Once Upon A Summertime

Once upon a summertime if you recall
We stopped beside a little flower stall
A bunch of bright forget-me-nots was all you let me buy you
Once upon a summertime just like today
We laughed the happy afternoon away
And stole a kiss in every street cafe
You were sweeter than the blossom on the tree
I was as proud as any man could be
As if the mayor had offered me the key, the key to Paris
Now another wintertime has come and gone
The pigeons feeding in the square have flown
But I remember when the vespers chime
You loved me once upon a summertime.

Johnny Mercer, Once Upon a Summertime

That’s Another Question

Okay, earlier today I answered the desert island question, kind of (see below). Now I pose a question James Lileks’ asked on The Bleat (if you don’t read Lileks’ blog daily you’re missing something) yesterday:  You are given a check for a million dollars, tax free. You have to spend it. You cannot use it on bills, or invest it, or just give it away. What would you do with it?

Lileks says he’d make a movie, which is a great idea.  I’ve written two screenplays, the second of which I really think could find a market if we could get it made.  It might need a bit of tweaking from the professionals but what original screenplay doesn’t? So that’s a possibility.  My wife’s immediate response was to buy a house at the beach and I could go for that too.  My first response was perhaps an apartment in Manhattan so I could pop up to NYC whenever I wanted.  Second response was to set up vacations all over the world for the next decade and beyond, flying first-class, staying at the finest hotels, eating the best food, etc.  I’d also buy all the books, music, and DVDs I ever wanted and get a club membership at the best golf course close to my house.   

I might also buy a new car, not because I don’t like the one I’m driving now but because what I have now is old and it has a cassette tape player and I’d want something with a CD player and a plug for my IPod.  The car itself means not much to me, so long as it’s reliable. 

Would I buy a new, bigger, home?  No.  Neither my wife nor I ever cared about living in a big house.  Too much space to keep clean.  At this point in our lives if we move we’d probably go smaller, into a condo.   Maybe we’d use the money to move into a very nice condo, so long as a weekly visit from the cleaning-lady came with it.  I hate housework and so does my baby. 

Someone responded in the posts’ comments section with perhaps an even more interesting question, one that may shed more light on your character than the original question: “What if you won a huge lotto? Big enough so you wouldn’t have any worries about money, ever again. Now, it’s two years after you’ve won that. You’ve travelled, you have the RV, the cabin, the remodel, whatever. You wake up and it’s Monday morning. What is your day like?”

Who can say, really?  I think that my day would not be so different from what it would be without the money.  At least I hope it wouldn’t be.  I’m certain that I’d still have the same interests and concerns.  I’m in my fifties: I know my likes and dislikes, and I know my own mind.  I’ve never longed for splendor, nor for anything that I couldn’t buy with my own hard-earned money.  To be honest, I like money, it buys you a bit of freedom and gives you some peace-of-mind, but it’s not a central to my happiness.  So long as I have my girl, my family, a few friends, and a few outlets, like music and the theater and trips to New York, with the occasional jaunt over to Europe, then I’m happy. 

Someone in the comments answered that they’d build a theater and hire pros to run it, and then sit back and enjoy the people in town seeing great theater.  What a grand idea!  Put me down for that one too. 

Another responded that he’d try to outdo Andrew Carnegie for philanthropy and that too crossed my mind.  I’d like to come up with some sort of organization dedicated to a cause that I was certain would benefit my community and/or the world at large.  I’d staff it with a few pros whom I respected but mostly with family and a few friends since they would be the only people I fully trusted, at least at the beginning.  (I’d have my wife overseeing the books because I could then be certain we weren’t be spending a penny more than was necessary.  I love you baby.) Something like that could be highly rewarding.

Okay, enough for today.  It’s the weekend and we all need some downtime.  If I were infinitely rich I hope I’d still do what I plan to do today as a poor pauper: spend some time with my love and continue reading an astoundingly good book, Gordon Woods’ Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.  If you’re looking for me, I’ll be the very happy guy on the couch.

Stranded

I recently joined Goodreads, a site for booklovers, and I’ve been adding books to my “read” list as I recall them.  The list is up to 360 books as of today though that number is only a fraction of what I’ve read in my life. I’ll be adding more.  Perusing my bookshelves the other day in order to add to the list I came across the book Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, by Greil Marcus, which I bought when it was first released back in 1979 and I was 21 years old.  The book consists of twenty rock and roll writers essays answering the question: what rock and roll record would you take to a desert island?  Marcus adds a final chapter entitled “Treasure Island” in which he answers a different question: were a Martian to land on earth and ask you the meaning of rock and roll, what would you play to explain.  Marcus uses the question to craft a commented discography is which he outlines the best rock and roll has to offer, at least up to that time. 

It’s a fun book with some surprising entries and it got me thinking.  When I purchased the book thirty years ago my answer to the desert island question would have been unequivocal: Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.  (I’ve blogged about Van and Astral Weeks previously here and put together sort of my own rock and roll discography here, here and here.)  I have loved Astral Weeks since the first time I put it on the record player when I was in my mid-teens.  I had no idea at the time that it was considered by the rock cognoscenti such as Marcus and Lester Bangs (who chooses Astral Weeks as his desert island record in the book) as one of rock and roll’s masterpieces.  I simply knew that I loved it.  It got to me in a way that no other record ever had.  And no one else knew about it!  It was my own little treasure.  And it would be tucked under my arm when I landed on that desert island. 

Would it still be?  If the desert island question were presented to me today would I still choose as I did as a 21 year old?  A 51 year old has different needs than a 21 year old, after all.  Would the me of today need or want to ride Astral Weeks’ emotional roller coaster in his desert island existence? (By the way, I’ve quoted Lester Bangs in this space previously as saying “Cyprus Avenue”, one of the records finest songs, was about “rapture, and despair.”  Perusing his essay this morning, I see that he says “rapture and anguish.”  I was close but wrong.  Thirty years will play with your memory.) Plus, as anyone who has read even the past few posts on this blog knows, my musical tastes have…what?   I was about to say my musical tastes have changed, but that’s not true.  The rock and roll I loved thirty years ago I still love.  Better to say my musical horizons have widened.  These days I listen to classical, jazz, and standards as much as I listen to rock and roll, probably more.  After all, I’ve heard the rock and roll thousands of time by now.  There is nothing new there, while there is still plenty of new music to explore in those other areas.  Anyhow, I digress.  Probably because I am avoiding the question.  What record are you tucking under your arm as the ship that dropped you off sails away into the distance?

I could cop out like Marcus and simply say, well, I’ll take my IPod with me along with the twenty-five hundred songs I have on it.  That’ll do.  No, you say?  I must choose a single record or CD?  Can I least put together a compilation?  No?  No. 

And the answer to the question is: I don’t know.  Or, at least, it depends on the day.  Today I might still choose Astral Weeks, tomorrow some other Van Morrison record, like Tupelo Honey, or Saint Dominic’s Preview, or Veedon Fleece.  Would I choose any other rock and roll?  No.  The older I get the more I am convinced that Van Morrison is the greatest rock and roller of them all (i.e. my favorite).  I listen to his music far more than anyone else, including Dylan. Pack me off to the island with just Van’s oeuvre and I’d be satisfied. 

But there are other contenders now.  Today I might choose some Bach concertos, such as this CD, which I adore.  I imagine keeping oneself from falling into the depths of despair would be of central concern on a desert island and I know of no music more joyous than the Bach concertos.  Tomorrow I’d perhaps choose Beethoven’s Archduke Piano Trio whose jaunty, bouncy second movement would keep one’s spirits up and whose first movement would add a dose of pure beauty to go along with it.  If you deem that large doses of beauty are the most important need on the island, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet might do the trick.  It’s a touch choice, as you can see.

Perhaps a Jo Stafford collection, Helen Merrill’s debut album or Frank Sinatra Only The Lonely would fit the bill.  Jo Stafford’s full, rich voice could see you through a lot, and, to my taste, when she sang the standards no one did it better.  The Merrill and Sinatra records might be dangerous though.  You might want them in order to wallow in your despair but listen to them too much on your desert island and suicide may be your only way out.  As much as I love them, best they be left back on the mainland. 

Or maybe I’d bring along Pops’ Hot Fives and Sevens, perhaps the seminal jazz recordings.  The music is consistently great and it has the added benefit of including ninety songs.  That’d last you awhile.  And whose spirits would not be lifted while listening to Louis Armstrong sing and blow his horn?   

Clearly this post has devolved into an excuse for listing some of my favorite music.  So sue me.  Marcus used an entire book to list his.

There is more but time is short this morning so I’ll end.  Today, if forced to choose, I’d still go with Van Morrison.  But I’d take one of his later records, Magic Time, because you’d need a dose of magic if you’re all alone forever on a desert island.  And what song would be more appropriate to your existence than its opening track?  It would be the story of your life:

Bach’s Cantatas

Speaking of looking back (see post below) I’ve recently been looking way back, about 275 years.  I’ve loved Bach for a long time now but most of what I’ve listened to is his secular music, his violin concertos, the Brandenburgs, the harpsichord concertos, his cello suites, his violin sonatas, etc.  Most of this music was written between the years 1717-1723 when Bach was in the employ of Prince Leopold of of Anhalt-Köthen.  The prince loved Bach and apparently the feeling was mutual.  Furthermore, the prince knew his music – he was a gifted violinist - and as a result he realized Bach’s genius.  He put no restrictions on what Bach could write and for this we can thank Prince Leopold for some of the most glorious music in the Western canon.  So, thanks Leo. 

But all good things must come to an end.  Leopold married in 1721 to a shrew who apparently had no appreciation of music and who felt that Leopold was spending far too much money on his court orchestra and Bach.  Bach hated her and things began to deteriorate from there.  By 1723 he felt he could no longer continue as Kapellmeister at Cöthen.  Bach was offered the position as Cantor at Leipzig, and though Leopold’s shrew kicked the bucket before he accepted, Bach decided to move on anyway.  Alas, if only she had died sooner, before Bach had started looking for other employment, musical history may have been changed forever.  At any rate, Bach would spend the rest of his career at Leipzig until his death in 1750.  And unlike his position with the prince, his new job imposed strict requirements on what he could write.  The main requirement, other than teaching at the school, was to “provide weekly music at the two main churches in Leipzig”.  This necessarily meant that most of what Bach wrote forever after was church music (though he would write both The Art of the Fugue and the wondrous Goldberg Variations late in life).  Hence his St. Matthews Passion, the Mass in B Minor, and his chorale preludes and cantatas, both of which he wrote hundreds.  The sheer volume of these works intimidate the newcomer.  Which ones should we listen to?  Which are the best?  Having completed re-listening to Robert Greenberg’s Teaching Company course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, I’ve now begun re-listening to his Bach and the High Baroque.  This has inspired me to take a shot at the cantatas.  The cantata form rose during the Baroque alongside opera and oratorio.  They were essentially small scale operas intended for the church, for one or two singers, acting out the gospel lesson of the day or week.  As such, a new one was needed weekly, which explains how we know of some 250 Bach cantatas, with many hundreds more thought lost. 

I received Bach: Cantatas BWV 80, 140, 147; Jesu, meine Freude from Amazon last week and listened to the cantatas at home and during my morning workouts this week.  And they are marvelous.  I especially love the first movement choruses – the chorus of Wachet auf (“Sleepers Awake”), BWV 140, is truly sublime.  I know I use this phrase a lot when discussing music, but it makes me giddy.  Everyone knows some of this music, for instance the fourth movement choral movement of Wachet Auf can he heard here:

If you’ve ever been to church, you’ll recognize some of this music.  If anyone told me twenty years ago that I’d be listening to and enjoying church music I’d have told them they were crazy but there it is.  Here is that sublime first movement chorus to Cantata No. 140.  Turn up the volume and enjoy:

Dropping Out

I sent this Victor Davis Hanson blog post to my wife a few weeks back and she responded that I could have written it, so closely did it resemble my own experience.  The post’s subject has to do with Hanson’s alienation from contemporary culture and, judging by the responses in the comments section, Hanson and I are clearly not alone.  Like Hanson, I once was deeply engaged with the popular culture.  But also like Hanson, alas, I never go to the movie theater anymore and I only watch a few current movies per year on DVD.  There’s simply very little coming from Hollywood these days that interests me as most of what I see is predicable, trite, and boring.  Likewise music.  I have no idea about music being produced today or who is producing it. I couldn’t name a popular hit song over the past decade if my life depended on it.  As I’ve mentioned before, modern popular music is a world that doesn’t exist for me.  And so on: I don’t read the newspaper beyond a glance at the morning sports page, I very rarely watch or listen to public TV or radio, and I watch less sports than I used to.  For instance, I loved professional basketball from the time I was a child until the day Larry Bird retired but I never watch it anymore.  Like other once glorious things, it has devolved.  Rather than being a team game, it’s now a one-on-one or two-on-two affair, with little of the teamwork, ball movement, movement away from the ball, and beauty (think the old Celtics teams from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s) that once epitomized the game.  Pro basketball these days seems to be about clearing out for one player to go one-on-one to the basket against his defender and, if that doesn’t work, to pop it out to a teammate for a three-pointer.  Indeed, the three-point shot is one of the problems with the game today.  The twenty-foot jump shot is a thing of the past as is working together to get the best shot under the best circumstances. 

I watch a smattering of TV.  I still watch Entourage, which isn’t as good as it once was, and I’ll watch Curb Your Enthusiasm until it’s run is complete.  And, as any reader of this blog knows, I love Mad Men.  I started watching 30 Rock last year but it got unfunny after its first season.  I’m thinking about starting to watch The Office because I watched a few episodes recently and found it quite good, particularly how they handle the relationship between Jim and Pam, which is touching.  I had a bit of a bias against it when it first came on because my wife and I had watched the original British version of the show, which was brilliant, and I thought the American version could not possibly match it.  Perhaps not, but my cursory viewing of these recent episodes tell me it’s well-made.  We’ll see if it’s worth watching the full run.

I don’t want to be this way.  To anyone who reads this blog, clearly I love movies, music, television, books, and sports.  But in the desert called modern culture it’s more rewarding to look backwards.  There’s still lots out there to find so long as you know where to look. 

Too Marvelous For Words

Last night I watched Turner Classic Movies’ delightful documentary celebrating Johnny Mercer’s 100th birthday, Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me.  While he was a singer and a composer as well as the co-founder of Capitol Records, Mercer’s greatest fame came as a lyricist, the finest America ever had.  That’s not just my opinion.  Gene Lees, who knew Mercer, in his book, Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer, writes this: “Every American lyricist I have known considers, or considered, him the best of them all.”  The list of standards Mercer wrote seems virtually endless and while people may no longer recognize his name, it is well-nigh impossible, even in this musically-impoverished age, for them not to know some of his songs, so ubiquitous have they become.  He differed from Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and some of the other great lyricists of the day in that he was purely American.  A southerner from Savannah, Georgia, shaped by the blues and jazz of his birthplace, Mercer had no old-world European influences and as such his songs had a looser, more natural feel to them.  He spoke the American language, sprinkling his songs with colloquialisms, catch phrases, place-names, and slang, all in a conversational style that hid their technical brilliance.  Terry Teachout captured Mercer perfectly in this excerpt from his 2004 appreciation of Mercer in Commentary magazine (subscription required):

Mercer's brand of lyricism—unabashed yet unsentimental, and expressed with a colloquial directness that conceals extreme technical sophistication—is unmistakable. No one else, for example, could have written a lyric like “Skylark” (1942): “Skylark,/Have you anything to say to me?/Won't you tell me where my love can be?/Is there a meadow in the mist/Where someone's waiting to be kissed?” In its precise rhymes and beautifully shaped cadences, it is obviously a product of the golden age of American songwriting. But no other golden-age lyricist, not even Oscar Hammerstein II, could have aspired to its air of uncontrived simplicity.

Mercer had dozens of collaborators though perhaps his most prolific partnership came with Harold Arlen.  The two wrote some of the most satisfying songs in the American songbook: “That Old Black Magic”, “Blues In The Night”, “One For My Baby”, “This Time The Dreams On Me”, “Come Rain Or Come Shine”, and many more.  In the TCM documentary, which is filled with glorious old footage, Mercer explains that he wrote differently for different performers, tailoring his lyrics to the performer’s personality.  This versatility also conveys to his composing partner.  The same man who wrote the blues-tinged lyrics for Arlen’s compositions would write the wistful lyrics to “Moon River” with Henry Mancini and the melancholy, meandering lyrics to “When The World Was Young” with M. Philippe Gerard.

Johnny Mercer is an American treasure, “America’s Poet” as someone described him in the documentary.  The documentary runs again on November 18 and you should catch it if you can.  Better still, go get some of his music.  Here’s just a taste, Sinatra doing the definitive version of “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”: 

About Last Night

Yesterday’s Republican victories in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races have to be a blow to the administration.  While I don’t think the results were a referendum on Obama I do think they were a referendum on Obamaism, a certain rejection of his radical overhaul of health care and energy.  The size of the McDonnell victory in Virginia (18%) was too big, virtually unprecedented, to blame the loss simply on a bad Democratic candidate, not in a state that Obama carried by 6% last year.  Likewise New Jersey, which Obama carried a year ago by 14% and which Christie won by 5%.  While the Democrats would like to blame the defeat on a failed, unpopular governor, take into account that Jersey is one of the most liberal states in the country and Christie achieved his margin with a third-party candidate peeling some votes away from him.  It appears that 20-25% of the electorate switched last night.  People are onto the Obama agenda and they don’t like it.  remains personally popular with the American people (though not nearly as popular as he once was) they don’t like his policies.  And the New Jersey result shows that his popularity doesn’t rub off.  Obama campaigned with Corzine five times over the past few weeks, to no affect.  And here’s the biggest reason why this is a blow to the administration.  The so-called Blue Dog Democrats, those representatives and Senators who won last year in districts or states that John McCain carried, all have a wet finger to the wind, taking notice of last night’s results.  They’ll be even more reluctant than previously to cast votes for unpopular programs that may cost them their seats.  Passing Obamacare just got harder.