Oof. Today was a day. An ice storm led to a 13-hour blackout at home, and work was an adventure, too. I don’t have a whole lot of extra mental bandwidth for musical commentary…so here’s a song that doesn’t need commentary. It’s Gladys Knight and the Pips with “Midnight Train to Georgia”.
I had a long day at work today (not a bad day at all, but we had a big project today for which I had to be at work a bit early) and my brain is doing its impression of tapioca, so here’s a song that’s been showing up in my YouTube recommendations of late. I’ve featured it before, but not in a little over seven years, so here it is again! This was a huge country hit forty years or so ago. I’m not sure, but this performance must have been before the song became as big as it did, because eventually the bass singer’s “Papa-ooo-mow-mow” bit became so popular that whenever it got to that part in any live performance, it would be greeted with massive cheers.
Anyway, here are the Oak Ridge Boys with “Elvira”. (Note the guitar player, behind the lead singer, really getting into it about thirty seconds in! Cracks me up every time I see this.)
When I’ve listened to Florence Price’s music over the last few years, I’ve thought often of Antonin Dvorak’s observation from the time he spent in the United States, among American musicians and composers. Paraphrasing, Dvorak noted that the American musicians in that time were relying heavily on the forms and modes coming out of Europe. There isn’t anything particularly wrong with that, and a lot of fine music, if not great music, emerged from composers like Edward MacDowell. But Dvorak–whose own music was deeply steeped in the folk music of his beloved homeland in Moravia and Bohemia–felt that American music’s real rise to greatness would come when composers looked not to Europe for inspiration but rather to the music of Native Americans and the African-American community.
Later in the 20th century, this would come to pass, and Florence Price was a part of that.
This work is simply called “Concert Overture No. 2”, but its musical forebears do indeed come from the African spirituals of her own forebears. The work’s mood is set from the very beginning in that unique blend of sad hopefulness that imbues so many of those very spirituals.
(A repost…today is the 61st anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight aboard Friendship 7.)
Image credit: NASA
Sixty years ago today, astronaut John Glenn launched in a spacecraft called Friendship 7 and became the first American to orbit the Earth. Here’s a wonderful documentary, assembled by NASA after the mission’s end, detailing the events of Glenn’s mission, from pre-launch preparations to Glenn’s post-splashdown arrival on the aircraft carrier.
I watched this film way back in third grade, when our class was doing a research project on space; I remember Mrs. Grosbeck, our teacher, looking with some dismay at the two giant film reels for this movie and realizing that we’d have to watch it in two installments. (That’s something I recall from watching educational movies in school: seeing the teacher pick up the film reel, and noting its size which would therefore indicate its length. Big film reels, meaning longer films, made us happy. If it was a small one, someone in class would say something like, “Awww, a short one.” Good times!) I’ve looked for this film on YouTube and in other places a few times over the years, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally available. I could watch archival NASA footage for hours. It reminds me that there was a time when you could read about NASA and not see the phrase “budget cuts” in the next sentence.
I love the style of this film — listen to the portentous narration, loaded with patriotic fervor and the clear belief that space exploration is obviously what’s next. “Today, John Glenn and the Mercury team challenged space…and they won!” And while all this goes on, a stirring music score throbs away in the background. A documentary like this would be dismissed today as slavish propaganda, and I suppose, in a way, that it is…but you know what, I just don’t care. Our space program in the 1960s, even though we might wish it was less motivated by a desire to beat the Soviets, was a time of greatness that we achieved because we just plain wanted it. And it saddens me to think that our era of space exploration was so short that a landmark mission, fifty years ago, now seems almost quaint.
Come on, America! Why are we messing around? The stars are awaiting us!
Image credit: NASA
(via)
Michael Jordan turned 60 two days ago.
While I’ve slowly come around to the acknowledgement that LeBron James is likely the greatest basketball player of all time, my commitment to MJ as the greatest still holds some sway in my head. The man was incredible, and watching him play when he was just himself was exciting enough. But when he turned it on and played not just as one of the NBA’s best but as MJ, the single best of all time, it was just something to behold. He did things that defied explanation, and then you would watch a slow-mo replay of the astonishing thing he’d just done, and it would somehow become even more astonishing.
There was no need at all for slow-mo in Game One of the 1992 NBA Finals, however. That series pitted Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, who were the defending champs, against the Portland Trailblazers, who featured my personal favorite basketball player ever, Clyde Drexler. As we had lived in Portland several times in earlier years, I rooted for the Blazers in that series…but it became quickly apparent that Jordan wasn’t losing. He took over that first game, and it wasn’t his usual ballet-like progress to the hoop that did it; he just rained in shots from beyond the 3-point line. His dominance became so thorough and inexplicable that at one point he turned to the sideline and shrugged as if to say, “I don’t get this, either.” I don’t think LeBron at the height of his powers could have beaten Michael Jordan that night.
Anyway, MJ is now 60. He only retired 20 seasons ago, in 2003–that was his second and final retirement, having retired previously in 1993 after winning three consecutive NBA titles and wanting to go play baseball. Which he did, spending two years being a big draw in the minors as a Chicago White Sox prospect. In his absence from the NBA the Houston Rockets won back-to-back NBA championships, led by their superstar player at the time, Hakeem Olajuwon, who had been the first pick overall in the 1984 NBA Draft. The third pick that year? Michael Jordan, to the Bulls. (The number two pick, Sam Bowie, might have been great had injuries not affected his career.) After two seasons of baseball, MJ decided that enough of that was enough, and he returned to the NBA and the Bulls, where he picked up right where he left off and won three more consecutive championships.
I’ve always had a bit of trouble with basketball as a spectator, owing to my constant feeling of having missed something amazing and then having this be borne out when I watch the replays. Basketball is a game that looks better in slow-motion to me, which keeps it generally at arm’s length. (Also, I am terrible at playing it, because an eye doctor once informed me that my depth perception isn’t the best, which is not what you want when you’re shooting baskets.) MJ, however, was always worth watching.
In her review of a new movie about Emily Bronte, titled Emily, Sheila O’Malley cites two lines from one of Bronte’s poems:
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.
Somehow I’d never seen that poem before, so I tracked it down. Didn’t take long: I have it in several anthologies. Here it is, in full:
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
I find myself returning, time and again, to the English Romantics and their ability to create deeply evocative and specific visions and feelings with a relative economy of words. “Grey flocks in ferny glens” conjures such a perfectly precise image in my mind in just five words, and the last stanza seems a perfect encapsulation of the smallness of the single human in the face of universal nature.
It’s that time again:
:: Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and commitment to reclusiveness fame is returning to bookstores as the illustrator, along with caricaturist John Kascht, of a new book. Wow.
:: Harrison Ford gives a very insightful interview:
I think it’s the place I feel most useful. It’s what I know the most about. I lost my chops as a carpenter. I haven’t ever played fiddle. But I feel comfortable wrestling with how to make behavior out of words on a page and tell a story, and I’m still excited about the prospect of telling a story. I think this is a service occupation — telling stories. We need it. Whether it’s drawing on caves or religious tenets, we love telling stories.
:: Via Roger:
(original)
:: When The Onion decides it’s not taking prisoners, the results can be brutal. Perhaps it helps to understand the context of this from the days preceding it–the New York Times‘s insistence on platforming anti-trans voices with little questioning, the response in the form of an open letter signed by many (including myself), and the Times‘s pouting response to that, followed by their running an appalling op-ed titled “In Defense of JK Rowling”–is best found on one’s own. Meanwhile, The Onion opens fire:
“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.
We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.
Youch.
In the 1940s and 50s, there were quite a few Black singing quartets recording music. Many early Black solo artists got their start in groups like this (Sam Cooke being a prime example), but I’ve just learned something very interesting about these groups and their role in Black music history. One of these groups was called The Jubalaires, and apparently their style relied less on gorgeous harmonies and vocal work and more on rhythm and a singing style that was at times a blend of singing and speaking.
In other words, The Jubalaires were a very real precursor to what we know today as rap. And this song, “Noah”, has been called the very first recorded rap song. I don’t have the historical chops to assess that claim, but how fascinating! It’s a really neat listen, I must admit, as someone who knows very, very little about rap.
President Carter
I’m sure we all know by now that former President Jimmy Carter is accepting hospice care, rather than continuing to seek treatment for various health issues. Carter is 98 years old; he was elected President over 46 years ago, and he left office over 42 years ago. Carter’s presidency did not go smoothly, but his post-Presidency has been amazing to behold as he has tirelessly championed democracy and other humanitarian causes for decades since leaving office. I expect the historical verdict on Jimmy Carter will likely remain some variant of “Not a great President, but a great man nonetheless.”
Jimmy Carter is the first political figure of whom I was genuinely aware, although admittedly with a very immature understanding of anything at all. I remember hearing about him from my kindergarten teacher and thinking “A peanut farmer wants to be President! Cool!” I had no idea what a “President” was; I vaguely recall asking one of my parents that very question, and getting a response that “He’s the boss for the whole country.” I pictured someone like my school’s principal, going all over the country telling people what to do.
President Carter also angered me as a young sci-fi geek when he chose the evening of ABC’s broadcast of the premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica for the signing of the Camp David Accords. I mean, when you’re a kid sitting down to watch a highly-hyped teevee show with explodey-spaceshippy goodness, nothing throws you into a state of infuriation quite like the screen going dark and suddenly the words “ABC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT” coming on. I’ve made my peace with this more recently, though. (“Harumph,” though, says my inner 7-year-old.)
All was forgiven, though, just a couple of weeks later. At this time we were living for a year in Elkins, WV, and the town’s annual festival, the Mountain State Forest Festival, was coming right up, in early October. That year we learned that President Carter himself was coming to Elkins to walk in the parade. We were in the stands along the main street that day, and finally, after what felt like hours (it might have actually been hours), the parade began, and suddenly, there he was: the President of the United States himself, walking in the street and waving, beaming that famous smile of his. Then he climbed into his limousine and I thought “That’s it?” But up he popped from the sun roof, waving some more. Not long after he was gone. I actually found the President’s briefing book from that day–apparently he gave a campaign speech that morning for one of WV’s senators, before driving in the parade–and by late afternoon, he was back at Camp David. I also found these two photos from that day:
Looking at this, I can’t believe how close those spectators were allowed to get to the President!
Not sure if the guy in the tan overcoat is a Secret Service guy or not; he kind of looks like Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s White House Chief of Staff.
To this day, President Carter remains the only US President I have ever actually seen. The closest I’ve come since? A campaign rally in Erie for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and a couple of times when Presidents Bush the Younger and Obama flew into Buffalo, and I saw Air Force One from the parking lot of The Store.
Anyway, best wishes to President Carter as he begins this journey with as much grace as he seems to have pursued all of his previous journeys.