Saturday Night Fish Fry (After Hours)

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Here's an unpublished (so to speak) set of Beatles tunes performed live by Frank Zappa and his ill-fated "best band you never heard in your life," from a 1988 concert in Helsinki.



I reckon Sir Paul will authorize commercial release of these recordings by the Zappa Family Trust about the time he officially designates Heather Mills as the Fifth Beatle.

Two things stand out to me in this clip: the quaint topicality of the lyrics and the technical acumen of both the musicians and the engineers in echoing the studio-type feel of the original Beatles recordings.

At this point in Frank's life, he was preoccupied by (among many other things) how TV evangelism had infused US politics with a sinister overtone, and so he was delighted when preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were publicly exposed as sexual "perverts" and moral hypocrites, and he gleefully used it as "material." Most of the lyrics here focus on Swaggart, whose sex scandal broke into the news during the band's 1988 tour. But these were the waning days of the second Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra affair and other Republican outrages having broken the windshield of our little democracy flivver and flattened three of its tires while the President drifted into senility. So we hear Zappa's mocking references to such one-hit wonders as National Security Advisor Admiral Poindexter and Attorney General Ed Meese. I think Zappa's parody lyrics are at their best when they remain vulgar and playful, as opposed to the more coarsely obscene texts for which he became infamous (in the Clean World, at least). In these pieces he veers over into the "obscene" lane, but arguably expresses no greater magnitude of depravity than Swaggart guiltily preached on any given day in his ministry. And all these lyrics are based on True Facts---set to the music of the Fab Four!

As one commenter on this video said (but for a different implied reason than I would give, and with which I disagree), the Beatles could not have performed most of these songs live with anywhere near the fidelity that FZ and his band accomplish in this performance. That's partially explained by the level of sophistication that synthesizer technology had reached by the end of his career, but much more so by Zappa's almost-supernatural ears and almost-peerless skills as an arranger. The musicians must also be credited for their technical skills, but as herded and over-rehearsed by FZ and---worse---a junior musician whom he put in charge of drilling the band on a daily basis as his own health began to emerge as a debilitating problem. Because of his stature, Zappa could get away with rehearsal schedules that could fairly be called abusive, but his second-tier foreman couldn't command the same obedience. So Zappa's musicians revolted and the band fell apart halfway through the world tour. (Strangely, Wikipedia doesn't have any account of this major milestone in Zappa's career---the end of it as a performing musician, to be exact---so I can't link to it.)

This video presents the same 12-piece band documented live on Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make A Jazz Noise Here, which Zappa issued to help him recover from a financial loss of about half a million dollars (in an era when that probably meant twice as much as it does today). Broadway is the most broadly (hurhurhurrrr) appealing, but bristles with Reagan-era political topicality that isn't universal enough to have aged well. The others have a few high points, but come across as thrown-together filler tour tapes. The Beatles suite played here is much more entertaining and respectful of the source material than the pointlessly condescending covers of "Purple Haze" and "Stairway To Heaven" that show up on Best Band.

I think FZ really believed that this lineup was in fact his best band ever. From a technical standpoint, that would be his call to make. But as a fan, I've never gotten much enjoyment from his '80s ensembles. They achieved their precision and impressive responsiveness to Zappa's extemporaneous direction through the maestro's extreme exercise of control and, as I say, over-rehearsal to the point of sounding brittle underneath it all. Nevertheless, this particular segment sounds more relaxed and human than I've come to expect from Zappa's latter-day aggregations.

What do you think? Does this music do anything for you?

Beatles Suite, Frank Zappa and band (1988, live in Helsinki, Finland, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: as Fifty50 readers who have taken Music Appreciation will observe, this music isn't actually a medley, but a regular sequence of songs with each having a segue into the next.

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.

Coulda been a contender

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Well, whatever, I guess. Liberal bloggers everywhere all pumped by the "open letter" that Vikings punter Chris Kluwe wrote to a bullying, homophobic Maryland state legislator on Friday. You can read here, in addition to the letter, the circumstances prompting Kluwe to write it. I don't have any reason to doubt the authenticity of his motives for writing it, and he falls on the same side of both issues he addresses---freedom of speech and equal rights for gays---that I do. Hooray for both of us and all our fellow travelers! But after reading the piece line by line I ended up feeling like I had wasted my time.

I have a classical view of public communication: in order to have impact, it should have a clear purpose and a target audience. In a case like this, I'd expect Kluwe's purpose to be persuasion, and the target audience---beyond the purported addressee, Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr.---to be the mainstream media for maximum reach. If not, then why not... and what instead? The only two answers I can think of are (1) self promotion and (2) stirring up the pot for laughs.

Kluwe is obviously articulate and thoughtful, so I thought it was too bad that he squandered his shot at the public ear with pointless obscenities and stock badboy smack talk. An articulate and thoughtful person can cut any stupid asshole to ribbons with a simple, logical rebuttal and festoon it with plenty of invective that could still feasibly be discussed on Sunday morning networks or even NFL pregame shows (assuming the purpose of saying anything in the first place is impact and reach). Even assuming that probably wouldn't happen, because they are the corporate media, after all, there would still be no room for anyone to dismiss what Kluwe wrote with prejudice simply because he couldn't restrain himself from using the swear words.

Yet check out the second-to-last paragraph in his letter, where he buries the serious, well-thought-out point of his piece:

I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?

I don't object to Kluwe's deft deployment of the term "cockmonster" here, because it forcefully and justifiably ridicules the consciously rationalized premise of homophobes. (Myself, I would have framed the word in quotation marks since it is a term of art, so to speak.) It's too bad that this---Kluwe's actual point---is virtually invisible, and it's one purposeful obscenity neutered by the three gratuitous paragraphs that precede it.

The story could have been "NFL player treats politician, club owner to lesson in rights". Instead we have a patronizing story line, relegated to the liberal blog ghetto, about a pro athlete playing against the widely held public stereotypes of ignorance, homophobia, and conservatism. In other words, the story is mostly about Kluwe the celebrity and the novelty of his letter, and hardly at all about the thuggish and chilling machinations of whistledick state lawmaker Emmett C. Burns Jr. That's too bad: Kluwe coulda been a contender.

Enough of the "Big Dog" crap already!

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I wish another member of the Bush-Cheney administration would get explosive diarrhea for each time I see a variation on this particular idea:

Move over little dog, the big dog's moving in.

I'm truly and eternally mystified why every card-carrying liberal seems to worship Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband, who signed a law to end the Glass-Steagal Act for banking system integrity; signed the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act; established the humiliating Don't Ask/Don't Tell military personnel policy; beat up on poverty-stricken Americans by adopting a Republican plan to add to the misery of public aid recipients; signed the authoritarian Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and pranced around as one of the nation's biggest cheerleaders for a tidal wave of economic globalization initiatives that give us (and citizens of all other nations) much less leeway to run our own affairs, delegating sovereignty upwards to trans-national corporations.

Bill Clinton "beat" the Republicans simply by adopting much of their program and tongue-washing it in expertly-delivered feel-your-pain rhetoric that might either have issued from the mouth of a man with a conscience or a man without one. This is the real reason why he drove Republicans crazy: he was in a position to make them obsolete. They simply had to neutralize him, if not destroy him. And Clinton obligingly gave them a prong they could hang an impeachment trial on.

Too, I'd be surprised if there aren't many liberal Democratic women who are, secretly, at least a little uneasy about all this Big-Dog adulation, considering that the one accomplishment Clinton will always be remembered for is seducing a White House intern into a grossly uneven power relationship that involved having his lumpy pecker (possibly the veteran of a dozen chancres). At very least, it seems that the Big Dog may not have much more respect for women and their feelings than any off-the-shelf rock star.

Can anyone point to a single constructive, progressive piece of legislation promoted and signed into law by Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband that every made anyone's life better outside of a corporate shareholder's meeting or a beltway political consultancy? Truly, I can't think of a single Bill Clinton accomplishment that matters today in any positive way.

You're welcome

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Starting tonight in Tampa, Fla., and continuing for the next several days, the national Republican Party will transform a cavernous ice hockey rink into a cavernous horse hockey rink.

Slice of life

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I decided to mow the lawn for the first time today since Memorial Day weekend. So as I crouched over the lawn mower carefully pouring gasoline from a 2 gallon can, directly from the neck without the spout, I noticed that the ember of my lit cigar was about 15 in. from the tank. "Hmm," I said to myself, "I need to go park this cigar somewhere else." So I did.

Mitt Romney, telepath?

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It seems that Dubya-II either anticipated this morning's rumination on this blog or, perhaps more likely, had himself a Freudian slip about something that may be gnawing at him underneath it all:

Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — his Vice Presidential running mate — as the “next President of the United States,” on Saturday.

I was listening while I was typing my first "patsy" post, and didn't catch the remark. In all seriousness and humility, I am certain Dubya-II has never read this blog. See what he's missing? Validation!

For whatever it's worth, I got the link from Krugman's blog.

Ryan and Dubya-II

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I'll be interested to see how many years of tax returns Paul Ryan makes public now that he's VP stock. His nominal mentor now, Dubya-II, may stand to lose no matter what Ryan does. If Ryan releases more than 2 years of returns, he makes Romney look bad and at least temporarily refocuses the "national dialog" on what Dubya-II might be hiding, financewise. And if Ryan releases 2 years or less, then he redoubles Romney's vulnerability on tax secretiveness and helps to keep the issue alive "with a bullet," as they used to say in Variety Billboard.

If Romney really has demoted himself to the role of patsy for a cabal of evil men, as at least one observer suggests, then Ryan could shiv him and twist it a few times by releasing 10 full years of returns. Anything that makes Romney a more untenable candidate than he already is now helps Ryan and that highly hypothetical, almost completely improbable cabal.

Creepy hypocrite

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Here's another kernel from Charlie Pierce on Paul Ryan, the right-wing congressman

who lies awake at night worrying that The Deficit will come and eat our grandchildren, lives in a house overseen by the National Park Service, which means that he qualifies for a 20 percent investment tax credit for the house he lives in. Of course, his "budget" would largely decimate the NPS, but that would be only those parts of it enjoyed by other people.

Pierce also reminds us that Ryan, who told the Virginia crowd this morning how he lost his father at an early age, was supported throughout his youth by Social Security survivor benefits that kept a roof over his family's head and food in their stomachs. For Ryan, Social Security benefits are an entitlement; for our kids and their offspring, it's a handout reeking of moral hazard that must be eliminated.

Bullied

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I think Charlie Pierce at the Esquire Politics Blog makes the two most important points you'll hear in the coming week about Mitt Romney's VP candidate:

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth -- our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as an something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

Pierce, like Paul Krugman specifically on economics, has been way out in front of the pack in their fingering Ryan as a phony and a troglodyte. They've made it clear, with argumentation and documentation, that his reputation for both intellectualism and decency are thinly sliced baloney served to us corporate celebrity pundits.

But I think Pierce makes an even more salient point as a throwaway line:

Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.

I agree. Think about what what Romney personally has to gain by selecting a clone of himself. A clone who is actually popular with the Republican base and may be popular with many so-called swing voters. Answer: nothing.

I think there is a nontrivial probability that Romney has been bullied into demoting himself to the role of patsy, so to speak, in a scheme by a cabal of evil men.

Wise sayings

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Since Willard Romney wants to continue and expand the Bush tax cuts so people like him pay less tax than nail ladies, I think we should just start referring to him as Dubya-II.

Tomorrow's matinee tonight

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This looks like a job... for Superman!



Kee-reist, Clark---why don't you just announce it to all of Metropolis on the electric radio?

This is the third Superman feature released by Fleischer Studios, and it's some pretty weak sauce compared with most in the series. One thing that's odd is that it's really light on dialog; odd because the Fleischers usually give us a heaping helping of unhinged villains chewing up the scenery with their turgid threats and declamations. Here, after seeing a headline about the "largest single shipment of gold ever attempted" on a flashy, coal-fired streamline deco passenger train (?!), we are on our own for most of the feature. Not that it's very challenging to decode, but these cartoons generally spell things out very explicitly for the juvenile target audience. Why has it become a runaway train, for example, instead of just rolling to a stop or---more plausibly---Lois taking over the controls? She's a skilled pilot, after all, as we learned in episode 1. (She also has no problem handling a Tommy gun here.)

The scenery and action are beautifully rendered, as we would expect from the Fleischers. But the physics are mostly awful, especially where Superman is manhandling the train to keep it off the floor of the gorge. Usually, one of the best things about this series is the way the animators convey a sense of mass and kinetic energy through The Man Of Steel's interaction with objects. So even in this weak episode, they do come through for us in the scenes where Superman struggles to pull the train uphill. The sound effects of the train axles help to sell the illusion.

It's fortunate for this gang of gold rustlers that railroad rights-of-way were so wide and drivable in the early 1940s and were so accessible from any stretch of highway. I love the scene where, although the teargas seems to be getting the best of our hero, one of the bad guys panics and just chucks the whole crate of grenades at once. Something else the kids and I used to laugh at: the scenes where Superman pulls the train toward the camera and gets his crotch all up in the viewer's grille. This is not the only episode in which Fleischer animators used that visual point of reference, either.

One throwaway animation effect that looks quite difficult to have rendered is the guard's shadow moving on the newspaper front page starting at about 1:39. Also, at about 7:55 we get a nice architectural view of the Depression-era "government mint" complex, but I wonder why the monumental inscription on the arch faces the building interior.

Billion Dollar Limited (1942, "Superman" cartoon by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures; Myron Waldman and Frank Endres, animators; Dave Fleischer, director), via YouTube, a work in the public domain embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Purfuit of Happineff

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There's a reason behind the neglect of my personal writing here over the past month or two: I've been absorbed in the "endgame" of editing (and designing and laying out) a book on the topic of construction management for a professional associate. Just between us girls, this work has taken over twice the amount of hours I'd expected based on the author's original proposal, and I'd estimate that the task has probably been three or more times the original anticipated difficulty.

I've stuck with this forlorn task for reasons that I need not go into here except to say that I may see more financial potential in the project than the author actually does.

A few weeks ago I encountered an event horizon, so to speak, marking the beginning of this publishing endgame. Specifically, it was a more or less final definition of the project scope (which is ordinarily the first order of business on a publishing job). So now I'm pushing the issue pretty hard and have declared myself to be in control of the final schedule. At the moment I'm dealing with a few last-minute efforts by the author to "creep the scope" of the editing task too far for my energy to endure. So while there is still some uncertainty remaining with the closeout, I am within no more than a few weeks of being done.

At that time, I will be free to indulge in my own personal Purfoot of Happineff to the full extent I wish. That, of course, includes tending to that garden of earthly delights you know as Fifty50.



Click here for provenance of the audio recording. The clip embedded here also includes a candid recording of the true story of General George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River, which addresses another seminal event in the colonies' struggle for independence from those British Imperialists!

Stars and stripes

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A few years ago while drifting into sleep on a Sunday night, I had an aesthetic experience with a John Philip Sousa march. Our FM public radio station used to run a show called Pipe Dreams, which featured a fairly wide range of music as performed on genuine pipe organs. (In its effort to make WILL-FM "even better," the program was eliminated 2 years ago and replaced with the same syndicated (i.e., simulated) classical music programming that fills about 18 hours of their 24-hour daily schedule.)

Anyway, that evening on Pipe Dreams was presented a rendition of Sousa's iconic "Stars and Stripes Forever," zestily pounded out on a major league, one-off concert pipe organ. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to retain either the organist's name or any information about his mighty instrument into the next day's waking world. But my mind was in a peculiarly receptive state between waking and sleeping, and the performance enthralled me.

I had enjoyed playing alto and tenor saxophone parts, both first and second, on this ditty in high school because most of the other instruments (especially the piccolo) were doing all the hard work. Yet the arranger---Hal Leonard, no doubt---was generous enough to let all the saxes play soli on one of the several famous melodies penned for the march... the one that goes "Dah Dah Dah-duh-duh duh-Duh-Duh" and so on. As with my K-12 concert band experience (starting in 5th grade, actually), my marching and pep band experience helped to plow a larger field for my musical tastes than I'd have tended otherwise.

But hearing "Stars and Stripes Forever" in my mentally, and I'd even say psychically, receptive state, made a memorable impression on me even on the verge of slumber. First, I was able to hear that the organist was hitting every essential note in the score outside of the percussion parts. That was plenty of a mind-blower to me, physical-coordinationwise, who admittedly is not familiar with the level of virtuosity needed for, say, Bach's baroque organ works. But more important was the clarity with which I grasped Sousa's composition. It was the first time I had ever experienced Stars and Stripes as a masterpiece of form, coherence, and even arithmetic.

I tried earlier today to find the specific performance of my memory on YouTube, but I couldn't (not on the first page, at least). The versions posted there are flawed, soundwise and performance-wise. The main problems are excessive echo or audience noise, which obscures an organist's precision; or, more typically, an organist's actual lack of precision and expressiveness. The version I heard that night was a well-engineered studio recording with all requisite reverb, but not too much. And the performer, whomever he was, sounded like he really got the piece. At the time of its composition, Stars and Stripes was not a mere patriotic chestnut written to be pried out of its shell once a year, but was actually a huge pop music genre of the period. I have no serious knowledge about American music before the emergence of jazz, but I suspect that Sousa marches were about the equivalent of rock and roll at the turn of the 20th century.

Not for nothing do we call him Big Rock Head... with bonus technical report!

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The lad we sometimes call Big Rock Head (BRH), who has now adopted "Rock Head" as his Official Rock & Roll Stage Name, proved that he deserves this monicker late Friday during a nighttime game of Capture The Flag at a park in Urbana. It is reported that some drinking was involved, not that it's unusual for drinking to be involved in anything that grad students might do on a Friday evening. Much more unusual is the fact that the youth of today were out playing like kids of yesteryear on a weekend night, at a baseball diamond in meatspace, exerting themselves physically.

It seems that BRH, in defending his goal, was pursuing his quarry with a singlemindedness of purpose that led him to become unaware of a chain-link fence installed along the third-base line. The slanted fencepost with which BRH posed for this photo spread this morning brought his sprint to an abrupt halt, skullwise (upper right). The placement of the split could not have been executed any more purposefully by a Hollywood makeup artist. So if the 10 stitches shown above leave a scar as a legacy, then the graphical layout makes a fine style statement in addition to its reeking of masculine essence.

After getting his noggin rattled, and the contents probably lightly concussed, the poor baby was surprised in the dark by what a sweat he had worked up---it was even streaming into his eyes! As we now know, this was actually leakage from his circulatory system, which still dotted the dirt on the dugout floor Saturday morning (center right), along with a fat drop on the left Converse sneaker which he had discovered a bit earlier.

The fencepost is not one of the security-grade jobs you find at industrial and government installations, but it is a steel fencepost after all. Because I am not a trained incident-site investigator, my forensic analysis was necessarily informal. I judged the post to be well-anchored, with indications of some ductility when the cap was pushed back and forth. The slant of the post is significantly more pronounced than the corresponding post at the far end of the first-base line (not shown), and the direction of the lean corresponds well to the vector of the BRH sprint. At the base of the subject post I found well-defined buckling (bottom right). The discolorations above the buckling are ambiguous. They could have been made by a previous impact with the post, such as might occur when scuffed by the deck of a riding lawnmower. However, the marks do not make any obvious sense as an effect of the deformation of the post, either Friday night or at a previous time. Therefore, I judged the markings to be a red herring, forensics-wise.

Finally, if you click on the spread and look closely at the enlargement of the lower-right picture, you may see a few crisp cracks in the parched mud in the lower-right quadrant adjacent to the base of the post. These cracks show up better on the high-resolution images, so you may take my word that they are there. These cracks radiate out from the base of the post opposite of the direction from which BRH impacted it. This is a geological artifact I would expect to see as a result of such an impact.

Big Rock Head is somewhat over 6 ft tall and weighs approximately 200 lb. Having some knowledge of his physical capabilities and the joie de vivre with which he plays, I do not think it is farfetched that he might have struck the post at 15 mph---a sprint that could produce a 4 minute mile, but which need be sustained only for a few moments of alcohol-assisted galumphing to produce the documented effect on the pole.

Therefore, it is concluded that solely with the hardness of his cranium, body mass, and autolocomotion, BRH caused a ductile failure in a steel fence post during a nocturnal session of Capture The Flag. The young gentleman whom he was tracking at the time should feel thankful for the good offices provided by said fence post, bodily-harmwise.

What I saw south of town last evening

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Touring on the road bike, trying out a new pair of shoes:

1. A soaring red-tail hawk, landing atop a tall utility pole, then pacing me with slowly flapping wings about 100 ft to the east, heading south. I wasn't sure of my identification and I told it to show me his tail, not expecting to have my request acknowledged. After about 15 seconds he caught a draft and executed a soaring banked hairpin U-turn that gave me visibility of his back, including a fiery red tail that was emphasized by the late-afternoon sun.

2. Upon my approach, a sudden rustling in some short rows of drought-stressed corn at the edge of the field to my immediate west. An awkwardly galloping groundhog, bounding along the row opposite my direction, with a cartoon-like cloud of dust drifting on the wind from where he first bugged out.

3. During a water stop, a frantic group of killdeer trying to pester and lure me away from some nearby ground nests. Three or four flew around me in wide, interleaved circles, producing a din of racket that sounded like angry baritone seagulls (I've never heard these birds say "kill-deer" as the are reputed to do). At the same time, about 50 ft back toward town, one of them put on the famous broken-wing act, which I'd never seen before. Typically, when a cyclist rides through their territory, they will escort the rider about 30 to 50 ft in advance, flying low and alternating with a rapid walk until the bike closes in to about 20 ft. At that point, they resume low flight over the blacktop.

4. The red-tail again, or one of similar proportions, flapping lazily toward the south from where I was returning. Behind it, a small, fast black bird of some kind. This puzzled me as big hawks should be kind of scary to smaller birds, but this one closed on the raptor quickly, looking like it was trying to win a race. Then suddenly, from slightly above, the blackbird divebombed the hawk, pecking once at its back then swinging wide to the right and getting lost fast. I recognized the call as belonging to a redwing blackbird. They are very aggressive about protecting their nests, which they build in ditches using grasses and mud. The males will perch on telephone wires to watch over their territory, and will sometimes get aggressive with passing bicyclists, pecking at their heads or helmets. Evidently they don't take any crap from red-tailed hawks, either.

Voodoo economics

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In a dream last week I was granted an important revelation:

We now have more empirical evidence for the existence of real-world zombies than we do for the validity of supply-side economics.

First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.

It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.

Update: post title changed to the obvious, which I started to do several times during composition but forgot.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This is neat!



For starters, I never get tired of listening to the radio version of this tune. There's so much to like. First, it's a delicately balanced rock ballad; the tempo is danceable and almost brisk while the chord progression includes lots of nifty chromaticism that carries an emotional tinge.

Second, the lyrics deal with the overworked topic of young heartbreak with precocious maturity and a heartening lack of melodrama. As an expression of support for a friend who has lost the "game," I always perceived that Gerry was singing to a female friend, but that's not actually "hard-coded" into the lyrics. Assuming my interpretation represents the band's intent, there is one big way this type of song can go wrong: the consoling party (that is, the singer) is using sympathy as a pretext to worm his way into a distraught lady's undergarments. There's no room for suspicion of that in these lyrics, though.

Third, the arrangement handles the orchestration perfectly. The small string section provides atmospherics, the brass instruments contribute dignity, and the oboe phrases evoke the moments before sunrise better than any other voicing I can think of. This part of the chart reminds us that some adults took part in the production, too---George Martin, maybe? Whomever: they did themselves and the band great credit through economy and understatement, avoiding both cloying sentimentality and over-formality.

But this performance, as I say, is particularly neat to my earbones. It's from a 1964 edition of The Ed Sullivan Show. The boys are playing live, for real, with a small orchestra stashed away somewhere behind the theatrical flats or on the sidelines. As you can hear, there were some problems keeping the orchestra in sync with the band in a few places, particularly a brass flourish at the end of the bridge (around 1:40). I find these production artifacts to be endearing, and don't hear them as errors. These are the fingerprints of a noteworthy pop music performance by talented musicians who at the same time sound like regular, approachable people.

Along those same lines, they Pacemakers sound like they're playing regular, everyday instruments. The rhythm guitar and piano don't sound cheap, but unprocessed and unaffected. Their tones are the same sounds that talented kids in the neighborhood could produce in Dad's garage if they had the same equipment and experimented with the knobs. And I enjoy hearing all the raw detail in those instrumental parts---especially the guitar---that were not conspicuous on the single.

Although I can't be certain, this sounds like the same performance included on a disc I own that collects Ed Sullivan Show recordings of five British Invasion bands from 1964 - 1966. A few months ago I dug it out after it laid dormant in my "stacks" for almost 20 years, and became enamored of it. As I've implied, the sound will not impress audiophiles, but the audio fidelity is perfectly good for a live recording of the period, and most of the tracks offer fine performances replete with previously unheard details and artifacts like those I've mentioned above. The Billy J. Kramer material is good (two Lennon-McCartney songs). The Searchers track, Needles and Pins, is also very nice and makes me wish a few more had been included. Peter and Gordon are alright, and even the four (!) Herman's Hermits tracks are decent---much better than I expected. Besides the Pacemakers' three tracks, the disc ends with a great "set" by The Animals, who exude a genuine and unprocessed character that you could imagine being played in a bar or college gym. The only stinker of the lot is I'm Telling You Now by Freddie and the Dreamers (sorry, lads, but even as a kid I didn't care for your sucky novelty music). A production note about the disc: each "set" is well engineered to sound like a single performance, but many of them are edited together from different locations in the space-time continuum.

Anyway, back to the libretto: below I'm providing the catalog information from the version I own, which will deviate from the YouTube particulars because mine is audio and theirs is video.

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Gerry and the Pacemakers (performance 10 May 1964, from "The Sullivan Years: The British Invasion" [1990], TVT Records TVT 9428-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Odd: gas prices have fallen

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I almost failed to notice that a gallon of gasoline costs about $0.50 less than it did here at the end of March. I guess this price decline didn't rise to my awareness because I haven't heard Republican congressmen and centrist pundits gabbing nonstop on NPR about how President Obama has done such an extraordinary job in this connection.

Out back

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Still have more days off than I've used so far this hiatus. Here are three snaps of a job I dreamed up 2 years ago. I think slow.

I started the project 2 years ago by buying the wrong kind of cedar for the frame, but only discovered that after assembling the frame last summer. Since worrying about that for a year didn't transform the cedar into below-grade quality, I decided to sink it into the ground just to avoid more delays. I assumed this would would be a crap job that I'd have to redo in a few years anyway.

As it turned out, the quality happens to be pretty high. The photo on the left shows the frame with a compacted bed of soil and brick rubble, with four sacks of patio-base gravel (also called roadpack) tamped down over it manually. (The brick rubble backfill was probably a stupid idea that I will regret later, along with the off-spec wood.) The three sacks pictured just about filled the frame to where it needed to be. Lots more tamping ensued with an 8 x 8 cast iron plate mounted at the end of a heavy garden-tool handle. My big innovation was discovering that the paver stones are the same thickness as a 2 x 4, so I screwed together a float-type device, center picture, to level the roadpack to the correct recess, pulling the device back and forth and merrily tamping it all until I was pretty flurking sick of it. The right-hand photo shows all the stones in place, with roadpack having been carefully poured, swept around, tamped, etc., to fill in all the cracks. I should have wetted the stone for this final photo so it would match the other two. The pavers aren't as pale as they appear in the final shot. If you want a closer look, by the way, clicking on the picture should load a larger version.

Note the clump of Shenandoah switchgrass near upper left. After construction I backfilled around the frame with soil excavated from elsewhere on the estate, then moved the switchgrass to the end of the path to prevent drunken visitors from falling over the ledge. This edifice constitutes the scenic overlook of the estate, which is known to myself and the lads as Moronica International State Park.

To the left of the path is the asparagus garden, which is not doing so hot this year. Now that I have this job in the Done column, I can begin thinking about extending the path 90 degrees to the left. Why? Because some moron laid a mess of these pavers on top of playground sand on the west side of my house about 20 years ago, creating a paradise for ant colonies and invasive weeds. Two years ago I dug them out and stacked them on a palette. So this is a recycling project. Also a weight-control project.

Editor's note: Please forgive rusty, mediocre text. I am on hiatus, and so is my brain.