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Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Ellen and I got our tickets today to see Ray Davies! He'll be playing at the end of the month in Montclair. Well I'm excited: The Kinks are a band I've always liked when I listen to their music, although I'm not very familiar with the span of their œuvre, I know a lot of their songs and love when they come on the radio -- as Ellen was saying earlier, the trouble with The Kinks is all their songs are just so catchy, you can't stop singing them when you hear one. I don't really know anything about Davies as a solo act, I understand he plays a lot of the old Kinks tracks and some new music as well. Everything I've been reading online over the past few years suggests it's going to be a great show. And what great timing! Holly of The Song In My Head Today has picked November as the month of The Kinks; every day she is posting reflections on a song of theirs, one song per album, in chronological order. So far:
- Stop Your Sobbing, from The Kinks.
- Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl, from Kinda Kinks.
- Where Have All the Good Times Gone, from The Kink Kontroversy.
- Too Much on My Mind, from Face to Face.
posted evening of November 4th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, October 31st, 2009
This has been a really excellent weekend for playing music -- last night I jammed with John, who I met pretty recently and had not played with previously, and was startled to find that we're on just about the same page musically. We picked up each other's songs very quickly and got some nice harmonies going. Then today I played with Bob and Janis and Gregory, and realized that we've really made a lot of progress over the past half a year or so, after a couple of years of being in a rut -- at this point one of us can call a tune and even if we haven't played it in a while, we jump right in and harmonize. A musical milestone of sorts for me this afternoon was playing violin and singing in unison with it -- I've never been able to figure that out before but today it was sounding all right. (Neither the playing nor the singing was as good, quite, as if I do one or the other -- but I could hear how they were going to get better.)
posted evening of October 31st, 2009: Respond
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Monday, October 19th, 2009
Found it! -- Many thanks to Deborah for sending me Unamuno's poem "Portugal" (an unpublished fragment), from which the line quoted in The Stone Raft is taken.
Portugal, Portugal, tierra descalza,
acurrucada junta al mar, tu madre,
llorando soledades
de trágicos amores,
mientras tus pies desnudos las espumas
saladas bañan,
tu verde cabellera suelta al viento
-- cabellera de pinos rumorosos --
los codos descansando en las rodillas,
y la cara morena entre ambas palmas,
clavas tus ojos donde el sol se acuesta
solo en la mar inmensa,
y en el lento naufragio asà meditas
de tus glorias de Oriente,
cantando fados quejumbrosa y lenta.
Portugal, Portugal, o barefoot land,
nestled by the sea, your mother,
weeping lonely
over tragic loves
while the salty foam
bathes your naked feet,
your green locks loose to the wind --
locks of whispering pines --
your elbows resting on your knees
and your dark face between your palms,
cast your eyes where the sun goes down
alone in the immense sea
and in this slow shipwreck reflect
on your Oriental glories,
singing fados, plaintive and slow.
(Not making any claims about the quality of this translation -- it is done on the fly. If you have any ideas about how it could be improved, feel free to mention them in the comments.) It's a pretty poem -- in his (engaging) essay on The Rivers of the Douro Valley in Literature, Antonio Garrosa Resina notes that Unamuno composed it during a visit to Oporto in 1907. I'm a little uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of "junta al mar, tu madre" in line 2 and "soledades" in line 3 -- I must be mistranslating this -- not sure what the (plural) "soledades" is referring to but it can't be (singular) Portugal, who is next to her mother the sea... maybe it's "weeping over tragic solitary loves." (Also: is the "slow shipwreck" the sunset? I think Portugal's glories being "Oriental" is a reference to the subject of The Stone Raft, the treaty which gives Portugal imperial dominion over all lands to the east of a particular longitude, Spain over lands to its west.)Well: this brings up a question for me about Pontiero's translation in The Stone Raft. The context is that José and Joachim have just met Pedro and the three are having dinner, watching the news on TV where they see images of people standing on Portugal's beaches looking at the oncoming ocean. Let's look at the Portuguese and Pontiero's rendering together:
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Agora
ei-los ali, como Unamuno disse que estavam, la cara morena
entre ambas palmas, clavas tus ojos donde el sol se acuesta
solo en la mar imensa, todos os povos com o mar a poente
fazem o mesmo, este é moreno, não há outra diferença, e
navegou.
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There they are now, as Unamuno described them, his swarthy face cupped in the palms of his hands, Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea, all nations with the sea to the west do the same, this race is swarthy, there is no other particularity, and it has sailed the seas.
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I'm not going to argue with italicizing the quoted portion and capitalizing its first letter, I mean it's not in the original but it reads fine; but how could "la cara morena" possibly be understood as referring to Unamuno's face rather than as part of the quotation? This makes no sense at all to me -- it's an interesting image but it can't be the image intended in the original passage. Note how "moreno" is used again referring to the Portuguese race -- this is the only distinction between them and other peoples with the sea to the west. Here's my attempt at an improvement, relying heavily on Pontiero for a sense of the flow of the passage:
There they are now, as Unamuno described them, Your dark face between your palms, cast your eyes where the sun goes down alone in the immense sea, all peoples with the sea to the west do the same, this one is dark-skinned, there's no other distinction, and has sailed the seas.
posted evening of October 19th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, October first, 2009
More animation from Alexeïeff and Parker! I found a compilation of all their pinboard cartoons. The listing:
- 0:00 Night on bald mountain (1933) -- Just extraordinary. 7 years ahead of Walt Disney. Look at the metamorphosis about 1:40 in...
- 8:22 Parade des Sools (1936) -- Hats! and lots of 'em. (IMDB oddly has this piece listed as "Parade des Chapeaux" -- this accurately describes the piece but it is not the title.) Possibly Chapeaux Sools is a hat company, and this an advertisement for them?
- 9:38 Etoiles Nouvelles (1937) -- commercial for Davros Nouvelle Egyptian size cigarettes
- 11:04 Chants Populaires (1944) -- "Alouette" w/still image
- 11:42 En Passant (1943) -- bucolic scene, terrifying squirrels
- 13:04 Fumées (1952) -- smoke rings. Looks like a commercial for a brand of pipe tobacco called V.E.?
- 14:25 Les Rimes (1954) -- entertaining Brun Lune biscuit commercial
- 15:23 Pure Beauté (1954) -- soap commercial (Monsavon brand) / meditation on the female nude
- 16:25 La Sève de la Terre (1955) -- Esso commercial? -- totally psychedelic
- 18:26 Automation (1960) -- Renault commercial; boring/technically impressive
- 20:12 The Nose (1963)
- 31:33 Pictures at an Exhibition (1972) -- with a spoken introduction in English
- 42:25 Three Moods (1980)
I'm kind of taken with how Mussorgsky pieces bookend their career. It's interesting that all of their commercial pieces have titles and credits.
posted evening of October first, 2009: 1 response
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Monday, September 28th, 2009
 My grandfather had a big collection of books of comic strips -- Pogo, Katzenjammer Kids, Li'l Abner, Gasoline Alley -- that I would read whenever I went over to his house. One of them was a collection of Fox Fontaine's Toonerville Trolley -- Sylvia has gotten into the video game Toontown lately, so I suggested we take a look at Toonerville -- thinking its name had the same source*. I never knew it had been made into a cartoon! Here are the three episodes -- Nicely done!
(Another find from the same search: The Electric Prunes performing Toonerville Trolley on the Mike Douglas Show in 1967 -- not The Prunes' finest moment, which if you're interested in seeing their finest moment take a look at this footage.)
 * Looks like I was wrong about this. Image searching for "Toonerville Trolley" brings up some pictures of an actual trolley in Louisville in the early 20th Century, when Fontaine was working as a reporter in Louisville...
posted evening of September 28th, 2009: Respond
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I've gotten interested in this particular 16-bar melody line that I've been hearing in a lot of old blues and jazz tunes -- it is the melody that always makes me think "They're Red Hot!" when I hear it, because Robert Johnson's song is the first one I ever heard with this structure:
I was listening to Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra playing "How Come You Do Me Like You Do?" last week and realized it's essentially the same melody -- since then I've worked out that several other songs on the records that I'm listening to regularly are built from the same elements -- here is a brief playlist of a couple others, including Tommie Bradley's hilarious "Adam and Eve" and a version by "Bogus" Ben Covington.
 (And, wow! A 2000th post ought not go unnoticed.)
posted morning of September 28th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, September 5th, 2009
This is kind of exciting to hear about: Big Dance Theater is presenting a new show called "Comme Toujours Here I Stand" based on Cléo de 5 à 7, featuring an original title song by Robyn Hitchcock -- a confluence of two of my very favorite artists! (And of an art form I'm not familiar with at all...) It will be premiering next month at The Kitchen in NYC; I'll certainly be there.
 Speaking of Hitchcock, here are a couple of things I've seen in the last few days and been meaning to link to:
posted morning of September 5th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, August 29th, 2009
I was able to find a lot of the titles from the soundtrack at YouTube. Not complete, but respectable... Index here.
...And I just noticed, these songs are in alpha order rather than in the order they appear in the book. That seems like something that ought to be corrected.
posted evening of August 29th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, August 16th, 2009
Another difference between Inherent Vice and my standard category of novel-reading experience is, I like the reading a lot better if there is music playing in the background. Normally I have a hard time reading when I'm listening to music, here they seem to enhance one another. From my iTunes shuffle today:
- It ain't nobody's business, Mississippi John Hurt
- La-Do-Dada, Dale Hawkins
- What Goes On, Robyn Hitchcock and Grant Lee Phillips -- this was a very nice coincidence because it came on just as I was starting to read the lyrics to the Spotted Dicks' new single "Long Trip Out" (which is on the radio in Doc's car), and suddenly I am singing them to the tune of "What Goes On", and they are fitting pretty well. Here is a verse of it:
Long trip out, from the Mekong Delta...
It's a last lost chance, when you need a friend,
And you're flyin on out of
Cam Ranh Bay at midnight,
And you won't know how, to
Get back home again. Then I spent a little while distracted, trying to find out more about "What Goes On" -- turns out it is a Velvet Underground song. - The Birds Were Singing, Carter Family
- There'll be Joy, Joy, Joy, Carter Family -- the Carter Family threatening to distract from the novel, they do not quite work together.
- Floater, Bob Dylan -- now this is more like it --
- Till the End of the World, Ernie Tubb
- Salty Dog Blues, John Hurt
- Knockin on Heaven's Door, Dylan and the Band -- I was not actually participating in the music-listening/reading activity here, "Salty Dog" had reminded me that Lola needed to go out --
- I Something You, Robyn Hitchcock.
The book? I'm dying to recommend it to you but having trouble with what to say about it... I am bursting out laughing about once per page.
...and later on in the shuffle, Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra plays the "What-cha-call-'em Blues" which go very nicely with the lyrics I am reading at this moment, to Carmine and the Cal-Zones' "Just the Lasagna". Conclusion, when there's music playing it's much easier to imagine Pynchon's lyrics being sung.
posted afternoon of August 16th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
Robyn Hitchcock on "Words and Music from Studio A"! Some unreleased tracks, some interesting conversation. All solo and acoustic.
(Of "I'm Falling" he says slightly foreboding about 20 min. in, "This is where Brian meets a nice boy in a New York nightclub...")
posted evening of August 12th, 2009: Respond
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