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Tuesday, January 28, 2003
SOME STRAY BITS…
(Been slack on the blog lately, so here are some things I've had hanging around.
The first is a clipping from the L.A. Times Book Review. In 2001, they ran a lengthy review of the book AMERICA'S MUSICAL LIFE, A History By Richard Crawford. The review was by author Ken Emerson. We join the review already in progress...)
Such impertinence goes back at least as far as America's first international hit song, Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susanna." After a couple of verses of seeming nonsense ("the sun so hot I froze to death"), an unexpected hush falls "when everything was still" and a vision or the ghost of the singer's lost love comes "running down the hill," at which point the tempo picks up and the tomfoolery resumes with "the buckwheat cake was in her mouth." On his recent CD "Magic Beans" on the "Kill Rock Stars" label, Mike "Sport" Murphy dramatizes the continuity of this tradition by interpolating Foster's verse into one of his own songs and following it with a verse from Bob Dylan's "Memphis Blues Again." ("I am convinced," Murphy e-mailed me, "Dylan used 'Susanna' as his model.") Interestingly, Chadwick's "Jubilee" also quoted Foster, in this case his "Camptown Races." Perhaps what Ralph Ellison called the "near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" of the blues is the hallmark of all American music.
Ken Emerson, the Author of "Doodah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture" and Co-author of a Recent Documentary about Foster on PBS's "The American Experience," Is Working on a Book About the Brill Building Sound and Pop Songwriting in New York During the 1950s and '60s
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times
(So thanks, Ken.
Here's a group of short bits from unsent batch mails I'm busy deleting. First up, a snipe.)
"I don't like his work... I think it's ugly" - Jules Feiffer on Basil Wolverton.
Ponder this a moment. Oh wait, do you know who these two are? Jules Feiffer is a New York beardo… one of these smug aesthetic wannapunchems who impress the stupid and the pretentious by simply having cultivated a louder sneer. He wrote the instantly dated Elliot Gould (see what I mean?) vehicle "Little Murders" and drew a comic strip for the Village Voice for about 300 years. The strip looked identical every week - a sequence of loose, brushed ink renderings of subjects so dull you forgot them AS you looked. The gags, such as they were, consisted of self-congratulatory p.c. ironics that sank like bad donuts every motherfucking time. What, o what could suck more than the work of Jules Feiffer?
(I never did get around to discussing Wolverton. I will, trust me. Next is an observation.)
It was revealed to me, in a blinding epiphany, that Thelonious Monk composed "Round Midnight" after viewing the Bogie/Bacall film TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. What happened was, the score (largely a set of variations on co-star Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole") seeped into his head in fragments, and there took root and bloomed as the masterpiece he then entitled after a reference Bogie made (agreeing to make the plot's pivotal rendezvous around midnight) in the film. This is one way masterpiece begets masterpiece… genius inspires genius.
(And lastly, a gripe.)
Sport Murphy has never heard a note of music by Stephen Merritt. So fucking leave me alone. And Sport knows he supposedly resembles John Cusack, but come off it already.
(That's all for now. My computer is breaking down, I fear, and I have no money.)
(Been slack on the blog lately, so here are some things I've had hanging around.
The first is a clipping from the L.A. Times Book Review. In 2001, they ran a lengthy review of the book AMERICA'S MUSICAL LIFE, A History By Richard Crawford. The review was by author Ken Emerson. We join the review already in progress...)
Such impertinence goes back at least as far as America's first international hit song, Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susanna." After a couple of verses of seeming nonsense ("the sun so hot I froze to death"), an unexpected hush falls "when everything was still" and a vision or the ghost of the singer's lost love comes "running down the hill," at which point the tempo picks up and the tomfoolery resumes with "the buckwheat cake was in her mouth." On his recent CD "Magic Beans" on the "Kill Rock Stars" label, Mike "Sport" Murphy dramatizes the continuity of this tradition by interpolating Foster's verse into one of his own songs and following it with a verse from Bob Dylan's "Memphis Blues Again." ("I am convinced," Murphy e-mailed me, "Dylan used 'Susanna' as his model.") Interestingly, Chadwick's "Jubilee" also quoted Foster, in this case his "Camptown Races." Perhaps what Ralph Ellison called the "near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" of the blues is the hallmark of all American music.
Ken Emerson, the Author of "Doodah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture" and Co-author of a Recent Documentary about Foster on PBS's "The American Experience," Is Working on a Book About the Brill Building Sound and Pop Songwriting in New York During the 1950s and '60s
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times
(So thanks, Ken.
Here's a group of short bits from unsent batch mails I'm busy deleting. First up, a snipe.)
"I don't like his work... I think it's ugly" - Jules Feiffer on Basil Wolverton.
Ponder this a moment. Oh wait, do you know who these two are? Jules Feiffer is a New York beardo… one of these smug aesthetic wannapunchems who impress the stupid and the pretentious by simply having cultivated a louder sneer. He wrote the instantly dated Elliot Gould (see what I mean?) vehicle "Little Murders" and drew a comic strip for the Village Voice for about 300 years. The strip looked identical every week - a sequence of loose, brushed ink renderings of subjects so dull you forgot them AS you looked. The gags, such as they were, consisted of self-congratulatory p.c. ironics that sank like bad donuts every motherfucking time. What, o what could suck more than the work of Jules Feiffer?
(I never did get around to discussing Wolverton. I will, trust me. Next is an observation.)
It was revealed to me, in a blinding epiphany, that Thelonious Monk composed "Round Midnight" after viewing the Bogie/Bacall film TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. What happened was, the score (largely a set of variations on co-star Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole") seeped into his head in fragments, and there took root and bloomed as the masterpiece he then entitled after a reference Bogie made (agreeing to make the plot's pivotal rendezvous around midnight) in the film. This is one way masterpiece begets masterpiece… genius inspires genius.
(And lastly, a gripe.)
Sport Murphy has never heard a note of music by Stephen Merritt. So fucking leave me alone. And Sport knows he supposedly resembles John Cusack, but come off it already.
(That's all for now. My computer is breaking down, I fear, and I have no money.)
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