Ars Amatoria

My bride has - not one - but two master's degrees.
So, like the song says, she can spell s-e-x!

Just sayin'...

Caught the first half hour of "Get Yourself A College Girl" last night on TCM; a complete and utter shriek, and you can say I said so.

The title song above is so awful that it seems an almost intentional joke on what were known as "co-eds" back in the day. And compounding the joke is the scene a bit later where "Terri"'s fellow "co-eds" insist that she's, like, Joan of Arc leading them into this brave new world of female liberation. To have s-e-x, apparently. Which is, well, sorta not a real "Joan of Arc" thing, but, whatev'.

I understand that the rest of the film features some early Sixties musical brilliance (the reviewer at the link discusses perhaps the most famous; the appearance of Astrud Gilberto performing The Girl From Ipanema):

"My friends, what any viewer of this sequence has just experienced is pure -- repeat, untainted in any way -- musical perfection. Incredibly talented artists, at the absolute peak of their careers, captured on well photographed 35mm format performing their single most famous number.

It just doesn't get any better than this."

Plus some early British Invasion from The Animals and the Dave Clark Five...well, let's say that if I'd been perkier and the flick on earlier I'd have tried to watch the rest.

Instead I am left with the indelible impression of the 1959 Miss America crooning about how intellectual women are better because they really know how to screw.

Which is not how I recall it, but perhaps I went to the wrong school.

Friday Jukebox: ¡Oscile los timbales!

Alexander Abreu - currently of Habana d'Primera - rocks the timbales:

What can I say? The sun is trying to break through, and I'm feeling muy Cubano; ohe', 'mana, dame una cerveza mas y' baje y siéntese al lado de mí, mi guapa, y mire la puesta del sol conmigo...

Friday Jukebox: Guitar Gods Edition

Caught Rodrigo and Gabriela - and their new sidemen, the Cuban group C.U.B.A. this past Wednesdayand they rocked the house just like this:Makes my fingers hurt just listening. But wonderful, wonderful music.

Friday Jukebox Saturday Edition: Like Nashville With A Tan

I wanted to post this yesterday because it came across the radio late one afternoon and reminded me of the way it made me fell back in the late Nineties when it was in heavy rotation on the FM Radio.
In case you don't know the backstory, the guy who did this is someone named "Shawn Mullins", who may very well be the poster boy for one-hit wonders. This is pretty much it.

I was going through a divorce at the time, and I was feeling sorry for myself. Even though reasons 1 through 99 my ex was leaving had to do with that I had been a lazy git, and a self-absorbed dick, and she had finally had enough of my nonsense and left.

But aside from the sob factor something in this little song always got me; maybe it was the horrifying grimness of the story he tells in it, the relentless misery of this wretched woman in this shitty little bar who is out of ideas and hope, and the guy on stage who doesn't have an answer, either...until the chorus.

And then, well, everything's gonna be all right. Right? Because...because...well, everything's gonna be all right.

And it seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, that this goofy little song isn't a bad theme song for our lives, most of us. We know that all around us is the stuff of tragedy, or at least bad melodrama. Poverty, cruelty, misery, unhappiness of every sort and color, pain, death, loneliness, the end of all our hopes and dreams. Non-alcoholic beer. Vengeful tax auditors. Divorce. Cancer.

But those are just the cold and dark outside our window, always there, always waiting.

Inside it's warm, and light, and there's love and hope, and those we care for around us. And if we look away from the black panes long enough, and pretend hard enough we can almost believe that those evils will not touch us; that the Angel of Death will see the blood of our sacrifices on the lintel and pass us by.

And, like the song says - the happy part, the catchy part, the part you want to believe - everything's gonna be all right.

And you know what? Maybe that's not such a bad way to live.

So let's take that chorus to the bridge, and peer over the railing there, and throw our dreams into the water.

And let the stream take them far away.

Friday Jukebox: Surprise!

Loves me some Norah Jones; sorry about the ad, but she's totally worth it.

Country when Country Wasn't Cool

Just a brief note that at the same time I was bloviating about country music Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money was doing about the same thing

His money graf: "Rather, today’s country radio provides messages that fit in very well with the modern Republican voter: reinforcing what they see as traditional values based in an idealized rural setting that they see as threatened by B. Hussein Obama and his Weatherman-loving, Derrick Bell-hugging ways with his health care and such." And he also has some interesting things to say about the marginalization of the "old" country style after the Seventies.

Worth a look.

Friday Jukebox: Dead Man Walkin' Edition

I've developed a mild obsession with the music of The Civil Wars:And the thing is, I'm not a particular fan of "country" music, at least the kind of thing that comes out of the Nashville yick-a-hoo music factories today.

The Civil Wars create something very different; a frighteningly naked, stripped-down, achingly-harmonious plainsong of the sort that my Celtic ancestors brought with them to the impoverished hills of places like West Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas that eventually became the blues, and Western swing, and finally the country-and-western that we know today.

The "country" music you hear cranking out of pickup trucks and from the speakers in the faux-cowboy bars always seems to me to be fundamentally about pride and arrogance. The singers - and the listeners - may adhere to the old formulas about whiskey and broken hearts and faithless women. But down inside is a sort of inverted smugness. Yeah, the music seems to say, I'm an ignerent shitkicker...but because of my bone-deep Country Strength (and patriotism and the love of Jesus in my heart) I'm a better man (or woman) than you latte'-sipping sophisticates and I - and down deep in your heart, you - know that.

If the music of The Civil Wars is "country" it sounds to me like the older country; the "country" of the Scots-Irish refugees who came here seeking not a better life but any life at all, having been whipped out of their old lives like starving dogs. It's a grievous music, full of the knowledge that while the meek may inherit the Earth while they live in it they'll probably get jack, and shit; that the rich man and the strong man are going to grow richer and stronger and the poor man will not. That a lifetime of toil and heartbreak are your lot and mine, and we cannot change that, and we cannot escape it.

Friday Jukebox: Poison and Wine

Remember where I talked about simple voice putting across a beautiful song?

Simply lovely.(Sorry for the ad, but it's worth waiting through, and h/t to Krugman, wherein I first heard this)

And this is for Lisa, with the gentle thoughts of another hopeful romantic.

So Emotional

I really try and avoid the horrible celebriphilia that runs mad through everything in American pop culture.

You know when you read something like that you're in for a post about celebrities and pop culture, right?So, okay. It's not that I don't enjoy pop culture; by and large - if you've been reading this blog for any time you know that - I am the pop culture guru in this household.

But to my mind there's a skeevy sort of obsession with famous people you can't avoid unless you work hard at dodging the electronic media and limiting your exposure to almost all the other forms of popular press and entertainment. I try, but even I couldn't miss the "news" that Ms. Whitney Elizabeth Houston departed this vale of tears the past Saturday, aged six years younger than I am.

Now in general this blog tries to live by Joe Kugelmass' "Five Rules About Celebrity Deaths", to wit;

1. A blogger is not capable of being “disrespectful” to a dead famous person. That person’s friends and family do not care.

2. In most cases, famous people who die young will still have managed to have more of “a life” than 99.99% of people who die old.

3. Many people who are publicly sad about a celebrity death had not thought about that celebrity once in the previous twelve months.

4. Some of the things that lead to celebrity deaths are, in fact, not relevant to the lives of ordinary folks (e.g. Michael Jackson’s personal drug doctor).

5. Public mourning is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors. For example, the bad economy increased mourning for Steve Jobs. People are more grieved by Whitney Houston’s death than they were by Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s death because her songs were more radio-friendly and sentimental.

In keeping with the first five of these rules I have no real insights or trenchant observations about the passing of Ms. Houston. She seems to have been a rather ordinary woman whose single outstanding qualities appear to have been her pretty face and powerful voice, without particular intellectual or emotional depth, lacking any hint of either greatness or depravity. Without her voice she would no doubt have been simply another nice semi-urban girl from New Jersey.

So it is her voice that ensures the emotional glurge regarding her death.

And for me, at least, her voice is perhaps the single thing that I truly dislike about the woman, and the only real observation of any worth that I can think to make about the woman now that she is sure to be enshrined in the pop culture pantheon.

Here's why.

First, let me qualify myself; I've sung publicly, not professionally, but in both an organized choral group and as a soloist. You wouldn't pay for my solo singing - at least, I hope you wouldn't - but I have a decent amateur bass-baritone and know my way around both classical and popular music. I've been known to rock the house with "Wild Colonial Boy" when I've had a few. So; I can sing, a bit. And as a result I have some very definite ideas about what makes a song work.

Okay. So, here's our gal the late Ms. Houston tearing into perhaps her best known pop song, "I Will Always Love You" at the 1994 Grammys.The performance is...well, it's what Houston did. The quivering vibrato, the swooping, breathy phrasing, and of course the "big moment" - it comes with the key change at 3:19 in the video - the pause, the breath, and then the soaring blare as Houston's voice rises and swells in a cresting wave of throbbing emotion. That was her style, and although she wasn't the only singer of her era who used it she might have been the best known and the most influential.

That belting style is now nearly inescapable when you hear power pop sung in public. You hear now it every time you turn on "American Idol" and any one of it's many imitators, or encounter one of the many pop-song belters trained in the post-Whitney Era. It's as if every single jazz and pop vocalist between 1950 and 1980 had been instantly turned into Barbra Streisand.

But...here's the thing. Check out the lyrics to "I Will Always Love You":

"If I should stay,
I would only be in your way.
So I'll go, but I know
I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way.
And I will always love you.
I will always love you.
You, my darling you.

Bittersweet memories that is all I'm taking with me.
So, goodbye. Please, don't cry.
We both know I'm not what you, you need.
And I will always love you.
I will always love you.

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you've dreamed of.
And I wish to you, joy and happiness.
But above all this, I wish you love.

And I will always love you..."

Got it? Is that a sad song, or what? "Bittersweeet memories"? "We both know I'm not what you need"? This sucker is about loss, my God; heartbreak, the death of a precious love, desolation, the long, slow, agonizing draught of bitter gall you know you will drink the rest of your life as the one you can never forget recedes in the rear-view mirror.

This is fucking tragedy, man.

But Houston's version - and all the other belters' that have followed her - makes a kind of joke out of that. The emotional throb and gush, the soaring finale...she's not standing there heartsick and grieving that she will always love you; she's hurling her challenge to the skies - she WILL always love you, goddammit, and she's not ashamed who knows it.

Now.

Here's the woman who wrote and first sang this song, Dolly Parton, doing the tune exactly twenty years earlier than the Grammys:Excuse me for being partial, but for my money that's how you put over a hearbreaking song; simple, clean, her voice as clear and sharp as a winter night and as crushingly empty. There's no strength in Parton's version, no power, no hope. She knows she has lost everything, and the sweet clarity in her voice makes the pain of that loss utterly unbearable.

But you hear much more of Whitney than Dolly in pop singing today. So while I am sure that there are those who were fond of Ms. Houston, or loved her, I cannot and do not pretend to share in their grief.

Since I was not a particular fan of the woman's vocal stylings what was lost to me by her death was only her voice and her vocal style, and since that part of her leaves me somewhere between indifferent and mildly irritated to mourn, or pretend to mourn, or, indeed, to do more than to note her passing with a rather irked shrug would be to violate the Five Rules.

Therefore, I will do no more.Sorry, Whitney, but...meh.

Friday Jukebox: Gramma's Naughty Youth Edition

From 1931.I love the comment on the Youtube site: "1931? Did they execute this guy for releasing such a song? I thought sex didn't exist before 1965, when hippies discovered it."

Friday Jukebox: Tears

My bride told me this story.

She and The Girl were coming home from a simple errand; a shopping trip, a visit to the library, and she was playing this on the radio as the station wagon pulled to a stop at the curb outside the house.
She sat for a moment, watching the windshield wipers push the spitting rain, until she heard a to-a-parent-familiar sound and turned to see our little girl weeping.

Like any mother would do, she turned and unfastened the Girl's seatbelt and hauled her over the partition into her lap. She hugged the small, shaking body to her, and kissed the bowed head on the sleek, shining black hair, and asked Missy if she could tell her Mom what was wrong.

Mojo says that when she had swallowed down her sniffles the Girl said;

"This song makes me think of all the bad things I did and the times I wasn't nice, and the times you didn't like me. And that makes me feel sad."

So Mojo squeezed little Missy tight and promised her that part of being mommies and daughters was that you were always loved, no matter what sort of bad thing you had done.

Because, really...what else can you say?

And the two of then sat listening to the pattering of the rain until it was time to go into the house.

Friday Jukebox: Double St. James Infirmary Edition

Today two videos for the price of one, both covers of the jazz standard "St. James Infirmary Blues". The first is probably the "classic", the 1959 Louis Armstrong version:
There's a nice discussion of the man's work on this number, and this recording in particular, here.

And then there's this, a recent performance by, of all people, the actor Hugh Laurie:
I'm not actually sure which one I like better, other than to repeat something I read once that Billie Holiday said when asked about the blues. She said that the difference between white people singing the blues and black people singing the blues is that for the white folks - no matter how sorrowful the tune - the music was essentially "happy"; syncopated, swinging, fun. For the black, no matter how zippy the tune or jump the rhythym, the music was fundamentally sad.

So...on this rainy Friday put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain.

So the gals can all know I died standing pat.

Friday Jukebox: Wild Wild Edition

Just felt like some serious boogie today.
Ella was truly brilliant and isn't this a great cover?

Dunno why this occurred to me; remember that awful "Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey" song I posted a year ago last December?

So, OK...if you watch, or hear, or read anything from the U.S. from about the turn of the 19th Century to sometime in the 1960's you can't get away from the "white ethnic" stuff.

By that I mean that it mattered - sometimes it REALLY mattered - whether you were a Yankee-type Yankee or whether your mom or grandpa got off the boat from Sweden or Italy or Greece. Ballplayers were "wops" or "squareheads" or "hebes", guys in the news had knicknamess like "Dago" or "Heinie", women were characterized as "fiery" if they had a name ending in "i" or "a" and "placid" if they looked like Heidi. And those goofy ethnic songs, they were all part of that.

And suddenly - within a decade - it all vanished. By the Seventies the whole "white ethnic" thing had dropped out of popular culture. It still pops up once in a while - the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" or "Moonstruck" sort of thing - but nothing like you'd have run across in the Thirties or Forties.

Bill James, writing about baseball (of course) said that it had much to do with the arrival of the African-Americans (and, probably to some extent, the Hispanics). When the civil rights era began and the blacks had semi-open entry into American society everyone else was just "white". At least, that was James' theory.

The other thing that occurs to me is that the early Forties was the end of the mass European migrations. The immigration window closed to Europeans as a group. By the Sixties the last first-generation Swedish-Americans and German-Americans and Italian-Americans had been here twenty years. They were, by the primary indicators that mattered; language, dress, tastes indistinguishable from the Yankees that had been here since 1790.

Not sure which was the most critical. But it's interesting that Ella and the Ink Spots and the bluesmen and rock-n-rollers and soul singers that followed them helped make all those wops and squareheads and hebes into "white people"...

One last bit of marginalia.

I enjoyed seeing a handful of magpies on my trips East this week (the one detailed in the post below as well as an even longer expedition just yesterday...).

Pica hudsoni has always been a favorite of mine, both for its gorgeous plumage as for its rude and intrusive intelligence.

But that wasn't what wandered across my mind. It's that the European cousin of our "Black-billed Magpie" (Pica pica) is just called a "magpie" and has a little doggerel associated with it. Are you familiar with it?

It's supposedly Scots and goes something like this:

"One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a wedding,
Four for a birth.
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Eight for heaven,
Nine for hell,
And ten for the Devil's one self..."

That's really all. Hope you had a great week, and are looking forward to a great week-end...

License to Il

What IS it about these juche videos?They're like candy; you just can't resist putting them to goofy pop music and dancing around the unheated hovel as you slowly starve to death.

I wonder what the ghosts of the hard men who died for Granddaddy Kim Il Sung in the freezing mountains of 1951 think about the ascent of the third Kim to the Throne of the Hermit Kingdom? From red revolution to hereditary monarchy in three generations?

God, what ridiculous monkeys we humans are.

Else We Would Love It Too Much

I'd like to you watch the first minute of this video. I can't embed it, it's probably protected by the Stones' record label.

Because as I was hunting for Stones videos I came across this and ended up watching the first minute probably half a dozen times. I couldn't look away.

The camera sails weightlessly along above the lush green of Vietnam. And the blooms of the ordnance - it's napalm, or napalm mixed with white phosphorus - are like perfect fire flowers that rise from the ground in gorgeous, deadly incandescense to the pounding soundtrack of "Paint It Black"."It is well that war is so terrible," said Bobby Lee, "...else we would grow to love it too much." Watch the first minute of this thing and you can understand why people - let's be honest; men - throughout all human time have fallen in love with war. Because in its way it really is incredibly beautiful.

But at the same time it's fucking horrible.

Watch it again. The part of Vietnam we're seeing isn't a factory, or a bridge, or a road. It's not a military base. There don't appear to be troops below the aircraft or within the rain of fire. I think the string of crappy little village shacks are...a string of crappy little village shacks.

And the fast-mover is blowing the shit out of them, apparently at random.

There's no pattern to this I can see. There's no visible "targets"; the aircraft isn't dropping its ordnance on a specific point, or a visible enemy.

It seems to be doing just what it looks like: flying along at 200 feet AGL just bombing the living hell out of random shacks and everything inside them..And I can't imagine how ANY sane human being could love that too much,

or some,

or a tiny bit,

or at all.

Friday Jukebox II: Northern California Kick Ass Edition

OK, nepotism confession time; the bass player for this group - The Mermen out of San Francisco is my ex-brother-in-law Allen Whitman.But ex-family-connections aside (and losing my friendship with Allen was and is perhaps the thing I still regret the most about my detonation of my first marriage) it is more than just nepotism that makes me post this video here. These guys genuinely rock, and they are a sort of kind of odd fixture in the northern CA surfer scene.

Which is pretty amazing, because as I understand it neither Whitman nor the lead guitarist (Jim Thomas) can surf across a flat pond on a calm day.

Be patient (or forward to about 2:20 when the rocking really begins) because this song, "Casbah", is one of their more kick-ass, except for the very vivid memory I have of one show of their I went to see at some little shithole bar somewhere in the dumpy part of Santa Rosa, CA, back in the Nineties.

A typical Merman song is not quite as tight as this one - there's a lot of noodling about and long soloing. And there's not a lot of FM radio 3:40-style discipline. A Mermen tune goes...well, as long as it needs to. And there's a lot of very astral spaciness there. So there we were, just surfin' along with the Mermen (all of us with our earplugs in - these guys are LOUD) on our ride to...where-ever.

Until suddenly the boys kicked over into a beautiful, incredible, perfectly terrifying instrumental cover of the Rolling Stone's "Paint It Black".
I wish I could find you a YouTube video of that cover. It fucking blistered what was left of the dingy paint off the walls and knocked us out of our chairs. It hammered the freaky dancers who had been ambling around the tiny dance floor to their knees. It made the sun come out into the northern California night; it made the mountains tremble and the seas run red with blood.

It was everything fucking great about rock n' roll.


Damn. I miss those guys.

Friday Jukebox: Northwest Kick Ass Edition

Did I mention I loves me some Sleater-Kinney?
Proof that the Northwest can produce some great four-chord rock bands outside Seattle. Miss 'em.

Friday Jukebox: Shameless Vidiot Edition

Heard this last night while the Boy was watching the "Cars 2" movie:Odd thing: I love the Weezer cover of this old Cars tune, and I loved that the Pixar people used it for a movie about cars.

But the actual movie?

Sucked pipe.

I've been wondering if it was even possible for the little desk-lamp to MAKE a bad picture. Apparently so; not awful, just long, slow, and a very pedestrian mashup of race-car and spy movies without any particular flair for either one.But the song kicks tailpipe.

Friday Jukebox: Latter-Day Lehrer Edition

Caught this on our local jazz station KMHD on the way back from Port Angeles tonight;She's got a CD release party tomorrow here in Stumptown and unless I'm held captive by social obligations I intend to see her, by Joe.

Friday Jukebox: Mercenary Memories Edition

Warren seems to be confused between the "Simba Rebellion" of 1964 and the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970.Mind you...is there anyone now who really remembers either one?Or Patty Hearst and the SLA?

No matter. Great song, and it serves to remind us that our nation, our government, and our world in general is stuffed with people who would make Roland post-decapitation a candidate for fucking MENSA.