Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy, February 10, 1957.]

That’s my dad, James Leddy, and me. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day to all.

Charles Mingus defies bomb threat

Charles Mingus, New Haven, Connecticut, 1972:

“Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music. If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’”

The occasion was a concert at Yale University to raise funds for a department of African-American music. When a bomb threat came in, Mingus alone refused to leave the theater and played Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” one of his favorite pieces for solo bass, as Ellington (and everyone else) stood outside the open doors. Quoted in Claudia Roth Pierpont’s May 17, 2010 New Yorker essay on Ellington and race.

A plucky, smart cashier

She was fumbling a bit to get the groceries into the string-bag: “My Tetris skills aren’t working today.”

Namaste, typewriter

The Telegraph reports that the Indian government is saying goodbye to the typewriter:

Over the next few days the last typewriter will be taken from India’s government offices and replaced by the computer, bringing to an end an era that lasted for 80 years. While computers have been gradually replacing typewriters in even the most remote parts of the country, the machine was still used to test the typing skills of aspiring job applicants. The government has decided to do away with such an anomaly.

The article goes on to note that the typewriter has been removed from the list of goods in India’s Wholesale Price Index, “joining other archaic items such as pagers, sewing machines, hair oil and outdated brands of ‘Indian Made Foreign Liquor.’”

India’s government offices finally say goodbye to the typewriter (Telegraph)

A related post
NYPD typewriters (Still in use)

The Odyssey, not a novel

In a Wall Street Journal blog, Alexandra Cheney reports on Wednesday’s Odyssey/Ulysses reading in Manhattan:

Last night Stephen Colbert, Marian Seldes, Barbara Feldon and Stephen Lang, to name a few, found themselves in front of a sold-out audience reading from both Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, the theme being the parallels between the two landmark novels.

The Odyssey has been called the first novel (for its complexities of character and narrative), but it is not a novel. It is an epic poem. Ulysses, that’s a novel.

Perry Mason and John Keats

The trial is over. The murderer — who did the deed on Halloween — confessed in the courtroom. Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and Della Street sit in Mason’s office:

MASON (examining a Halloween mask)
    From the religious vigil of All Hallows’ Eve to
    murder: Halloween’s come a long way.

DRAKE (as if reciting poetry)
    Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and
        sepulchres.

STREET (a bit surprised)
    Paul, you’re reciting poetry.

DRAKE (innocently)
    Am I?

MASON (as if reciting poetry)
    But strength alone is like a fallen angel: trees
        uptorn,
    and darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and
        sepulchres.

DRAKE (as if surprised)
    Hey, whaddaya know? Keats.

From John Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry” (1816):

But strength alone though of the Muses born
Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,
Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres
Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs,
And thorns of life; forgetting the great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

You can watch this scene from “The Case of the Dodging Domino” (1962) at YouTube.

*

May 5, 2020: John Rabe writes to point out the presence of the word burrs in the passage from Keats. “I wonder,” John writes, “if that’s what caught the scriptwriter’s eye.” And I wonder how I didn’t see the word when I made this post.

Mason (Raymond Burr) stops reciting just in time to avoid a wildly meta moment.

[This post is for my friend Rob Zseleczky, who may be happy to know that you can still find Keats on television these days.]

“A Day in the Life” lyrics at auction

Tomorrow at Sotheby’s:

Autograph manuscript of John Lennon’s lyrics for the “A Day in the Life,” the final track on the Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 2 pages (10 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.; 267 x 194 mm) on a single sheet of unruled writing paper, [London, 17 January 1967], comprising 2 complete sets of the lyrics written in black felt marker and blue ballpoint pen, several autograph emendations and corrections (a few of these in red ballpoint pen): (1) the recto bears Lennon’s original first draft, written in a hurried but fully legible cursive script; (2) the verso bears an autograph fair copy written almost entirely in capital letters and evidently prepared for use in the recording studio, incorporating the emendations from the first draft and adding three further ones, numbering the verses 1-4, and indicating the insertion of the phrase “I love to turn you on” after the third verse. A short mended tear at center top margin and tiny hole in center lower margin, neither affecting text, some light marginal stains. Matted, framed, and double-glazed.

This manuscript comes from “the estate or a descendant of Mal Evans.” Estimated price: $500,000–$800,000.

[June 18, 2010: an undentified collector paid $1.2 million.]



Autograph manuscript, “A Day in the Life” (Sotheby’s)

Listening to Robert Johnson

Elaine pointed me to a WNYC.org feature about an ongoing debate concerning the proper playback speed for Robert Johnson’s recordings. Some listeners contend that Johnson’s recordings play at least twenty percent too fast, due to an effort to make the recordings sound more exciting or to faulty equipment.

My knowledge of pre-war blues recording makes the first explanation seem merely outlandish: it assumes on the part of recording personnel an imaginative interest in music and production for which we have no other evidence. Skip James’s 1931 Paramount recording sessions, for instance, included these elements of production: mints, whiskey, a company guitar, and a board to enhance the sound of James’s stomping.

As for the second explanation, faulty equipment could well play a part in the sound of Johnson’s recordings. But what equipment? And what part? Johnson recorded in San Antonio in November 1936 and in Dallas in June 1937. Can we assume that the same equipment was in use in both places? There are further variables: Johnson’s guitar may have been tuned higher or lower than standard pitch. (Tuning higher gives more punch.) He may have been using a capo (greater punch still). The impossibility of reverse-engineering the circumstances of recording puts me in mind of the title of David Shapiro’s poem “After a Lost Original”: we have no reference point for knowing what Johnson sounded like when recording other than his recordings.

There is though at least one fairly straightforward way to begin thinking about the question of speed: we know the schedule of several days’ worth of recording sessions that preceded and followed Johnson’s, with Mexican musicians, old-timey musicians, and Western swing groups (all listed in the booklet accompanying the 1990 CD release of Johnson’s recordings). Such recordings as are still available could provide a basis for comparison: slow them down too and find out what they sound like. To make such comparisons would mean thinking of Robert Johnson as one musician among many in a world of makeshift studios, not as a musician whose recordings can be removed from historical context and adjusted to suit the twenty-first-century listener’s sense of what sounds right.

One more consideration: I know of no Johnson associate ever commenting on differences between Johnson’s recordings and his non-studio performances. Indeed, there’s a remarkable moment in The Search for Robert Johnson (dir. Chris Hunt, 1992), when Willie Mae Powell, the “Willie Mae” of Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” hears for the first time the 1937 recording of the song she inspired. Her face opens wide when she hears Johnson sing her name. There’s no question that the voice she is hearing is a familiar one.

And that doesn’t surprise me. To my ears, the drastically slow samples available online are deeply unconvincing. The “Cross Road Blues” played in the WNYC feature (link below) sounds lethargic, lifeless, like someone singing in slow motion. One industrious listener with a Technics turntable has made available very slightly slower versions that may be more convincing. But if they are more convincing, that would be because they sound very much like Johnson’s recordings as we’ve known them.

Further reading and listening
Steady Rollin’ Man (With musical samples)
Slow Down, Robert Johnson! (WNYC)
Robert Johnson revelation tells us to put the brakes on the blues (Guardian)

And earlier today, WNYC linked to a comment on the speed question by Elijah Wald, author of the excellent Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004). I wrote this post before reading what Wald has written.

[The details of Skip James’s 1931 recording sessions may be found in Stephen Calt’s I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1994), the best book on blues I’ve read.]

(Thanks, Elaine!)

Hi and Lois watch

In August 2008, the sight of baby Trixie riding in the front seat of a car turned me from casual Hi and Lois reader to close reader. No job too small!

In today’s strip, Trixie is wondering about where the dirt in the vacuum cleaner goes:


[Hi and Lois, June 16, 2010.]

The scene calls for some sort of response. I think I have it: HI! AND LOIS! CHILD-PROOF YOUR OUTLETS! Yes, I’m shouting.


[Hi and Lois, June 16, 2010, with reader-supplied outlet cover.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Ulysses on the air

You can watch a live broadcast of readings from James Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey (in Robert Fagles’s translation) tonight at WNYC.org (7:00 Eastern).

The crowdpleaser: Stephen Colbert as Odysseus in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey.