Discography Year Two - Week 11

Welcome to Week 11 of the second year of our Discography music discussion. I have nothing profound to add (as if I ever do) other than to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving.  Happily I will be seeing many of you next week - either at Champlain at the beginning of the week or in the Natti as I pass through town (and, yes, Dave Wallace I'd love to get an adult scholarly beverage if we can make the schedule work). Oh, and in regards to Dave Kelley's evocative last line; whether it's Marcel and Albertine or Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura or Majnun and Layla (or, for that matter, Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd), it's always about a girl.

Gary Beatrice

George Jones, I Always Get Lucky With You

It's easy to forget how well written 1950s country music was. Lyrically, musically, "I Always Get Lucky With You" has it all.

And how good of a singer is George Jones when he completely blows Merle Haggard away on this song?

If you claim that you don't like country music you haven't been listening to the right country music.

Dave Wallace

The National - Terrible Love

For a bunch of guys originally from Cincinnati, it took me a while to warm up to the National.  They initially struck me as too gloomy and depressing.  Then, I was lucky enough to see them in concert and it was a classic "Oh, I get it now" moment.  Their last few albums are especially terrific, and I picked Terrible Love for today's entry.  It's a very good representation of the National "sound."

Alice Neiley

I had a tough time with the song choice this week. There are plenty I’ve been listening to, mostly Sondheim and Gershwin, because my grandmother has always especially fond of those composers, and by osmosis or blood-line, so have I.  There have been other posts on this blog that touch on death/dying, gratitude, and grief, to varying degrees. As some of you know, my grandmother’s process has been a fairly painless one, and she’s lived an extremely full, long life – circumstances I know are rare, and for which I feel luckier than I’ve ever felt about anything, I think. She died this morning at 6:30am. My father and aunt arrived at the respite house at 6:35, my brothers and I at 6:40, my mother at 6:50. Another aunt, uncle, and cousin showed up a few minutes later. Until that moment, I was sure I’d write about the song “Not While I’m Around” (Judy Collins’ version), from Sondheim’s Sweeny Todd. But instead, an instrumental tune, “Swimming” composed by Abel Korzeniowski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEYz9Uq01nc 

popped into my head and wouldn’t leave. See, my grandmother loved the water, especially being IN the water. As I looked at her this morning, I kept thinking “She’s floating.” She waded into Lake Michigan to float on her back every summer until about 3 years ago. I once saw her – no joke – floating on her back reading. No inner tube, no life belt. Given that she had almost no fat on her, this is anatomically…just…weird. But I saw it. More than once. When she wasn’t floating, she loved sinking—sitting on the sandy bottom of the lake (the colder the water temp the better), staring up at the blue sky as if from the inside of a snow globe. Korzeniowski’s song seems to embody everything about swimming – the floating sensation sweeps through me whenever I hear that high register piano riff and the allegro strings and the harp—the cello solo brings the exhale, the sinking, the release. Gram and I swam together a lot. She used to take me into Lake Michigan in late May, when the water was so cold it made your skull ache. We’d get up early, split a banana, then grit our teeth and giggle all the way in and under. Afterward, both of us completely blue in the lips, she’d say “Isn’t that just the most wonderful, though?” And I’d say “My favorite favorite,” which brings me to the escalation of Korzeniowski’s “Swimming”: the dynamics rise just after the third harp moment, and the strings sound like an extended musical shiver, the spontaneous kind that sinks into and rises from deep in our bones, reminding us we’re alive.

Kathy Seiler

Nick Murphy – Medication 

Nick Murphy was previously known as Chet Faker (as an homage to Chet Baker). His music is characterized as electronica or “trip hop.” He originally got popular when he covered No Diggity. I stumbled across the Medication song when I was letting Spotify play me new release music while I was mowing the lawn in early fall. I liked the song enough to write it down on an index card. Then, a few weekends ago, my son was home from college and looking at all the songs I’d written down on the card, and he suddenly started talking about how great Nick Murphy is and how he’d changed his name from Chet Faker.  I went “Wait, what? You know him?” 

That led to a lovely conversation with my kid about this musician and his music. Since we don’t share a lot of musical tastes in common (other than me teaching him how to crank the bass in a minivan, windows down), it was a sweet, unexpected moment with him. Since those moments are becoming rarer as my son becomes a man, I treasured it. I like this song – I don’t love it -- but it’s going to now remind me of the moment when my son and I first met as two adults, sharing something together we didn’t know we had in common.

Dave Kelley

A short and hopefully sweet post this week.

"Expresso Love"  Dire Straits

 In some ways, I think I overrated Dire Straights when I was younger.  However, "Making Movies" was a great record.  With some help from Springsteen's producer Jimmy Iovine and E Street member Roy Bittan  (the dean of the university of musical perversity), I think "Making Movies" is a classic record.  "Expresso Love" is my favorite track with some down and dirty guitar work from Mark Knoffler.  Plus, it reminds me of a girl.. 

Kevin Andrews

Just when you thought the world could not get stranger, it does, bigly. I’m sure I don’t need to list examples. No doubt there will be more liars, hypocrites, charlatans, and imbeciles in the news today. It’s hard to keep up.

One of the things I appreciate most about music is its tonic properties. Recently it’s been useful as an anti-depressant too. I’d be interested in hearing what all y’all use to block out the absurdity d’jour.

For me it’s been old-school R&B–Motown, Soul, Funk, etc. (especially mixed with Bourbon). Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves all work well. Today, it’s Raphael Saadiq’s 2008 The Way I See It. Two tracks in particular 100 Yard Dash and Staying in Love stand out but the whole record is a gem. Raphael wrote and produced the album and plays many of the period instruments.

Phillip Seiler

KT Tunstall

Love is an Ocean

This week I don't have any long treatise or deeper meanings. I just want to share a song and an artist I love fully. KT Tunstall burst onto the music scene in 2005 with the ridiculously catchy single "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" off the album "Eye to the Telescope". She's been writing great songs ever since. If you don't love a short, sassy, Scottish broad with an acoustic guitar, I'm afraid we can't be friends. (Seriously I recommend her Twitter account if you enjoy people willing to vulgarly speak truth to power.) She also spent a summer busking on the Church Street marketplace sadly after I had graduated from UVM.

Back to today's song, it is from her most recent album, KIN, and it is the final track. In an era of random playlists and singles, this feels worth highlighting because it is a stunningly beautiful way to end an album (those lingering notes...bliss) and begs you to immediately start the whole album over again just to reach that end. So just enjoy this beautiful song and I really recommend watching the video which I had not seen until this morning. It is a perfect complement to the song in its own stark beauty.

Gary Scudder

Lee Morgan, Search for the New Land

This will be the end of my Lee Morgan trilogy, following up his role on John Coltrane's Blue Train and Morgan's own The Sidewinder.  The album Search for the New Land came out in 1964 right after The Sidewinder, but it was actually written and recorded the year before.  The story is that the record company simply didn't know what to make of it, especially the title track, so they just shelved it.  Soon, however, The Sidewinder was such a big hit that they felt empowered to release Search for the New Land.  Truthfully, I like Search for the New Land better, especially the title track.  You can see the influence of people like Davis or Coltrane or some of the other innovative jazz performers who were pushing the boundaries.  About the time that you think you have the song figured out it takes off in a different direction, and takes it's own sweet time getting there (checking it at over fifteen minutes).  The talent on the record is top notch: Morgan (trumpet), Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Grant Green (guitar), Reggie Workman (bass) and Billy Higgins (drums).  Again, how in the hell did I not know who Lee Morgan was?  I think the New Land speaks to jazz, certainly, but also the African-American experience.

My Years With Proust - Day 650

   I saw a good deal of Gilberte at this time, as it happened, having renewed my friendship with her for our life, in the long run, is not calculated according to the duration of our friendships.  Let a certain period of time elapse, and you will see (just as, in politics, former ministries reappear, or, in the theatre, forgotten plays are revived) friendships renews between the same persons as before, after long years of interruption, and renewed with pleasure.  After ten years, the reasons which made one party love too passionatly, the other unable to endure a too exacting despotism, no longer exist.  The affinity alone survives, and everything that Gilberte would have refused me in the past, that had seemed to her intolerable, impossible, she granted me quite readily - doubtless because I no longer desired it.  Although neither of us had ever mentioned the reason for this change, if she was always ready to come to me, never in a hurry to leave me, it was because the obstacle had vanished: my love.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 694

It is funny how friendships come and go over the years.  I've been remarkably fortunate to have a series of friends who I've been close to for decades, but other folks just disappeared off the face of the earth, and doubtless it was probably more my fault than theirs.  Considering how much we change over the years it's rather amazing that we keep friends at all.  I didn't stay in my hometown and have lived in Cincinnati and Atlanta and Vermont - and, for that matter, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi - and passed through high school and college and graduate school and a couple of teaching positions.  With every stop along the way I changed and evolved, and yet there are some folks who have always been there - whose friendship has always fit.  I've now known Dave Kelley for something like thirty-five years - and Jack Schultz for something like forty-five years - and yet there's never been an uncomfortable feeling that they were a friend from a different age and we had nothing to talk about any more.  Truthfully, I've had more of those moments with my own family with either of the two of them.

In this passage Marcel reflects upon his relationship, now renewed, with Gilberte, after the death of Albertine.  What I find interesting is the line, "and everything that Gilberte would have refused me in the past, that had seemed to her intolerable, impossible, she granted me quite readily."  His point is that she granted them because he no longer loved her and no longer demanded them, and because they weren't a demand she would grant them quite willingly without losing face.  A ex-mistress will happily cross the ocean to see you when your wife won't cross the six inch no-man's zone in the middle of the bed.  So that much is a "duh."  What I'd really like to know is what Gilberte would have found "intolerable, impossible" once but which she now granted "quite readily."  I suppose it could be a request to meet for tea to discuss painfully long French novels, although the romantic (or the perv) in me suspects it's something more creative.

My Years With Proust - Day 649

Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay; a position in society, like anything else, is not created once and for all, but, just as much as the power of an Empire, is continually rebuilding itself by a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies in social or political history in the course of half a century.  The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 685-686

"The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day."

My excellent friend Steve Wehmeyer likes to tell this story.  Two years ago we were walking around Stone Town on the island of Unguja and we were talking about how I had dragooned him into going to Zanzibar in the first place.  At that point something like the following conversation took place:

GS: "We should really combine two classes together and come back here in January, and for two weeks and not  just one."   

SW: "Yeah, sure, that would be amazing if we could somehow make that happen."

GS: "Oh, it's already real.  I've imagined it.  Everything else is just details."

SW: "Thank you, Lawrence."

Steve, of course, was, gently, giving me a little grief by calling me Lawrence, as in Lawrence of Arabia.  I also get the occasional "Nothing is written."  To be fair, I've earned the abuse, and certainly much more.  I do tend to think that everything is possible, and that no idea is too big, and that once you've imagined the big, crazy idea all that's left is filling in the details.  And as it became clear that we were going to be able to put together two classes for a year-long experience with a two week trip in January, I said to him (I'm paraphrasing, but only a bit), "You know what would be cool?  What if we put together four classes with a trip over January?  We could have thirty students and four professors? No one's ever done that."  His response: "Nothing is written."  So, about next year's trip to Zanzibar with four professors . . .

My Years With Proust - Day 648

At first I saw watching her, as she read it with an air of astonishment, then raised her head, her eyes seeming to come to rest upon a succession of distinct and incompatible memories which she could not succeed in bringing together. Meanwhile I had recognised Gilberte's handwriting on the envelope which I had just taken from my pocket-book.  I opened it.  Gilberte wrote to inform me that she was marrying Robert de Saint-Loup. She told me that she had sent me a telegram about it to Venice but had had no reply.  I remembered that I had been told that the telegraphic service there was inefficient.  I had never received her telegram.  Perhaps she would refuse to believe this. All of a sudden I felt in my brain a face, which was installed there in the guise of a memory, leave its place and surrender it to another fact.  The telegram that I had received a few days earlier, and had supposed to be from Albertine, was from Gilberte.  As the somewhat laboured originality of Gilberte's handwriting consisted chiefly, when she wrote a line, in introducing into the line above it the strokes of her t's which appeared to be underlining the words, or the dots over her i's which appeared to be punctuating the sentence above them, and on the other hand in interspersing the line below the tails and flourishes of the words immediately above, it was quite natural that the clerk who dispatched the telegram should have read the loops of s's or y's in the line above as an "'ine" attached to the word "Gilberte." The dog over the i of Gilberte had climbed up to make a full stop. As for her capital G, it resembled a Gothic A.  The fact that, in addition to this, two or three words had been misread, had dovetailed into one another (some of them indeed had seemed to me incomprehensible), was sufficient to explain the tails of my error and was not even necessary.  How many letters are actually read into a word by a careless person who knows what to expect, who sets out with the idea that the message is from a certain person?  How many words into the sentence?  We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same starting-point, are all quite natural.  A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 670-671

Well, we've solved the mystery of Albertine.  She is, in fact, quite dead.  The telegram that Marcel received was not from her at all, but rather from Gilberte.  It was a combination of some remarkably clumsy efforts on the part of the Italian telegraphic service, and doubtless Marcel's own desire to read the words signalling Albertine's resurrection and her desire to come home to him.  The telegram announced the marriage of Marcel's ex-love, even if fairly one-sided, Gilberte, to his best friend, Robert de Saint-Loup.  As we get further into the novel it has great significance because it takes Gilberte, mainly, out of the running to be a serious love interest for Marcel, and also assures her own unhappiness.

Proust then launches into a discussion of how the mind processes words, which is both fascinating and also serves as an explanation for how he might have messed up reading the telegram. "How many letters are actually read into a word by a careless person who knows what to expect, who sets out with the idea that the message is from a certain person?  How many words into the sentence?" A couple years ago I was talking to my first year students about the brain's proclivity to create a narrative - essentially, that the narrative making part of the brain was always up and ready for action.  And the example that I used, in one of those odd spur of the moment flights of fancy that oddly work out more than they fail, was to give them a brief Arabic lesson.  I wrote the word that appears to the top left on the top line below, which is the word "Muslim."  As we know, Arabic is written right to left.  The little circle at the far right (hence the first letter of the word) is the equivalent of an "m." It is followed by three short lines, which sort of look like a lazy, bottom-heavy "w" - that is the Arabic equivalent of an "s."  The taller line that looks like an "l" is, in fact, that Arabic equivalent of an "l."  And that leaves the little elephant trunk at the end, which is what the "m' equivalent looks like at the end of a word (well, it's one of the ways that it looks).  So, that leaves you with mslm. The marks above and below the lines transform the letters.  If there is nothing above or below you treat the letters as having an "a", so the beginning would be "ma."  However, in this case there is a little loop, and that turns the "a" into a "u", just as the little line below at the end turns the "a" into an "i." And this is why Muslim is more appropriate than Moslem, although, because we're talking transliteration in addition to translation, the latter was very popular in the West for centuries.  Now, the point I then made to the students was that in Arabic the marks above and below the line are often left out, especially in the newspaper.  This gave me the chance to ask the students how Arabic readers could actually read the words, and they were able to hypothesize that the brain would fill in the blanks, not simply because of habit, but also because of the inherent logic.  I then asked the students how many letters they actually looked at when they read, which further made their little brains hurt.  It's the same concept, obviously, you just look at a few letters, even if it's just the first and the last letters of a word, and the brain fills in the rest on its own.

And while we're here, the second word over from the right on the top line is Allah.  On the bottom line the word farthest to the right is Quran. I really need to get back to working on my Arabic, for the obvious reasons.

Now, being Proust, he then takes this a step further and proposes, correctly, obviously, that we do the same thing is many other instances as well.  Just as our brains fill in the gaps in words, it also fills in the gaps in our lives.  We fly along looking at a random bits of information, our equivalent of letters, and we "guess" at the bigger meaning, often with consequences as foolish or comical or tragic as a bad translation. "We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same starting-point, are all quite natural.  A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises."

Oh, and apropos of almost nothing, all of this discussion of deciphering handwriting reminds me of my time in graduate school, and the seemingly endless hours I spent working my way through 16th century documents trying to decipher the mysteries of Tudor national security.  The document below is just about the cleanest writing you could possibly imagine.  In my first couple years here at Champlain I was teaching an honors history class (back when we had things like honors history classes - or honors classes - or history classes, for that matter).  For some reason I was teaching the students a little paleography, something I would never have done in a regular history class.  I'm sure it was because it was an honors class and I was trying to come up with unique things for them to do.  For the final assignment, in lieu or yet another paper, I gave them four different projects from which to choose.  As a lark, I gave them a paleography assignment where they had to transcribe a pretty random 16th century letter and tell me what they thought it was about.  Truthfully, I didn't think any of them would choose that option, but every single one of them did.  I think they just thought it was an adventure, and it was an assignment that was so odd that they figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity - let alone once in a Champlain College academic lifetime opportunity. 

This booke heere followinge (called A Viewe of the Present State of Ireland) . . .

Father

Well, not my father.  The other day one of my more clinically insane student, Anthony, took a detour on his Velazquez-Picasso project presentation to point out that when he was stuck he actually came to ask me for help.  Of course, he needed a backdrop to express this point, and this was what popped up on his Powerpoint.  When he sent me a copy he entitled it "Father," and "I am enlightened."  Lunatics.  And to think, I'm taking him to Zanzibar in January; which is not the same as promising to bring him back from Zanzibar.

If only they devoted as much time to working on the actual assignments . . .

My Years With Proust - Day 647

Sometimes a vague landmark which I seemed to recognise led me to suppose that I was about to see appear, in its seclusion, solitude and silence, the beautiful exiled piazza.  At the moment, some evil genie which had assumed the form of a new calle made me unwittingly retrace my steps, and I found myself suddenly brought back to the Grand Canal.  And as there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of a reality, I finally wondered whether it was not during my sleep that there had occurred, in a dark patch of Venetian crystallisation, that strange mirage which offered a vast piazza surrounded by romantic palaces to the meditative eye of the moon.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 666

Not surprisingly, this passage reminds me of the 1973 Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie movie Don't Look Now.  I've never made it to Venice even though it's been a goal of mine for years; I don't know if it's on my bucket list, mainly because I don't seem to have a bucket list.  Mainly I just think of places I want to go and then go there, without years passing by where I pine away for the locations. 

What mainly jumped out at me when looking back over my scribbled notes in the book is the one next to this passage: "Did he actually get a telegram from Albertine?"  I feel like Proust's trying to gaslight the reader, while at least being honest about it when he points out that "there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of a reality. . ."

My Years With Proust - Day 646

   On returning to the hotel I would meet young women, mainly Austrians, who came to Venice to spend the first fine days of this flowerless spring.  There was one in particular whose features did not resemble Albertine's but who attracted me by the same fresh complexion, the same gay, light-hearted look.  Soon I became aware that I was beginning to say that same things to her as I had said to Albertine at the start, that I concealed the same misery when she told me she would not be seeing me the following day because she was going to Verona, and that I immediately wanted to go to Verona too.  It did not last - she was soon to leave for Austria and I would never see her again - but already, vaguely, jealous as one is when one begins to fall in love, looking at her charming and enigmatic face I wondered whether she too loved women,  whether what she had in common with Albertine, that clear complexion, that bright-eyed look, that air of friendly candour which charmed everyone and which stemmed more from the fact that she was not in the least interested i knowing about other people's action, which interested her not at all, than that she was confessing her own, which on the contrary she concealed beneath the more puerile lies - I wondered whether all this constituted the morphological characteristics of the woman who loves other women.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 663-664

Marcel continues to climb out of his depression, finding another new woman, this time an Austrian, to obsess over.  The relationship never went anywhere, mainly because she was scheduled to leave Venice, but Marcel began to notice certain definitive trends that marked his relationship with Albertine: "Soon I became aware that I was beginning to say that same things to her as I had said to Albertine at the start, that I concealed the same misery when she told me she would not be seeing me the following day because she was going to Verona, and that I immediately wanted to go to Verona too."  It is one of the shameful secrets of humankind that we court, date, fuck, marry and divorce the same person repeatedly.  We employ the same endearments, tell the same lies, repeat the same moves in bed, share the same stories, reveal the same secrets we've never told anyone, endlessly, with the only noticeable difference being the color hairs they leave on our brush.  Actually, that would sound a lot better if I were saying it with Robert Mitchum's voice from Out of the Past.  Do I actually believe it?  I think it's more true than we want to believe.  The self may be fabricated, but it's also pretty solidly constructed, and it's not as if we recreate ourselves, for the most part, with every new woman who passes through our life.  Proust hints at the notion that all love affairs are actually self-love and I have trouble going that far, but he was also a genius so I should probably listen.