A Date With Flies

I am going to warn you, I have saved this story till late.  And I did this purposely.  I hope we’ve separated the sheep from the goats.  This is one of the truly traumatic experiences of my life, and this is not “remembrance.” When a guy is lying on a couch and the psychiatrist finally unearths this juicy nugget—the guy yells “Yeah!  Yeah, it’s true! Uh, uh,” is this reminiscence?  Is he being nostalgic?  No.

We’re just discussing the true-life-existence that we all go through.  Each one of us in our time—most of us cleverly erase these things as we go.  Some you never quite erase, but you rarely bring to mind.  The really bad things that happened, the bad, unexpected things that have really happened, that are deeply buried down in our own private storehouse of useless garbage, stuff that our lives would have been much better off without.

It happened in a June.  I’ve long since had this theory that the truly bad stuff—the stuff that really impresses you for being bad, are things that occur when all the indications were pointing in the opposite direction.  In other words, when things looked like it was going to be fantastic—and a total fiasco occurred.

Well, it was June.  I was about sixteen.  When you’re about sixteen, particularly when you’re sixteen and up, as a male, you get an almost pathological interest in the opposite sex.  This is not hearsay evidence.   I speak from experience.  The male at sixteen is a walking cake of human yeast.  Fantastic, hot currents flow through the blood like you wouldn’t believe.  I don’t know if this is true of girls.  I can only speak from the male standpoint.  I am not being a male chauvinist, I’m merely being a male realist.  And he retains it to a lesser or greater degree throughout his life.  The constant interest in the other sex.  Don’t make it too simple.  It’s not necessarily as an object of sex, either, it’s a whole, complex thing, the whole mystique of the girl.  Girls—it’s a different ballgame, you know?  And you’re drawn to it, You’re fascinated about it.  You form theories about it.  And it’s occasionally even discussed back of the garage.

Rumors float among the males.  Of one type or another.  And no matter how specific the information or knowledge gained through lectures, through film, it still has nothing to do with the real thing!  You can study warfare all you want, but the first time you get shot at, that’s another ballgame.  Whole new kettle of fish.

____________________________________

____________________________________

SUMMERTIME REVISITED

One of these mornings
You’re going to rise up singing.
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll fly to the sky.

As I’m enthralled by Billy Stewart’s over-the-top scatting of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” I decided to see how a few others have sung it in a jazzy way. Apparently the song is a major item for singers to interpret. I’ve watched/listened to a number of other renditions on YouTube. There are many, including elegantly traditional vocals by opera singers, who performed  without adding special interpretations, but those below represent ways some artists have altered the standard words and lyrics in ways that especially caught my ear. The jazz musicians all did wonderful interpretations. Janis powerfully expressed her usual emotional intensity.

As much as I’ve enjoyed jazzy takes on songs by all of the above, and interpretations by Frank Sinatra and others, it’s never occurred to me to make side-by-side comparisons. I enjoy them all, but none approached the quirky stratosphere of Billy Stewart. It’s Stewart’s “Summertime” and Ferry’s “Hard Rain” that got me to explore  other musical variations on a theme.

Ella gets shown twice—singing with Lois’ singing and playing trumpet, and her solo singing. Janis Joplin gets shown twice because of the dark, fuzzy images—and because her varied/expressive facial expressions deserve it.

____________________________________

Final Turkey Adventure Segment

She looks at me with these two cold blue eyes.  She says, “That’s probably true.”

And I say, “But, Patty, I got—well—Patty—.“  I get an inspiration.  I get her to walk outside with me and there is my car.  It looks like a chicken coop with wheels.  I say, “Patty, I’m going to tell you the truth.  I got trapped by seven-thousand, five-hundred-and-fifty turkeys.”

She looks at my car.  The feathers are still falling off the Ford and three turkeys had sat on my shoulders during the melee.  She looks at me.  She says, “You are a slob!”

I say, I’m a slob? The turkeys!  I didn’t do it!”

She says, “Alright, let’s go.  It’s date time.”

I had to wipe off the door handle and she got in.  She had her dress on under her store uniform and now she was all dressed up.  It was a very bad scene.  The turkey in the back seat had gotten excited too.

I was supposed to take her to dinner.  We pulled up in front of this restaurant and we walked in.  What do you think the special was that night?  I don’t even have to tell you.  With gravy and stuffing.

As soon as we had our table I got up and went to the men’s room.  I started wiping stuff off my shoulder.  There was an attendant in there with combs and cologne.  He came up and he said, “How are you, sir?”

I said, “I’m fine.”

“Can I help you, sir?”  He takes out his spot remover.  “What is that?”

I said, “Well—“

He said, “It can’t be what it looks like.”

I said, “It is.”

He said, “Chicken?”

I said, “Worse than that.”

“Geese?”

“No, no, worse than that.”

He said, “What is it?”

I said, “Turkey.”

He said, “Turkey!  That’ll never come out!”

That’s right.  It never came out.  Today I’ve got an electric blue, turkey-spotted sports coat in my closet.  If turkey ever really comes back as a decorative item, I’m ready.

Turkeys ended, stay tuned for next kid story.

_______________________________________

_______________________________________

Part 3 of 3 of Ferry’s “Hard Rain.”

CONVERSION

AFTER HEARING, VIEWING, CONTEMPLATING SO MUCH, I REMAIN CONFUSED.

(I’VE HEARD/VIEWED FERRY’S “A HARD RAIN” DOZENS OF TIMES)

Dylan’s studied and satisfying refusal to alter his equanimity, avoiding the emotional excess his words seem to insist on for the listener, seem to emphasize the steady power of his meaning –its timeless folk-origins. While Ferry has transformed “A Hard Rain” into an over-the-top emotional affectation, an extravaganza not made to persuade but to enthrall—a new esthetic object.

From Dylan, Ferry has made a new, stirring mental construct, a new object of obsessive originality—fabulous, awe-inspiring, mesmerizing in his fierce-eyed repetition from which one cannot avert ears or eyes. And yet, of course, he has not killed off the Dylan itself—he’s only transmogrified our notions—leaving us with the old revered Dylan plus the newly fabricated Ferry.

Recently, at my goading, my wife, who’s not a big Dylan fan, watched Ferry’s “Hard Rain” for the first time, proclaiming it “brilliant!”

In an Internet review of Ferry, Douglas Wolk writes: “A Hard Rain” is one of the most awesome Dylan covers ever, the kind of interpretation that leaves its source bruised, hung over and covered in Sharpied taunts. Ferry ripped apart Dylan’s apocalyptic tapestry fiber by fiber and reconstructed it in Day-Glo plastic thread; his performance’s deliberately affected mannerisms….

In an Internet essay, Robert Forster commented: “Ferry, though, pulled off a stroke of genius. With ‘A Hard Rain’, he took one of Dylan’s greatest and most revered early works, a stark and compelling piece of protest-era song-writing, and put it into the glam-rock blender. And by God, it worked. ‘A Hard Rain’ being a three-chord folk song, Ferry not only saw the possibilities of pounding it into a fantastic three-chord rock song, but the opportunity to add all the touches so characteristic of his work at that moment: grand camp gestures that the song just had to lie down and take.”

Sympathetic/poetic vs ironic/bombastic.

I am both conflicted and seduced by these

diametrically opposed artworks.

Bryan Ferry’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” is the strangest, best Dylan cover ever.

Th-th-that’s all, folks!

___________________________________________

A turkey just sitting on the hood is looking in the window at me.  He’s looking right in.  This big, fat, forty-seven pound turkey.  You can see he’s lost ten years off his life—his feathers are turning white.

And we sit there.  The turkeys won’t move.  They just sit.  Once in a while one looks up and goes gwaglewaglewagle.  If you think Chicken Little was afraid of the sky falling—you don’t know what a turkey’s like!

We sit there for around fifteen minutes.  This farmer’s walking around chewing Mail Pouch and spittin.’  He’s bugged.  He’s got his lantern going, and finally, one by one the turkeys start walking off my hood, they’re looking around.  On the road they start falling in to company formation once again.  Slowly we go down that road, me, my Ford, the scared turkeys, the farmer spittin’ in the ditch, and we go two or three-hundred yards.  The farmer comes to a farmhouse and the turkeys all turn left.  Off they go.  I put the car very carefully in first and I move down the road.

The car smells bad.  (The car smelled with a smell that, to the day I got rid of it, never fully was expunged.  It was a very ripe Ford that I sold.)  It’s got a –I don’t know how to say this—fear acts on a turkey the way that marvelous product that tastes just like Swiss chocolate, acts on a nine-year-old kid after  he’s eaten two packages of it.

I’ve got my electric blue sports coat on, the car’s covered with a thick coating.  It’s just been a bad night all the way down the line.  I finally get to the next town.  The girl’s name is Patty and she works in a drugstore, and she got off her job about seven o’clock and I’m showing up about ten.

I drive up in front of the drugstore.  It’s open till midnight, so she’s sitting inside at the counter.  Waiting.  I walk in.  I say, “Patty, you will not believe this!”

___________________________________

___________________________________

Part 2 of 3 of Ferry’s “Hard Rain.”

CONUNDRUM

Dylan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXn9ZKPx6CY&list=RDMMhXn9ZKPx6CY [

Ferry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zwBHd4kll0&index=1&list=RD7zwBHd4kll0

Comparing a Bob Dylan rendition of “Hard Rain” with the Bryan Ferry staged performance, first one should note that Ferry’s short version (his “official” rendition = more financially acceptable) runs three minutes, eleven seconds, while Dylan’s complete playings in varied performances, run from six to over ten minutes. (It’s also a fact that Dylan, early in his career, performed shortened versions.)

I present here Ferry’s cut version, with my annotations, including his added words of embellishment in red, besides cutting two whole stanzas of Dylan’s lyrics that apparently didn’t fit his up-tempo extravaganza. I experience Ferry’s “Hard Rain” as bombastically ironic. The black stage set with bright spotlight features Ferry at a pure white grand piano, with three attractive back-up singers who, in their jazzy costumes and flashy/ironic expressions and voices, bounce along to the up-tempo rhythm. Ferry and the back-ups are frequently videoed in over-the-top, extreme close ups—faces and mouths. Ferry’s opening, with ironic smugness, introduces the whole rendition.

          Ferry’s Dylan

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
Walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,
Stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
Been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard.

It’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

                   [Entire stanza missing—“What did you see…”—etc.]

Oh what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
What did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’,
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,

One hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazing, heh,

[Here the video begins inserting war scenes—Considering Ferry’s context, I don’t buy the phony emotional play.]

Ten thousand whispering and nobody listening, heh,
One person starve, I heard many people laughin’,

       [The three girl backups do a pronounced, ironic laugh.]
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,

 [The back-up singers give an ironic-sounding “awwww!”]
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, hard, hard, hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

    [Entire stanza missing—“And who did you meet,….”etc.]

And what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
What’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’
Walk through the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well-hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, and none is the number.
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand in the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

[Ferry “sings” in a vocal tone and facial expression which I see as ironic comment, including in the following line, the apparently ironic, “ha-ha-ha-ha”]

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a ha ha ha ha hard,

[As though laughing at the thought.]

And it’s a hard rain’s a gonna fall.
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s so hard so so hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a gonna fall.

             [Throughout, Ferry and the three singers express in actions and sound a disparaging irony–especially, see his expression lower left. Video ends with camera pulling back, revealing singers and Ferry at his white piano.]

In a 1977 interview, there was this approximate exchange:

INTERVIEWER: …a song like “Hard Rain,” which is a Bob Dylan song, it was actually totally different. Being such a major fan of Bob Dylan’s were you a little bit worried that there was one version….

FERRY: There were plenty of other people as well….I thought that he’d underplayed it kind of. He did it during his kind of protest period, and it was just a kind of beautiful poem to me, you know, done to a guitar-strumming accompaniment.

Other comments by Ferry:

“To me a cover is just changing the vocal performance. I like to change a song.”

“Virtually anything you did would have to be different because all [Dylan] did was guitar and voice and mouth organ,…“

Ferry in an interview. “So I did it over the top, real kind of pounding piano and everything, sound effects and so on.

End Part 2 of 3.

_____________________________________

I’m all dressed up and it’s been an hour-and-a-half behind these crummy turkeys.  I do something that even to this day, I’m sorry for doing.  I’m driving right behind this mass of turkeys who are walking along with that funny looks on their faces, their eyeballs spinning, and their bills going, gwaglewaglewagl.  Right up behind them I’m going, and I put my hand on the horn and go WHAAAAAAAAAAAA!  I’ll tell you, have you ever hollered “FIRE” in the middle of the Saturday night feature down at the Bijou?  These turkeys blew their corks!  The air is full of turkeys!  Flapping their wings and landing on the top of the Ford, they’re landing on my hood, gwaglewaglewagle gwaglewaglewagle!  It’s a gigantic rain of turkeys.

This guy’s running around.  He’s got his lantern and he’s hollering and if you ever heard a farmer swear—they know languages that stevedores don’t know!

I sit there.  Oh, my god, these turkeys!  What am I going to do?  The turkeys won’t move now.  They’re sitting on the fenders, they’re sitting on the running boards, there’s one turkey on the back seat crying.

The guy looks in my car window.  “Well, alright, wise guy.  Them turkeys, when they gets scared, they just won’t move.  We’re gonna sit here all night until them turkeys decide they’ll start movin’ again.  Now look what ya done did!”

I say, “I was trying to turn around and my elbow hit the horn.”

“Don’t give me none a that!”

More talking turkey to come.

____________________________________

____________________________________

•

•

In Bob Dylan’s Hands

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

A HARD RAIN—BOB DYLAN, BRYAN FERRY

I am a Bob Dylan enthusiast—especially of his early work such as “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Tambourine Man,” “Positively 4^th Street.” I seldom encounter a cover of his work that I can tolerate. (Yes to some Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix.) So hearing Brian Ferry do “A Hard Rain,” I’m at war with myself in a knock-down-drag-out-dispute. Ambivalent. Confused. Conflicted.

•

I acknowledge that Dylan has been a play-actor in his own publicity and performance as the innocent folksy traveler, the vagabond. (Early in his professional career he had Pete Seeger and many others believing in his bogus biography.) But considering the straightforward nature of this situation, I believe his statements regarding his serious creative works as related to his artistic forebears. I do believe he meant what he created at that period in his career in such songs as “Blowin’ in the Wind.” At about that time he was living with Suze Rotolo, who, with her family, were said to be far-leftwing activists, and the country was engaged in a heartfelt folksong revival. He believed it and was preaching to the choir. He also saw which way the wind was blowin.’

In all his public performances I’ve seen in person and in videos, he presents no dancing and prancing and flashy floodlights—no such visual theatrics—he stands there, expresses his beliefs, and performs his creations like an old time folksinger. (The backdrop for the early video of him here is a corny setting that I’d like to blame on the TV production dept.) I find these Dylan songs poetic and filled with his own surrealistic version of truth—kind of like ancient epics.

In Dylan’s book, Chronicles—Volume One, he writes:

“Woody’s songs were having that big an effect on me, [In the late 1950s, early 60s] an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know…. [Lord] Buckley was the hipster bebop preacher who defied all labels. No sulking Beat poet, he was a raging storyteller who did riffs on all kinds of things from supermarkets to bombs to crucifixion…He had a magical way of speaking.

For me, a couple of Dylan’s songs, such as “A Hard Rain,” have the classic purity and rightness of The Lord’s Prayer—you wouldn’t go changing words or doing pop-elaborations on it (except maybe if you were Lord Buckley). It has the straightforward, simple, classic, solemn power, the rightness of a traditional folk song. In Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech he wrote in part:

I wanted to know all about it [traditional folk] and play that kind of music….

I hadn’t left home yet, but I couldn’t wait to. I wanted to learn this music and meet the people who played it. Eventually, I did leave, and I did learn to play those songs. They were different than the radio songs that I’d been listening to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to life….

I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. [America’s traditional folk song content.] None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it….

Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days….

•

What is it that Bryan Ferry has done, and why? In the video, one sees an elegant stage performance, a short, punchy entertainment, that hasn’t, for me, a shred of appreciation/homage for the original. It demeans the genre in which the song was created–a simple, poetic folk-telling of universal truths–reinterpreted as an entertaining, glitzy stage production, getting maximum effect from a powerful surface without any social/philosophical base. The performance seems a put-down. It’s taken the raw moral and poetic meaning, the 1960s associations and contentions, stripped them bare to fleshless, soulless bones, and reformed the skeleton with newly energized, living flesh and flash.  Should we expect some respect from a cover version of a song, a poem, a prayer, an anthem?

See upcoming ARTSY for my continuing conflicts regarding Ferry’s “Hard Rain.”

_________________________________

They’re going under the car. They’re very dumb—they think it’s the sky.  One turkey gets caught under my differential in the back.  I can hear him under the floorboard, gwaglewaglewagle, and I have to get out and pull him loose.

One thing you are probably not aware of regarding turkeys.  Turkeys en mass are extremely gamey.  That’s all I gotta say.  And furthermore, they’re very uninhibited—their personal habits are not exactly the kind you want in your living room.

I’m driving forward and it’s like some surrealistic nightmare.  The farmer ahead is waving the lantern, the guy behind me has his lantern, and the entire entourage moves across the landscape like a scene out of an Ingmar Bergman movie, The Turkeys.

It must have been an hour-and-a-half.  We finally get to the end of this road and they’ll either have to take the crossroad left or right. I’m going to wait.  Which way are the turkeys going?  When they go one way, I’m going the other.  Well, the guy in front turns right, the guy in the back turns left.  And I’m stuck.  Two flocks of turkeys.  I’ve got my choice.  It’s either that or drive straight over the pumpkin field ahead of me.

______________________________________

______________________________________

IMAGINARY NEW YORK TIMES INTERVIEW

These days, the Sunday New York Times book review section has a page where, one author per issue, they ask each interviewee similar questions about their reading and writing habits.  I’ve frequently thought about this regarding my own work, so it occurred to me to ask myself and respond as though I’d been questioned by the Times.

What books have you recently read and are about to read?

I recently read Susan Cheever’s biography of E. E. Cummings. Years ago I’d read two previous bios of Cummings, but Cheever’s especially impressed me with how her insightful and sympathetic approach gave me a significant sense of his whole conflicted being. I look forward to reading the revised edition of E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany.

What “great books” have most impressed you and why?

Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, Leaves of Grass, Ulysses, U. S. A. Trilogy: They each gave me an unexpected and strong intellectual/emotional/esthetic sense of the author’s created world.

Which writers most inspire you?

Ernest Hemingway. When I was an impressionable teenager, my cousin, Raymond B. Anderson introduced me to Hemingway’s controlled and forceful writing when he loaned me Death in the Afternoon. I eventually read virtually all of Hemingway, and am especially impressed and influenced by how Carlos Baker’s Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, explored what Hemingway did and how he created some of his fiction out of his actual experiences.

In recent decades, I’ve been very inspired and impressed with the entertaining mental agility with which Norman Mailer made every subject he handled a worthwhile intellectual reading experience.

What kind of books must attract you these days?

In recent years, I mostly read books and articles that focus on various aspects of the subjects I’m writing about: humorist Jean Shepherd and my totally true, authentic experiences in art expressed in short, illustrated blog  essays titled ARTSY FARTSY.

These ARTSYS include info/commentary on: “The Garden of Earthly Delights”; artists’ books such as Mexican Codexes and Blake’s “Jerusalem–The Emanation of the Giant Albion”; discovering a secret in Cezanne’s “great slash” atop his Mont Sainte Victoire; constructing a classical guitar and Japanese shakuhachi; correcting MOMA’s Picasso mistake, and my vending of “The Guernica Colorization Kit”; Abstract Visual Relationships; Suzanne Farrell’s ballet slippers, John Curry, Torvill and Dean; Machu Picchu, Vietnam Memorial, and New York’s High Line; fondling in awe the 24,000-year-old Venus of Lespugue, and the world’s greatest netsuke; my 34-year unique design adventures at New York’s museum of natural history (including the sex of grasses in the Komodo Dragon exhibit); my 50-year-old love affair with the New York Times; my encounters with Brother Theodore, Moondog, Seinfeld, three hours with Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, and having tea with the Vampire Lady; and much more stuff.

What kind of books do you avoid?

Genre.

What would you like to discuss with one of your favorite authors?

I’d like to ask Walt Whitman, whose writings up to the early 1850s were the most maudlin tear-jerkers, what altered his being—what inspired him into making the extraordinary creations in his 1855 and subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.

Who would you most like to write a biography of yourself?

Susan Cheever.

What few written words seem among the most memorable and powerful to you?

Lyrics co-written by Barry Mann in 1961 with Gerry Goffin:

I’d like to thank the guy who wrote the song
That made my baby fall in love with me….

Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong….

Darling, bomp bah bah bomp, bah bomp bah bomp bomp
And my honey, rama lama ding dong forever.

And when I say, dip da dip da dip da dip
You know I mean it from the bottom of my boogity boogity boogity shoop.

______________________________________