Tears of a Clown Silly ?

Sometimes I stumble on a blog that I can't quite make heads or tails out of, but yet it seems somehow interesting, and maybe a bit of a challenge. Such a blog is Tears of a ClownSilly.

The jury is still out, for I haven't quite grokked the discussion, which is sort of how JAlva can leave me sometimes, and even the Madame, although I have been reading her for several years now.

Strange values

I consider the flying of the national flag (other then on USA government buildings) of the trashiest of tastes. But I find I am irked even more, by those tasteless people who display flags without the proper respect, like some of the typical red-neck patriot sort I see around here. Flags left draped over balconies, in the garbage or caught in bushes, old and faded and tattered as my neighbor has. You must pull it down by sundown, unless you have it illuminated! You should fold it properly.

(this photo is of George Bush being disrespectful)

I don't know where I got this strange value, considering how garish and ugly the US flag is to me. Maybe it is like treating your enemy with respect. Burning a flag is fine, as the act, in itself, signals a respect for the symbolic truth of the flag. But thankfully we are still free to be disrespectful if we so choose (I think?). Improper flag treating only roils me like some guy wearing highwater bell bottoms, it is a taste thing.

As Universal Pictures seems to think I might be eligible to vote for something, they sent me a viewing DVD of the film United93. A John Powell score that is a great piece of work. Watching this film reminded me of one of my daily pains. There are few of my fellow Yanks who could understand that I love my country and yet I also know that we were begging for 9/11 to happen. I am banished as a traitor and obviously a monster. But I, too, suffered real emotional trauma on that day. Walking in Paris, down a street in Boulogne-Billancourt when a French friend called on the cell phone, and almost yelled that I had to get to a TV to see this terrible disaster happening in my country. Ducking into the Arab alimentary corner shop, to pick up a few things, Ahmed had his little television, behind the cash register, on. We watched the one building burning together, a terrible tragedy. Yet right in front of our eyes, another plane flew into the other tower! My stomach dropped right out, in the realization that this wasn't an accident. I rushed up to my employers around the corner, and turned on the big tv and sat transfixed until the buildings collapsed. It was sheer horror, on a scale I had never believed I would witness. The fact that under 3000 people died is only a miracle and testament to the responders. But nobody believes I think that, because of my belief that we had and still have it coming.

A friend refused to fight in Vietnam, and for that he had to spend two hard years in a federal pen. Not a good time, to be a traitor in a federal pen. He remarks, now, how after he served the same two hard years in peace, as many in the military served while killing over three million innocent people, he receives no benefits while they get free health, etc. etc. It has never been easy, being a true patriot.

I go out on the limb...

... and on some record of some sort.

The "unrest" in Paris is formulated, encouraged and directed by the French and international business interests.

Yes the conditions are hard for all the rambunctious young men sans job or hope, but they certainly are better off then most of the very poor here in the US. They HAVE real welfare, they HAVE free medical care. One has to ask, "who profits from these riots?" and the answer is clearly the "conservative" business interests. Not only do they get to act tough and look good to a frightened population, but in trying to be "nice", they will get to dismantle the labor laws that have retained the quality of life in France. "To help these young men we must make it easier to hire and fire". It will work, for humans are more probably descended from sheep then apes.

Why would I think such an absurd, paranoidal thing? About a few months ago, a slow drumbeat from the usual Economist/FT/WSJ area. "Geee, soon it will be the year anniversary since the riots, I wonder (wink, wink) if they will riot again?". The supposition that a yearly anniversary of violent behavior could be the instigation of violent behavior, is very strange. If, let's say, my mother had died due to what I imagined as malpractice by a doctor, and thus foolishly went out that night, and in grief and self righteous anger slammed my neighbor's car with a shovel (neighbor being a doctor), would I feel the need to do it again a year later? In the last month the level has increased until this week when the same suspect media gang has been veritably shrieking ""ARE YOU GOING TO FUCKING RIOT, OR ARE YOU JUST WUSSES?" So now you have a gang of four, burning up some busses. Four does not constitute a riot, but smells amazingly like a group of thugs, guaranteed immunity and well paid, to stir it up.

The world, all around us, is marching down a road whose direction is towards some very dangerous looking parts (unless you have enough resources to avoid those parts). The Dems will not win back majorities (if come very close), and even if they do, nothing will change the direction of our destiny. It is a brave new world, indeed. A decade or two from now, you will either be scrambling for your life, or sitting in The Four Seasons, at high tea (as I did a few days ago), chortling about your dividends. RUN!!! MAKE A LOT OF MONEY NOW!!!! QUICK!!! THERE ISN'T MUCH TIME!!!

Or, you can climb off of the "grid" and go to the Isle of Mannisfree.

This Shite is Crap!

Last night in this here hotel, have to be up early to catch the flight home, but I got a bottle of Coca-Cola's water brand, Dasani, out of the vending machine, and it tastes like bad tap water, not even good tap water. Okay, I might be an accidental water snob. Twenty five years ago, as the water in Santa Monica is soooo bad, had Mountain Valley Water installed, for their big 5 gallon glass bottles. Good stuff. And otherwise I always have San Pellegrino in stock for the fizz. But this Dasani shit sucks!

A tip of the chapeau to the Rockville Ramada Inn. Firm bed and free wide-band internet. It looks like I will be lucky to be home but a few weeks out of the next three months (sigh).

Hail, Hail, Chuck Berry

It being the man's birthday today. A complete coincidence, but last night I picked up his Chess boxed set (used and cheap), in hopes it had better mastering then some of the earlier released CDs. The box doesn't have my favorite CB tune, Deep Feeling, which is on After School Session, my favorite album of his, (and a telling title, seeing he went on to do six years for a Mann act violation).

I fell in love with it, back in March 1968. I was the occasional engineer for the newly formatted, alternative rock & roll, WBCN in Boston. Several times I engineered the late night show of Peter Wolf, later of the J. Geils Band, from a room in back of the rock club The Boston Tea Party (the club owner had just bought the radio station). Deep Feeling was the Woofer-Goofer's theme. It is now in my top five, desert island discs. It is a perfect record, a jewel, oh, and an instrumental. Although the fact that it is a steel guitar Berry is playing, is easy to discern, but because it didn't say so anywhere, as a youth, I often tried to see if there was anyway I could play it on my regular guitar. An interesting exercise.

In 1978-9, I was drinking in the bar of The Troubadour, here in L.A., when who should I espy standing by a wall with a women, then Chuck Berry. He had just gotten out of a four month imprisonment for tax evasion. With a belly full of Mexican courage, I walked up to him, thanked him for all the great music (minus My Ding-A-Ling, puhlease!). He politely but brusquely acknowledged as he looked like his interest was much more in the woman, but do I stop? "Soooo, was Deep Feeling played with a steel guitar?" (I really wanted him to see I was a true connoisseur) "What do you think, asshole" he snarled and turned his back to me, and refocused himself on the female companion. I deserved it, and yet, still somehow cherish the memory, as if I had picked up a guitar pick he had dropped.

Those autumn blues

Sunday evenings are the worst time of the week. It is the end of the week-end's technical time out, and the looking forward to the mornings jump back into the fray, completely unprepared and without a clue as to how you are going to make it through the week without getting into some big trouble with someone. Big trouble because that work you had put off, until the weekend, hadn't gotten done (best intentions).

The fall,as we call it here in the US, also wears deep. The flush of hope and confidence that started the school year in September with new books and good intentions, have started to show the lie. In the choice of staying in and doing the work that is required, or cracking open a new pack of Camel straights and walking into the fog for the warmth of a bar, one finds oneself powerless to take the right road.

I remember October 1977. I had spent an emotional but adventurous August in Europe, based at my grandparents on a beach in the Netherlands. I came back to a losing small claims case against a crooked recording studio owner, and my senior recital at New England Conservatory, at which my precious instrument was stolen from the dressing room in the hour before the concert (I went on with my teacher's, Barry Galbraith's guitar). That finished school, now I was moving out to Los Angeles, where a band I had produced some sides with had moved the month before, on my urging.

There was a girl. She had been with me, off and on, since I was 18 and she was 16, inbetween all the others. I had been ruthless in my relationship with her, and she had gotten her own back a few times, we had a history. Now I was moving away, although it was ostensibly for good, neither of us probably believed that until a few years later. The Sunday before my Tuesday departure, we drove out to a party in Amherst. I proceeded to drink hard and make an ass out of myself, again. After enough coffee, as the sun started to set over the multi-hued hills of western Massachusetts, we set off for Boston and our last nights together (but first, a stop at the Casablanca for a couple of drinks, eh?).

Life for this young alcoholic seemed to rush between best of intentions, high hopes for the future and a hopeless grind of the way things always seemed to actually work out. And I hadn't a clue. The lord is my shepherd, but I wish her luck, for my brain is a veritable basket of snakes.

Life is very different now. I live, maybe even thrive where many of my running (drinking) buddies have fallen. My happiness is simply contingent on a daily spiritual maintenance. But I have never been very good at maintaining consistency in daily rituals, so sometimes, on foggy, cooling autumn Sundays, an old familiar hopelessness tries to sneak back in. SHOO! I HAVE WRITTEN YOU AWAY!

:-)

Testes, testes a 1 ana 2 ana...

Elsie's poodle, Hershey, inspired a tonsorial tune up on my part. My next door neighbor says it makes me look like a "little boy". I am not sure I like that, but it is comfortable, and looks reasonably OK in the mirror. When I think about how damn important haircuts were to me, between 1963 and mmm, maybe 1995 (why, I once flew ten hours each way, for a haircut!) I am the opposite now.

I remember being at a club on some Kensington High Street rooftop, circa late eighties, and meeting the lead singer of Haircut 100. That is a band name that has stuck in my memory long after their one hit faded away.

Now that traffic on this blog has dipped down to that of my academic web page, I feel even more free to publish the following spam poetry:

Good day.
look
room and scowled out at the harsh dawn light.

Still she didnt fire, but her grin widened until it was
or slumped against the furniture, waiting for my

that by one Horst Geier

I digress...

... for a moment, as once again, the venerable Johns Hopkins has chimed in (via Lancet), and if a blog is not a place to go FUCK YOU! I TOLD YOU SO YOU GOD DAMN MURDERERS.... well then, what is it for then?

After the US finally got out of Vietnam with over three million "slant-eyes, gooks" murdered (not counting all the people killed or maimed by ordinance left behind, or cancer caused by agent orange), there has been a constant whinge and moan from a certain part of the US citizenry, about left behind GIs who are being "held in slavery by vindictive Vietnamese". Millions of dollars over the thirty-five year period has gone to examine such myths (witness Rambo).

This whining seems to come loudest from a fatigue wearing bunch of intellectually deprived, whom, one can bet on it, have never seen a war (mostly overcompensating Chickenhawks). Many of these jerks, who start parading about and shouting (and given great coverage in the news media) on the usual holidays are probably of a surprisingly large amount of US males who claim to be Vietnam Vets, but are not (a curious social sickness). Right along with the constant repitition of the common belief in the myth of the spat upon GI. One knows that they have never been near a war, for if they had, they would know that the amount of people missing from Vietnam, are remarkably few, if one has seen/experienced or even intelligently imagined modern warfare. Our weapons are not designed for efficiency in anything but sheer and utter destruction. Modern bullets don't just poke a whole in you for your life to slowly ebb out, they blow up ripping whole sections and pieces off and out. The larger munitions actually vaporize humans (beam me up Scotty), pulverizes them into bits that decompose get grown over quickly, and are gone as fast as you can say "Bob was my uncle". Un-countable ("body counts are not our business").

Earlier this year, some Yanks got taken to task for burning the dead bodies of enemy soldiers on the field in Afghanistan. "They were stinkin' up the place", was the reason given, and excepted by the same people who now claim to know that John Hopkins is filled with idiots and liars. They, like those "Vietnam Vet" protesters, seem to know exactly how many dead there have been ("body counts are not our business"). After years of periodic pulverizing/vaporizing "strategic targets" in Iraq, I would be somewhat disappointed if the numbers were less then John Hopkins thinks, for at 655k dead "enemy" at 334 billion bucks, we are only paying about a half mil a hit, still a lot more then Tony Soprano pays. And we're talking about knocking off real gumbas, nobodies, women and children. Sheesh.

As much as I admire John Slaboda and the gang at Iraq Body Count (see sidebar), I am beginning to think they are doing no one a favor, when Bush and his boys refer to it as the official count, as if fity thousand dead is really quite alright. But imagine if John Hopkins was wildly off base, and only 300k Iraqis have met their makers at our hands, assuming that each might have at least two people who really liked the stiff, there are now 600k in the world who are maybe even willing to become human bombs against the US!

A month ago, in a Parisian laundromat, I gave my Herald Tribune to a fiftyish , mid American woman who was accompanying her daughter to junior year abroad. "Oh, imagine that, a newspaper in English". She clucked a bit at the headlines, and allowed, "Oh, I voted for Bush in the last two elections, but I won't again". I wanted to ripp her a new asshole right there, the middle aged women and children murderess, but she was sooo stupid at the same time, sounding like such a SNL bit, that I swallowed it. What the hell use would that have been. As her dittzy daughter had complained about not being able to find internet access for her lap-top, I had suggested BIA. There they were the next morning, to ruin my breakfast. NO I DIDN'T WANT TO TALK!!! (gee, he sure seems grouchy in the morning).

Speaking of mush brained fellow 'mercuns, and an almost complete change of subject, I have noticed that my local supermarket, reopened after a six months overhall, is so dark inside that I find myself bumping into things. This is done for good reasons, saving on power both directly in the lighting, and indirectly in the cooling. It brings back years of memories of fat and sassy Yanks relating their return from overseas trip. "I was so glad to be home in this here USA, that I got on my fat knees and kissed the ground". The reason they were glad to be home, the foreign stores were "dingy and dark, narrow isles" etc. Well it is finally coming to the US, as energy costs go up. Well duhhhhhhhh.

Why Music?

One of the biggest questions being bandied about my field, is, why do we make music anyway? We are the only animal that does make music (not communicate via sound though, which is relatively common). I remember my teacher at Harvard one summer a long time ago, John Lewis of MJQ, stating he thought the reason that any specific musician makes music is because, no one else that the musician had heard, had managed to "scratch the itch". I thought I'd take a flyer for a moment, and my explanation is closely tied to our emotional machinery.

We (homo sapiens) make all kinds of racket from birth, as a means of manipulating our surroundings to our desired benefit, via the machinery of manipulating our parents or whomever larger, more capable, are handy. Infants will use a vast range of pitch, loudness, timbre and effects in these usually successful ploys. After we reach a certain age, we are expected to stop behaving in such a demanding way, and we learn to keep our pitch, loudness, timbre and effects within an expected, polite norms, except in times of extreme stress. In music, we can still express shameless, manipulating verbalizations, not otherwise allowed in society, and even be commended for it. And remember, one of our foremost emotional concerns involves our love and acceptance by our tribe.

Certainly, many of us go on to have manipulatory emotions of various kinds, as adults, and some are better then others, in convincing their tribe to accept their outbursts. And then, maybe others just pick up the sax.

Authenticity, or,

do you hear the same things that I do?

Last night I went to a small, very local production of the musical that had been derived from the biopic The Buddy Holly Story (1978). A good friend's wife had directed it, this was the last night of a succesful run, and a whole troop of us had come from a celebration of my friend's birthday. This energetic distillation of the movie of the same name, which was a fictionalization of Holly's life, was... well, I am not planning on reviewing the production.

I sat, watching this "musical" and pondered about how I imagined my perspective might be different, which lead to further ponderings on our experience together in society. In the last fifty-sixty years, the Rock & Roll era, as music became such a successful, pervasive commodity in itself, it also became a prime tool for marketers to help define and accurately target their intended victims.

Following are opinions, thoughts, a certain brainstorming, I have no empirical evidence:

A deep sensitivity to music is nowhere nearly as widespread as we tend to assume, maybe spread out on the old curve like most things, such as sex. And yet, the thought of a young person without a music playing device and some collection of musics of which the person would identify with, would be very rare, indeed. I am a music person since I was four years old, but I could imagine many an adolescent at an early social event, feeling a quiet desperate lack of understanding when their friend turns to them with gleaming eyes, saying "wow, is that music great, or what!". "Yeah, I love it!", the adolescent allows, making a mental note to try and quickly develop this taste in the immediate future. Some relationship with music must be established, whether it has any effect or not, for social reasons. So people use that which does effect them, by utilizing a nonmusical sensitivity that can be applied. Those of a more verbal tendency may become deeply involved with the lyrical content, others may pay a special attention to the visual aspect of the performers and their particular fans. Maybe there is a dressing style connected, or a certain dance performed to the performers music. Some may talk about the performers videos, the possible narrative interpretations, or the graphical style and content of the packaging. Most people will be a combination of average intensities on most of these areas, but as there will be a small percentage that is overwhelmingly involved with the music, their will be some who are just as involved with some other aspect.

I think this as I watch a depiction of a, fifty year past, musical performer. I am at first surprised at how little of the musical aspects are accurately understood, all remaining after the distillation is the most obvious foreground effects. The background is lost but replaced with an extra attention to the dress, and accoutrements of the period, also heavily cliché. Much attention is paid to a vigorous dancing and smiling routine that has almost nothing to do with the subject and his period, and all to do with recent musical production styles. Ohhhhh, I get it, this is what an average cross section sees/saw in a musical performer!

Waiting on a word...

... for the bank to say yea or nay, in regards to the Parisian palace, I find I can't help but think about it, and wish to get on with the purchase. I was having one of my rare talks with my sister last night, and I told her about the apartment, and that admist so many things, it is barely half a block from the Mosquee de Paris, and most particularly, to the entrance to the teahouse/restaurant part of the Mosque.

In a burst of excitement, she related a trip to that very Mosque, that we took en famille, very long ago, perhaps 1959-1960. There we were regaled with the most exotic, cous-cous and tajine etc. She being all of eight or nine years of age, would remember whereas I was only six-seven. But surely I would have remembered what she relates as our trip to the mosque as having to pass soldiers carrying machine guns, and it all being very scary. My little brother and I would have certainly noticed MACHINE GUNS! I remember a day along the left bank, the bookists and seeing some clochard walking down below the bridges. I remember many things, as a photograph, about our two week stay, including a stop in the woods on the way to Fontainebleau, to eat a picnic lunch, and having (dutch) Uncle Charles teach me how to crack hard boiled eggs on my head. I can't picture the bed I slept in at our Champigny-sur-Marne, hosts (Lilly et Charles), a couple that my father had become close friends with after he marched into Paris as a US soldier, but I remember the dining room table and the old deserted gasworks behind the building (from where Charles had retired). Dad had been with the army corps of engineers and was billeted out in the stables of Versaille. He liked it so much that he went back for two years after the war (Paris, not the stables).

But I do NOT remember anything about no Mosque, couscous or machine guns. My sister is a creative sort. A very successful creative sort, on peer-review panels for the NEA, teaches at artsy colleges, and maker of artsy films. Just this month she produced a festival up near where she lives. I have often found her propensity for creation often leaps across polite lines, but I will defer to her memory on this. Maybe because I like the idea that I have been there before. I love the idea, that the Jardin des Plantes, across the street from the apartment, was the only jungle Henri Rousseau ever visited (I have always loved his primitive jungle scenes). I love that Rilke wrote his poem there. I love that a block in the other direction from the Jardin and Mosque, is the Pitie-Saltpetriere Hospital (for some reason blogger is not allowing any accents at the moment). The whole quartier is built on the most interesting rubbish pile of thousands of years of human history.

But I don't remember no stinkin' machine guns, and would the bank just say YES!

A lovely surprise.

In 1972, I stumbled on a used record of this, Abbey Lincoln. I had not heard of her, but I had heard of Bob Russell who had produced and written most of the great songs on the album. I fell in love with the strident, iconoclastic voice right away (some people I know, never take to it). It must of been just a short time later I heard her sing When Malindy Sings, with her husband Max Roach. Wowee! Kazowee!

I picked up this unpromising Sidney Poitier film, For Love of Ivy (1968), for the Quincy Jones score, and the curiosity of seeing Ms Lincoln acting.
There are more then a few interesting people involved (leave it to Quincy), even Maya Angelou with BB King! In the movie, the Poitier character has a portable casino going on. It reminds me of an "after hours" joint in the basement of a furniture store in Roxbury Crossing (Boston), in the early seventies. You would come in the back door, a big piece of the wall paneling would move aside, and there would be a stairway going down to a whole barroom set-up, neon beer lights and all.

The movie is not at all, bad. There are a lot of fun things to remind one of the times.

A quiet man in Paris

A Jack of a man, rarely gets embroiled in anything too contemporary, when it comes to politics, but if he does, it is with a measured tone and deep resources.

A drizzly, gray Sunday,

I stay in the cockpit, torn between work and internet (I include the photo of cockpit, thinking of one of Frank's surveys a while back, "how do you blog?", and as new 'puter has built in camera).

Speaking of the Dragnet theme (as I did, a couple posts ago), over the weekend, I have been on a Miklós Rózsa kick (who composed said theme). I have not been a huge fan of his before. I respected his composing and orchestrational control. But having read his irritatingly ego ridden autobio, Double Life, and a few years ago having re-examined Ben-Hur, one of his most famous scores that I found bombastic and not particularly well connected to the images, I had been nursing a slight deminishment of his work compared to the opinions of my fellow film music folk.

But El Cid makes up for all! What a movie (in spite of Charlton Heston) and the score is what makes it work. I remember the year it came out (1961), seeing it in a drive-in on Cape Cod, and then again at The Coolidge Corner Theatre (Brookline). The music was almost as big on me that year, as the theme from Exodus the summer before, it is where I think I first got a taste for the Lydian mode in music. And what a glorious sounding orchestra, beautifully recorded, Hollywood's finest, still nothin' like them. It is the score that makes the horses run, the swords thrust and where all of the kinetic sense comes from. (I promised myself, I wouldn't say anything about Sophia, aaahhh, hubba-hubba, oops).

Also watched Double Indemnity (1944), which is always fun if only to watch Fred MacMurray be so... so snappy. Of course Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson give incredible performances as well. Rósza's bombasticness was one of the hall marks of film noir, but he has a hard time changing gear, or the film may have been re-edited a bit after he recorded the score, as the music behind dialogue and other places, is often too busy, and so ducked greatly in volume. I hope I am not deriving it from having read his autobiography, but it seems as if he thought too much of his music to allow it to be subservient to the film, which would make him a better composer, then a film-composer. They are not the same thing. Yet El Cid is the perfect match of his talents, excusing all.