And while I’m on about music and recordings and the like, the March ’07 US-released Amy Winehouse record Back to Black is epic. I can’t get it out of my mind. Interestingly, the replay quotient is up there with Neko Case’s second and third records, also audio explorations of heartache.
La Musique
How pleasant to hear NPR’s coverage of the Ponderosa Stomp as I pulled in to the carport this evening and to end the night with Ahmet Ertegun’s valediction on the PBS. Astonishing to be reminded that the Stax men, Booker’s band, were Otis Redding’s sidemen. How amazing to have been introduced to the persons playing the instruments via that silly movie, and to realize how ingenious it was of those comedians to insist on the players.
Orson
As I lay in bed last night, the 10pm LA Theatre Works broadcast of Austin Pendleton’s 2000 play, Orson’s Shadow came on. Recorded in 2002, the play later ran for a year or so in New York City, opening in 2005. the New York production won a passel of awards, and if I read my web-sign aright, the performer who read the Welles role for the radio play won an LA Critic’s Circle award for the role in a contemporaneous stage production. The play’s main characters are Orson Welles, Sir Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, and Vivien Liegh. The play’s initial narrator and catalyst is midcentury critic Kenneth Tynan. From the opening scene through the end of the play i was totally captivated, at first by the amusingly accurate vocal chracterization of Welles and then by the complex, witty, and sympathetic writing.
The play is set in 1960, before Oliver’s odd Oscar-winning turn in The Entertainer but after the stage production that would lead to the film and after Welles’ work on Touch of Evil. Tynan recruits Welles and then Olivier and Plowright to star in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and we get the best seat in the backstage to observe Pendleton’s sympathetic and knowledgeable visions of his lead characters. The play is hilarious and tragic and the written voices of the well-known men ring heartily true to our mediated knowledge of their speech. It was tremendously engaging and satisfied that sublimated Jones anyone with an interest in the history of 20th century media has to spend an hour or two at table with Mr. Welles in all his brilliance and idiocy.
Josh Bell rocks (?) the DC Metro
WaPo recasts Josh as busker. He’s game. DC commuters? um. Point: JOSH!
I really, really liked this. I sent this note to the WaPo team responsible for the piece.
Thank you all for making my day.
I knew Josh, distantly, as a kid when we were growing up in Bloomington. I haven’t seen him except to be aware of his career in years and years. However, I have heard about his openness and groundedness through the hometown grapevine from others of that cohort. I have no doubt that he is as open to and welcoming of the brilliant and crazy stunt you crafted with his kind cooperation and as sanguine and full of humor as you capture in the story.
In the years since I left Bloomington, I have become friends with more than one busker, but only one who might be characterized as a profoundly gifted professional musician. If I read him correctly, he has come to hate the busking portion of his work, primarily because in order to gather that money-generating crowd, you must rely on set pieces, little two minute magic tricks that confound, excite, and inspire, and which can be executed over and over, once every thirty minutes, to capture the crowd and engage them into the one-or-two dollar donation, or even better, the CD purchase.
Despite what I read as his frustration, his pursuit of the technique has resulted in a spellbinding performer who is unafraid to use his magic tricks to capture the audience’s attention before he proceeds with a piece he may regard as a more subtle and challenging expression of his talents as a songwriter and performer.
I flatter myself I would have had the time and openness on that morning to recognize the preciousness and hilarity of the gift Josh and your team offered the DC commuters at that, incredibly busy, station. I don’t mistake my desire for self-regard with a probable account of my notional interaction.
I can, however report this: your sensitive reportage and careful attention to craft in the prose of your final piece successfully echoed the tragic colors of Josh’s ‘Chaconne’ on the printed page, or more accurately on the internet, and moved me to tears. Kudos to all of you, and my tears are for the tragedy of our national culture of isolation and overscheduling. Thanks for a kickass reading experience, and great work with the multimedia documentation. Simply outstanding, entirely worthy of every participant, from the DC commuter though to Josh and his violin.
UPDATE:
Two days later, Wiengarten notes that this is his largest-response-generating piece, and that at least 10 percent of the thousand or so correspondents note, as I do, that we wept.
If I could
Moments ago KEXP evening man Don Slack pre-credited a song, “If I could,” performed by a female lead singer whose name I did not catch. The song is by ex-Gizmo Tim Carroll, and Slack credited Carroll just before he played the side, causing me to bark excitedly and run around in circles. The song was delightful.
RIP, noisily
Per Bart: Funeral for a Friend. Helen Hill gets laid to rest in NOLA. Alternafreaks lay claim to the foundations of American culture and win a stake to the title by blood right. Get the fuck out of the way, dammit.
See ya, Doctor
The Stranger: RIP, Charles Gocher of Sun City Girls
(Confidential to Alice Dee: oddly, I don’t think I woulda linked to this if we’d not spoken. It’s the first day of Lent, and all day I have been plotting a delicious fish feast. Perhaps this relates to the untimely passing of Dr. Gocher, fellow venturist.)
UPDATE: A commenter on the Line Out post above links to this fantastic picture of Charlie, one of the ways I will always remember him.
You Don't Lethem Me Yet
As spotted on the Vulgar Boatmen listgroup: Jonathan Lethem’s upcoming novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, is titled after a justly-admired Vulgar Boatmen tune. Intriguing possibility!
SHUT THE FUCK UP
The Society for Ethnomusicology and especially me, Mike Whybark (although the Society has seen fit to suppress many, indeed, the majority of, specific aspects of their requests in previously published versions of this acoustifesto):
* calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;
* condemns the use of music or noise although how the fuck it’s possible to definitively delineate a goddamn difference is beyond my weak-ass means to determine but it really fucking pisses me off that assholes some of whom I may have met or may meet personally in the next forty-to-sixty years engage their time to ‘defend’ what they mistakenly perceive as our shared economic or political interests by perverting one of the most astonishing and nearly holy facets of human social creativity into a weapon revealing the true and absolute nature of all our interactions with one another as wholly predatory and therefore never worthwhile for one moment from the day of birth forward and fuck you oh fuck you oh fuck you may my money turn to shit in your hands as an instrument of torture at which improbable instance I shall laugh; and
* demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music or noise such as that commonly found on top-forty radio or independent ‘experimental’ radio stations with the ironic exception of the compositions of Iannis Xenakis as an instrument of physical and psychological torture, insofar as it may be possible given the generally dismal prospects of providing commercially successful music which may be fairly judged not to be an instrument of physical and psychological torture.
Buzzkill
Buzzcocks soundtrack for AARP ad. When viewed in the context of a particularly grim Battlestar Galactica, it’s enough to give me the willies. Torture! Suicide! 30-year-old music written by teenagers used to sell retirement planning to 60-year olds! Divorce! Adultery! Heart-numbing use of the drink!
I suppose, given the episodes’ topics of faith, loyalty, love and betrayal, a better choice than “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” (employed, I suppose, in the faint hope of erasing the crystalline irony of the title – a quote from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – or possibly in a fit of truly profound cluelessness) would have been “Ever Fallen in Love.”