Bach, revised

Elaine Fine reimagines The Coffee Cantata.

Zippy bangles

[Zippy, May 31, 2017.]

Today’s strip shows that “it isn’t easy being Zippy.” This panel shows Zippy engaged in what Bill Griffith calls “the ‘over and over.’” I was surprised to discover this morning that “stretchable diamond bangles” has real-world referents. Unlike, say, “covfefe.”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“He knows that he is a thinker”

Alfred Döblin, “Astralia.” 1912. Bright Magic: Stories, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

The short stories of Bright Magic are expressionist, extravagant, and sometimes sharply funny. Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) is best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”

Another song that’s been running loose through our household: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” the subject of a Soul Music episode (BBC Radio 4). Frankie Valli himself calls this song “one of the most important songs of its time, or of all time, I should really say.” It really is an extraordinary song. This episode made me gleeful.

A related post
“Waterloo Sunset” on Soul Music

[An inspired touch: Soul Music has no announcer providing introduction or commentary. Someone begins talking, and the path to the music might be a surprising one.]

“Lamento Sertanejo”

This song is in my head and heart and shows no sign of leaving: “Lamento Sertanejo,” music by Dominguinhos, lyrics by Gilberto Gil. It’s a song of alienation and dispossession whose title might be translated as “Countryman’s Lament.” I am on shaky ground here about everything but my love of this song.

Here are the lyrics, in Portuguese and in English translation. And here are my two favorite performances of the song from YouTube. There are many, many more.


Dominguinhos, accordion; Gilberto Gil, guitar and voice. October 2010.


Mayra Andrade, voice; Yamandu Costa, seven-string guitar; Hamilton de Holanda, bandolim. Dominguinhos is the audience. August 2011.

I’m waiting on a two-CD anthology of Dominguinhos’s music. There’s no stopping.

[A sertanejo is an inhabitant of the sertão, a region in northeast Brazil. In this song the sertanejo is a long way from home. A Google Image search for sertanejo returns many cowboy hats, so perhaps “Cowboy’s Lament”? I found my way to the first performance via Richard McLeese’s Music Clip of the Day. A Flickr photograph let me date the second performance.]

Cooper-Moore on the air

From the podcast The Checkout, “The Irrepressible Ingenuity of Cooper-Moore.” Cooper-Moore is honored tonight with a Lifetime of Achievement award at the Vision 22 Festival in Manhattan. All best wishes to him.

A related post
Cooper-Moore in Illinois

Trump trumps Integritas

The New York Times reports on the Trump Organization’s “coat of arms”:

It was granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies, the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the socialite who built the Mar-a-Lago resort that is now Mr. Trump’s cherished getaway.

The Trump Organization made one change in the design it appropriated: the name Trump replaced the Latin Integritas. So now the shoe, or coat, fits.

As the Times notes, “the British are known to take matters of heraldry seriously.” The Trump Organization has to use a different coat of arms for its golf course in Scotland.

#FakeCoats!

On Independent Lens

Farmer/Veteran: “Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on forty-three acres in rural North Carolina.” Tonight on PBS.

Memorial Day

[“Ashland, Aroostook County, Maine. Even with gasoline rationed, many people attended the Memorial Day ceremonies in cars.” Photograph by John Collier. May 1943. From the Library of Congress.]

Ashland was and is one small town among others small or smaller. The drive must have cost some drivers a good part of their weekly gasoline ration.

Representative Adrian Smith on “the necessity of nutrition”

On Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, Scott Simon asked Representative Adrian Smith (R, Nebraska-3) whether he would vote for a budget that eliminated SNAP (food stamps). Smith, who supports farm subsidies, dodged the question:

SS: “Well, let me ask you this bluntly: is every American entitled to eat?”

AS: “Well [laughing], nutrition, obviously, we know, is very important, and I would hope that we can look to — ”

SS: “Well, not just important; it’s essential for life. Is every American entitled to eat?”

AS: “It is essential. It is essential.”

SS: “So is every American entitled to eat, and is food stamps something that ought to be that ultimate guarantor?”

AS: “I think that we know that given the necessity of nutrition, there could be a number of ways that we can address that.”

Perhaps he’s thinking of nutraloaf?

Smith might have had a career as a character in a Dickens novel. Say, Hard Times.