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JEAN SHEPHERD & a Widespread RANGE
I have always known that an important part of my ways of
observing and reacting to the world
is thanks to that guy who talked to me nightly
as I matured, Jean Shepherd.
I have just realized that my artsy fartsy attitude toward the world’s
multifaceted glories owes some significant thanks
to that radio mentor, Jean Shepherd.
New York Times crossword puzzle of 3/15/72
JEAN SHEPHERD, MENTOR TO MANY
* * * * *
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (2019) is a book I’ve just discovered–it discusses why often a wide range of interests is of commanding advantage. To sum up the book’s 339 pages (some would say inadequately summarizing it): sometimes a particular problem in one field of study cannot conclusively/correctly be solved by experts with extensive knowledge in that field–but experience/situations brought forth from a wide variety of disparate fields can be successfully used—this could be called “thinking outside the box.”
In my particular art-related interests, I call this being ARTSY FARTSY.
* * * * *
An “ARTSY FARTSYIST” if I ever saw one.
The full-page book review of Range in the Sunday New York Times book section
June 9, 2019, is illustrated (as shown above) with
a silly but related cartoony image by Carl Vander Yacht.
The book reviewer, Jim Holt, comments:
Folk wisdom holds the trade-off between breadth and depth is a cruel one: “jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” and so forth. And a lot of thinking in pop-psychology agrees. To attain genuine excellence in an area—sports, music, science, whatever—you have to specialize, and specialize early. That’s the message. If you don’t, others will have a head start on you in the 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” supposedly necessary for breakout achievement.
But this message is perversely wrong—as David Epstein seeks to persuade us in Range. Becoming a champion, a virtuoso or a Nobel laureate does not require early and narrow specialization. Quite the contrary in many cases. Breadth is the ally of depth, not its enemy. In the most rewarding domains of life, generalists are better positioned than specialists to excel.
* * * * *
Jean Shepherd’s range (RANGE) of interests and powers of observation were vast. And he had the ability to improvise nightly on innumerable fields of interest–for decades on the radio, as well as express his talent in various fields.
His television series, Jean Shepherd’s America shows his concerns and appreciation for the vast cultural panoply of America, the country he loved.
His promotion to his listeners of good literature and poetry (as well as Robert Service and Archy & Mehitabel) added to the mix.
His enthusiasm for world travel as a civilizing influence on one—from accompanying the early Beatles, to engaging with former headhunters in the Amazon, is informative and entertaining.
He had extensive knowledge and appreciation of opera and, contrastingly, his involvement as critic, MC, and the playing of contemporary jazz recordings on his early radio shows. On some programs he expressed his appreciation for such funky jazz as “Boodle Am Shake.” He would, on occasion, play the audio of Paul Blackman, the one-man-band (sort of like the color illustration above?). He demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in the kooky silliness of playing kazoo, jews harp, nose flute, and knocking out tunes by rapping his knuckles on his head.
My little symbolic Shep-stuff-in-a-box.
None of these are actual pieces from Shep.
They are just examples of things related to him.
Top, brass figlagee with bronze oak-leaf palm I designed.
Blue kazoo. Red nose flute. Metal jews harp at bottom.
Actual Rapidograph pen–the kind Shep drew with.
Lower left, actual Signal Corps brass insignia.
Lower right, Orphan Annie decoder pin replica.
SHEP THUMPING OUT A TUNE
* * * * *
Range, page 273: “An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a
recurring theme in research on creative thinkers….”
With his widespread interests and abilities, Shepherd did not hesitate
—whether the circumstance required it or not—
to be silly.
It was part of his artsy fartsy character.
JEAN PARKER SHEPHERD,
MASTER OF: RADIO, TELEVISION, FILM, LIVE
PERFORMANCE,
AND THE WRITTEN WORD
(and several musical instruments).
Gang, I’ve spent well over an hour searching in my Excelsior, You Fathead! for a quote from someone I interviewed for it. Two pages before the end of the book and my search, I found it:
Page 438-9, Larry Josephson: “I don’t think it’s possible to perform at the level that Shepherd did and have that kind of ego and drive–to be on the air five or six nights a week and yet be a sensitive, caring, loving human being. You have to get up and concentrate the energy–drive, and whatever–to be a performer. It narrows your ability to give warmth and love to kids, women, and friends… I’m sure here and there there’s somebody in the world who was a very great creative artist and also a nice person, but I can’t think of anyone.” [The subsequent comment of Josephson’s, from earlier in the interview, I placed in the book just after the above] : “I think that the most important thing about an artist is what comes out of the radio, or what happens on the stage or the screen. What they were as a private person is less important–it’s kind of trivial–for the real junkies. I think Shepherd was an absolute genius. He was one of a kind….
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JEAN SHEPHERD’S AMERICA & PARTS UNKNOWN
My two concurrent obsessions, Jean Shepherd and Anthony Bourdain just encountered each other in my thinking, and I realized that they have a special attribute in common. It’s their passionate use words and image to give a sense of their fascination with travel.
* * *
Jean Shepherd’s America is a series of nearly two dozen half-hour videos (1971 and 1985), covering a wide variety of American subjects. Shepherd’s love of America and Americana, encompassing all the vast, quirky, lovable aspects of the country, is on full display. I quote from my Excelsior, You Fathead!:
Fred Barzak, the series production director remembers:
He just basically wanted to hit the road….He put out a big map and said, “So where do you want to go, Leigh, where do you want to go, Fred…” That’s how the decisions were made. They were extemporaneous. They were freeform.
Allowing for some ego in the act, Shepherd as Shepherd—on camera (or as narrator in A Christmas Story)—had a knack for creating direct, real connection to the audience….The programs restated many Shepherd themes found in his previous work….
Was Jean Shepherd’s America a bunch of individually self-indulgent, inordinately slow-moving, inchoate, failed graspings for the Great American Novel as Documentary? Or probably was it a few masterpieces of an incomplete, vast mosaic of the country, the very contemplation of which only a master, striving toward encompassing the unattainable vastness, would have had the temerity to attempt? The complete series can only be appreciated if one mentally steps back from the mosaic and visualizes it in its entirety, appreciating the courageous attempt,…
Yes, in a mainly extemporaneous exercise, it displays and brings appreciation to the rich variety of this country’s customs and culture. Also in Excelsior, You Fathead! I quote Shepherd regarding his passion for travel as well as his passion for observing what he called “straws in the wind,” and “cracks in the sidewalk”:
“The real news would be news that described people. I mean—what is happening to people? This would be the real news….But if we could somehow capture the essence of people.”
“As far as I’m concerned, travel—I have found travel to be one of the most—oh—use all these clichés, but it is the one thing that I find really, truly, does give me a kind of final sense of involvement and satisfaction.
“I love the sensation of being completely removed from my known environment, and just looking out—just being able to walk through a street that is—that is completely unknown to me—to look at people who are unknown, to go into a place that is unknown–a restaurant to look at—the sky is unknown….
“I went to the headwaters of the Amazon. I was there. I am a trained reporter. Those of you who listen to me know that. My life has been devoted to absorbing sights and sounds and listening, and I am going to try to give you in the next couple of days—maybe the next week or two—my impressions of what I consider probably the high point of my life so far as adventures and experience is concerned.”
Shepherd lower left (note tape recorder),
in the Amazon.
My Excelsior, You Fathead!’s self-consciously platitudinous title for the section on Shepherd’s travels is “Travel Broadens One.” In my book manuscript posted on www.shepquest.wordpress.com transcribing many of his travel narratives, my introduction comments:
Probably most important is the thrill of all travel, as changes of environment seem to make him feel most intensely alive….
Returning from trips, he gives his observations on the air and sometimes plays parts of the tapes he’d made on-site—a few words, snatches of music, local sounds, the rush of the sea against the hull of a sailing vessel. All evoking some special sense of where he’s been. Dominant among those sounds, of course, is that of the timeless human voice….
He has his very good reasons for traveling. He emphasizes that being in new places promotes new ideas, new ways of understanding our world. All the simple things should be noticed because they are of a different order from the simple things at home….
Shepherd and Bourdain appear to have a related passion for travel,
adventure, and experiencing parts unknown.
* * *
Anthony Bourdain, creator and star of television’s Parts Unknown, an extended series of programs based on the local foods, but encompassing much in the way of the customs, feelings, and basic humanity of scores of places around the world, talking to an audience at a New Yorker event:
“I go to places, I do a bunch of stuff, and I talk about how that felt and how I react to those things as truthfully as I can. By truthfully, I mean I do not owe you journalistic truth as a viewer. I owe you only the truth about how I felt at the time. Did I feel stupid, disoriented, angry, passionate, confused. That’s the only mission I set for myself.”
Just after Bourdain died in June, 2018, CNN, the station that aired Parts Unknown, did a 12-minute tribute, “Remembering Anthony Bourdain,” which included the following Bourdain comments:
You know, food is the entry way. I’m a guy who spent 30 years cooking food professionally. That’s where I come from, that’s how I’m always going to look at the world, but food isn’t everything. And something comes up and I’m happy to get up from the meal and wonder off elsewhere….
We ask very simple questions. What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook? And everywhere in the world we go and we ask these very simple questions we tend to get some really astonishing answers….
You know, one of the great things about travel is just when you think “I’ve had enough of this,” something really interesting happens, and interesting things happen to me all the time. All the time. I still feel I have the best job in the world and it’s still fun. More importantly even, I think, it’s still interesting, and it’s still challenging–in a good way.
He had visited scores of countries, and he talks about how important travel is for promoting knowledge, understanding, empathy for the other.
* * *
Amazing the intelligent/sensitive/humane attitude
Bourdain and Shepherd share.
Jean Shepherd’s America in its only 2-dozen parts
is a partial fulfillment—Parts Unknown, in its scores
of episodes comes closer to fulfilling their potential.
Their passion for experiencing and bringing home
other peoples in their own turf and circumstances.
* * *
* * *
P.S. I have requested (and they are winging their way to me),
three presents for Fathers Day:
A small, stuffed, Peppa Pig
New book on the sometimes-advantages of being a generalist
New Anthony Bourdain book
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JEAN SHEPHERD–What more can I say?
DEAR JEAN SHEPHERD ENTHUSIASTS
My enthusiasm for Jean Shepherd began in the fall of 1956 when I began listening to his broadcasts. After a couple of decades it became revitalized when I read his obituary in late 1999. As I say in the introduction to my book Excelsior, You Fathead! that obituary made me realize “that I’d lost an old friend. It was then that I recognized how much he had meant to me–and means now, and how important his art is to American culture.” Since then I’ve written two published books about him (one as transcriber and editor); transcribed and edited two unpublished manuscripts of his kid stories and travels (both posted on my blog in their entirety); I’ve written various published articles about his work including the commentaries for the nine Radio Again CD sets of Shepherd’s syndicated broadcasts; been interviewed several dozen times regarding him; and since early 2013, I’ve posted over 750 illustrated essays about him and his work on my blogsite: www.shepquest.wordpress.com
All posts should remain available indefinitely. The left column of the posts indicates access to many by subject matter, and the right column gives access by monthly chronological posting. (One of my most interesting discoveries is finding and posting information regarding the important parts three women, Jeanne Keyes Youngson, Lois Nettleton, and Leigh Brown played in his personal and professional life. I’ve posted unique info on this also.)
I had hoped to receive much input from viewers of the blog regarding Shepherd’s creative career and life. As I say on the top of the blog page under the title “About,” I encourage everyone to submit ideas, information, and questions to this blog so we can all learn by participating in open discussions regarding every aspect of Shepherd’s creative world. I’ve certainly appreciated the many “Likes” and some “Comments” and compliments I’ve received regarding particular posts–thank you very much. Yet, the response in the main seems to have been passive—not the feedback, the vibrant interaction I’d expected from followers of Shepherd.
As I put it early in my 495 book-pages about him: “Because of what Jean Shepherd created on the radio and in other media, many thousands of fans saw him as hero, mentor, and role model for creative urges and personal integrity. In the high quality of his work, the joy he provided, and in the ways about perceiving the world that he inspired and nurtured, Jean Shepherd was worthy of such ardor.” As a Shepherd enthusiast once said, “He makes you think about things.” Through my blog posts I had expected from those interested in what Shepherd elicits in one’s mind and soul more thoughts-leading-to-responses. It would have been for me, such an ongoing pleasure, and, I believe, would have provided interactive content that would have given several more years of life to this blog.
But, regarding my attempts in this blog to elicit agreements or even provoke alternative views, to find joyous comments and perceptive comments that Shep inspired as to ideas, and comments-leading-to-discussions of his creative work, there has been little interaction, and I admit to being disappointed and dismayed.
* * *
I’ve done all of the above to add to and promote Shepherd’s legacy and as pure pleasure on my part. At the moment, I don’t know what more to say. For now, despite my continued enthusiasm, I’ve run out of stuff. I hope more material of all sorts will arrive and I’ll be able to continue blogging on this subject that has been such a joy in my life for all these years. To quote Shepherd from the last text page of my Excelsior, You Fathead!:
“I’ve been trying to say it.
What I have been trying to say all along. Yeah.
There’s not much time left. But you’ve got to hear it.
You’ve got to be able to hear it.”
*
Excelsior, you fatheads!
Gene B.
(Eugene B. Bergmann)
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JEAN SHEPHERD tragedy part 3 (last of a repeat)
INTRODUCTION
I’ve given a lot of thought to the nature of classic tragedy. And I’ve given a lot of thought recently to the nature of Jean Shepherd’s life and career. I’ve given a lot of thought to the relationship of tragedy to Jean Shepherd’s tragic life and career.
Since I read his obituary in the Times in October 1999, through my book Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd published in 2005, my play, “Excelsior,” performed in March, 2007, my book of introduced and edited transcripts, Shep’s Army—Bummers, Blisters, and Boondoggles published in 2013, my blog, Shepquest started in February, 2013, and all my other Shepherd projects published and not yet published, I’ve spent much of my waking hours thinking about Jean Shepherd.
This book collects my nine extensive, illustrated blog posts on the subject of the extraordinary nature of Shepherd’s creative career and its sad trajectory, which I choose to call a classic tragedy. Elsewhere I have dealt with some of his human faults—here I deal in the main with his talent and his professional career.
Excelsior, Shep, you gave it your best, and that was damn good.
–E. B. B.
THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE
A Tragedy in Obdurate Acts
and Extenuating Circumstances
(First of a Tragic Series)
This is The Shepherd’s Life, a very partial bio, selected, condensed, concentrated, focused—one idea and interpretation of a classic tragedy as understood by a particular person based on what he knows and understands and guesses. (Many people, including the media, describe any and every unfortunate occurrence–such as a fatal accident–as a “tragedy.” This may well be very sad, but not a classic tragedy.) For me, a classic tragedy emerges from a combination of a person’s conflict with his/her cultural environment along with some personal attribute and/or flaw within that person’s being. (Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, etc.)
Please remember that quotes from the Shep are not necessarily objectively true, but are probably true in spirit. The opinions are based on current knowledge. The results are as objective as I can make them–and simultaneously subjective/creative. Contradictory and an enigma–make the best of it.
I believe this is an insecure world.
I mean, you know, that’s the way life is.
Lightning bolts, thunderstorms, hail,
Mack trucks, fistfights in the dark.
–Jean Shepherd. August 29, 1964.
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JEAN SHEPHERD–Snapshots and American culture
Although many Shepherd admirers recognize that Shep was a great enthusiast regarding America and its multifarious culture, many may not have connected this understanding with the many ways in which he conveyed this. Despite (and, in a sort of take-off regarding) his disparagements of (American) human foibles, he once commented that he liked to portray important American events in his art. Yet, probably few are aware of such seemingly minor/irrelevant aspects in many of his works. Holidays, for instance, were portrayed in all their Americanness in such examples as A Christmas Story and “The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters,” and in parts of series of television narratives that include “Jean Shepherd on Route One,” and many of the episodes of his television series Jean Shepherd’s America.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s book The Artist Project (2017), I encountered an artist, Jane Hammond’s comments on the museum’s collection of vernacular photographs of snaps by amateurs. She writes:
I mine the images for specific things I want: I want this guy’s boots, I want this head in the sand. So there’s a forensic quality to these snapshots. They’re filled with information, with what I call the thinginess of things….It’s our own cultural shared information.
* * *
I’m reminded of the book American Snapshots (1977) by Ken Graves and Mitchell Payne, for which Shepherd wrote in his introduction to the book:
…it is a touching, true, Common Man history of all of us who grew up and lived in America in this century.
…What artistic results he [the snap-shooter] obtains are almost inevitably accidental and totally without self-consciousness. Perhaps of his very artlessness, and his very numbers, this nameless picture-taker may in the end be the truest and most valuable recorder of our times. He never edits; he never editorializes; he just snaps away and sends the film off to be developed, all the while innocently freezing forever the plain people of his time in all their lumpiness, their humanity, and their universality.
* * * * * * *
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JEAN SHEPHERD truths and fictions (part 2)
Continuing parts of the John Wingate interview of Shep on 9/18/73 (CD of interview provided by Shep enthusiast Gary.)
A call-in listener says: “When you were in World War II.”
Shep: “I was not. I was in the Korean War.”
Listener: “In the Korean War?”
Shep: That is correct.”
Shepherd has claimed this more than once. However, we have copies of his World War II service papers, including this one indicating his discharge on 16 December, 1944:
(Taken from http://www.flicklives.com)
Another caller asks about the story he told of a German submarine off the coast of Florida when he was in service there. So wasn’t he in World War II? Shep says he never told a story about a sub. (But see my transcript of his “Swamp Radar” story published in my Shep’s Army, and listen to it on the brassfiglagee website, dated 6/20/64.)
Maybe he forgot he’d told the sub story? But his insisting that he was not in World War II, but in the Korean War, was probably an attempt to make himself seem younger than he really was. He was consciously not telling the truth. It’s far easier to gather info now about truths/fictions than it was a few decades ago–we have the magnificent Internet, which includes such great Shep sources as http://www.flicklives.com.
(Much more on true/fiction to come.)
* * *
JEAN SHEPHERD–and KEN NORDINE
Word jazz artist Ken Nordine has died. Because of his work’s relationship to Jean Shepherd’s radio improvisations, lo these many years ago I contacted him and I believe we spoke for a few minutes by phone. Unfortunately, neither my physical archives of papers, tapes, and CDs, nor my crumbling memory can locate a damn thing we said. I vaguely recall (I think) that Nordine was familiar with and appreciative of Shepherd’s work. I encountered his obituary this morning in the New York Times:
Googling reveals lots more. For Shepherd enthusiasts especially, his work is worth pursuing.
By Christopher Borrelli Chicago Tribune
For those unfamiliar with “Word Jazz”: Imagine the silkiest voice delivering light Beat poetry over an aural landscape of piano tinkling and ringing phones and plops and echoes and hums, seeming to meander so far into Nordine’s subconscious that (through the miracle of tape) he has sonorous, trance-inducing discussions with his own thoughts.
* * *
By Rick Kogan Chicago Tribune (TNS) Feb 16, 2019
….What you will discover is the voice of Ken Nordine, one of the few people in the history of radio to use the medium to its fullest potential, rather than as a forum for blather, confrontation, inanities and noisy nonsense. He made a kind of vocal music as the voice of thousands of commercials and as the force behind a new art form he created and called “word jazz.”
* * *
Also part of NYT obit, Nordine is quoted that the goal of his poetry
was to “make people think about their thinking
and feel about their feeling,
but even more important to think about their feeling
and feel about their thinking.”
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JEAN SHEPHERD –and others–true/fiction (3 of several)
The relationships of truth to fiction in a variety of works–including mine and Shepherd’s.
Click on images to enlarge
I began Rio Amazonas with two epigraphs, and then a salutation:
“The issue is one of metaphor. Beyond that, license. What are we allowed to get away with by calling it literature rather than life.”—Diana Trilling quoted in Mailer: His Life and Times by Peter Manso.
I have always treasured those things that have emotionally affected my life.”—Mario Vargas Llosa [Peruvian author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature].
SALUTATIONS, DISCLAIMER, ETCETERA
Rio Amazonas is an act of truth, fiction, fantasy, love at first sight, faith, hope, and rape.
Taking advantage of Peru’s beckoning charms once upon a time in the last quarter of the 20th Century (450 years after the original conquest), I traveled south. As exhibit designer and teacher on an expenses paid Fulbright grant, seeking background for a South American Hall design in New York, I contemplated the arts, sites—and sights—of this exotic land of my dreams. I also hoped to discover plot, characters, and meaning, for some contrived, socially, politically, economically relevant Peruvian novel of landless highland peasants, urban coastal decay, and jungle desecration.
As I came upon myself midway through my path in the forest (I was just over 40 at the time), I had an adventure in the Amazon. I found my way.
Now, pen in hand, equipped with poor memory, muted sensory feelings, and serenely modulated emotions, yet exploiting all available resources, I travel back, seeking to repossess the treasure.
Toward that goal, two components shape this book. As far as knowledge, memory, and psyche allow, the true parts are fact. The rest is fiction: within that fiction no character is real, no dialogue or actions ever happened. Fact inspires fiction (I take what I want): fictional exigencies, mutual enhancement, an interactive synthesis which somehow might be truer than matters of fact, I try to effect the most dramatic consequences through the caressing indirection of pen-tip to paper.
Success in this quest depends on acts of daring, skill, luck, self-gratification, conquest, and violation, as it does in all great adventures. The epistle begins.
The novel begins, alternating true parts with the created fiction. At the end, the protagonist (yours truly) eliminates all competitors and flows romantically to safety down the Amazon with his conquest:
She welcomed him into her body. Exploding in a downpour of fiery sensations. A moan of ecstasy slipped through her lips. She was drawn to a height of passion she had never known before. She lay drowned in a floodtide of the liberation of her mind and body. Contentment and peace flowed between them. Her heart swelled with a feeling she had thought long since dead. The admission was dredged from a place beyond logic and reason*
*The foregoing sentences: chosen from The Romance Writers Phrase Book by Jean Kent and Candace Shelton, Perigree Books, copyright 1984. “The essential source book for every romantic novelist, containing over 3,000 descriptive tags arranged for quick, easy reference, guaranteed to stimulate the imagination.”
Much more to come
(including some specifically Shep stuff.)
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JEAN SHEPHERD–At the heights (8)
Ever been to one of those joints where the people walk around tables and they sing to you? It’s a terribly embarrassing thing. I’m in this joint one night with this girl, we’re eating a plate of spaghetti, and there’s this guy who plays cheap guitar. And he comes over and he hangs over the table, see. He has been eating garlic and he’s playing this guitar, and he’s doing “La Paloma”—sort of a South Chicago–type “La Paloma.” And he’s playing the guitar and the spaghetti tasted terrible and the “La Paloma” was awful too—and you’re not again, I can see it—that interested in my—I don’t blame you. But can’t you just see—[Singer on the record interjects, “Oh, but you’re killing me!”]
It’s just the way I am, baby. [Laughs.]
[Singer: “Ohhh!”] Ohhh! You see what I mean? There’s a certain hairy vitality about this that all of us lack today.We’re kind of poured out of a plastic mold. Each of us. Let me say a polyethylene mold—it’s better than just plastic. Or styrene, for the low, lost types. [Someone once commented to me it should be transcribed as “low loss types.”]
Yes sir, that’s my baby. No sir, don’t mean maybe. Yes sir— that’s—my—baby—now. Baby! [Laughs.]
See—it doesn’t work—nothing. You got to wind it up. You got to have the key, you see—stick it in the side where the socket is and wind it just as tightly as you can. Not too tight!— you break the springs—wind it up [Singer gravelly, grating, with that earthy, serious, syncopated beat.] and—wouldn’t it be incredible if this world turned out to be actually only this big ball with a key sticking out the side of it—and they forgot to wind it? For the last ten thousand years, we’re running down?
That’s the last portion of the existing audio.
More stuff to come.
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JEAN SHEPHERD –at the heights (6)
Ever tell you about the time that I wrote the message on the inside of a Baby Ruth candy wrapper? And floated it in a Castoria bottle down the Chicago River? Castoria. [Laughs.] Is there anyone out there who is willing to cry for us now—for it? No, you don’t float anything down the Chicago River—it flows up the Chicago River. They reversed the direction of the Chicago River—they really did—it’s one of the mammoth achievements of mankind. [Music fades to a close.] Ohhh— that’s great! Great! Great! Ohh! [Laughs.] That’s just the way I feel tonight!
Hey—play another cut on that side, will you? And hold it in abeyance. The one—the cut I want you to play is, “Blues I Love to Sing.”* Hold it in abeyance. We use this occasionally when things look the way things look tonight. I have this terrible, terrible, terrible, awful feeling. It’s not really frustration— it’s a kind of borderline—a case of immense disappointment or something. Here it is, June, it’s springtime— it’s almost summer, isn’t it? The sixteenth, isn’t it? Summer will be here in four days—five days. It’s June. All these people—everywhere, are stretched out for millions of miles— one after the other, bumper-to-bumper, sitting there with their radiators overheating.
* “Blues I Love to Sing.” Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall vocal 1927.
(Can be found on YouTube and on Jim Clavin’s http://www.flicklives.com.)
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