I've mentioned musician Jackson Browne a few times over the course of this blog - this blog which will be twenty-freaking years old in November! It seems like just yesterday it was a mere ten years old.
I've recently gotten into Warren Zevon. I've enjoyed his songs over the years, and went to bat against a college radio station in Philadelphia, back in the 1990s because they were bowdlerizing "Lawyers Guns and Money," cutting out the line "the shit has hit the fan" when they played it. Because of the word "shit."
But I've discovered additional Zevon cuts lately, like Desperados under the Eaves, which has Zevon's musical impression of an air conditioner that is amazingly soulful and affecting.
I've rediscovered "Tenderness on the Block" released in 1978 - it's not on "Offender/Pretender" - but it is on YouTube - it's hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote cynical and gory songs like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, Werewolves of London and Excitable Boy (discussed in this droll Paste article "Profoundly Horrifying Song Lyrics: “Excitable Boy” by Warren Zevon.") When I hear these lines from Tenderness:
Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight? Trying to run before she can walk, that's right She's growing up, she has a young man waiting...
I almost expect the next line to be -
And he's gonna dig up her grave and build a cage with her bones
But this girl won't get caught by the Excitable Boy because:
She was wide-eyed, now she's street-wise
To the lies and the jive talk
But she'll find true love
And tenderness on the block
UPDATE: he co-wrote this with Jackson Browne so that makes more sense.
What's truly horrifying to me is that any teenager Zevon might have been singing about in 1978 is in her sixties now.
Zevon didn't make it to his sixties, dying at age 56 - not from liquor or drugs (although he abused those for much of his life) or a car crash, but from mesothelioma.
Well I finally have a French translation of my play LE CHAT NOIR that I like and I got a bunch of francophone actors to perform it on Zoom this past week. What an experience. It was so weird but fun to hear the whole thing in French.
And it was so appropriate since, as I just found out, this week is la semaine de la langue français et de la francophonie. That is to say, the French government is, from March 15 - 23, celebrating the French language and French-speakers, which includes those outside of France.
By chance, the French speakers I assembled for the Zoom reading included a Ukrainian, a Franco-Turk, two French people from the south of France, a Quebecois and me, because I decided to play the role of Madeline Valadon, the mother of Suzanne Valadon. Only because she does not have a lot of lines and I practiced her lines night and day for a month.
And I still couldn't quite get some words right. I practiced with Microsoft Word, which has a dictation feature - you speak and Word transcribes what you say onto a document. And you can do it in lots of different languages, including French.
So I practiced saying the words with Microsoft Word and watched how it was transcribed. I got pretty good after a while but there were some words that were incredibly difficult to pass off to Word as if a French-speaker was talking. Words like "scélérat" (scoundrel), "pour louer" - which means "to rent for" but Word kept thinking I was saying "polluer" which means "to pollute." And "meule" which means "millstone" and it's sort of pronounced "mew-lah" but Word though I was saying, at various times, "mur" (wall), "mûle" (mule), "molle" (soft) and "nul" (zero, but also an insult along the lines of "loser.")
I did finally conquer "la fée vert" which means "the green fairy" - it's what people sometimes call absinthe, but I had to practice a million times before Word understood I was saying "fee" for fairy, instead of feuille (leaf) or fait (fact) or veille (the day before) Oh lah lah!
But worst of all is "love" - or "l'amour." Usually when I said the word it came out "la mort" which means death. And they are fairly distinct- "la mort" is like lah mehr, while l'amour is like lah-moor. I don't know why it took so long to get it right. And I have to get it right! French is the language of l'amour, not the language of la mort!
And that was before I knew it was originally a slave song that was "discovered" by white people during the Civil War and then published. Apparently it was pretty obscure for almost a hundred years until a friend of Pete Seeger rediscovered it.
The version that really gets me is by Joe and Eddie maybe because it was used during an important moment in the show "The Good Lord Bird."
The first version I heard, by the Highwaymen also affects me, but the Joe and Eddie version makes me cry. And that was before I read that Joe Gilbert of Joe and Eddie died at the age of 23 in a car crash.
After Joe’s tragic death, I worked as a single in L.A. and for a short while, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although I enjoyed performing, I found it frustrating to keep a band together and it was during this time I started writing, something I had never done before. Eventually I moved back to L.A., where I began to spend a lot of time in the studio, fortunately, with some of the greatest producers in popular music: Gene McDaniels, Louis Shelton, Richard Perry, Thom Bell, and Quincy Jones. I will be forever indebted to these wonderful, talented people. Because of them I found my next calling, writing and producing music.
I put the song in one of my plays, which will hopefully be produced one of these days.
Murderbot premieres May 16 with its first two episodes on Apple TV+. It will run 10 episodes total, with a weekly drop after the premiere through July 11.
OK! So now there are five flowers on the one stem, plus another stem where at least three more buds are about to open and I think the old stem from last year, which is still green, is planning to bud too - that would be cool.
There are actually three stems now shooting out of this plant. The one with the two flowers, the one from last year which is still green, but doesn't look like it has any plans to sprout, and a brand new stem which looks like it will have flowers in about a month. Big excitement here at orchid central.
The other stem-like items are aerial roots. Apparently it's perfectly normal for orchids to have them.
Which means it's time for the music of Vince Guaraldi thanks to his work for "A Charlie Brown Christmas."
Interesting facts about Guaraldi:
He was a life-long resident of the San Francisco area.
According to this bio: " In 1971 he became an unofficial member of the Grateful Dead, jamming with them in Bay Area concerts while the group was between permanent keyboardists.
To get an idea of how much worse rail travel is between the United States and Europe, consider this:
There are 334 miles between Montreal and New York City, going almost directly south.
There are 331 miles between Edinburgh and London, going almost directly south.
A mere three miles difference.
But it takes 12 hours to get from Montreal to New York. Amtrak claims 10 hours, but in my experience it takes 12.
It takes 3 and a quarter hours to get from Edinburgh to London.
Even considering that passports must be inspected when crossing the international border between Canada and the United States, that's a ridiculous difference in the amount of time it takes to travel virtually the exact same distance.
It takes 16 hours to travel the same approximately distance between Paris France and Maribor Slovenia, which includes four countries - France, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.
Something needs to be done about train travel in the US.
Although one paragraph discusses how famous Wells has not been:
To this day, most people—even in College Station—still don’t know who Martha Wells is. Local newspapers ignore press releases about her latest award. The Barnes and Noble down the street has never invited her to its Star Wars Day, even though she has written a Star Wars novel. She did a signing in town once where nobody showed up.
Wow, that's rough.
This WIRED piece on Wells is the first time I've seen her husband mentioned, so extra points for that. Both Wells and the author of the WIRED article "Murderbot, She Wrote," Meghan Herbst are on Bluesky now and I am following them both. Herbst quickly followed me back, I'm still waiting on Wells.
It is probably pretty obvious through the Murderbot Diaries, but Wells has very cool political views. I've mentioned before that Murderbot is "gloriously woke."
I've written a one-act play and an R-rated fan fiction about Murderbot. I hope one day Wells licenses Murderbot to writers the way the Star Wars franchise has permitted writers, like Wells herself, to write Star Wars books.
It turns out it's very difficult to emigrate to Canada, even if you're pretty good at French. But I am looking at all possible options for getting out of the United States for the duration of the hideous evil Trump dictatorship.
Because pourquoi the hell pas?
Inspired, sort of, by Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.
The translation:
Here they grow the flowers of evil.
I don't like them in general.
But if you follow this fine lesson
By giving more hydration
we will have the flowers of good.
The quiz gives you a sense of just how illogical Rand was and how much she hated those who did not agree with her "philosophy."
1. When a man inspired by John Galt's endless speech hears a mother tell her child to give away one of his toys, what does he do?
Answer
He slaps her so hard he fractures her jaw.
2. When an old guy in the 20th Century Motor Company's company town finds out that the money he wanted for record albums was given to an 8-year-old girl so she could have braces, what does he do?
Answer
He punches her in the mouth so hard he knocks out all her teeth - it's clear in context that Rand considers this justified - one clue is that the child is described as ugly - almost all villains in Rand's simple-minded tales are ugly.
3. What is Rand's explanation for the existence of Communism?
Answer
Sadism. "And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way (Ivy Starnes) eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’"
4. Who forced the 20th Century Motor Company to collectivize?
Answer
The owners of the 20th Century Motor Company themselves. Because you know, that always happens.
5. When trains from California reach New York City, and they have to dump tons of rotten produce they've been carrying, which river do they dump it in?
Answer
In the East River, which is on the other side of Manhattan from where the train line stops - at the Hudson River. This error is made worse by the fact that Rand was living in Manhattan when she wrote this.
6. How do the book's heroes Dagny and Hank convince local officials to allow their train to barrel through towns at dangerously high speeds?
Answer
Local officials were "outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour."
7. How does Rand deal with people on a train who hold pro-government opinions - including the children of those people?
Answer
She gases them, then blows them up.
8. When all industries in the United States are suffering from railroad failure-induced shortages, and cities are starving, what is the one industry that, inexplicably, manages to function perfectly?
Answer
The florist industry: "It was late afternoon when the florist telephoned her. "Our Chicago office sent word that they were unable to deliver the flowers, Mrs. Rearden, because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet." This is how Rand decides to have Mrs. Rearden find out her husband Hank is having an affair with Dagny Taggart.
Well the quest to learn French continues - I've been at it seriously since Trump became president, since I rightly guessed he would be a disaster for the United States and there would come a time when I would have to escape to Canada, which is officially bi-lingual.
I still am only about level B2, just maybe on the edge of C1, which is "expert" level. I'm pretty confident in my ability to read and even to write in French. My French speaking ability is OK except when confronted with an actual francophone, and then I become embarrassed about speaking it.
And as far as understanding when French people talk - I can understand French politicians and other professional speakers pretty well, but regular street French still sounds like a big mush.
But the quest continues and I've taken to creating silly videos as a learning aid.
The first one I created "Les Perroquets" was because I kept mixing up the word "perroquet" - parrot - and "perruque" - wig. And then the goofy story about wig-wearing animals came to me. Voilà.
This next one, "La Pecheuse" I made because I find it funny that "pêche" means to go fishing, as in "J'aime aller à la pêche" - "I like to go fishing," but the word pêche also means "peach."
Yes I realize English has weird homonyms too, like "bat" the mammal and "bat" as in baseball bat, but I'm used to those. The French ones still seem funny to me.
Then I switched to writing "comptines" which are French nursery rhymes. The first one, "Pain Perdu" was written in a Covid haze - yes Covid finally got me at last, this past July.
So I was thinking about the French term for French Toast, which is not, as some have guessed "le toast francais."
The French call it "pain perdu" which is pain = bread and perdu = lost. Lost bread. So I came up with three verses on the subject of "pain perdu."
It's trickier to rhyme in French than you might think, because although a LOT of French words rhyme with each other - in practice, French almost always throws out the last consonant of any given word, which means most of the words end with a vowel sound.
On the other hand, the word you want to use may change depending on whether the subject is male or female, for example.
The main character in these three Pain Perdu verses is a French woman, but in the second verse I wrote "Une jour il va me rendre fou." which means "one day it's going to drive me crazy" (literally "one day he is going to me render crazy.")
Not only did I get the gender of the word "jour" - day - wrong - it should be UN jour (but the similar word "journee" IS feminine - don't get me started) but since the person speaking is female, it should be "il va me rendre folle" A crazy man is fou. A crazy woman is folle. But "folle" rhymes with "goal," which does not rhyme with perdu. Oy.
Since my voice was a croaking mess at the time I was making the animation (I was referred to as "sir" by the receptionist when I called to cancel my dentist appointment) I decided to use AI for the voice. And since I hate my voice even when it is not impacted by Covid, I like the results much better.
Pain Perdue is the first to not feature le chat qui porte une perruque, but the second one to feature outer space.
The cat in the wig is back in the most recent video, "Les Nouvelles Comptines Pour Les Nuls" (New Nursery Rhymes for Dummies.) The first rhyme is about a tea kettle, only because the word for tea kettle, "bouilloire" is hard for me to say. Like many French words it has too many vowels in a row. Although at least it has consonants. There are two French words I can think of off the top of my head - oie (goose) pronounced "wa" and eau (water) pronounced "oh" that have NO CONSONANTS.
And I also confuse bouilloire with two other words - "brouillard" - fog and "brouiller" - blur.
The second rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for kite is "flying deer" - cerf volant.
The third rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for "bat" in the mammal sense is "chauve-souris" which literally means "bald mouse." I mean, really? You see a flying mammal and the thing you notice is the condition of its head hair? And I don't think non-flying mice exactly have long flowing locks either.
Also the word for "to smile" in French is "sourir" - which, when you conjugate it for first or second person singular (well present tense, they have a dozen other tenses, don't get me started), is spelt "souris" exactly like the word for mouse. "Une souris qui sourit" means "A mouse who smiles" but even though the word "sourit" in this case is conjugated for third person singular, it sounds the same - so it sounds like "Oon sue-ree key sue-ree." And yes, I spelled it wrong (souri) in my animation. And yes that is a stylized representation of the Moulin Rouge.
Don't even get me started about the confusion between voler meaning to steal and voler meaning to fly. I'm thinking of making another animation about that.
La souris qui sourit et la vache qui rit - ca va me rendre folle.
I created all the music using Garage Band, and hand drew the illustrations in the first two videos, mostly, but used canned images for the second two. And the AI voices were created in murf.ai. I put it altogether in Adobe Premiere Pro, which I am finally getting the hang of - I was pretty happy with the bat.
Earlier this year I added a post to this blog entitled "The Civil War - but with cats." Well it turns out representing Civil War scenarios with animals is practically a genre. I recently found this image.
Here we see Ulysses S. Grant, represented by a bull-dog type canine challenging Jefferson Davis, represented by what looks like a whippet, wearing a planter's hat, to try to get his supplies, while Jeff only has cotton on his side.
I am a fan of "My Little Pony" which makes me, what, a "brony?" Or maybe, at my age, a crony?
I was aware, back in 2012, of the unusual My Little Pony fandom of young men between the ages of 15 - 30. I know I was aware because I can see I wrote a blog post about it back then.
However, I was so clueless in 2012 that I included in my blog post an image of a "My Little Pony" toy from an earlier generation of the My Little Pony franchise, instead of one from the generation that really captured the brony imagination "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic."
The Friendship is Magic (FIM) animation series includes little knowing asides, which is one of the reasons it is enjoyed by adults. In one episode, called "Too Many Pinkie Pies" there is a reference back to the look of an earlier generation My Little Pony.
A FIM generation pony looks like this:
Animated...
Grace à la langue française
So how did I become a Pony crony? It's because of the French. When the convicted felon Donald Trump was elected POTUS in 2016 I began to learn French with the idea that if I had to ask for political asylum in Montreal (the closest big Canadian city to New York) I would be ready by becoming bi-lingual. And as Trump is threatening to be POTUS again, I still have that escape strategy in mind.
In addition to taking classes at FIAF in 2017 I began to watch cartoons on YouTube that had dubbed French versions. Cartoons because they are mostly aimed at children which means the dialog was slower, clearer and with a smaller vocabulary than anything aimed at adults.
I started with random videos like this one, La chanson des squelettes. Then I graduated to the French version of the British animated series Peppa Pig which is aimed at four-year-olds. When my French got a little better, and I had seen every French episode available of Peppa Pig, I moved on to another British series "Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom" called in French Le Petit Royaume de Ben et Holly, which is for eight-year-olds.
At first I watched the episodes strictly for the French, but my French was not good enough to understand all the. dialogue, and I sometimes struggled to understand the plots, so I would watch the English language version of the episode I was struggling with. And then I became interested in the show. There were two episodes in particular that I thought raised the MLP: FIM series to a level above Peppa Pig and Ben and Holly. I will write about them soon.
Steely Dan FAQ author Anthony Robustelli describes "Pretzel Logic" as a bluesyshuffle about time travel.[6] Fagen has stated that the lyrics, including anachronistic references to Napoleon and minstrel shows, are about time travel.[7][6] According to Robustelli, the "platform" referred to in the song's bridge is the time travel machine.[6]
Lyrics
I would love to tour the Southland
In a traveling minstrel show
Yes I'd love to tour the Southland
In a traveling minstrel show
Yes, I'm dying to be a star and make them laugh
Sound just like a record on the phonograph
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time, yes I do
'Cause he looks so fine upon that hill
They tell me he was lonely, he's lonely still
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah
I stepped up on the platform
The man gave me the news
He said, you must be joking son
Where did you get those shoes?
Where did you get those shoes?
Well, I've seen 'em on the TV, the movie show
They say the times are changing but I just don't know
My orchid was dropping flowers so I thought that it was going back into its non-flowering state - but then a new flower blossomed. I thought orchids were only supposed to bloom for a few months at most. Now it's been five months since the first blossom.
The New Yorker magazine recently shared a link to an article which is a reminder that the New Yorker has been around for a long time. A profile of that daring Mae West titled Mae West, the Queen of New York from 1928.
This was right before West went out to Hollywood and never went back to New York.
And if she hadn't done, we probably would know her name no better than we know the name of Ina Claire, mentioned in the article:
Mae West has little interest in anything outside the theatre. Her reading is confined usually to Variety or any occasional newspaper. She does not even know the names of important theatrical figures unless she has come into direct contact with them. The other night Ina Claire came to see “Diamond Lil.” When Mae West was told she was out front she said, “All right, bring her in. But who is she?”
I have no idea how far Mae West will go, whether she will fade out to “that little place on Long Island” all good vaudeville people long for, or will write, year after year, hokum, melodramas, and sex thrillers to shock the worthies of the town, but I don’t think “Diamond Lil” is her last success.
Clara Bow didn't make many talkies, and I've never seen or heard any until I found a copy of a 1929 movie "Dangerous Curves" on YouTube. Bow plays a circus tightrope walker. I knew Bow was from Brooklyn - Prospect Heights (Mae West was also from Brooklyn but Greenpoint) but I did not know how much of a Brooklyn accent she had - or at least had for this role - listen to her say "pah-tik-yah-lee cawfee."
Bow plays another circus performer in "Hoopla," her last film, in 1933, with an accent closer to her own.
What's really interesting about the role is that it would have been perfect for Mae West - Bow plays a wise-cracking vamp who falls for an attractive young man. In fact the role is the Mae West character - West really never played any other kind. Bow's character is even named "Lou" and West played "Lady Lou" in "She Done Him Wrong" also released in 1933. Based on the few films I've seen of either of them, I'd say Bow had greater range as an actor than West, but on the other hand, West wrote many of her own wise-cracks.
West was almost a decade older than Bow, but West spent her twenties and early thirties in New York theater, producing, directing and starring in plays she wrote herself, and getting arrested for them.
West didn't get to Hollywood until 1932, at the end of Bow's career and the beginning of the dread "Hays Code" which cracked down on naughtiness in Hollywood. Since all of Bow's movies were pre-Code, she got to show a lot of skin, including at least two films where she is seen skinny-dipping, including Hoopla. If it wasn't for the Hays Code, you know West would have tried to top Bow for who could be the naughtiest.
I found this funny graphic at the Library of Congress website recently and then, coincidentally a couple of days later at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
It's called "The Question Settled" and the cat on the right represents the South - or to be exact "Jeff" as in Jefferson Davis, the white cat represents the North as indicated by "Old Abe" on his collar, and the cat on the left has a ribbon labelled "contraband" which is what the enslaved people, rescued from the Confederacy by the Union Army, were called.
This version from the Library Company is in better shape than the one in the Library of Congress, but you can still see spots and stains on the image. I'll have to clean that up with Photoshop one of these days. More about the image here.
Initially I called my play about the friendship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass THE LINCOLN-DOUGLASS DEBATES but decided to change it to GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.
The first title was a response to the Republican party's shameful abuse of the memory of Douglass, specifically when a Republican state senator of Virginia, in the early days of the ongoing campaign by the Republican Party to erase Black history, introduced a bill to ban the teaching of "divisive concepts."
He was open, however to the discussion of "history" for example "the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass."
The senator had confused abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass with white senator Stephen Douglas, who famously had a series of debates, primarily about slavery, with Lincoln in 1858. This was after Donald Trump had said “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Which made it sound like Trump believed Douglass was currently alive.
But in the end I decided that too many people might not get the difference between Douglas with one S and Douglass with two Ss and so might assume the play was about the actual Lincoln - Douglas debates.
The phrase "getting right with Lincoln" is used often by historians, as I came to learn in the year and a half of researching Lincoln and Frederick Douglass before writing the play. The phrase comes from an essay by historian David Donald published in The Atlantic in 1956, although apparently Donald originally got it from a congressman:
as Congressman Everett Dirksen solemnly assured his Republican colleagues, that these days the first task of a politician is "to get right with...Lincoln."
I decided to use the phrase as a way to describe Frederick Douglass' gradual appreciation of Lincoln and their friendship, which was cut horribly short by Lincoln's assassination.
Also it sounds cooler than my first title, although the phrase has been used by some of the least cool people imaginable, starting with Donald himself. Although he does not explain why he finds it so objectionable that all points on the American political spectrum want to claim Lincoln as an ally - does he not understand how politics works? - he does not hide his contempt for politicians as a whole. And then of course there's the very fashionable misogyny of the time:
the seventeenth annual Lincoln Day dinner of the New York Republican Club, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1903. Some five hundred men attended--their wives were segregated in those happy, bygone days-
Nobody except other racists take Sailer seriously, and so I have no doubt Kesler is a racist. Abraham Lincoln does not need an extremist ghoul like that defending his honor.
More recently the phrase was seen as the title of the 2021 book Getting Right with Lincoln: Correcting Misconceptions about Our Greatest President by Edward Steers. It's an exhaustive and exhausting book examining claims about Lincoln's relationships and beliefs. Steers finds no nit too small to pick. It's not a fun read, although I do appreciate its emphasis on the fact that historians, while usually starting out from the same primary sources, often do not agree among themselves.
In a lecture about Frederick Douglass in 2018, historian David Blight used the phrase too:
...there's this old saying about Abraham Lincoln that I think David Donald coined in a 1955 essay, 50-something. And the line is simply "getting right with Lincoln." You know, choosing your Lincoln and getting - using Lincoln for your cause, getting on the side of Lincoln. What would Lincoln think? What would Lincoln have done? We kind of do that with Douglass now to some degree...
While doing research for my Lincoln play, I found this photo of Lincoln. It seems more dynamic than most of them - he doesn't look so much like his monument here, more like a guy who's about to say something - probably tell a funny story. It almost looks like he's winking but I think more likely his eyelid just drooped like that.
