"Put another nickel in,
In the nickelodeon
All I want is havin' you
And Music! Music! Music!"
We didn't call it a nickelodeon but we listened to that song on a jukebox (same thing) in 1950 (I was 11) in the Stoplight Grill on West Main, catty cornered from the shotgun house that sat back from the street, the one I was born in. (Wonder years, those. Pee Wee Anderson and I pre-dated Harold and Kumar by eating as many sliders as we could afford from our paper routes and that we didn't spend on the pinball machine.) Teresa Brewer sang the hit; she was "hot" in 1950. She herself was only 19 then. She would become a jazz singer after many pop hits before she died in 2007 at the age of 76.
The tune of the "refrain," where she sings
"Closer, my dear come closer,
The nicest part of any melody
Is when you're dancin' close to me..."
is kind of lifted from a piano work by Franz Lizst, I can't say which but I recognize the melody when I hear it. It's OK to borrow the phrase, good composers flattered one another by borrowing here and there, besides Lizst has long been in the public domain. Perry Como's "Hot Diggety" was Chabrier's "Espana Rhapsody."
And in the 70's the lead-in to the tune "All By Myself" is even the same orchestral arrangement as that of Rachmaninoff in a piano concerto. And I confess I like the modern composer's resolution of that lead-in better than the original Rachmaninoff composition, which leaves me kind of frustrated. Rachmaninoff, though, is all in all one of my favorite composers. One of my favorite movie scenes is the fantasy seduction of Marilyn Monroe by Tom Ewell (he in his "smoking jacket") in "The Seven Year Itch" accompanied by a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto.*
Listening to the finale of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony. No TV tonight (although I will probably look in on The Daily Show, the best #@! news show on the air). And I'm still enjoying soundtracks -- catch "Ratatouille," a great feature-length cartoon. The music is by Michael Giacchino, one of the better Hollywood composers, I'd say, judging from this.
And "The Milagro Beanfield War" is on Turner tonight. I love its theme by Dave Grusin.
Music! Music! Music!
(*No. 2 -- in c minor, Op. 18, if you give a ...)
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
She Sells Sea Shells
My library research so far has involved (1) fires, (2) doctors, and (3) mussels. I've related some anecdotes about fires, and a history of doctors revealed some nifty ones, included one of the pioneer women doctors of the US. Mussels are freshwater clams, found in the Ohio River (along with crawdads, also known as crayfish, which you might say are freshwater lobsters. We have our ersatz imitations out here in the provinces.) This town had a thriving industry of making buttons from mussel shells in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
My local comrades and I have started a meeting at Cragmont College, and it's caused me to reflect on my early days there. I was such a scared, immature kid who tried to cover up his fear by being brash and mouthy -- more or less, I suppose. Perhaps I really wasn't that bad, just a silly, fraudulent kid.
A fellow freshman made the dean's list the first semester I was there; he was on probation at the end of the Spring term. He was kicked out the next year. Booze. Wonder whatever happened to him.
In the eighties, I met an alcoholism counselor, Nan, who'd been in my class at Cragmont. She told me she was a recovering alcoholic, in AA. She happened to be from the same town as the aforementioned guy, a progressive town in northern Indiana. She told me about driving out with a classmate of mine, Ken, while we were students and the two of them got rip-roaring drunk in his car. They were both "pinned," but to different sweethearts. Ken is still married to the girl he "pinned" in college. Nan was still married to her frat pin man too, only her husband was an alcoholic, "practicing," as they say, and she was unhappy about that. (Ironic, that word "practicing," in his case, because he's a doctor of medicine.)
When she told me about getting drunk with Ken way back then I had a longing to go back to that time and be mature enough to -- drink with a coed that I was friends with! And to have been mature enough to be pinned to the person I was going to marry! Even while this woman colleague of mine was telling me that we were peers now in alcoholism. She had been on a pedestal while I was in college, so far above me ... That was then, and this was now, our retrospective, and by her admission we were not so far apart in maturity, but ... They say that some of us are "egomaniacs with inferiority complexes." I can't explain it. A writer in residence at Indiana University, Alyce Miller, has a volume of short stories called "The Nature of Longing." It's a worthy topic, and good luck to anybody who can explore it. Life is a mystery to be lived, rather than a problem to be solved, someone said.
Gentlemen -- goodnight.
My local comrades and I have started a meeting at Cragmont College, and it's caused me to reflect on my early days there. I was such a scared, immature kid who tried to cover up his fear by being brash and mouthy -- more or less, I suppose. Perhaps I really wasn't that bad, just a silly, fraudulent kid.
A fellow freshman made the dean's list the first semester I was there; he was on probation at the end of the Spring term. He was kicked out the next year. Booze. Wonder whatever happened to him.
In the eighties, I met an alcoholism counselor, Nan, who'd been in my class at Cragmont. She told me she was a recovering alcoholic, in AA. She happened to be from the same town as the aforementioned guy, a progressive town in northern Indiana. She told me about driving out with a classmate of mine, Ken, while we were students and the two of them got rip-roaring drunk in his car. They were both "pinned," but to different sweethearts. Ken is still married to the girl he "pinned" in college. Nan was still married to her frat pin man too, only her husband was an alcoholic, "practicing," as they say, and she was unhappy about that. (Ironic, that word "practicing," in his case, because he's a doctor of medicine.)
When she told me about getting drunk with Ken way back then I had a longing to go back to that time and be mature enough to -- drink with a coed that I was friends with! And to have been mature enough to be pinned to the person I was going to marry! Even while this woman colleague of mine was telling me that we were peers now in alcoholism. She had been on a pedestal while I was in college, so far above me ... That was then, and this was now, our retrospective, and by her admission we were not so far apart in maturity, but ... They say that some of us are "egomaniacs with inferiority complexes." I can't explain it. A writer in residence at Indiana University, Alyce Miller, has a volume of short stories called "The Nature of Longing." It's a worthy topic, and good luck to anybody who can explore it. Life is a mystery to be lived, rather than a problem to be solved, someone said.
Gentlemen -- goodnight.
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