Ramblin' with Roger

More birthday month music

Depressive Quartet

Here’s more of my birthday month music celebration. These are songs tied to a particular time and place, or occasionally multiple times and places, in my life.

For about a year, c. 1965, I tried to learn to play the piano. I went to the home of Marcheta Hamlin, our church organist. She was patient, but it just wasn’t in my skill set. One time she wanted me to play Minuet in G major, then attributed to J.S. Bach, but now considered to be written by Christian Petzold. She said it was like A Lover’s Concerto by The Toys. I didn’t know the song at all then and may not have until The Supremes covered it the following year.

After I broke up with my girlfriend in May 1971, I visited my friend Steve in Poughkeepsie. He was playing the Billy Preston album That’s The Way God Planned It, produced by George Harrison. The first song is Do What You Want. I LOVE that song. Within a year, I saw Billy live in Elting Gym at SUNY New Paltz, which I was attending.

In my freshman year, I was in Scudder Hall, probably in my dorm room, when I determined that When You Dance, I Can Really Love by Neil Young was Our Song for The Okie and me. This track, and the Billy Preston tune, have something in common. They start much slower than they end.

Help Me by Joni Mitchell defines a rebound relationship that didn’t last, and a concert went awry.

My real understanding of apartheid in South Africa started with Biko from Peter Gabriel’s third album. BTW, that whole collection, sometimes called Melt, is a desert album of mine. I have a copy of it in German.

Again

My tenth high school reunion in 1981 was a bit of a dud. But a bunch of us went over to my friend C’s house. My friend Karen played the new Rolling Stones single Start Me Up about once an hour between midnight and 6 a.m.

Romance was hit or miss in the day. I developed a Depressive Quartet of songs. I wrote about them here. Sweet Bitter Love by Aretha Franklin, her best track on Columbia. My First Night Alone Without You by Jane Olivor. Gone Away – Roberta Flack; if I WANT to cry, this song always works. Stay With Me by Lorraine Ellison. If I needed to feel worse: Remove This Doubt by The Supremes; Down So Low by Linda Ronstadt; Can We Still Be Friends by Todd Rundgren.

I was riding back from somewhere late at night in 1983 with my roommate Mark, a part-time disc jockey at my favorite radio at the time, Q104. Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes came on the radio, and we mused whether the song would have any commercial success. I had my doubts.

More next week.

That Black/Irish thing

Paradise Square is based on true events

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I will note that Black/Irish thing.

When I was down in NYC in June 2022, my sister Leslie and some friends arrived earlier. They got to see the Broadway production of Paradise Square. It is described thusly:

“Led by Tony winner Joaquina Kalukango (who won Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical), Paradise Square is based on true events from a part of New York history that not many Americans know about.

“The musical is set in 1863 during the Civil War, in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood. This real-life neighborhood used to house free Black Americans and Irish immigrants, who lived together, worked together, and married each other. Kalukango’s character Nelly owns a saloon called Paradise Square, where most of the musical’s action takes place…

“The neighborhood was built over a filled-in freshwater lake. The buildings placed on top of it would sink and sag, and were notoriously damp, making it a breeding ground for diseases. Because of this bug in its design, housing in Five Points was cheap, making it a destination for new Irish immigrants and freed Black Americans.”

My sister thought it was excellent. Unfortunately, the show’s run abruptly ended shortly after controversies of “Lawsuits, Unpaid Bills, and Alleged Bullying” came to the fore.

Genealogy

In my extended family, there is a man named George Liggins. The 1910 Census shows that he was 49, designated as black, with his father born in Ireland and his mother born in New York. His wife Hannah, 54, noted as white had both parents born in Ireland. Their three sons and three daughters, ranging in age from 15 to 25, were listed as mulatto.

I wonder if George Liggins’ parents met in Paradise Square. I have no way of knowing, but it’s an interesting fantasy of mine.

You should be dancing

Around the same time as the trip to Carnegie Hall, my wife and I saw Irish Dance: Steps of Freedom on PBS. “This program charts the evolution of Irish dance, from its early Celtic origins to its peasant dance roots to its mix with Caribbean and African slave cultures.” So the Black and Irish intermingling narrative continues.

I was surprised by my interest in the difficulties of the American Irish Historical Society in New York City, as reported in the New York Times in December 2022. The following month, it was reported that the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany, which I’ve not yet visited, would be involved in revitalizing the NYC entity. “The new board was announced by state Attorney General Letitia James to deal with the group’s financial issues… Elizabeth Stack, executive director of “the Albany entity “will serve on the three-member interim board…”

I’m no closer to figuring out my direct lineage from County Cork, Ireland. Perhaps the Irish American Heritage Museum could help?

Movie review: Living

Ikiru

In the movie Living, the audience is introduced to a young man named Wakeling (Alex Sharp) on the train on his way to a new job as a paper-pusher for the department of public works in 1950s London. He learns he should not make small talk with his colleagues on the transit.

But he turns out not to be the focus of the story. Instead, it is Williams (Bill Nighy), the department head. Williams is a stiff, stoic bureaucrat; his offices and others like his have mastered the art of being very busy while accomplishing next to nothing. Then he receives a formidable diagnosis but finds it difficult to share the news with his son and daughter-in-law.

At this point, the always-present and never-tardy man decides to try to experience life. But he doesn’t know how. Williams goes out of town and engages a stranger, a playwright named Sutherland (Tom Burke). But Sutherland’s suggestions aren’t what he needs.

Maybe Williams’ former underling, Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), who he meets serendipitously, might help.

The movie is a remake of the 1952 Akira Kurosawa film Ikiru, which I was not familiar with. Indeed, Ikuri shows up in the opening credits; for a time, I thought I had gone to the wrong theater.

Bill Nighy does buttoned-up very well, and Williams’ incremental breaks from his staid existence – he changes from his traditional bowler hat! – is believable.

Award-worthy

The movie is slow, which is not meant at all as a criticism. It’s not an action flick. But it is moving. And it’s economical; at 102 minutes, it’s 40 minutes shorter than Ikiru.

Bill Nighy is rightly nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. Kazuo Ishiguro is up for the Adapted Screenplay. The movie would be a more worthy nominee for Best Picture than a third of the films that got the nod.

I viewed Living at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in early February.

March rambling: 2008 again?

amateur sleuths

Is it 2008 again, or not? (bank failures)

US Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) makes his DC entrance

New Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) Signs Law Gutting Child Labor Protections for Minors Under 16 Years Old

Defiant Woman at the Center of New York’s First Abortion Battle – in the 1840s

How to Make the Hybrid Model Work for Women

The HistoryMakers: Documenting Black history through first-person accounts | 60 Minutes

My City by James Weldon Johnson

The Destruction of Negro Communities and the Birth of the African American

Mapped: Which Countries Get the Most Paid Vacation Days?

Indonesia unveils the construction site of a new capital city, Nusantara. Jakarta is experiencing overpopulation, infrastructure problems, and chronic flooding. The current capital is quickly sinking into the Java Sea, and parts of the city could be entirely submerged by 2050. But the new “project may lead to substantial rainforest deforestation, threaten endangered species’ habitats, put Indigenous peoples’ homes at risk, and more.”

March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. The Colon Club calls attention to the disease.

Why are nurses quitting? Ask the nurse no hospital will hire.

Idaho Murders: As a Small Town Grapples With Sinister Rumors, Media’s True-Crime Obsession Grows and The Case the Internet got wrong: A new investigation sheds light on Lindsay Buziak’s unsolved murder, revealing a vast web of misinformation. These are as much about the rush to judgment by amateur sleuths as the crimes themselves.

Worst Civil Engineering Failure in US History – March 12, 1928: St. Francis Dam Disaster

And more

John Cleese was confronted with three men who kinda looked and/or kinda sounded like his character, Basil Fawlty. He had to guess which one did the impersonation professionally.

Chaim Topol, Tevye the Milkman in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ Dies at 87

Robert Blake, the Combustible Star of ‘In Cold Blood’ and ‘Baretta,’ Dies at 89

‘M*A*S*H’ Stars Hold Table Read for New Scene Written By AI

Marvel Working to Find ‘Quantumania’ Leaker. It’ll probably be more successful than SCOTUS was.

My friend Fred Hembeck asks Mark Evanier about Tiny Tim

Is the Beyond Burger Healthy?

Hey, Stewart’s, $5 / 2 = what??

Now I Know: The Dark History of Groomsmen and Baseball’s Strangest Trade and When Space and Physics Don’t Mix and Why Beer Comes in Brown (or Green) Bottles

I’m happy about the results of the Academy Awards, although I did not watch the program. It’s been my experience that people who saw EEAAO in the cinema, as I did, enjoyed it FAR more than those who watched it at home.

The Big Lie, redux

To me, it’s all one big, continual story. The Big Lie about the 2020 election, including the allegations about rigged voting machines.The January 6, 2021 insurrection. Dominion voting machine’s defamation case against Fox News and the information that came out during the trial’s discovery phase.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News exclusive access to raw footage of Jan 6. Tucker Carlson, one of the verified liars in the Dominion discovery, had footage of Jan 6 edited to suggest that the insurrection was just a sightseeing event, a claim so absurd that the White House and Senate Republicans from Mitch McConnell to Thom Tillis rebuked Carlson.

Check out pieces by Jake Tapper, Bill Maher, Seth Meyers, Drezner’s World, and possibly most comprehensively, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Music

In honor of ME: Adagio and Allegro for Piano and Horn by Robert Schumann, Opus 70!

And this: Sir Roger Norrington Eroica/Happy Birthday surprise from the SWR Symphonieorchester

Afro-American Symphony by William Grant Still

Casablanca suite by Max Steiner

Coverville 1433: The Rihanna Cover Story and 1434: Cover Stories for Nik Kershaw and Nina Simone, and 1435: Album Cover: Dark Side of the Moon’s 50th Anniversary

Wayne Shorter, 1923-2023

Guitarist David Lindley: 1944—2023

K-Chuck Radio: The joy and sadness of Yvonne Barrett

Classical Composer Reaction – Analysis of This is America (Childish Gambino) | The Daily Doug Ep. 542. (Doug Helvering)

Make Way For Tomorrow dance number- Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth, and Phil Silvers (!)

Carpenters with Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Julien Neel

It’s not Lou Reed … and it’s not Jefferson Airplane, either.

Mr. Ma answers all the cello questions you never knew you had!

Burt Bacharach’s Clever Key Changes – David Bennett Piano

Ten classical music songs you know, but you may not know their names

“We’re willing to sacrifice our egos for the good of the band” – interview with Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran.

Please keep voting for the niece Rebecca Jade for the San Diego Music Awards daily in categories 20, 21, 25, 26, and 27. Also, vote for Peter Sprague in category 4, which RJ sang on.

The zen of baseball division

pieces of eight

When I first learned about pi, it was noted as 3.14, or 22/7, the latter because I suspect they figured kids couldn’t understand how to multiply by 3 1/7. Or something.

Pi, of course, is 3.141592, followed by a whole lot of numbers, none of which I have bothered to memorize. And 22/7 is 3.142857 endlessly repeated. Close enough for most purposes.

As a kid, I loved the beginning of baseball season. I would take the box scores from the morning newspaper, the Sun-Bulletin, in Binghamton, NY. I’d figure out players’ batting averages after one or two games because it was FUN. (No, really, it WAS!) It was a bit of baseball division, as it were.

Figuring out two to six at-bats was easy. Eight at-bats also worked because I thought of pirates’ pieces of eight; in my mind, I considered eight twelve-and-a-half cent pieces (.125, .250, and so forth). Sussing nine at-bats was a cinch (.111, .222, et al.) though I had to add a point above 50%. (.556, .667, and so on).

Calculating seven at-bats was only slightly more challenging. But once I figured it out, I recognized its beauty. 1 for 7 is .143; 2 for 7, .286, 3 for 7, .429; 4 for 7, .571; 5 for 7,.714, 6 for 7, .857. The first two digits are multiples of 14 until you get past 50%, then it’s one more than that.

Om

Let me let you in on a secret. All the information I’ve written to date in this post was written in my head in the nine minutes I was waiting to take my blood pressure on a Sunday morning when I had not gotten enough sleep the night before.

I was so entranced thinking about the numbers that I missed the little chirp on the stove’s timer signaling one minute to go. It wasn’t until the device signaled the entire nine minutes that I recognized the passage of time.

It was almost, dare I say it, a zen experience, musing over numbers. I liked it, but I don’t recall experiencing something like that in a very long time.