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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I wish that whomever posted this clip on YouTube had obscured the identity of the musicmakers. It's an epic bit of fucking around by Brian Wilson that hints at what he might have accomplished in the studio armed with better mental hygiene.



Starting at about 0:12 and repeating through the track you can hear the Woody Woodpecker motif in the high register of the accordion, which accounts for the subtitle of the composition. There's also a bonus cartoon theme that's even more prominent, arrangementwise, though to my embarrassment I can't identify the source material by its proper title. (Maybe one of you can.) It's featured in at least one Bugs Bunny episode---the one where he has invaded Elmer Fudd's surrealistic dreams (the one with the Salvatore Dali landscapes) for the express purpose of driving Mr. Fudd insane. Bugs gives lyrics to some old saw of a classical theme, thusly: "The rabbits are coming, hurrah, hurrah...!" Wilson uses a slight variation of it. What a nut!

I really enjoy, and am still taken aback by, the psychological tone of this piece. It certainly conveys something foreboding along the lines of a return to winter... at least the winters of yesteryear when all the leaves dropped from the trees, the insects died, the birds flew south, and the landscape was blanketed in frozen gray water crystals for 3 or 4 months.

Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (Woody Woodpecker Symphony), The Beach Boys (reissue 1990, "Smiley Smile & Wild Honey," Capitol C2 93696), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

4 comments:

  1. Hmm, are you thinking of The Campbells Are Coming? I would call it a folk tune.

    But good grief. The Beach Boys thing is really fantastic. I need to listen to this some more.

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    Replies
    1. G: yes, that's it! I had no idea where the theme came from other than the public domain through Carl Stalling and Warner Brothers. My quick survey of YouTube reveals that there are at least two very different ways to render the tune, one being the Bugs Bunny way (my preference, of course)and the other seeming like a more subtle or dim reflection of it.

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  2. (just passing through): a reply to Valentini's pilot wave proponency in opposition to conventional QM.

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.1278

    If we happen to live in a universe where relaxation to steady state has occurred, and so drives measurement outcomes, other possibilities will be difficult to show experimentally... Tilting at non-extensive worlds.

    Scarlet Pimpernell




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