Since some kind soul took it upon themselves to delete my previous link from Youtube, I was forced to go in search of another example of the great man performing his signature work. And I found one. And it’s even better than the first one, with the added bonus of Japanese subtitles..
Actually, I’m supposed to go and see him tonight in concert, with Alison Moyet for reasons that pass my understanding. She’s a lovely girl, but I don’t think I can face it. Think I’ll stay home and watch this clip a few more times..
Yup, ‘fraid I’ve been at the Borges again.. I’ve, perhaps unforgiveably, picked out a couple of passages from his essay ‘Coleridge’s Dream’ that tickled my fancy. You know the poem he’s talking about – it’s the one that starts like this..
“… A Mongolian emperor, in the thirteenth century, dreams a palace and builds it according to his vision; in the eighteenth century, an English poet, who could not have known that this construction was derived from a dream, dreams a poem about the palace. Compared with this symmetry of souls of sleeping men who span continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or nothing at all…”
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” …The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman execution. To speculate on the intentions of that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless, but it is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal In 1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of Kublai Khan’s palace; of the poem, we know that barely fifty lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or of music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one will be the key…”
.. Just been reading Joseph Campbell on the Arthurian Grail Tradition, and stumbled on a passage that nicely explains something that had puzzled me. I’d often wondered why all the knights wandered around individually on their quest, rather than joining forces. Campbell writes this..
“… They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at a point he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path…“
Nice, huh? I liked it anyway..
..and of course no discussion of Arthurian legends would be complete without a reference to the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch..
“… Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count. Neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three…”
I was obliged at the weekend, against my better judgement, to attend the First Holy Communion of the daughter of close friends. It was, of course, a mistake – big old church, big old priest.. and all I could think of, as he continued to pontificate, were the words of the immortal Jack Handey, which, as it happens, were some of the first I quoted on this blog, a while ago now..
.. Not for this guy. I’ve witnessed some pretty stunning musical performances over the years, but I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like this. Must admit, I didn’t think it was real at first. Oh, and if you want to try it at home, you’ll need proper, expensive crystal wineglasses, apparently – not those ones you got free down at the petrol station..
Been struggling to dig myself out of a hole this morning, with limited success.. so, where to turn? Where else but the oft-maligned wonder that is the worldwide web. In the space of five minutes I’d found these two treasures, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never stumbled across before, by two of the artists I most revere. And, for the moment, life is good again..
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.. Not a song – a poem..
Browning Decides to Be a Poet
by Jorge Luis Borges
In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher’s stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words–
the gambler’s marked cards, the common coin–
give off the magic that was there
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today’s dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The Persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.
Oh Danny Boy the pipes, the pipes are calling
from glen to glen and down the mountain side
The summer’s gone and all the roses dying
’tis you ’tis you must go and I must bide
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow
or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow
‘Tis I’ll be there in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny Boy, Oh Danny Boy I love you so
And when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me
And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be
If you will bend, and tell me that you love me
Then I shall sleep in peace until you come to me
Celebrations upon the arrival of the second goal.. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Not a bad day, all things considered.. well whisky-ed up now, to be honest..
Happy birthday to the Queen, the absolute Queen, of song-writing..
This is the song of hers I like the best, and nobody ever sang it better..
We had the huge pleasure of meeting Carole – sadly just the once. One of my favourite Corinne moments, actually. We were performing at the Supper Club in New York and, at the time, Carole’s daughter Louise Goffin was opening for us. At the sound check, Louise let us know that Carole was in New York and would be attending the show that evening. Louise is a delightful, talented girl, but very conscious of, and understandably nervous about, the fact that she’s the daughter of a legend..
So, just before showtime, Corinne is in the ladies room putting on her make-up (backstage facilities are not great at the Supper Club) and spots someone familiar in the mirror next to her. In typically disarming Corinne style, she turns and introduces herself with the words… ” is it.. are you.. Louise’s mum?”..
She stayed for the gig and hung out in the dressing room afterwards, saying very gracious and enthusiastic things about the performance – you never saw a band look more pleased with itself .. Turns out she was preparing for her role in the Broadway production of Blood Brothers and was workng on her Liverpudlian accent. I recall we all took turns to demonstrate to her the proper way to say “You’re a fookin’ staaarr!!”
Two For The Road (1967). First got to see this..ooh, must be ten years ago now, on a night off in Tokyo. We rented it from some exotic avant garde movie place in Ebisu. Hard to imagine, even just ten years ago, the lengths one had to go to to find stuff like this. Nowadays… well, I just checked, and Amazon can guarantee delivery of the DVD to my door by noon tomorrow for the princely sum of £4.97. Not quite the same somehow..
Anyway, here’s a little taste of that wonderful Stanley Donen movie, featuring my current favourite Mancini score, and starring the inspired but, at the time, unlikely pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Funny, every time I watch it I’m reminded of another unlikely pair..
The inventor of the Hula Hoop passed away this week. Richard Knerr, who also came up with the frisbee, died on Monday at the age of 82. As the Guardian reports.. “Knerr founded the Wham-O toy company with his childhood friend Arthur “Spud” Melin in 1948. The pair made sporting goods such as catapults, boomerangs and crossbows, before branching out into less harmful territory with products such as the Superball, the Slip ‘n’ Slide water slide, and Silly String.”
“Their break came in 1958 when they heard about a large ring that was being used for exercise in Australia. Wham-O used plastic to create their own version of the ring, which they called the Hula Hoop. Their promotion of their product in the playgrounds of southern California paid off; according to the company, they sold 25m Hula Hoops in four months.”
As a tribute I’m revistiing a young lady who certainly knows the business end of a hula hoop, and somebody who does things which I doubt Mr. Knerr ever envisaged being attempted with his product. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you once again the remarkable Elena Lev. Honestly, it’s enough to make a demon dwarf jump around on his bed..
..OK, it’s probably still Banacek, but this certainly gave it a run for its money back in the day. Jerry Fielding’s fabulous score for McMillan and Wife, staring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James. I had a huge crush on her at the time, but now I’m wondering whether I actually had a crush on Jerry Fielding’s arrangement. She was cute, though..
I think by now we’ve all seen enough of Studio 60 to appreciate that it’s further ammunition, as if any were needed, for the Sorkin-is-God brigade of which I am, of course, a fully paid-up member. Sharpest show on TV since, well, The West Wing.. Great characters, great dialogue – but my favourite moment so far has been a musical one, and one that I thought at the time was about to go horribly, mawkishly wrong..
“…Andrews plays a displaced New Orleans trumpet player subbing for a member of the house band on the show-within-the-show. When a producer discovers that Andrews’ character is working because L.A.-based musicians have been surreptitiously calling in sick so that relocated New Orleans musicians can earn some extra cash near the holidays, he cuts a sketch and replaces it with a performance of “O Holy Night” by a band of the trumpet player’s hometown peers… The episode-concluding sequence, in which the band performs in front of projected photos of post-Katrina flooding and snapshots of recovery, struck an appropriately emotional chord…“
Sounds like your worst Disney-inspired saccharine nightmare, right? Mine too. Here’s how it turned out..
Not too damn shabby, huh?. When was the last time a musical performance as good as that actually made it onto mainstream US TV, or mainstream TV anywhere for that matter? Oh yeah, I remember now – it was Yo-Yo Ma performing the Bach G Major Cello Suite on, you guessed it, The West Wing..
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
