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Good heavens! Kate Bush turns 50!

Happy birthday, Kate!

A lot of Bruce Springsteen songs are about a kind of urban angst that I’ve never had to live with. I don’t fully understand this song, Lost in the Flood. But when I saw this 1975 concert on video, there were two lines that jumped out at me:

And I said, “Hey, gunner man, that’s quicksand, that’s quicksand, that ain’t mud.”

And later:

And he said, “Hey kid, you think that’s oil? Man, that ain’t oil, that’s blood.”

Somehow, those two lines, sung more than thirty years ago, seem to be about our present situation in Iraq.

I just saw a PBS American Masters program about Pete Seeger. I learned that Pete has this written around the face of his banjo:

This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.

Stephen Foster wrote this song in 1854. This version is sung by Nanci Griffith.

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.

Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.

Melanie Safka and the Edwin Hawkins Singers:

On a DVD, playing on a big screen, with surround sound, this scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is just breathtaking. I don’t know how effectively it will come across in a YouTube video — it’s certainly no substitute for seeing the movie properly — but I hope you’ll be able to see why I think this is worth sharing.

In fact, it’s good to be alive. It’s exciting.

A song by Cat Power, titled Maybe Not.

There’s a dream that I see, I pray it can be
Look cross the land, shake this land

An election year is a good opportunity to shake this land.

It was supposed to be an Instant Cultural Touchstone.

When I quoted a line from the 1968 pop song “Master Jack” a while ago — “It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack” — I was convinced that anyone who read it would immediately have that song running through his head.

I was wrong.

I’ve talked to a few people — people old enough to remember 1968 pop songs — and it seems I can’t tell an Instant Cultural Touchstone from History’s Most Baffling Trivia. Darn.

Here is an old music video of the South African group Four Jacks and a Jill performing “Master Jack.” Pay no attention to the very poor lip sync.

This old song keeps running through my head. The tune is catchy, but I don’t think I’ve heard it since it made the Top 40 back in 1968.

It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.

Oh, it’s a very strange world. Listen:

British Airways has airbrushed a scene of arch-rival Sir Richard Branson out of its in-flight James Bond movie “Casino Royale”, sources close to the company said on Monday.

The Virgin Atlantic chief is briefly featured in the original 007 film at an airport security scanner, but can only be seen from the back in the edited version.

Shots of the tail fin of a Virgin plane have also been obscured.

“Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten,” apparently.

Via Ed Brayton, they have different concerns in Utah, where a Republican delegate wants his party to pin the blame for illegal immigration squarely on Satan.

Don Larsen, a district chairman, has submitted a resolution equating illegal immigration to “Satan’s plan to destroy the U.S. by stealth invasion” for debate at Saturday’s Utah County Republican Party Convention.

Referring to a plan by the devil for a “New World Order … as predicted in the Scriptures,” the resolution calls for the Utah County Republican Party to support “closing the national borders to illegal immigration to prevent the destruction of the U.S. by stealth invasion.”

“Everything I need to know I learned in Sunday School?”

Meanwhile, a school teacher in Indiana fights to keep her job. Why?

The column in the student newspaper seemed innocent enough: advocating tolerance for people “different than you.”

But since sophomore Megan Chase’s words appeared January 19 in The Tomahawk, the newspaper at Woodlan Junior-Senior High School, her newspaper adviser has been suspended and is fighting for her job, and charges of censorship and First Amendment violations are clouding this conservative northeastern Indiana community. …

[Newspaper advisor Amy] Sorrell has been placed on administrative leave and the school district has recommended she be fired. A public hearing is scheduled April 28, and the school board expects to vote May 1.

Kindergarteners aren’t cute at that age.

You want fresh thinking? Look to the U.S. armed forces:

The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks — including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer — according to Pentagon officials.

Foreign citizens serving in the US military is a highly charged issue, which could expose the Pentagon to criticism that it is essentially using mercenaries to defend the country. Other analysts voice concern that a large contingent of noncitizens under arms could jeopardize national security or reflect badly on Americans’ willingness to serve in uniform.

Remember those old movies about the French Foreign Legion? Our fresh thinking is French thinking. But our fries — those are freedom fries.

It’s a very strange world, and I thank you.

In A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

From Cat’s Cradle:

I did not know what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there.

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.

Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered idly over the noiseless keys.

I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me — that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.

Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to me.

The record was called Cat House Piano. It was of unaccompanied piano by Meade Lux Lewis.

Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let Lewis play his first number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.

“Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1905,” I read, “Mr. Lewis didn’t turn to music until he had passed his 16th birthday and then the instrument provided by his father was the violin. A year later young Lewis chanced to hear Jimmy Yancey play the piano. ‘This,’ as Lewis recalls, ‘was the real thing.’ Soon,” I read, “Lewis was teaching himself to play the boogie-woogie piano, absorbing all that was possible from the older Yancey, who remained until his death a close friend and idol to Mr. Lewis. Since his father was a Pullman porter,” I read, “the Lewis family lived near the railroad. The rhythm of the trains soon became a natural pattern to young Lewis and he composed a boogie-woogie solo, now a classic of its kind, which became known as the ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues.’”

I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done. The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon Blues.”

Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone — and then Angela Hoenikker joined in.

Her eyes were closed.

I was flabbergasted.

She was great.

She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.

My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.

When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

You can find audio samples of Meade Lux Lewis here.

When I was a little kid, I loved all animated cartoons. It didn’t much matter whether they were any good. When advertisers started pushing Popeye macaroni — green spinach-flavored macaroni in the shape of Popeye characters — I pestered my mom until we got some.

Oh, it was terrible!

Maybe that’s why I stopped loving Popeye cartoons. Or maybe it was the crude rubber-limbed early animation, Olive Oyl’s grating whine, Popeye and Bluto’s inarticulate mutters and grunts, or the dim-witted, predictable stories. As I grew older, I still loved cartoons, but Popeye fell by the wayside.

Then, many years later, I saw three long color cartoons: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor, Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. They were good — good enough that I’m having trouble now deciding whether to buy this forthcoming DVD of the first sixty Popeye cartoons.

Could it be that Popeye just went over my head? Were Popeye cartoons making serious points about the human condition, and I was just too immature to get them? Roy Zimmerman found something:

Nixon looks rational, Reagan looks fiscally responsible. Dan Quayle looks like a genius.

If it turns out Woody Woodpecker is deep, I’m in serious trouble.

Ed Brayton has a number of videos of musical comedian Roy Zimmerman. Here’s one of them:

More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

You know what’s missing from the iPod and the iTunes downloadable music store? Pure dumb luck, that’s what.

Listen: one day in 1986 I was in a brick-and-mortar record store, browsing in search of some perfectly ordinary music. Playing in the background was something odd and interesting with an African chorus. Then I recognized Paul Simon’s voice, and I wondered whose record this was, that Simon would lend his voice to it. The more I heard, the more completely the music hooked me, and when I got to the checkout counter, I asked, “What is that?”

It was Graceland, of course — and it wouldn’t be available for sale until the following Tuesday. The next Tuesday I was back at the record store to buy one of the greatest albums of all time.

That wasn’t the only time I found music I love through pure dumb luck, or kismet, or the “x factor.” I discovered Aimee Mann’s solo album Whatever in the same way. And in 1982, that’s how I first heard The Roches. They were singing The Hallelujah Chorus, a capella, in breath-taking three-part harmony. It was a remarkable feat, but I don’t think I was truly hooked until the next song, “Losing True.” I guess I’ve been hooked for about twenty-five years now.

Last night The Roches were here in Columbus, Ohio performing and promoting their new CD, Moonswept, which will not be officially released until March 13th. Their harmonies are still breath-taking. Their songs are witty. Some are funny; some are sad, and some are funny and sad at the same time.

Highly, highly recommended. Lots of free online videos at their website. Music samples on their myspace page.

Three cheers for pure dumb luck.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I don’t have a cell phone, so I don’t need a customized ring tone.

This blog, however, is thoroughly cutting-edge. So when I heard about these eight distinctive short MP3s, I thought, “Oh, the young kids today, they love this stuff. They can use it for their ringy-dingy thingys.” From Wired.com:

Last year, Americans spent an estimated $600 million on ringtones, thanks to the popularity of realtones — those 10- to 30-second snippets of popular songs. But with tinny sound and abrupt edits, they’re a sorry substitute for the real thing. Now preeminent indie rockers They Might Be Giants have embraced the ringtone as a stand-alone medium. The Brooklyn-based band, which was an early short-form innovator with “Dial-a-Song” - an answering machine that played a different tune each day for callers - has started composing original songlettes as an alternative to the canned loop. “We take a little sketch of a lyric or idea and make it as intense as possible,” says singer-songwriter John Flansburgh. “These songs are built for repeated listens.” To prove it, TMBG composed several original “snacktones” just for Wired readers.

They’re free downloads.

A mix of genres that gives me chills: the great Irish folk band The Chieftains, and Ziggy Marley: