Category Archives: Music

Put a Light in Every Country Window

Posted on by

Winter temps have kicked in, but at least Monday’s drizzle and mist didn’t become ice. Now we have dry subfreezing conditions. Tolerable.

Meandering around online recently — often the best way to find anything interesting — I came across “Put a Light in Every Country Window.” A song about rural electrification in Australia. Can’t say I’ve ever heard one of those before.

Put a light in every country window,
High-speed pumps where now the windmills stand.
Get in and lay the cable so that one day we’ll be able
To have electricity all over this wide land.

Catchy tune. Wasn’t long before I found the liner notes of Folk Songs & Ballads of Australia, recorded in 1964 by Gary Shearston, a star of the Australian folk revival (another thing I didn’t know about).

“A song from the pen of Don Henderson, one of Australia’s best and most prolific contemporary songwriters, who has travelled and written throughout the Eastern States,” the notes say. “This song was written three years ago after a journey through the area of the giant Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme.”

Of course it isn’t the only song about rural electrification. Surely Woody Gutherie’s “Roll on Columbia” counts as one, and maybe “Grand Coulee Dam” does indirectly. Considering how many songs Gutherie wrote, there are probably others too.

There’s also this recent oddity about Rural Electric Cooperatives, to the tune of “The Battle of New Orleans.” It’s interesting, but a little hard to listen to.

Tintinabulation &c

Posted on by

A classic November day outside my window today. Slate gray sky, rain in the morning, chilly but not freezing, gusts of wind pushing leaves around. At least week’s ice and snow are gone. They’ll be back. A brown Christmas would suit me fine, but I can’t count on it.

Back to posting after Thanksgiving, around December 1, after a week-long holiday from posting, but not from work this year. Still, being off on Thursday and Friday — which will include no special consumer activity on my part — ought to be pretty sweet, as always.

We will probably hit the grocery store on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. Meat, carbohydrates, sweets, etc. Exact menu to be determined in conference with the rest of my family in the near future.

Here’s Phil Ochs’ adaption of Poe’s “The Bells.” Didn’t know about it until recently. Nice.

I have a big book of Poe’s work from the library that I’ve been grazing lately. Read “The Bells” again, among other things, after many years. I’d forgotten most of it. Somehow I didn’t notice when I was younger that the poem progresses from silver to gold to brass (brazen) to iron bells — from merriment to happiness to alarm to death, or at least what I take for death in poem, though not the song:

They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!

Last night I read “Hop-Frog,” which I hadn’t before. A neat little revenge story, like “The Cask of the Amontillado,” though not quite in the same horrifying league. I guessed the ending — what violence Hop-Frog was planning. No matter. Poe’s usually worth a read. The influence of even that minor story seems to turn up in odd places.

The Hot Sardines

Posted on by

Usually one visit to the city per weekend is enough. On Saturday, the trip to see The Merchant of Venice involved a drive to a part of town where parking is easy and an El stop is nearby, so we could ride the rest of the way to a neighborhood with far more difficult parking.

Not long ago, I found out that the Hot Sardines were going to be in town the same weekend — but on Sunday — so I decided that I wanted to see them, too. At least driving all the way was an option, since the band was playing at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. We parked a half a block away.

The only reason I know about the Hot Sardines is YouTube. To be more exact, YouTube algorithms that suggest one thing and another. When it comes to music, that’s almost always very little outside a narrow range, but occasionally something unusual gets through. Probably listening to electroswing a few years ago made the bots suggest the Hot Sardines’ to-the-ceiling-lively version of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

They’re just as lively in person. Hot is fitting. Hot jazz and lots of it, in a roughly two-hour show with no intermission and two encores, with frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol and bandleader Evan Palazzo each hopping their jive — peppy vocals and animated piano, respectively. Other band members jammed on trombone, trumpet, bass, tenor saxophone, clarinet and drums, sometimes including conga. Often enough each of them had solos in which to shine, and shine they did, every jack jazzman of them.

There was also a fellow on stage with no instruments. Sitting in a chair in his fancy duds and fine hat. (Of course, they all wore fancy duds — Bougerol in gold lame and Palazzo in powder blue.) As soon as the first number started, his feet started tapping, and you noticed the taps on his shoes. He was the band tap dancer. Did he ever move, sometimes just sitting down, but often on his feet, moving all over the stage, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap with arms and legs moving every which way, adding his distinctive rhythm to the band. Who thought of adding him? (A.C. Lincoln by name.) What an inspiration.

Some tunes were more familiar, some less, all good. Among others, the Hot Sardines played “Some of These Days,” a Sophie Tucker number, “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Lulu’s Back in Town” and “Caravan” (take note of A.C. Lincoln doing his thing in that last video). “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” was the first encore.

As we entered the theater, I noticed a few small signs here and there explaining that the show was partly sponsored by the European Union. Odd, I thought, then forgot about it.

About mid-way through, Bougerol, who had a pretty good between-song patter, mentioned it. “Seems like one of our sponsors is the European Union,” she said, making a gesture that told us, How strange.

“Must be because I’m a French national,” she said.

Listening to her speak or sing in perfectly idiomatic and unaccented English, you’d have no clue. Apparently she was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, but spent time in Ivory Coast and Canada while growing up — as well she might, since her grandfather was a Canadian jazzman named Bobby Gimby, who wrote a song I might have sung as a six-year-old had I lived in Ontario instead of Texas.

Bougerol did four or five of songs in French — just as jazzy as anything in English — but the only one whose title I know was “I Wanna Be Like You,” or whatever the French equivalent is. She said she knew it from watching the French version of Disney’s Jungle Book as a child.

The band lineup is a little different in this video, but the tune and lyrics are the same.

She also told the amusing story of how the band formed. Namely, the beginning of the musical collaboration between her and Palazzo, who met by answering the same Craigslist ad for a jazz jam. They discovered they both knew a relatively obscure Fats Waller song, “Feet’s Too Big,” and played it at the jam.

Then they played it for us in the audience.

Now that’s a fun song. Fats Waller’s recording of it is here.

The Edgar Allan Poe Museum

Posted on by

Halloween snow today. Mid-morning.Halloween Snow

Mid-afternoon. Of course, it will melt in a day or two.

I’ve spent a fair number of Halloweens in the North; this is the first time snow has fallen. Cold rain, sometimes, but no snow. Sometimes warm fall days or blustery cool ones, like the Halloween of 2001, when Lilly was so unnerved by the dark and the strong winds while out trick-or-treating that she insisted that I carry her home. She wasn’t quite four, so it was possible — but tiring.

Speaking of Halloween, I’ve been listening to “Danse Macabre” lately.

In high school, I made the mistake of calling the piece “Halloween music” in front of my band director. He let me have it. It’s a tone poem! It’s serious music from France! It’s blah blah blah. Know what, Mr. W? I was right. It can be all those other things and Halloween music as well. Halloween as in spirits roaming our world before All Hallow’s, not the candy-gathering custom.

The last place we visited during the recent Virginia trip was the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond.

Poe Museum Richmond

A small, specialized museum not in a house that Poe lived in — one of the places he lived was a few blocks away, long demolished — but including a building that is suitably old. In fact, according to a plaque on the wall, the oldest house still standing in Richmond, the Ege House.

All in all, an interesting little museum. Ann thought so too. I found out things I didn’t know, such as that Poe was a gifted athlete at the University of Virginia. Also heard more about things I did know, such as that after Poe died, his enemy Rufus Griswold wrote damning and largely false accounts of the author — vestiges of which still cling to Poe.

The museum is essentially three rooms: Poe’s early life, which was haunted by Death; Poe’s literary career, which was informed by Death; and Poe’s early and mysterious death, which was literally about Death. Some of the artifacts were owned by Poe or his family, or were portraits of them. Other items evoked his life and literature.

Such as this marble-and-bronze memorial to Poe.

The sign says, “… Edwin Booth, on behalf of the actors of New York, presented this monument to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885 in memory of Poe…” Eventually, I guess, the Met got tired of it, and it ended up in Richmond.

Or this bust of Pallas, a copy of a Roman sculpture. Can’t call yourself a Poe museum without that, though a depiction of Night’s Plutonian Shore would be good as well.

Poe himself in stone out in the garden.

The garden is a pretty little space. People get married there, apparently.

My own favorite item.

I haven’t seen The Raven, but a movie with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, directed by Roger Corman, who did a lot of Poe-inspired movies, has to be worth a look.

UVA, Part 1: Rugby Road

Posted on by

We arrived behind the Rotunda of the University of Virginia at about 4 pm on October 13. Under cloudy skies, but the day was warm and good for walking around the picturesque campus. Even parking had been relatively painless, and at no cost, on a street a few blocks away.

We walked down Rugby Road to get to the Rotunda. At one point, we crossed a bridge over railroad tracks. A specific message had been painted on the inside of one of the safety walls.
Rugby Road Beta Bridge CharlottesvilleThere was evidence of repeated painting.
Rugby Road Beta Bridge CharlottesvilleLater, as we walked back to the car, I got a good look at the other side of the bridge.
Rugby Road Beta Bridge CharlottesvilleLocal tradition. I figured it had to be. Didn’t take long to find an article about the bridge — Beta Bridge — in UVA Today.

“For instance, one of the most notable landmarks on Grounds, Beta Bridge, has been at the center of its own tradition since just the latter half of the 20th century.

“Often brightly colored with hand-lettered messages spanning its length, the bridge carrying Rugby Road over the C&O Railroad tracks over the years has become the place for paintbrush-wielding students to express themselves.”

I don’t know whether Riley accepted or declined the proposal, or even if it was serious, but I was able to look up the unfortunate fate of Henry McDavid Reed. He was a UVA student who died of brain cancer in August.

That’s not all I found out about Rugby Road, which has a number of frat houses on it, and passes by the university’s art museum and architecture school, among other things. It’s also the title of a UVA drinking song, mostly sung to the tune of Charles Ives’ “Son of a Gambolier.”

Its first verse no doubt includes some of the cleaner lyrics:

From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, we’re gonna get drunk tonight.
The faculty’s afraid of us, they know we’re in the right,
So fill your cups, your loving cups, as full as full can be.
And as long as love and liquor last, we’ll drink to the U. of V.

The version on YouTube also has a verse that I suspect is left out these days.

All you girls from Mary Washington and RMWC,
Never let a Virginia man an inch above your knee.
He’ll take you to his fraternity house and fill you full of beer,
And soon you’ll be the mother of a bastard Cavalier!

RMWC would be Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, which is now simply Randolph College. Mary Washington is the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

If I’d thought about collegiate drinking songs when I was in college, I probably would have considered them hopelessly old fashioned — and that was 40 years ago. Maybe I didn’t hang out with the right crowd. Or the wrong crowd, take your pick.

A Motley Thursday Assortment

Posted on by

Congratulations to Geof Huth, who will be a grandfather come 2020. The latest of my contemporaries to do so, but hardly the last, I bet. Who are my contemporaries? People who could have gone to high school with me. An idiosyncratic definition, but I’m sticking with it.

News items pop up on my phone — misnamed, isn’t it? — my communications-information-time sucker gizmo, the work of bots and algorithms that are as mysterious as the Sibylline Books. Usually, it offers nothing I want to read, since the ways of bots and algorithms may be mysterious, but they’re still pretty dimwitted.

Sometimes, though, the offering is just downright bizarre. Recently the phone told me that one Susan Kristofferson had died. Given the name, I thought she was some relation of the singer of that name. I was just curious enough to check (on my laptop), and no — nothing to do with the singer. Nothing to do with me, either. Neither friend nor relative nor even nodding acquaintance.

So why did the phone tell me about her? Only the bots and algorithms know, and they aren’t telling.

Looks like Tom’s Diner in Denver, whose 1973 atmosphere I enjoyed in 2017, will soon be no more. Too bad to see a good diner go, Googie or not.

Late last year, I groused about a Chicago joint that serves $8 slices of pie, a price that compares unfavorably even to Manhattan. In Lansing, Michigan, recently, I paid about $8 for creme pie — but for that price we got two slices that we shared.

Tasty pie. Served by the Grand Traverse Pie Co., with 15 locations, all of which are in Michigan, except for an oddball in Terra Heute, Indiana. Sure, it’s cheaper to operate in a small city, but that alone can’t account for the difference between $4 and $8 slices.

Until recently, I hadn’t heard “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits in years. You might call it advert-scat. It’s funny.

I first heard it in college, because my friend Dan had some Tom Waits records, most memorably Small Change. Listening to it now, it occurs to me that some of the phrases have mostly passed from common use in the advertising world, such as please allow 30 days for delivery or the heartbreak of psoriasis or no salesman will visit your home.

So in 100 years, will the song mostly be 20th-century gibberish? Maybe. Still, with a light beat, steady bass and driving sax, I’d listen to Tom Waits sing gibberish.

Thursday Balderdash

Posted on by

An unusual string of chilly days here in mid-June. As in, lower than 70 degrees F. even during the day. But at least it hasn’t been this cold, as the Weather Underground claimed it to be on the evening of May 26 in northern Illinois.

It was fairly chilly that night, but I believe 52 F. was correct.

Toward the end of May, I visited Navy Pier in Chicago for a short while after dark. Unfortunately not on an evening with fireworks. But the area is alive with people well into the evening, many of them giddy and dressed to the nines after disembarking from party boats.

The new Ferris wheel on the pier (installed in 2016) is pretty by night.
“Both the 1995 and the 2016 wheels were manufactured by Dutch Wheels,” the Chicago Architecture Center says, referring to the two wheels that have been on the site since the redevelopment of Navy Pier in the mid-90s.

“Known as the Centennial Wheel, the new attraction measures 196 feet in height and has 42 gondolas. While this Ferris wheel won’t contend for the ‘world’s tallest’ title, it is currently the sixth-tallest wheel in the United States.”

The world’s tallest Ferris wheel would be…? The High Roller in Las Vegas, according to Wiki, since its development in 2014. You’d think it would a Chinese wheel, but no. Some functionary in the Chinese government hasn’t been doing his job, which is making sure that mindless giantism expresses itself in highly noticeable public structures. Too bad for him, the tallest one is in this country. USA! USA!

Spotted in I don’t remember which store recently.
The product might or might not be effective for pest control, but I know one thing: I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.

For some reason, we had a 45 of that song around the house when I was a kid, though I don’t recall either of my brothers being Dylan fans. I had a certain fascination with it, especially imagining a literal window made of bricks in a room surrounded by National Guardsmen.

Curiously, Dylan saw fit recently to put the song on YouTube, along with others of similar vintage.

In case you’re wondering what the Alabama Coat of Arms looks like, wonder no more.
Found between a pair of elevator doors at the Alabama State Capitol. The Latin reads, We dare to defend our rights, which happens to be the state motto, adopted in 1939 due to the efforts of Marie Bankhead Owen, a ladylike white supremacist who also happened to be Tallulah Bankhead’s aunt. The ship is the Badine, which first brought Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville to the future Alabama, where they founded Mobile.

Late Spring Break

Posted on by

Time for a spring break. Later than the standard breaks taken by students, but it’s been a long time since I could call myself that. Back again around May 21.

Congratulations to my nephew Sam and his wife Emily, whose second child, Georgiana, was born healthy late last week. Nothing like having a daughter. I liked the experience so much I did it twice.

It’s a sobering thought to realize that she and her brother could well live to see the 22nd century.

Closer to home, spring can’t decide whether to be warm or cool, as usual. But there has been rain in quantity when there hasn’t been snow.

I tried to start my lawnmower last week during one of the cool days, while it was still in the garage. Nothing doing. So I anticipated draining its gas tank of old fuel, something I forgot to do in the fall.

On Saturday, when it was very much warmer, I parked the mower outside for a while and let it warm up in the sun. Then I tried to start it and voilà, it woke from its hibernation, ready to trim the grass in its noisy way.

During our recent visit to UIUC, we wandered past Davenport Hall.

From the looks of it, an ag building. But not any more. These days, it houses the university’s geography and anthropology departments. Dating from 1899, it’s one of the older buildings on campus. Nice facade. Reminds me of Texas A&M.

Not far from campus, an all together different kind of building. And yet a building. That’s a broad concept, after all. A bit of local color usually not acknowledged as such.

Some music for spring. Electroswing. Seems fitting somehow.

The first number, “Zoot Suit Riot,” released in the late ’90s, seems vaguely inspired by the incident in early ’40s Los Angeles. The quality of the video is poor, but with the crisp audio that doesn’t matter.

A more recent swing, dating from this decade, though in the case of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” with a helping of “Diga-Diga-Doo,” the songs are original swing vintage. I’m fond of other versions as well, such as Max Raabe’s, which I saw him do.

Also recent, the lively “Gimme That Swing” and its kinetic, or maybe frenetic, video.

Speaking of music, I’ve picked one more biography to read, now that I’m done with Alexander Hamilton. A genius of a different sort: Cole Porter.

Thursday Nokorimono

Posted on by

One major installation we saw at the Elmhurst Art Museum on Saturday didn’t have anything to do with the Bauhaus (which got a Google doodle today), or Mies van der Rohe, or anything but the sky.

“Skycube” by David Wallace Haskins, which was installed in 2015. It may look light, but it’s made from 6,000 lbs. of steel.
The mirrors inside the cube deliver an image of the sky to — in — at — the square window — hole — aperture — on the side. It’s a little unnerving to sit there and look at it, but also hard to turn away.
Stand next to the “window” and you can get a self-portrait in the sky. Got a surreal tinge to it.
The view might be even more interesting on one of those days when rafts of clouds are speeding along at high altitudes.

The YouTube autoplay algorithm is pretty much of the same dense mindset as Top 40 radio is, or at least used to be. Play one song, well known or even not so well known, and it will line up nothing unusual or surprising.

Odd, then — and I’ve tested this on a few separate days — when I queue up something by the B-52s, a good many lesser-known songs of theirs appear on the autoplay. Mostly published by the group itself, but not always (and who doesn’t like a song that mentions ancient Mesopotamia?).

Might just be a fluke, though. Your results may vary. I doubt that algorithms will ever be good enough to weed out all the flukes. Hope not.

The last time I was in downtown Chicago, earlier this month, I paused for a moment to take a picture of a sign on E. Adams St. marking the eastern terminus of the former U.S. 66.
That’s the western-facing side of the side, covered by stickers from all over, with many European in origin. Shortly before I took my picture, a group of Germans were doing the same. Must be in their Reiseführer von Amerika. And what does the Meat Bunny know?

By the time I took a picture of the eastern-facing side, the Germans were gone.
Leaving only this fellow and his selfie stick.

Thursday Whatnots

Posted on by

News I missed, and I miss a fair amount, which I figure is actually healthy: “For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars,” a NASA press release from December says.

“NASA’s Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere — the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun…

“Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.”

Voyager 2 is now slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Or 16.5 light hours. That’s still in the Solar System, though. “It will take about 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly 30,000 years to fly beyond it,” NASA says.

Not long ago, the original Godzilla — Gojira, to be pedantic — appeared on TV, in Japanese with subtitles. Not that the famed atomic beast needs any subtitles. I had my camera handy.
I didn’t watch it all, but that’s one way to approach televised movies. Not long ago, I watched the first 15 minutes or so of The Sting, a fine movie I’ve seen a few times all the way through. But other tasks were at hand, so I quit after Luther is murdered.

Later, I had the presence of mind to turn the TV back on and watch the last 10 minutes or so, when the sting is put on gangster Doyle Lonnegan. It’s a satisfying ending, but it got me to thinking.

A con with that many people would surely generate rumors. Just as surely, the rumors would make their way to the murderous Lonnegan, who wouldn’t rest until Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker were dead. But that’s overthinking things.

Here’s another example of a dim algorithm. Just about every time I use YouTube, I see anti-teen smoking PSAs. Or maybe they’re blanketing the medium, regardless of audience. Still, if I didn’t take up smoking 45 years ago, I’m not going to now.

That brings to mind the first time I remember seeing one of my contemporaries with a cigarette. That was about 45 years ago at a place called the Mule Stall.

The Mule Stall was a student space on the campus of my high school with a few rooms, chairs, a pool table and I don’t remember what else. It was tucked away about as far as you could get from the rest of the school, opening up to the street behind the school.

High schoolers used it, but junior high kids from the district had gatherings there occasionally as well. The event I remember might have been the wrap party for one of the plays I was in. Besides not acquiring a taste for smoking back then, I also discovered the theater wasn’t for me, except as an audience member. But ca. 1974, as a junior high school student, I did a few plays.

There we were, hanging out at the Mule Stall, when we noticed a girl named Debbie, who was in our class, pass by with a cigarette between her fingers. I didn’t know her that well, and I don’t remember much about her now, though she had curly hair, glasses and the sort of development adolescent boys pay attention to. At that moment, I guess she was on her way out to smoke the thing, though we didn’t see that.

I don’t know anything about her later life. She attended high school with us for a while, but either moved away or dropped out before the Class of ’79 graduated. I wonder if even now, she holds her cigs in yellow-stained fingers and spends part of the night coughing.

As for the Mule Stall, we had occasional high school band parties there later. One in particular involved almost everyone lining up to dance to the “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” That was fun. As Wiki accurately says, the dance was very much alive in Texas in the 1970s.

In fact, the Wiki entry has a description of the style of dance we did. Someone who did the dance seems to have written it, because this is exactly right.

“This dance was adapted into a simplified version as a nonpartner waist-hold, spoke line routine. Heel and toe polka steps were replaced with a cross-lift followed by a kick with two-steps. The lift and kick are sometimes accompanied by shouts of ‘whoops, whoops,’ or the barnyard term ‘bull s–t.’… The practice continues to this day.”

We used the barnyard term. An administration with no sense of history apparently razed the Mule Stall in the 1990s. Now the site is parking.