murder on camera. Shackleton, when I got to his office, was making plans to capitalize on the rumors. He had a cheap slasher movie, and he had quickly added a new ending to it involving a fake killing of the lead actress, or someone who he hoped looked enough like her, since the original movie had been shot several years earlier. When I walked in, they were all sort of in a panic. The film was so tame, in addition to being so lame, that the film review board was giving it an R rating. So they were scurrying around to find a piece of film from a porno movie that could be shoehorned in somewhere.

Apparently they succeeded, because the film opened a few days later with an X rating, the title of "Snuff," and the tagline "Filmed in South America...where life is cheap."

But meanwhile, when I got home that night, my girlfriend was making plans with a women's group to picket the theater when the movie opened.

"Oh, God, no," I said."Don't do that. Being picketed is this guy's only hope of making a profit on this movie. It's so awful no one will go to see it after the first day, but if the protest makes the TV news, that's box office gold for them."

But she and her group would not be dissuaded, and they did picket, and the film did make some money for Shackleton.

So I was right.

Maybe. You're really never wrong to stand up against the truly awful in society. I still think I was right...sometimes you're just playing into the bastards' hands. But maybe the bigger picture is it's not OK, and you always have to say it's not OK when it's not.

How a poem comes together (sometimes)

I just found these old notes on my hard drive while looking for something else. They must have been something I started doing for a class at some time. I seem to have been following the genesis and development of a particularly slippery poem. The notes were apparently originally handwritten, and then transcribed over.  I have no idea how much time went by between one and the next. I'm guessing that the lines of poetry and the metrical notations were the handwritten notes, and the exigeses came when I typed them all up.

FIRST PAGE OF NOTES

I was thinking of writing a ghazal, and since I’ve been thinking a lot about a possible  connection between ghazal and blues, I began with

                the blues

and then tried to fit a couple of lines to it

The first crack of light in the morning was the blues

When all shadows were shadow, that was the blues

and at the same time, I written a phrase I liked the sound of

striped like snakes

and I started thinking of light – morning light, maybe morning light across a bed, striped like a snake, and the next line I tried was this:

She woke up in the morning with her arms around the blues

The morning light lay like a striped

SECOND PAGE

that seems to be as far as I got with that thought. I was in the process of deciding I didn’t want to use “blues” as the monorhyme end word in a ghazal. The next couplet I tried was (brackets around works that were crossed out):

Morning [began] started like a [striped] snake across her bed;

When all shadows were shadow, the dark was her bed.

So I’d gotten rid of two things I really thought I wanted to work with, the blues and “striped snake.”

The next thing I was going to get rid of was the ghazal. It wasn’t working for me; I didn’t feel it. But I still liked the formal regularity of the line, and I knew that the lines and rhythms I was hearing were formal. I decided to try a villanelle.

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

When the shadows clustered into shadow

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

Then, on the back of the page, a bunch of scattered notes. I was trying to find rhythms that I liked.

  -     /     -        /    -    /      -   /       -    /

day slithered like a snake across her bed

   /        -         /  -    /       -   /      -     /

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

    /     -       /      -     /   -    /    -

Shadows clustered into shadow

and a bunch of possible rhyme words for the B rhyme:

shadow

meadow

arrow

tallow

and under the list of rhyme words, another line:

hair like snakeskin stretched across her bed

which seems to mean I was moving away from the snake-as-sunbeam image, and this is maybe an example of letting a fine isolated verisimilitude go by.  I think snake-as-sunbeam may well be a pretty good image. But I was allowing myself not to be locked into it, to look around for other possibilities.

So here’s what fills up the rest of this page:

Like a snake she’d let into her bed

which I guess I hated. I hate it now, looking at it. The metric pattern forces the line to sound stilted and awkward – “LIKE a SNAKE she’d LET inTO her BED” -  which puts that horrible, ugly stress on TO. So under it, I have a note for the stress I want:

/    -   into bed  (DA – duh INto BED)

and under that, a line that fits the meter:

Like a snake she’d followed into bed

which I also liked better as a plot line, but I seem to have abandoned it. I go on to try a couple of other lines, using one of the “B” rhyme words. I didn’t have the whole lines, just this much:

-    /     -    /   pretended she was dead

/  -    /    -   , made her skin like tallow

and then filling out the lines (indicating words crossed out, words stuck in, and in the third line, a stressed syllable that had to go in, but I didn’t have yet):

For two days, she pretended she was dead,

                         felt

[made] her arms ^  like clay, [her] breasts like tallow,

Hair [hung] like snakeskin   /   across her bed.

Then, on the back of the page, a couple of lines that don’t seem to be going anywhere, and I think I knew they weren’t going anywhere:

When she was seventeen and newly wed,

 What men were   /    -    pierced her like an arrow

PAGE THREE

By now, I had the beginnings of a poem:

The day slipped like a snake across her bed,

And when the shadows clustered into shadow,

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead.

She showed her arms like clay, her breasts like tallow,

Her skin shed like a snake’s across her bed.

And it was working pretty well. Except I didn’t like it. I liked the image of breasts like tallow, but “arms like clay” didn’t do much for me. It seemed to be just there for the meter, to fill out the line. “They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead” seemed like a nice line. It was metrically regular. It said something interesting. Why didn’t I like it?

Looking at it again now, I do kinda like it, and I like the formal poem that’s starting to take shape. But at that point – and I hope my instincts were right – I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the form, and I really didn’t like the meter. I wanted to break free of it...into free verse, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s why they call it free verse.

PAGE FOUR

So I changed “wasn’t dead” to “was alive,” and I broke it into two lines, to shake myself loose from the metric regularity:

To show them she was

alive, she wriggled free from

her skin, like a snake, and now

her new breasts were soft, like tallow,

So I’d completely and finally abandoned the snake-as-sunlight image. Too bad, maybe. Or OK, maybe. Anyway, I needed to start stripping things down. I knew I liked the image of breasts like tallow to suggest a new, moist, not-quite-formed body emerging from the shed outer layer of skin. Here’s the next start:

To prove to all three of them she was

alive, she shrugged free from

her skin, like a snake, and when

she turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

[and her hands]

[and] her hair was downy, and white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was fast, she had

pads of air under her feet.

[and] She could move in any direction,

she could spin and dance like a leaf.

I tried out the “three of them” to see if they’d open up an interesting plot line, but they didn’t, so I let them go. This was pretty much the last hand-written draft.

That's the end of the notes I have in this file. If there were more intermediate steps, I don't remember them. But here's the finished poem.

PROOF

They asked her to prove she was real,

so she shrugged out of

her skin like a snake, and when she

turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

her hair was white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was sudden, she had

pads of air under her feet.

She could move in any direction.

She could flip and scoot like a leaf.

She turned into shadow with the shadows.

  

Books and movies

I'm reading The Green Mile, by Stephen King. I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but I've liked what I've read. I'm reading this one because it was originally published as a serial, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot.

Anyway, one always talks about books and movies, how the book is almost always better, but of course that's not true. As Howard Hawks said, often a good book will make a bad movie, but a bad book can make a great movie. High Noon came from a Saturday Evening Post story which no one remembers. Shane is from a Western novel that no one reads any more. Maybe genre fiction has a better chance at becoming better on film.  I read somewhere that Clint Eastwood acquired The Bridges of Madison County specifically because he wanted the challenge of turning a perfectly awful book into a good movie. Maybe he succeeded...I spared myself reading the book, and the movie was watchable. David R. Slavitt, poet and translator (his version of Ovid's Metamorphosis was not loved by some critics, but they were wrong -- it's brilliant), translated The Fables of Avianus from Latin. Are they an overlooked masterpiece? I asked him. No, he said. Avianus was a terrible writer. That's why I chose him -- so all the literary credit for the translation can go to me.

The Wizard of Oz is regarded by many as one of the greatest movies of all time, and although the books are beloved, it's hard to imagine anyone putting them on the best books of all time list. Still, I can imagine someone saying, "The book was better."

What about movies that are pretty nearly exactly as good as the book? I'd put The Green Mile on that list.

Lots of novels are written these days with the idea that they'll be made into movies, and the novels are written almost like screen treatments. They generally make serviceable novels, and serviceable movies -- neither is likely to stand out.

An odd exception to this generalization: Grahame Greene's The Tenth Man. Quoting from Wikipedia: "In the introduction to the First edition of his novel, Graham Greene states that he had forgotten about this story until receiving a letter about it from a stranger in 1983. Greene had first suggested it as an idea for a film script in 1937, and later developed it whilst working for MGMduring the 1940s. Nothing came of it and the rights were offered for sale by MGM in 1983. The buyer allowed Greene to revise and subsequently publish the work."

So The Tenth Man was actually written as a screen treatment, but it made a wonderful short novel. Interestingly, when it was eventually filmed with Anthony Hopkins, it wasn't a very good movie.

But back to The Green Mile. The book basically is the movie. The prose is straightforward, the story is the same in both versions. The one literary device that King uses, which is interesting and unobtrusive, is the moving back and forth in time by the first person narrator. The narrator places himself in a nursing home, maybe 40 or 50 years after the action of the novel, which is in the 1930s. So although he's essentially narrating the story as it happens, he's narrating a story that he knows the ending of, so he can jump forward in time and tell you what's going to happen.

Poem online

A poem at Halvard Johnson'sOn Barcelona website.

Who gets paid what?

A rant I posted in response to a Facebook post wherein the writer announced that the recent salary increase given to Seattle pitcher Felix Hernandez had made him hate baseball.

I've never understood all this rooting for management in baseball. It's unique to sports, especially baseball. No one is going to post that they hate computer software because Google pays a top software designer 20 million, or they hate Hollywood because Leonardo diCaprio gets 20 mil for Blood Diamond.
But baseball owners are so historically stupid -- they're the one group of capitalists who have led the fight to denigrate their own product, because they hated free agency so much...they preferred the old indentured servitude system where a Ralph Kiner had to accept a pay cut after leading the league in home runs, because he had nowhere else to go. What other business would have done this? Can you imagine, in the same era, a movie studio advertising BATMAN -- starring Jack Nicholson, who got paid $6 million plus a percentage, and boy, did that ham ever not deserve it?
Putting this in historical perspective again, at the same time that baseball owners were waging a PR campaign against their own product, a Broadway producer who understood publicity, Sonny Werblin, took over the Jets, and immediately paid a young college quarterback, Joe Namath, twice what the competitive rate at the time was. And instead of bitching and moaning about the salary, Werblin played it up -- built a positive PR campaign around it. Result -- the AFL shot up in the awareness of fans and players, and became a gold mine. This was around the same time that Lamar Hunt of the Hunt oil family was losing a million dollars a year with the Houston Oilers. A shocked sportswriter -- probably one of those in the pocket of baseball management -- reported this to daddy H. L. Hunt, who said "Uh-oh. At that rate, he'll only be able to run the team for another 200 years."
Seattle's ownership made what looks to be a smart business decision. They've made their fan base feel proud by locking up the team's best and most popular player. They've shown that they're serious about building a winning team, and that will make the Mariners a more attractive proposition to other free agents. And are you really going to root for those owners who've taken the luxury tax established by baseball to give small market teams a chance to compete, and put it in their own pockets?

Donald Hall on Poetry Readings

From an interview with Hall for the Woodstock Times, several years ago.


“Reading poetry aloud makes a difference in one’s relationship to one’s words,” Hall says. “When I started writing, I thought of poetry exclusively on the printed page, though I was always very much aware of the sound of words. Poe was my first influence, at the age of 12 – then Stevens, at 14. Even when I was writing with no sense of words to be spoken out loud, my throat would move as I wrote.

"But reading one’s own poetry out loud to an audience was unheard of back then. Frost did it. But Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore – they virtually never read out loud

 “So I was writing for ‘sounded print,’ not for the spoken word. Then one day when I was about 27, an agent for lecture tours called me. I was flabbergasted. He wanted to me schedule a tour of reading poems to people…on stage…in public?

 “I started out by reading with my hands at my sides, in a high-pitched monotone. Then I started to think more about what it meant to read poems aloud. When I was young, I’d thought about being an actor—it was between poetry and acting for me—but acting is only a part of it. As a teacher, teaching other people’s poems, I had always tried to implant a voice in the poems I was teaching. Now I started to think about that voice. I started to think about how poetry sounded out loud. What was at one time writing theoretically for voicing, has now become writing actually for voicing.

 “This can do good things for your poetry, but it can do dangerous things, too. I remember a time—it was in 1959—when I was working on a poem, and there was a key word that I knew was wrong. ‘Ah,’ I heard myself say, ‘but in a reading I can make it sound right.’ And, fortunately, I caught myself. ‘Uh-oh,’ I remember thinking. ‘Watch your ass. This can be dangerous.’

“There are other dangers in thinking about reading poetry aloud. You don’t want to be writing for the applause of college students. You don’t want to limit yourself to writing poems that can be understood in hearing, although there’s nothing wrong with writing some poems like that.

 “On the other hand, there are ways it can help. I go through many drafts in writing a poem. I write every day, but an individual poem may take me a year or more to finish. I don’t start reading a poem aloud until the late stages of revision, so all of my initial relationship is to words on a page, but when I do start reading it aloud, sometimes I’ll find my voice will drop when I get to a certain word, as if I subconsciously didn’t want anyone to hear it. That’s a good signal to me that I should be taking another look at that word.”

An audience at a reading, Hall notes, should remember that “it’s different from reading a poem. Basically, you want to listen for pleasure – pleasure in the sounds of the words, pleasure in the moment – with no thought of interpretation. Just take it in, and let it flow through you.

“I compare listening to spoken poetry to learning a foreign language. At first you hear words and translate them into your own language. Then, you get to the point where you can make that leap to thinking in the other language. To get the most out of a reading, you need to make that leap – to turn off the translation machine, and just listen to the flow of that spoken language. You don’t want to be writing a critical essay in your mind as you’re listening.”

Spotify 101

Someone needs to teach a course on how to find things on Spotify. Just because you don't find it,it doesn't mean it's not there.Researching my Godcild thread, I discovered a mention of a big band version, by Chubby Jackson from 1948. I checked -- you can't find this on YouTube, but you can on Spotify with great difficulty. A search on "Chubby Jackson" doesn't work, nor does a search on "Godchild. But if you enter "Chubby Jackson Godchild" you can find it.

It's listed as being on an album called "New York Scene in the 40's," but if you try searching for it on Spotify's search engine, you won't find it. Spotify's search engine doesn't seem to find anything with an apostrophe. So maybe just "New York Scene"? Uh-uh. It seems the only way to find it is to click through from "Chubby Jackson Godchild."

But once you get there -- what a wonderful album! Here's the track list:


1    Epistrophy - Cootie Williams
2    I Can't Get Started See All - Dizzy Gillespie
3    Good Bait - Dizzy Gillespie
4    Double Date - Metronome All-Stars
5    No Figs- Metronome All-Stars   
6    Yardbird Suite - Claude Thornhill
7    Donna Lee  - Claude Thornhill
8    Anthropology  - Claude Thornhill
9    Tiny's blues - Chubby Jackson
10    Father Knickerbopper - Chubby Jackson
11    Godchild - Chubby Jackson
12    All Wrong - Chubby Jackson
13    Nice Work If You Can Get It - Sarah Vaughan   
14    Mean To Me  - Sarah Vaughan
15    It Might As Well Be Spring  - Sarah Vaughan
16    Ain't Misbehavin' - Sarah Vaughan

Birth of the Cool: Godchild

Birth of the Cool 7: Godchild. I'm doing this in the order they appear on the CD, not the order they appeared on the original album.The reason for this choice...actually it wasn't a choice. This happened to be the first track listing I ran across online, not having the album in front of me. If I were to start over, I'd use the original listing. Actually, "Godchild" is the third track on the album. The first four were "Jeru," "Move," "Godchild" and "Budo." They were the first four songs recorded, and the two singles released, someone at Capitol having decided they were the best melodies, and likely to be the catchiest. A good decision, I think -- it's really those first four melodies that hooked me in thinking about the album, and made me want to pursue this. Certinly "Godchild" is a wonderful melody. It was written by George Wallington, an outstanding bebop pianist, and it's probably been recorded in more different version that any other piece except possibly Budo/Hallucinations. In at least one YouTube uploading, the composition is credited to Gerry Mulligan, and certainly his arranger's hand is here, but it's Wallington's tune. Starting with the Birth of the Cool track:

Here's a beautiful version by Wallington with a trio, featuring Nick Stabulas on drums, and Teddy Kotick, who I had the pleasure to meet when he played at Opus 40 with J. R. Monterose, on bass.







AllMusic lists a version several of the Birth of the Cool tracks by Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and I've dug deep, trying to find them, and have finally come to the conclusion that they don't exist. Apparently there's an LP of Charlie Parker - Miles Davis - Lee Konitz, but it's a teaser. Some of the tracks are by Bird, some by Miles and Konitz.



Here's a beautiful version by a Mulligan tentet featuring Art Farmer and Lee Konitz. Great ensemble work, wonderful opening statement of the melody by Mulligan, lots of room for solos, the Farmer and Mulligan solos neatly resolving in an ensemble restatement of the melody.





Versions you can find on Spotify but not YouTube -- Bill Charlap, Tal Farlow/Charles Mingus/Red Norvo, Howard Roberts. Here's one YouTube does have, from Kai Winding:


 And from the classic Mulligan-Chet Baker quartet:




And finally, Terry Gibbs with a big band:

Birth of the Cool: Deception

Birth of the Cool, track 6. "Deception" was written by Miles, and the arrangement for the Birth of the Cool nonet was Gerry Mulligan's. You can hear the musicianship of both of them at their best here, working in counterpoint to each other, Mulligan's ensemble voicings making a nest for Miles to soar out of.

It came from the last recording session for the album, in March of 1950.


I didn't know if I was going to find another recording of deception, and when I did, it blew me away. Clifford Brown and Eric Dolphy? I would never have thought of them as contemporaneous. But Clifford died in 1956 -- if you'd asked me to guess, I would have said around 1952 -- and Dolphy was just starting out, playing with local bands in LA. His father -- talk about supportive! -- built him a studio in the back yard, and friends -- like Clifford Brown -- would come by and jam. This is from one of those sessions:

Birth of the Cool: Budo

Birth of the Cool, track Five: Budo. For many years, looking at the album cover, and playing the tracks on it, I pronounced this in my head with a long U. But it turns out to be Bud-oh, a composition credited to Bud Powell and Miles Davis -- arranged by John Lewis for the Birth of the Cool sessions -- but based on an earlier Bud Powell composition, "Hallucinations." Here's the Powell original:

And from Birth of the Cool:



Budo is one of the most widely covered of the Birth of the Cool originals, but strangely, a lot of those versions of this classic have not made it onto YouTube or Spotify -- including versions by Red Norvo/Charles Mingus/Tal Farlow (who also covered "Move" and "Godchild" on the same session), Lee Morgan Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd and Horace Silver, Joe Lovano and Hank Jones. Versions by Miles and Chet Baker, Miles and Charlie Parker, Miles and Diz also can't be found on YouTube, although there is one by Miles and Trane. Here's a nice version by Bud with Stan Getz:



Bobby McFerrin has a very interesting solo version of "Hallucinations," also not on YouTube, but you can find it on Spotify. And here's a great version of "Hallucinations" by Keith Jarrett:

Birth of the Cool: Venus de Milo

Birth of the Cool, track Four: "Venus de Milo" is a Gerry Mulligan composition, and again, it's been rarely covered, not even by Mulligan except on his "Rebirth of the Cool" album, which was basically a mistake. There's a version by Tito Puente and Maynard Ferguson which is good, and you can find it on Spotify, but if you look for it on YouTube, you get, curiously, directed to a whole string of Audiobooks and episodes of The Great Gildersleeve. And there's a lovely version of it by Jimmy Rowles, which you can find on YouTube with some difficulty, and if you keep digging, you'll discover that it comes from a trio album with Rufus Reid and Mickey Roker, on which they performed four Birth of the Cool numbers -- the others being "Jeru," "Godchild" and "Darn that Dream."



Here's the Jimmy Rowles version of "Venus" -- beautiful. I wish I could find the other three "Birth" interpretations, but no luck on either YouTube or Spotify.



And here's the only other version I could find on YouTube (not counting the song by Prince). This one a bit of an oddity, by the US Army Blues Band. Really not bad -- nice Mulligan-like arrangement.



The entire "Birth of the Cool" sessions have recently been recreated by a Dutch tribute orchestra named Cool Dawn -- you can find them on Spotify, if you're looking for a tribute band. Also on an album of Mulligan compositions (including "Boplicity" from Birth of the Cool) by a group called the Latino Blanco band, also findable on Spotify.

Sex, drugs and genius

I did a graph search using Google ngrams of the words sex, drugs and genius in books from 1800 to,the present. Drugs have always outstripped sex, but the gap reached a plateau of wideness in 1918, shrank to almost nonexistent in 1930, and has widened continually since then. In 1800, genius showed up a lot, sex and drugs barely a blip on the radar, which of course did not exist in 1800. Genius has gradually declined over the years, until it fell behind drugs in 1966, and lost out to sex in 1978. What all this means, I couldn't begin to tell you.

Giving away the ending

In June of 1790, Benedict Arnold’s plans to betray his country by turning West Point over to the British were discovered, and he had to flee for his life, his name forever synonymous with treason.

Suppose you didn’t know that was how the story ended. Then you have a dashing young merchant sea captain, a daring smuggler, a loving husband of an unloving wife who gains, loses, and gains another fortune, who gives up a life as the wealthiest merchant in Connecticut to join the Sons of Liberty and then the Continental Army, who leads the first successful campaign of what is not yet even officially the Revolutionary War, winning Fort Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain for the new American cause. You have a commander who leads an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the British in Canada, but in doing so, stays with his men through the most grueling hardship, winning their love and respect. You have the master strategist, the daring commander, the wounded victor in the battle of Saratoga, and where’s your story going?

If you don’t know that your hero is Benedict Arnold, there’s suspense, there’s indignation, there’s reader identification with this brave man who serves his country brilliantly, but is thwarted, hamstrung and betrayed over and over by cowards, publicity-seeking thugs, and petty political maneuverers.

And maybe it’s a better story that way. Hard to say, because we know the story so well.  As it is, when we read about Ethan Allen stealing the credit for the victory at Ticonderoga, about the treacherous engineer Montresor giving him misleading maps for his journey to Quebec, or the cowardly Colonel Enos turning back with 300 of Arnold’s 1000 men, about the politicians who stabbed Arnold in the back, passing him over for promotion again and again in favor of lesser men, we read it with a sense of foreboding, rather than suspense, and each of these betrayals take on a sense of inevitability. Also, a red flag goes up in our minds every time we hear of a betrayal. Those incidents loom larger in our sense of the story than they might if we didn’t know the ending. Knowing the ending makes it a different story.

E.M. Forster, in his great book Aspects of the Novel, writes about life measured by time vs. life measured by value, “and our conduct reveals a double allegiance. ‘I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it.’ There you have both allegiances in a single sentence. And what the story does is to narrate the life in time. What the entire novel does – if it is a good novel – is to include the life by values as well.”  The story of Arnold’s life, because it’s nonfiction and we know the end, is told by values. Betrayer and betrayed – in these moments time stands still. Of course, it’s also told by time. Events unfold chronologically. But time stands still for us as readers when a betrayal enters the story.

What can you say about a 21-year-old girl who died? What if you don’t start the story that way? If you don’t start the story that way, frankly, it’s probably not a mega-bestseller, because you don’t have a story if she doesn’t die, and you’re pretending to a suspense that the reader isn’t going to feel. Take away the suspense,  and the life told by values becomes altogether different.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love begins with the death of Cesar – old, sick, bloated, ugly, drunk and poor. As he stands up, staggers and falls in the swoon from which he will not awaken, he knocks over the credenza which holds all of the 78 RPM records he made in his life. And for the rest of this wonderful novel, as we follow the young, brash, ruthless, gifted, self-absorbed womanizer, we see him through this veil of sadness.

Just as we know the Benedict Arnold story will end with treason, we know how “I’ll sing you the true tale of Billy the Kid / I’ll sing you the deeds that this young outlaw did” will end. By the time he’s 21, he’ll have been “shot down by Pat Garrett, who once was his friend.” But in the case of Little Joe, giving away the ending by telling us that “he’ll wrangle never more / His days with the remuda they are done” lets us know that the life measured by time is going to be short, and the life measured by values will have to be measured against that inevitability. On the other hand, in “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” we have three characters – four, with Big Jim – whose lives are measured in both time and value, and the intersections of those lives leaves room for suspense which is enhanced by our not knowing the ending.

What happens next? Is a key element in every story. Starting out by telling us what happens at the end is a choice you can’t make every time, but sometimes it can be the right choice.

Birth of the Cool - Moon Dreams

Moon Dreams is a standard of sorts, composed by Glenn Miller's pianist and Johnny Mercer, which may very well make it the only instance of of Miles covering Glenn Miller. The Glenn Miller version can't be found on YouTube, although you can find it on Spotify, but you have to search for Glenn Miller Moon Dreams. For a standard, it hasn't been covered much. There's Glenn's version, which isn't all that good, and one by Martha Tilton -- the first recording ever made for the fledgling Capitol Records.





But it seems it took Miles to really find the beauty of the song. As with many of the other Birth of the Cool cuts, it was covered by other artists from the session, like Lee Konitz. Again, not too many others.  But both Airto and Flora Purim have recorded it, separately and together. Here's Flora's version --

Birth of the Cool - Jeru

Birth of the Cool, track 2

"Jeru" is a beautiful melody by Gerry Mulligan that almost no one seems to have covered. Allmusic.com lists mostly versions by Mulligan, Miles, and a few other Birth of the Cool alumni like Lee Konitz. Allmusic lists a version by Oscar Peterson (on a Live in Paris album according to Allmusic), but I can't find either one on YouTube or Spotify. LastFM acknowledges that it exists, but they don't have it. Allmusic also lists one by Stanley Clarke and Patrice Rushen, which I was finally able to find on YouTube, but as "Jazz Straight Up - Jeru." Here it is:

 


I also found a version by the Clare Fischer clarinet choir, which can't be heard in its entirety on any Internet site that I've found, although you can hear the first 30 seconds on allmusic and other sites. And -- I suppose this is why I pursue stuff like this -- found out a lot about Clare Fischer, whom I had never heard of, and who died a year ago almost to the day. Check out his Wiki page -- fascinating guy. He won a Grammy in 1981.

Spotify has a vocalese version by Mel Torme, with Mulligan and Shearing backing him up, but it doesn't do much more than point up Torme's limitations as a jazz singer.

Birth of the Cool: Move

Started thinking about Birth of the Cool, and the original compositions by Miles, Gil Evans and others that made up that session -- what great tunes they all are. Started wondering who else has recorded them. So here's the first cut on the album, "Move," as played by Bireli Lagrene, the gypsy jazz guitarist who first made his mark at the age of eight, playing Django Reinhardt's book.

 

And again by Stan Getz, a live performance from 1951, featuring Teddy Kotick on bass -- Teddy who played at Opus 40 several times with J. R. Monterose.

Guns and Redstaters

I contribute to a small political discussion online forum, and every now and then I write something there that's modestly thought out, so I decided I'd post a few of those here, even though I've mostly stayed away from political postings here.

This has to do with the NRA's sudden discovery that there's violence in the media, and the conservatives' newfound meme that hey, why don't liberals care about media violence the way that we do?

iolence in the media has always been a liberal issue. What's weird now is that conservatives are taking it up, and they don't understand anything they're saying.

Exposure to violent movies, video games, etc., is (according to some theories) a bad thing because:

(a) it may provoke people into putting on hockey masks and slashing up teenagers. (not likely)

(b) it may provoke people (mostly very young people) into thinking that committing violent acts is a good idea, in which case they'll most likely turn to guns.

(c) it may make people (especially young, every easily influenced, not terribly mentally stable people) into thinking that the world is a very dangerous place, and they'd better get an AK-47 to protect themselves, their homes, and possibly even their neighborhoods (e.g., Trayvon Martin case).

Have I left out anything?

The Tragic Polka

The Tragic Polka on YouTube!

The Rocklins

Rehearsal for The Rocklins today -- the play based on a story by Harvey Fite that we'll be premiering June 9 and 10 at Opus 40! Today we worked on the music - by Thomas Workman - which is wonderful and challenging. There's essentially one song in the play - "Spirit of Stone," developed from a one- stanza poem by Harvey Fite in his book "The Rocklins." but different verses are sung at three different points in the play by representatives of three different cultures, and Thomas has varied the melody subtly to reflect each culture, using an Aeolian scale for the Greco-Roman Rocklin, A Phrygian scale for the Egyptian Rocklin, and a pentatonic scale for the Mayan Rocklin. It's very beautiful.

Tomorrow Never Knows

The concluding image of last week's Mad Men stays in my mind. Don Draper has had to find Beatles-type music for a sponsor, and he's out of his depth. "When did music become so important?" he asks his wife.
She gives him "Revolver" to listen to, and as the episode ends, he's standing in his perfect living room, listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows." He, of course, looks perfect as only Don Draper can. And the swirling sitars and guitar tape loops, and the lyrics about people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion, are moving the world into a place where Don's perfection is no longer relevant.
And it's a requiem for jazz. Don Draper is the Playboy ideal. His apartment, even with a wife, is the Playboy Pad. And this is the Playboy of the 50s, of the Kennedy era, of the Peter Gunn era, when jazz was the musical accoutrement to the hip lifestyle. Of course, the Playboy reader was the guy who regularly voted Doc Severinsen as the top jazz trumpeter. Music mattered in this era, the era of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly and Zoot Sims and Lennie Tristano, but to the Playboy reader it was background...the Playboy-approved background. And as Don Draper stands there, perfect, listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows," he is on his way to cultural irrelevancy, as the Playboy reader moves from choosing Doc over Miles to McCartney over Mingus, or for that matter Lennon over Hendrix.