First Snowfall at Opus 40

Just a dusting. But snow is here.

Jazz on Jazz

Starting an informal list, with the help of my core of jazz main men, Peter Jones, Mike Kaufman and Larry the Fluff Audette, of jazz composers saluting other jazz musicians.

My first three:

John Coltrane -- Mr. P.C.
Charles Mingus - Goodbye Porkpie Hat
Dizzy Gillespie - Woody 'n you

From Mike:

Thelonious Monk -- In Walked Bud
Benny Golson -- I Remember Clifford
Dave Frishberg -- Zoot Walked In

From Peter:

Charlie Parker -- Billie's Bounce
John Lewis -- Django
Duke Ellington -- Concerto for Cootie
Charles Mingus: Jelly Roll Jelly


and more from me:

Raymond Scott -- When Cootie Left the Duke
Jelly Roll Morton -- King Porter Stomp
Fletcher Henderson -- New King Porter Stomp

Just a Little Further, Father

This is interesting. While most distinctions between words blur with time, further and farther -- at least according to Hubpages -- was always blurred, and it's only recently that grammarians have started clarifying the distinction -- farther refers to miles, further to everything else. I'm not sure why I should particularly trust Hubpages, but at the moment I have no other corroborating source.

Battle of the Decades

No one was happy about it, but Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, featuring the redoubtable Teddy Penergrass, won out. with 5 votes, with Hammer and Neneh Cherry each getting 2, and The Stripper one. I was the only one to vote for Mickey Mouse.

The new batch:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and we can be thankful for having lived through (to varying degrees) the American Century in Music, one of the most fruitful, varied and innovative eras in the history of music. And you can be thankful for me, filling your ears and minds with some of the best and some of the worst in that tradition. And if, over the last couple of weeks, you've cursed me for some horrible selections, perhaps this one will remind you of how much more painful it is to have to choose between a selection of great and distinctive stylists.


40S ON 4
Glenn Miller
(I've Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo


50S ON 5
Everly Brothers
Devoted To You
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXeiExU8lrA


60S ON 6
Sam Cooke
Chain Gang




70S ON 7
Chicago
Baby, What A Big Surprise ('77)



80S ON 8
Debbie Gibson
Shake Your Love



90S ON 9
Black Box
Everybody Everybody



Well, we have three on the lower tier and three on the upper tier, and they divide where the fogey meets the road. None of the lower three are awful, though they all have aspects of awfulness. Chicago had a style and a sound that was considered original at the time -- jazz/rock -- but it was a sound that almost no one did well. Miles did, of course. Chicago blended the wimpy end of rock with the tame end of jazz, to no particular advantage. Does anybody really know what time they're going on for the next show? Does anybody really care? If anyone is interested in hearing what jazz/rock should have and could have become, amd you can find the album, check out Brute Force. Their only album was produced by Herbie Mann, and described by Downbeat as Pharaoh Saunders meets Sly and the Family Stone. The jazz was free and adventurous, the rock was gritty and groove-based. The great Stan Strickland was their tenor player.

Debbie Gibson was awful, but she was young and cute, and she was actually the youngest female artist ever to reach number one with a song she wrote, produced and performed. Needless to say, she didn't do any of them well, but she did in time develop into a pretty solid professional, and it's hard not to have a certain modest affection for someone who could say of her early pop idol career, "You never get a chance to be that cheesy again."

Black Box were Euro-House, which is different from Euro-Disco in that...er...well...in that their records misdiagnosed a strange and near-fatal illness each week. They were awful in that they hired a supermodel to lip-synch their vocals on their videos, but otherwise they weren't bad.


OK, on to the good stuff. I'll do them chronologically, since choosing between them is so darn hard, and I'd rather put it off till the last minute.

Give yourself eight minutes of uninterrupted time to watch the Glenn Miller video, because it's that good. They go through the song once with Tex Beneke and the Modernaires. And that's good, though not great. Beneke's voice, like his saxophone, was the perfect vehicle for Miller's arrangements. He was whitebread, but he was the epitome of whitebread, and nobody ever did it better. Larry the Fluff has another opportunity to vote for him, as it turns out, and with another novelty song (I had this sneaking suspicion that we'd done 'Kalamazoo' before, but I can't find it in my files). Anyway, Tex Beneke looks like the archetype for Billy Batson and Captain Marvel, and he makes for a thoroughly enjoyable musical experience. Then, as he finishes, and you think the song si probably finished, the Nicholas Brothers show up. They sing as well as dance here, and I love their singing, too, but the dancing is on a whole other level. If Fred Astaire was the grace, and Gene Kelly the athleticism, the Nicholas Brothers were both. And if Glenn didn't swing like Basie, he swunbg enough to put the Nicholas Brothers into orbit. If you can't get enough of the Nicholas Brothers -- and who ever could? -- check them out with Cab Calloway here --

If this isn't the very best of the Everly Brothers, it's right up there close. The Everlys were as musically tight as Glenn Miller, and they were perfectionists to the same degree. I somewhere have a CD of Everly Brothers outtakes for those first Cadence sessions, and the versions of "Wake Up Little Susie" and "Bye Bye Love" that hit the charts were between their 15th and 20th takes -- these two young kids, trying to explain to seasoned professionals like Chet Atkins what they wanted, and finally getting through to him. The outtakes -- even up to the final outtakes -- are wonderful, and a lot of artists would have been satisfied with them. But they were wonderful in the way that earlier family harmony groups like the Delmores and the Louvins were wonderful. The final takes were a new sound, and it was all theirs.

Is this the best of Sam Cooke's songs? Who knows, who cares? Sam Cooke was such a triumph over his material. These mostly dumb little novelty songs that no one else could have made into great records. Or a chain gang song that's so clearly not out of any chain gang experience. If you want an actual great song, it's "Touch the Hem of His Garment." None of it mattered. It was Sam Cooke, and that's all that mattered, and our experience of his voice caressing those lyrics almost makes us believe that they were great songs.

I was pretty sure I was going to end up voting for Sam. But it's Glenn Miller and the Nicholas Brothers.

Battle of the Decades

Many complaints over the last BOTD -- a general attitude that this was a weak competition. It's my belief that anyone can vote for a good song -- it takes real musical acumen to choose between lesser tunes. And it wasn't even such a bad group. If Joni Mitchell backed by Pat Metheny and Michael Brecker can only finish third, that should tell you something. But Joni only picked up three votes.

The Madonna-loving whippersnappers were insufficiently impressed by La Isla Bonita to give it more than four, although it's certainly not Madonna at her worst.

So the Forties picked up this round, even though I couldn't link to the actual recordings. Some voted for Jimmy Dorsey's soaring sax, some for the melodic charm of "Jersey Bounce," and some out of loyalty to New Jersey. Jimmy and "Jersey Bounce" picked up six votes, and the laurel.

So...you thought the last batch was bad -- wait'll you see this one. Actually, I didn't think the last group was so bad. There was merit in all three of those selections. OK, there was no merit at all in any of the others. But since I have a finely honed death wish, I'll post it, especially since I'm heading down to see Charis and Wendy, and I can be attacked by them in person. And don't forget, the real test is voting when you have nothing to vote for.


We almost had another Eastern Seaboard tribute this time around -- I'd just C&P'd a new list, when my computer froze, and I had to reboot, and we lost, among other numbers, Harry James and Helen Forrest doing "Manhattan Serenade."

Instead:


40S ON 4
Dick Haymes
It Can't Be Wrong

50S ON 5
David Rose & His Orchestra
The Stripper



60S ON 6
Mouseketeers
Mickey Mouse March



70S ON 7
Harold Melvin
Bad Luck ('75)



80S ON 8
Neneh Cherry
Buffalo Stance



90S ON 9
MC Hammer
U Can't Touch This



We surely would have done better with Harry James than with Dick Haymes -- he was everything that was boring about the 40s, so much so that I can't find this on YouTube or anywhere else, and you're not missing anything. But the rest of this crop is so bad, they almost make Dick look good. "The Stripper" is pure kitsch, and dumb kitsch at that. MC Hammer is cookie cutter rap.

Neneh Cherry is better, but when you're a fogey, rap is rap.

Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes had Teddy Pendergrass, and he was one of the great romantic voices of soul, and he'd be a worthy vote.

What is "Mickey Mouse Club March" doing in the Sixties? Annette had already left by then. For that matter, what is "The Stripper" doing in the Fifties? That doesn't seem right to me either. Well, after a moment's research, it is and it isn't. "The Stripper" was originally released in 1958, as the B side of Rose's version of "Ebb Tide," but it didn't become a hit until it was on the sound track of "Gypsy" in 1972.

Does anyone ever wonder who all those orchestra leaders from the 50s were? The ones who had one or two hits on the charts? Who was Ralph Marterie? Frank Chacksfield? David Rose? Hugo Winterhalter? Percy Faith? Ray Anthony? Frank Weir? Russ Morgan? What were they all doing with orchestras? What did they do with those orchestras the rest of the time? Play proms and debutante balls? If the classic big bands of the 30s had all had to disband because of economic hard times, what was the economic story for these bozos? I know some of them, like Les Brown, had radio gigs for people like Bob Hope, but that doesn't explain the whole phenomenonlet.

Anyway, I vote for Mickey Mouse Club. It meets Jon's criterion of iconicity. And if anyone else cares to join me on this, you're as welcome as can be.

Opus 40 Thanksgiving Weekend

If the weather is good, we will be open.

Opus 40, Fall Foliage

A recent visitor, Mr. John Hubbard of Hamilton, NY, sent us a bunch of pictures he took during a visit at the height of the fall foliage season. I loved them -- I'd never seen the fall colors here captured so well. Mr. Hubbard has allowed us to use them, so I've posted a slide show.

Battle of the Decades

No surprise on the last one (which I didn't get around to posting here) -- it was a walkaway for the Beatles with very tough competition. Nine votes for Let it Be, 3 for Fortunate Son. Glenn Miller, REM and Sarah M. all pulled down one each, and all had great songs.

Here's the new batch, and I predict a wide spread.



40S ON 4
Jimmy Dorsey
Jersey Bounce



50S ON 5
Trini Lopez
If I Had A Hammer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyTO5vcFWuw

60S ON 6
Jan & Dean
Dead Man's Curve
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Anq4wdZc2Ow

70S ON 7
Joni Mitchell
Free Man In Paris ('74)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXBba77U1_Y

80S ON 8
Madonna
La Isla Bonita
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHZDjO_DlSI

90S ON 9
Janet Jackson
Black Cat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJFgUbzslNQ



Trini Lopez in the 50s? That can't be right. Well, at least it wasn't "Lemon Tree." But it displaced some actual 50s song that might have been good.

I never loved Jan and Dean, but the song does have nostalgic appeal. Janet Jackson is all flash and no substance. She has about as much sex appeal as Mary Lou Retton, and a particularly ordinary voice. It's good flash, but that ain't enough. So these two go out together.

So we move on to the finals. Madonna has flash and substance to spare. And I actually had not heard this song before, and it's wonderful. I love the Spanish guitar. Jimmy Dorsey gives us another white swing guy. Glenn Miller had a sound all his own, but Jimmy was the better jazz musician (although I do have a recording of Coleman Hawkins' first session, with the Mound City Blowers, featuring Miller on trombone). I couldn't find Jimmy's version of Jersey Bounce on the Web, but last.fm has a bunch of other waxings http://www.last.fm/search?m=all&q=jersey+bounce. The classic Benny Goodman version, a great one by Gerry Mulligan, and an unbelievably great one by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. There's also a version by Glenn Miller, in which he shows that when he's up against the jazz greats, he can't compete.

And I'm going with Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, and the recently departed and mourned Michael Brecker. I don't think Joni Mitchell is a great lyricist. Her lyrics are always a little pretentious and forced for my taste. But she's a great singer, and a great composer, and boy, can she put together a band. Michael Brecker kicks ass here, and Joni kills.

A Walk Through Opus 40

A lovely video tribute on YouTube by 1Pablo247:

David McDonald on Opus 40

Click To Play

Who's the real Marxist? Unsurprisingly, it's Woody Guthrie. And the song about the lady and the gypsy is not necessarily promising material. The Clancy Brothers' Gypsy Rover wimps out completely. In the first place, she doesn't have a husband to leave. She has a fond lover, but he wins the election for upper class twit of the year -- he doesn't even compete. It's left to her father to chase after her -- score one for the patriarchy! The father loses...sort of...but not really. The ersatz gypsy turns out to be the lord of the land all over, and if there's a message there, it's that the poor man can't win. Not only is the aristo going to get the woman, he's going to co-opt the poor man's rough-hewn charm.

The Gypsy Davey is a real gypsy, and not a sly whistling singing seducer like the Gypsy Rover, either. She just feels his magnetism -- the magnetism of the proletariat -- and goes.

In a way, though, the wraggle-taggle gypsies are an even better paradigm, because the rejection of the soft life of the aristocracy doesn't even depend on sex appeal. And this is a wonderful lyric -- it's basically the same story, but look how it begins:

There were three gypsies a come to my door,
And down stairs ran this a-lady, O.
One sang high and another sang low
And the other sang bonny bonny Biscay O

Then she pulled off her silk finished gown,
And put on hose of leather, O
The ragged ragged rags about our door
And she's gone with the wraggle, taggle gypsies O

It was late last night when my lord came home,
Inquiring for his a-lady O
The servants said on every hand
She's gone with the wraggle-taggle gypsies, O

Why does the lady throw herself headlong into the life of the wraggle-taggle gypsies? What is the strange harmony the gypsies sing? Is she bewitched, if not seduced? They are gypsies, after all. And who's the narrator here? It's not the lord. Is it a servant, a major domo? Or some sort of weird Mercedes McCambridge-type lord's sister?

I still like Woody for working class hero. I like that it's the boss, rather than his lordship -- this is a solid anti-capitalist message.

After that, they're all co-opted to one degree or another. Conway Twitty's cowboy is the macho stud who can give the lady what she needs. She'll go back to her rich guy husband, but she'll never be his again, and you know she'll be putting on those tight fitting jeans and going out prowling for the cowboy, or some cowboy, again. But although he protests his credentials too much -- he's a cowboy, he's a good ol' boy, he's a peasant -- he's never a real egalitarian. He feels just like a peasant who just had met a queen, in his mind she's still a lady. There's more awe than class warfare.

And John Denver is just a wimp, a hands-acr0ss-the coffee table wimp.

Clean Hands

A student wants to write a paper on “Lay Lady Lay,” but she’s supposed to be writing from a political perspective, and she doesn’t see how you can possibly approach “Lay Lady Lady” with a political interpretation. I tell her I’ll give her a lot of leeway -- maybe there’s no chance. But on my way home, all I can think of are political interpretations of “Lay Lady Lay.” And that just with the few lines I can remember.

I generally figure I can write anything I want in this blog under the safe assumption that my students don’t read it. I generally figure I can write anything I want under the safe assumption that nobody reads it. But Skye, if you happen to find this, I guess it’s a gift.

“Lay Lady Lay” is powerfully erotic charged – it exists in an erotic moment, and it’s easy to see why no would wanna step back and consider its political implications. You wanna be her, about to tumble into that big brass bed. You wanna be him, aflame with desire.

But who are these people? She’s a lady. And who is he? Just from the couple of snatches I remember of the song, his hands are clean. Who comments on the cleanness of his hands? Not an aristocrat. He’d take it for granted. So he’s a workingman, a peasant. He’s the Gypsy Davy. He’s the Cowboy and the Lady, the cowboy and the lady in tight fitting jeans. It’s class warfare – the aristocrat who can’t give his wife the earthy delight that she needs (I find myself assuming the Lady is married). It’s the basis of racism, and all class snobbery – the fear of losing our women to them, the fear of the conqueror that the soft life of the ruling class has robbed them of their virility.

The reverse of that – the aristocrat and the milkmaid – can play itself out in one archetype as the Cinderella story – poor girl uses her sexuality to raise herself in class, but she’s still the loser in gender politics, she’s still subservient. The other reversal, in the traditional gender archetype – the cowboy gets the lady to say yes – his earthy sexuality brings her down to his level, and she loves it, The milkmaid gets to say No to the aristocrat. She leaves him unsatisfied…she keeps the upper hand. Sarah Palin – in her scenario, at least – says No to the foppish, white wine-and-brie-loving Obama. You want me, but you can’t have me. I’m fucking Grandpa instead.

If there’s an element of class anger here, there’s sexual politics too. She’s Milady; she’s Madonna. And he’s there to turn her from Madonna to whore, the two archetypal roles. He’s going to lay her across the brass bed of a New Orleans whorehouse.

But the Gypsy Davy, like Jody in the army archetype, has got the girl and gone. Gone for good. Even here, there's a hierarchy. Jody's a bottom feeder, the Gypsy Davy represents freedom, escape from the whole capitalist trap, as well as the sexual virility that comes with it. The cowboy, on the other hand, doesn’t get to keep the lady, but she’ll never really belong to the rich rancher again.

None of this is the case with Clean Hands. He’s still begging. He is, in the terms of the other stories we’ve read this semester, the supplicant student of Isaac Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant,” not the jolly coachman-seducer of Maupassant’s “Confessing.” He’s Keats’s bold lover – all of which makes the song so erotic. Desire is erotic. The Gypsy Davy, the Cowboy, Jody – they really are about power. The erotic moment is past for them. And we know what happens if the Bold Lover wins his goal. The Madonna doesn’t become the whore; the fairy becomes the demon. The sexual conqueror becomes the sex slave. La Belle Damn Sans Merci has him in thrall.

It’s Clean Hands’s vulnerability that gives him the intensity of desire. He can’t know what colors the aristocrat has on her mind. He can tell her that, like Marie Antoinette, she can have her cake and eat it too, and the magic of the moment of desire allows us to forget that Marie Antoinette couldn’t have that either.

But getting back to the political, by pleading for the lady, Clean Hands is buying into the capitalist system, the hierarchy of power. He wants her because she's a lady, because she's the unattainable, because she's a step up the ladder.

OK, Skye -- that's a start. Next time I'll actually look at the rest of the song.

Fruit Flies and Popular Girls

I've been pretty consistent in keeping this site focused on the arts and education, and keeping it out of politics -- there are too many other good sites covering that area. But Sarah Palin's attack on fruit flies pushes over into education, so I can't resist.

Research money on fruit flies a waste? Here are some of things it can but:

Huntington's disease

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported on Monday that researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have cured fruit flies of the genetic disorder Huntington's disease.


Birth Defects

A Queen's University study of fruit flies may revolutionize the way birth defects are studied.

Fundamental secrets about the development of human embryos

Fruit flies ... are essential workhorses in thousands of biomedical research laboratories around the world. Decades of study have revealed that the tiny insects, which bear little resemblance to people, nevertheless share much of our genetic heritage. Fruit flies possess strikingly similar versions of the genes that promote normal human development and, when altered, contribute to disease.

"Nobody would have predicted that an arcane fruit fly that had a leg sticking out of its head would have revealed fundamental secrets about the development of human embryos," said Charles Zuker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego.

On Sept. 6 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute campus in Chevy Chase, Zuker and a distinguished group of researchers joined forces to extol the virtues of the fruit fly as a model system in biomedical research.

The metamorphosis of biology into a science offering numerically precise descriptions of nature

The metamorphosis of biology into a science offering numerically precise descriptions of nature has taken a leap forward with a Princeton team's elucidation of a key step in the development of fruit fly embryos -- discoveries that could change how scientists think not just about flies, but about life in general.


Use of fruit flies in the International Space Station to learn what space travel does to the genes of astronauts.

Fruit flies, genetic malfunction and human disease.


But what really tickled my curiosity is why Sarah decided to pick on fruit flies, of all things. Fruit flies have been a lynchpin of biomedical and genetic research going all the way back to Mendel.

Then it hit me...that's precisely why. She vaguely remembers hearing about them in high school science, and she hated high school science -- all the popular kids hated it. Besides, she and her popular friends probably used "fruit fly," like "fruit bat," as a gay-bashing insult, so she thinks this is just something to snicker at.

Handicapping poetry

I've been asked to speak to a group of students this Wednesday as part of a symposium on "Writing for Publishing." They want me to talk specifically on poetry, so I have to figure out what to tell them. Well, I pretty much know. You can't write poetry with an eye toward getting published. If you try to, you might get published, but you'll never write anything any good. You write for the poem -- to fulfill your obligation to that poem, to find why it matters and bring that out, So the real question is -- what do you do with the poems you've written? Writing poetry is inspiration and work, technique and passion, and that's all that should matter. What comes after is strategy and marketing, and at that point, these are virtues. You're not betraying your art in the slightest by being good at selling yourself, or your work.

If you're a slam poet or a performance poet, the path is basically the same as that of a musician. Start in small clubs, build up a reputation, go on to bigger venues.

If you're a printed word poet, you can submit work to magazines, you can enter contests, you can network whenever you have the chance, and if you have the temperament, you can make more chances. If you go where poets are -- writers conferences, summer workshops, elite graduate progams -- you'll meet more poets than if you don't, and people will start to know who you are. You can start a poetry-related blog, and try to get links to other blogs -- you'll be more successful here if you have something to say than if you're just making an online place to self-publish.

Submitting work to journals that publish poetry -- you need to know what the field is. There are a couple of good annual directories of poetry markets -- Poet's Market and Dustbooks Guide to Poetry Publishers. There are also a lot of good web sources, but these two books are the best and most complete. I read Poet's Market like the racing form, looking for clues to help me in picking winners. First, bloodlines. Many magazines list a few of the poets they've published. Are these poets you like? Poets you'd be pleased to get between the covers (of a publication) with?

Second, stamina. If the magazine has been around for ten years or more, it's likely to have a more substantial reputation, and less likely to fold between the time you send work to them and the time you get it back.

Third, class. In the racing form, this means the size of the purse the horse is racing for. In poetry, there's no purse. It's a strange profession in which you give away your primary product in the hope of ancillary revenues -- teaching jobs, fellowships, reading circuits. So class here means circulation. How many people might actually read your poem? Pick a magazine that has a circulation of 1000 over one with a circulation of 200.

Contests are very popular these days, and they can be a good way to go, although I haven't done it myself. You'll have to pay a small entry fee to most contests, so think about whether you want to make that investment. If a contest is sponsored by a legitimate magazine or organization, and if it has judges with decent credentials, you can assume it's probably on the up and up. A few years ago, there was a scandal about contest prizes all being won by friends or former students of the judges, but most places have now been shamed out of that. Many of the contests are chapbook contests, and if you have a body of work you're pleased with, look into them.

A book of poems? That's for later. Start with the first steps.

Wow...well, I guess that's what I'm going to say.

Battle of the Decades

THE '40S
Peggy Lee
Manana
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUT6mTq5ekM

THE '50S
Fats Domino
It's You I Love
http://www.last.fm/music/Fats+Domino/_/It%27s+You+I+Love?autostart

THE '60S
Tom Jones
What's New Pussycat?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsoYU1z0nbU

THE '70S
Earth, Wind & Fire/The Emotions
Boogie Wonderland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jLGa4X5H2c

THE '80S
Loverboy
Queen of the Broken Hearts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfRJtkDJOkU

THE '90S
Billy Idol
Cradle of Love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxZPPOHqop4


An overwhelming -- and gratifying for me -- vote for Margaret, for warmth, intelligence and musicianship. REM second with three votes, although Fred Koller suggested "REM are the Monkees for gen x slackers." Which is a putdown of sorts, but where does it leave me, given that I'm on record as liking the Monkees? One for Lee Michaels, One for Madonna, coming up surprisingly short in the intergenerational battle of the divas.

Another great pop diva of the 40s up this time around, but I don't that she'll get the same type of support.

And since I'm not sure who I'm supporting this time, instead of my usual elimination stratagem, ending with my winner, I'll just go through them at more or less random.

Well, I'll probably eliminate Loverboy first off. They aren't so much worse than the others in the "Well, Dick, I'd give it a 76 -- it's got a good beat, you can dance to it" sweepstakes. But I couldn't really listen to it all the way through.

Billy Idol's got a good beat, and you can dance to him, and he has a girl in his video who takes her shirt off, and he takes his shirt off, and he snarls a lot, and he's entertaining enough.

Earth Wind and Fire have a great beat, and you can really get down to them. Plus they have all those great 70s outfits, and some nice playing, and some great grooves.

Manana is a dumb cutesy song, and more than a little racist, but it does have Peggy Lee, and Lordy lord, she was pretty back then.

Can I really even be considering voting for Tom Jones? Come on, admit it, some of the rest of you are tempted, too. This is a guilty pleasure, and while you can get a YouTube of Tom performing it in concert (really awful), the recording plus Japanese anime is the best way of experiencing it.

No YouTube for Fats -- I have a link to the song on Last.fm. It's not Fats at his absolute best, but it's plenty good.

So I'm between -- God help me -- What's New Pussycat, and Earth Wind and Fire, and Fats. Stay tuned while my good taste angel and my bad taste angel battle this one out.

And...since this was sent out...bad taste has triumphed, and I went with the Pussycat, in spite of this from my daughter Wendy:

I am sorry, but you have all lost your minds. This is a crappy choice and there is nothing I want to vote for - and certainly not What's New, Pussycat? Alexandra had the best out of all - she is thousands of miles away. She could have pretended her email was down, thus saving herself from her humiliation. I guess I will go with Billy Idol, if no abstentions are permitted - but I would prefer to abstain. If it is good enough for Sarah Palin's family, it should be good enough for us - oh wait, it wasn't good enough for them either.

Saxophone Colossus

The blog 17 Green Buicks has a list of important jazz albums, including G-Man, the album recorded live by Sonny Rollins at Opus 40 in 1986, and acclaimed by critics as one of the best jazz albums of the 80s -- one of the rare albums to capture the strength of a live Sonny Rollins performance.

This was also the concert where Sonny fell and broke his foot, got up and finished the gig. You can see it on YouTube -- the Green Buick guy links to it. I added my reminiscences to the third of the YouTube segments.

Keats and the Squirrel

My students, writing on “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” have all started with the withered sedge and the dearth of birds as symbols of desolation, which of course they are. But the landscape is not described entirely in terms of desolation. It’s desolate for the knight, but not for the squirrel. And someone is enjoying that harvest. It’s the opposite of “Grecian Urn,” where the townspeople are frozen in time on the pilgrimage to the sacrifice, and the little town is empty. Here the knight is frozen in place, forever unable to partake of the harvest.



This also suggests that the narrator is just passing through. He’s seen signs of the harvest before he gets to the barren place where the knight loiters. Real life and real nourishment aren’t that far away, but it doesn’t seem as though the knight is ever going to get to them…and it seems as though that’s his choice. He’s loitering. Did the word have the same connotations in Keats’ time? Apparently, yes. the OED quotes Sir Walter Scott in 1814: “Officers…loitered in the hall, as if waiting for orders.” The knight doesn’t seem to be waiting for orders; he’s already gotten them from the pale kings and princes. Don’t bother to try to go anywhere.



The knight is in thrall to his world between illusion and reality. The sedge is withered, not because he’s in a place of perpetual barrenness, but because the harvest is done and winter’s approaching. The traveler knows this. He is presumably going to keep going, on to a farmhouse where he can get some good bread or other fruits of the harvest. And he seems to know that there’s nothing much he can do for the knight.

Who Has Websites?

The brilliant (and under recognized in this country) French filmmaker Pascal Aubier has his own website -- unfortunately for his American and British and Canadian and Australian fans whose French may not be up to snuff, it's only in French. This also means, I've discovered, that if you don't have your Google search engine set to "Search for pages written in any language" (under Preferences) his website won't be listed.

At least he has a website. Francois Truffaut, as near as I can make out, doesn't. Neither does Jean-Luc Godard, although he does appear to have a MySpace page. Nor Eric Rohmer. Nor Bernard Tavernier. Has the idea of individual websites not occurred to French filmmakers yet? Or anywhere in Europe? There's an Ingmar Bergman website, but it seems to exist only in English -- and I have reset my preferences to "Search in any language."

The Bergman site is a fan site.

Do filmmakers not have their own sites? Individual movies do -- you can see them included in all trailers these days. Martin Scorcese doesn't, though there are several Scorcese fan sites. The Coen brothers do. Neil LaBute doesn't. Jon Avnet doesn't. There are a bunch of Tarantino fan sites, but he doesn't have his own.

Why not?

So Aubier is in the vanguard. But not in English.

Battle of the Decades

The Beatles won the last BOTD convincingly, but hardly unanimously. Chuck Berry got strong support, and both Mariah Carey and Benny Goodman got well-deserved votes. Nothing for Barbra Streisand, though she was worthy too.

Well, they can't all be choices among songs and artists of this level, and I'm afraid this one is not. But here goes:



THE 40s
Margaret Whiting o/Paul Weston
It Might As Well Be Spring
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKZ04mc1-e8&feature=related
http://www.last.fm/music/Margaret+Whiting


THE 50s
Johnnie Ray with The Four Lads
Cry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hm0r3AGrN8&feature=related



THE 60s
Ray Charles Singers
Love Me With All Your Heart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ6MTQbjQBc


THE 70s
Lee Michaels
Do You Know What I Mean
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fymw5ie9Zd4



THE 80s
Madonna -- True Blue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb8akXtOCaI


THE 90s
R.E.M.
Shiny Happy People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwPu96ZcV_I

It could be worse. As I was copying and pasting this, some of the songs turned over, and we had Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes), Disco Duck, and the Ames Brothers.

For you whippersnappers, the Ray Charles Singers are not Ray Charles, and in spite of the psychedelic video, they ain't psychedelic either.

And I can get rid of Lee Michaels almost as easily. He was the harbinger of the new spirit of FM radio, which was that it was starting to get a little boring. This isn't the worst song ever recorded, but who wouldn't change the station when it came on?

You might not turn off Johnny Ray quite so quickly (or you might turn him off more quickly). He was kind of horrible, kind of mesmerizing. He was sui generis, and also almost totally deaf, which may or may not explain his singing. Anyway, "Cry" was his ur-song, and it became famous for its naked display of emotion by a male singer -- was he unmanly? Was he the new man? This YouTube video also has his version of "Just Walking in the Rain," originally recorded by the Prisonaires, who were maybe the original gangstas, in that they were real prisoners, let out on a work-release program to record a handful of great songs at Sun studios. You can sample them here; http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=prisonaires&search_type=&aq=0&oq=prisona

This brings us to the two whippersnapper numbers, probably destined to be the big vote-getters this time around. Did Madonna ever make a bad video? If she did, it wasn't this time around, especially the booty-shaking trio at the beginning. She didn't make many bad records, either. However, I think I'd give REM, and their strange take on the world -- David Byrne meets the Marshall Tucker Band -- the nod here.

But I have to go with my dear friend Margaret Whiting. No one sang a pop song like she did, found the meaning in the words the way she did. When the Kool Jazz festival replaced Newport, and moved to New York, they called Margaret and asked her to appear in an evening of Tribute to the American Song. "But I'm not a jazz singer," she told them. "I only sing the melody."

"Exactly," they replied. "And do you know how hard it is these days to find someone who can do that?"

Margaret never stopped being herself, never stopped being true to the great songs of her father and her mentor Johnny Mercer, and was never a fogey, either. Her championing of the First Amendment rights of the erotic film industry led to meeting the love of her life, gay porn star Jack Wrangler. They've been together since 1976, married since 1994, and he's successfully produced shows for her and others.

A memory: when I started working with Margaret, I took Jon and Claudia to an upper West Side cabaret where she was featured. Somehow, the cabaret had neglected to provide an MC, and Margaret was stuck in the wings, waiting for someone to introduce her. Jon took the bull by the horns and introduced her from his seat at a table. She gratefully came out, graciously thanked him, and gave one of her always-great shows.

Here's my bio of her from The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_/ai_2419201301

The YouTube video pairs her with George Shearing; Last.fm has just a clip of "It Might as Well Be Spring."

My vote, and my heart, to Margaret Whiting.

Concert cancelled

Sadly, the Dennis deYoung concert has had to be cancelled.